For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code. Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript. We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
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247: Approaching Learning and Content Creation with Sy Brand
02:01 - Sy’s Superpower: Making Complex Topics Digestible * Sy on YouTube: "Computer Science Explained with my Cats" (https://www.youtube.com/SyBrandPlusCats) 06:28 - Approaching Learning to Code: Do Something That Motivates You * Greater Than Code Episode 246: Digital Democracy and Indigenous Storytelling with Rudo Kemper (https://www.greaterthancode.com/digital-democracy-and-indigenous-storytelling) * Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) * Terrastories (https://terrastories.io/) 11:25 - Computers Can Hurt Our Bodies! * Logitech M570 Max (https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-M570-Wireless-Trackball-Mouse/dp/B0043T7FXE) * Dvorak Keyboard (https://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/) 13:57 - Motivation (Cont’d) * Weekend Game Jams * The I Do, We Do, You Do Pattern (https://theowlteacher.com/examples-of-i-do-you-do-we-do/) 22:15 - Sy’s Content (Cont’d) * Sy on YouTube: "Computer Science Explained with my Cats" (https://www.youtube.com/SyBrandPlusCats) * Content Creation and Choosing Topics 33:58 - Code As Art * code:art (https://code-art.xyz/) / @codeart_journal (https://twitter.com/codeart_journal) * trashheap (https://trashheap.party/) / @trashheapzine (https://twitter.com/trashheapzine) * Submission Guidelines (https://trashheap.party/submit/) * Casey's Viral TikTok! (https://www.tiktok.com/@heycaseywattsup/video/6988571925811367173?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1) 41:34 - #include ＜C++＞ (https://www.includecpp.org/) * Lessons learned creating an inclusive space in a decades old community (Sy's Talk) (https://developerrelations.com/community/lessons-learned-creating-an-inclusive-space-in-a-decades-old-community) * QueerJS (https://queerjs.com/) * Emscripten (https://emscripten.org/) * Graphiz it! (http://graphviz.it/#/gallery) Reflections: Mandy: Digging into Sy’s videos. Casey: Working within content creation constraints. Sy: Make a video on register allocation. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join. MANDY: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 247. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here with our guest today, Sy Brand. SY: Hey, everyone! CASEY: Sy is Microsoft’s C++ Developer Advocate. Their background is in compilers and debuggers for embedded accelerators. They’re particularly interested in generic library design, making complex concepts understandable, and making our communities more welcoming and inclusive. They can usually be found on Twitter, playing with their three cats, writing, or watching experimental movies. Hi, Sy! Good to have you. SY: Hey, thanks for having me on. CASEY: The first question we like to ask, I think you're prepared for it, is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? SY: Yeah, so very topically, I think one of my superpowers is forgetting what topics I want to talk about when recording podcasts and that, I acquired through having ADHD and forgetting to write things down. But I did write things down this time so maybe that won't be too much of a problem. But I think one of my other ones is making complex topics digestible, trying to take computer science topics and distill them down into things which are understandable without necessarily having a lot of the background knowledge, the resources you’d expect. I gained that mostly through my background in computer science and then my interest in public speaking and communication and performance poetry, trying to blend those together to make things easier to understand, lower the barrier for entry. CASEY: I love it. Making complex topics digestible. That's definitely a skill we need more of in the world. MANDY: Absolutely. So Casey told me you are a bit of a teacher and you do a lot of teaching on, is it YouTube? So making things easier to digest. Like I said, during the preshow, I've been trying to learn to code on and off for 12 years, as long as I've had this career, and I've started and stopped, gotten frustrated and stopped, and I've tried different things. I've had mentors and I feel like I've let my mentors down and I've tried this and that. I've tried the code academy and I don't know. So how do you do it? Can you tell us a little bit about how you do that? SY: Sure. So most of the topics that I am interested in teaching is, because I come from a background of compilers and debuggers and very low-level systems, those are the things that I want people to get excited about because I think people look at compilers, or C++, or low-level programming and think, “Oh, this is not very interesting,” or new, or it's too complex, or it requires too much of a degree, or whatever. But none of that is true. You can write a compiler without having to have a lot of the background knowledge you might expect and you can learn C++ without having to – it can be a lot easier than people make art. So I want to make these concepts seem interesting and understandable because they're deeply interesting to me and they've been working on them for a large part of my life and I still love it and find them fascinating. So I want to share that with people. CASEY: What's your motivation when you're working on these? Is it to understand things that are complex, or are you solving problems you have, or other people have, or maybe a blend, or other motivations? I'm wondering what gets you so pumped about it. SY: Yeah, so I think it's a few different things. I make videos on Twitter, or YouTube, things like that of explaining concepts that I'm already familiar with and it's pretty much stuff that I could write an entire video off the top of my head without having to do any research. So I've done videos on explaining what a compiler is and all the stages of compilation, or a video on higher cash performance works, or [in audible 05:48] cash configurancy, garbage collection. These are all things I could just sit down and write something on and don't have to do a lot of research. Then there's the more exploratory stuff. I've been live streaming the development of a Ranges library for C++, which is being able to compose operations, building up a pipeline of operations for your data and then declarative manner so that you don't have to deal with a lot of memory allocations and moving data, or a range yourself. You just say, “Here's all the steps that I want to occur,” and then someone who has written all of these pipeline operations deals with how that actually happens. I've been developing that library live and trying to teach myself hired to do all of these things as while also teaching other people at the same time. MANDY: So is it right to assume that maybe I've been going about learning to code in all the wrong ways and that I've just picked a language and tried to dive in, or did I miss some of the conceptual stuff? And if so, as I suspect, a lot of the conceptual stuff has gone over my head. So where do you suggest, if you were giving me advice, which yes, you are giving me advice. [laughter] Where would you suggest, as a brand-new beginner coder, what kind of software concepts I need to research and understand before actually diving into an actual programming language? SY: Honestly, I don't think that there's a single answer there and I don't think there's a lot of wrong answers there. From my perspective, the best way to learn how to code is doing something that motivates you and that gets you excited because coding is hard and when you hit those bumps and things are going wrong, if you don't have that motivation to keep going, then it's very easy to stop. I know I've done it in trying to learn certain concepts and things like that before, because I felt like, “Oh, I should learn this thing, but I wasn't really interested in it,” and then I find out it was hard and stopped. The best way that I learn is finding something where I'm like, “Hey, I want to build this thing,” or “I want to understand this because I want to solve this problem,” or “because I want to dove on that knowledge with something else.” It's always the motivation, but then I'm coming from if you're someone with ADHD, or something like me, then it's pretty much impossible to do anything without [chuckles] having a strong motivation behind it. So that kind of comes into my way of learning as well. MANDY: That's super interesting. Actually, the last episode we did was with Rudo Kemper and he did a project with Ruby for Good. I went to that and I actually got really excited, intrigued, and wanted to get involved and learn how to code because I was really interested and passionate about the project that he presented, which was Terrastories, which was handing down indigenous knowledge technologically so that stories aren't lost in just having oral traditions, that these stories are actually being recorded and are living somewhere on the internet. So that's really interesting. I went to that and then of course, pandemic happened. It didn't happen again last year, but I'm thinking about going back this year. I'm hoping maybe I can be on a team with somebody that could just shadow and sit there and maybe Casey would let me be that person because rumor has it, Casey is going to be there. Ruby for Good on the East Coast in the fall. CASEY: Yeah, I'll be there. I'd be happy to have you shadow me. Also, my role lately has been a higher level. Last time I was a product manager for the team not coding and this year I'm going to be helping the teams be happy and effective across the board because there's always a team, or two that need some alignment work so that they can be productive the whole weekend. MANDY: That's interesting. Okay. Well, I'm sure I'll find somebody who wouldn't mind me doing a kind of shadow. CASEY: For sure. MANDY: Yeah, cool. CASEY: That's the kind of environment it is. MANDY: Absolutely. CASEY: Yeah. SY: That definitely sounds like the right kind of thing like something where you hear about something, or you look at this project and you think, “Hey, I want to get involved. I want to contribute to this.” That's what can drive a positive learning experience, I think it's that motivation and that motivation could just be, “Hey, I want to get into the tech industry because it pays well and we need money to live because capitalism.” That's like totally legit as well. Whatever you find motivates you to work. MANDY: Yeah, that's why I'm here. I had to find a way for my daughter and I to live. SY: Yeah. MANDY: So I got into tech and podcasts and then I'm working for all these people who I always considered so much smarter than me. I was like, “I could never learn that. I'm not good enough.” But now since joining the podcast as a host and coming on here, I'm feeling more and more like I am smart enough, I could do the thing and so, I'm actually really getting into it more. But it's just that being on the computer for so many hours doing the work stuff makes it hard to also break into the wanting to do the learning outside of my work hours – [overtalk] SY: Right, yeah. MANDY: Because it's so much computering. SY: Yeah, or just split the good screen from bad screen. CASEY: I've been computering so much, I have a tendonitis in my right pinky now from using the arrow keys on the keyboard too much, I think and bad posture, which I've been working on for years. Computers can hurt our bodies. SY: Yeah, definitely. I use the Logitech M570 mouse, which I switched to a number of years ago and was one of the best changes I ever made for using the computer and also, switching to Dvorak for keyboard layout. CASEY: Okay. I use that, too. SY: Nice! CASEY: Dvorak. It's not better, but I learned it. [laughter] It might be more better for my health maybe, but I'm not faster. That's what people always ask. SY: I'm definitely – [overtalk] CASEY: Instead of ASDF, it's a AOEU under your fingers; the common letters right at your fingertips. You don't need the semicolon under your right pinky. [laughter] Why is that there? SY: Yeah. MANDY: Yeah. I was going to ask for us what you were even talking about there. So it's just basically reconfiguring your keyboard to not be QWERTY thing? SY: Yeah, exactly. MANDY: Okay. SY: That means you have to completely relearn how to type, which can take a while. Like when I completely stopped using QWERTY at all and just switched to Dvorak, I didn't even buy a Dvorak keyboard, I just printed out the keyboard layout and stuck it to my monitor and just learned. For the first while, it's excruciating because you're trying to type an email and you're typing 15 words per minute, or something. That's bad. I did definitely did get faster shifting to Dvorak. Before I think I used to type at like 70, 80; I type around a 100 words per minute so it changed my speed a bit. But to be fair, I don't think I typed properly on QWERTY. I switched 10 years ago, though so I can't even remember a whole lot. [chuckles] MANDY: That's interesting, though. That gives me something I want to play around with right there and it's not even really coding. [laughter] It's just I’ll be just trying to teach myself to type in a different way. That's really interesting. Thank you. [chuckles] CASEY: Yeah. It was fun for when I learned it, too. I think I learned in middle school and I was I practiced on AIM, AOL Instant Messenger, and RuneScape. SY: Nice. CASEY: I didn't dare practice while I had essays due and I had to write those up. That was too stressful. [laughter] CASEY: Summer was better for me. SY: Yeah, I switched during a summer break at university. CASEY: Low stakes. I needed the low stakes for that to succeed. SY: [laughs] Yeah. CASEY: We were talking about what motivates you to learn programming and I wrote up a story about that for me actually recently. SY: Okay. CASEY: At the highest level, my first programming class, we modeled buoys and boats and it was so boring. I don't know why we were doing it. It didn't have a purpose. There was no end goal, no user, nobody was ever going to use the code. It was fine for learning concepts, I guess, but it wasn't motivated and I hated it and I stopped doing CS for years until I had the opportunity to work on an app that I actually used every day. I was like, “Yeah, I want to edit that.” I just want to add this little checkbox there. Finally, I'll learn programming for that and relearn programming to do useful things for people. Motivation is key. SY: Yeah. I think because I started doing programming when I was quite young, I knew it was definitely the classic video games, wanting to learn how to make video games and then by the time I actually got to university, then I was like, “Yeah, don't want go into the games industry.” So didn't end up doing that. But I still enjoy game jams and things like that. If you're not again. CASEY: That's another thing you might like, Mandy. It's a weekend game jam. MANDY: Hm. CASEY: I don’t know how into gaming you are, but it's also fun, lower stakes. People are just partying. Not unlike Ruby for Good. They happen more often and I like how it feels at a game jam, a little better than a hackathon because you're building something fun and creative instead of using a company's API because they told you to. SY: [laughs] Yeah. MANDY: Yeah, I was honestly never exposed to video games as a child. They were a no-no in my household and that's one of the things that I always cursed my parents for is the fact that I am the worst gamer. [laughs] My daughter makes fun of me. I'll sit down and like try to – she's 12 and I'll try to do something. She'll be like, “Wow, this is hurting me to watch you, Mom,” [laughs] and I'm like – [overtalk] CASEY: Ouch. MANDY: No, she called me a try hard and I was like, “Yeah, I'm trying really hard to just go forward.” Like I'm trying really hard to just jump over this object, [chuckles] I was like, “If that makes me a try hard well, then yes, I'm trying very hard. Thank you.” SY: Yeah. My 6-year-old has now got to the point where he can beat me at Super Smash Brothers so I'm not feeling too good about that. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. My 6-year-old nephew beat us all in Mario Kart a couple weeks. SY: Yeah. [laughs] I can still beat in the Mario Kart. That, I could do. [laughs] MANDY: Yeah. A lot of the games she does looks fun, though so it's something I would be interested in, it's just something that I haven't been exposed to. I'm really excited now that—I don't want to say the pandemic is nearing an end because it seems to be not happening, but I’m excited – [overtalk] CASEY: True. Things are opening up. MANDY: Right now. Until they start closing down again. CASEY: Yeah. MANDY: Because I'm so excited for things like Ruby for Good, driving down to D.C. and seeing some of my friends, and I would be interested in going to one of those game things, as long as people are just like, “Oh yeah, we can be patient with her because she's never done a game before.” [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. My last game jam had eight people on the team and zero had ever done game development before. We figured something out. SY: [chuckles] Yeah. MANDY: Oh, that's fun. SY: Like muddle along. CASEY: Yeah. Somebody did like level design. They did a title map. Someone did sprites. They were like, “I'm going to do a sprite tutorial now.” Sprite is moving like a walking character. We had learned all the terms for it. We didn't know the terms either, but it was a good environment to learn. MANDY: It seems it. It seems like if you have a happy, healthy environment. For me, it was just, I was becoming stressed out. I had a standing meeting once a week with a really, really awesome person and it felt like it was more of like, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I have to work this into my already busy workweek and if I don't, then I'm completely wasting their time,” and I started to feel guilty to the point it brought me down. I was just like, “I don't think this is good for either one of us right now” because I’m feeling too much pressure, especially with the once-a-week thing and it's like to get through this chapter and then get through this chapter, and then I'd have a question and I'm not good at writing things down and then I'd forget. It seems like that might be more of a strategy to learn for me. I think a lot of people, there's different strategies like you have your visual learners, or you have your audio learners and I think for me, it would be cool just like I said, shadowing somebody. Like, if I just like sat there and it wasn't weird for me just to watch it over somebody's shoulder while they're doing this thing, that would a more conducive environment to the way I learn. CASEY: Yeah. I like the pattern, You do, We do, I do. Have you heard of that one? MANDY: No. CASEY: Or I do, We do, You do depending on the perspective. So it's like shadowing first and then doing it together where you're both involved and then you can do it on your own. It's a three-step process to make it a little bit easier to learn things from other people. SY: Yeah, that makes sense. MANDY: Yeah, that sounds like how kids learn. It’s how we teach our children like I do, now we're going to do it together, now you do it. Yeah, I definitely have used that with my kid. [chuckles] CASEY: And it's just completely reasonable to do that as adults. That's how human brains work. MANDY: Yeah. No, I don't feel – that's the thing I would have to not almost get over, but just be like, “Oh my gosh, I'm 2 years old. I'm learning like I'm a toddler and that's so embarrassing.” But I think that that is a great way to learn and a great way to approach learning in general. I just started a book on learning more about crystals and it's the beginner's guide and she said, “You read this book and then you can move on to reading this other 700-page book that I've authored, but you should probably read this concise guide first.” I think a lot of people feel the pressure to dive into the super smart, or what they perceive as being the super smart way of diving in like, picking up the Ruby book, or the books that everyone talks about when there's so many other great resources exist that break it into smaller, bite-sized, digestible chunks. I think there's no shame in learning like that and I think a lot of people think that they just need to dive right in and be like, “Oh, this is the hard book, I'm going to go for the hard book first.” Like no, start with the easiest, start small. SY: Yeah. I think as you say, it definitely depends on how you learn what kind of resources you find interesting and engaging. CASEY: I've heard a similar story from a lot of friends, Mandy, where they really want to learn something, maybe programming in general, or a language, and then they psych themselves out, or they don't have the bandwidth in the first place, but they don't realize it and they struggle through that and the guilt because they want to, but they don't have time, or energy, which you also need. It's really common. A lot of people that I know are really motivated to do a lot of stuff; they want to do everything. I know some people who are fine not doing everything and that's great because they're probably more grounded. [chuckles] [laughter] But a lot of people I know really want to learn at all and it's a tension; you don't have infinite time and energy. SY: Yeah. I definitely fall into wanting to learn absolutely everything and right now. MANDY: So what kind of things are you teaching right now, Sy? What kind of content are you putting out there? SY: Yeah. So like I said, a lot of it's to do with low-level programming, like how memory actually works on a computer and how it affects how we program things. Because for a lot of people, if you come from a higher-level programming background, you're used to memory being abstracted away from what you do. You deal with variables, you deal with objects, and the implementation of the programming language deals with how that actually maps onto the underlying hardware. But if you really need to get the most performance you possibly can out of your system and you're using a little bit lower-level language like C, or C++, or Rust, or Swift, or something, then you need to understand how your processor is actually handling the instructions and that is actually handling your memory accesses in order for your performance to actually be good. Some of it is not obvious as well and does not match with how you might think memory works because the processors which we're using today are based in so much history and legacy. A lot of the time, they're essentially trying to mimic behavior of older processors in order to give us a programming model, which we can understand and work with, but then that means that they have to work in certain ways in order to actually get performance for the high-performance modern systems we need. So having an understanding of how our caches work, how instruction pipelines work, and things like that can actually make a really big difference down with the low-level programming. MANDY: Okay. So I'm looking at your Twitter and then looking at your pinned tweet, it says, “I made a YouTube channel for my ‘Computer Science Explained with my Cats’ videos.” How do you explain computer science with your cats? Because that's something I could probably get into. SY: Yeah. So I have three cats and – [overtalk] MANDY: I've got you beat by one. SY: Nice. What were your cats called? MANDY: I have four. I have Nicks after Stevie Nicks. I have Sphinx because he looks so regal and I have Chessy and I have Jolie. SY: Cool. Mine are Milkshake, Marshmallow, and Lexical Analysis cat. MANDY: [laughs] Cool. SY: [chuckles] Yeah. So the things explained with my cats, it's mostly I wanted to explain things with my cats and random things, which I find around my house. So I remember I have a Discord server, which I help to moderate called #include , which is a welcoming inclusive organization for the C++ community. We were talking about hash maps and how hash maps are actually implemented, and I realized that there's a lot of different design areas in hash maps, which can be difficult to understand. I wanted to try and explain it using boxes and teddies and my cats so I set up a bunch of boxes. These are all of the buckets, which your items could go into it and then there's some way to map a given teddy to a given box. Let's say, it could be how cute it is. So if it's super cute and it goes in the west most box, and if it's kind of cute, then it goes into the box after that and so on and so forth. That's kind of how hash maps work. They have a bunch of memory, which is allocated somewhere, a bunch of boxes, and they have some way of mapping given items to a given box, which is called a hash function. In this case, it was how cute they are and then you have some way of what happens if two teddies happened to be as cute as each other, how do you deal with that? There's a bunch of different ways that you could handle that and that's called hash collision. Like, what do you do with collisions? Do you stick them in the same box and have a way of dealing with that, or do you just put them in the next box up, or a few boxes up, or something like that? There's whole decades worth of research and designing, which go into these things, but the concepts map quite nicely onto boxes and teddies and how cute they are. [chuckles] MANDY: I love that. SY: They are also explaining how caching works with chocolate, like the intuition with memory access is you ask for some chunk of memory and you get that chunks. You ask for a single chunk of chocolate and you get that chunk of chocolate, but in reality, that's not what happens in most cases. In most cases, you're actually going to get back a whole row of chocolate because it's most likely that if you're going to get a bit of chocolate, you're probably going to be accessing the bits which are right next to it. Like, if you have an array and you're processing all of the elements in that array, then you're just going to be stepping along all of those elements. So it's much faster to bring all of those elements would be right into memory at once. That's what happens in modern processors. Without you having to ask for it, they just bring in that whole row of chocolate. So I tried to – [overtalk] CASEY: That’s so polite. [laughs] When your friend asks for a single chip, or a single piece of chocolate, you know what they want more. SY: [laughs] Yeah. CASEY: How generous of you to give them the whole bag. [laughs] Whether they want it, or not though. SY: Yeah. MANDY: So are these videos relatively short, or are they more long-form videos? SY: Yeah, they are 2 minutes long. MANDY: Oh, cool. SY: I try and keep them within the video limit for Twitter videos, which is 2 minutes, 20 seconds. MANDY: Okay, cool. See, that's something I could probably commit to is watching one of those videos not even maybe once a day because sometimes that's a little bit, much pressure every day. So maybe I try to work out three to four times a week. So saying I'm going to do this three to four times a week and I'm going to not stress on I'm going to do this every Monday. Generally three to four times a week, I think that's something I could, could commit to. SY: Yeah. Trying to get them within 2 minutes, 20 seconds can be really tough sometimes. Like it's quite – [overtalk] MANDY: Do you do a lot of editing? SY: Yeah. I would sit down and I'll write the whole episode, or video, or whatever and just get in all of the content that I want, just put it onto a text document and then I'll start filming it in whatever order I want, and then I start editing and then quite often, I realized that I've got 2 minutes, 40 seconds worth of content, or something and I can't quite cut it down and I have to reshoot something and then reedit it. I try to get it all done within a single day because if I don't get it done in a single day, then it ends up taking even longer because I get distracted and things like that. I need to focus just getting this one thing done. MANDY: So you're doing these within hours? SY: Yeah. MANDY: From start to finish, how many hours would you say you invest in these videos? SY: Start to finish, about 5, 6 hours, something like that. Like I said, I don't really have to do a lot of research for them because they're things I know very well, so I can pretty much sit down and just write something and then most of the time is spent in editing and then captioning as well. MANDY: Very cool. CASEY: I've been doing a bit of video editing lately and it takes so long. SY: Yeah, it really does. CASEY: I'm not surprised it takes 5, or 6 hours. [laughter] MANDY: No, I'm not either. I do all the podcasts editing. For those of you listening, who do not know, I edit all these podcasts and it takes roughly even 5 to 6 hours for audio, because I also put other work into that, like doing the show notes and getting the transcripts. Now I have those outsourced because I don't have enough hours in the day, but there's a lot of different parts to editing, podcasting, screen casting, and stuff that I don't think a lot of people know that these 2-minute videos that you do really do take 5 to 6 hours and you're putting these out there for free? SY: Yeah. MANDY: Wow. That's amazing. I assume you have a full-time job on top of that. SY: Yeah. Because my position is a developer advocate, I can count that as is doing work so I don't have to do that in my own time. MANDY: Very cool. Yeah, that's cool. I love DevRel so working in DevRel, I do that, too. I'm a Renaissance woman, basically. Podcast editing, DevRel conference organizing, it's a lot. SY: Yeah. MANDY: So I give you mad props for putting stuff out there and just giving a shout out to people who might not be aware that content creation is not easy and it does take time. So thank you. Thank you for that. Because this seems like the kind of stuff I would be able to ingest. SY: Yeah, thanks. MANDY: And that's cool. CASEY: I'm especially impressed, Sy that you have these interests that are complex would expand and you can explain the well and you find the overlap with what people want to know about. [chuckle] I think maybe in part from the Discord, you hear people asking questions. Can you tell us a little bit about what that's like? How do you decide what's interesting? SY: Yeah. I ask people on Twitter what they would find it interesting, but I also, because right now I'm not really going to conferences, but previously I’d go to a lot of conferences and people would come up to me and if I give a talk on compilers, for example, come and say like, “Oh hey, I never knew how register allocation worked. It was super interesting to know.” So I don't think I've done a video on register allocation yet actually. I should do one of those. MANDY: Write that down. SY: [laughs] Yeah. That's the kind of thing. Just because I spent a lot of time in communities, conferences, Discords, on Twitter, you get a feel for the kind of topics which people find interesting and maybe want to know how they work under the covers and just haven't found a good topic. Even function calls like, how does a function call work in C at the hardware level? If you call a function, what's actually happening? I did a video on that because it feels like such a fundamental thing, calling a function, but there's a lot of magic which goes into it, or it can seem like a lot of magic. It's actually, I want to say very well-defined, sometimes less so, but [laughs] they are real so there is random reason. MANDY: Very cool. I want to talk about the other content creation that you do. So code art journal and trashheap zine, do you want to talk about those a minute? SY: Sure. So code art was an idea that I had. It's a journal of code as art. I'd hear a lot of people saying, “Oh, coding is an art form.” I'd be like, “Okay. Yes. Sometimes, maybe. When is it an art form? When is it not? What's the difference between these?” Like, I spent a lot of time thinking about art because I'm a poet and I spend most of my free time researching and watching movies. Code as art is something which really interested me so I made this journal, which is a collection of things which people send in of code which they think is art and sometimes, it's something you might immediately see and look at it and think, “Okay, right, this is code and it's fulfilling some functional purpose,” and maybe that functional purpose gives it some artistic qualities just by how it achieved something, or if it does something in a very performant manner, or a very interesting manner. Other times, you might look at it and say, “Okay, well, this is code, but it's more aesthetic than functional.” And sometimes it's things which you might look at and think, “Okay, is this even code?” Like there was someone sent in a program written in a language called Folders, which is a esoteric programming language entirely programmed using empty folders on your hard drive, which I absolutely love. I'm super into esoteric programming languages so I absolutely loved that one. [chuckles] But yeah, so the – [overtalk] CASEY: That sounds so cool. Where can people find it? Is it online also? SY: Yes, it’s in print and there's also, you can get the issues online for free in PDF form. There is a third issue, which is pretty much fully put together on my machine, I just haven't done the finishing touches and it's been one of those things that's just sat, not doing anything for months and I need to get finished. [chuckles] And then trashheap zine is another thing that I co-edit, which is just utter trash, because as much as I love more explicitly artistic films and writing and things like that, I also have a deep love of utter, utter trash. So this is the trashiest stuff that we could possibly find, even the submission guidelines that I wrote for that is essentially a trash pond, but random submission guidelines. So if you have trash, please send our way. MANDY: Yeah. I was going to say, what you consider trash? What trashiest [laughs] enough to be in these zines? SY: I can read out, where's my submission guidelines? The URL for the zine is trashyheap.party, which I was very, very pleased with and the website looks awful. I spent a lot of time making it as awful as I possibly could. Things like any kind of – [overtalk] CASEY: I love the sparkles. SY: Yes! CASEY: When the mouse moves, it sparkles. SY: Isn’t it the best, seriously? Yeah. CASEY: Every website should have that. SY: Yeah, totally. Like texts you sent your crush at 4:00 AM while drunk where you misspelled their name and they never spoke to you again, or draft tweets which you thought better of sending, purely Photoshop pictures of our website. [laughter] A medically inaccurate explanation of the digestive system of raccoon dogs. All good stuff. MANDY: That's amazing. CASEY: I know a lot of people who would be cracking up reading this together. [laughter] CASEY: That sounds great. There's so much treasure in this trash heap. MANDY: Yeah. Don’t worry, folks, we'll put links in the show notes. CASEY: Oh, yeah. SY: Yeah. One of my favorite things with it was when we'd get all of the submissions, we would get together and just project them up on a wall and read them together and so much so bad, it's hilarious in the most wonderful way. CASEY: That sounds like a party itself. SY: It is, yes. CASEY: The be trashheap party. SY: Absolutely. CASEY: It's kind of taking me back to early pre-YouTube internet when we watch flash cartoons all the time and a lot of those were terrible, but we loved them. SY: Yes. I made some as well, they were so bad. [laughter] I remember getting a very non legal version of flash and making the worst stick flash renovations I possibly could. CASEY: Oh, speaking of content creation, I've been learning some animation and 3D modeling animation lately. I had my first ever viral TikTok; it had over 9,000 views. SY: Wow! Nice. CASEY: And so when I look at my phone, if it's not the notifications muted, it's annoying. I have to turn it off. [laughter] SY: Yeah – [overtalk] MANDY: Congratulations! [laughs] CASEY: Thank you. So the video is a USB thumb drive that won't insert, even though you flip it over. That's been done before, but what I added was misheard lyrics by the band Maroon 5. Sugar! USB! That's what I hear every time. Mandy, have you done any art? MANDY: Have I done any art? CASEY: Lately? MANDY: Oh. Yeah. Well, actually – [overtalk] CASEY: You've been doing some home stuff, I know. MANDY: Yeah. I've been doing plant stuff, gardening, but this weekend, I actually took my daughter to a workshop. It was called working with resin—epoxy. SY: Oh, cool. MANDY: And we got to make coasters. The teacher brought stickers, feathers, and crystals and it was like a 3-hour workshop and I think my daughter had extra resin. Her birthday is on Thursday this week and I noticed she was making kind of the same ones and I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I'm making gifts for my friends that come to my birthday party.” I just thought it was so sweet that I was like – [overtalk] SY: Oh, so sweet. MANDY: Usually birthday parties, you receive gifts, or whatever and she's like, “No, I would like to give them gifts for my birthday,” and I was like, “Oh, that's adorable.” So I've been trying to do more things with my hands and get off the screens more, which has been the major thing keeping me back from being on code. I've made a strict weekend policy where I do not touch my computer from Friday evening to Monday morning, unless it's an absolute dumpster fire, I need to do something, or if a takeout menu looks better on my computer than it does on my phone. [laughter] Then I'll pop it open, but I won't read the email, or do the Slack. And then this Saturday I'm taking a course in astrology. It's all-day workshop so I'm excited to kind of dive into that stuff a little bit more. CASEY: So cool. It's hard to believe we can do these in person again. I'm not over it. MANDY: I know. I'm so afraid to get excited over it and then have it be taken away again. CASEY: Yeah. Sy, tell us a little more about #includes . I've actually heard of it. It's a little bit famous online. It's an inclusive community, I know from the name. SY: Yes. CASEY: Tell us more about it. SY: So it actually started off on Twitter as a half joke; Guy Davidson tweeted being like, “Hey, so why isn't there a diversity and inclusion organization for C++ called #include?” Because #include is it's like a language concept in C and C++ and people were like, “Hahaha yeah, you're right,” and then Kate Gregory was like, “You're right. We should make one.” So we did [chuckles] and we started off with like six of us in a Slack channel and then ended up moving to Discord and starting our own server there and now we are a few thousand members. Back when we had in-person conferences, we would have a booth at pretty much every major C++ conference, we had scholarships, which we would send people on, we got conferences to improve by having live captioning and wheelchair accessible stages and gender-neutral bathrooms instituting and upholding code of conduct, things like that. We started off thinking, “Hey, if we could get some conferences to have a code of conduct or something that would be great,” and then it ended up being way, way, way bigger than any of us thought it would become, which is amazing to see. CASEY: That's so cool. What a success story. SY: Yeah. CASEY: How long has it been going on now? SY: I guess about 3, or 4 years. Yeah, probably closer to 4 years. My sense of time is not good the best of times, but something around 4 years. CASEY: I'm curious if another language community wanted to do something similar if they're inspired. Is there a writeup about what y'all have done? SY: I've given talks. CASEY: That we can point people to. We can put that in the show notes. SY: Yeah. I've given a couple of talks, as I said. CASEY: Talks, that would be good. SY: Other people have given talks as well. I gave a slightly longer form talk DevRelCon, London in 2019, I think, which was on the lessons which we learned through trying to build a welcoming and inclusive community. Community which has already been around for decades because C++ was first standardized in 1998 so it's been around for quite a long time and has a lot of history. CASEY: That sounds great. I can't wait to watch it. SY: Yeah. I know that there's other languages. You have JavaScript, QueerJS, which is a really cool community and I'm sure there are other languages which have similar things going as well. CASEY: I had never heard of QueerJS. I'm queer and JS. SY: Yeah. CASEY: I'm glad I had this moment just now. SY: It’s cool. They have a Discord and I can't remember how active the Discord is, but they would have meetups across the world, they have one in London and in Berlin and bunch of other places, and talks and community. It seems really cool. CASEY: That's awesome. SY: I wanted to give a talk about C++ and JavaScript because you could link target JavaScript with C++ these days, which is kind of cool. CASEY: I’ve used Emscripten before. SY: Yeah. CASEY: I didn't use it directly, other people did. It turned Graphviz into a JavaScript. A program that runs in JavaScript instead of normally, it's just CSS. So I could draw circles pointing to other circles in the browser, which is what I always wanted to do. Graphviz.it, that “it” is my favorite Graphviz editor. It's online. SY: Cool. I like Graphviz a lot. Emscripten is really cool, though. Basically a way of compiling C++ plus to JavaScript and then having the interoperation with the browser and the ecosystem that you might want to be able to call JS functions from C++, or other way around, and do things which seem operating systems E, but have to be mapped inside the browser environment. CASEY: That's powerful. I'm also glad I've never had to use it directly. Other people made libraries doing it what I needed. Thank goodness. [chuckles] Abstraction! SY: Yeah. I've not used a whole lot, but I did find it fairly nice to work with when I did. I made a silly esoteric programming language called Enjamb, which is a language where the programs are cones and it runs on a stack-based abstract machine and the interpreter for it is written in C++. I wrote a command line driver for it and also, a version which runs in the browser and that compiles using Emscripten. It was really cool and I picked it all up with CMake, which is the main C++ build systems that you could just say, “Hey, I want to build the combine line version for my platform” like Windows, or Mac, or Linux, or whatever, or “Hey, I want to build it for the web,” and it would build the JavaScript version in HTML page and things like that. It's pretty cool. I recently made another esoteric programming language, which you program using MS Paint. You literally make shapes with MS Paint and you give the compiler an image file, and then it uses OCR and computer vision in order to parse your code and then generate C from that. [laughs] It's pretty ridiculous, but I had so much fun with it. CASEY: OCR is Optical Character Recognition? SY: Yes, exactly. CASEY: So I'm picturing if I wrote a program on a napkin and a computer could maybe OCR that into software. SY: Yeah. So it uses OCR for things like function names because it supports function calls and then uses shapes for most things. It has things like a plus sign, which means increment what it's currently being pointed to, or right, or left, or up, or down arrow is for moving things around. You would actually make an image file with those symbols and then I used OpenCV for working out what the shapes were. It was the first time I've ever done any kind of image recognition stuff. It was a lot easier than I expected it to be; I thought we'd have to write a lot of code in order to get things up and running and to do image detection. But most of the simple things like recognizing hey, this is a triangle, or this is a plus sign, or this is a square, and things like that were pretty, you don't need a lot of code in order to do them. That was mostly when you had to say like, “Okay, this is a triangle, but which direction is it pointing in?” It got a little bit more complicated; I had to do some maths and things like that and I'm terrible at maths. [chuckles] So that was a little bit more difficult, but it was a lot fun to get started with and I had a much lower barrier to entry than I expected. CASEY: Now I want to play with OCR and image recognition. I haven't done that for 10 years. It was not easy when I tried it last time with whatever tool that was. SY: [chuckles] Yeah, I did it – [overtalk] CASEY: For the future! SY: [laughs] Definitely. Yeah. I did it with Python and Python has fairly nice OpenCV bindings and there's a ton of resources out there for predicting most of the basic stuff that you would expect. So there's a lot of learning resources and decent library solutions out there now. CASEY: Cool. All right. We're getting near the end of time. At the end, we like to go through reflections, which is what's something interesting that stood out to you, something you'll take with you going forward from our conversations today. MANDY: I really am excited to dig into Sy’s videos. They seem, like I said earlier in the show, something I could commit to a few times a week to watching these videos especially when they are concepts that seem so much fun, like cats, teddy bears, cuteness levels, and things like that. I think that would be a great start for me just to in the morning while I'm still drinking tea just before I even dive into my email, check out one of those videos. So I think I'll do that. SY: Thanks. CASEY: Sy, I liked hearing about your process side with your constraints like 2 minutes, 20 seconds on Twitter, that's such a helpful constraint to make sure it's really polished and dense. It takes you 5 to 6 hours and you make things that people ask about, that they're interested in. That whole process is fascinating to me as I try to make more viral TikToks. [laughter] Or whatever I'm making at the time. SY: Yeah. CASEY: I always wondered how you made such good stuff that got retweeted so often. Cool things of insight. SY: Yeah. Mostly just time. [laughs] I guess, it makes me remember that I definitely want to make a video on register allocation because I love register allocation. It's such a cool thing. For those who don't know, it's like if you have a compiler which takes your code and maps it onto the hardware, your hardware only has a certain number of resources so how do you work out how to use those resources in the best manner? It maps onto some quite nice computer science algorithms like graph coloring, which means it maps quite nicely visually, I could probably make a pretty cool graph coloring visualization with some random things I have strewn around my room. CASEY: I can't imagine this yet, but I will understand that clearly soon I bet. MANDY: That's awesome. Well, I just want to wrap up by saying thank you so much for joining us today, Sy. This has been a really awesome conversation. And to folks who have been listening, thank a content creator. It takes time. It takes energy. It's a lot of work that I don't think a lot of people, unless you've done it, really understand how long and in-depth of a process it is. So thank one of us content creators, especially when we're putting this content out for you for free. To do that for us Greater Than Code, we do a Patreon page and we will invite Sy to join us and we would like you to join us as well. If you are able to donate on a monthly basis, it's awesome. It's patreon.com/greaterthancode. All episodes have show notes and transcripts, and we do a lot of audio editing. So join us if you're able. If you are still a person who is greater than code and cannot afford a monthly commitment, you are still welcome to join us in our Slack community. Simply send a DM to one of the panelists and we will let you in for free. So with that, thank you so much, Casey. Thank you again, Sy. And we'll see you all next week. Special Guest: Sy Brand.
246: Digital Democracy and Indigenous Storytelling with Rudo Kemper
02:45 - Rudo’s Superpower: Being Pretty Good At Lots of Things! * Learning How to Learn on the Fly * Digital Democracy (https://www.digital-democracy.org/) * Earth Defenders Toolkit (https://www.earthdefenderstoolkit.com/) * Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) * Problem-Solving & Mastery: “Fake it until you make it!” 13:14 - Digital Democracy (https://www.digital-democracy.org/) & Terrastories (https://terrastories.io/) * The Amazon Conservation Team (https://www.amazonteam.org/) (ACT) * Matawai People (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matawai_people) * Capturing & Recording Oral History * Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) * Mapbox (https://www.mapbox.com/) * Indiginous-Requested, Indiginous-Led * Taking Action When Invited * Listen Before Action * Co Creation * Mapeo (https://www.digital-democracy.org/mapeo/) 27:39 - Defining an “Earth Defender” * Earth Defenders Toolkit (https://www.earthdefenderstoolkit.com/) 30:40 - Community Collaboration/Development Best Practices Without Overstepping Boundaries * Tech Literacy 35:52 - Getting Involved/Supporting This Work * Digital Democracy (https://www.digital-democracy.org/) & Earth Defenders Toolkit (https://www.earthdefenderstoolkit.com/) * Stakeholders & Ownership 45:03 - Experiences Working w/ These Projects * Anyone Can Contribute * Meeting Fellow Dreamers 47:33 - Oral Traditions & Storytelling: Preserving History Reflections: Jacob: Getting involved and connecting virtually. Mandy: Register for Ruby For Good! (https://ti.to/codeforgood/rubyforgood) Happening in-person this year from September 23-26 at the Shepherd's Spring Retreat (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=39.5070593%2C-77.7891734+%28Shepherd%27s+Spring%2C+16869+Taylors+Landing+Rd%2C+Sharpsburg%2C+MD+21782%29), in Sharpsburg, Maryland! Mae: Being able to adapt and learn as a superskill. Be proud of the things you can do. Rudo: It’s inspiring to build community around software and the needs that it serves. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join. MAE: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Greater Than Code. My name is Mae Beale and I'm here with my friend, Mandy Moore, who will introduce our guest. MANDY: Hi, I'm Mandy and I'm here with Rudo Kemper. He is a human geographer with a background in archives and digital storytelling, and a lifelong technology tinkerer. For the past decade, he has worked in solidarity with Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Amazon to map their ancestral lands and document their traditional knowledge and oral histories. He is passionate about co-creating and applying technology to support marginalized communities in defending their right to self-determination and representation, and being in control of telling their own stories. Rudo currently works with Digital Democracy, where he is accompanying local communities across the globe in defending their lands, and stewarding the development of the Earth Defenders Toolkit, a new collaborative space for earth defender communities and their allies. He also serves on the executive boards of Native Land Digital and the International Society for Participatory Mapping, and is one of the core stewards of the open-source geostorytelling application, Terrastories. Rudo is originally from Curaçao, but currently based in Springfield, Virginia. And I know personally, Mae and I have both gotten to work with Rudo at Ruby for Good. I was in D.C. I'm not sure where you were, Mae. But before we delve into that, we do need to ask our standard question from Greater Than Code, which is what is your superpower, Rudo and how did you acquire it? RUDO: [laughs] Okay. I love it. Thanks Mandy. It's so great to be on the podcast and to be having this conversation with you all, this is really exciting. My superpower and how did I acquire it? I think the way that I usually answer is that I don't have any one superpower. I'm not great at anything, but I'm pretty good at lots of things and I've acquired that from just having different roles and just done different things across my life in my career, where I'm able to kind of mess with a little bit of code but I'm not a developer, I've made maps before, but I'm not an expert cartographer in that way either. I speak some languages based off of places that I've lived, but not fluently. [laughs] You get the idea. So I think that's kind of my super power is just being pretty decent at a lot of stuff, but not amazing at any one thing. I don't know if that's a typical answer or not, but [laughs] that's what comes to mind. MANDY: That's a great answer! I like it. I like it; being good at a lot of things is a good skill to have. RUDO: Being decent at a lot of things, let's not get too out of hand here. [laughter] MAE: Well, it’s awesome, Rudo because it's not just that you have acquired some skills. I'll try to go in line with what you're putting down here on the good, although I have some personal experience to disagree, [chuckles] but I'll follow you. But it seems like you are always learning new skills and picking up new things that you're able to be adept at very quickly. So I don't know if you have any further thoughts about how did you learn how to learn so well and so quickly? RUDO: Wow. I think by necessity, [chuckles] like you're just put into a position where you find yourself having to learn something completely on the fly. For example, I recently joined Digital Democracy in November and one of the projects that I started to work with is this Earth Defenders Toolkit, where I pretty much discovered right away that I had to play the role of a product manager. Now I've worked with product managers before, including yourself, Mae, on some Ruby for Good projects, but I've never had to do it before, or really had a good sense of what that entails. Somebody told me two months into this project and trying to figure out how to basically coordinate a lot of moving pieces and keeping track of a roadmap, et cetera, et cetera, “Rudo, you're basically a product manager right now. You should know that,” and I'm like, “Okay, let me look up on Google what product manager means and what that all entails,” and that was helpful because I'm like, “Okay, got it.” This is kind of what I've been doing on the fly without much knowledge, or thought put into it and then you learn because you have no choice. [laughs] So I feel like it's been a lot of that. Also, when I was younger, I would apply for jobs where I'm not exactly sure how to do the thing yet, but two weeks before the job, you figure out what that is. And then the job on the first day, like, “All right, I know how to like mess with a little bit of HTML CSS now because I just spent a few nights brushing up on that.” And then just also, in my more professional work in South America, you find yourselves in positions very often where you figure out how to do things very quickly working with indigenous peoples and certain contexts where there's a lot of specific local knowledge that is important for you to know and you just pick that up as you go. So I feel like it's been a lot of kind of, sort of ad hoc learning and then after you do a lot of that, you become more mentally, I think trained to do that more often. MAE: Absolutely. Love it. Yeah. MANDY: I can totally relate to that because that's why I'm here. 12 years ago. My daughter is turning 12 next week. RUDO: Hey, congrats! MANDY: And I know exactly how long I've been in tech because it's from almost the exact day she's been born. So I was never interested in getting into tech, or it was never a thing that I had planned on doing, but I can really identify that just out of necessity, getting in there and finding myself in a place where I always saw myself in a job. I was waitressing and as a single parent and doing it alone, you can imagine bartending isn't a very lucrative career, or easy-to-have career for someone who has to work till 2, or 3 o'clock in the morning. So I was like, “Where can I find any job that I can work online that's not a scheme, or multilevel, or sales because I'm just not a salesperson.” No offense to anyone who is, I think salespeople are great. I just didn't like really laid back in the fact that you really don't have to buy this thing unless you want to. [laughs] So I make a really crappy salesperson. But learning how to do things on necessity and 12 years later, here I am. Actually, I started out just being the person who produced these shows and now, here I am second time being a panelist because I've grown into that self-confidence in that I feel like maybe I don't code, but I still have technology skills that I've come into and picked up along my 12-year career that I can also contribute to Greater Than Code conversations. So I love it. RUDO: Awesome. Yeah. That sounds totally relatable in that regard where you figure out how to do the little things and then eventually, those become bigger things and before you know it, you're running the ship. [laughs] MANDY: Yeah, and a lot of it is reputation too, which I'm guessing that is where you are. Like, if you're just one of those kinds of people that jumps in and put yourself in these situations, that can be really, really scary sometimes and then all of a sudden, people are asking you for more things and they're like, “Oh, can you do this?” and I'm like thinking to myself, “No, but I'm going to learn.” RUDO: Right. MANDY: So when somebody always asks me, “Can you do this thing? Can I hire you to do this thing?” I'm like, “I have no idea how to do this thing.” I will learn to do this thing and just they say fake it till you make it, I guess that's what I did for 12 years. So that's how I'm here. [chuckles] But we're not here to tell them about my story. We are here to talk about Ruby for Good and especially Terrastories and Digital Democracy and all the stuff that you do that's improving our world as a whole. I just want to quickly say that our friend, Jacob Stoebel, has joined us so he is now here, too. RUDO: Hey, Jacob. MAE: Hey! JACOB: Hi! MANDY: So I'm excited to get into the meat of this conversation and where should we start? MAE: Well, if it's okay, I would love to add one thing to what we were just talking about, where I thought going into coding that it was something that is masterable. I didn't that actually the whole entire time, you're just reteaching yourself, or you're just teaching yourself things that you've never seen before. So I tell people that I get paid to solve puzzles I've never seen before and that's a pretty good life [chuckles] and it's very similar to what both of you are describing and what I know of both of you. I still feel it sometimes, but there's this orientation that the coders, or the code is the most important part, which just isn't. being in community and figuring out how to connect people and make things happen, that's what all of y'all do brilliantly. So anyway, I just want to say from the perspective of being a coder, it’s like that's one part of what makes things happen and so many coders I know have so many projects that just never see the light of day because they don't have all of these other pieces to pull it together, or connections, or the ability to make them. So I just want to effusively credit both of you with being amazing and helping all of us be here right now. So way to go and thank you. RUDO: I love that. I actually just want to add to that before I started working with coders and developers and getting into the more direct tech development space, I had this idea that the programmers are totally people that mastered to know how to do this entire code base. I can just pull different pieces of code from nothing and there's very systematic kind of way and that was my conception of the coder and then I started working with developers. Initially threw me for good and now with Digital Democracy, I realized it's exactly as you say, Mae. It's problem-solving like, “Okay, well, let's look at that. Let's examine what this does and mess with it and figure out how to get it to behave the way that we want to,” which is actually how I do things, too and it made me feel like, “Oh, wow, actually, maybe I could one day become a coder because they think and work exactly as I do just at a higher capacity, of course. It was more of a toolkit, if you will. But the methodology is pretty much the same. It’s really cool. JACOB: It really is. It's the attitude of given enough time, I theoretically could learn anything, but that doesn't mean I want to because there's only so many seconds I have in my life. But theoretically, if it feels worth it, I can do it. MAE: I think that's true for anyone ideally. I used to play pool full time and someone asked this famous pool player, who I was standing next to and who I know, and they said, “Well, do you think that Mae can be a pro pool player?” and he said the same thing you just said, Jacob, like, “Well, yeah, if she puts enough time in, of course she can.” So there's this thing about mastery is more about time commitment. I tell my niece all the time, she rolls her eyes, but I ask her, “How do you succeed, or get good at something?” and she's like, “You do it a lot,” and I'm like, “What else?” She goes, “You fail.” [laughs] Like I've got her trained on this is how you just have to put in the time. Rudo, it's now been, I think 7 years since we first met that you have been stewarding this Terrastories program and your commitment and devotion to this project and just effusiveness in general help it continue to thrive and I'm just so excited that you're here. I don't know if it would make sense for you to maybe share with our listeners something about either how you came into Digital Democracy through the Terrastories angle, or if you wanted to go from Digital Democracy back out, whichever way might be just some framing of we said a lot of words so far and I don't know that everybody knows what – I don't definitely know that I know what they all mean. RUDO: Sure. Yeah. Gosh, has it been 7 years already? Man, time flies. [laughs] It's been quite a journey, no doubt. Yeah, I think the way I would frame that is more like by entry point of like how I got started working with code and doing Terrastories and how that all emerged. So it was a little bit of background. I've always had a little bit of a background in web development. I used to build basic websites in the early 2000s and I know a little bit of HTML and CSS and so, I've always had that in my back pocket later working with WordPress and stuff like that. I joined an organization in 2014 called the Amazon Conservation Team where basically my role was doing participatory mapping with indigenous people. So by training, I've background in geography and so, that's what a lot of my work has been in the past 7, or 8 years is working with communities to help them map their lens and to do that in a participatory way. That means we're not doing it, we're helping communities use the tools, build capacity to do it themselves. So I was working with the community in Suriname, which is in South America. Dutch-speaking country with an Afro-descendant group called the Matawai and we were doing this participatory mapping project where they were – it's really amazing, actually. It's this community that the ancestors are formerly escaped slaves that were brought over in the 1700s and were able to escape into the rainforest. They fought against the colonial power at the time, which was the Dutch, and they successfully fought for their freedom to exist there and they continue to live there today. It's this really kind of amazing community. They have a lot of pride in their history of course, as well and there's a lot of storytelling about the first time that their ancestors arrived in a completely new world, new forest, new things to eat, [chuckles] new medicines, completely different space and had to adapt to living there and have a lot of really fascinating stories about their ancestors. What they first did and where they first settled and what are the sacred spaces and almost mythological stories about their history that are really informative for who they are as a people. It's part of their self-identity is this amazing history. So we were doing this mapping work with this community basically helping them use technology like GPS and smartphone applications to map their lands and out of that came this desire to want to do more. Because when you're mapping, it's place names, but that's only a part of the puzzle. It's only a part of the story. There's so much richness and information and knowledge about places that people are carrying. They basically carry with them in their heads. Basically, the mapping spurred this broad community level reflection of wanting to do more to capture that oral history that's contained by the elders and so, that spurred a desire to want to capture some of that. Long story short, we start working with this community to record oral histories and we were trying to think of creative ways that we could use technology to maybe produce something that would appeal to the young people especially. Like younger people anywhere, the kids in the Matawai had cell phones and they're not really so interested in sitting around listening to the stories of their elders. We wanted to create this new technology, or some way to make it exciting for them to learn about their oral histories. With my previous hacky web developer background, I'm like, “Well, we could probably maybe spin up, I don't know, an offline WordPress, or something with some interactive maps. We'd get it working on local hosts, it'll be fine. MAE: It’ll take like two months; we’ll have it rolling. RUDO: Yeah. No big deal. I knew about Wham Stacks and stuff where you can locally have servers and like, “Yeah, we'll figure it out. No worries.” So we tried to do that and it was not quite so easy. Interactive maps, as it turns out, are very hard to get running offline. They're very dependent on APIs and all kinds of stuff that's available on the internet and that's where that industry is going, especially. So that was the first thing. The second thing is you need to get it working on smartphones and all that. Basically have it running in the jungle turned out to be a little more complicated than anticipated. [chuckles] So we had a lot of setbacks where we tried to do that ourselves and we tried to hire some consultants that were interested, but then gradually ducked out after they themselves realized like, “Hmm, this is tricky, I don't know if I can do this.” And then one thing led to another, after a long year of just trying to put this application together, we ended up encountering a network called Ruby for Good, which is what Mae as a part of as well and I think has been featured on this podcast before and basically, it's this amazing collective of volunteer developers that like to build software for good and that can be something like a diaper service to get diapers that are no longer being used by a family into the hands of another family. So building software to engender and enable those kinds of services, or it can be building really amazing storytelling applications for communities in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. As we told the community about that, we pitched the ideas like, wouldn't it be amazing to build this application and the community really loves it and was inspired by it and out of nothing, the first Ruby for Good, which I think it was 2018, Mae, if I'm not mistaken. MAE: Yeah. You might be right. I thought it was earlier, but. RUDO: Yeah. Who knows? The idea was around longer. In 2018, there was a D.C.-based events where a team got together and was like, “All right, how do we make this happen?” I was fortunate enough to be there as well and in the span of a weekend, an application materialized out of nothing, which is amazing to see. Of course, it was buggy, it was scrappy, it didn't do everything we needed it to, that took years before we got to the point where we even talked about an MVP, or anything like that. But that was just so powerful and incredible to see what you can do with a group of people that are motivated and that want to help out and that was really, I think my first foray into code and that was mainly watching people do things and being like, “Okay, that makes sense. This little module does this,” and eventually, I got to be good enough that I could make little changes, like changing the color of something and hiding something and then making it appear again and eventually, smaller, but still more in-depth changes to the application. MAE: Love it. So cool, Rudo and Ruby for Good, what's cool is it's not only developers, but there are designers, product managers, other community people, and generally, we try to have someone from the organization that we're serving come to the event and Rudo was one of the first people that that actually worked out with. So there was an event and there might've been one other group that had a representative. So it was like, “Whoa, hey, hi!” It was really fun to have Rudo there. And then another connection is one of the organizers was Brazilian and so really was motivated to help with Amazonian preservation and also had a connection to Mapbox and Mapbox was a huge supporter early on for Terrastories to get off the ground, too. So there's just so many different connections that have come along to contribute and it's just such an honor in the world to have opportunities to contribute. So thank you, Rudo for continuing to make that be available to people to help with. What I'm curious about is just to rewind the timeline just slightly to when and how did the Amazon Conservation Team get connected and asked to make these maps and then it became –? Because one of the things that moves me most about this project is that it was indigenous requested, indigenous-led partnerships and so many times, especially from the States, there's a lot white savior stuff and like, we're going to bring our modern technology to help you do…. So just the fact that this exists at all and the way it came to exist is just so beautiful and I was hoping maybe if you share a little bit more of that, people might be interested to hear. RUDO: Yeah, absolutely. So the way the ACT operates in many other organizations that are very grassroots and oriented towards working closely with communities take on a similar approach, which is first of all, to only take action when invited. So instead of coming to a community with an idea in advance and being like, “Hey, wouldn't it be cool if?” It's a request that comes from the community. In the case of this example of the Matawai from Suriname, they had learned about similar mapping work done elsewhere and wanted to do their own map and inquired in their network who can we speak to that can help us make a map like this and that's what led them to be connected with ACT. So it's that initial contact from the community that's really key to that and then there's different modalities of that, too as it plays out. Another concept that's really important that doesn't get practiced enough, to be honest is very simple, but it's always to first listen before taking any action. Such a simple concept, but it's so often not practiced, especially when it comes to NGO worlds where there's funders and they have their own deliverables and timelines and things like this and they want to see something. No, listen to the community first and see what they want and take the time to do that as well. With indigenous peoples, this is especially relevant because decision-making and consensus building is not the same based on community to community, it differs. So taking the time to go by the local processes and hanging out a while and not showing up only for 48 hours and then leaving, expecting to have a fully fleshed idea of what that community needs. It takes time and it can evolve as well. So having that open-endedness is really important when it comes to working with communities and the flexibility for projects to adapt and evolve, and to never come with solutions that are pre-made. Never. That's so pivotal. And then the final thing, the final piece of that to take it one extra level—and this is something that Digital Democracy we take very seriously—is co-creation. So when solutions are proposed and specifically tools, even digital tools, and those start to be worked on, define ways of co-creating that as much as possible with communities. I would even say for example, with Ruby for Good, I was able to show up and that's fine, but ideally, somebody from the community would have been able to show up as well to have that kind of co-creation relationship be even more direct and more complete rather than via proxy. Of course, that was the best we could do, but ideally, we want community members to be as involved in a co-creation of technology as possible. That can be tricky. It can be hard, it takes time. Donors don't understand that; it's very hard in our space to find donors that really realize what that takes and what that entails. But that's what we believe is the right way forward. Mapeo, which is one of the tools that we're building at Digital Democracy, with Terrastories as well, there's always this process of constantly verifying and validating if what we're building is actually matching the needs and if not, what needs to be adapted and that goes from the code and how it's built and the different principles that communities find to be very important like data sovereignty to the user interface. One example, people in the Amazon sometimes have eyesight issues and don't have glasses and so, looking at a phone and a small application can sometimes not be very helpful. So it's across the board from the backends to the way that the frontend of applications is built and of course, that's technology, but really this goes to any project design to have that co-creation being really core of it. JACOB: Are there ongoing needs that have to be fulfilled? Support if something goes wrong, or maintaining infrastructure, like, I don't know what any of that might mean. RUDO: Yeah, this is a huge part of it and it's something that at Digital Democracy for example, there's a technology team, which is software engineers, developers, UX designers, product managers, all of that, and then we have a programs team, which is more folks and that's what I'm serving over at Digital Democracy, where our role is that accompaniments and ensuring that the communities that are using the tools have the resources that they need, whether that's training guides, or modules, or something breaks in the field and they need support and that happens a lot. It is one of the, I don't want to say tensions, but difficulties in doing this work is that we are developing open source technology and things can sometimes break and communities have expectations. Sometimes when something breaks in the field, if it's not clear why it broke, the person might feel like it's their fault somehow, that they somehow broke it and that can be very tricky to work with. Especially in the case of the pandemic where nobody is able to travel and so, there's a level of remote support, so that has to happen. We're very sensitive to that ensuring that while co-creating and involving communities in the early stages of software is very powerful, it can also lead to disappointment if it's not done in the right way and that people aren't clear about well, this is an early phase at this particular software and that people don't feel like guinea pigs as well that they're just being used to develop a software that's not working and there's a lot of frustration that can result from that. MAE: Absolutely. Yeah, we experienced that—we being me and anyone else with whom I've done any kind of software venture that is for good whether, or not through Ruby for Good—and to have the cultural barriers and historical exploitation to try to figure out how to mitigate that is super complicated. So awesome that that is the priority of Digital Democracy. Something I noticed from Digital Democracy’s website is the use of the term earth defender and you're talking about co-creating and listening to the people themselves, I'm curious if you might be willing to share with us some more about what defines an earth defender. Do people call themselves earth defenders? Who gets named an earth defender? Who gets to wear the earth defender sash, or superhero costume, and how does that work? And if it's relevant, how did Digital Democracy come to have that as a priority and a phrase that's got as much privacy as it does on its website. RUDO: Yeah. I love it. It's such a good question. So whenever we have any kind of session, or workshop about Earth Defenders Toolkit, or any discussion, any chance that we have to talk to people, we always start with that question actually of like, what does earth defender mean to you? If you were to interpret this term, what is your takeaway? What comes to mind when thinking about this? We almost intentionally don't define it because we want people to be able to have their own version, or definition of it, or their own interpretation, because it can mean so much. So definitely, we're thinking of some things when we started to use the term. Of course, we've done a lot of work with indigenous peoples in the Amazon, more recently in Africa and Southeast Asia as well, but there's also other communities, like local communities, that are not indigenous, that are also on the front lines of fighting for their rights to their land, or protecting biodiversity, fighting extractivism taking place that's nearby, and these kinds of big global forces that are threatening the livelihoods of both lands and communities on a local basis. So we wanted to have something a little bit more broad to be able to essentially, apply to many different communities that are in that same position. But then at the same time, I think gesturing to your question, Mae anybody can be an earth defender if you're taking an action to defend the earth. That can be any of us as well. That can be somebody who wants to get involved to do something, to contribute to that broad pursuits and that can be many things. That can be climate action, that can be working on the front lines with communities combating extractivism, like I said, it can be political activism, it can be many different things. So this notion of earth defender, I know we haven't defined it, or you might've even looked on the website, like, “Let's see how they define it,” and we've almost intentionally kept it that way because we want it to be an open definition where people can decide for themselves what that means. And then also, the platform that we're building, Earth Defenders Toolkit, also has an intentionally open-ended structure where the resources that we're providing focus on some things that we hear a lot about from communities in terms of pain points and obstacles and resources that they wish existed. But there's a lot of room to again, co-create it with anybody that wants to use it and own it and make this be a hub, or a platform, or a community. So that lack of parameterization is almost intentional there. JACOB: This is making me think in – well, if I have any incorrect assumptions about what I meant to say, please check them, but I'm thinking about a community that has been doing something along the lines of what you're talking about and they've been doing it well for a long time and they have a lot of genuine connections in their own community, but they've never made software before. I'm thinking about collaborating with a community and wanting them to be the leaders, but at the same time, helping them understand what are good ways to go about, what are best practices to go about making quality software, which might not – I come from the nonprofit world in a previous life and I think those work cultures are very different and for a good reason. But I'm wondering like how helping a community pick up those best practices while also letting them be in charge seems like an interesting challenge to me. RUDO: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's so interesting and I think of one community that, I haven't worked with them, but a colleague of mine has in Guyana where there was an application that was being built. I think sometimes when software is being developed, there's almost this intention to keep the community, or whoever it's serving out of the kitchen, if you will, out of the development process of what that looks like. In this case, in this community in Guyana, he tried to do the opposite and actually explain how the tech is built and why the pieces are what they are and what they're doing. This was in an indigenous community that, I think sometimes the assumption might be better not to involve them, or have them considering those kinds of technical details, even though in a way where you assume that indigenous people wouldn't understand that somehow. But in fact, they really gravitated towards that and actually appreciated the application all the more understanding how it's built and we actually got a lot of enthusiasm out of learning the technology. I feel like it speaks to a broader interest in tech literacy and just how that as a whole, like when you work with the community on their tech literacy, it enables them to achieve things far beyond just a creation of one application. It has much more broad impact in terms of interacting with all technology. So it has a benefit beyond just the application development cycle itself. But also, I think we don't give people enough credit in terms of how much they actually are able to get involved in that process and make sense of the different pieces of the application. So there can be a huge benefit actually to having that. I hope I articulated that well. I thought it was a really interesting question. JACOB: No, definitely and I didn't have any particular answer in mind, [chuckles] but I just think it's an interesting problem because I think about my family, or my friends who were not in the tech industry and they just want technology to work. Like, they know what they want, they just want it to work. The best practice is iteration, which are really important like, I'm the stakeholder, this is the software that matters to me and then saying, “Hey, go use the software that works and doesn't do everything you told us you'd want us to do and tell us what you think,” [laughs] I just feel like would be just such a new concept to people who haven't worked in that way. RUDO: Yeah. One of my colleagues once described this as the way that browsers used to tell you what was going on behind the scenes and then even if you don't know about technology, you can figure it out. You associate certain lines of texts that are obscure to you, but something happening in the application, even if you can't make sense of what exactly that is, or the sound of a modem, the old dial-up modems, and you could figure out by the sounds when it's actually connecting versus when it's [laughs] not doing its job. To give that slight exposure to what's going on with the tech can be really helpful and powerful for people that usually are shielded from that more backend stuff and then also might not have a sense of why something isn't working. MAE: Yeah. Any project that I've been involved in helping people understand, not only how does technology work, but how to establish processes that have resilience and are able to be replicable and all of these more structural organizational things, how can we help improve that? Because it translates way beyond the specific project and that's another—oh, I don't know if I even love referencing this. I'm trying to think if I know of a different one. But that teach someone how to fish and then they can be able to self-sustain whereas, going and bringing some fish is a one-time situation. So yeah, I love that angle and thanks for bringing that up, Jacob. That's awesome. It's cool too, because it connects right into what I was going to ask next and I'm channeling Casey Watts a little bit in how if any listener wanted to be involved and that person could be a coder, they could not be a coder. How can people become involved and/or support this work, any part of the Earth Defender Toolkit? Rudo, you probably have a great idea of all the different ways in which any human could be of service, or connection, or whatever. I don't know if you already have a – hopefully, you have an elevator speech ready to go about this topic. [laughter] RUDO: I think yeah. What occurs to me thinking about that question is that there's so many communities that need help with many, many, many different things and sometimes that can just be accessing resources, or just helping communicate what's going on in their lens to an outside audience, or help configuring phones, or help translating materials, or just being somebody who has exposure to how the Western world, or forces that are now emerging in their lens. So communities never needed help with the management of their own lands. But now that these external forces are frequently impacting their livelihoods, somebody who can help navigate those changes that are taking place is a tremendous need that so many communities express. Like in the past couple of weeks, we've had a couple of forums, virtual, with communities in Africa. Just this morning actually, we had an Africa forum where they were saying something over a hundred different community members from Africa present where we were discussing basically what the work and what sort of actions are looking like in different parts of Africa, from Senegal to Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Congo and providing those opportunities for learning from one another and there was just so much requests for how can we apply this toolkit? How can we take similar actions where we are? So I think just anybody that wants to get involved, there's so many communities and the question isn't how to find those communities. In my own experience, just showing up somewhere is actually an effective way of finding a way to be helpful because you might have skills that you don't even know about, that could be something you take for granted. Just to name a silly example, file management, knowing how to navigate a directory of files with trees and subdirectories and things like that is something that a lot of people don't know, or quite understand because they didn't grow up with it like many of us did. Just little things that you might not think are valuable skills can actually be tremendous assets to a community that is trying to solve a problem, even before you even get to something like technical stuff like coding, or mapping, or whatever. Just being a resource is such a huge asset. So we are creating spaces for more communities to post help requests to we're dealing with this, is there anybody that can help us and vice versa. If you are somebody that wants to get involved, to write about what you have to offer. Under Earth Defender Toolkit, there's a form for that where let's say that you have 10 hours per week to dedicate to whatever it may be and anybody that wants to get in touch, that this is what you have to offer and what your skills are. Beyond that, of course, there's if you are a programmer, if you are a developer, there's definitely open source software that one can contribute to and there's processes to plug into that. So in the Earth Defenders Toolkit, we do have a contribute page where there's lots of different ways to get involved. Financial, of course, is an elephant in the room. There's tons of communities that need support financially to be able to take actions, or to travel somewhere, or to get resources that they need. So there's all of that and we try to point to different places that responsibly where one can contribute in that regard. [laughs] I think that's what comes to mind. MAE: Awesome. And what is the relationship between Digital Democracy and Earth Defenders Toolkit like, what is the larger mission of Digital Democracy and how does this help fit in the picture? RUDO: Yeah, so Digital Democracy is basically, we're an NGO. We're an odd NGO in the sense that we're a tech company in a way with a product manager and a roadmap and all that stuff and familiar processes, but we're a nonprofit. So we also then have to work with finding funding from a nonprofit space, which can be tricky for tech, because as I mentioned earlier, donors don't often understand exactly the work that we do and then the other thing is the programmatic company and for the tools that we're building. It’s interesting because we take on this value of tech Gnosticism, but then we're also building specific tools and so, our approach isn't done to like, “Hey, we have this hammer, let's go find nails.” It's still very inspired by this philosophy of not wanting to promote any kind of one tool in advance when starting to work with a community. Out of that idea is where Earth Defender's Toolkit came from, which is this new platform where we're thinking very open-ended about actions and tools and what even is a tool. Does it need to be digital? Can it be something analog? Can it be something like a human connection. Those are things that we're learning when we ask communities about the different tools that they need and resources that they need. One thing that we're really trying to take seriously in terms of software—there's Mapeo, there's Terrastories and frequently, we get inquiries where a community might write to us and say, “Hey, I love this. How do I use this? How do I get started?” and the only thing that we have to provide is a software guide of here's how you install it, or here's how you set it up and things like that. But the question they're asking is much bigger. They're asking, “How do I get started? How do I find resources? How do I make a team? [laughs] How do I apply this thing that you've created?” We usually don't have anything for that. That's where the accompaniment comes in where we can walk somebody through that process, or perhaps share a case study of somebody else who has, but there's no real resources to target that and that's really what communities are asking and then when they find out that something like that doesn't exist, they say, “Hmm, I don't know. I won't download this application, or use it because it's too complicated. I don't have a sense of how to really apply it in practice.” So that's what we're trying to do with the Earth Defenders Toolkit is providing guides on how to get started, how to even figure out what kind of action to take. For a community in the Amazon and the Ecuadorian Amazon that's facing petroleum concessions being given out in their lens like, how do you fight that? How do you take action? That's such a huge phenomenon that it can be hard to figure out how to even meaningfully fight back against that. It may take time also to figure out what that looks like and so, we try to provide guides, or case studies of how other communities have taken action as well. In some cases, using software successfully so for example, mapping software to create maps. We'll also while generally always recognizing that it's much bigger than the tools, it's also the human networks; the solidarity that comes out of using a software and the processes around it can be just as meaningful, if not more than the tool itself. So honoring that broad ecosystem that exists around the usage of a tool is what we're trying to create materials about and how to engender that and how to meaningfully use tools as part of this broader scaffolding. JACOB: And proving out because there's always the story of seeing a piece of technology and like, “Oh yeah, we'll use this and it’s going to solve all of our problems,” but there's no buy-in in the team, or the community, or as a group. How can a community prove out, “Oh yeah, it’s going to solve this very specific problem and look how exciting this is.” RUDO: Yeah. I think one of it is seeing it be created and playing a part in that. Like, filing a request of oh, well, this is almost exactly what we need, but can it also do this one thing and then seeing that happen and knowing that that was your request that made that happen is, I think a huge part of it. Right, Mae this also goes to Ruby for Good in how stakeholders of projects become involved in it and really start to embrace it. MAE: Absolutely. RUDO: They play a role actually in the creation of it and so, that generally is helpful in terms of ownership. If you've developed a project, or designed a project, rather than having somebody else to design it and bring it to you, you feel more ownership over the process, you feel like it's yours and a lot of the communities have expressed that. Like Mapeo is ours, we had a role in building it, I think is a huge part of it and then the other thing is seeing other communities use it and what they've been able to accomplish. It's also really important for especially local communities and indigenous peoples to see how another indigenous community has taken action is hugely inspiring for themselves because they are fighting the same things we are with the same constraints and they've been able to do this. We want to do that, too. So I think knowing about those other stories of communities can be really helpful, too. I would love to hear more from me as well about how what your experience has been like working with one of these projects, which is Terrastories. MAE: Sure, yeah. Thanks for asking. The first year that Terrastories, which apparently was 2018, was that Ruby for Good, I was leading a different team and I was so jealous because I didn't know about this project and I wanted to be part of it from the very first moment and then later on, I did have the pleasure of co-leading a team for a virtual Ruby for Good. What I love most about the Terrastories project, second to the part I was saying about it being in existence because of indigenous request and interest, is that anyone can contribute. Tou could just read the Read Me and send a Slack message through Ruby for Good Slack, “Hey, we were wondering about this.” You don't have to be a developer. But people who are new developers, the team and all the different people that have ever been involved in coding the pterosaurs repo are super supportive of any brand-new coder. Like if you've never even committed to GitHub before, or never done open source before, there's a lot of community building. What inspires me is the energy of that, of let's all do whatever it is that we can in that moment and let's all gain more skills to work toward a world we want to be living in and want our future generations to live in. It's this really resonant thing going on between how it happens and what it is and where it leads us all together. So that's pretty much my answer. I get inspired by community and building a future that I dream of and meaning fellow dreamers, like everybody on this call. Just want to encourage anybody who might have a concrete interest in Terrastories and that visual video storytelling app to consider trying to get involved. We'll leave some links in the show notes about how to get ahold of Rudo, who is amazing and can direct anybody to anybody else. [chuckles] You'll find a way to become involved if Rudo is there. [laughs] I think that's probably what I would share. MANDY: I was involved in 2018 with Terrastories and I was just blown away from the second I heard about it. I was like, “That's the team I want to be on,” and it was more because I’m not – yeah, I am technical, I need to stop having this imposter syndrome. I am technical, but I'm not a coder. But I loved the whole concept behind Terrastories, especially it was because I'm a reader. I love to read. I love memoirs. I love history, the whole concept behind Terrastories and just right now, there's oral traditions, oral traditions, everything is passed down and as people are unfortunately, dying, or those stories are getting lost. So now the big draw for me was that this is how these stories are getting told and they'll be here for future generations and that that won't be the case anymore. And now that you know and also, there's that what's it called? Is it the game that they play the telephone game and it's like, “Well, you said this,” and then it gets turned into, “Well, they said this,” and then it's completely wrong by the end of the time, it gets the whole way down the telephone line? The visual storytelling is just so compelling because you will actually have this concrete stuff now that you can actually go and look up because technology is advanced. I don't have that with my grandparents. I only know what I've been told and who knows if those things are even true! [chuckles] So I love that this exists and I love that this is a way to preserve history as a whole. RUDO: Right. Yeah, totally, Mandy. I think that's what's so inspiring about it. Of course, it came from an indigenous community and their specific needs, but really, this is something that's applicable to all of us. Because everybody has oral histories in their own family history that has been passed down from generation to generation and that we may lose at some point as well, or like you're saying, the telephone game, or changes, or just perhaps details that are not quite so clear. For any community, really, whether it's a subculture, people talk a lot about oral histories of underground music, for example and to different venues in a city. Terrastories can be used to map something like that, or your own personal family, history of migration, for example, and where people came from. I feel like as humans, we all live place bound lives and so, an application like this is really applicable and useful to everybody. JACOB: This is the part of the show where we like to wrap up by everyone reflecting on something that they're going to take away from this conversation, maybe have a call-to-action. Well, first of all, I have wanted to do the Ruby for Good in D.C., I think every summer since 2018 and for every single summer, there was a reason why I couldn’t do it. [chuckles] The pandemic of course, being last year, [chuckles] but no, and I can't do it this year. I don't even know when it’s happening. Any who, I think it's probably time to get on the GitHub page and see how we can get involved because I have been trying to find ways to connect in new ways with new people because of the pandemic and this seems like an interesting way to do it while maybe hopefully contributing something that I might be perfectly good at. So I guess, that's my takeaway. MANDY: Cool. So yeah, on that note, I will say that I was just informed yesterday via email that Ruby for Good is happening this year. It's going to be from September 23rd to 26th at the Shepherd's Spring Retreats. That is in Sharpsburg, Maryland. So I'm planning on going, I know our fellow friend and panelist, Casey Watts, is going. Mae, are you coming? MAE: Oh yeah, I don't miss Ruby for Good. MANDY: Rudo, will you be there this year? RUDO: I have to check and see if I'm around. MANDY: Okay. RUDO: Date wise. Yeah, I'd love to. MANDY: It’s actually longer. The last one I was at was only Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I think they're actually adding a day to it this year. So it's going to be four days and I will have to leave a day early because I, unfortunately, have another commitment that I have to come back for. But I'm planning on being there and if you want to go, I suggest you go to rubyforgood.org and sign up. Tickets do tend to go fast and there's an option to just get a ticket if you are paying by yourself, or if you're perhaps a bigger company and feel like donating, or sponsoring a cause like Terrastories, or the other causes that we talked about throughout this episode. There are options for you to be a sponsor and you should check it out. MAE: Thanks, Mandy. Yeah, same for Digital Democracy and Earth Defenders Toolkit. These projects, like Rudo said, depend on support from donors as well. So in our middle of the pandemic situation where we are right now, all of these kinds of things to preserve and protect goodness in our world and the ability for humans to be here at all, [chuckles] as much as you can contribute, please consider that. For my reflection, I loved the part, Rudo where you were talking just at the very beginning about being able to adapt and learn and I am naturally good at that, but can sometimes not think of that necessarily as a super skill and you were reluctant to do so also. [laughs] But anyway, it just reinspired me to be more proud of the things I can do and that ties into some of the stuff Mandy was talking about, too and like, no, actually I do do this. So y'all gave me a nice boost to that today. RUDO: Awesome. So maybe I'll go last on inspirations. So for me, for the past 3, or 4 years, it's been just tremendously inspiring to work and volunteering open source developers and with Terrastories, I think the last time I checked, there were more than 60 people had contributed to the code and that's just a code. That's not even talking about designers, or people who have just had an idea, or a suggestion, or things like that. They're not documented on something like GitHub and it's just been really tremendously inspiring to build community around software and the needs that it serves. In the pandemic, we've let that lapse a little bit because of course, everybody has priorities in their lives and other things are going on, but it's really inspiring me again to start building more community again and to start sharing more of the word of Terrastories and being more involved in that. And then the other thing is, I think to go back to the beginning again about everybody can be a coder is to motivate myself to do more of this and just get to that point where you realize like, “Oh gosh, now I'm suddenly –” like you were saying Mandy in terms of the podcast suddenly, you're in charge of this now. [chuckles] But it started with just little steps here and there to continue that journey for myself and to become more of a better developer and to own that title instead of being like, “No, I'm not a developer. I just happened to know how to do a few things with code.” [laughs] MAE: I'm so proud of you! You said to be a better developer. Yes! RUDO: First time I’ve ever said it. [laughs] MAE: You heard it here, folks. MANDY: Yes, I love it. I think we would all do that more as people is you know what, I am going to do this, or I can do this, or get rid of that imposter syndrome. Well, Rudo, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We really appreciated having you here and I hope to see you at Ruby for Good in September. To everyone else, I urge you to check out the show notes, get involved. We provide transcripts. We also have a Greater Than Code Slack committee, which Rudo will also be getting an invite to for being a guest. You can come talk to us and hang out there. You can go to our Patreon page to get into that. It's patreon.com/greaterthancode, or if you can't afford to donate, or give, just DM me on Twitter and I'll let you in as long as you’re also greater than code. And with that, we will see you all next week. Special Guest: Rudo Kemper.
245: Hacking Reality with Rony Abovitz
03:03 - Rony’s Superpower: Being a Space Cadet: Free-Willing Imagination, Insight, and Intuition 06:54 - Becoming Interested in Technology * Science + Art * Star Wars (https://www.starwars.com/) * Solar Power 10:30 - Unstructured Play and Maintaining a Sense of Wonder and Free-Spiritedness * Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcenden (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnxpqecbpOU) 15:15 - Power Structures and Hierarchies * Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow) * Order vs. Disorder * Greater Than Code Episode 125: Everything is Communication with Sam Aaron (https://www.greaterthancode.com/everything-is-communication) 35:04 - Using Technology to Decentralize Social Structures: Is it possible? * Hacking Reality * Enlightenment and Transcendence * Somatics (https://www.healthline.com/health/somatics) * Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis by Stanislav Grof (https://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Emergency-Personal-Transformation-Consciousness/dp/0874775388) 01:05:19 - The Game of Capitalism * What It Means To Win; Mimicking Desires * Reorienting Around Joy, Creation, Learning, and Experiences * Self-Actualization & Community 01:09:39 - Are We Technology? * Survival of the Fittest Reflections: Tim: We as a global community, need to bring our drums to the drum circle. Chanté: How do we build decentralized guilds? Arty: 1) Breaking out of nets and creating opportunities to innovate, invent, rethink, and enable new things to happen. 2) How do we create more entrepreneurship and enable more entrepreneurial innovation to happen? Rony: Empathy, Compassion, Imagination, Freedom, Courage. BONUS: The lost classic "Fire" (from one of Rony’s early bands) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5575o58xzm2kh28/fire.wav?dl=0) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join. CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 245. My name is Chanté Martinez Thurmond, and I am here with my friend, Tim Banks. TIM: Hey, everybody! I’m Tim Banks, and I am here with my friend, Damian Burke. DAMIEN: Hi, I'm Damian Burke and I'm here with my friend, Arty Starr. ARTY: Thank you, Damien, and I'm here with our guest today, Rony Abovitz. This is actually the second time Rony has been with us on the show. The first time we unfortunately had some problems with our audio recording. We had a really great conversation so, disappointing, but I'm sure we will have an even better conversation the second time around. Rony is a technology founder, pioneer inventor, visionary leader, and strategic advisor with a diverse background in computer-assisted surgery, surgical robots, AI, computer graphics, and visualization sensing advanced systems, media animations, spatial audio, and spatial computing XR. Rony has a strong history of creating new technology fields in businesses from the startup garage onward, including Magic Leap, the world's leading spatial computing company founded back in 2011. His new still start at Sun & Thunder he plans to launch in 2021 and prior to Magic Leap, he also founded MAKO Surgical, a medical software and robotics company specialized in manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance technology. He is deeply into film, art, animation, music recording, AI, robotics, ethics, and philosophy. He is also a senior advisor at the Boston Consulting Group advising a small group of deeptech startups and a few Fortune 50 companies, a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, and a two-time World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Welcome to the show, Rony. RONY: Thank you for having me again. ARTY: It’s a pleasure. So our first question we always ask on this show is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? RONY: I think my superpower is not being able to do a podcast the first time correctly. Actually, I think I had a really good response last time, but I think the main one is I’m just like a space cadet and you could translate that into just, I have a very freewheeling imagination so I think that's always been my superpower. I could always imagine, or have a creative idea around a problem and really imagine things that don't exist, that aren't there yet. I think that's been always really helpful in anything I've done. So that's probably my main superpower. I don't know what that would look like as a superhero outfit. I think I gained a second achievement level, which is some level of insight, or intuition into knowing things, which I think it's really hard to explain, but I feel like I didn't have that. And then in college, it was a really interesting experience, which I probably won't get into a lot of detail here, but I think I gained that achievement level. I feel like I have both of those now. I feel like I leveled up and gained this insight intuition kind of thing that I didn't have before and I think those two together have been helpful. So there's probably many more achievements to unlock, but I think I got those two so far in the game. DAMIEN: You leveled up on intuition as a result of an experience in college. RONY: Yes. It was an interesting experience. I had a transcendent experience. DAMIEN: [chuckles] Well, that sounds exciting. ARTY: I think before my question was, how did you develop that? Tell us a little bit about your background. What kind of family did you come from? Was this something that you think was cultivated in childhood, or was this something that happened as you got to adolescence and then to into college? RONY: My mom's a painter. So she's an artist and she was pregnant with me walking around the campus at Kent State during the Kent State shootings and had to run away to not be shot. That was kind of there, but not there. She was an art student at Kent State at the time. I think she said to me at some point, there was difficulty in the pregnancy such they had to give her some morphine, or something. It probably got into my brain [chuckles] so probably scrambled it a little bit. I'm not sure if I had all that, but who knows what they did back then. So there's a little bit of that, but my mom's a freewheeling artist so I grew up that way. Dad passed away a couple of years ago, but always entrepreneurial, also artistic. So had this freewheeling imaginative household where no one told you, you couldn't do anything. I think that actually helped a lot. Nobody was born with a silver spoon. Both my parents were born but I was dirt poor as you could imagine. My Dad grew up in a house that had no windows so when we'd visit, my grandmother’s chickens would literally fly through the window [laughs] and knock your head. When you're a kid, you think it's the greatest thing in the world. I think I swam in a bathtub that also served as the place to cheat fish. I think my Dad's mom would bring fish to the market and sell them, like a carp, or something and I thought they were my friends and didn't realize they were turning into dinner. I think that's why I became a vegetarian. So we grew up really poor on both sides. Everyone was self-made, freewheeling, and imaginative so that probably did help. CHANTÉ: Yeah. I think for myself, too. Just growing up poor helped with my imagination; I just dreamed of all these amazing things I would one day have as an adult. So I happen to think it's a superpower, too. It's pretty cool. Thanks for sharing all that. TIM: So I guess, what I'd like to know is when you’re coming from that kind of background, what first was your jumpstart into using technology, or being interested in technology? RONY: I think I was always simultaneously interested in science and art at the exact same time, which is odd, which makes for a good misfit because either you're the art damaged kid in school and you hang out with the art crowd, or you're the science nerd and you hang out with – but I liked both so there's not really a good place where if you're both to hang out. Probably just being really curious about how everything works and what's going on behind the scenes. Like, why are things the way they are, trying to imagine them, but I'm not totally sure. I just sort of always was into both. That is a very good question. It's kind of asking if you're a fish, how did you get fins? I'm like, “I guess, they grew?” But I don't know, I just seem to be equally into that. Probably Star Wars, if you really get down to it. I saw Star Wars as a kid and suddenly, that's what you want to do. You want to build an X-wing, fly an X-wing, blow up the Death Star. That probably had a lot to do with it. Actually got to meet George Lucas, which was super awesome and I'm like, “You're responsible for my entire path in my life. Science and engineering, wanting to do all these crazy things. It's all your fault.” He was like, “Oh my God, don't blame me for this.” [chuckles] CHANTÉ: Wow. RONY: But no, it was in a funny way. CHANTÉ: That's funny because the last time the conversation we had, Rony, we talked about all these cool people that you've met that have influenced you and I asked you like, “Is this a SIM? How are you meeting all these amazing people?” [laughs] RONY: I'm pretty damn sure it's a SIM at this point. [laughter] Definitely a SIM. I'm very close to that. [overtalk] CHANTÉ: Become convinced now, for sure. RONY: We can get into that later, if you want. I think it's a SIM. I'm not sure who's running it right now, but it’s a SIM. [overtalk] CHANTÉ: [inaudible] wanting to do that. ARTY: So with all this creativity, what were some of the first things you started dreaming about building? RONY: I think as a kid, I wanted to make a solar-powered airplane, which sounds like an odd thing, but I was weirdly into solar power. Like, I wanted solar-powered cars, I started to get solar cells from Radio Shack and soldered them up in stuff and spin motors. I'm like, “That's so cool, it's free, there's no battery needed,” and then of course, you need batteries to store it if there's clouds. But I was thinking that was really neat. It was just like this magic of sun on this thing, on this chip and suddenly, you get electricity out of it. It was like, whoa. I think my uncle gave me some Radio Shack science kit when I was really small. I started messing with it. I had a solar cell and I figured that was magical and I got really into it. I don't know why I didn't pursue that because it seems like that'd be a good thing to do today. But I was like really into in the very beginning, solar-powered, building solar-powered everything, especially solar-powered airplanes. I wanted to build some perpetually flying. Actually, I designed something that won a state science fair award that pretty much looks like later on and after that, it was a plane that I think flew across the United States, a solar-powered plane, and it was very similar design. So I was actually kind of happy I was a little bit in front of all of that, maybe 5 years or 10 years ahead of that one. ARTY: Just thinking about there's so many things like that that are magical. Just you've got this conversion of sun energy to electricity and there's so many things now we take for granted that are just kind of there like, “Oh, I have the internet in my pocket.” I feel like we've lost some bit of that wonder with taking some of these things for granted. I was talking with Chanté a little bit earlier about how dreaming gets stifled, how creativity gets stifled, and we ended up in this mode where we're doing things the way the world expects us to. We've got jobs in this path of life that we're supposed to follow and these rules, or the ways that things are supposed to be versus that passion of creativity, of discovery, of wonder, of wow, isn't this amazing that sun energy can be converted to electricity? I wonder what I could do with that. I wonder what I could build. I wonder what I could create that doesn't already exist. Where do you think that spirit comes from and is there a way that we can create more of that in our culture? RONY: It's a great question because I think there are still kids who have this experience, but I think less kids. I think it was just totally unstructured imagination, unstructured play. All my friends when we were kids – I didn't let my daughter do this, but we were like 8, 9, 10 years old, we’d grab a garbage can lid, make a sword out of a branch, and then we'd run around in the woods fighting dragons. There's no adults around, dozens of kids having some kind of like full on whatever we wanted. Like, we're just running about till almost nighttime deep in the woods like the kids from Stand By Me, the movie, or something. We got our bikes; we're riding miles away. We’d do whatever adventures we wanted. I remember a couple of friends of mine and I, we'd walk along the highway, which was incredibly stupid, collecting beer cans because we thought, “Wow, look at that, we can collect beer cans.” I don't know why. We're like 9 years old, we thought that would be a cool thing to do and we would figure it and then we'd cut them and make airplanes out of them and just craft stuff. That's probably dangerous. I won’t recommend kids do that right now. But the idea of unstructured play; there's not a game, there's not something someone designed, you're not watching television. You're just running around in the world, doing stuff and your brain and your imagination have to fill in the gaps, I think that's what people really should be doing. Whereas, I think a lot of kids do this now, here's a tablet. It forces you to think in patterns; you’re thinking in a certain way and that's actually scary because everyone's copy pasting the same device and running on the same popular app, or whatever and that's patterning your brain to be caught in a certain way of thinking versus this unstructured thinking, which is more rare right now, I think. DAMIEN: So that sounds like something that would be lovely to get back as an adult. Do you have any techniques? Is this something you do? Do you have ways of structuring that? [chuckles] Of getting to that unstructured play as an adult? RONY: I'm an anomaly because I don't think I ever got structured, which is, I think unfortunate. Not unfortunate, I think it's fortunate that I never got structured. So trying to think if you got caught and how would you break free. But I think I really never got caught in that net. I think I've always been like a wild fish in the ocean, but – [overtalk] DAMIEN: How do you stay out of the net? That's also something I'd like to hear. RONY: That's an interesting, I never had a job, like an actual job job. College, I started my first company and never really worked for anybody. I figured I'm unmanageable so I can't work for anybody, I might as well start my own companies. That was a saving grace because I think it would have been difficult to work for somebody. To conform and work in somebody else's system rather than to build something and try to make that a place people want to be at. But then it's weird, it's like you become the man and you're like, “Oh my God, what am I doing?” That's a whole another topic I won't get into this second. DAMIEN: But do you provide that sort of structure and patterns for people who work for you? RONY: In the beginning of all the companies I started—and I'm doing this again with a new one—it's always been freewheeling, awesome – I think the people that are beginning, that was the greatest time ever. But then as you get bigger, once you get to pass 20, 30 people, even 30 people unstructured, big, crazy, some folks start to come in and crave that structure. This is chaos, like what's going on and then you're like, “Okay, we’ve got to order this and we’ve got to processes and operating plans and all these other things,” and then next thing you know, there's 2,000 people working for you. I'm still trying to figure out how do you maintain that wonderful, free-spirited, freewheeling environment at bigger scale because at bigger scale, it feels like you’ve got to create all this framework and all these boxes for people to be in and processes. People are demanding it like, sometimes employees get upset that it's not there because they're so used to being in that cage for somebody else that they're not used to being free and they want to run around and go back to that cage and I'm like, “Be free,” and they're like, “No.” People who worked for me in the past will tell you that. They'll basically say it was this odd thing that I was pushing them to be more free than they wanted and then the ones who really liked it, got shunned as the things got bigger because what's that person not conforming? They're supposed to follow the procedures and why are you spending all your time with them because they're the ones that don't follow the rules. I'm like, “I don't like following the rules.” So I guess, what is a good technique? I have a recording studio, so I think playing really loud guitar helps. It lets you feel like you can like do anything. Really loud guitar through a big amp, a lot of fuzz pedals, or things like that, or you go on a long hike. We would do ocean kayaking, go a whole day ocean kayaking where there's sharks and weird stuff and some of you are far away from a computer. There's the universe and wild animals and you're back to primal nature again; you feel like you're just a wild, free spirit. I try to do that as much as possible. I think those things help, but it's hard, though and then you’ve got to go back on a Monday morning and there are some office space type manager asking you for TPS reports. That's really difficult. I feel bad because as the companies I've built got bigger, I probably had someone who had someone who made someone do a TPS report and it always bothered me. But it's like, you can't run at a certain size without the TPS report even though nobody knows what a TPS report is. If you don't know what it is, watch the movie but it's like why at some point you'd have someone two, or three levels below you make someone else do a TPS report? ARTY: Yeah. That's a great question. It's like who created this damn report? And why are we so coming to the demand of a report, or empirical data to move forward and work it in our life? As you were sitting there talking and everything, it brought me back to that comment I had again of Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute who talked about his concept of scaling, how that happens in all things that exist in the universe. There's a ratio of scale that we can't really escape and it's an interesting phenomenon that I'm still trying to understand, but I think, Rony where I feel really kindred spirited to you is I hate to be tamed and then once I feel like we have to scale, or tame, I'm like, “Oh, this I want out of this.” Get me out of this game, get me to the new game where I get to germinate something and start it, and there's no form and I love that. I wonder, though. Somebody like you who's created all this amazing technology, aren't you the guy who could maybe make this a reality where we can create those experiences [chuckles] using technology to help us get in and out of these dreams, dates in and out of these waking and normal states that the society has locked into? RONY: Well, here's a couple things to think about from what you're saying. One of them, I have a notion of can you build a gigantic decentralized—I won't even call it a company, but a guild—of free people who are connected through blockchains? And it does not look the pyramid of structure of a company, but it's some kind of guild of artisans and we blockchain to each other and emerge and do things together? Like orcas will form packs because it's the right thing to do but there’s no – well, there actually is an alpha orca so you do have a small pyramid. So it's the alpha orca have fights and then you become the ronin orca. There's a little bit of that. But is there a decentralized guild blockchain thing that could have hundreds of thousands of people that could build totally new tech platforms that are not the central power tech companies? I've always been pondering that and wondering how is that possible and every time I've thought about it, it seems like people collapse back into the same structure of the pyramid. Like they want a king, you try to create something that doesn't have a king, or a queen, and they want the king again. Why do we keep doing that? But somehow, I believe that there is a way to do that to have that democratic free-spirited thing. I think that's what the United States was founded on. Let's not have a king. Let's just have someone who's kicked out every 4 years. They're nothing special. Don't make a big deal about them. But now, 200 years later, we made that person more into a king. We give them special powers; they can do things and they don't get – they're above normal citizens. How did that fall apart? But I just keep wondering, is that possible? Because I think big tech companies reflect more of a monarchy. There is a central figure that have massive power, there's the inner court that have massive power, and then there's the serfs who all work for the central authority. It's basically, we fought against that to free ourselves of monarchies, but our companies and tech companies look more like monarchies. They could be benevolent, or not benevolent, but we still have not been able to get past that king over people thing. It perplexes me and why we keep repeating that. TIM: Well, I think there's a few things with that. You mentioned scale, like as you get bigger and as you add more people, you add more ideas and you add more notions on what the right thing to do is, or what the right way to go is. Obviously, as you do that, more folks are going to agree, or disagree on it. You're going to have various ways of opinions; you end up getting factions, or tribes, or whatever it is. Certainly, this is where people think that way, this group of people think that way, and then you introduce politics because you have to find some way to get all these folks with different ideals to agree on a common purpose, or a common goal. When you do that, once you introduce politics, then you start to introduce the notion of leadership like that. But I think it's interesting when we look at it in the guise of big tech companies and how we have these regions, a lot of this ends up coming is because of the people that ended up profiting the most off of the tech company are the ones that get to make all the decisions. It would be an interesting thing if there was a truly democratic company where everybody from top to bottom made the same amount of money, had the same amount of equity, have the same amount of say in the company. And then if you are a leadership role, it's more like maybe a strategic vision, but your CEO is going to make the same amount of money as your junior developer. Because unless you do that, you don't have a democratic, you don't function; you have a hierarchy by definition. DAMIEN: What we're talking about is power structures and every time there's a power differential, there's going to be a power structure that supports that. The reason why you said earlier when you were about talking how you were having to be like, “No, be free. There are no rules here. It's not a cage.” People resist that because they've been lied to. They say, “You don't have to stick to my rules.” All that really means is I'm not going to tell you what the rules are, which is horribly traumatizing. So until you have that equally distributed power, you're going to have that hierarchy and that structure and somebody is going to want a TPS report before they can go forward on something. RONY: Are there any examples where that's existed for some period of time, even in a small form? Like the equally distributed power, anything? DAMIEN: I've seen it in co-ops. It requires a lot of trust and the more people you involve, the more differentials you're going to find. [overtalk] CHANTÉ: And I think there are some [inaudible] in this communities. ARTY: I think scale. [overtalk] RONY: Like a small co-op. CHANTÉ: We can definitely do this. RONY: A small co-op. ARTY: Yeah. There's definitely people that are trying to do the sorts of things that you're talking about from an organizational structure standpoint, but as you've also pointed out, there's dynamics of resistance to it of it not necessarily being what people want. I mentioned this book before, Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book and the thought that comes to mind as we're talking about this dynamic of being pulled toward wanting order and structure is a big part of his thesis in the book is that we have a desire for order in our consciousness and we have a gravity toward wanting order in that chaos and disorder is uncomfortable. So when we're in that uncomfortable situation, we can learn skills to create our own order out of the disorder, to be creative, to think about ways to construct new ideas and stuff in our head and make new games. But our brain wants some kind of game to play, wants some kind of order to build around, and I feel like, we were talking about these nets that we get caught in and the way that our education system is structured, the way that we learn in school is a net in itself. We learn how to play the game of school and teach people how to follow the rules and be really good at following the rules and in playing the game that's given to you. I feel like if we want to teach people how to create order out of disorder from their own consciousness, through creative play, that we need a learning environment that is oriented toward those things so that we can get practiced at it. Being in a situation of being uncomfortable, being around people that are good at those kinds of things that we can learn how to mimic perhaps and shift those shifts, those things around that way. An acquaintance of mine, we had on the show a while back, Sam Aaron, he does Sonic Pi and he teaches little kids how to code, learn how to be a music DJ and it's the coolest thing. I was reading this post about a little 6-year-old, who was super excited about DJing it at her next birthday party coming up and she was going to get really good at DJing and mixing her own beats. She's 6 years old and I'm just looking at this how beautiful it is and that seeing that fire, that inspiration to create light up in someone, once that fire's lit, it keeps fueling itself. It keeps fueling that desire. I feel like there's something very powerful about music, because you've got some basic rules of how things work, but this huge space to create in, and almost everything we can relate in various ways to music. What if we changed the way that we educated to focus on some of those musical principles and this could be something that's adult learning, too is how can we learn to riff together in a musical context and learn how to do jazz? RONY: That’s very cool. DAMIEN: What I heard is that we should all start jazz bands. TIM: Yeah, same. RONY: That's all good with me. TIM: Let’s see if they get too big, then you have to have a conductor. [laughter] DAMIEN: Like a quartet, big band at most. No orchestra. [overtalk] TIM: You see, big band has to have a conductor, right? That's one of the things. DAMIEN: I have played in a big band without a conductor. TIM: I was in a couple of myself. We'll talk about that one later. RONY: Well, actually that's a good thing because if you have a trio, or a quartet, everyone can go and it somehow works. You all have to pay attention, but if you try to do that with 10 people, 20, 50, a 100, it turns into noise. DAMIEN: I also think it depends on what kind of music you're making. A symphonic orchestra generally needs a conductor, at the very least a concert master who can wave the bow and get people on time. But I've been in drum circles of 300 people that made beautiful music with absolutely no leadership, or any sort of control like that. TIM: Well, I think the difference is that in the drum circle, I don't think there's a preconceived plan that's being executed. It's all improv, right? It's all made on the fly and then you pick a direction. I think it's different when you have a set task, or a thing you’re going to accomplish. In the case of a symphony, or any other thing where we have we're not making up music on the point on the spot, we have a set score. We know what notes they're going to be and we're going to be done. I think there's space for both of those. There's space to say that we're just going to see what comes out of this and then there's another bullet that says, “Okay, well we have to do this.” One is very much creative and I love that. The other part is executive. You don't want, for example, surgeons to just go in there willy nilly and just saying, “We're just going to see what we find and just do whatever.” There has to be a plan. There has to be something that gets executed. Any kind of engineering feat, it has to be done with a plan and structure and different things that have to be done at certain times. So I think there's a place for both in any healthy culture and society where people that create and people who design certainly should not be encumbered by definitions of structure. But if you're going to create, or design something that's going to withstand a hurricane, there obviously needs to be some concerns about a structure and how things are put together. RONY: But let me give you guys a comment on power structure and I'm a bit of anomaly because I've always been super uncomfortable being in that alpha power spot, but I've always had to be there to build a company. Some of them got quite big and the bigger they got, the more uncomfortable I was because I didn't think a human being should have that power. By the way, the question about smart people and billionaires, I've met a bunch of those billionaires that you've mentioned, I've also met some incredibly smart people; they're not always directly correlated. There may be a smart billionaire, but it's not one-to-one—a billionaire who’s someone who's highly optimized at a certain function. Some of those brilliant people I know are super poor and they have built-in things in their mind that they don't want to do the things that they might see oppress others to get to a certain place. They just don't. So they're more happy in their lot making $25,000 a year, or whatever they're doing. But I think what's interesting about trying to not have a power structure is how people just default go into this algorithm in people's brains. I'll give an example. When one of my companies was small, I had a largely empty office and a couple cool collectible vinyl toy things. I love weird, those kind of animate vinyl toys and then just Star Wars thing. I just have a couple of my shelves. When people would visit, like new employees, or partners, they would bring something and put it on the shelf like an homage offering. I'm like, “That's weird,” and then the more that people thought now it was required to bring one of those and make an offering and leave it on my shelf. So a few years later, my shelves are covered the hundreds of these offerings and I'm like, “What in the heck is going on here?” I didn't ask anyone to do it, but people felt like if you're going to go see the alpha wolf, you have to bring them a dead rabbit and leave it as an offering and it was just amazing. It's like all this stuff and I would give most of it away, but it was really weird how everyone has this algorithm that they feel like if you're going to go visit the alpha leader, you've got to bring a gift, an offering, a moose, whatever you happen to have caught. Even when we dealt with people from outside the US, it was even more extreme like you'd have this whole formal exchange; you had to bring them a gift and they would bring you this gift. I was like, “What is going on here?” This is thousands of years of evolutionary biology wired into people's brains making them do things. I'm like, “I don't want to be that!” Like, that's not what we're doing. We're totally building a different social order, no one's paying attention to me at all, and everyone is just like, “Nope, we have this code built into our brain and we're just going to do that.” I found that to be really strange to the point where I build two decent sized companies and each time, I felt like I had to throw the ring into the volcano like in The Hobbit, or Lord of the Rings, because if you don't, it just kind of gets to you. I felt like if it started to get to me, I just need to throw it into the volcano and start over again. Hand the ring to someone else and go back to base camp and try it again, which I'm doing now. But I found that both times I built successful tech, but not the nonhierarchical culture I had in mind at the beginning, which I'm trying to do now again. I'm not sure how do you fight human biology? I'm like, “Don't do that. Stop bringing the moose and the rabbits by! What on earth are you people doing?” and they just keep doing it. I don't know what it ism or why, but it's like, we are hard wired as humans to follow an alpha wolf. In fact, the alpha two and threes feel like they actually have to challenge you in a tribal fight and if you don't put them down and show the rest of the wolf pack that you're the alpha, then they'll try to eat you. It's like what is going on? But that is what happens at every company, in every country, in every government, and it's so weird that we have not evolved past the way we were thousands and thousands of years ago. CHANTÉ: Is it possible, Rony the endeavor that you're working on now to use technology, to dream of new futures and realities that does decentralize social structures in the sense – because my feeling is the collective consciousness is why we're doing this. Like, we can't escape ourselves. So if we give ourselves new experiences and we know what it feels like to have decentralized collectivism, then we may choose to build new cities, families, and companies in a decentralized structure. Because that power and oppression, it feels like a human instinct that we can't escape it. but I'm just not convinced that that's real. I think it's been something, a story, a narrative that we've been stuck in. So I think we have to build a new story, or create a new story and a new reality and I think technology can allow us to do that and people like you and everyone on this call, we can do that together. ARTY: Yeah. I was thinking about that, too of software gives us this ability of reality construction and if we've learned certain ways of doing things, if we operate in a certain net in a certain rails playing certain games and we don't have a template for anything else so that outside of that is just disorder and unstructured and unknown, then we're going to cling to the familiar structure. We're going to cling to what feels safe and known and predictable, and that we know how to operate. I feel like the way to escape that is to create an alternative that offers structure of a system that gives you a set of rails that reorients things and creates opportunities for creativity, for entrepreneurship, for ideation, but creates new structures where those things can thrive. I don't think we're going to get away from technology, but we can reinvent our interface with technology. We can reinvent the shape of our social software infrastructure and how we relate to one another through technology. I feel like to overcome that gap, what needs to happen is a vision, really, is the putting together a vision of what that might look like such that we can build it. RONY: I spent the last decade going really deep into that, about as deep as you could possibly imagine, and it started out actually a few years earlier, 2008, 2009, working on this call it a Miyazaki film world project with my friends at Weta and we spent a few years on that. And then one of the things I felt was if you're going to – I won't get into the details of the project is actually something Sun & Thunder will hopefully be releasing. But if I was going to go into this idea of hacking into reality, what is that? I actually needed to go do that in order to be credible about making a story about it, or making a film about it, or film world. So I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to go on a tangent.” So I started a tech company with the idea that we're going to be reality hackers. Like, we're going to figure that out and we're just going to go all the way. We're going to hack into the visual cortex, we're going to go full on, and it was amazing because all these people, like people who created The Matrix and Neal Stephenson from Snow Crash, all these people started showing up. And then some of the very early stuff we did, we started to go really there, like really deep. That's stuff that you can productize, but we're starting to unlock things about how the human brain works in our connection to this weird connection between the physics and how our brain constructs reality. What does that mean and how do you actually get in there and actually hack it? We did some stuff that freaked me out so much. Everyone in the early days was like, ‘Whoa, maybe we need to take a step back.” I think that's actually what happened. We had those whoa moments. “Let's take a step back and let's not unlock full atomic fusion right now. Let's do something that you can actually maybe ship,” but we're going to places that were not ready for as a species. We really had those moments where we would see over the horizon. That was intense. One of the things that made me walk back and I think a couple of early folks that we just felt like human software, our human biology is totally unprepared for this. Like, we're not prepared to hack reality. We are not equipped. We're not ready as a species. We would screw things up beyond all belief. Look how badly we're doing on social media, which is so thin and almost nothing. When I think of digital realities, whether it's AR, spatial computing, VR, those are simulation training grounds for the real thing. It scares me when people are talking about neural implants in the brain like, no, no, no, we are not ready for that. In our SIM testing on social media and digital reality, we're not doing a good job. We’re creating fairly awful places with occasional cool places. I thought, “Okay, we're going to unleash this like Renaissance of art and imagination.” It's like, no, that's not what's going on. It's going on in little pockets. But for every art and Renaissance thing, you've got like nine, or ten horrible things. Some things I can't even mention. I used to tell our investors, “Someone's going to make trillions of dollars doing the things we refuse to do” because the level of control and weird stuff you can pump into someone's brain. There are companies I'm not naming; you could imagine why they're spending $6 to $8 to $10 billion a year trying to conquer digital reality. Why they have reality labs. You should be really frightened about why they're doing it. L ARTY: Right. RONY: I started out with a notion of can there be this real creative imagination Renaissance and I actually believe there can. But at the same time, it's like every time you have a superhero, there's something else like the super villain appears. It's a law of the universe and I feel like the more we were trying to do good in hacking reality, you would have bad equally emerging and equal strength, maybe sometimes even larger. I don't know what's going on, but it did get me to take a step back and wonder. The human software is totally unprepared and so backwards. Like we're running Dos 1972 right now, or even worse than that. Our software is like Middle Ages and it's so easily manipulatable and triggerable and all kinds of horrible – the human, we have not transcended. We are not where we need to be collectively. That doesn't mean there's not individuals, or groups who are transcending and becoming more enlightened and evolving in a good way. But the net human condition seems to be quite in the bad place right now. It actually scares the crap out of me. So I did take a step back from the notion of I don't know we're ready and maybe we just need to take a breath and figure out our social system, our human biology, like what's going on because we are evolving at so much slower pace than the rapid accelerating pace of our tech capabilities. We're building insane tech. AI will pass us all in this decade, like, what the heck are we doing to ourselves? We're unleashing things in the world we have no idea and society is not capable of predicting. The nonlinear event impact is really scary and we just keep doing it. I don't mean to be all pessimistic, but I think the hope of this creative Renaissance is something that's a beacon—it should be a beacon for some—where you're free, you’re decentralized, you're not controlled by this monarchal power. But too much of the other side is actually winning right now, too much of the other side is dominating everything because they're playing the game that I think our brain is wired to. We're wired to a pyramid structure. The people who realize that manipulate it, they take advantage. They do all the things; they’ve figured out the social psychology, they've hacked the code of the human brain, and they're making tons of money doing it because they know how we are. I don't know if that's just how it will be forever, or is there going to be an actual enlightenment for people. That made me take a step back from hoping that everyone will just have this inner artist wake up and now, I’m not so sure. CHANTÉ: I love that question now. I think it makes me go back to something I continue to say, it's just like, do we get off of our technologies, or get off of the things that we believe connect us? Because we are ourselves technologies so, do we need to be constantly manipulating something else? There's a lot of power in just being together in real time, in real life together and I think if we can go back to some of that, we can remind ourselves because—and this is coming from somebody who spent a lot of time and money in meditation and self-transcendence. Now I'm at this place where I'm like, “Do I need to transcend, or should I just be right where I am because the past, the present, and the future are actually all one and should I pay attention to who I am and what I am and where I am a little bit more versus constantly thinking in the future? This is so hard for me because I'm a futurist. I love to think and imagine new possibilities. But I just wonder. That’s kind of one of the mantras I've been sitting with in the last six months, or so. RONY: Thinking of what you're saying, we had a pretty high-level of Tibetan Buddhist who built one of the great temples in Tibet where monks meditate and they built it from memory. There's no architectural plans and he was one of the leaders that he came by and I showed him some stuff we were doing. It was maybe 5, 6 years ago. He's like, “That's amazing and you're cheating.” He goes, “We take years to learn how to do that, but we could do more than what you're doing. You're just level jumping.” I get what you're doing, I understand it but you're taking the elevator, the sky tram up the mountain, and there's something about – but you're not equipping people to know,” or. I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time. I think I have a better grasp now, but we're not spiritually ready for what we can do and they spent a lot of time doing this. They have their own virtual reality. In fact, it was interesting was I said, “We're not really building technology. We're simply trying to unlock what's in the human brain, which is an amazing computer, best GP in the world is the visual cortex. Best display is our brain. That's all there, we're just trying to tap into it.” He's like, “We do the same thing using different tech, but you're kind of cheating.” I thought that was interesting. It’s like you don't really have the satisfaction of climbing up to mid base camp on Everest; you just took the elevator and suddenly, you're there. But your lungs aren't ready. You didn't climb the mountain. You're not fit. I feel like technology is doing that for us. Spiritually, we're just not ready. CHANTÉ: Yeah. I spend a lot of time in somatics. I'm in a couple of somatic communities and we talk a lot about those somatic reps. There's a lot of wisdom in experiencing something firsthand and witnessing somebody else do it alongside you in that community because we learn that way, too. If you're picking up on other people's energetic vibes and feel, you collectively whoever's in that space, in that room, It is something that cellularly somatically, you will become a little bit wiser from. I can't describe it. It's only when I'm in a collective with my yogis who we're doing deep breathing together, or we're doing POS in a practice together and there's just this thing that I experience that I've never had on any drug, or any kind of tech, using technology, what do I put on a headset, or something? I can't describe it. It feels out of this world and it's almost like only those of us in that room would ever be able to describe it and maybe indescribable, but it's powerful. So I keep going back to that. RONY: One of the things he told me was, “Okay, you'll help people realize that reality is just an illusion, but are they equipped to understand that?” That will just freak them out, they're going to break down, and now what? When you actually really get that, when you really understand like how reality is constructed, if you go deep and get into that, which we had to do to build some of the things we were doing, it does weigh heavily on you because you're like, “What the heck is actually going on?” A lot of things you were taught growing up that your parents, or grandparents might believe and then you’re – where you might read in a book and you're suddenly facing that the reality you know is not stable; it's liquid, it's hackable, it's editable. You're like, “What is going on?” That kind of opening up of your mind is an interesting place, but no one's equipped to really go there. You almost got to step back and say, “I'm going to forget I saw that. Let me just go back and watch a football game,” and it's way easier to go back and play X-Box right now. [laughs] DAMIEN: Those sorts of discoveries have been happening for all of recorded history and I think farther. People get there via gyms, they get there via sitting on a mountain in the modus pose and sometimes, they come back and go, “Okay, I'm just going to pretend that it's real. [laughter] And sometimes, they don't and die under a Bodhi tree, whatever. But these are things that these are not new realizations, or discoveries. RONY: No, they're not. But what weird is that the vast majority of people have not had that. CHANTÉ: Right. RONY: Vast majority like, think about how many people in this country are not even on the first step of any form of enlightenment. The actions they take, the things they believe, the people they vote for, you're like, “They're so orthogonal and distant from that.” So you do have pockets of people who've had enlightenment and transcendence over the last thousands years, but it's a fractional minority and that's what's like why are the rest stuck? Where is everybody's stuck on and why? DAMIEN: Because they want to be. CHANTÉ: Well, I don’t know. [overtalk] DAMIEN: Ego death is death. Nobody wants death. CHANTÉ: We’re programmed to be. I think we're conditioned and makes me think, too also Stanislav Grof, I'm not sure if you all know him, a famous transcendent, or transpersonal kind of. RONY: What’s his last name? CHANTÉ: Stanislav Grof talks about the spiritual emergency. I'll drop the link here. Really interesting, too and did a lot of holotropic breathwork to get people through transcendence and used a lot of other, I think drugs and synthetics to have those transcendental experiences. But talks a lot about the spiritual emergency and I think you're right, Rony talking about when we have this realization that oh my God, what is reality? [chuckles] Because reality is something that we all can define differently and even this is something that I think quite a bit about what the future of work and technology and all of us coming together, this convergence of who am I without that role, without that title? Who am I without my computer and without my phone with the internet in my pocket? I don't know that we've spent enough time examining who we are going in. We're always looking out and I think we have to come back into ourselves to be home and I'd like to see and I am trying to do more of that, trying to cultivate those experiences with the communities that I run circles with, or the things that I have influence on is just, let's go back into ourselves because there's so much power there. DAMIEN: I talk about this as the high school basketball version of reality. If you've ever been to a high school basketball game, championship, league championship, whatever, and you got the crowds yelling and screaming and everybody's enthused and excited about what's going on. If you were to go down to center court and wave your hands and go, “Hey, hey, hey! Hey everybody, everybody, whoa, whoa, none of this matters.” That's really rude. You're right it doesn't matter. It's high school basketball, but we have chosen to make it matter because that's what makes the game. If you don't care about the rules, you don't have a game. If you don't care about the characters, you don't have a movie. If you don't care about the desk and the computer, you don't have a job. So we make these decisions. We can see through it, if we choose to and see that it's an illusion, it doesn't really matter. But if that's what you're here for, go for it. Have fun. If that’s not – RONY: Here's a question, just because it's an illusion, does it mean it doesn't matter? DAMIEN: Exactly. RONY: Actually, just a hint at that. We made this digital person, her name was Micah, and people's reactions to her were unbelievable. They began to have relationships and we had to change behavior code around Micah and if you actually broke her personal space, she would leave. She'd walk away and actually open up a door in a wall and disappear. If you behave badly around her, you would lose access. We had to create this social code of conduct because people were – it was odd. I won't get into all of it. But then we fixed that and it was just interesting that people would want to be with her because she would gaze into your eye and pay attention to you. Looked amazingly real, but almost hyper real, like the most real person who was totally focused on you and that attention level from this illusion made people feel good. Even though she is an illusion, that feeling was real and reality is illusion anyway so is she just as real as anything else, or was something going on? It was kind of odd, like is what you feel, or what you carry with you actually that thing anyway, even if it's all an illusion? DAMIEN: And you get to decide that for yourself with and among your culture and your peers, your group. ARTY: Well, I think joy matters for its own sake. Connecting with one another, having fun, experiencing joy, it’s a reason to live, it's a reason to be. And if we're playing a basketball game together, it's fun. The people that are in the crowd, enjoying the game and getting involved with it emotionally, too, it's fun and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with having fun and enjoying those experiences and then being meaningful for their own sake. If we have an experience with a digital person and figure out ways to have some feeling of connection, of being paid attention to, of being listened to, there's definitely some risks with regards to dynamics of attachment and just messing with us as humans that I think are definitely of concern. There's just risks with creating emotional love attachments to digitalness that I think is unexplored, unpredictable riskiness because heartbreak is a real phenomenon experience that can be devastating. That aside, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with experiencing good feelings from those things happening in our lives. TIM: I just wonder, though what does it say about the human condition when with 7 and a half billion people on the earth that we need to be with, we would think that we need to create a digital person with which to interact? There are so many of us out there with which we could be interacting and probably should be interacting. We've gotten this far as a species without needing to have an artificial person. [overtalk] DAMIEN: Well, we have our emotional people. We have our pet canines, we have the robot people, people make friends with Roombas. Before that, people made friends with stars in the sky. They’ll look back to Orion and that’s Ra, Ra loves me and so on. TIM: Sure. DAMIEN: It’s the same relationship we have with other human beings. TIM: To some extent, but we were still, the person who was having that relationship was the one who actually defined what that person is, who that was, was essentially the imagination. With an artificial person, or artificial intelligence, you don't have that; someone else is deciding that. So would you want to have that type of interaction? I feel like we could probably, as a society, do way better of devoting our resources to improving the human condition among each other by interacting with each other and understanding each other's hopes and dreams and heartbreaks and struggles than if we were going to spend the resources and the time to develop an artificial person with which to interact. If I think of what we want to do to help people, we want to help everyone to help the human condition, to help and just improve lives and create joy around people? I feel like spending toil creating an artificial person is a fool's errand to that end. DAMIEN: Well, what you’re describing would be more effective, but it's outside of our skillset. [chuckles] We need George Lucas for that. RONY: Let me agree, but disagree on one thing, I'll give you a couple examples. Imagine your family has, let's call it an artificial person who's with your family for hundreds of years and is the keeper of the cumulative wisdom of your great, great, great grandparents and is that wise uncle, or aunt, or grandparent that just has the whole history of your family all the way through and can be pulled up and is that kind of totem with the family all the way. It's just an example, something a human being can't do, but could be interesting. It's like we keep photo albums. Now we have video albums of family. What if you had almost like a shaman of the family who you could talk to and it could give you the accumulated wisdom of all your ancestors? Wouldn’t that be kind of interesting? TIM: We've had that accumulated wisdom passed down without having the demonstrable technological privilege of being able to afford to purchase not only an artificial person, but the means with which to property to keep that artificial person going. They've had books and scrolls, they had cultural passed downs, they've had just word of mouth passing down these stories that have been great and rich stories for those of us who are descendants of slaves. I know who my family members were not because they were written down anywhere, not because of any technology preserved, but when they were preserved through word of mouth. Linnaeus was written in Bibles somewhere. So we have that and we have the stories behind that, that to me, it speaks to why carrying those things forward is important, but it also speaks to that even if such technology existed back then, it would still be only to the very, very privileged. I think that we need to acknowledge that with a lot of the things we're talking about, talking about why people haven't become enlightened, it is definitely, almost certainly an essential clue that you have the time and the ability to be able to spend time enlightening yourself versus trying to survive. I think if we spend the time to improve everyone's conditioned to where survival is not a struggle, then we will see much more enlightenment. We would actually see, I think, a dramatic leap forward in what we're capable of as a culture and as humanity. But we spend time shooting billionaires in the space instead. RONY: When you say moving people from survival not being a struggle, what is that level that you think everyone is beyond the day-to-day struggle and is in that place? What does that mean you think across our collective country, or countries? TIM: I know for me, I have been in a place where I didn't know where my next meal was coming from and I haven't had that worry in decades. I don't think any of us here probably have worried about really, are we going to eat today? Are we going to have a place to live today? Maybe we've had those struggles before, but right now, we're five of us sitting around here talking on the internet. Those are probably not our struggles. But there are people in this world that we can all imagine, we have folks that don't have that they are wondering, like, am I going to have the lights one day in the country we are on that only has the power on for 4 hours a day as our food going to spoil? There are various conditions under which people struggle, I think if we could get a baseline and just have a baseline opportunities where people have power, they have access to clean water, they have access to healthcare, they have access to what we define the basic needs of food, health, power, access to the rest of the world via the internet as a baseline so that when they're not concerned with what we take for granted as the basic things. Like, I know if I get sick, there's a hospital I can go to. I don't know how much could it cost, but I can go right now and I can ask the hospital. To have those kinds of things handled allows people the privilege to be able to really then look beyond the essence of struggle, taking care of the animal brain, and we can now look beyond those things. We can now say, “Hey, what does it mean now?” They can examine the condition a lot better when they're not hungry. I feel like for us, these things are all great to talk about, but I think if there's a place where I'm going to turn my attention, if I can, beyond the basics of feeding my family, I would love to do that and then see what the world becomes in 50 years, or a 100 years when so many more people are freed from having the struggle of survival and we have now the point where we talked about before, where now we're all equal people in this society of the globe and now we all have our equal ideas that we can contribute to moving us forward instead of so many of us just trying to stay alive. RONY: I'll tell you what's interesting. I agree with you. The thing that I wonder about first of all, I think it would be great if there is a way – by the way, I think technologically, there is a way to get everyone on the planet out of their survival mode. I really think we have the smarts, the capabilities, the resources to actually do that. Why we can't organize to do that, I'm not sure, but I totally believe we can. There's zero reason. In fact, I was at this thing in 2005, it was the World Economic Forum where it's just the biggest billionaires and people that run the countries, the world, they get together. I was there as a technology pioneer. So every year, they'll pick a number of startup people and they want you to co-mingle with the people that run the biggest things on the planet. It was a very weird experience. But one of the things they were talking about was this issue, how do we solve that and I'm just sitting there going, “All of you in this effing room could actually solve this today. Right now. You really could.” There's meetings, there's dinners, people are talking about it. I'm like, “That's good that you're doing, but you literally can. All of you have the means to do it.” Like, where is the – but they didn't. They didn't do it, but they were talking about doing it. I'm like, “Do you like talking about doing it more than doing it?” So that was one thing. I don't know why we haven't able to organize, but the other piece is my grandparents, my great-grandparents, everyone was as dirt poor as you can imagine. But they were more spiritual and transcendent and enlightened and that as we got up, I look at my cousins, everyone's struggled and then my parents did a little better and we did a little better. People seem to be less concerned about becoming enlightened and improving and more concerned about what's the next car they're going to buy and we do need to bring everyone to that baseline, I totally agree. But I haven't seen it make people get spiritually better, get themselves together more. It's more of they go down a different path of just wanting more cars, more things, and less enlightened. It's kind of weird. I don't know why. In fact, the more money, maybe the inverse proportion that the whole enlightenment, it's a weird phenomenon. Not that you want people to be impoverished like, we want to pull people out of that. I think that's important. But as you go to the other side, you almost zap that part of your brain away. You have too much money, it makes you not sensitive anymore to what's happening in the world. ARTY: There's this game of capitalism that is this game of business of how much money can we make and you see different folks at different tiers of playing these various games, whether you're in the workforce and you're thinking about how do I get the highest paying job and be able to buy a nice house and there's a set of rules and thinking of how to excel in that. Then you've got this world of investment and just playing at another level of abstraction. But in both of those dynamics, there's this game and these rules and this idea of what it means to win that seems to anchor people's thinking and drive. And then as we learn from others, what it means to win and we see other people being successful in that and they go and buy a new fancy car and then we're like, “Whoa, they want a fancy car. Well, I want a fancy car, too.” So we mimic these desires from other folks in our culture at whatever game we're fascinated by and I feel like some of those things are some of the fundamental things that need to shift is these game mechanics that we're incurring around. One of the things from the Flow book is Csikszentmihalyi talks about how symbols are deceptive and they have a way of distracting us from the realities they're supposed to represent. So there's these symbols of things that we chase—a better job, a bigger house, more money, et cetera—and these symbols are things that are supposed to make us happy and then we end up chasing the symbol. Often, people that have all kinds of money playing these games, doing all this stuff, they still haven't found a way, even with all these things, to find happiness, to find joy in their lives. I feel like if we can learn and reorient around the experience of joy, the experience of creation, of creating with other people, of learning how to have and how to experience these really cool highs in life and turn those kinds of experiences into the goals that we have, that maybe we can break free of the chains of things that we play of what it means to win, what it means to win at life. This is effectively what we're talking about here. CHANTÉ: I was going to say, as you were describing that, it’s like okay, then how do we rebuild – maybe not rebuild as a word – it's how do we cultivate a culture amongst those of us who are interested to orient us towards this collectivism and community versus this self-actualization and individualization that we tend to be orienting to here in this country and other first world countries? I happen to believe we have the ability to build culture and that is something we’ve got to spend more time and money doing. So makes me think also of this blog post I stumbled upon a few years ago that was comparing Maslow's hierarchy of needs structure to that of the Blackfoot Indian community and saying how he had taken that for inspiration and used his own cultural and his own lived experience to change the narrative around what that was to create this new conceptual model. They started with self-actualization and I believe as it went up, it was more oriented towards community. So I keep going back to our first nations people around the world and I think there's a lot of wisdom there that we haven't tapped into and we sometimes believe that there's no technology there, but there's a ton of technology in those communities that we just have discarded, or the belief is now that that's not revolutionary when in fact, it probably has been revolutionary the whole time and we've just set out to believe something different. RONY: I totally agree. Chanté, you asked the question, are we technology? I think so. [laughter] There's probably very little doubt that we are. I think we're just becoming aware of that and we're becoming aware that we're in some kind of SIM with rules and not just one rule set. So I think depending on where you're going, you could play the accumulate the gold coins rules, amass the kingdom, or you go down the enlightenment path. I think there's multiple games in the SIM at the same time and that makes the game design quite interesting. [chuckles] I'm becoming more and more convinced that's what's going on. DAMIEN: It’s like the Total Front. There's multiple games, people compete in different things. RONY: Yes. It's an open game world. CHANTÉ: It is and I think we have to continue to remind ourselves of that. One of the questions I had written down just between our last call and this one is just who are we going to give the power? How are we going to empower people who maybe don't have the technology and the resources to develop and design these games? How do we get them the tools and how do we make it a little bit more equitable so that we can have new lived experiences and realities? Because if I go back to this first nations, or indigenous people, are we including them in these conversations? Are we talking to folks who aren't using this technology every day? And then once we bring them into the conversation, how do we say, “Okay, here's something.” Maybe they don't want it, but here's something let's see what you build. RONY: I think one of the things that's going on, one of the game mechanics are one uncovered, which is survival of the fittest. I think that's happening and I think technically savvy people are using their capabilities to evolve past non-technically savvy people. Those capabilities give you huge advantages of resource control and then that gives them an ability to create even more technology. If you think about a survival of the fittest game mechanic, technology actually plays into that really well. I think it's emerging out of that. It's like the human mind, if you don't believe in Darwin, it doesn't matter it's happening. It believes in you. Just like, don't believe in gravity, don't believe in climate change, we believe in you anyway. We're going to flood the earth. We're going to burn down California. Climate change is going to do its thing. Physics is going to do its thing. It doesn't care who believes in you, or not. Doesn’t need you to believe in it. I think Darwin doesn't need you to believe in Darwin either, it's just happening and those who don't believe in it, you're going to get evolved away because the people that believe in it tend to be more on the science, tech understanding what's going on side and they are disproportionally winning past the people who are stuck. I actually think the way we're a product of some version of us that evolves past other versions of us that went extinct, I kind of worry, but probably realize that's what's happening. The tech enabled folk are the ones who are literally winning the survival of the fittest and they're just zooming past everyone else and in 50 years, it's going to be the gap is so unbelievably wide that I don't know what's going to happen, but it feels like a Darwinian lever. That's what it feels like what's going on and we're having a spike. Evolution is not just linear; it has these discontinuities. It feels like tech is one of those discontinuities that's creating a spike and we're evolving into something else, we’re fusing into tech to be these tech bio things that will outrun, out pass, out intelligence our classic selves, what we are right now. I don't know what you do with everyone who is not keeping up; that's where the compassion and empathy has to come in. How do you pull everyone forward, educate everyone? Because if they don't, they literally are in the Darwin rule going to get left behind in a serious way. That's what's kind of scary. Sounds very doom and gloom, I didn't mean to go there. We need to end on a much happier note. [chuckles] DAMIEN: Well, should we move on to reflections? Does anyone have a happy reflection they want to kick off with? TIM: I think that the thing that when we're all talking about it, I do like Damien's notion of the drum circle where I feel like we as a global community, hopefully, can get to the point where we can all bring our drums to the circle and just see what comes out of it. Right now, we are playing sheet music. [chuckles] We probably need to get on the same sheet of music and then learn to just bring our drums to the circle. I think a lot of the things we talked about are steps along the way, but I do think that we all have to do our part to make sure everybody can be included in this and get to that democratic anarchistic notion where everybody is equal and everybody's input is as valuable as everyone else's, but that's the goal, right? I feel where everybody is valued, everyone is heard and everybody is seen and I think that's a noble goal for anybody. RONY: I totally agree. CHANTÉ: I love that reflection, by the way, Tim and I think where I'm really curious is just going back to something that Rony said around how do we build these decentralized guilds protected by blockchains. That's something that I wrote down, but I would love to just continue to dream about and of course, those of us on this call today, it's like let's continue this conversation offline somewhere, at Rony’s, [laughs] because technology is not being nice to us today. [laughs] But I'm really inspired and just so happy, we got a chance to have this conversation again. Thank you. ARTY: The thing I keep coming back to is this breaking out of these nets. How do we break out of the nets and create opportunity to innovate, invent, to rethink, to enable new sorts of things to happen? As long as we're stuck in this current path of momentum that already exists, that we're already moving toward, it's a challenging road. We've got a lot of big problems that need solving, that can be solved, that we're capable of solving, and yet we don't do it and why don't we do it at an abstract level? Well, we're stuck in these nets. I think about your background, Rony that you talked about with starting pretty much as a founder, you're going down the entrepreneur route because you don't fit in easily in existing systems. So it's much easier to operate in a mode of building your own. One of the things I've been thinking about is how do we create more entrepreneurship and enable more entrepreneurial innovation to happen and teach and create space for those sorts of skills. I feel like this goes together with the distributed self-organizing, whatever that emergence of new social order is, that speaking that way of being in that unstructured space of being okay with the discomfort and being able to create your way out of the box is something that we need to create a deliberate effort to cultivate and to make space for. It won't happen on its own, unless we make a deliberate effort to bring that world into existence. RONY: I think we need empathy, compassion, imagination, freedom, courage coupled to our crazy new technology. It's my version of we need Jimmy Hendrixs, Gandhis, and MLKs. Because they existed, that gives me hope that more of that's possible and that wasn't technology we made, that was those people found something in them that I think we all have, we just got to tap into. So I think that's really important. The other last funny thing I want to I'll send it to you. This is about the glitch and crashing audio equipment. One of the best things I ever recorded in my band, we jammed for 10 minutes and then we went back and played. We recorded, it's a tape. We only recorded 35 seconds of it. I'll send you that. It was the best 35 seconds I ever did. But it's like, what happened to that 10 minutes? It was like, oh my God, that was the best session ever and then went back to play and we're like, “No, no, that couldn't possibly have happened.” We have no idea what we did. It was like the spirit came and took us and in 32 seconds, you see it taking off and then it's just the tape broke. I salvaged that 35 seconds. I'll send it to you guys. You can stick it into the podcast, but it's really funny and it's like, it's that glitch just when you're on the groove, it crashes everything. So I'm going to get off because I've got to jump into something, but I also hope I don't crash this session. Hopefully, this one works out. But thank you so much for having me. This was great. DAMIEN: Thank you for being here, Rony. RONY: I really appreciate it. It was awesome. We went to some cool places. Thank you, everyone. CHANTÉ: Thank you so much. It was great. RONY: All right, peace. CHANTÉ: Thank you. Bye, bye. Special Guest: Rony Abovitz.
244: Making Peace and Creating Trust with Brianna McGowen
01:52 - Brianna’s Superpower: Intense Empathy and Feeling Deeply * Octavia Butler: Parable of the Sower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sower_(novel)) 06:28 - Practicing Acceptance vs Resignation * Making Peace Without Giving Up * Problems/Tasks vs People * Providing Alternate Narratives * Delicious Democracy (https://www.deliciousdemocracy.com/): Making Things a Pleasurable Experience for All 12:04 - Delicious Democracy: A Creative Advocacy Lab (https://www.deliciousdemocracy.com/) * Biomimicry (https://biomimicry.org/what-is-biomimicry/) * Creative Ways to Form Grassroots Coalitions * Online Town (https://theonline.town/) * Door Knocking * Reinforcement 17:14 - Community-Owned AI * Merging Humans with Algorithms; Technology with Government * Platform Co-Op Conference (https://platform.coop/events/conference2021/) * What is Ownership? * Mastodon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon) * DisCO.coop (https://disco.coop/) 24:51 - Trust * Trustless = Antihuman * “Building Trust” by Robert C. Solomon & Fernando Flores (https://www.amazon.com/Building-Trust-Business-Politics-Relationships/dp/0195161114/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=%E2%80%9CBuilding+Trust%E2%80%9D+by+Robert+C.+Solomon+%26+Fernando+Flores&qid=1627492322&sr=8-1) * The Industrialization of Trust * Confidence Levels * Working Families Party (https://workingfamilies.org/) 40:41 - Outcomes > Outputs * Measurements of Success * Measurement Theory (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/measurement-theory) * Proxy Measures (https://centerforgov.gitbooks.io/benchmarking/content/Proxy.html): All Measures Are Proxy Measures 46:56 - Equitism (https://codetomove.com/manifesto.html) * User-Centered Design (https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/user-centered-design.html) Reflections: John: Unique approaches to door knocking: Changing the script. Casey: 1) All measures are proxy measures. 2) Thinking about how growth mindset and outcomes not outputs relate. Damien: Being able to work with nonbinary is the only way to deal with things like trust and confidence levels. Brianna: 1) All measures are proxy measures. 2) Meandering conversations! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join. JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 244. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Hi, I’m Damien Burke and I’m here with Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I am Casey and we're all here with our guest today, Bri McGowen. Bri is the Chief Technology Officer of Delicious Democracy. She is a developer, poet, data scientist, advocate, and modern dancer passionate about intersecting worlds, developing community-owned AI, and building Equitism. Welcome, Bri! So glad we have you. BRIANNA: Hello! Happy to be here. CASEY: So Bri, our first question for guests is always the same. It's what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? BRIANNA: It's both, my superpower and my kryptonite. It's both, a strength and also the thing that will keep me up at night, but it's just the science fiction author, fantasy author, Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower and the main character, Olamina, is what's called a sharer and a sharer is basically someone who can see someone's pain and experience it as if it's their own, which is a whole other level than empathy. But I think maybe my superpower is just intense empathy to the point where I will actually physically not be okay if I experience, or hear, or see someone in pain, or in need. And then I think it's the thing that is my Achille’s heel, too because sometimes I'm feeling helpless, or I don't have a good path to help someone. It'll just keep me up at night, honestly. So it's both my superpower. I feel good that I have this ability to feel deeply, but also, it's hard to sometimes draw emotional boundaries. [laughs] CASEY: I love Octavia Butler, too. BRIANNA: Me too! CASEY: How did you get that power? When did you realize you had it maybe? BRIANNA: As a kid maybe? I don't know. I can't pinpoint it, but I know that maybe that's what drove me to do a lot of advocacy in my teen, early adult years is because I wanted to not feel helpless all the time. Yeah, I don't know the moment I realized I had that power, I guess. CASEY: Well, that's an interesting answer too. DAMIEN: I love the concept that your superpower is also a weakness; it feels so true to the superhero genre, which I’m a big fan of, or even the [inaudible]. That which makes you extraordinary is also what destroys you. BRIANNA: I don't know. I feel like I knew more about the superhero world in silos. [laughs] I feel like I get by. [laughs] JOHN: You feel like the opposite can also be true and if it's something that I like to think about when I'm thinking about adverse and traumatic events that happen to people, and then maybe you grew up in a terrible environment, that can really affect you through the rest of your life. But if you can take the coping skills that you have to learn in order to make it through, those coping skills can make you, for example, really empathetically, because you had to pay attention to what everyone was feeling around you in order to stay safe. But that does make it so that you can pay attention to other people to that degree to be really tuned into what they're feeling. So you can even take that burden and turn it into a superpower as well. BRIANNA: Yeah, totally. So I was helping co-lead a team a couple months ago and I think that's honestly what makes me a good leader, team leader, is because I'm very much attuned to – even like during scrums, I can just hear something in someone's voice and I'm like, “Hey, what was that?” Like, “What is the closed captioning of what you're trying to say there?” I sometimes find it maybe I'm overly checking in, but also, during the lockdown, I found that to be actually very helpful. So it's trying to balance that, but I think that's also why I feel good at leading things is because I can also use that burden sometimes to be persuasive and make arguments for people to also get them to feel and see things and have a paradigm shift of sorts. DAMIEN: I can definitely relate to that as a leadership skill. I'm the product lead for a product where I know the least about it and my opinion matters the least. [laughter] I know the least and my opinion matters at least, and that's what makes me a good leader. I'm forced to listen because I don't know anything and so, being able to have that naturally is where you're always listening and you're always aware of what's happening with people, that would be really powerful. BRIANNA: Yeah. I also just go back to the boundaries of, I said a little earlier, the input feed. When to be able to move forward, or practice acceptance. That's, I think the one thing I've been doing lately is trying to practice more acceptance of things without being resigned. CASEY: Oh, that's tricky. DAMIEN: Can you elaborate on that distinction between acceptance and resignation? BRIANNA: Yeah. Okay. So for me, it's between the finite and infinite games that are at play in the world. Finite being something that you play to win and infinite games being you play to continue play. I tend to think of resignation as a give up, as a place where you abandoned hope and it's a very finite way to experience, I think the world, because I always believe in change and new perspective and that's very easy to say. Sometimes, it's very painful, but acceptance is maybe accepting where things are in the moment without feeling strung-out and to keep pushing for an outcome, but maybe changing how you play the game, or changing what outcome you even want. Acceptance to me just feels like making peace without giving up. DAMIEN: I love that. To me, it dovetails with the connection, or the distinction between past and future. The past will not change; it will always have been what it was and so, that's something to accept. The future has not yet been written and so, we're not resigned to what we think it might be, or fear it might be. BRIANNA: Yeah. CASEY: That sounds just right to me and what you were saying, but I was picking up Bri. Acceptance is about accepting the past and resigning would be accepting the future such that you're not going to work on it any. I feel like you've got it more. I know it's not your many sentences, but I see this paradigm. BRIANNA: [laughs] I think there's also maybe nuance between problems, or tasks versus people. Sometimes practicing acceptance of where people are. Maybe there's a lot of misinformation around and you're maybe expanding a lot of energy trying to dispel, or refute when maybe you need to practice acceptance of understanding where people are versus instead of being resigned and instead of being like, “Oh, that's just where they are. They'll never change, blah, blah, blah,” practicing acceptance of where they are and being curious about what could be that thread, or narratives that might change someone's perspective. I see this all the time. So I'm saying this as if it's a thing that happens a lot, which I have no idea, but in my experiences of even in the workplace with coding, or in advocacy, to me, it's never like, “Oh, these people are forever this way.” It's like, “Okay, that's where they are now,” and it really is sometimes the right moment, the right person, the right dollar amounts even that might change someone's mind. So that's always interesting to me. I don't accept people not growing no matter how old you are. JOHN: Yeah. That reminds me of something. I think Arnold Caplan had a talk about where you were saying that if you're trying to refute maybe an idea you don't agree with, or misinformation, you can try and say, “Just stop believing that,” or “Stop thinking that spaces are better than tabs,” but they're probably not going to just stop doing it when you tell them to; they're probably going to dig in and argue against that. But if you can provide an alternate narrative that says, “Okay, that's your narrative right now, but there's this other one that is a path forward from where you currently are,” that you can just switch tracks and start believing that other narrative about how things are working, it's a much more effective than saying, “Just stop doing what you're doing” without providing the alternative to “Oh, in here is a way forward for you to think about how things are.” I always thought that was a really useful distinction and way of thinking about how to work with people. BRIANNA: Totally. The worst thing is someone entrenching further into their worldview and becoming a rigid. I think that's always and I notice in my body whenever I feel tight, that's when I'm also the most susceptible to arrogance and being dismissive. So I totally believe that because you don't want someone to be further entrenched and my philosophy is, I’m the co-director of Delicious Democracy, which is D.C.’s creative advocacy lab, and our fundamental philosophy is figuring out ways to make things a pleasurable and enjoyable experience for folks specifically merging culture and politics. So what is that point where people who might be apathetic to politics, who feel like things will never change, what would make them feel like it's an enjoyable, or even celebratory experience to participate? That's always rule number one, don't try and just refute off at the first go. DAMIEN: You described Delicious Democracy as a creative advocacy? BRIANNA: Creative advocacy lab, yeah. DAMIEN: What does that mean? BRIANNA: So it's more because of the pandemic. Before lockdown, when we were still gathering and not worrying about the coronavirus, we did a yearlong project where once a month we would gather and we would experiment in how we gathered in spaces. Even from showing up into a space and maybe the prompt is just see everything, notice everything without saying anything to anybody and what kind of conversations can you have with that. It'd be like 30 people in a room just nodding and noticing each other without saying anything. Or it'll be an event where we did biomimicry where we were inspired by nature. There is a turtle event where how turtle peeks its head out of its shell and goes back in? So we would start with what would that look like as an actual gathering event? We'd start with two people,1-on-1 pairs, and then 2-and-2. The one-on-ones form 2-on-2s and the 2-on-2s form 4-on-4s and then keep going until it’s 32-on-32, and then you would go back down, then the groups would break apart and then you go back into your 1-on-1s. Why that's important is because you're changing how you approach a space so it's not just another political event where you're expecting a panel and people are experts talking to a group of folks to receive information. It's more like everyone's an active participant and your experience is your expertise. So I think it's just a different way to approach politics that's more ground up grassroots approach and it allows for everyone to feel like they can have ownership in a movement and so, Delicious Democracy is all about experimenting with creative ways we can form grassroots coalitions. DAMIEN: That’s amazing. BRIANNA: It's fun! The pandemic, we went digital. What did our digital bodies look like? There is something called online town where you can see your digital body on the screen and you can virtually meet up with people and have conversations and the further you'd get to someone, the more in-focus their video is and the more clear you can hear them in the further away, the less you'd be out of focus. So everyone was just running around talking to each other online, it was really funny. And then now we have a project called Delicious Summer where we are door knocking in specific neighborhoods and Ward 5, which is the ward I live in, asking a question what is your top local concern? It's really interesting to hear people's and then we educate them on resources they might need like mutual aid, or programs they could tap into and also, the coalitions that exist in D.C. JOHN: I love that you start door knocking with a question about what the person's concern is, rather than “I want to give you all this information, you just have to sit there and take it, which is the typical, I feel like way of doing it. So that whole drawing them out into let's take your concerns seriously and then you can connect them to what they're interested in and what they care about as a way of bringing them to into ti. I love that. BRIANNA: Yeah. It's kind of tricky where you can listen and then take what someone says and then say, “Oh, if you care about that, there's this movement happening around just that,” or something like that. It's really fun. But I agree normally when people door knock, it's usually during campaign season and it's usually when people are like really asking for someone to contribute to something in a very again, I'll say finite way usually to an end of either electing someone, or whatever and sometimes it can just feel so predatory. So this is definitely a way to flip that script and have it be a pleasurable experience for both, the doorknocker and the resident. JOHN: Yeah. In fact, I've noticed that of the few emails that I've engaged with from my senator, who I love and I love all the stuff he talks about, but the only ones I really engage with are the ones where he was just like, “What are your priorities? What do you think I should be focusing on?” and I was like, “Oh, I'd love to do that. [laughs] I will fill in this survey, sure thing.” [laughter] So it was a very different interaction than the usual either fundraising, or this is an issue I'm like, “I know it's an issue.” BRIANNA: Yeah, and I think in between election cycles is the great time to listen. So for future because like Ward 5 is having a council member; there is going to be an election literally next year. So this is a great way to listen to what folks in Ward 5 actually have as concern and connect neighbors to each other so that they can also like build some sort of community power or groups to advocate for the issues that they care about in their ward. Because I think one of the things that I'm most afraid of, and this really keeps me up at night, is just reinforcement. In data science, there's this concept of reinforcement learning where your algorithm just learns on itself and one of the things that scares me is that with technology and I guess, the biases we have in our algorithms and the way in which we even go about our logic of creation scares me because it feels like there is a certain malleability to the human that may not in an algorithm in terms of how far it goes in its learning cycle and how much effort it might take to reverse some of the things it creates. What scares me is inequities and the trauma being systematically programmed in our systems and then that being the foundation for future artificial intelligence and things like that. So I really am trying to figure out a way to merge the human with the algorithm in a not so linear way and I think one of the biggest things that I think that can be achieved is by listening to people and making policy that makes sense for people and figuring out a way to maybe merge technology with a government that works for people. There's just a lot of non-linearity in that trying to figure out, but it's not so clear. DAMIEN: Is this connected with your work with community-owned AI? BRIANNA: Yes. DAMIEN: So how does that work? What does that even mean? BRIANNA: So when I say community-owned, I think cooperative and so, like a worker-owned business and it can mean a lot of different things. So I don't want to be so prescriptive with it because I say it as a thing that is meant to be explored. But the way I interpret that is building some sort of artificial intelligence tool that can help mediate maybe burdens that can exist in a community where the community owns it as a tool rather than a private company owning it and extracting the community's data, or whatever as profit, and then the community seeing none of those benefits coming back into the community. So anything from a door knocking app that's community0owned, that'd be cool where the community can literally learn from each other and then if they want to, as a community, sell that data to developers who would love to have that data, I'm sure about who's living in what and what they want and what kind of businesses they want and whatever. That would be really cool and the community seeing profits from that back into the community, I feel like it could also be just a platform co-op, too. Anything from a website to an app, or whatever that is community owned. CASEY: What's the closest thing you've seen to have something like what you're imagining here? Do you have anything like it yet? BRIANNA: Yeah. So there's this conference called Platform Co-op and I've never been, but it's something I've wanted to go to, but I'm sure that things like this are ideas other people have, I haven't seen it personally, but I'm pretty sure it's out there. CASEY: Cool. DAMIEN: It sounds like an excellent way to get worlds intersecting and preventing that reinforcement that happens when you have bias built into people building in tech, which generates bias in tech reinforces that way. By getting more people involved, more ownership more broadly distributed, you get that community benefit from the things being built. Am I getting this right? BRIANNA: Yeah. Think of a community-owned social media app where instead of all the profits going to this very small pool of owners of say, I don't know, Twitter, or Facebook. or whatever making it to where every user can either own their own data, or their digital body, or earn profits that that app makes. That's another way to look at it too, is maybe even a community-owned social media and then what kind of rules and regulations would you want for it? It just opens a whole world of how do you govern it then? What does it mean to have ownership? What does ownership even look like? I think there's so many alternative ways that you can think of what even ownership is. So when I say community-owned AI, there's a lot of layers of how to even go about it. CASEY: The closest thing I can think of that I've used is Mastodon. BRIANNA: Yes! CASEY: The open-source Twitter. I want that. BRIANNA: Yes, it’s one of them. CASEY: Unfortunately, very few people I know are active on it. I try once in a while to double post Twitter and Mastodon for those few friends that I have there, but I haven't gotten to stick there yet because the power of social networks is annoying; the monopolies already got it. the couple of different forums of it have different monopolies, I guess, long form/short form, Facebook/Twitter. BRIANNA: Oh, is Twitter short form? CASEY: Yeah. BRIANNA: Yeah. Mastodon is cool. I'm not on it, but I love the idea of it [chuckles] and that's also a problem like, how do you make it desirable for people to want to own something together as a community because it just goes back to people. People sometimes don't always get along. We're messy, messy creatures at times. So there's also a level of how do I even go about building where those relationships and building that trust? I think also another thing that I have a frustration with is this trend to build trustless systems like blockchain and whatever and I'm like, “Okay, I get it.” I understand the desire to go that way, but there's something that doesn't sit right with me about wanting a trustless system. I think building better systems where trust means something and more points where if trust is broken, the whole thing isn't broken and so, making more resilient systems, I think is worth exploring and that also looks like a DisCO and that's a distributed cooperative. So instead of decentralized, it's distributed and—they actually have a cool website you should also check it out—but they propose ways in which you can build more trust in your systems. That it's an alternative way to think of what I think blockchain could be. But right now, it's all the rave about blockchain and cryptocurrency is like, oh, it's completely decentralized and you don't have to have trust in it and it feels counterintuitive at times. CASEY: The way you're describing it makes me think of how a lot of organizations say, “Oh, we'll just use Scrum the prescribed thing,” which it says not to do actually in Scrum, but they say, “We'll just do the thing as it's prescribed and that'll fix all of our problems. We don't need to trust our employees. That would be dumb,” and then that never works out because the core of any functioning team is trust. BRIANNA: It’s also so fragile. CASEY: Any community needs trust. BRIANNA: Yeah. CASEY: These large things just aren't as good, they're not large trustless. The way you put it with trustless is just so vivid to me. I hate it. That sounds terrible. BRIANNA: Sounds anti-human a little bit. It's just like, what does that even mean? DAMIEN: It is anti-human, it's an industrialization of a very human thing, but there's an amazing book. Oh God, I think it's Francisco Ferdinand. One of the premises of the book is that trust is a verb. So when you trust somebody, there's a necessity that there's a possibility of betrayal. If there's no possibility of betrayal, that's not trust and so, authentic trust is where there is a possibility of betrayal and you've acknowledged that and accepted that. We all know that it stinks when that happens so we're looking for ways to make it not happen and that's where we get the industrialization of trust, which is the basis behind cryptocurrencies, blockchain, Airbnb, FICO, [chuckles] and so many other things. JOHN: Yeah, what strikes me is there was, sometime in the past 15 years, some concept of a web of trust where you can build out a network of like, “I trust you,” and then there's a transitive trust to the people that you trust. So it was built through those social connections rather than imposed by the network, or whatever it was. I don't think it ever went where everyone was hoping it was going to go; to turn into a way of connecting people, but I think you’re right, that’s so alienating to have trustless environments. DAMIEN: That was absolutely a fascinating shift. That was a way of distributing trustees in public key cryptography and creating that web of trust and in theory, it was absolutely amazing. I think where it fell down beyond the fact that public key cryptography is not something humans innately understand, but also, that the trust was very binary. So it was binary and it was transitive and that's not how humans trust and nor is it a practical way of dealing with trust. CASEY: I was just playing with some speech recognition tool, Amazon’s Transcribe, and I like how it had a confidence level, 0 to a 100%, for every word in the entire transcript. So I think about that now, even when another person's talking to me, sometimes they say a sentence, or a phrase that just isn't quite right and I know it and I have like only 70% confidence in that part of their sentence. Getting very granular there, or the concept under it, if I can. JOHN: Yeah, that actually reminds me. I was reading an article about how when an algorithm, or a robotic system, or something that presents data, a decision is made, “I'm about to do this. I think you should do that,” most of the time, the UX around that is, “Here's what you should do,” or “Here's what's going to happen.” Not a, “I think this is the way to go and I'm 70% confident that this is the way to go.” Giving that confidence in the decision makes humans able to parse the interaction so much more rather than, “Oh, the computer says this is the 100% exactly the right thing to do,” and then when it fails, you're like, “Oh my God, these are terrible.” But if they had said, “I think this is what we should do, but I'm only 70% confident,” then you'd be like, “Oh, okay, well, we'll see how this goes. Oh, it didn't work out. Well.” We understand how things can go and with that confidence level, it's a much more human way of understanding an action, or a choice, or a recommendation to say, “I think this is going to work, but I'm only 40% sure.” That's a very different statement than “You're going to love these new shoes, no matter what.” BRIANNA: Oh my God, totally. So one of the biggest things that I would do if I were developing some sort of tool that where I had to use some algorithm that generates a probability of what someone should do, like an owner, whoever the end user is, I always put in the confidence level and I got in trouble once because they're like, “No, this is what you should do,” and you click a button and it allows you to do it, or whatever. But I just hated that. [laughs] It's just kind of funny, one time I had an app for my partner and it's just like, whenever I'm feeling XYZ, how I want to be treated. So it's like a Quizzlet almost where it goes through a series of questions like, is it late at night? Have I had a good night sleep? Blah, blah, blah. Have you asked these things yet? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Are we at a party, or is it a quiet social gathering? It literally just goes through a couple of – and it's just 10 solid questions where I know I'll probably feel like whatever, or have I had a couple drinks, or not. It's like, “Yes, a little bit. You’re wasted.” [laughs] And it then generates a series of things, or a couple of suggestions of what I would like to receive, or questions I would like to be asked, maybe just like a, “Hey, checking in,” or maybe it's, “Ask me to just dance it out,” like ask if you want to dance with me because sometimes that totally throws me off. Especially if I'm in a heated argument, if someone's like, “Will you just dance with me?” It'll totally throw me off and makes things so ridiculous, absurd, and silly. So I think that's one of the things I felt was this series of questions and then I did the backend logic of if you answered this, this and this, but this and this, and it's probably going to be this outcome. And then it gives you four choices each time with a confidence level of what percentage I might want. Is it like, “Just leave me alone, I'll be okay, whatever”? Or is it like, “Hey, maybe the space isn't working, you could probably try asking again,” or “Maybe just dance it out.” So I just gave a series of possible things that he could do and he used it for six months solid straight and it was so fun because it wasn't just one thing to do. It was like a suggestion of many different things with percentages of how likely that is to maybe work in that instance, or whatever. I think applying that logic to even something a decision that needs to be made, say at an executive level, and then just giving options of what percentages things might work. And then also having fallback options of like, “Okay, you chose this answer. Here are the probable outcomes of what happens,” I think is a great way to test not only your blind spots, because hopefully, you're not working in a silo. Hopefully, you have other developers checking in on you and also having those meetings with what those outcomes could be. But also, it's a great way to show that it's problematic to feel 100% about anything, if that makes any sense. DAMIEN: Mm hm. JOHN: Yeah. But on a similar note, I was talking about how if expressing your own confidence and the position that you're expressing is also a great way to diffuse those testing arguments about a technical tricks, or whatever you can say. I definitely think we should use JWT for this, but definitely means 70%, it doesn't mean 99%. And then if everyone can give that confidence, then you can be like, “Oh, that's what we're working with” is different people confident in different ways about different things rather than, “Oh, well the senior developer thinks that we should use JWTs. I guess, we have to use JWTs even though, I'm not really comfortable with the it.” But it allows a much more fluid conversation than everyone just saying, “I think you should do X.” CASEY: Confidence level. It's like scale of 1 to 10. How much pain are you feeling that the doctor's offices have? It's like getting a number is so much clearer than just trying to say regular where it's like, “I'm fine. It's just a 9.” JOHN: Yeah, and the illustrated ones really give you different activities of how much does this hurt like, stumped toe, B. Bs! Like, my legs off, what you consider to be a 9? CASEY: Yeah. People are really good at relative like greater than, more than that, or less than that, worse than that. People good are that. People are not as good at absolute scales, but the numbers still help communicate it better than just hand-waving for sure. It's like for the vaccine, some people say they won't get the vaccine because it won't help more than it hurts them, maybe whatever. But if you put numbers to it, some people haven't thought about the numbers enough to put it into words yet and that's the step forward in that process of talking through it and some people maybe would accept the vaccine if they knew more about it, some people would accept the vaccine if the risk of COVID having a fatal outcome was worse. A lot of people aren't having this conversation on these terms, but you can talk about it and put numbers to all these things like, how bad would COVID have to be? How likely would you have to be to get it? Like, everyone you're around has it then what do you consider getting it? Or if you tweak all these variables, everyone probably has some point where they might consider the vaccine will be more worthwhile than not. BRIANNA: Earlier in the year, I door knocked for the vaccine campaign in D.C. to just let neighbors know that they could get the vaccine and I don't know if this happened with y'all, but in D.C. was a hot mess at first because the system was crashing and it was The Hunger Games for getting an appointment. When the digital divide is so real in D.C., a lot of folks who did not have access to internet, or fast internet were often left not being able to even secure an appointment and then I can't imagine folks who are not computer savvy having to deal with that system so. CASEY: It was terrible. BRIANNA: It was horrible. CASEY: It was really bad. BRIANNA: It was bad. [laughs] So there was a whole door-knocking campaign, just vocally. It wasn't a part of actually government led thing, but one of the questions I would ask folks, especially folks who are hesitant, or believing even some of the conspiracy theories, or Bill Gates going to track you, or whatever, I would say, “So what would be the thing that would convince you to get the vaccine? What would be that?” And just giving that wedge of doubt to there, I think firm believe was really interesting because then they would actually have to challenge themselves and be like, “Oh, if I –” like, it just seemed to change the conversation rather than saying, “I'm not going to get it.” It's like, “Okay, what would be that variable that would make you be more open to it?” And I think that's when the conversations were easier to have, but it's hard because that right there deals with a lot of layers of fear and then poor education around what even it was and then also really bad, I think education around prevention. It was just this individualistic protect you in your own mentality rather than wearing a mask isn't for you, it's for your neighbors. I don't know. I don't think there was ever a moment where there was an actual educational campaign around what it meant to be a part of this greater, I guess, cause not for yourself, but for other people. But with the vaccine specifically, I don't know, there was a huge level of fear around it that I encountered door-knocking and then having to dispel some of the myths was interesting. CASEY: I always want to know how effective communication is on things like that and apparently, it can be hard, or expensive to get the information you were getting by door-knocking on a wider scale, large enough to make estimates for the population in D.C. I don't see many groups doing that. Do you know of any that even ad hoc have ample sets of data that they use to extrapolate in D.C.? I'd like to see more of that. BRIANNA: I don't know specifically about the vaccine, but I know working families party has interesting datasets sometimes and I know even some campaigns have interesting datasets that may not be necessarily public. But communication around people who are hesitant to get the vaccine, sometimes it's not even going to be your conversation that does it so I can be like, “Okay, well, who do you trust? In this entire role, who is it that you go to?” Because if I'm realizing that I'm not getting across, I'll just switch it up to be like, “Okay, whoever you trust the most, talk with them and have that conversation and see what y'all come up with.” So it's always encouraging people not to be referring to a YouTube video conspiracy theory, but going to an actual person, hashing it out with a person is always my strategy. CASEY: There's more trust with literally the people you trust. Back to that theme. BRIANNA: Full circle. [laughs] DAMIEN: I love these strategies because they all start with meeting people where they are, accepting where they are and going, “Okay, well, what can we do from here?” JOHN: Yeah. Not only the reality of the situation, but also the humanity of the person you’re dealing with. BRIANNA: Oh yeah, people will sometimes be just yelling, “Absolutely not! No! Forget that!” and it's just like, “Okay, well I'm not going to change your mind, but I bet I could get you to be curious about something.” So that's always a – CASEY: [inaudible]! [overtalk] BRIANNA: [laughs] Yeah. Then again, it's like maybe I didn't get the outcome I wanted going into it, but I still think it was a different game to be played. DAMIEN: And then back to the infinite versus a finite game. A finite game, there's a win, or a loss and in the infinite, you move in a direction and we can keep moving in a direction. JOHN: Yeah, I always feel like you've made a fantastic opening in this situation with that where you can get them to think what would me them roll with this, or who would I trust to actually talk this over with where they're changing the foundation on which they've made the decision and once that happens, more possibilities open up from there. And if you can get even just that little shift in the little interaction, then so many more possibilities are capable of down the line. Even convincing that day, or maybe they'll think about it for a couple weeks and maybe they'll notice some things that some friends are saying and then start to think, “Oh, well maybe it wouldn't be that bad,” and that's still totally a success. BRIANNA: Yeah. I think I'm always present to especially with people who have a completely different world view than me, it's never going to be just one conversation that does much, it's going to be forming that relationship. So it's always good to understand what even capacity I have sometimes for that relationship building. And then also, realizing what I think might be good for maybe trusted either elected official, or whatever, like what arguments they should be making, because I can take that to an elected official and say, “Hey, so-and-so, this person was like they're not getting the vaccine until you say that you got it and you liked it.” Blah, blah, blah. I'm always present to, it's not going to be just one conversation, but I am excited about putting that wedge of doubt in there. [chuckles] CASEY: There's a spectrum I'm building in my head just now during this conversation. In product management, we often say we want outcomes, not outputs. So if you do ship the project that doesn't help anyone in the end, but you shipped it, check done. That's not good enough. You need the outcome of helping them with their problem. But here, we're going a step further. It's not just the outcome that they are now changed their mind they're going to get the vaccine, but progress toward that goal, that really is what matters. It's the growth mindset kind of idea, throw it in there. So progress is better than outcomes is better than outputs. What do you think of that? DAMIEN: Oh. CASEY: You all are inspiring. BRIANNA: I think progress is interesting. I’m personally sometimes hesitant to say that word just because I think a lot of relationship, especially, I don't know, in America, the idea of exponential growth in progress can sometimes be very toxic, but I do like the way you used it. CASEY: [inaudible] better word for it. DAMIEN: I always feel like if things are getting better, then what more could I possibly ask for? My grandmother had a sign in her kitchen, “If you're well, there's nothing to worry about. If you're sick, there's only two things to worry about: I'm going to get better; I'm going to get worse. You're going to get better, there’s nothing to worry about. You're going to get worse, there are only two things to worry about: you’re going to die, or you’re going to live. You're going to live, there’s nothing to worry about. If you’ve got to die, [laughter] well, there's only two things to worry about: you’re going to go to heaven; you’re going to go to hell. And if you go to heaven, there’s nothing to worry about. If you're going to hell, well, you can be so busy shaking hands with old friends, you’ll have nothing to worry about.” [laughter] So going off the bottom into that little tree there. As long as things are getting better, things are getting better and what else could we possibly want? BRIANNA: I wish I were able to accept that. [laughs] I just feel like better for who and at what cost, but it's interesting that you memorized that on off your grandma. [laughs] Wow, you must've seen that a lot. DAMIEN: Oh, that was a good 30, or 40 years and better is doing a lot of words. A lot of work in that, in what I just said, because better for whom, like you said. Better how? BRIANNA: Yeah. I got into an argument the other day. It was a good argument, but it was about the term economic growth and it was with a friend and he was like, “Yeah, well, third world countries, they just need more economic development and that's how you improve their country,” and whatever. And I was like, “Well, one, where to begin,” [laughs] and two, it was just like, “Okay, well define economic development.” And then we just like kept on going down and down and it just, I don't know. She just said, “Well, making things more efficient and having good outcomes,” and I was like, “Uh, how do you define what is good and shouldn't they be defining what is good for them?” I don’t know, I'm always really worried sometimes with layman terms like that of good and better because sometimes, the people who are deciding that are often the ones that may not be the ones that impact, or feel the impact of the consequences. So I'm always hesitant to say those things, but I totally hear what you said. I hear what you're saying. DAMIEN: We get to where our measurement is never of the thing we want, it's of the thing we can measure. GDP is an extraordinary example of that. If a parent stays home and takes care of the child, the contribution to GDP is 0. If they go and get a job, it's been 105% of that money on childcare. Well, that's massive contribution to GDP, but nobody's life's got better there. BRIANNA: Isn't that crazy how we have measurements that sometimes are totally meaningless? DAMIEN: It's inherent to measurement theory that you're never going to measure what you actually want to know and then people are sticky so they come up with a measurement that's useful in one context and they like it and they stick with it and they keep going. JOHN: Like BMI. DAMIEN: Oh. BRIANNA: Yeah. [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah, that one hurt. BRIANNA: Let’s just go around the table naming all these horrible measurements. [laughs] DAMIEN: Someone stop me from spending 20 minutes on BMI right now. BRIANNA: I know, right? It’s like even in agricultural industry, some measurements of success are usually around yields rather than balancing. How much you’re able to take out and put in to keep your land producing and healthy versus just creating this monocrops that are totally susceptible to pathogens and they're all alike. It's a very fragile system, but yet, you get more investments and loans even if you have higher yields, but higher yields often tend to mean really ravaging the land. So I always think about what measurements of success are and if they even make any sense. BMI, GDP, perfect examples. CASEY: This sounds like we shouldn't measure anything, which isn't what any of us are saying right now. [laughter] I like to use the phrase “proxy measure: a lot because I'm measuring something, but it's just a proxy. It's only ever a proxy for the thing that I really care about. So the health of the country, not GDP. GDP is a proxy measure. It's just the economic half of it, but maybe we could add another proxy measure, or two and get a little closer. All measures are proxy measures the way I use them, at least my models of the world and as a product manager. BRIANNA: Proxy measures. DAMIEN: I love that. All measures of proxy measures and so, knowing where they fall down and being aware of GDP went up, but everybody's more miserable. [chuckles] BRIANNA: Yeah, right. [laughs] Oh, you're the richest country in the world and you're also the most depressed. [laughs] But yeah, I like proxy measure because also, there is the foundation that it's limited and I always think that that is healthy. JOHN: Yeah. It helps you see that there's going to be an error percentage in there and that you should be looking for it to see is it still applicable in this situation? Is the measure actually useful, or accurate versus where it was originally? DAMIEN: So Bri, there's a word in your bio that I don't think I've heard before, but I wonder if you'd be willing to tell us what this is and what this means: equitism? BRIANNA: Oh, yes. That is a word I used to describe myself in the future that I believe in. So I call myself an equitist, which to me, means the fusion of soulful political movement where you are seeking balance and accepting change, staying curious, and believing in a world that can be nourishing for you and your community. It’s the idea of empowering community and finding a role in a community that is meaningful for you. I think a lot of people experienced meaninglessness in jobs, or whatever. So finding roles where you can actually feel you have agency and the power to affect good—I use that word loosely—into the world. Being probiotic in your approach, and to me, it's very political, but it's also just a way of being. So that to me is what equitist is. It's like a balance. So it's not a conservative, or a moderate, or a liberal, or a progressive, or a socialist, or a democratic socialist. It's like it doesn't fall into the spectrum in terms of politics, it's just an alternative way to not necessarily reject the political spectrum, but add a Z measure to it. Does that make sense? Was that too [laughs] dilute to break that down a little bit, or is that too weird? [laughs] Let me know. CASEY: I think this is partly why we get along so well. I care a lot about having people feel included and things are being built by the people who need them more than building stuff for people, or at least in the middle of building with people. I think about that in the workplace a lot and in the community a lot. Like, with ranked choice voting we worked on together, that's a big part of that, too. I have family that are conservative and liberal and all different types and I talk to all of them and my big thing is I want everyone's voice to be heard and part of it. I support all these people; I just want them to be involved and it sounds like it gets pretty related to equitism. BRIANNA: Yeah. CASEY: I want to get the people involved in the stuff for the people. BRIANNA: Yeah. It's like saying that the way systems are set up sometimes just aren't very people-centric and even the way we think about the political spectrum to me is bullshit. It's just like, “Oh, you're conservative,” or “You're liberal, or progressive,” and it's just like, people are way too complex to box themselves in. The people who putting labels to themselves tend to be the more rigid politically. It's like rigid radicalism in a way and so, I just feel that okay, so you have a very strong view of what you would, you would like to see in what you think ought to be, but if your proposal is toxic, or unhealthy, I don't know. If you aren't able to bring people in and they feel good about the way they want the world to be with that idea. I don't know, it's just like rejecting dogma in a way. I feel like this itself is its own conversation. CASEY: [inaudible]. [overtalk] BRIANNA: Yeah. That's a lot to digest, I would say right there. CASEY: To pull it into tech a little bit, this reminds me of user-centered design where you’re building stuff with the person in mind, you're incorporating them and ideally, they're even part of your team, the kinds of people who would use your application are on your team, that'll be the best. BRIANNA: Yeah. I personally am not on the UI/UX side of things, but I'm always wanting to know what users think about the things I build, because it means absolutely nothing if you build something that you think is so cool, but no one finds useful. So I always am very sensitive to that. I agree, working on a team with all men has been sometimes the most challenging thing in my life and it can be very, very alienating and isolating. It's just nice to have allies, but it's so nice to also feel in solidarity with someone, too. So yeah, I totally agree with that, Casey. JOHN: So now it's the time of the episode where we go into what we call reflections, which are the thoughts, or the ideas, or the things that we're going to take with us after this conversation and maybe keep seeking them out, or talking about with others. I think for me, the thing that's sticking with me is the changes that you made into the senior political script of not only the door-knocking, but also, the way you approached the space to break down the hierarchy and to bring relation at an even level. It's very dare I say, anarchist because if there isn't that hierarchy between the people who know and who are telling, and the people who are just being told. I really liked that because it’s so inclusive and it’s so welcoming and that is really what I want to keep thinking about [inaudible] new to my life. CASEY: I've got two things I want to share. One is I like, Damien, your quote of me that said all measures are proxy measures. I probably even said, I don't know, but that it's very succinct, the way you put it. I love it. And my second one, I need to work on this one a little more, but thinking about how growth mindset and outcomes not outputs relate. Progress, I'm not sold on that word either, but it seems like that should fit into that framework in my head someday. I hope it sits nicely. DAMIEN: Well, Casey, thank you for repeating that, all measures of proxy measures because I had already forgotten it. You said it first and I repeated it because it was so awesome and so, now I've heard it four times, I’m going to hold on to that. I would have used that as my reflection, but I was thinking how there seems to be so much – [laughs] this is a hilarious thing to say. In the computer software engineering, there's so much binary thinking—things either are, or they aren’t—and being able to work with non-binary is the only way to deal with things like trust, it's the only way to deal with things like confidence levels. Nothing either is, or isn't, that's not how human cognition works, or how the world around us works. So it's important to know our limitations when we put things into binary and to avoid putting things into binary as much as possible, which is at odds with the entire science and theory. [laughs] So that’s going to be something I’m going to think a lot about into the future. Thank you. BRIANNA: I just want to say, I do think there is space for having the binary in terms of having an advanced exploration, but I do think binary as something that is strictly to be followed can be toxic, might be the demise of our culture. But my reflections is, I love all measures are proxy measures. I think that's fantastic in terms of just thinking of something as you can use measures and try and have metrics for things, but with the grain of salt on what it is you're actually measuring and that whole quantum thinking of the more you try and measure and pin down, the more it's not there. I think there is that little magic in between trying to measure and also not have to confine something, or define something, I should say. I also enjoyed the fact that this conversation is kind of meandered. We had a lot of topics and I feel like there's a lot to unpack so I feel like I'll have a lot more reflections even two days after this. [laughs] I'm like, “Well, we talked about this one thing.” [laughs] I take a long time to process, so. JOHN: That’s a good sign. BRIANNA: Yeah. JOHN: Good conversation. BRIANNA: Yeah. Thank you all for having me on. DAMIEN: Well, thank you for joining us. This has been wonderful. CASEY: Yeah, thank you. Special Guest: Brianna McGowen.
243: Equitable Design: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know with Jennifer Strickland
02:51 - Jennifer’s Superpower: Kindness & Empathy * Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-complex-ptsd-2797491) (C-PTSD) 07:37 - Equitable Design and Inclusive Design * Section 508 (https://www.section508.gov/) Compliance * Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/) (WCAG) * HmntyCentrd (https://hmntycntrd.com/) * Creative Reaction Lab (https://www.creativereactionlab.com/) 15:43 - Biases and Prejudices * Self-Awareness * Daniel Kahneman's System 1 & System 2 Thinking (https://www.marketingsociety.com/think-piece/system-1-and-system-2-thinking) * Jennifer Strickland: “You’re Killing Your Users!” (https://vimeo.com/506548868) 22:57 - So...What do we do? How do we get people to care? * Caring About People Who Aren’t You * Listening * Using Web Standards and Prioritizing Web Accessibility * Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman (https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Standards-Jeffrey-Zeldman/dp/0321616952) * Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm (https://www.amazon.com/Bulletproof-Web-Design-flexibility-protecting/dp/0321509021) * Progressive Enhancement * Casey’s Cheat Sheet (https://moritzgiessmann.de/accessibility-cheatsheet/) * Jennifer Strickland: “Ohana for Digital Service Design” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfsZlkm59BE) * Self-Care 33:22 - How Ego Plays Into These Things * Actions Impact Others * For, With, and By * Indi Young (https://indiyoung.com/) 44:05 - Empathy and Accessibility * Testability/Writing Tests * Screen Readers * TalkBack (https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/6283677?hl=en) * Microsoft Narrator (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/complete-guide-to-narrator-e4397a0d-ef4f-b386-d8ae-c172f109bdb1) * NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/about-nvda/) * Jaws (https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/) * Heydon Pickering (https://twitter.com/heydonworks/status/969520320754438144) Reflections: Casey: Animals can have cognitive disabilities too. Damien: Equitable design initiatives and destroying the tenants of white supremacy. Jennifer: Rest is key. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDO: Hello, friends! Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 243. My name is Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my wonderful friend, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Thank you, Mando, and I am here with our wonderful friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here today with Jennifer Strickland. With more than 25 years of experience across the product lifecycle, Jennifer aims to ensure no one is excluded from products and services. She first heard of Ohana in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, “Ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind, or forgotten.” People don’t know what they don’t know and are often unaware of the corners they cut that exclude people. Empathy, compassion, and humility are vital to communication about these issues. That’s Jennifer focus in equitable design initiatives. Welcome, Jennifer! JENNIFER: Hi! DAMIEN: You’re welcome. MANDO: Hi, Jennifer. So glad you’re here. JENNIFER: I'm so intrigued. [laughs] And I'm like 243 and this is the first I'm hearing of it?! DAMIEN: Or you can go back and listen to them all. MANDO: Yeah. CASEY: That must be 5, almost 6 years? JENNIFER: Do you have transcripts of them all? CASEY: Yes. JENNIFER: Great! MANDO: Yeah. I think we do. I think they're all transcribed now. JENNIFER: I'm one of those people [chuckles] that prefers to read things than listen. DAMIEN: I can relate to that. CASEY: I really enjoy Coursera courses. They have this interface where you can listen, watch the video, and there's a transcript that moves and highlights sentence by sentence. I want that for everything. MANDO: Oh, yeah. That's fantastic. It's like closed captioning [laughs] for your audio as well. JENNIFER: You can also choose the speed, which I appreciate. I generally want to speed things up, which yes, now that I'm getting older, I have to realize life is worth slowing down for. But when you're in a life where survival is what you're focused on, because you have a bunch of things that are slowing your roll and survival is the first thing in your mind, you tend to take all the jobs, work all the jobs, do all of the things because it's how you get out of poverty, or whatever your thing is. So I've realized how much I've multitasked and worked and worked and worked and I'm realizing that there is a part of the equality is lost there, but we don't all have the privilege of slowing down. DAMIEN: I can relate to that, too. So I believe every one of our past 243 episodes, we asked our guests the same question. You should know this is coming. Jennifer, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JENNIFER: I don't know for sure. People have told me that I'm the kindest person they've ever met, people have said I'm the most empathetic person I've ever met, and I'm willing to bet that they're the same thing. To the people, they just see them differently. I acquired being empathetic and kind because of my dysfunction in my invisible disabilities. I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood trauma and then repeated life trauma, and the way it manifests itself is trying to anticipate other people's needs, emotions, moods, and all of that and not make people mad. So that's a negative with a golden edge. Life is full of shit; how you respond to it shows who you are and rather than molesting kids, or hurting people, I chose to do what I could to make sure that no one else goes through that and also, to try to minimize it coming at me anymore, too. [chuckles] But there’s positive ways of doing it. You don't have to be like the people who were crappy to you and the same goes like, you're in D.C.? Man, they're terrible drivers and it's like, [laughter] everybody's taking their bad day and putting it out on the people they encounter, whether it's in the store, or on the roads. I was like, “Don't do that.” Like, how did it feel when your boss treated you like you were garbage, why would you treat anyone else like garbage? Be the change, so to speak. But we're all where we are and like I said in my bio, “You don't know what you don't know.” I realized earlier this week that it actually comes from Donald Rumsfeld who said, “Unknown unknowns.” I’m like, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” MANDO: You can find good in lots of places, right? [laughs] JENNIFER: If you choose to. MANDO: Absolutely. Yeah. JENNIFER: Look at, what's come out of the horror last year. We talk about shit that we didn't use to talk about. Yeah, it's more exhausting when lots of people, but I think in the long run, it will help move us in the right direction. I hope. MANDO: Yeah. That's absolutely the hope, isn't it? JENNIFER: We don't know what we don't know at this time. My sister was volunteering at the zoo and she worked in the Ape House, which I was super jealous of. There's an orangutan there named Lucy who I love and Lucy loves bags, pouches, and lipstick. So I brought a backpack with a pouch and some old lipstick in it and I asked a volunteer if I could draw on the glass. They gave me permission so I made big motions as I opened the backpack and I opened the pouch and you see Lucy and her eyes are like, she's starting to side-eye me like something's going on. And then she runs over and hops up full-time with her toes on the window cell and she's like right up there. So I'm drawing on the glass with the lipstick and she's loving it, reaches her hand behind, poops into her hand, takes the poop and repeats this little actions on the glass. MANDO: [laughs] Which is amazing. It's hilarious so that's amazing. JENNIFER: It's fantastic. I just think she's the bomb. My sister would always send pictures and tell me about what Lucy got into and stuff. Lucy lived with people who would dress her in people clothing and so, she's the only one of the orangutans that didn't grow up only around orangutans so the other orangutans exclude her and treat her like she's a weirdo and she's also the one who likes to wear clothes. Like my sister gave her an FBI t-shirt so she wears the FBI t-shirt and things like that. She's special in my heart. Like I love the Lucy with all of it. DAMIEN: Well, that's a pretty good display of your super empathetic superpower there. [laughter] And it sounds like it might be really also related to the equitable design initiatives? JENNIFER: Yeah. So I'm really grateful. I currently work at a place that although one would think that it would be a big, scary place because of some of the work that we do. I've found more people who know what equity is and care about what equity is. The place I worked before, I talked about inclusive design because that's everywhere else I've worked, it's common that that's what you're doing these days. But they told me, “Don't say that word, it's activism,” and I was stunned. And then I'm like, “It's all in GSA documents here,” and they were like, “Oh,” and they were the ones that were really bad about like prioritizing accessibility and meeting section 508 compliance and just moving it off to put those issues in the backlog. The client's happy, no one's complained, they think we're doing great work. It's like, you're brushing it all under the rug and you're telling them what you've done and you're dealing with people who don't know what section 508 is either because who does? Very few people really know what it means to be section 508 compliant because it's this mystery container. What is in this? What is this? What is this thing? DAMIEN: So for our listeners who don't know, can you tell us a bit what section 508 is? JENNIFER: Sure. So section 508 means that anything paid for with federal funds must be section 508 compliant, which means it must meet WCAG 2.0 success criteria and WCAG is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If you're ever looking for some really complicated, dense, hard to understand reading, I recommend opening up the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I think the people that are on the working groups with me would probably agree and that's what we're all working towards trying to improve them. But I think that they make the job harder. So rather than just pointing at them and complaining like a lot of people do on Twitter, or deciding “I'm going to create a business and make money off of making this clear for people,” I decided instead to join and try to make it better. So the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are based on Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust, POUR. Pour like this, not poor like me. [laughs] So there's just a bunch of accessibility criteria that you have to meet to make your work section 508 compliant. It's so hard to read and so hard to understand that I feel for everybody like of course, you don't know what section 508 compliance is. It's really, really hard to read. But if somebody who is an accessibility specialist tells you and writes up an issue ticket, you don't argue with them. You don't say, “This isn't a thing,” you say, “Okay, how soon do I need to fix it?” and you listen to them, but that's not what I experienced previously. Where I am now, it's amazing. In the place I worked before here, like just the contracting, they welcomed everything I said to them regarding accessibility. So I just clearly worked at a contractor that was doing a lot of lip service and not talking the talk, not walking the talk, sorry. [laughs] Super frustrating. Because accessibility is only a piece of it. I am older probably than anybody on this call and I'm a woman working in tech and I identify as non-binary. The arguments I've had about they/them all my life have been stupid, but I'm just like, “Why do I have to be female?” It's just, why do I have to be one, or the other? Anyway, everyone has always argued with me so I'm so grateful for the young ones now for pushing all that. I'm Black, Native, Mexican, and white all smushed together and my grandma wouldn't let me in the house because apparently my father was too dark so therefore, I'm too dark. Hello? Look at this! [laughter] Currently, some people are big on the one drop rule and I always say to people, “If you hate me, or want to exclude me so much because somewhere in me you know there is this and how do you feel about so-and-so? I’m done with you and you are bad people and we've got to fight this stupidity.” I have also invisible disabilities. So I'm full of all these intersectional things of exclusion. I personally experience a lot of it and then I have the empathy so I'm always feeling fuzzy people who are excluded. So what am I supposed to do with the fact that I'm smart, relatively able-bodied, and have privilege of being lighter skin so I can be a really good Trojan horse? I have to be an advocate like, what else am I supposed to do with my life? Be a privileged piece of poop that just wants to get rich and famous, like a lot of people in tech? Nope. And I don't want to be virtue signaling and savior complex either and that's where equitable design has been a wonderful thing to learn more about. HmntyCntrd.com and Creative Reaction Lab out in Missouri, those are two places where people can do a lot of learning about equity and truly inclusion, and challenging the tenants of white supremacy in our working ways. I'm still trying to find better ways of saying the tenants of white supremacy because if you say that in the workplace, that sounds real bad, especially a few months back before when someone else was in office. When you say the tenants of white supremacy in the workplace, people are going to get a little rankled because that's not stuff we talk about in the workplace. DAMIEN: Well, it's not just the workplace. JENNIFER: Ah, yes. DAMIEN: They don't like that at sports bars either. Ask me how I know. MANDO: No, they sure don't. [laughter] JENNIFER: We should go to sports bars together. [laughs] Except I’m too scared to go to them right now unless they're outdoors. But when we talk to people about the actual individual tenants about power hoarding, perfectionism, worship of the written word, and things like that, people can really relate and then you watch their faces and they go, “Yeah, I do feel put my place by these things and prevented from succeeding, progressing, all of these things.” These are things that we've all been ingrained to believe are the way we evaluate what's good and what's bad. But we don’t have to. We can talk about this stuff when we can reject those things and replace them with other things. But I'm going to be spending the rest of my life trying to dismantle my biases. I'm okay with my prejudices because even since I was a kid, I recognized that we were all prejudice and it's okay. It's our knee jerk first assumption, but you always have to keep an open mind, but that prejudice is there to protect you, but you always have to question it and go, “What is that prejudice? Is that bullshit? Is it right? Is it wrong?” And always looking at yourself, it's always doing that what you call self-awareness stuff, and always be expanding it, changing it, and moving it. But prejudice? Prejudice has a place to protect, speaking as someone who's had guns in her face, knives through her throat, and various other yucky things, I know that when I told myself, “Oh, you're being prejudiced, push yourself out into that vulnerable feeling,” things didn't go very well. So instead, recognize “Okay, what are you thinking in this moment about this situation? Okay, how can you proceed and keep an open mind while being self-protective?” DAMIEN: Yeah, it sounds like you're talking about Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 Thinking. We have these instinctive reactions to things and a lot of them are learned—I think they're all learned actually. But they're instinctive and they're not things we decide consciously. They're there to protect us because they're way faster, way more efficient than most of what we are as humans as thinking and enacting beings. But then we also have our rational mind where we can use to examine those things and so, it's important to utilize both. It's also important to know where your instinctive responses are harmful and how to modify them so that they're not harmful. And that is the word. JENNIFER: I've never heard of it. Thanks for putting that in there. Power accretion principles is that it? CASEY: Oh, that’s something else. JENNIFER: Oh. CASEY: Type 1 and type 2 thinking. JENNIFER: But I know with a lot of my therapy work as a trauma survivor, I have to evaluate a lot of what I think and how I react to things to change them to respond things. But there are parts of having CPTSD that I am not going to be able to do that, too. Like they're things where for example, in that old workplace where there was just this constant invalidation and dismissal of the work, which was very triggering as a rape survivor/incest survivor, that I feel really bad and it made me feel really unsafe all the time. So I felt very emotional in the moment and so, I'd have to breathe through my nose, breathe out to my mouth, feel my tummy, made sure I can feel myself breathing deeply, and try to calmly explain the dire consequences of some of these decisions. People tend to think that the design and development decisions we make when we're building for the web, it's no big deal if you screw it up. It's not like an architect making a mistake in a building and the building falls down. But when you make a mistake, that means a medical locator application doesn't load for an entire minute on a slow 3G connection—when your audience is people who are financially challenged and therefore, unlikely to have always high-speed, or new devices—you are making a design decision that is literally killing people. When you make a design decision, or development decision not to QA your work on mobile, tablet, and desktop, and somebody else has to find out that your Contact Us options don't open on mobile so people in crisis can't reach your crisis line. People are dying. I'm not exaggerating. I have a talk I give called You're Killing Your Users and it got rejected from this conference and one of the reviewers wrote, “The title is sensationalism. No one dies from our decision,” and I was just like, “Oh my God, oh my God.” MANDO: [laughs] Like, that’s the point. JENNIFER: What a privileged life you live. What a wonderfully privileged life! There's a difference between actions and thoughts and it's okay for me to think, “I really hope you fall a flight of stairs and wind up with a disability and leave the things that you're now trying to put kibosh on.” But that's not me saying, “I'm going to go push you down a flight of stairs,” or that I really do wish that on someone. It's emotional venting, like how could you possibly close yourself off to even listening to this stuff? That's the thing that like, how do we get to a point in tech where so many people in tech act like the bad stereotype of surgeons who have this God complex, that there are particular entities working in government tech right now that are told, “You're going to save government from itself. You've got the answers. You are the ones that are going to help government shift and make things better for the citizen, or the people that use it.” But the people that they hire don't know what they don't know and they keep doing really horrible things. Like, they don't follow the rules, they don't take the time to learn the rules and so, they put user personal identifying information, personal health information on the public server without realizing it that's a no-no and then it has to be wiped, but it can never really fully be wiped. And then they make decisions like, “Oh, well now we're only worried about the stuff that's public facing. We're not worried about the stuff that's internally facing.” Even though, the internally facing people are all some of the vulnerable people that we're serving. I'm neutralizing a lot of what I'm talking about. [chuckles] MANDO: Of course. [laughter] DAMIEN: Well, convinced me of the problems. It was an easy sell for me. Now, what do we do? JENNIFER: The first thing we do is we all give a fuck about other people. That's the big thing, right? Like, how do I convince you that you should care about people who aren't you? MANDO: Yeah. CASEY: I always think about the spectrum of caring. I don't have a good word for it, but there are active and passive supporters—and you can be vocal, or quiet—like loud, or quiet. I want more people to be going around the circle of it so if they're vocally opposed, just be quiet, quietly opposed, maybe be quietly in support, and if you're quietly in support, maybe speak up about it. I want to nudge people along around this, the four quadrants. A lot of people only focus on getting people who passively care to be more vocal about it. That's a big one. That's a big transition. But I also like to focus on the other two transitions; getting a lot of people to be quiet about a thing that as opposed. Anyway, everywhere along that process is useful. JENNIFER: I think it’s important to hear the people who were opposed because otherwise, how are we ever going to help understand and how are we going to understand if maybe where we’ve got a big blind spot? Like, we have to talk about this stuff in a way that's thoughtful. I come from a place in tech where in the late 90s, I was like, “I want to move from doing print to onscreen and printing environmental to that because it looks like a lot of stuff has gone to this web thing.” I picked up Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards and Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design and all of them talk about using web standards and web standards means that you prioritize accessibility from the beginning. So the first thing you build is just HTML tagging your content and everyone can use it. It's not going to be fancy, but it's going to be completely usable. And then you layer things on through progressive enhancement to improve the experience for people with fancy phones, or whatever. I don't know why, but that's not how everybody's coming into doing digital work. They’re coming in through React out of the box, thinking that React out of the box is – and it's like nope, you have to build in the framework because nobody put the framework in React. React is just a bunch of hinges and loops, but you have to put the quality wood in and the quality glass panes and the handles that everybody can use. I'm not sure if that analogy is even going to work. But one of the things I realized talking with colleagues today is I tend to jump to three steps in when I really need to go back, start at the beginning, and say, “Here are the terms. This is what section 508 is. This is what accessibility is. This is what A11Y is. This is WCAG, this is how it's pronounced, this is what it means, and this is the history of it.” I think understanding history of section 508 and what WCAG is also vital in the first version of WCAG section 508, it adopted part of what was WCAG 1.0, but it wasn't like a one to one for 1.0, it was just some of it and then it updated in 2017, or 2018, I forget. Without my cheat sheet, I can't remember this stuff. Like I got other things to keep in my brain. CASEY: I just pulled up my favorite cheat sheet and I put it in the chat sidebar here. JENNIFER: Oh, thank you. It's in my slides for Ohana for Digital Service Design that I gave at WX Summit and I think I also gave it recently in another thing. Oh, UXPA DC. But the thing is, the changes only recently happened where it went to WCAG 2.0 was 2018, I think it got updated. So all those people that were resisting me in 2018, 2019, 2020 likely never realized that there was a refresh that they need to pay attention to and I kept trying to like say, “No, you don't understand, section 508 means more now.” Technically, the access board that defines what section 508 is talking about moving it to 2.1, or 2.2 and those include these things. So we should get ahead of the ball, ahead of the curve, or whatever you want to call it and we should be doing 2.1 and 2.2 and even beyond thinking about compliance and that sort of stuff. The reason we want to do human beings is that 2.1 and 2.2 are for people who are cognitively fatigued and I don't think there's anyone who's been through the pandemic who is not cognitively fatigued. If you are, you are just a robot. I don't know. I don't know who could not be not cognitive fatigue. And then the other people that also helps are mobile users. So if you look at any site, look at their usage stats, everything moving up and up and up in mobile devices. There's some people who don't have computers that they only have phones. So it just seems silly not to be supporting those folks. But we need, I don't know. I need to think more about how to get there, how to be more effective in helping people care, how to be more effective in teaching people. One of the big pieces I've learned in the last six months is the first step is self-care—sleep, exercise, eat, or maybe those two need to be back and forth. I haven't decided yet because I'm still trying to get the sleep workout. Before I moved to D.C., I was a runner, hiker, I had a sit spot at the local pond where I would hang out with the fishes and the turtles and the frogs and the birds and here, I overlook the Pentagon and there's swarms of helicopters. I grow lots of green things to put between me and it, but it's hard. The running is stuck because I don't feel safe and things like that. I live in an antiseptic neighborhood intentionally because I knew every time I went into D.C. and I saw what I see, I lose hope because I can't not care. It kills me that I have to walk by people who clearly need – this is a messed up world. We talk about the developing world as the place where people are dying on the side of the road. Do you have blinders on like, it's happening here? I don't know what to do. I care too much. So what do we do? What do you think? DAMIEN: Well, I think you have a hint. You've worked at places that are really resistant to accessibility and accessibility to improvements, and you've worked at some that are very welcoming and eager to implement them. So what were the differences? What do you think was the source of that dichotomy? JENNIFER: I think at the place I worked after I left the hellhole; the product owner was an Asian woman and the other designer was from India. Whereas, before the other place was a white woman and a white man and another white man who was in charge. And then the place I work now, it's a lot of people who are very neurodiverse. I work at MITRE, which is an FFRDC, which is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center. It's full of lots of smart people who are very bookish. It's funny when I was a little kid, I was in the gifted and talented kids and so, they would put us into these class sessions where we were to brainstorm and I love brainstorming. I love imagining things. I remember thinking, “I want to work in a think tank and just all I do all the time is brainstorm and we'd figure out a way to use some of those things!” And I feel a little bit like I'm there now, which is cool and they treat one another really well at MITRE, which is nice. Not to say it's perfect there. Nowhere is perfect. But compared to a lot of places, it's better. I think it’s the people are taking the time to listen, taking the time to ask questions. The people I work with don't have a lot of ego, generally. At least not the ones I'm working with. I hear that they do exist there, but I haven't run into many of them. Whereas, the other place, there was a lot of virtue signaling and a lot of savior complex. Actually, very little savior conflicts. They didn't really care about saving anyone, sorry. Snark! [laughs] DAMIEN: Can you tell us a little more about ego and how ego plays into these things? JENNIFER: How do you think ego plays into these things? DAMIEN: Well, I think it causes people to one up and turn questions around it on me, that's one way. Ego means a lot of things to a lot of different people, which is why I asked the question. I think it was introduced to English by Freud and I don't want to use a Freudian theory for anything ever. [laughter] And then when I talk to people about death of the ego and [inaudible] and all of these things, it seems really unpleasant. People like their self-identity, people like being themselves, and they don't want to stop being themselves. So I'm not sure how that's related to what you were saying. CASEY: The way I'm hearing you use ego here sounds like self-centered, thinking about your own perspective, not taking the time and effort and energy to think about other people's perspectives. And if you don't have a diverse set of experiences to lean on your own, you're missing out on a lot. JENNIFER: Yeah. I tend to think about, I guess, it's my dysfunction. Once again, it's like, how do my actions impact others? Why are other people thinking about how their actions impact others? When you're out in public and you’ve got to cut the cheese, are you going to do it when there are a lot of people around? Are you going to take a stinky deuce in a public bathroom that you know other people in there? If you think about the community around you, you would go find a private one if you cared at all. But most people don't care and they think, “I do what I got to do.” I just think we need to think a little bit more about the consequences of our actions and I tweeted yesterday, or this morning about how – oh, it was yesterday. I was watching TV and a new, one of those food delivery commercials came on. This one, they send you a stove, you get a little oven, and you cook all of their meals in this little throwaway dishes. So you have no dishes, nothing. How much are we going to just keep creating crap? When you think about all of this takeout and delivery, there's just so much trash we generate. We should be taxing the bleep out of companies that make these sorts of things like, Amazon should have the bleep taxed out of it because of all the cardboard and I'm just as guilty because I ordered the thing and the box of staples arrives in a box. It has a plastic bubble wrap all around it. Like it's just a box at $2.50 staples, but I couldn't be bothered to go – I don't know if they have them at Walgreens. Like for real, I don't know. We need to do better. We need to think about the consequences of these decisions and not just do it like, that's the thing that tech has been doing is let's make an MVP and see if it has wheels. Let's make a prototype, but do the thing. Okay, let's do the thing. Oh, it's got wheels. Oh, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing. Who cares about the consequences of all of it? Who cares? Your kids, your grandkids someday maybe will when the world is gone. We talk about climate change. We talk about 120-degree temperatures in Seattle and Portland, the ocean on fire, the beaches are eroding, like the ice cap—most of the Arctic is having a 100 and some odd degree temperature day. Like we are screwing it up and our legislation isn't keeping pace with the advances in technology that are just drawing things. Where are the people who care in the cycle and how are they interrupting the VCs who just want to like be the next big tech? Everybody wants to be the next Zuckerberg, or Jack, or Bezos, or Gates, or whatever, and nobody has to deal with the consequences of their actions and their consequences of those design and development decisions. That's where I think it's ego, it’s self-centeredness, it's wanting to be famous, it’s wanting to be rich instead of really, truly wanting to make the world a better place. I know my definition of better. We've got four different visions of what better is going to be and that's hard work. Maybe it is easier to just focus on getting famous and getting rich than it is on doing the hard work of taking four different visions of what good is and trying to find the way forward. DAMIEN: Making the world a better place. The world will be a better place when I'm rich and famous. But that also means – and that's the truth. [laughter] But what else you said was being empathetic and having a diverse – well, marginalized people in charge where you can see that that's why the impact that things are having on other people. It's not just about me being rich and famous, but it's also about things being better for other people, too. JENNIFER: Yeah. I don't necessarily mean marginalized people have to be in charge. DAMIEN: Right. I took that jump based on your description of the places you worked for. I should have specified that. I wasn’t clear enough. JENNIFER: I do have to say that in general, when I've worked for people who aren't the status quo, more often than not, they bring a compassionate, empathetic approach. Not always. There have been some that are just clearly driven and power hungry, and I can't fault them either because it's got to take a lot to come up from wherever and fight through the dog-eat-dog world. But in the project work, there's the for, with and by. The general ways that we redesign and build things for people, then the next piece is we design and build things with the people that we're serving, but the newer way of doing things is that we don't design and build the things, the people that we're serving design the things and tell us what they want to design, and then we figure out how to make sure that it's built the way they tell us to. That goes against the Steve Jobs approach where Steve Jobs said people don't know what they want sort of thing. Wasn't that was he said? DAMIEN: Yeah. Well, there was Henry Ford who said, “If you ask people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses.” JENNIFER: Right. D And Steve Jobs kind of did the same thing. JENNIFER: Right. And we, as designers, have to be able to work with that and pull that out and suss it out and make sure that we translate it into something useful and then iterate with to make sure that we get it. Like when I do research, listening sessions with folks, I have to use my experience doing this work to know what are the – like, Indi Young’s inner thinking, reactions, and guiding principles. Those are the things that will help guide you on what people are really wanting and needing and what their purpose is. So you make sure that whatever your understanding is closer to what they're really saying, because they don't know what can be built. They don't know what goes on, but they do know what their purpose is and what they need. Maybe they don't even know what they need, but they do know what their purpose is, or you keep validating things. CASEY: I want to amplify, you said Indi Young. I read a lot of her work and she just says so many things that I wish someone would say, and she's been saying them for a while. I just didn't know about her. Indi Young. JENNIFER: It’s I-N-D-I and Y-O-U-N-G. I am so grateful that I got to take her courses. I paid for them all myself, except for one class—I let that other place pay for one through my continuing ed, but I wanted to do it so badly that I paid for all myself. The same thing with all the Creative Reaction Lab and HmntyCntrd stuff; I paid for those out of my own money that probably could have gone to a vacation, [chuckles] or buying a car, or something. But contributing to our society in a responsible and productive way, figuring out how to get my language framework better. Like you said earlier, Damien, I'm really good at pointing out what the problems are. I worry about figuring out how we solve them, because I don't really have the ego to think that I know what the answer is, but I'm very interested in working with others to figure out how we solve them. I have some ideas, but how do you tell a React developer that you really have to learn HTML, you have to learn schematic HTML. That's like learning the alphabet. I don't understand. CASEY: Well, I have some ideas around that. Amber is my go-to framework and they have accessibility baked into the introduction tutorial series. They have like 13 condoned add-ons that do accessibility related things. At the conference, there's always a whole bunch of accessibility tracks. Amber is like happy path accessibility right front and center. React probably has things like that. We could have React’s onboarding docs grow in that direction, that would be great, and have more React add-ons to do that that are condoned and supported by the community could have the same path. And it could probably even use a lot of the same core code even. The same principles apply. JENNIFER: If you want to work together and come up with some stuff to go to React conferences, or work with the React team, or whatever. CASEY: Sounds fun. DAMIEN: Well, one of the things you talked about the way you described it and made it sound like empathy was so much of the core of it. In order to care about accessibility, you have to empathize with people who need that functionality. You have to empathize with people who are on 3G flip phones. That's not a thing, is it? [laughs] But nonetheless, empathizing. JENNIFER: A flat screen phone, a smartphone looking thing and it's still – if anyone's on a slow 3G, it’s still going to be a miserable experience. DAMIEN: Yeah, 3G with a 5-year-old Android OS. JENNIFER: But I don't think it's necessarily that people have to empathize. In an ideal world would, but maybe they could be motivated by other things like fast. Like, do you want to fast cumulative layout shift? Do you want like a great core vitals Google score? Do you want a great Google Lighthouse score? Do you want the clear Axe DevTools scan? Like when I get a 100% little person zooming in a wheelchair screen instead of issues found. Especially if I do it the first time and like, I hadn't been scanning all along and I just go to check it for the first time and it's clean, I'm like, “Yes!” [laughs] CASEY: Automation helps a lot. JENNIFER: Yeah. CASEY: When I worked at USCIS, I don't know what this meant, but they said we cannot automate these tests. I think we can and they didn't do it yet, but I've always been of baffled. I think half of it, you can automate tests around and we had none at the time. JENNIFER: Yeah, you catch 30 to 50% of the accessibility issues via the Axe rule set and JSX Alley and all that. You can catch 30 to 50. CASEY: Sounds great. JENNIFER: That's still better than catching none of them. Still not great, but it's still better than nothing. They're not here to tell us why they can't, but adding things into your end-to-end test shouldn't be that hard if you know how to write tests. I don't personally know how to write tests. I want to. I don't know. Like, I have to choose which thing am I going to work on? I'm working on an acquisition project, defining the requirements and the scope and the red tape of what a contract will be and it's such foreign territory for me. There's a lot of pieces there that I never ever thought I would be dealing with and my head hurts all the time. I feel stupid all the time, but that's okay. If you're not doing something you haven't done before, maybe you're not learning, it's growing. I'm growing. I'm definitely growing, but in different ways and I miss the code thing of I have a to-do list where I really want to get good at Docker, now I want to learn few, things like that and I want to get back to learning Python because Python, I think is super cool. CASEY: There's one thing I wanted to mention earlier that I just remembered. One thing that was eye-opening to me for accessibility concerns is when I heard that screen reader has existed, which was several years into my programming career. I didn't know they were a thing at all. I think it's more common now that people know about them today than 10, 15 years ago. But I still haven't seen someone use a screen reader and that would be really important for me as a developer. I'm not developing software lately either so I'm not really coding that. But if anyone hasn't, you should use a screen reader on your computer if you're developing software that might have to be used by one. JENNIFER: So everyone on a Mac has voiceover. Everyone on an iPhone has voiceover. It's really hard on the iPhone, I feel like I can't, oh, it's really hard. I've heard great things about Talkback on Android. And then on Windows, newer versions have Microsoft Narrator, which is a built-in screen reader. You can also download NVDA for free and install it. It depends on how much money you want to spend. There a bunch of different ways to get Jaws, do Jaws, too. Chrome has Chromebox so you can get another screen reader that way. CASEY: So many options. It's kind of overwhelming. If I had to recommend one for a Windows user and one for a Mac user, would you recommend the built-in ones just to start with, to play with something? JENNIFER: So everywhere I've tested, whether it was at the financial institution, or the insurance place, or the government place, we always had to test with Jaws, NVDA, and voiceover. I test with voiceover because it's what I have on my machine, because I'm usually working on a Mac. But the way I look at the screen reader is the number of people who are using screen readers is significantly fewer than the number of people with cognitive considerations. So I try to use good semantic markup, basic web standards so that things will work; things have always been pretty great in screen readers because of that. I try to keep my code from being too complicated, or my UI is from being complicated, which might do some visual designers seem somewhat boring to some of them. [chuckles] CASEY: Do you ever turn off CSS for the test? JENNIFER: Yes, and if it makes sense that way, then I know I'm doing it right and is it still usable without JavaScript. Better yet, Heydon Pickering's way of like, it's not usable unless you turn off the JavaScript, that was fabulous. I pissed off so many people. But to me, I try to focus on other things like how clear is, how clean is it? Can I tab through the whole UI? Can I operate it with just a keyboard? Your keyboard is your best assistive tech tester. You don’t skip. If you can tap through anything without getting stuck, excellent. If you don't skip over nav items. CASEY: My biggest pet peeve is when websites don't work when you zoom in, because all of my devices I zoom in not because my vision is bad, but because for my posture. I want to be able to see my screen from a far distance and not lean in and craning my neck over laptop and my phone, both and a lot of websites break. JENNIFER: Yeah. CASEY: You zoom in the text at all, you can't read anything. JENNIFER: Yeah. At the one place I worked before, we required two steps of zoom in and two steps of zoom out, and it still had to be functional. I don't see that in most places; they don't bother to say things like that. CASEY: Yeah. JENNIFER: At the government, too – CASEY: I wonder how common it is if people do that. I do it so I think it's very common, but I don't know the right. [laughter] JENNIFER: But that's how the world is, right? I can tell you that once you hit this old age and your eyes start to turn against you and things are too small, or too light, you suddenly understand the importance of all of these things so much more. So for all of those designers doing your thin gray text on white backgrounds, or thin gray text on gray backgrounds, or your tiny little 12 and under pixels for your legaleas, karma is out to get you. [chuckles] We've all done it. Like there was a time I thought nobody cared about the legaleas. That's not true. Even your footer on your website should be big enough for people to read. Otherwise, they think I'm signing away my soul to zoom because I can't read it. If you can zoom it in, that's great. But some apps disable the zoom. DAMIEN: So we usually end on a series of reflections. How do you feel about moving to that? JENNIFER Sure! DAMIEN: We let our guests go last. Casey, do you have a reflection you want to share with us? CASEY: I'm thinking back to Mando's dog and I thought it was interesting, Jennifer, that you linked your experiences with the dog’s experiences. Like, some of the symptoms you have might be similar if a dog has CPTSD, too and I think that's really insightful. I think a lot of animals have that kind of set up, but we don't treat them like we treat humans with those issues even if they're similar. DAMIEN: It was in your bio, equitable design initiatives, I really want it to dig into that because that fascinates me and I guess, if draws that bridge between things that I think are very important, or very important for me, both accessibility, that sort of work, especially in software design, because that's where I'm at. And then destroying the tenants of white supremacy and being able to connect those as things that work together and seeing how they work together. Yeah, that's what I'm going to be reflecting on. JENNIFER: Yeah. Whenever we're doing our work, looking for opportunities to surface and put it out for everyone to look at who has power, if this changes who has power, if this doesn't change who has power, what is motivating the players, are people motivated by making sure that no one's excluded, or are people motivated by making sure that their career moves forward, or they don't get in trouble rather than truly serving? I still am in the mindset of serving the people with a purpose that we're aiming to meet the needs of kind of thing. I still have that mindset. A lot of the prep work, we're still talking about the people we aim to serve and it's still about getting them into the cycle. That is a very big position of power that a designer has and acknowledging that that's power and that I wield that power in a way that I consider responsible, which is to make sure that we are including people who are historically underrepresented, especially in those discussions. I'm really proud of a remote design challenge where all of our research participants were either people of color, or people with disabilities. Man, the findings insights were so juicy. There was so much that we could do with what we got. It was really awesome. So by equitable design initiatives, it's really just thinking about acknowledging the power that we have and trying to make sure we do what we can to share it, transfer it, being really respectful of other perspectives. I've always thought of it as infinite curiosity about others and some people have accused me being nosy and they didn't realize it's not about getting up in their private business. It’s just, I want to be gracious and respect others. What I will reflect on was how I really need to rest. I will continue to reflect on how I rest is key. I'm making a conscious decision for the next couple of months to not volunteer because I tend to do too much, as Casey may, or may not know. [chuckles] Yeah, I want to wake up in the morning and feel energized and ready to take full advantage of, which is not the right way to phrase it, but show up as my best self and well-prepared for the work. Especially since I now have found myself a new incredibly compassionate, smart place that genuinely aims to improve equity and social justice, and do things for the environment and how grateful I am. I totally thought this place was just about let’s them all and it’s so not. [laughs] So there’s so many wonderful people. I highly recommend everybody come work with me if you care about things. DAMIEN: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer for being our guest today. It’s been a pleasure. The author's affiliation with The MITRE Corporation is provided for identification purposes only, and is not intended to convey or imply MITRE's concurrence with, or support for, thepositions, opinions, or viewpoints expressed by the author. ©2021 The MITRE Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Approved for public release. Distribution unlimited 21-2206. Special Guest: Jennifer Strickland.
242: Considering The Social Side of Tech with Trond Hjorteland
01:20 - The Superpower of Sociotechnical System (STS) Design: Considering the Social AND the Technical. The social side matters. * Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity by Michael C. Jackson (https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Systems-Thinking-Management-Complexity/dp/1119118379) * Open Systems * Mechanical * Animate * Social * Ecological * On Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events (https://www.amazon.com/Purposeful-Systems-Interdisciplinary-Analysis-Individual/dp/0202307980/ref=sr_1_3?crid=IJR9EM3K73NE&dchild=1&keywords=on+purposeful+systems&qid=1625847353&sprefix=on+purposeful+systems%2Cstripbooks%2C157&sr=8-3) 09:14 - The Origins of Sociotechnical Systems * Taylorism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management) * Trond Hjorteland: Sociotechnical Systems Design for the “Digital Coal Mines”* (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/) * Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-232X.1970.tb00505.x) 18:42 - Design From Above vs Self-Organization * Participative Design * Idealized Design * Solving Problems is not Systems Thinking 29:39 - Systemic Change and Open Systems * Organizationally Closed but Structurally Open * Getting Out of the Machine Age and Into Systems Thinking (The Information Age) * The Basis for the Viable System Model / Stafford Beer // Javier Livas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaLHocBdG3A) * What is Cybernetics? Conference by Stafford Beer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg) * Jean Yang: Developer Experience: Stuck Between Abstraction and a Hard Place? (https://www.akitasoftware.com/blog-posts/developer-experience-stuck-between-abstraction-and-a-hard-place) * The Embodiment and Hermeneutic Relations 37:47 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Industrial_Revolution) * 4 Historical Stages in the Development of Work * Mechanization * Automation * Centralization * Computerization * Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation) * Ten challenges for making automation a "team player" in joint human-agent activity (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1363742) * Jessica Kerr - Principles of Collaborative Automation (https://vimeo.com/369277964) Reflections: Jessica: “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn’t know you see.” – Trond Trond: In physics we do our best to remove the people and close it as much as possible. In IT it's opposite; We work in a completely open system where the human part is essential. Rein: What we call human error is actually a human’s inability to cope with complexity. We need to get better at managing complexity; not controlling it. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: REIN: Welcome to Episode 242 of Greater Than Code. I’m here with my friend, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Thanks, Rein and I'm excited because today we are here with Trond Hjorteland. Trond is an IT architect aspiring sociotechnical systems designer from the consulting firm Scienta.no—that's no as in the country code for Norway, not no as in no science. Trond has many years of experience with large, complex, business critical systems as a developer and an architect on middleware and backend applications so he's super interested in service orientation, domain driven design—went like that one—event driven architectures and of course, sociotechnical systems, which is our topic today! These happen in industries across the world like telecom, media, TV, government. Trond’s mantra is, “Great products emerge from collaborative sensemaking and design.” I concur. Trond, welcome to Greater Than Code! TROND: Thank you for having me. It's fun being here. JESSICA: Trond, as a Northern European, I know our usual question about superpowers makes you nervous. So let me change it up a little bit: what is your superpower of sociotechnical system design? TROND: Oh, that's a good one. I'm glad you turned it over because we are from the land of the Jante, as you may have heard of, where people are not supposed to be anything better than anybody else. So being a superhero, that's not something that we are accustomed to now, so to speak. So the topic there, sociotechnical system, what makes you a superhero by having that perspective? I think it's in the name, really. Do you actually join the social and the technical aspects of things, whatever you do? But my focus is mainly in organizations and in relation to a person, or a team cooperating, designing IT solutions, and stuff like that, that you have to consider both the social and the technical and I find that we have too much – I have definitely done that. Focused too much on the technical aspects and not ignoring the social aspects, but at least when we are designing stuff we frequently get too attached to the technical aspects. So I think we need that balance. JESSICA: Yeah. TROND: So I guess, that is my superpower I get from that. JESSICA: When we do software design, we think we're designing software, which we think is made of technical code and infrastructure, and that software is made by people and for people and imagine that. Social side matters. TROND: Yeah, and I must say that since Agile in the early 2000s, the focus on the user has been increasing. I think that's better covered than it used to be, but I still think we miss out on we part that we create software and that is that humans actually create software. We often talk about the customer, for example. I guess, many of your listeners are creating such a system that actually the customers are using, like there’s an end user somewhere. But frequently, there's also internal users of that system that you create like backend users, or there's a wide range of others stakeholders as well and – [overtalk] JESSICA: Internal users of customer facing systems? TROND: For example, yes. Like back office, for example. I'm working for our fairly large telecom operation and of course, their main goal is getting and keeping the end users, paying customers, but it's also a lot of stuff going on in the backend, in the back office like supporting customer service support, there is delivery of equipment to the users, there's shipment, there is maintenance, all that stuff, there's assurance of it. So there's a lot of stuff going on in that domain that we rarely think of when we create their IT systems, I find at least. JESSICA: But when we're making our software systems, we're building the company, we're building the next version of this company, and that includes how well can people in the back office do their jobs. TROND: Exactly. JESSICA: And us, like we're also creating the next version of software that we need to change and maintain and keep running and respond to problems in. I like to think about the developer interface. TROND: Exactly, and that is actually, there’s an area where the wider sociotechnical term has popped up probably more frequently than before. It's actually that, because we think of the inter policies we need and organize the teams around for example, services are sometimes necessary and stuff like that. JESSICA: Inter policies, you said. TROND: Yeah, the inter policies offices go into this stuff. So we are looking into that stuff. We are getting knowledge on how to do that, but I find we still are not seeing the whole picture, though. Yes, that is important to get the teams right because you want them to not interact too much but enough so we want – [overtalk] JESSICA: Oh yeah, I love it that the book says, “Collaboration is not the goal! Collaboration is expensive and it's a negative to need to do it, but sometimes you need to.” TROND: Yeah, exactly. So that'd be a backstory there. So the main system, I think and the idea is that you have a system consisting of parts and what sociotechnical systems focus a lot about is the social system. There is a social system and that social system, those parts are us as developers and those parts are stakeholders of course, our users and then you get into this idea of an open system. I think it was Bertanlanffy who coined that, or looked into that. JESSICA: Bertanlanffy open systems. TROND: Open system, yeah. JESSICA: Fair warning to readers, all of us have been reading this book, Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity by Michael C. Jackson and we may name drop a few systems thinking historical figures. TROND: Yes, and Bertanlanffy is one of those early ones. I think he actually developed some of the idea before the war, but I think he wrote the book after—I'm not sure, 1950s, or something—on general system thinking. It's General Systems Theory and he was also looking into this open system thing and I think this is also something that for example, Russell Ackoff took to heart. So he had to find four type of systems. He said there was a mechanical system, like people would think of when they hear system, like it's a technical thing. Like a machine, for example, your car is a system. But then they also added, there was something more that's another type of system, which is animal system, which is basically us. We consist of parts, but we have a purpose that is different from us than a car that makes us different. And then you take a lot of those parts and combine them, then you've got a social system. The interesting thing with the social system is that that system in of its own have a purpose, but also, the parts have a purpose. That's the thing which is different from the other thing. For an animal system, your parts don't have a purpose. Your heart doesn't really have a purpose; it's not giving a purpose. It doesn't have an end goal, so to speak that. There's nothing in – [overtalk] JESSICA: No, it has a purpose within the larger system. TROND: Yeah. JESSICA: But it doesn't have self-actualization. TROND: It's not purposeful. That's probably the word that I – [overtalk] JESSICA: Your heart isn't sitting there thinking, going beat, beat, beat. It does that, but it's not thinking it. TROND: No, exactly. [laughter] TROND: So I think actually Ackoff and I think there was a book called On Purposeful Systems, which I recommend. It's really a dense book. The Jackson book, it's long, but it's quite verbose so it's readable. Like the On Purposeful Systems is designed to be short and concise so it's basically just a list of bullet points almost. It's just a really hard read. But they get into the difference between a purposeful system and a goal-seeking system. Your heart will be goal-seeking. It has something to achieve, but it doesn't have a purpose in a sense. So that's the thing, which is then you as a person and you as a part of a social system and that's where I think the interesting thing comes in and that's where we're sociotechnical system really takes this on board is that in a social system, you have a set of individuals and you also have technical aspects of those system as well so that's the sociotechnical thing. JESSICA: Now you mentioned Ackoff said four kinds of systems. TROND: Yeah. H: Mechanical, animal, social? TROND: And then there’s ecological. JESSICA: And then ecological, thanks. TROND: Yeah. So the ecological one is that where every parts have a purpose like us, but the whole doesn't have a purpose on its own. Like the human kind is not purposeful and we should be probably. [laughs] For example, with climate change and all that, but we are not. Not necessarily. REIN: This actually relates a little bit to the origins of sociotechnical systems because it came about as a way to improve workplace democracy and if you look at the history of management theory, if you look at Taylorism, which was the dominant theory at the time, the whole point of Taylorism is to take purposefulness away from the workers. So the manager decides on the tasks, the manager decides how the tasks are done—there's one right way to do the tasks—and the worker just does those actions. Basically turning the worker into a machine. So Taylorism was effectively a way to take a social system, affirm a company, and try to turn it into an animate system where the managers had purpose and the workers just fulfilled a purpose. TROND: Exactly. REIN: And sociotechnical system said, “What if we give the power of purposefulness back to the workers?” Let them choose the task, let them choose the way they do their tasks. TROND: Exactly, and this is an interesting theme because at the same time, as Taylor was developing his ideas, there were other people having similar ideas, like sociotechnical, but we never heard of them a late like Mary Parker Follett, for example. She was living at the same time, writing stuff at the same time, but the industry wasn't interested in listening to her because it didn't fit their machine model. She was a contrary to that and this was the same thing that sociotechnical system designers, or researchers, to put it more correctly, also experienced, for example, in a post-war England, in the coal mines. JESSICA: Oh yeah, tell us about the coal mines. TROND: Yeah, because that's where the whole sociotechnical system theory was defined, or was first coined what was there. There was a set of researchers from the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which actually came about like an offshoot of the Tavistock Clinic, which was working actually with people struggling from the war after the Second World War. JESSICA: Was that in Norway? TROND: No, that was exactly in England, that was in London. Tavistock is in London. JESSICA: Oh! TROND: Yeah. So it was an offshoot of that because there were researchers there that had the knowledge that there was something specific about the groups. There was somebody called Bion and there was a Kurt Lewin, which I think Jessica, you probably have heard of. JESSICA: Is that Kurt Lewin? TROND: Yes, that's the one. Absolutely. JESSICA: Yeah. He was a psychologist. TROND: Yeah. So he was for example, our main character of the sociotechnical movement in England in the post-war was Eric Trist and he was working closely with Lewin, or Lewin as you Americans call him. They were inspired by the human relations movement, if you like so they saw they had to look into how the people interact. So they observed the miners in England. There was a couple of mines where they had introduced some new technology called the longwall where they actually tried to industrialize the mining. They have gone from autonomous groups into more industrialized, like – [overtalk] JESSICA: Taylorism? TROND: Yes, they had gone all Taylorism, correct. JESSICA: “Your purpose is to be a pair of hands that does this.” TROND: Exactly, and then they had shifts. So one shift was doing one thing, then other shift was doing the second thing and that's how they were doing the other thing. So they were separating people. They had to have been working in groups before, then they were separated to industrialize like efficiently out of each part. JESSICA: Or to grouplike tasks with each other so that you only have one set of people to do a single thing. TROND: Yeah. So one group was preparing and blowing and breaking out the coal, somebody was pushing it out to the conveyors, and somebody else was moving into the instrument, or the machinery to the next place. This is what's the three partnership shifts were like. What they noticed then is that they didn't get the efficiency that they expected from this and also, people were leaving. People really didn't like this way of working; there was a lot of absenteeism and there were a lot of crows and uproar and it didn't go well, this new technology which they had too high hopes for. So then Trist and a couple of others like Bamford observed something that happened in one of the mines that people actually, some of them self-organized and went back to the previous way of working in autonomous teams plus using this new technology. They self-organized in order to actually to be able to work in this alignment, but this was the first time that I saw this type of action that they actually created their own semi-autonomous teams as they called them. JESSICA: So there was some technology that was introduced and when they tried to make it about the technology and get people to use it the way they thought it would be most efficient, it was not effective. TROND: Not effective? JESSICA: But yet the people working in teams were able to use the technology. TROND: Yeah. Actually, so this is the interesting part is when you have complex systems then you can have self-organization happening there and these workers, they were so frustrated. They’re like, “Okay. Let's take matters in our own hands, let's create groups where we can actually work together.” So they created these autonomous groups and this was something that Eric Trist and Ken Bamford observed. So they saw that when they did that, the absenteeism and the quality of work-life increased a lot and also, productivity increased a lot. There were a few mines observed that did this and they compared to other mines that didn't and the numbers were quite convincing. So you should think “Oh, this would use them,” everybody would start using this approach. No, they didn't. Of course, management, the leadership didn't want this. They were afraid of losing the power so they worked against it. So just after a few research attempts, there wasn't any leverage there and actually, they increased the industrialization with a next level of invention was created that made it even worse so it grinded to a halt. Sociotechnical was a definer, but it didn't have the good fertile ground to grow. So that's when they came to my native land, to Norway. JESSICA: Ah. TROND: Yeah. So Fred Emery was one of those who worked with Trist and Bramforth a lot back then and also traced himself, actually came to Norway as almost like a governmental project. There was a Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program, I think it was called, it was actually established by – [overtalk] JESSICA: There was a Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program. That is so not American. TROND: [laughs] Exactly. So that probably only happen in Norway, I suppose and there were a lot of reasons for that. One of them is, especially as that we struggled with the industry after the war, because we were just invaded by Germany and was under rule so we had nothing to build. So they got support from America, for example, to rebuild after the war, but also, Norwegians are the specific type of persons, if you like. They don't like to be ruled over. So the high industrial stuff didn't go down well with the workers even worse than in England, but not in mines because we don't have any mines so just like creating nails, or like paper mills. Also, the same thing happened as I said, in England, that people were not happy with the way these things were going. But the problem is in Norway that this was covering all the mines, not just a few mines here and there. This was going all the way up to the – the workers unions were collaborating with the employers unions. So they were actually coming together. This project was established by these two in collaboration and actually, the government was also coming and so, there were three parts to this initiative. And then the Tavistock was called in to help them with this project, or the program to call it. So then it started off your experiments in Norway and then I went more – in England, they observed mostly, like the Tavistock, and in Norway, they actually started designing these type of systems, political systems, they're autonomous work groups and all that. They did live experiments and the like so there was action research as a way of – [overtalk] JESSICA: Oh, action research. TROND: Yeah, where you actually do research on the ground. This was also from Kurt Lewin, I believe. So I know they did a lot of research there and got similar results as in England. But also, this went a bit further than Norway. This actually went into the law, how to do this. So like work participation, for example and there was also this work design thing that came out of it. It’s like workers have some demands that goes above just a livable wage. They want the type of job that meant something, where they were supposed to grow, they were supposed to learn on the job, they were supposed to – there were a lot of stuff that they wanted and that was added to actually the law. So this is part of Norwegian law today, what came out of that research. JESSICA: You mentioned that in Norway, they started doing design and yet there's the implication that it's design of self-organizing teams. Is that conflict? Like, design from above versus self-organization. TROND: Yes, it did and that is also something that I discovered in Norway so well-observed, Jessica. This is actually what happened in Norway. So the researchers saw that they were struggling to getting this accepted properly by the workers, then I saw okay, they have to get the workers involved. Then they started with this, what they call participative design. The workers were pulled in to design the work they worked on, or to do together with the researchers, but the researchers were still regarded as experts still. So there was a divide between the researches and the workers, but the workers weren't given a lot of freewill to design how they wanted this to work themselves. One of the latest experiments, I think the workers weren't getting the full freedom to design and I think it was the aluminum industry. I think they were creating a new factory and the workers weren’t part of designing how they should work in that factory, this new factory. They saw that they couldn't just come in and “This is how it works in the mines in England, this is how we're going to do it.” That didn't work in Norway. REIN: And one of the things that they've found was that these systems were more adaptable than Taylorism. So there was one of these programs in textile mills in India that had been organized according to scientific management AKA Taylorism. And what they found, one of the problems was that if any perturbation happened, any unexpected event, they stopped working. They couldn't adapt and when they switched to these self-organizing teams, they became better at adaptation, but they also just got more production and higher quality. So it was just a win all around. You're not trading off here, it turns out. JESSICA: You can say we need resilience because of incidents. But in fact, that resilience also gives you a lot of flexibility that you didn't know you needed. TROND: Exactly. You are capable of taking in stuff that you couldn't foresee like anything that happens because the people on the ground who know this best and actually have all the information they need are actually able to adapt. Lots better then to have a structure like a wild process, I think. REIN: One of the principles of resilience engineering is that accidents are normal work. Accidents happen as a result of normal work, which means that normal work has all of the same characteristics. Normal work requires adaptation. Normal work requires balancing trade-offs competing goals. That's all normal work. It just, we see it in incidents because incidents shine a light on what happened. TROND: I think there was an American called Pasmore who coined this really well. He said, “STS design was intended tended to produce a win-win-win-win. Human beings were more committed, technology operated closer to the potential and the organization performed better overall while adapting more readily to changes in its environment.” This has pretty much coining what STS is all about. REIN: Yeah. I’m always on the lookout because they're rare for these solutions that are just strictly better in a particular space. Where you're not making trade-offs, where you get to have it all, that's almost unheard of. JESSICA: It's almost unheard of and yet I feel like we could do a lot of more of it. Who was it who talks about dissolving the problem? REIN: Ackoff. TROND: That’s Ackoff, yeah. JESSICA: Yeah, that’s Ackoff in Idealized Design. TROND: Where he said – [overtalk] REIN: He said, “The best way to solve a problem is to redesign the system that contains it so that the problem no longer exists.” TROND: Yeah, exactly. JESSICA: And in software, what are some examples of that that we have a lot? Like, the examples where we dissolve coordination problems by saying the same team is responsible for deployment? REIN: I've seen problem architectures be dissolved by a change in the product. It turns out that a better way to do it for users also makes possible a better architecture and so you can stop solving that hard problem that was really expensive. JESSICA: Oh, right. So the example of item potency of complete order buttons: if you move the idea generation to the client, that problem just goes away. TROND: Yeah, and I have to say another example is if you have two teams that work well together. [chuckles] You have to communicate more. Okay, but that doesn't help because that's not where our problem is. If you redesign the teams, for example, then if they – instead of having fun on the backend teams, if you redesign, you have no verticals, then you haven't solved the problem. You have resolved it. It is gone because they are together now in one thing. So I think there is a lot of examples of this, but it is a mindset because people tend to say, if there is something problem, they want to analyze it as it is and then figure out how to fix the parts and then – [overtalk] JESSICA: Yeah, this is our obsession with solving problems! TROND: Yes. JESSICA: Solving problems is not systems thinking. TROND: No, it’s not. Exactly. JESSICA: Solving problems is reactive. It feels productive. It can be heroic. Whereas, the much more subtle and often wider scope of removing the problem, which often falls into the social system. When you change the social system, you can resolve technical problems so that they don't exist. That's a lot more congressive and challenging and slower. TROND: It is and that is probably where STS has struggled. It didn't struggle as much, but that is also here compared to the rest of the world. They said because you have to fight – there is a system already in place and that system is honed in on solving problems as you were saying. JESSICA: That whole line management wants to solve the problem by telling them what workers want to do and it's more important that their solution work, then that a solution work. TROND: Yes, exactly and also, because they are put in a system where that's normal. That is common sense to them. So I often come back to that [inaudible] quote is that I get [inaudible], or something like that is that because a person in a company, he’s just a small – In this large company, I'm just a small little tiny piece of it; there's no chance in anyhow that I can change it. JESSICA: Yeah. So as developers, one reason that we focus on technical dilutions and technical design is because we have some control over that. TROND: Yes. JESSICA: We don't feel control over the social system, which is because you can never control a social system; you can only influence it. TROND: So what I try to do in an organization is that I try to find a, change agents around in the organization so I get a broader picture not only understanding it, but also record broader set of attacks, if you like it—I'm not just calling it attacks, but you get my gist—so you can create a more profound change not just a little bit here, a little bit though. Because when you change as society, if we solve problems, we focus on the parts and we focus on the parts, we are not going to fix the hole. That is something that Ackoff was very adamant about and he’s probably correct. You can optimize – [overtalk] JESSICA: Wait. Who, what? I didn’t understand. TROND: Ackoff. JESSICA: Ackoff, that was that. TROND: So if you optimize every part, you don't necessarily make the system better, but he said, “Thank God, you usually do. You don't make it worse.” [laughs] REIN: Yeah. He uses the example of if you want to make a car, so you take the best engine and the best transmission, and you take all of the best parts and what do you have? You don't have a car. You don't have the best car. You don't even have a car because the parts don't fit together. It's entirely possible to make every part better and to make the system worse and you also sometimes need to make a part worse to make the system better. TROND: And that is fascinating. I think that is absolutely fascinating that you have to do that. I have seen that just recently, for example, in our organization, we have one team that is really good at Agile. They have nailed it almost, this team. But the rest of the organization are not as high level and good at Agile and the organization is not thrilled to be Agile in a sense because it's an old project-oriented organization so it is industrialized in a sense. Then you have one team that want to do STS; they want to be an Agile super team. But when they don't fit with the rest, they actually make the rest worse. So actually, in order to make it the whole better, you can't have this local optimizations, you have to see the whole and then you figure out how to make the whole better based on the part, not the other one. JESSICA: Yeah. Because well, one that self-organizing Agile team can't do that properly without having an impact on the rest of the organization. TROND: Exactly. JESSICA: And when the rest of the organization moves much more slowly, you need a team in there that's slower. And I see this happen. I see Agile teams moving too fast that the business isn't ready to accept that many changes so quickly. So we need a slower – they don't think of it this way, but what they do is they add people. They add people and that slows everything down so you have a system that's twice as expensive in order to go slower. That's my theory. TROND: The fascinating thing, though—and this is where the systems idea comes in—is that if you have this team that really honed this, that they have nailed the whole thing exactly, they’re moving as fast as they can and all that. But the rest of it, they’ll say it’s not, then you have to interact the rest of organization, for example. So they have been bottlenecked everywhere they look. So what they end up doing is that they pull in work, more work than they necessarily can pull through because they have to. Unless they just have to sit waiting. Nobody feels – [overtalk] JESSICA: And then you have nowhere to fucking progress. TROND: Exactly. So then you make it worse – [overtalk] JESSICA: Then you couldn’t get anything done. TROND: Exactly! So even a well-working team would actually break in the end because of this. REIN: And we’ve organized organizations around part maximization. Every way of organizing your business we know of is anti-systemic because they're all about part optimization. Ours is a list of parts and can you imagine going to a director and saying, “Listen, to make this company better, we need to reduce your scope. We need to reduce your budget. We need to reduce your staff. TROND: Yeah. [laughs] That is a hard sell. It is almost impossible. So where I've seen it work—no, I haven't seen that many. But where I’ve seen that work, you have to have some systemic change coming all the way from the top, basically. Somebody has to come in and say, “Okay, this is going to be painful, but we have to change. The whole thing has to change,” and very few companies want to do that because that’s high risk. Why would you do that? So they shook along doing that minor problem-solving here and there and try to fix the things, but they are not getting the systemic change that they probably need. JESSICA: Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why startups wind up eating the lunch of bigger companies; because startups aren't starting from a place that's wrong for what they're now doing. TROND: Exactly. They are free to do it. They have all the freedom that we want the STS team to have. The autonomous sociotechnical systems teams, those are startups. So ideally, you’re consisting a lot of startups. REIN: And this gets back to this idea of open systems and the idea of organizationally closed, but structurally open. TROND: Yeah. REIN: It comes from [inaudible] and this idea is that an organization, which is the idea of the organization—IBM as an organization is the idea of IBM, it's not any particular people. IBM stays IBM, but it has to reproduce its structure and they can reproduce its structure in ways that change, build new structure, different structure, but IBM is still IBM. But organizations aren't static and actually, they have to reproduce themselves to adapt and one of the things that I think makes startups better here is that their ability to change their structure as they produce it, they have much more agility. Whereas, a larger organization with much more structure, it's hard to just take the structure and just move it all over here. TROND: Exactly. JESSICA: It’s all the other pieces of the system fit with the current system. TROND: Yeah. You have to share every part in order to move. JESSICA: Right. REIN: And also, the identity of a startup is somewhat fluid. Startups can pivot. Can you imagine IBM switching to a car company, or something? TROND: I was thinking exactly the same; you only see pivots in small organizations. Pivots are not normal in large organizations. That will be a no-go. Even if you come and suggested it, “I hear there's a lot of money in being an entrepreneur.” I wouldn't because that would risk everything I have for something that is hypothetical. I wouldn't do that. REIN: Startups, with every part of them, their employees can turn over a 100%, they can get a new CEO, they can get new investors. JESSICA: All at a much faster time scale. TROND: Also, going back to Ackoff, he's saying that we need to go get out of the machine age. Like he said, we have been in the machine age since the Renaissance, we have to get out of that and this is what system thinking is. It’s a new age as they call it. Somebody calls it the information age, for example and it’s a similar things. But we need to start thinking differently; how to solve problems. The machine has to go, at least for social systems. The machine is still going to be there. We are going to work with machines. We're going to create machines. So machines – [overtalk] JESSICA: We use machines, but our systems are bigger than that. TROND: Yes. JESSICA: Systems are interesting than any machine and when we try build systems as machines, we really limit ourselves. TROND: So I think that is also one of the – I don't know if it's a specific principle for following STS that says that man shouldn't be an extension of the machine, he should be a part of machine. He should be using the machine. He should be like an extension of the machine. JESSICA: Wait. That the man being an extension of machine, the machine should be an extension of man? TROND: Yeah. JESSICA: Right. [inaudible] have a really good tool, you feel that? TROND: Mm hm. REIN: This actually shows up in joint cognitive systems, which shares a lot with sociotechnical systems, as this idea that there are some tools through which you perceive the world that augment you and there are other tools that represent the world. Some tools inside you and you use them to interact with the world, you interact with the world using them to augment your abilities, and there are other tools that you have just a box here that represents the world and you interact with the box and your understanding of the world is constrained by what the box gives you. These are two completely different forms of toolmaking and what Stafford Beer, I think it might say is that there are tools that augment your variety, that augment your ability to manage complexity, and there are tools that reduce complexity, there are tools that attenuate complexity. JESSICA: Jean Yang was talking about this the other day with respect to developer tools. There are tools like Heroku that reduce complexity for you. You just deploy the thing, just deploy it and internally, Heroku is dealing with a lot of complexity in order to give you that abstraction. And then there are other tools, like Honeycomb, that expose complexity and help you deal with the complexity inherent in your system. TROND: Yeah. Just to go back so I get this quote right is that the individual is treated as a complimentary to machine rather than an extension of it. JESSICA: Wait, what is treating this complimentary to machine? TROND: The individual. JESSICA: The individual. TROND: The person, yeah. Because that is what you see in machine shops and those are also what happened in England when they called mining work again, even more industrialized, people are just an extension of the machine. JESSICA: We don't work like that. TROND: Yeah. I feel like that sometimes, I must admit, that I'm part of the machine. That I'm just a cog in the machine and we are not well-equipped to be cogs in machines, I think. Though, we should be. REIN: Joint cognitive systems call this the embodiment relation where the artifact is transparent and it's a part of the operator rather than the application so you can view the world through it but it doesn't restrict you. And then the other side is the hermeneutic relation. So hermeneutics is like biblical hermeneutics is about the interpretation of the Bible. So the hermeneutic relation is where the artifact interprets the world for you and then you view the artifact. So like for example, most of the tools we use to respond to incidents, logs are hermeneutic artifacts. They present their interpretation of the world and we interact with that interpretation. What I think of as making a distinction between old school metrics and observability, is observability is more of an embodiment relationship. Observability lets you ask whatever question you want; you're not restricted to what you specifically remember to log, or to count. TROND: Exactly. And this is now you're getting into the area where I think actually STS – now we have talked about a lot about STS in the industrial context here, but I think it's not less, maybe even more relevant now because especially when we're moving into the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution where the machines have taken over more and more. Like, for example, AI, or machine learning, or whatever. Because then the machine has taken more and more control over our lives. So I think we need this more than even before because the machines before were simple in comparison and they were not designed by somebody in the same sense that for example, AI, or machine learning was actually developed. I wouldn't say AI because it's still an algorithm underneath, but it does have some learning in it and we don't know what the consequences of that is, as I said. So I think it's even more relevant now than it was before. JESSICA: Yeah. TROND: [chuckles] I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or see, that is. JESSICA: Or hear something about it. You want to define it to our listeners? TROND: Somebody called it this hyperphysical systems. JESSICA: Hyperphysical? TROND: Yes, somebody called it hyperphysical systems. I'm not sure if you want to go too much into that, to be honest, but. So the Fourth Industrial Revolution is basically about the continuous automation of manufacturing and industrial practices using smart technology, machine-to-machine communication, internet of things, machine learning improves communication and self-monitoring and all that stuff. We see the hint of it, that something is coming and that is that different type of industry than what we currently are in. I think the Industrial 4.0 was probably coined in Germany somewhere. So there's a definition that something is coming out of that that is going to put the humans even more on the sideline and I think for us working in I, we see some of this already. The general public, maybe don't at the same level. REIN: So this reminds me of this other idea from cognitive systems that there are four stages, historical stages, in the development of work. There's mechanization, which replaces human muscle power with mechanical power and we think of that as starting with the original industrial revolution, but it's actually much older than that with agriculture, for example. Then there's automation, there's a centralization, and then there's computerization. Centralization has happened on a shorter time span and computerization has happened at a very short time span relative to mechanization. So one of the challenges is that we got really good at mechanization because we've been doing it since 500 BC. We're relatively less good at centering cognition in the work. The whole point of mechanization and automation was to take cognition out of the work and realizing you have to put it back in, it's becoming much more conspicuous that people have to think to do their work. TROND: Yeah. JESSICA: Because we're putting more and more of the work into the machine and yet in much software system, many software systems especially like customer facing systems, we need that software to not just be part of the machine, to not do the same thing constantly on a timescale of weeks and months. We need it to evolve, to participate in our cognition as we participate in the larger economy. TROND: Yeah. REIN: And one of the ironies of this automation—this comes from Bainbridge’s 1983 paper—is that when you automate a task, you don't get rid of a task. You make a new task, which is managing the automation, and this task is quite different from the task you were doing before and you have no experience with it. You may not even have training with it. So automation doesn't get rid of work; automation mutates work into a new unexpected form. JESSICA: Right. One of the ironies of automation is that now you have created that management at the automation and you think, “Oh, we have more automation. We can pay the workers less.” Wrong. You could pay the workers more. Now collectively, the automation plus the engineers who are managing it are able to do a lot more, but you didn't save money. You added a capability, but you did not save money. REIN: Yeah, and part of that is what you can automate are the things we know how to automate, which are the mechanical tasks and what's left when you automate all of the mechanical tasks are the ones that require thinking. TROND: And that's where we're moving into now, probably that's what the Fourth Industrial Revolution is. We try and automate this stuff that probably shouldn't be automated. Maybe, I don’t know. JESSICA: Or it shouldn’t be automated in a way that we can’t change. TROND: No, exactly. REIN: This is why I'm not buying stock in AI ops companies because I don't think we figured out how to automate decision-making yet. JESSICA: I don't think we want to automate decision-making. We want to augment. TROND: Yeah, probably. So we're back to that same idea that the STS said we should be complimentary to machine, not an extension of it. JESSICA: Yes. That's probably a good place to wrap up? TROND: Yeah. REIN: Yeah. There's actually a paper by the way, Ten Challenges in Making Automation A Team Player. JESSICA: [laughs] Or you can watch my talk on collaborative automation. TROND: Yeah. JESSICA: Do you want to do reflections? REIN: Sure. JESSICA: I have a short reflection. One quote that I wrote down that you said, Trond in the middle of something was “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn’t know you see,” and that speaks to, if you don't know you see it, you can't automate the seeing of it. Humans are really good at the everything else of what is going on. This is our human superpower compared to any software that we can design and that's why I am big on this embodiment relation. Don't love the word, but I do love tools that make it easier for me to make and implement decisions that give me superpowers and then allow me to combine that with my ability to take input from the social system and incorporate that. TROND: I can give it a little bit of an anecdote. My background is not IT. I come from physics—astrophysics, to be specific—and what we were drilled in physics is that you should take the person out of the system. You should close the system as much as possible. Somebody said you have to take a human out of it if you want observe. Physics is you have no environment, you have no people, there's nothing in it so it's completely closed, but we work and here, it's complete opposite. I work in a completely open system where the human part is essential. JESSICA: We are not subject to the second law of thermodynamics. TROND: No, we are not. That is highly restricted for a closed system. We are not. So the idea of open system is something that I think we all need to take on board and we are the best one to deal with those open systems. We do it all the time, every day, just walking with a complex open system. I mean, everything. JESSICA: Eating. TROND: Eating, yeah. REIN: And actually, one of the forms, or the ways that openness was thought of is informational openness. Literally about it. JESSICA: That’s [inaudible] take in information. TROND: Yeah. Entropy. JESSICA: Yeah. TROND: Yeah, exactly. And we are capable of controlling that variance, we are the masters of that. Humans, so let's take advantage of that. That's our superpower as humans. REIN: Okay, I can go. So we've been talking a little bit about how the cognitive demands of work are changing and one of the things that's happening is that work is becoming higher tempo. Decisions have to be made more quickly and higher criticality. Computers are really good at making a million mistakes a second. So if you look at something like the Knight Capital incident; a small bug can lose your company half a billion dollars in an instant. So I think what we're seeing is that this complexity, if you combine that with the idea of requisite variety, the complexity of work is exploding and what we call human error is actually a human's inability to cope with complexity. I think if we want to get human error under control, what we have to get better at is managing complexity, not controlling it – [overtalk] JESSICA: And not by we and by we don’t mean you, the human get better at this! This system needs to support the humans in managing additional complexity. REIN: Yeah. We need to realize that the nature of work has changed, that it presents these new challenges, and that we need to build systems that support people because work has never been this difficult. JESSICA: Both, social and technical systems. TROND: No, exactly. Just to bring it back to where we started with the coal miners in England. Working there was hard, it was life-threatening; people died in the mines. So you can imagine this must be terrible, but it was a quite closed system, to be honest, compared to what we have. That environment is fairly closed. It isn't predictable at the same size, but we are working in an environment that is completely open. It's turbulent, even. So we need to focus on the human aspect of things. We can't just treat things that machines does work. JESSICA: Thank you for coming to this episode of Greater Than Code. TROND: Yeah, happy to be here. Really fun. It was a fun discussion. REIN: So that about does it for this episode of Greater Than Code. Thank you so much for listening wherever you are. If you want to spend more time with this awesome community, if you donate even $1 to our Patreon, you can come to us on Slack and you can hang out with all of us and it is a lot of fun. Special Guest: Trond Hjorteland.
241: Data Science Science with Adam Ross Nelson
01:25 - Teaching, Learning, and Education 06:16 - Becoming a Data Scientist * Opportunities to Create New Knowledge * Data Science Science 19:36 - Solving Bias in Data Science * Weapons of Math Destruction (https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com/) 23:36 - Recommendations for Aspiring Data Scientists * Hire a Career Coach * Creating and Maintaining a Portfolio * Make a Rosetta Stone * Make a Cheat Sheet * Write an Article on a Piece of Software You Dislike * A Few Times, I’ve Broken Pandas (https://towardsdatascience.com/a-few-times-i-managed-to-broke-pandas-d3604d43708c?gi=7c2404551ab3) * Kyle Kingsbury Posts (https://aphyr.com/) * Contribute to Another Project * Post On Project Contribution (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6800974518308478976-4YqK) * Spend $$$/Invest on Transition * Bet On Yourself 45:36 - Impostor Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome) * Immunity Boosts * Community * Know Your Baseline * Clance Impostor Phenomenon Test (http://impostortest.nickol.as/) * Dr. Pauline Rose Clance (https://paulineroseclance.com/) * The Imposter Phenomenon: An Internal Barrier To Empowerment and Achievement by Pauline Rose Clance and Maureen Ann O'Toole (https://paulineroseclance.com/pdf/ip_internal_barrier_to_empwrmnt_and_achv.pdf) * Disseminate Knowledge * Confidence Leads to Confidence * Dunning-Kruger Effect (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dunning-kruger-effect) * Johari Window (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window) Reflections: Mae: Checking out the metrics resources on Impostor Syndrome listed above. Casey: Writing about software in a positive, constructive tone. Mando: Investing in yourself. from:sheaserrano bet on yourself (https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Asheaserrano%20bet%20on%20yourself&src=typed_query&f=live) Adam: Talking about career, data science, and programming in a non-technical way. Also, Twitter searches for book names! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDO: Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode number 241. I'm Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my friend, Mae Beale. MANDO: Hi, there! And I am also here with Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I am Casey! And we're all here with Adam Ross Nelson, our guest today. Welcome, Adam. ADAM: Hi, everyone! Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here. CASEY: Since 2020, Adam is a consultant who provides research, data science, machine learning, and data governance services. Previously, he was the inaugural data scientist at The Common Application which provides undergraduate college application platforms for institutions around the world. He holds a PhD from The University of Wisconsin: Madison in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis. Adam is also formerly an attorney with a history of working in higher education, teaching all ages, and educational administration. He is passionate about connecting with other data professionals in-person and online. For more information and background look for his insights by connecting with Adam on LinkedIn, Medium, and other online platforms. We are lucky we have him here today. So Adam, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ADAM: I spent so much time thinking about this question, I really wasn't sure what to say. I hadn't thought about my superpower in a serious way in a very long time and I was tempted to go whimsy with this, but I got input from my crowd and my tribe and where I landed was teaching, learning, and education. You might look at my background with a PhD in education, leadership, and policy analysis, all of my work in education administration, higher education administration, and teaching and just conclude that was how I acquired the superpower. But I think that superpower goes back much further and much deeper. So when I was a kid, I was badly dyslexic. Imagine going through life and you can't even tell the difference between a lowercase B and a lowercase D. Indistinguishable to me. Also, I had trouble with left and right. I didn't know if someone told me turn left here, I'd be lucky to go – I had a 50/50 chance of going in the right direction, basically. Lowercase P and Q were difficult. For this podcast, the greater than sign, I died in the math unit, or I could have died in the math unit when we were learning greater than, or less than. Well, and then another one was capital E and the number 3, couldn't tell a difference. Capital E and number 3. I slowly developed mnemonics in order to learn these things. So for me, the greater than, less than pneumonic is, I don't know if you ever think about it, but think of the greater than, or less than sign as an alligator and it's hungry. So it's always going to eat the bigger number. [laughs] It’s always going to eat the bigger quantity. So once I figured that mnemonic out and a bunch of other mnemonics, I started doing a little bit better. My high school principal told my parents that I would be lucky to graduate high school and there's all kinds. We can unpack that for days, but. MANDO: Yeah. ADAM: Right? Like what kind of high school principal says that to anybody, which resonates with me now in hindsight, because everything we know about student learning, the two most influential factors on a student's ability to learn are two things. One, teacher effectiveness and number two, principal leadership. Scholarship always bears out. MAE: Whoa. ADAM: Yeah. So the principal told my family that and also, my household growing up, I was an only child. We were a very poor household; low income was an understatement. So my disadvantages aside, learning and teaching myself was basically all I had. I was the kid who grew up in this neighborhood, I had some friends in the neighborhood, and I was always exploring adjacent areas of the neighborhoods. I was in a semi-rural area. So there were wooded areas, there were some streams, some rivers, some lakes and I was always the kid that found something new. I found a new trail, a new street, a new whatever and I would run back to my neighborhood and I'd be like, “Hey everybody, I just found something. Look what I found, follow me and I will show you also. I will show you the way and I'll show you how cool that is.” MAE: Aw. ADAM: I love this thinking. [laughs] MAE: I love that! CASEY: Sharing. ADAM: I'm glad because when I'm in the classroom, when I'm teaching – I do a lot of corporate training now, too. When I'm either teaching in a traditional university classroom, or in corporate setting, that is me reliving my childhood playtime. It's like, “Hey everybody, look at this cool thing that I have to show you and now I'm going to show it to you, also.” So teaching, learning, and education is my superpower and in one way, that's manifested. When I finished school, I finished my PhD at 37. I wasn't 40 years old yet, if you count kindergarten had been in school for 23 years. Over half of my life, not half of my adult life, half of my entire life I was in school [chuckles] and now that I'm rounding 41—that was last week, I turned 41. Now that I'm rounding 41 – MAE: Happy birthday! ADAM: Thank you so much. Now that I'm rounding 41, I'm finally a little more than half of my life not in school. MANDO: Congrats, man. That's an accomplishment. [laughs] So I'm curious to know how you transitioned from that academic world into being a data scientist proper, like what got you to that point? What sets you down that path? Just that whole story. I think that'd be super interesting to talk about and dig into. ADAM: Sure. I think context really matters; what was going on in the data science field at the time I finished the PhD. I finished that PhD in 2017. So in 2017, that was that the apex of – well, I don't know if it was, or maybe we're now at the apex. I don't know exactly where the apex was, or is, or will be, but there was a lot of excitement around data science as a field and as a career in about 3, or 4 years ago. MANDO: For sure. ADAM: So when I was finishing the PhD, I had the opportunity to tech up in my PhD program and gain a lot of the skills that others might have gained via other paths through more traditional computer science degrees, economics degrees, or bootcamps, or both. And then I was also in a position where I was probably—and this is common for folks with a PhD—probably one of the handful of people in the world who were a subject matter expert in a particular topic, but also, I had the technical skills to be a data scientist. So there was an organization, The Common Application from the introduction, that was looking for a data scientist who needed domain knowledge in the area that I had my PhD and that's what a PhD does for you is it gives you this really intense level of knowledge in a really small area [chuckles] and then the technical skills. That's how I transitioned into being a data scientist. I think in general, that is the template for many folks who have become a data scientist. Especially if you go back 3, or 4, or 5, or 6 years ago, before formal data science training programs started popping up and even before, and then I think some of the earliest bootcamps for data science were about 10 years ago. At least the most widely popular ones were about 10 years ago to be clear. And then there's another view that that's just when we started calling it data science because the skills for – all of the technologies and analytical techniques we're using, not all of them, many of them have been around for decades. So that's important to keep in mind. So I think to answer your question, I was in the right place at the right time, there was a little bit of luck involved, and I always try and hold myself from fully giving all the credit away to luck because that's something. Well, maybe we'll talk about it later when it comes to imposter syndrome, that's one of the symptoms, so to speak, of imposter syndrome is giving credit for your success away to luck while you credit the success of others to skill, or ability. But let me talk about that template. So the template is many data scientists become a data scientists with this three-step process. One, you establish yourself as an expert in your current role and by establishing yourself as an expert, you're the top expert, or one of very, very few people who are very, very skilled in that area. Then you start tackling business problems with statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. You might not be called a data scientist yet, but by this point, you're already operating as a data scientist and then eventually, you be the data scientist, you become the data scientist. If it is a career path for you, you'll potentially change roles into a role that's formerly called, specifically called data science. But one of the articles I wrote recently on Medium talks about the seven paths to data scientist and one of the paths talks about a fellow who really doesn't consider himself a data scientist, but he is a data scientist, been a data scientist for years, but he's really happy with this organization and his role as it’s titled as an engineer and he's great. He's good to go. So maybe we'll talk about it a little bit later, too. I think as we were chatting and planning, someone asked about pedigree a little bit and one of the points I like to make is there's no right, or wrong way to do it. There's no right, or wrong way to get there just once you get there, have fun with it. MAE: I love what you said, Adam, about the steps and they're very similar to what I would advise to any traditional coder and have advised is take all of your prior work experience before you become a programmer. It is absolutely relevant and some of the best ways to have a meaningful impact and mitigate one's own imposter syndrome is to get a job where you are programming and you already have some of that domain knowledge and expertise to be able to lend. So you don't have to have been one of the rarefied few, but just having any familiarity with the discipline, or domain of the business you end up getting hired at, or applying to certainly is a way to get in the door a little easier and feel more comfortable once you're there, that you can contribute in lots of ways. ADAM: And it gives you the ability to provide value that other folks who are on a different path, who are going into data science earlier—this is a great path, too don't let me discount that path—but those folks don't have the deep domain knowledge that someone who transitions into data science later in their career provides. MAE: Exactly. Yeah, and the amazing teams have people with all the different versions, right? ADAM: Right. MAE: Like we don't want a team with only one. Yeah. ADAM: That's another thing I like to say about data science is it's a team sport. It has to be a teams – it has to be done in tandem with others. CASEY: I just had a realization that everyone I know in data science, they tend to come from science backgrounds, or maybe a data science bootcamp. But I don't know anyone who moved from web development into data science and that's just so surprising to me. I wonder why. MAE: I crossed the border a little bit, I would say, I worked in the Center for Data Science at RTI in North Carolina and I did do some of the data science there as well as just web programming, but my undergrad is biochem. So I don't break your role. [laughs] MANDO: [chuckles] Yeah. I'm trying to think. I don't think I know any either. At the very least, they all come from a hard science, or mathematics background, which is interesting to me because that's definitely not my experience with web application developers, or just developers in general. There's plenty that come from comp side background, or an MIS background, or something like that, but there's also plenty who come from non-traditional backgrounds as well. Not just bootcamps, but just like, they were a history major and then picked up programming, or whatever and it doesn't seem to be as common, I think in data science. Not to say that you couldn't, but just for my own, or maybe our own experience, it's not quite as common. ADAM: If there's anybody listening with the background that we're talking about, the other backgrounds, I would say, reach out probably to any of us and we'd love to workshop that with you. MAE: Yes! Thank you for saying that. Absolutely. MANDO: Yeah, the more stories we can amplify the better. We know y'all are out there; [chuckles] we just don't know you and we should. MAE: Adam, can you tell us some descriptor that is a hobnobbing thing that we would be able to say to a data scientist? Maybe you can tell us what P values are, or just some little talking point. Do you have any favorite go-tos? ADAM: Well, I suppose if you're looking for dinner party casual conversation and you're looking for some back pocket question, you could ask a data scientist and you're not a data scientist. I would maybe ask a question like this, or a question that I could respond to easily as a data scientist might be something like, “Well, what types of predictions are you looking to make?” and then the data scientists could respond with, “Oh, it's such an interesting question. I don't know if anybody's ever asked me that before!” But the response might be something like, “Well, I'm trying to predict a classification. I'm trying to predict categories,” or “I'm trying to predict income,” or “I'm trying to predict whatever it is that –” I think that would be an interesting way to go. What's another one? CASEY: Oh, I've got one for anyone you know in neuroscience. ADAM: Oh, yeah. MAE: Yay! CASEY: I was just reading a paper and there's this statistics approach I'm sure I did in undergrad stats, but I forgot it. Two-way ANOVA, analysis of variance, and actually, I don't think I know anyone in my lab that could explain it offhand real quickly really well because we just learn it enough to understand what it is and why we use it and then we have the computer do it. But it's an interesting word saying it and having someone say, “Yes, I know what that means enough. It’s a science, or neuroscience.” ADAM: I would be interested in how neuroscience is used two-way ANOVA because I'm not a neuroscientist and two-way ANOVA is so useful in so many other contexts. CASEY: I'm afraid I can't help today. Maybe 10 years ago, I could have done that. [laughter] CASEY: It's just something that you don't work with and talk about a lot. It's definitely fallen out of my headspace. I looked up the other day, I couldn't remember another word from my neuroscience background. Cannula is when you have a permanent needle into a part of the brain, or maybe someone's vein, same thing. I used to do surgeries on rats and put cannulas and I was like, “What's that thing? What was that thing I did?” I have no idea! It's just like time passes and it fades away. I don't do that anymore. [chuckles] ADAM: So sometimes folks will ask me why I'm a data scientist and I love that question by the way, because I'm a major proponent of knowing what your why is in general, or just having a why and knowing a why, knowing what your why is. Why do you do what you do? What makes you excited about your career, about your work, about your clients, about your coworkers? One of the main reasons I am a data scientist is because it's an opportunity to create new knowledge and that's the scientific process, really. That's the main output of science is new knowledge and if you think about that, that's really powerful. This is now at the end of this scientific process, if you implement it correctly, we now know something about how the world works, about how people in the world work, or something about the world in general that we didn't know before. I get goosebumps. We're on podcast so you can't see the goosebumps that I'm getting. But when I talk about this, I actually get goosebumps. So for me, being a data scientist and then there's also the debate is data science, science and I say, absolutely yes, especially when you are implementing your work with this spirit’ the spirit of creating new knowledge. One of the reasons I am very adamant about keeping this why in the forefront of my mind and proposing it as a why for others who maybe haven't found their why yet is because it's also a really powerful guardrail that prevents us from working on problems that we already have answers to, that have been analyzed and solved, or questions asked and asked and answered. I'm a major proponent of avoiding that type of work, unless you have a really good reason to replicate, or test replication, or you're looking for replication. That would be an exception, but in general, questions—analytical questions, research questions, and data science problems—that lead to new knowledge are the ones that excite me the most. And then this goes back to what I was talking about a moment ago, my superpower teaching and learning. One of the reasons I really enjoy teaching data science in the classroom, or statistics in the classroom, or at corporate training is because then I can empower others to create new knowledge. That feels really good to me when I can help others create new knowledge, or give others the skills and abilities to do that as well. MAE: I love that. Yeah. I do have one angle on that, but I hope this doesn't feel like putting you on the spot, but especially in the not revisiting a established—I'm going to do air quotes—facts and from undergrad, the scientific definition of fact has not yet been proven false. But anyways, there is a growing awareness of bias inherent in data and we so often think of data as the epitome of objectivity. Because it's a bunch of numbers then therefore, we are not replicating, or imposing our thoughts, but there is the Schrodinger's cat, or whatever in place all the time about how those “facts” were established in the first place, where that data was called from? Like, the Portlandia episode where they ask where the chicken is from and they end up back at the farm. [laughter] The data itself, there's just a lot in there. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that accordion. ADAM: There’s a lot. That's a big question. I will say one of the things that keeps me up at night is this problem, especially when it comes to the potential for our work in data science, to perpetuate, exacerbate social inequity, social inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality, economic inequality. This keeps me up at night and I am, like most, or like everyone – well, no, I don't know if everybody is interested in solving that problem. I think a lot of data scientists are, I think a lot of researchers are; I think many are interested in solving that particular problem and I count myself among those. But I would be ahead of myself if I purported to say that I had a solution. I think in this format and in this context, one of the best things to do is to point folks towards others who have spent even more time really focusing on this and I think the go-to is Weapons of Math Destruction. Weapons of Math Destruction is a book. If you're on a bad connection, that's M-A-T-H. Weapons of Math Destruction and especially if you're just getting started on this concern, that's a good place to get started. MAE: Thank you. Thanks for speaking to that, Adam. CASEY: There's a piece of the question you asked me that I always think about is the data true and I like to believe most data is true in what it measured, but it's not measuring truth with a T-H. ADAM: That’s true. MAE: Whoa. ADAM: I think you could spend a lot of time thinking this through and noodling through this, but I would caution you on something you said it's true as to what you measured. Well, you have measurement error. We have entire – actually, I happen to have social statistics handbook handy. In any statistics handbook, or statistics textbook is going to have either an entire chapter, or a major portion of one of the introductory chapters on error, the types of error, and measurement error is one of them, perception error, all of the – and I'm on the spot to name all the errors. I wish I could rattle those off a little bit better. [chuckles] ADAM: But if you're interested, this is an interesting topic, just Google data errors, or error types, or statistical errors and you will get a rabbit hole that will keep you occupied for a while. MAE: Love it. I will be in that rabbit hole later. [laughs] ADAM: Yeah. I'm going to go back down that one, too myself. MANDO: So Adam, we have people who are listening right now who are interested in following one of your paths, or one of the paths to becoming a data scientist and maybe they have domain expertise in a particular area, maybe they don't. Maybe they're just starting out. Maybe they're coming from a bootcamp, or maybe they're from a non-traditional background and they're trying to switch careers. If you were sitting there talking to them one-on-one, what are some things that you would tell them, or what are some starting points for them? Like, where do you begin? ADAM: Well, one, admittedly self-serving item I would mention is consider the option of hiring a career coach and that's one of the things that I do in my line of consulting work is I help folks who are towards the middle, or latter part of their career, and they're looking to enter into, or level up in data science. So a career coach can – and I've hired career coaches over the years. Back to, Mando, one of the questions you asked me earlier is how did you end up in data science? Well, part of that story, which I didn't talk to then is, well, I went into data science route when the faculty route didn't open up for me and I'm a huge fan. I had two career coaches helping me out with both, faculty and non-faculty work for a while. So having been the recipient and the beneficiary of some great career coaching, I have also recently become a career coach as well. Probably something more practical, though. Let me give some practical advice. A portfolio, a professional portfolio for a data scientist is probably one of the most essential and beneficial things you can do for yourself in terms of making that transition successfully and then also, maintaining a career. If you're interested in advancing your career in this way, maintaining a career trajectory that keeps you going so having and maintaining a portfolio. I'll go through four tips on portfolio that I give folks and these tips are specifically tips that can help you generate content for your portfolio, because I know one of the hardest things to do with the portfolio is, well, let me just do some fictional hypothetical project for my portfolio, so hard to do and also, can end up being sort of dry, stale, and it might not really connect with folks. These are four ways you can add to, or enhance your portfolio. I wouldn't call them entire projects; maybe they're mini projects and they're great additions to your portfolio. The first one is: make a Rosetta Stone. This one is for folks who have learned one computer programming language, and now it's time for them to learn another computer programming language, or maybe they already know two computer programming languages. In fact, the Rosetta Stone idea for your portfolio doubles as a way to build on and expand your skills. So here's what a Rosetta Stone is. You have a project; you've done it from start to finish. Let's say, you've done a project from start to finish in Python. Now port that entire project over to R and then in a portfolio platform—I usually recommend GitHub—commit that work as git commits as a Rosetta Stone side-by-side examples of Python and R code that produce the same results and the same output. I love this piece of advice because in doing this, you will learn so much about the language that you originally wrote the program in and you will learn a lot about the target language. You're going to learn about both languages and you're going to have a tangible artifact for your portfolio and you might even learn more about that project. You might encounter some new output in the new language, which is more accessible for that language, that you didn't encounter in the old language and now you're going to have a new insight about whatever your research project was. The next piece of advice I have is make a cheat sheet and there's tongue in cheek opinion about cheat sheets. I think sometimes folks don't like to call them cheat sheets because the word cheat has negative connotations, but whatever you're going to call it, if it's a quick reference, or if it's a cheat sheet, a well-designed cheat sheet on any tool, platform, tool platform, language that you can think of is going to be a really nice addition to your portfolio. I recommend folks, what you do is you just find the things that you do the most frequently and you're constantly referencing at whatever website, make a cheat sheet for yourself, use it for a while, and then polish it up into a really nice presentable format. So for example, I have a cheat sheet on interpreting regression. I also have a cheat sheet that is a crosswalk from Stata, which is a statistical programming language, to Python. So actually there, I've put the two of them together. I've made this cheat sheet, which is also a Rosetta Stone. If you're looking for those, you can find those on my GitHub, or my LinkedIn, I have cheat sheets on my LinkedIn profile as well and you can see examples. I do have on YouTube, a step-by-step instructional video on how to make a cheat sheet and they're actually really easy to do. So if you even if you consider yourself not graphically inclined, if you pick the right tools—and the tools that you would pick might not be your first choice just because they're not marketed that way—you can put together a really nice cheat sheet relatively easily. The third tip is to write an article… about a piece of software that you dislike. So write an article about a piece of software that you dislike and this has to be done with, especially in the open source community, do this one carefully, possibly even contact the creators, and also, be sure not to blame anybody, or pass judgment. Just talk about how and why this particular project doesn't quite live up to your full aspiration, or your full expectation. I've done this a couple of times in a variety of ways. I didn't in the title specifically say, “I don't like this,” or “I don't like that,” but in at least one case, one of the articles I wrote, I was able to later submit as a cross-reference, or an additional reference on an issue in GitHub and this was specifically for Pandas. So there was a feature in Pandas that wasn't working the way I wanted it to work. [chuckles] MAE: Pandas. ADAM: Yeah, Pandas is great, right? So there's a feature in Pandas that wasn't working in quite the way that I wanted it to. I wrote an article about it. Actually, I framed the article, the article title is, “How I broke Pandas.” Actually, several versions of Pandas back, the issue was it was relatively easy to generate a Pandas data frame with duplicate column names. Having duplicate column names in a Pandas data frame obviously can cause problems in your code later because you basically have multiple keys for different columns. Now, there's a setting in Pandas that will guard against this and it's an optional setting—you have to toggle it on and off. This article, I like to say, helped improve Pandas. So write an article about software you dislike and also, like I said, be diplomatic and in this case, I was diplomatic by framing the article title by saying, “A few times, I managed to break Pandas,” and then – MANDO: This reminds me a lot of Kyle Kingsbury and his Jepsen tests that he used to do. He was aphyr on Twitter. He's not there anymore, but he would run all these tests against distributed databases and distributed locking systems and stuff like that and then write up these large-scale technical explanations of what broke and what didn't. They're super fascinating to read and the way that he approached them, Adam, it's a lot like you're saying, he pushed it with a lot of grace and what I think is super important, especially when you're talking about open source stuff, because this is what people, they're pouring their heart and soul and lives into. You don't have to be ugly about it. ADAM: Oh, absolutely. MANDO: [chuckles] And then he ended up like, this is what he does now. He wrote this framework to do analysis of distributed systems and now companies hire him and that's his job now. I'm a big fan of the guy and I miss him being on Twitter and interacting with him and his technical expertise and also, just his own personality. Sorry, your topic, or your little cheat there reminded me of that. We'll put some links—thanks, Casey—and in the show notes about his posts so if people haven't come across this stuff yet, it's a fascinating read. It's super helpful even to this day. ADAM: I'm thankful for the connection because now I have another example, when I talk to people about this, and it's incredible that you say built an entire career out of this. I had no idea that particular tip was so powerful. MAE: So cool. MANDO: [chuckles] So I think you said you have one more, Adam? ADAM: The fourth one is: contribute to another project. One of the best examples of this is I wrote an article on how to enhance your portfolio and someone really took this fourth one to a whole new level. I'm sure others have as well, but one person—we’ll get links in, I can get some links in the show notes—what he did was he found a package in R that brings data for basically sample datasets for our programmers and citizens working and data scientists working with R. But he was a Python person. So he suggested, “Hey, what about making this?” I remember he contacted me and he said, “I read your article about adding to my portfolio. I really think it might make sense to port this project over to Python,” and so, he was combining two of them. He was making a Rosetta Stone and he was contributing someone else's project. Now this data is available both in R and in Python and the author of this project has posted about it. He posted about it in May, early May, and it's constantly still a month and a half later getting comments, likes, and links. So he's really gotten some mileage out of this particular piece, this addition to his portfolio and the original author of the original software also has acknowledged it and it's really a success. It's really a success. So contribute to another project is my fourth tip. Oh, one more idea on contributing to another project. Oh, I have an article on that lists several projects that are accepting contributions from intermediate and beginners. The point there is identify specific projects that are accepting beginner and immediate submissions on contributions, mostly via GitHub. But if you go to GitHub and if you're newer to GitHub, you can actually go to a project that you like, go to its Issues tab, and then most projects have tags associated with their issues that are identified as beginner friendly. That is an excellent place to go in order to get started on contributing to another project, which makes the world a better place because you're contributing to open source and you have an addition to your portfolio. MANDO: Oh, these are fantastic tips. Thank you, Adam. ADAM: I'm glad you like them. Can I give another one? Another big tip? This one's less portfolio, more – MANDO: Yeah, lay it on us. MAE: Do! By all means. ADAM: And I'd be interested, Mae, since you also made a similar career transition to me. I made an investment. I think I know what you might say on this one, but I spent money. I spent money on the transition. I hired consultants on Fiverr and Upwork to help me upgrade my social media presence. I hired the career coaches that I mentioned. Oh, actually the PhD program, that was not free. So I spent money on my transition and I would point that out to folks who are interested in making this transition, it's not a transition that is effortless and it's also not a transition that you can do, I think it's not one that you can do without also investing money. MAE: Yeah. [chuckles] Okay, I'm going to tell you my real answer on this. ADAM: Okay. MAE: Or corollary. I had a pretty good gig at a state institution with a retirement, all of these things, and I up and left and went to code school. I had recently paid off a lot of debt, so I didn't have a lot of savings. I had no savings, let's just say that and the code school had offered this like loan program that fell through. So I'm in code school and they no longer are offering the ability to have this special code school loan. I put code school on my credit card and then while in code school, my 10-year-old car died and I had to get a new car. ADAM: Ah. MAE: In that moment, I was struggling to get some fundamental object-oriented programming concepts that I'm like, “Holy cow, I've got a mortgage. I no longer have a car.” Now I'm in a real bind here, but I be leaving myself. I know I made these choices after a lot of considered thought and consultation. I, too had hired a career coach and I was like, “I've already made this call. I'm going to make the best of it. I'm just going to do what I can and see what happens.” I really have a test of faith on that original call to make those investments. I would not recommend doing it the way I did to anyone! [laughter] MAE: And I went from a pretty well-established career and salary into – a lot of people when they go into tech, it's a huge jump and I had the opposite experience. That investment continued to be required of me for several years. Even still, I choose to do things related to nonprofits and all kinds of things, but it takes a lot of faith and commitment and money often, in some form, can be helpful. There are a lot of, on the programming side, code schools that offer for you to pay a percentage once you get a salary, or other offsetting arrangements. So if somebody is listening, who is considering programming, I have not seen those analogs in data science, but on the programming side, especially if you're from a group underrepresented in tech, there's a number of different things that are possible to pursue still. ADAM: Here we are talking about some of the lesser acknowledged aspects of this transition. MAE: Yeah. ADAM: Some of the harder to acknowledge. MAE: Yeah. MANDO: Yeah, I really liked what you said, Mae about the need to believe in yourself and Adam, I think what you're saying is you have to be willing to bet on yourself. ADAM: Yes. MAE: Yeah. MANDO: You have to be willing to bet on yourself and sometimes, in some forms, that's going to mean writing a check, or [chuckles] in Mae’s example, putting it on your credit card, but. [laughter] Sometimes that's what it means and that's super scary. I'm not a 100% convinced that I have enough faith in my ability to run the dishwasher some days, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that today, or not. This is going to be really silly and stupid, but one of my favorite cartoons is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. MAE: Yes! MANDO: It's a series on Cartoon Network, I think. No, Nickelodeon, I watched it with my kids when they were super little and it's still a thing that we rewatch right now, now that they're older. There's this one episode where this grandfatherly wizened uncle is confronted [chuckles] by someone who's trying to mug him [chuckles] and the uncle is this super hardcore general guy. He critics his mugging abilities and he corrects him and says, “If you stand up straight and you change this about the way that you approach it, you'll be much more intimidating and probably a more successful mugger,” and he's like, “But it doesn't seem that your heart is into the mugging.” [chuckles] So he makes this guy a cup of tea and they talk about it and the guy's like, “I don't know what I'm doing. I'm lost. I'm all over the place. All I want to do is become a masseuse, but I just can't get my stuff together.” Something that the uncle said that really, really struck with me was he said, “While it's important and best for us to believe in ourselves, sometimes it can be a big blessing when someone else believes in you.” MAE: So beautiful. MANDO: “And sometimes, you need that and so, I get it. You can't always bet on yourself, or maybe you can bet on yourself, but sometimes you don't have that backup to actually follow through with it.” That's why community is so important. That's why having a group of people. Even if it's one person. Someone who can be like that backstop to be, “You don't believe in yourself today. Don't worry about it. I believe in you. It's okay. You can do it. You're going to do it.” ADAM: Community is just massive. Absolutely massive. MANDO: Yeah. ADAM: Having a good, strong community is so important. Also, I think I could add to what you're saying is about betting on yourself. I don't know if I love the analogy because it's not a casino bet. MANDO: Right. ADAM: The odds are not in favor of the house here. If you have done the right consultation, spoken with friends and family, leveraged your community, and done an honest, objective, accurate assessment of your skills, abilities, and your ambition and your abilities, et cetera. It's a bet. It's a wager, but it's a calculated risk. MAE: Yes! That is how I have described it also. Yes, totally. I loved that story from Airbender and it ties in a few of our topics. One is one of the things Adam said originally, which is being deeply in touch with your why really helps. It also ties in the whole teaching thing and often, that is one of the primary roles is to offer faith and commitment to your pursuits. If I had had different code school teachers, the stress of my entire livelihood being dependent on my understanding these concepts in week two of bootcamp that I was struggling with, and I had made a calculated bet and I thought I was going to be awesome, but I was not. It was like the classic Peanuts teacher is talking, “Wah wah woh wah wah.” I had to lean into my teachers, my school, my peers, believe in me. I believed in me before, even if I don't in this moment and I just have to let that stress move to the side so that I can reengage. That was really the only way I was able to do it was having a similar – well, I didn't try to mug anybody, [laughs] but I had some backup that really helped me make that through. MANDO: Yeah, and those credit card folks call like, it’s tricky. MAE: Yeah, and then I had to buy a car and those people were calling me and they just did an employment verification. They said, “You don't have a job!” I was like, “Oh my god. Well, you [inaudible] get my car back, but I have really good credit. How about you talk to your boss and call me back?” So anyway, these things all tie into, if we have time to talk about something, I was hoping we would cover is this thing about imposter syndrome and believing in oneself, but also not believing in oneself simultaneously and how to navigate that. I don't know, Adam, if you have particular advice, or thoughts on that. ADAM: I do have some advice and thoughts on that. Actually, just yesterday, I hosted a live webinar on this particular topic with another career coach named Sammy and she and I are very passionate about helping folks. When we work with clients, we work with folks intentionally to evaluate whether imposter syndrome might be part of the equation. Actually, in this webinar, we talked about three immunity boosts, or three ways to boost your immunity against imposter syndrome and in one way, or another, I think we've touched on all three with the exception of maybe one of them. So if you're interested in that topic reached out to me as well. I have a replay available of that particular webinar and I could make the replay available on a one-on-one basis to folks as well, who really want to see that material, and the section – MANDO: [inaudible] that. ADAM: Yeah, please reach out and LinkedIn. Easiest way to reach me is LinkedIn, or Twitter. Twitter actually works really well, too these days. MANDO: We’ll put both of those in the show notes for folks. ADAM: Okay. Yeah, thank you so much. I look forward to potentially sharing that with folks who reach out. The community was the second immunity boost that we shared and actually, Mando and Mae, both just got done talking extensively about community. And then the first immunity boost we shared was know your baseline. We called it “know your baseline” and I know from our planning that we would put in this program notes, a link to an online assessment that's named after the original scientist, or one of the two original scientists who really began documenting imposter syndrome back in the 70s and then they called it imposter phenomenon. Oh, the history of this topic is just fascinating. Women scientists, North Carolina, first documented this and one of the two scientists is named Pauline Clance. So the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale, that'll be in the show notes. You can take the Imposter Phenomenon Scale and then objectively evaluate based on this is imposter syndrome a part of your experience, if it is what is the extent of that, and just knowing your baseline can be a really good way, I think to protect you from the effects of the experience. It's also, I think important to point out that imposter syndrome isn't regarded as a medical, or a clinical diagnosis. This is usually defined as a collection of thoughts and actions associated with career, or other academic pursuits. And then the third immunity boost is disseminate knowledge and I love the disseminate knowledge as an immune booster because what it does is it flips the script. A lot of times folks with imposter syndrome, we say to ourselves, “Gee, if I could get one more degree, I could probably then do this,” or “If I got one more certification,” or “I can apply for this job next year, I could apply for that permission next year because I will have completed whatever certification program,” or “If I read one more –” MANDO: One more year of experience, right? ADAM: Yeah. One more year of experience, or one more book, or one more class on Udemy. Especially for mid and late career professionals and we talked about this earlier, Mae the bank of experience and domain knowledge that mid and late career professionals bring, I promise nobody else has had your experience. Everybody has a unique experience and everybody has something to offer that is new and unique, and that is valuable to others. So I say, instead of signing up for the seminar, host the seminar, teach the seminar. [laughter] ADAM: Right? Again, there's nothing wrong with certifications. There's nothing wrong with Udemy classes, I have Udemy classes that you could should go take. There's nothing wrong with those, but in measure, in measure and then also, never, never, never, never forget that you already have skills and abilities that is probably worth sharing with the rest of the world. So I recommend doing that as a boost, as an immunity boost, against imposter syndrome. MANDO: Yes, yes, and yes! [chuckles] CASEY: Now, I took the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale test myself and I scored really well. It was super, super low for me. I'm an overconfident person at this point, but when I was a kid, I wasn’t. [laughter] I was super shy. I would not talk to people. I'd read a book in a corner. I was so introverted and it changed over time, I think by thinking about how confidence leads to confidence. MANDO: Yes. CASEY: The more confident you are, the more confident you act, you can be at the world and the more reason you have to be competent over time and that snowballed for me, thank goodness. It could happen for other people, too gradually, slowly over time the more you do confidence, the more you'll feel it and be it naturally. MAE: Yes! MANDO: I think it works the other direction, too and you have to be real careful about that. Like Adam, you were talking about flipping the script. If you have a negative talk script of just one more, just this one thing, I'm not good enough yet and I'm not you know. That can reinforce itself as well and you just never end up getting where you should be, or deserve to be, you know what I mean? It's something that I struggle with. I've been doing this for a really, really long time and I still struggle with this stuff, it’s not easy. It's not easy to get past sometimes and some days are better than others and Casey, like you said, it has gotten better over time, but sometimes, you need those daily affirmations in the morning in the mirror [laughs] to get going, whatever works for you. But that idea, I love that idea, Casey of confidence bringing more confidence and reinforcing itself. MAE: And being mindful of Dunning-Kruger and careful of the inaccuracy of self-assessment. I like a lot of these ways in which making sure you're doing both, I think all the time as much as possible. Seeing the ways in which you are discounting yourself and seeing the ways in which you might be over crediting. ADAM: Right. Like with a lot of good science, you want to take as many measurements as possible. MAE: Yeah. ADAM: And then the majority vote of those measurements points to some sort of consensus. So the IP scale is one tool you can use and I think to your point, Mae it'd be a mistake to rely on it exclusively. You mentioned Dunning-Kruger, but there's also the Johari window. MAE: Oh, I don’t know. What’s that? ADAM: Oh, the Johari window is great. So there's four quadrants and the upper left quadrant of the Johari window are things that you know about yourself and things that other people know about yourself. And then you also have a quadrant where things that you know about yourself, but nobody else knows. And then there's a quadrant where other people know things about you that you don't know. And then there's the complete blind spot where there are things about you that you don't know that other people don't know. And then of course, you have this interesting conversation with yourself. So that quadrant that I don't know about it and nobody else knows about it, does it really exist? Does the tree falling in the woods make a sound when nobody's there to hear it? You can have a lot of fun with Johari window as well and I think it also definitely connects with what you were just saying a moment ago about accuracy of self-assessments, then it gets back to the measurement that we were talking about earlier, the measurement errors. So there's perceptual error, measurement error—shucks, I had it, here it is—sampling error, randomization, error, all kinds of error. I managed to pull that book out and then get some of those in front of me. [laughter] CASEY: There are some nice nicknames for a couple of the windows, Johari windows. The blind spot is one of those four quadrants and façade, I like to think about is another one. It's when you put on the front; people don't know something about you because you are façading it. MAE: Hmm. MANDO: So now we'll go ahead and transition into our reflection section. This is the part where our esteemed panelists and dear friends reflect on the episode and what they learned, what stuck with them, and we also get reflection from our guest, Adam as well, but Adam, you get to go last. ADAM: Sounds good. MANDO: You can gauge from the rest of us. Who would like to go first? MAE: I can! I did not know that there was an evaluative measure about imposter phenomenon, or any of that history shared and I'm definitely going to check that out. I talk with and have talked and will talk with a lot of people about that topic, but just having some sort of metric available for some self-assessment, I think is amazing. So that is a really fun, new thing that I am taking away among many, many other fun things. How about you, Casey? CASEY: I like writing about software you dislike in a positive, constructive tone. That's something I look for when I'm interviewing people, too. I want to know when they get, get feedback, when they give feedback, will it be thoughtful, unkind, and deep and respectful of past decisions and all that. If you've already done that in an article in your portfolio somewhere, that's awesome. That's pretty powerful. MANDO: Oh, how fantastic is that? Yeah, I love that! CASEY: I don't think I've ever written an article like that. Maybe on a GitHub issue, or a pull request that's longer than it feels like it should be. [laughter] Maybe an article would be nice, next time I hit that. MANDO: Oh, I love that. That's great. I guess I’ll go next. The thing that really resonated with me, Adam was when you were talking about investing in yourself and being willing to write that check, if that's what it means, or swipe that credit card, Mae, or whatever. I'm sorry, I keep picking on you about that. MAE: It’s fine. [laughs] It’s pretty wild! MANDO: I love it. I love it, and it reminded me, I think I've talked about it before, but one of my favorite writers, definitely my favorite sports writer, is this guy named Shea Serrano. He used to write for Grantland and he writes for The Ringer and he's a novelist, too and his catchphrase—this is why I said it earlier in the episode—is “bet on yourself.” Sometimes when I'm feeling maybe a little imposter syndrome-y, or a little like, “I don't know what I'm going to do,” I click on the Twitter search and I type “from:sheaserrano bet on yourself” and hit enter and I just see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tweets of this guy that's just like, “Bet on yourself today.” “Bet on yourself” “Bet on yourself today, no one else is going to do it.” “No one's coming to save you, bet on yourself,” stuff like that and thank you, Adam for that reminder today. I needed that. ADAM: You're welcome. I'm so happy that you've got that takeaway. Thank you so much for sharing the takeaway. I have, I think two reflections. One, what a breath of fresh air, the opportunity to talk about life, career, but career in data science, and programming in a non-technical way. I think the majority of our conversation was non-technical. [laughter] We briefly went into some technicalities when we talked about how you can sometimes have duplicate heading names in a Pandas data frame. That was a little bit technical. Otherwise, we really just spoke about the humanistic aspects of this world. So thank you so much for that and I got a research tip! Mando, what a brilliant idea. If you're ever looking for more background on a book, do a Twitter search for the book name and then anybody who's been speaking about that book – MANDO: Oh, yes! ADAM: Yeah, right? You could extend that to a research tip. [overtalk] MANDO: That’s fantastic! Absolutely. Yeah. ADAM: So today, I learned a new way to get additional background on any book. I'm just going to go to Twitter, Google, or not Google that, search the book title name, and I'm going to see what other people are saying about that book. And then I can check out their bios. I can see what else they're sharing. They might have insights that I might not have had and now I can benefit from that. Thank you. Thank you so much for the research tip. MANDO: Yeah, and I think it dovetails really well into what you were talking about earlier, Adam, about publishing data. Like building out this portfolio, writing your articles, getting it out there because someone's going to go to Google, or Twitter and type into the search bar a Pandas data frame, column, same name, you know what I mean and now they're going to hit “A few times, I managed to break Pandas,” your article. But it could be about anything. It could be about that stupid Docker thing that you fought with yesterday, or about the 8 hours I spent on Monday trying to make an HTTP post with no body and it just hung forever and I couldn't. 8 hours, it took me to figure out why it wasn't working and it's because I didn't have one line in and I didn't call request that set body. I just didn't do it. I've done this probably more than a million times in my career and I didn't do it and it cost me 8 hours of my life that I'm never getting back, but it happens. That's part of the job is that – [overtalk] MAE: Yeah, sure. MANDO: And you cry about it and you eat some gummy worms and then you pick yourself back up and you're good to go. ADAM: Yeah, another common one that people are constantly writing about is reordering the columns in a Pandas data frame. There's like a hundred ways to do it and none of them are efficient. MANDO: [laughs] Mm hm. ADAM: So I love [inaudible], of course. MANDO: Yeah, you hit the one that works for you, write a little something about it. It’s all right. ADAM: Exactly, yeah. MANDO: All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on, loved having you on. Special Guest: Adam Ross Nelson.
240: No Striving, No Hustling with Amelia Winger-Bearskin
02:11 - Wampum.Codes (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995) * MIT Co-Creation Studio (https://cocreationstudio.mit.edu/co-cr-new-mozilla-fellow/) * Mozilla Fellowships (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/) * Check out some episodes! * Super-Group - Indigenous Tech, Indigenous Knowledge: Wampum.codes as a model for decolonization (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995/3586117-super-group-indigenous-tech-indigenous-knowledge-wampum-codes-as-a-model-for-decolonization) [Episode] * Weirdness with MorningStar (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995/3101911-weirdness-with-morningstar) [Episode] * Comedy in the age of Quarantine: A conversation with comedy writer and performer Joey Clift (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995/3071704-comedy-in-the-age-of-quarantine-a-conversation-with-comedy-writer-and-performer-joey-clift) [Episode] * Rock Hands with "Roo": a conversation with DeLesslin "Roo" George-Warren (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995/3004156-rock-hands-with-roo-a-conversation-with-delesslin-roo-george-warren) [Episode] 08:13 - Amelia’s Superpower: Being invited to cool parties! * no-funding.com (https://ameliawb.github.io/no-funding/) 11:26 - Storytelling & Performance * The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (https://usdac.us/) 20:16 - “Indigenous Antecedent Technology” * Decentralized Economies 24:16 - “Ethical Dependencies” * Indigenous wisdom as a model for software design and development (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/indigenous-wisdom-model-software-design-and-development/) * Articulating Values * Community Accountability * Policing vs Accountability 35:48 - Handling Disagreements and Giving Permission to Fail 40:55 - Robert’s Rules of Order (https://robertsrules.com/) 44:23 - “No Striving, No Hustling” 47:33 - Facilitating Communication with Peers * Storytelling Cont’d * Studio Ghibli Storytelling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli) * "Ma" – Negative Space This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 240 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke. I'm very happy to be with you here today, and I'm also really happy to be here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton. JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm glad to be on the show with you, too, and I'm also here with my great friend, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Aw, hello, and I'm going to introduce our guest. Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist and technologist who creates playful work with XR, VR, AI, AR, AV, and other esoteric systems of story and code. Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the stupidhackathon.com. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist for Contentful and host of the Contentful + Algolia Developer Podcast DreamStacks. She is working on ethics-based dependencies for software development as a Mozilla Fellow embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio. Welcome to the podcast. AMELIA: Thank you so much! I'm so excited to be here. You all are some of my favorite people, so [laughs] excited to chat on record. CORALINE: And today's going to be very technical; we’re going to ask you some very technical questions about XR, VR, AI, AR, AV and… JAMEY: That's a lot of letters. CORALINE: SP, everything. AMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, we were at a function. Coding. Yeah, let's crack it. [laughs] CORALINE: Amelia, just on a personal level, I'm so happy to have you here. You and I have talked before, we're both involved in ethical source, and I’m such an admirer of your work. I'm so happy to have this conversation in public with you today. AMELIA: Oh, back at you, Coraline. I love ethical source and I've been so excited to join your team of rebels, exciting thinkers, and dreamers. So I'm really excited to be here with you and in community with you. CORALINE: So Amelia, I first became aware of your work through your wampum.codes project that you did. Well, it's an ongoing project, but I guess, you started it with the Mozilla Fellowship. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think it's really fascinating. AMELIA: Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. When I started my Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, it was actually pre-pandemic. So it was right, but not very much so it was only a couple of months. We got to go to London and meet each other and I got to hang out a little bit at MIT with the Co-Creation fellows. I'm the first full-time fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, which is a really cool studio, imagined and led by Kat Cizek, who's an incredible transmedia storyteller and inspiring human that I get to be in collaboration with there. So for wampum.codes as an ethical framework for software development, we had imagined a lot of things and then the pandemic hit and I wasn't able to be as close to them as I was. I also moved from New York to San Francisco. Before I thought I was going to from New York to Boston pretty regularly on the train and then moved to California and that's when I decided to have the Co-Creation portion of wampum.codes exist as a podcast. So rather than flying to different spaces and meeting with friends and technologists on reservations, who are indigenous across North America, I was like, “Okay, well, let's do this via Zoom call as a podcast” as many people moved to different online formats during the pandemic and that's how the wampum.codes podcast was born. As I want to do research because if you're going to create an ethical framework for software development, based on indigenous values of Co-Creation, you need to do it in co-creation with those people. [chuckles] I had initially planned to fly all of them to MIT and have this big conference and everything. But instead, I got to have weekly conversations with indigenous people, who are using technology in creative ways to make positive impact in their communities. And then we still did a big conference at MIT, but virtually and actually, a lot more people were able to participate in it that way. Big surprise, right? All of us who are internet natives are unsurprised that you have a lot of accessibility there. So then that became the supergroup episode of wampum.codes where we had everyone who was going to be there physically at MIT and then I was able to distribute. Rather than using those funds to fly everyone to MIT, distribute those to all the different people who were on the podcast and just have weekly conversations with each of these people. I guess, the technology projects range and I welcome anyone to go to wampum is W-A-M-P-U-M, .codes, C-O-D-E-S. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can go on Buzzsprout, but it's able to be found on Spotify, or Apple, anywhere you find a podcast. We have RSS feeds there. If you go through the episodes, it varies where each of the indigenous people are coming from. Like, there's an incredible actress on there, MorningStar Angeline, and she is an incredible advocate and activist for the Albuquerque drag scene, also does really incredible art installations and happenings, and works in VR. But she's also the voice of the local area population in Red Dead Redemption, one of my favorite games. [laughs] So it's really interesting that she crosses all of these different media. Then we have another person, Joey Clift, who's a comedian, who's an indigenous comedian and the first indigenous person to be on the—and I'm going to probably say this wrong, but the house comedy team of UCB in LA, I think they call it the house comedy team. The interesting way that he uses technology is he created the largest Facebook group of comedians ever and it's the comedians with cats, basically. [laughs] I just love that he has this and then he creates all this comedy through that Facebook group. So that's an interesting way that comedy becomes its own scene through the social media network all based around cats. I think that's pretty amazing, that an indigenous person is grounded everybody in our deep love of animals. He does a lot of really great activist work. He's also a writer of a couple of different television shows right now and one of them is the first all-indigenous writers room Everett Hollywood. So he's doing really incredible things, but I love his use of technology in his cats group on Facebook. [laughs] And then you have Roo DeLesslin George-Warren, who's creating an app with children. He's part of Catawba nation and the app is around language preservation and language education of Catawba language. But it's the fun thing that we talk about on the episode is, there's some words that don't exist in Catawba language and it's because they're last truly immersed indigenous speaker of Catawba language passed away in the 80s. So anything that wasn't created up until the 80 didn't have an official name, but that doesn't mean that the language is dead. It's alive and it's an alive on the tongue of every child that's learning and every person that's living. But what it does mean is those children get to name some of these things, they get to name what a cell phone is, they get to name all these fun things, and one of the children said, “We should name cell phones rock hands,” and he's like, “Oh really? That's great. Why is that the word for rock and the word for hands in Catawba? And he said, “Well, because it's made of rocks and minerals and we hold it in our hands,” and I thought that was really beautiful. So those are the examples of how each of these different awesome technologists, indigenous leaders are using technology in creative ways. So from that, all those conversations really contribute to the framework that I helped to organize and turn into a workshop and writings around an ethical framework for software development. Those conversations are really key and important to it, because I need to learn how are people making change with technology, because that really will contribute to the guidelines that we hope people can bring out in the process of creating an ethical framework for software development and value-based dependencies. JAMEY: So we have one question for you that you may be expecting already, because we warn our guests about it, and that question is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? AMELIA: Oh, that's an excellent question and I'm cheating because I once was asked this question at Stephanie Dinkins’ AI dinner in New York and I just said the first thing that came to my head because I wasn't expecting it and the first time I said it, I said, “Wow, that's really stupid, Amelia. Why did you say that?” Well, it's because the first thing that came to my head, but then the longer I sit with it, the more I'm like, “I think it's true so I'm just going to say it,” again as if it's the first time which is, I think my superpower is being invited to cool parties. [laughter] JAMEY: That's a great superpower. AMELIA: Yeah. how did I acquire it? I think you just have to have cool friends and then those friends invite you to cool parties. It's worked out for me so far because sometimes their parties are in Dharamsala hanging out with the Dalai Lama, sometimes their parties are doing some weird art show in New York, and sometimes their parties are awesome powwows that have been going on for hundreds of years. So I think that's the best way I want to live my life [laughs] so that's my superpower. CORALINE: I love that. JAMEY: I just wanted to say that I don't think that's a stupid superpower at all. I think it's a beautiful superpower. CORALINE: I'm kind of jealous of that superpower, honestly. I think the last party I had, the big important, exciting thing was red velvet cupcakes. AMELIA: Ooh, that’s awesome. CORALINE: Oh no, you have red velvet cupcakes on the one hand, the Dalai Lama on the other hand, that's a tough choice to make really. AMELIA: Yeah. Obviously, during quarantine I feel like I've definitely not had my superpower active in a while, so maybe I'm in like my cave of solitude. [laughs] Definitely. It's been a tough year for those of us who that's our only superpower, but I definitely been invited to a lot of Zoom parties, let me tell you. I've led a lot of Among Us things and I've been the one to organize a lot of Zoom [inaudible] outlook. We all are Zoom fatigued, but I've been organizing what I hope could be something interesting. I started this thing called No-Funding.com as a virtual party where we could talk about, I don't know, it's supposed to be an artist support group where we talk about ways that we can support each other outside of gatekeeping and traditional funding avenues. But honestly, it's like, if you didn't need any funding and you didn't want any funding and you just wanted to be punk rock and talk about our art and how we can help each other, that's a space. We do it and we ended up getting into some esoteric conversations. We talk a lot about ethics and the worlds that we want to build that have a community focus. But we also just kind of, we'll talk about creative ideas to feed our soul like, “Hey, why don't we write poems today?” and somebody in the group knows how to teach us how to write poem. Someone might know something about an artist and teaches us something. So it's definitely more an artist support group, but with the motto of not – our motto is no striving, no hustling. [laughs] So that's No-Funding.com, join us every week. [laughs] CORALINE: Well, one of the things that really interested me, or interests me about your work, Amelia, almost everything you've said in terms of the things you're doing have a very strong community focus. As someone who came up in a very white Western technology environment where most of what happens is developer tooling and most of it is going to the companies in San Francisco, I think it's really interesting that people who are outside of that bubble seem to have stronger, especially people in different parts of their world, or indigenous cultures that are often ignored, or excluded, but you're doing community work. I see a lot of those non-white Western—what I’m trying to say—that's kind of unique in a way, or it's different from how technology is usually thought of in the US especially. I don't know where to go with that. I am so sorry. I just think that's so fascinating and so different and that's something I'm going to learn about. AMELIA: Yeah, and I think it's absolutely everything you said about technology is true and it also is true for the art world, too, which I came actually from a background of performance. My mom, growing up, was a traditional storyteller for our tribe, Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan and being a storyteller is something like being a politician, a historian, a performance artist, an actor, a writer, an educator. It's this combination because you need to be given the stories from elders. They have to trust you so you have to be a politician, or a leader and you're really required to make sure that the stories that you tell are relevant and significant for your current generation. You're taking information from previous generations, you're preserving it, and sharing it with your current generation so that it will have positive impact on the generations to come, but it has to be relevant. So you cannot tell it the same way that an elder gave it to you. It's the core requirements like, I'm giving you the story for you to make it new and relevant for your generation and each audience you meet with it has to be relevant. Our storytelling is embedded in multimedia. It's obviously, spoken word stories. It has music, it has patterns, it has art, it has pottery, it has bead work; all of these things reinforce the stories. When my mom would travel around, her superpower is being that leader, historian, educator. She has that voice that as soon as she says, “Hello, I would like to tell you a story today,” every person in the whole room sits down. You know what I mean? I don't know, that's her superpower is she can just, not even with a mic and she has a quiet voice. She can just be like, “Hello,” and everyone just sits down. She's like, “I'm going to tell you a story.” [chuckles] It's that incredible storyteller voice and then I would perform the songs and the music with her since she's not a musician, or a musical person at all, but she knows the songs and knows this is the story that has the song that goes live. So I would be the musical one and then I became an opera singer. At 15, I went to the Eastman Conservatory of Music at a young age and became a professional opera singer at a young age. So I came from a performance background and then once my work became so weird in the sense of, I had so much coding involved, projections and video. I'm a nerd and I've been a self-taught coder since I was very young and since my work became more integrated with multimedia, people were like, “You're not really an opera person anymore, or a director of new opera. You're kind of a multimedia artist.” That title was somewhat thrust upon me and I was like, “Oh, this is great. I'm going to go get my Master's degree, my MFA in art.” Once I went to school, they showed me my studio and then they lock you in there. They close the door and then you're supposed to live in your studio. I would pop my head out and like, “Hey everybody, what are we doing?” They're like, “Go away, like go back into your studio.” We're all in our studios heads down and then I said, “Oh, well, let's collaborate.” No one wants to collaborate with me. The only people in the entire, like above me, or below me, or my same year that want to collaborate with me were indigenous people. Interesting! [laughs] So we all wanted to collaborate and start making things together and our professors were like, “We're not even going to consider that for your grades, or for your thesis, or for – that doesn't count, that doesn't even exist. If you made it with another person, it doesn't even exist,” and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” The whole entire world doesn't work when it comes to the way that most media we consume isn't created that way. The only exception really is more the solitary artist, which also doesn't always work that way either. When you go and see things in a museum and it has one person's name under it, there's a thousand names that are not mentioned. When we see a film, we see the director, but we see the thousands of names come over us with the credits. When we go to a play, we open that cast book and we see all of those names that are behind that object. So it's really, the art world and the technology world overlap in that myth of the solitary genius, total myth that they perpetuate it. I definitely had a crisis, what I went into the art world and then again, as I've continued my journey throughout tech, where I'm like, “It's not true that one person has made these things,” [laughs] but we believe that. We believe that that's how things work and that was always a big shock to me and something that I've maybe found ways of integrating a more collective mindset into each of those spaces. I recently was meeting with this incredible group. The US Department of Art and Culture, I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're not a real government agency, but they perform really incredible service to our collective dreaming, which is they build things, like the People's State of the Union, or they've created the honoring native land initiative, which is an incredible toolkit for people to do land acknowledgements. They've recently hired me to bring on a new page of this honoring native land initiative to think about how do you bring something from land acknowledgement to action so it's not just making a verbal statement, but you're making a commitment that can come with action. When I was meeting with them initially, they were like, “Well, you do categorize yourself as an artist, but this role is a lot about community building. So can you talk a little bit about that?” And I thought, “Oh, that's so interesting because my whole life, I have felt like more of a community builder than an artist.” That's interesting that they assume that an artist isn't a community builder because it isn’t because there’s usually that separation. So I was very happy to find this role. One of the fun things that you do at the beginning of working with this group is to work with them to define a title and I don't have one yet. I'm going to share with you some of my ideas, [laughs] let me know what you think of me. JAMEY: So let's workshop them right here on the show. AMELIA: Right. I’m looking for your opinions because the other people have these incredible titles, like one is the Chief Ray of Sunshine. That's one of her names, she's the Chief Ray of Sunshine. One person is the Director of People and Possibilities. Another one is Director of Decolonization and Honoring Native Land. I thought, I think that's the title. And then I've been throwing around a lot of different ones. So one, I think was good as something around a land acknowledgement lab, because I want to make it a place where I can collaborate with lots of different people around how they can imagine, and give a framework and tools for people to imagine how you can change land acknowledgement thinking of this something that you say, something that you do, and something that has action. So that was what I've been thinking about. I don't know. What are some of the coolest titles you guys have heard? [laughs] CORALINE: Well, not exactly the same thing, but a friend of mine, Astrid Countee, who's also one of the panelists on our podcast. She is trained as an anthropologist and she got into tech. So she and I have been workshopping [chuckles] a title for her and we're coming up with sociologist engineer, anthropology engineer, things like that because the thing I like about that and the thing I like about what you're saying is that the impact that we have is a lot broader than the work that we do. We don't acknowledge the connections either and we tend to lionize the pure technical – I'm speaking as like the industry. We lionize that is the lone genius, like you were talking about, and I'd like to see us bring more of ourselves into how we describe the work we do, as opposed to just the, “Oh, I write code.” So Amelia, one of the things that you and I talked about in our conversation of couple of months ago, you introduced me to an incredible term that I'd like you to share with us and talk about and that is antecedent technology. AMELIA: Yeah. I like to think a lot about the continuous line that we have for technology and the way that oftentimes, when we're learning about a new technology, people will use metaphors that are connected to the technologies in history, but frequently, it's from a Western perspective rather than seeing a continuous line from technologies that were invented in indigenous communities. One of the reasons that I say it's important to look at indigenous antecedent technology is we don't want to colonize our future. We don't want take something and project it to the future with a limited understanding of how the world works. An example of that is that we've had, for thousands of years, decentralized economies that use decentralized ledgers and had large data systems that were able to be incorporated into consensus building contracts that led to peaceful communities. Like for instance, Wampum with the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois Confederacy, or even Quipu, we had in South America, which was a Turing-complete data system 500 years before Alan Turing was born. I think the reason why it's important is not because of primacy, or saying that's because something happened first it's better. But if you are thinking of making giant leaps in the future with some of these new emerging technologies, you could say, “Well, we don't have any data in the past, so we're just going to have to wing it.” Or you could look at it as a line and a string that connects to our ancestral histories and say, “Well, actually we did have successful distributed economy, decentralized economies, right in the location where I'm standing now. We could study how they worked in collaboration with the environment in this environment and learn from there.” Or we could just throw that out and say, “Wow, this is the first time California is ever going to use a decentralized economy. Let's just wing it.” Or you could say, “Actually, there’s precedent here we can learn from that, from this very location, from this very land.” Something that a lot of indigenous activists are talking about is understanding the connection and giving back agency to indigenous groups is not just racial justice, but it's also climate justice. So I think people who deeply want to make positive impact for our environment, or are looking at some of these possibilities for different types of economies in a less extractive format for your state, or for your nation, or for your continent, or your region, it is important to include indigenous knowledge in those discussions. So that's what I mean when I talk about antecedent technology is like, are these innovations that you're building? Do they have deep roots, and do you have a mechanism of looking at them in historical context? Can that give you more data to make more successful models for how you might make innovation in the future? CORALINE: But Amelia, how can people do that and also solve every problem from first principles? AMELIA: I know, right? [laughs] And that's the funny thing is we see this is an issue in Silicon Valley already. Already, people are like, “Oh my gosh, they're reinventing buses,” or they're reinventing these things that already existed not a 100, or 200, or 300 years, or a 1,000 years ago, but people are reinventing something that happened a month ago, or a year ago. That is what we do. We pile slight innovations on top of each other in an extractive format to create competition and I think that it's a slowing down of that. It's like, what if it's not about reinvention, or just rebranding, or remarketing, but if our goals have of real long vision of lasting for seven generations, can we think then about innovation in a different way? JACOB: I've never heard the phase ethical dependencies. Could you educate me, if you care to? AMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, sure. I think about it like I love to use technological terminology to describe ethical, or creative practices and I love to use creative and ethical terminology to describe technological practices. I like to be a bridge between these two worlds because it's somewhere I sit in the middle of. So when people aren't technical and they're like, “What is an ethical dependency?” Then I'll start talking to them about how certain computer programs can't run unless they have all of their check-dependencies and I explain that to them. And then when it's a technical group, I'll talk about when you go through your package.json and you're trying to communicate to someone who might be using your GitHub repo, you might have a bunch of different choices of things that you can connect them with in your package.json. Maybe it's just basic, “Hey, this is the version I'm using and make sure you use this node version.” As you go through it, the only ethical choice I've had, at least as a web developer, is this MIT open source, or is this CANoe, or what is the licensing for this is, or is it just closed source so it's for the company that I'm working for. The reason why I wanted to make an ethical dependency for software is I wanted there to be more options and more choices there that you could say, not only do I have license, which really is just adjudicated through the legal process of international law of copyright. If someone violates the MIT license and close sources my open source project, maybe I can sue them. But if I'm a small developer, I probably don't have the resources to some people. But what if I don't even believe in that process? I'm somebody who truly believes in a horizontal organization that is a mutual aid network and we don't want to spend our funds on lawyers suing people. But we do want to have a way in which our community is held responsible to each other and maybe we have our own process of guidelines that this group adheres to and we want a resource where people can say, “Okay, what are the values behind your code that you imagine people should uphold?” And then my article that I wrote for the Mozilla blog, I mentioned an example, which is a cat shelter. Like, what if I made a really great website for my friend's cat shelter and then they reach out to me and say, “Hey, my other friend would really love to use your code. Is that totally fine?” “Yeah. It's open source. No problem.” “Okay, great, great, great,” and then I say, “Well, actually, I did a lot of work on this. I'm totally fine anyone using it for free, but I don't support kill shelters.” If it's a no-kill shelter, then totally cool with them using my code, but if there are not a no-kill shelter, I don't know if I wanted to spend all hours that I did making this and the time supporting it and everything else that I do. That's my values. Like, you can use my code for free, but not if you're using it to do something that I don't want to see in the world. I think we see that a lot in open source projects for research where researchers have done incredible systems for looking at the stars and star mapping, and then those same systems are used for military guided missiles and they're like, “Wait a minute. I use all those graduate students and we spent years and years and years building this incredible thing to look at stars and have this be an educational tool and now it's being used in a way that is absolutely not how we anticipated, or what we thought would exist in the world.” And there's not a mechanism because they didn't necessarily close source it; they're just using it as a guidance system. [chuckles] o it's like, how could you hold people accountable? I think the first step is to make explicit the values to begin with and a lot of times people will say to me, “Well, if you can't enforce this, then what is the point of doing this?” I think that's an interesting thing in our culture that we immediately go to policing before we can even think of the imagination of what is our value? Oh, you're not even allowed to think of what your values are, because if you can't police them, they don't matter. Well, that's actually a very strange skewed worldview to imagine that you can't hold values unless you can police them. Because in a world of post-policing, we have to have ways that we hold values, right? [laughs] We can't just throw out values. So the first step is articulating and agreeing upon the values and creating an ethical dependency, and then through the process in wampum.codes, I talk about how accountability can work within a community and what you want accountability to look like. It shouldn't be the default that the only way you can hold someone accountable is to sue them, or is to police them through a court system, or international court system. There should be a way in which you can hold people accountable that is more aligned with the values of your group. Maybe you can say, if you have found someone that has not followed these ethical guidelines, invite them to this town hall where we'd like to talk about it, or meet us every week at the Zoom link. There's lots of different ways you can put an accountability link in your package.json, which is, this is how I expect my community can hold me accountable. This is how I want my community to hold me accountable. This is how I want my community to hold each other accountable. So we talk through that process. I don't think it should just be a default outsource thing to a government that you have no influence on the copyrighting law that exists. It’s like well, it's either open, or close. So that’s a bad – now I've lost my place, but feel free to ask me questions. [laughs] These guys have stopped running. JAMEY: I really like the distinction that you make between policing and accountability, which I think are words that have similar meanings, but very different vibes. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how those two concepts like work different in practice. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you can imagine that it's – I always start from a point of imagining that it's the community, that we are all part of a community and that we care about the values and we care about each other. Like, you're starting from a point of imagining. Everyone's a good actor before you start imagining how someone is a bad actor. It's like saying, “I need to explain to you why this game is fun and what the rules are before I start.” If I start off being like, “Okay, everyone who's going to cheat at this game, this is what's going to happen to them.” Then people are like, “Well, wait, what game is this and what even are the rules?” So just start from a point of like, “This is why the game is fun. This is why we want to participate in it. These are the rules of the game and the rules are part of how we have fun.” The rules are a part of how we engage with each other. The rules are part of the point of why we're even playing. It makes it fun, constraints are fun, and then you can start thinking about like, “Hey, and if you cheat at this game, these are the fun ways you can cheat at this game and these are the ways that are actually not fun and everyone in the group would rather you just not do that and if you do do that, then maybe we talk about what we do.” I think that's a more of a process of thinking about the ideas, the end, and the means exist within the community and are part of the community. I think a lot of activists organizations have been very involved in rethinking community accountability without policing and oftentimes, they're communities that either indigenous communities on reservations don't have policing in the same way that other spaces do and/or their places where policing does not benefit those communities. They're not actually defending the rights, or the needs of those communities. So they've had to start thinking about like, “Well, we still have to think about what we do when we have something in our community that we don't want to have.” Like, if we have domestic violence, what do we do in a way that still protects and maintains our community, that we can still make sure we have help and needs? That's an issue that I think a lot of reservations have looked at because it's like we don't have police, or police don't help us when they come and so, how do we figure out ways that we can support our communities and make sure that we can minimize domestic violence and they have lots of different initiatives all over Indian country that are really amazing. So I think that's a good example. JAMEY: I find it really refreshing, the attitude about the game, like these are the rules of the game before we talk about cheating, because I find myself feeling a way that's jaded that my brain does go to. But I know there's bad actors and I've dealt with bad actors and I stress about that. I think it's a stressful thing that it’s reasonable to stress about, but putting that value lower than the value of well, what's the ideal and how do we start with that, I think it really feels good. AMELIA: Yeah. I know as a young developer and probably all of you have had a very similar experience, but as a very young developer, you'll enter into a space and be like, “Oh, I have a question about this,” and then you just get a hammer on your head like, “This isn't the space where you ask questions! That's the space where you ask questions and you don't ask this question on Tuesday. You only ask them on a Wednesday!” and you're like, “Ah!” We've all had that experience, too, which isn't a very accessible way of someone wants to join your party and you're like, “Oh, you really aren’t to join on Wednesdays and not with that question.” and it’s like – So I think it's important to make things accessible to someone who's a new, or an outsider and give them a way of being a good actor because otherwise, if they don't, then everyone new will be a bad actor without any option of otherwise and of course, there are bad actors. We've all grown up on the internet, [laughs] so I think we know. Another thing that is interesting is I've been doing these workshops with development teams, at companies, startups, blockchain companies, or financial companies, or nonprofits, or academic departments, or groups of artists. It is always interesting that people are like, “Oh yeah, who should be here that can articulate our values for this exercise?” My answer is, “You,” and they're like, “Oh, well, no one gave me permission to do that.” “On behalf of who?” “I don’t know on behalf of who,” and I'm like, “Well, you get to do it on behalf of everyone.” You get to articulate it and then someone else gets articulated and then we get to talk about that. I'm always surprised that this is sometimes the first space that anyone's given them that permission, it's like, “Well, what do you think are the values?” They go, “Well, I think our values are X, Y, and Z,” and someone else can say, “Well, I think it's this other thing,” and they can say, “Oh, interesting.” And then the founders, or the directors can be there and be like, “Wow, I had no idea all these different opinions,” and then we'll say to them, “Well, what did you think it was?” They’re like, “I actually now, I realize I don't know. Now I'm liking these ideas,” or “I'm thinking about this differently.” So it's square one is that articulation and everyone thinks that that's a given. They're like, “Oh, well, that'll be easy. That part will take 5 minutes.” But that is almost the entire time. [chuckles] Usually, it’s that beginning of like, “Okay, we are articulating our values.” Then once you articulate them, it's actually quite easy to just embed those into your source code and then think about accountability and all that. But getting on that same page, it's often the first time that – and coders will say things like, “Well, I think the UX person was supposed to decide this.” The UX person said, “No, no, no, I don't think it was me. I think it was somebody else who was supposed to decide this!” I'm like, “Well, if actually no one on your development team thinks they're allowed to express this, then that's probably a problem because how are they supposed to design code that meets your values of your team if no one thinks they're allowed to articulate that?” JAMEY: Something I find striking about the story that you just told is that, I think we often feel disagreements are a really bad thing to have and you just told the story where having disagreements was a very good thing to be experiencing because it's like more ideas and more discussion. I wonder what your thoughts are on like, well, how can we get past that feeling of like, “Oh, well, if someone disagrees with me, that's a bad thing.” AMELIA: I think it's different for different people. I think all of us have probably worked on international teams. I work on an international team with a lot of German coworkers and they're not in any way afraid of disagree [chuckles] in the beginning of a meeting, but they are very hesitant to disagree later on. They have this great way of clashing in the beginning with lots of ideas. Like, “No, I don't think that!” They're really, really clashing in the beginning, but then once we've all agreed to move forward with something, then they would be more hesitant later on to be like, “Hey, I don't think this is working out” because they're like, “No, we made a commitment, we're going to do this. We'll just keep doing what we decided.” It's harder for them later on to like flag a problem and say, “I think we should go in a different direction,” because it's less part of their culture to do that. It's like, “Well, we all agreed. So if we all agreed and we're all together, then we all agree and we're all together. You don't later go on and decide something else on your own.” Whereas, I feel like in American culture, it's not as big of a deal for someone to raise the hand and be like, “I think we're going to go into a brick wall if we keep going this direction so we’ve got to veer to the left.” Everyone would be like, “Thank goodness.” But if you showed up at the brick wall, they'd be like, “Why didn't anyone –?” “Oh, we knew we were going to run a brick wall. Why didn't you say anything?” “Oh, we didn't want to disagree.” That wouldn't be appropriate in American culture, but they make jokes all the time in Germany that that's what happens sometimes because people agree and then they'll just keep going. [chuckles] So it's very interesting clash of culture. I think different cultures have different points at which they feel comfortable. That's just one example. You can imagine how all of us have so many different cultures when it feels okay to have disagreements and sometimes explaining that in the beginning could be helpful, too. Because in some of these groups, you'll have people that are international that are speaking more in the beginning and I'll call that out, too and say, “I hear a lot of Europeans are disagreeing in the beginning. Oftentimes, Americans don't feel comfortable doing that, but this is a helpful way of making sure we have alignment and it's not seen as that you think someone's idea is not good, but it's a way of contributing, or adding.” Sometimes I throw that out because I know even based on different parts of the US that you're in, you might have different ways when you feel more comfortable sharing a descending of opinion. [chuckles] CORALINE: Amelia, how does that intersect with permission to be wrong? AMELIA: Oh, I like that permission to be wrong. Tell me a little bit more about that. What do you –? CORALINE: I think it's tied to what we talk about a lot about psychological safety and safety to fail. Things don't always fail just for environmental reasons. AMELIA: Oh, yeah. CORALINE: Sometimes someone had an idea and it ends up that idea isn't workable, but we have such attachment to the idea that I think we oftentimes are likely to run into that wall because we don't want to admit that we didn't think of something, or we didn't see something coming, or we didn't think it through correctly and that’s a lot of pressure. AMELIA: Oh, totally. Absolutely, it is. I feel like I find that a lot when I was a professor and I still am a trainer. I work at Contenful as a technical trainer and I think as a teacher, you see that a lot with people. It's like that first moment where students have learned something and they want to apply it and sometimes, our first idea is great, but usually our first 20 ideas are terrible. [chuckles] So it's like when you're first learning something, you don't always have the best ideas and what I usually have tried to do in my classrooms is give people just an enormous space to create a lot of bad ideas quickly. If it's in an art class, I might say, “Okay, I've taught you how to do this animation. I need you to make a 100 in the next hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Well, then make them really bad and really crude and just find out how to do volume,” and when you find out how to do volume, you get over a lot of the preciousness of the first bad idea that is usually really bad, but you're really precious about it because it's your first and that can push past that. Similarly, in technical training classes, it might be the same where it's like, “Okay, all 50 of you have to do this impossible task in an hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Great. So let's start with, where should we start?” Often, where should we start is a bad idea. People are like, “We should start with writing down everything that we need to do!” It's like, “Well, if you only have an hour, that's probably going to be the hour of just writing it down, or you could start somewhere.” There's lots of different options. So I think permission to fail, or permission for bad ideas sometimes can be overcome by that brute force of just being like, “Well, do the first 100 bad ideas, get it out of your system.” [laughs] JACOB: I was just thinking about how I've worked in an organization in the past that really wanted to have that very collaborative beyond the same page about values. There was one issue that came up a lot, which was that we had this culture where if anyone wanted to blow up the entire thing and make us all talk about it from ground zero, they could. I think that, whether on purpose, or not, was abused and what ended up happening was not really able to go anywhere. Effectively, what happened was the person who wanted to just keep bringing up their thing got their way because you know. AMELIA: Yeah. JACOB: When you were talking about that earlier, I was thinking about what's a way for one of the values of a group to be like, “We want to be able to have everyone's input, but we also want to move forward,” and I was just thinking about how we would do that. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think this is why so many mutual aid networks, or activist groups, or anarchist groups will use different formats like even Robert's Rules of Order, or they make their own versions of that where they say – and then I've seen in some artist groups, they'll have the 10 not commandments, but things on the wall where if a certain thing in a conversation is going there, they might point to it and say like, “Hey, is this number eight derailment? Are you derailing our consensus through number seven only being concerned with your own idea?” And then they will be like, “Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's what you're doing here. Number seven and number eight and right now, so we're going to move past that.” Or with Robert's Rules, you might say like, “Yeah, your emotions on the table doesn't have a second. So we're tabling that.” I think that's why it's important to have some of those ground rules when you're in an activist organization and maybe we should take some of those activist language into the product space at companies as well to say, we can have formalized ways. It doesn't mean we're not listening to people. There's a balance between “You're never allowed to question our values,” or “Yeah, you can bring up your own pet project at any time and derail everyone else's process and project and progress.” So I think there's definitely a balance there and people can always make addendums to that. People can say, “Hey, we're going to pause Robert’s Rules right now because it looks like we're getting kicked out of the space in 5 minutes so we're going to move to this section. Does everyone agree with that?” “Yes, we agree with tabling those rules that we already agreed to make a supplemental rule for this section.” I don't know how many of you have worked in an activist organization. Sounds like all of you see what I’m talking about. [laughs] Sometimes it's a lot of saying that and saying it really fast, but you get used to it. You get used to being like, “Oh my gosh, we only have 5 minutes. Okay, should we table this? Yes, or no? Do we have a second? Okay, we do. Great.” It takes more verbiage, but it is a way that we can agree on the rules of play and that people feel safe being like, “No one seconded that idea. You have brought it up for the third time, you’re bringing it up again, no one's going to second it again. So it's okay, we get it. You still want that idea. That's okay. We're writing it down in the minutes, but how it goes. [chuckles] You're also welcome to start your own group and have that be a focus and that's always possible, too.” So not everything has to be done by, for, with, and with approval of the group and I think that's what's great, too. JAMEY: So Amelia, you were talking earlier in the show about your No Funding group. That's what it was called, right? AMELIA: Yeah. JAMEY: And the phrase that you said, I wrote it down was, “No striving, no hustling.” AMELIA: Yeah. JAMEY: I liked that so much that [chuckles] I wrote it down and I was hoping we could talk about that because I think that that's something that people really struggle with, too. Anxiety about productivity and monetizing hobbies is something I see a lot. I'm also in the tech space and the art space, and you see that a lot in comics like, how can I make this thing that I want to do into my career? Which like, there's something beautiful about that, but it's also really tough when you're doing that with everything in your life that should bring you joy. So this isn't really a question, but I was hoping you could talk about no striving, no hustling. AMELIA: Oh yeah, thank you so much, Jamey. So I'll read you the little statement that we made, just because it's funny, but we say, “No Funding: Be the crypto-anarchist digital artist collective you want to see in the world. The mutual aid network that aims to help creatives radically rethink our relationships to funding, grants, and gatekeepers. In an arts and media culture increasingly focused on securing patronage from institutions, corporations, and wealthy individuals, No Funding asks what creative life would look like if artists were fully liberated from money and the self-censorship imposed by its pursuit? Rather than experience the soul crushing lifestyle of striving, rejection, and constant jockeying for position, could we instead find new ways to support one another and what would we make?” As part of the official announcement, I wrote a short story called Child's Play, where I imagine a world in which children seize control of the global economy with nothing more than a Minecraft server and their grandparents’ goodwill. [laughs] “No Funding is a public group. You can visit no-funding.com to get in on the fun and participate in weekly online conversations where members present on topics near and dear to them. No Funding is primarily a BIPOC creative technologist group, but it's open to anyone who's ever needed a day job to make something cool that they believe in. Our motto is no-striving, no-hustling; No-Funding.com a creative collective.” So that's our little statement. [laughs] JAMEY: I love it. I love everything about it. AMELIA: Yeah. I've had a lot of fun because I don't know how you felt during the pandemic, but I feel adrift in a sea of information where I don't know where land is. I don't see a lighthouse. I can't tell if I'm 5 minutes from shore, or a 5 miles and having a check-in with people with this format that it's like, no striving, no hustling, you're not pitching your project for a group of adjudicators. This is a group of people for people by people and I've been able to get more of a temperature on how people are feeling, what people are thinking. For me, it's helping that lighthouse of how far I am adrift. When I have my own notions of, I think this is going on and then I go to a No Funding meeting and I'm like, “Okay, I'm totally wrong. I can adjust myself to the shore.” So for me, it's been really helpful in that way. JAMEY: I think that there's two pieces of what you just described that have a similar result, but are different, which is trying to get funding because we live in capitalism and you need money to survive and to do things, which sucks and it's hard. And then on the other side, I think you have just this feeling about whether, or not you're being productive in that way. Even if an artist doesn't need to make money off of something to pay their bills, I think there's a feeling of like, but if I'm not making money, then it’s not valuable, or it's not real, or it's not as valuable as something else that someone else is working on. Actually, that is also capitalism that made that happen, but I think that's a little bit more solvable maybe. It's hard for us to just decide that we're going to have a community without that kind of global economy. But I think we could decide that we're not going to hold ourselves to that in the way that we do, but that's a tough step to take, I think and it sounds like you have a whole group of people that have all taken that step. [chuckles] AMELIA: Yeah. It's pretty incredible. I think we're all very diverse and don't agree on a lot of things, but the one thing that we do agree on is that the definition of having a full and creative life is only available to someone who does never need to work. Even if there are people in our group that might be true for, we all agree that that's not true, that you can have a full creative life and do many different jobs at many different times in your life for many different reasons. That is the one thing that we've committed to is like having a day job doesn't kick you out of the club of being a activist, a creative, a dreamer, a thinker, and a world that that exists is a world that is actually quite creatively stifling. It's very stifling and we see that it ends up just reproducing a lot of commonality and there's only a small demographic of people then who gets to participate in it and they have a very small narrow grasp on the world. I think we see that in a lot of our media that in order to participate in media, you have to be independently wealthy enough that you don't need to make any money from it and then those people tend to be a very small narrow demographic. And then you say, “Well, why don't we have all of our stories are told from this one perspective?” It's like, “Well, those are the only people that are allowed to do that work because it requires a full-time job where you don't make money.” Then of course, you 're going to get the same group of people [chuckles] that are going to tell the stories then. So that's why we think about it of like, well, what could we make if we assume we have day jobs, if we assume we don't need money, what kind of projects can we make together, or how can we support each other and each other's projects all coming from a notion of there's not someone coming to save us and we're not looking to grab the attention of someone high up there. Rather, we're looking to our right and to our left of us and the people that are standing beside us and saying, “How do we move forward?” JAMEY: I find that incredibly inspiring and empowering and it's something similar that I think about in comics a lot where people who are new to comics are often trying to get in with people that are already names in comics and really talented people that of course, you want to work with those people, but those people are doing something different than you if you're just a beginner. I heard the advice when I was new, that's like, “Hey, don't reach out to me, reach out to people that are your peers, because me and my peers used to be like that and we all became successful together and what you need to do is make a group like that and then you become successful together.” I thought about that a ton since I heard it and I think I'm getting a similar vibe from what you're talking about that and I think it's beautiful. AMELIA: Well, thank you so much, Jamey. You literally described the exact impetus for me forming this is I get a lot of talks weekly at universities and I had so many students after my talks be like, “Can we grab coffee? I'd love to pick your brain.” I look at my schedule and unfortunately, just because I have a full-time startup job and I do lots of advocacy and activism on the side, I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to be able to meet with you in like three months and that's not good.” I want to be able to give more time to these people who have really valid questions, but I also don't think that I hold anything that they need. Like, I don't think that I'm the person standing in the path for their progression and I need to give them a hand up. In fact, I think what I do need to do is to give them a space where they can communicate with their peers, like you said, and I say that to them. I say, “Look, I'm not brushing you off because you're not important. I'm taking myself out of this equation because I'm not important and you don't need me to tell you how to move forward, but you do need your peers and luckily, I've collected all of you from all of my talks into a group that meets weekly and you can all talk to each other, which is a much more valuable thing and I facilitate this. I've created this as a way of giving you a Zoom link that everyone can connect to each week, but you're going to connect with each other and you're going to meet hundreds of people around the world that are your peers, that will be your network, that will be the person to your left and to your right.” I always say to people, “If you look to your left and your right and you don't see anyone, that's because there's somebody behind you, you need to pull up that you need to give a hand to.” CORALINE: Oh, yeah. I've been doing a lot of that, thinking and talking about storytelling, and the value I place in storytelling and I'm also thinking about how can I give agency to other people to tell their stories? But one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about storytelling is for example, look at superheroes. Almost every white superhero is a lone actor. They don't have a community connection. They don’t have a family; they all died in a terrible accident. AMELIA: Origin story, yeah. CORALINE: Yeah, and that's the kind of stories we tell and it’s what we’re telling people. You have to be the hero. You have to be the most famous. You have to be the most rich. I learned there's actually a name for different kinds of stories, there's a German word for it called bildungsroman, and I'm probably pronouncing that all wrong, but this is more what our stories used to be like. The entire story would be about the development of the hero and it's not the hero's journey like a Joseph Campbell thing, it's literally how they learn how to be who they are. We don't tell the stories, or the origin story that's highly dramatic and left behind as opposed to acknowledging that we're all flawed and that hopefully, we're all growing and that hopefully, we'll just be better people and that's enough. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. My son, when he was a baby, he used to hate Disney movies because he would say [chuckles] they always have like the mom, or the dad always dies, something bad always happens to them in the beginning, and then the rest of the story is running from a trauma to find a perfect ending and this is like a 4-year-old telling me this. I'm like, “Yeah, that is the problem with the Western myth of the origin story,” and he was like, “But I want to just watch friends having fun together, telling each other jokes, going on a journey. I want it to look like my life. I want to see stories that look like my life,” and I'm like, “Yeah, well, you probably will find your stories in other spaces,” and he did. He finds Minecraft, which is much more of a similar thing to his experience is we're collectively building our story through participating in a world on a server that we've negotiated the terms of and that's his fictional world and he still is that way. His generation is still that way. The Zoomers, I think tell stories in a more interactive and collective format and they're not as interested in media that comes from a single voice, which I think is cool, so. [chuckles] JAMEY: I read some discourse recently about Studio Ghibli movies and people were talking about Studio Ghibli movies don't really have conflict and I thought that was confusing because obviously, there's lots of conflict in many of them. There's lots of problems and they solve the problems. I think that the thing that people mean when they say that isn't that there's actually no conflict, it's that there's room in those stories for quiet moments of reflection and that makes people feel like it's not conflict because you're having that space to sit with it and think about it and then continue. I think that's what is so relaxing about them. People will feel like, “I'm relaxed and so, it's not stressful and it's not conflict,” but it's giving yourself space to, I don't know, I already said it what I was going to say, so. [laughs] AMELIA: That's really beautiful. I met this screenwriter once when I was in LA and I was really surprised by his point of view because he said a lot of people think that drama is violence, aggression, death, hardship, and he says the best drama that most people want to watch is a good person has to make a tough decision. I just loved that statement because it's true. That kind of drama, it doesn't have to just be this doom and gloom, or I'm taking in trauma and trauma there. As soon as he just said that phrase to me, I was like, “Tell me more. What is the story?” I was like, “Tell me, I want to know the end of your story,” he's like, “No, no, no, that's every story I tell on TV. That is my story is like –” He's like, “This is why we love hospital dramas because it's like these doctors, they need to make a tough decision and it does have life, or death consequences, but they're saving lives, or the core concept is not about death and destruction and violence. The core concept is about them trying to save a life and make a tough decision and people love that.” So the concept that people only like entertainment that has a lot of violence, or trauma and is like, okay, that's true and [laughs] actually people love to see a good person making a tough decision. So I always remember that when I think about storytelling. CORALINE: Amelia, I really appreciate your sharing with us your story today and I think it's very inspiring and I think it's also really wonderful that it seems to connect to other things. It's not just your story, it's a collective story, but you are a force for bringing those stories to life and I really appreciate that. Giving people the space to tell their stories and [inaudible] their stories. AMELIA: Oh, awesome. So thank you so much, Coraline and I see that Jamey thought of the name. JAMEY: The term I was looking for is Ma. I don't actually know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, even though it's only two letters, M-A, but it's a Japanese word for negative space. Negative space is so important in design, white space is important in code, and the idea of negative space being important in a story, I think is really valuable. AMELIA: That's really beautiful and I think as a collective, we always move slower and we move at the speed of the community and it changes the speed, or the way in which we tell stories, but it changes the value, I think in a positive way. Those of us who want to connect to our community can then see stories that reflect our own reality. So I think that's really beautiful. Maybe the Ma, or the space within community storytelling will be defined and have some terms someday. That'd be cool. JAMEY: Maybe the kids from your story at the very beginning who made up the rock hand word will come up with a word for it for us. [chuckles] AMELIA: Totally. Absolutely. CORALINE: Amelia, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. AMELIA: Thank you so much for having me. What a beautiful conversation and a beautiful afternoon conversation for me. So thank you for making sunshine happen for the rest of my day. JAMEY: Thank you so much. This was really great. Special Guest: Amelia Winger-Bearskin.
239: Accessibility and Sexuality with Eli Holderness
01:35 - Eli’s Superpower: Germinating Seeds & Gardening 03:03 - Accessibility in Tech * Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20360490) * Remote Work 09:16 - Having Conversations with Leadership/Management * Trust & Honesty * Communication * Shame & Guilt; Managing Expectations 18:26 - Team Culture and Support * Setting Good Examples * Reducing Stigma * Removing Onus 20:09 - Human Performance & Safety * People are the source of your success * Pretending Out of Fear and Rejection * Context-Switching 29:09 - Being Who You Are – Sexuality in the Workplace * Battling Thoughts of Deception * “I am allowed to change at any time.” * I Am Me by Virginia Satir (http://www.doallthegood.com/new%20pdfs/I%20AM%20ME.pdf) * Discarding Things That No Longer Fit * The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō (https://www.amazon.com/Life-Changing-Magic-Tidying-Decluttering-Organizing/dp/1607747308) 37:33 - Sobriety & Drinking Culture Reflections: John: Your marginalizations are not problems to be managed. They’re just who you are. Mandy: “I own me and therefore I can engineer me.” (http://www.doallthegood.com/new%20pdfs/I%20AM%20ME.pdf) – Virginia Satir Rein: “I own everything about me, My body including everything it does; My mind including all its thoughts and ideas; My eyes including the images of all they behold; My feelings whatever they may be… anger, joy, frustration, love, disappointment, excitement My Mouth and all the words that come out of it polite, sweet or rough, correct or incorrect; My Voice loud or soft. And all my actions, whether they be to others or to myself.” (http://www.doallthegood.com/new%20pdfs/I%20AM%20ME.pdf) – Virginia Satir Eli: How complicated and complex but beautiful it is to be a person. Make space. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 239. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, John! And I’m here with my friend and a very special co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Thanks, Rein. Hi, everyone! Today, we’re here with Eli Holderness. Eli has been in tech for 5 years since graduating in 2016 and has become disabled with CFS a few months into their career, which has really affected how they view the industry and what jobs they've been able to take. They're also genderqueer, bi, ADHD, and Jewish, and they're excited to talk about finally having a job where they can bring their whole self to work. They're quite an extrovert and have been blessed with a strong queer support network since university, and are keen to break down the barriers into tech that shut out other marginalized folk who aren't so lucky as Eli has been. Welcome to the show, Eli. ELI: Hi! Yeah, I'm super excited to be here and really honored to be here for Mandy’s first in on the panel. I don't really have a thesis statement for what I want to talk about today, other than I guess, general topics around accessibility and tech, and an interesting aspect of that is things that have changed over the last year with the recent horribleness. MANDY: That sounds great. But first, we have to ask you the question we always ask everyone and that is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ELI: So my superpower is, if you give me a seed, like a plant seed, I can probably germinate it and it's a double-edged sword. Recently, I saw my parents. I was lucky enough to see my parents early in the year and my mom was making a tie out with Seville oranges and she said, “I've got all these Seville orange seeds. Do you want them?” And long story short, now I have a whole crop of orange seedlings on my windowsill because I just cannot stop myself. I'm not really sure how I acquired it. I think I might have inherited it from my grandmother who grows tomatoes and is a really keen gardener, but my bedroom is slowly being taken over by plants. It's kind of a problem. MANDY: I know the feeling. Ever since the pandemic, I ended up buying 2 plants and now I think I have 15 plants? Yeah, they just keep multiplying, but I'm enjoying having them around. So that's a great superpower to have because I’m either a hit, or miss when it comes to either plants thriving, or plants die. ELI: I've had really bad luck with succulents actually, which is supposed to be the typical you couldn't kill it if you tried, but apparently, maybe I've just got reversed superpowers when it comes to part like it's opposite day every day with me. But no, some of my oranges are doing quite well, so maybe you're manage to keep them alive. That’ll be nice. So one of the things I wanted to talk about is just experiences of accessibility and tech. I work 4-day weeks and I have done for a couple of years now. That's about what I can handle with my CFS, which is chronic fatigue syndrome. It basically means my body just sucks. My body is an extended practical joke that God is playing on me. And how various things I hope will change after the pandemic, or we will hopefully see some of the changes in our working patterns maybe persist in ways that they've been helpful to people for accessibility, like being able to work from home obviously is a huge one. But I think there's also been maybe a change in attitudes to meetings, how we schedule our time, and deliberately blocking off time just to work in your calendar so that you're not interruptible and various like, how those things actually can be super necessary for some people, even though we're only now coming around to them as norms in the industry. I don't know if you folks have experiences of how your work has changed and if that's made your work easier, or more difficult. JOHN: My work actually didn't change much as far as the pandemic. My team has been remote for the last decade. ELI: Oh, wow. JOHN: So it didn't change things for that. Although, the rest of the company outside of technology all went remote. So we've been using that opportunity to try and help the rest of the company get up to speed on things you can do to keep the team together while they're working remotely, because we've been building that expertise for a while. That was nice to be able to help other people, get up to speed on what that was when it all happened on such short notice for everyone. And I think I've heard so many people talk, much like you, about hoping that the remote work situation continues afterwards because we've all just had this huge example of work can get done just fine without an office so why are you insisting on an office? Yeah, I think a lot of people are really hoping that sticks. MANDY: Yeah. For me, I feel the same. I've always worked from home. It's funny, my daughter's going to be 12 so I always base the number of years I've worked from home on her age because it was literally when she was born. So it's been 12 years that I've done this. But I will say that over the pandemic, a lot of other people are now coming around to knowing that working from home, while it is a privilege, it's not exactly easy. I've had to put a lot of boundaries in place with my clients and take a lot more self-care because I feel like the pandemic has been a very unique situation. For me, at least, it's not the same as it used to be working from home. Working from home, I had more schedule and regimen and stuff, but now, as I said, my daughter, she's doing remote schooling this year. So there's that, I also, for my mental health, need to work out every day and I just do that when I feel like right now is a good time where I should take a break. I need to get up and do that kind of thing. Back before I used to be like, “Okay, 3 o'clock is the time where I go and work out.” Now it's like, whenever I need a minute, or I'm feeling overwhelmed, or I need a brief break, I go and do it. So I've kind of had to put more boundaries in place and a lot of people are now a lot better about that. I'm not getting excessive pings on my phone, or text messages, “Where are you? Where are you?” I stress to my clients asynchronous like, “I'll be back. I promise, I promise you I will be back, but please don't call me saying, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ [laughs] because I need some time away from the screen.” I find myself much more productive when I sit down and do an hour, or two and then go do something, like the dishes, or the laundry, and then come back for an hour, or two, and then go prepare dinner, or do a doctor's appointment, and then come back for an hour, or two and break up my day in that way. So I think that the pandemic has allowed us to be a lot more accessible in that way and a lot of companies are being much more like you don't have to have butts in chairs from 9:00 to 5:00, or 8:00 to 4:00, or whatever hours those are. ELI: It's interesting for me because one of the things that I lost when we went to work from home because I've always been in an office until this past year, but I, with my ADHD, really benefit from externally imposed structure. I actually gave a talk at a conference back in March, Python web conference, about working from home with ADHD. Having to be work from home and not have the structure of an office has really made me confront a lot of the ways that I was coasting based on that external structure and not really addressing maladaptive behaviors I had. So when we started working from home, I found myself just really procrastinating until I was able to put in place things like, “Okay, don't contact me at this time because I'm going to be head down on a piece of code,” and if I get distracted by something, somebody coming in with a support ticket that needs to be done, I will be thrown off kilter for the entire rest of the day and broke my flow, like break my hyper-focus. So that was something where actually my chronic fatigue was less of a factor in my ability to work over this past year than my ADHD had been, which it flown under the radar for almost my entire life. But one of the things that's been really nice as well as that, the place that I'm at now at the moment, I can just say, “Oh, my brain is full of BS today. I'm not going to be very productive.” A huge part of being able to work as well as I do at the moment is having people who are willing to work with me in the ways that I need, which is really nice and letting me have a 4-day week, which is surprisingly uncommon. I have been turned down from a lot of job interviews and whatnot for needing a 4-day week and that's something I hope we see less off going forward as our industry accepts that a more flexible working pattern can still be useful, productive, and valuable. MANDY: Yeah, I agree. So how do you bring up conversations with people you work with, or your bosses, or management team? What do you say? How do you tell them what your individual needs are and what are their reactions? ELI: So the place I'm working at the moment, Anvil, it's a really small team. There's 8 of us and it's pretty flat structure as well. While I have the two co-founders, Meredydd and Ian, they run things as it were, but it's not a traditional, I guess, management. I don't feel beholden to them in the same way that I would to like, they're not my boss exactly, but they do pay my salary, but they're not my bosses in that sense. So if I say to them, “Look, I'm not going to be able to get this thing done because I just can't focus today,” or multiple times I said, “Oh, my brain is full of BS. My brain is too full of sludge today. I'm going to take a nap.” I did that today. The trust is there for them to say, “Okay, go do that and you'll get your work done when you get your work done.” So when I bring things up, like we have regular check-ins, or whatever, I might say, “Oh, I've been in a rut lately and I think I really need to change what I'm working on,” or how I'm working on it. This thing isn't working, that thing isn't working and whether, or not it's because of one of the weird ways that my brain, or my body is, they just handle it as if it were a need. There's no fuss just because it's a rising from a way that I am outside the norm, which I think is the ideal way to handle it because obviously, every person is unique and what we define as norms, or any vague clusterings of behaviors and traits that we see in people. It's just the most common way for a person to be, but everybody is going to differ from it in some way. I have had experiences in the past when the trust hasn't been there and I've said “Something's not working,” or “I'm struggling,” and a manager has just not, I guess, believed that I was being genuine, thought I was skiving, and that has been some of the worst experiences. I think that's where some of the dark side of inaccessibility and it's not just in tech. That could be in any workplace is when there isn't trust between you and the person that you serve, the person you're working for, the person who's representing your employer to you. When I say my views on accessibility have really shaped the way that I view the industry and what jobs I've taken, that's one of the key things that has to be there is my managers have to trust that I'm being honest about my abilities and my needs. And that's true for anyone, but I think it becomes particularly weighty when you're talking about things that arise from marginalizations. JOHN: And do you find that that's trust that you have to build up in relationship with those managers, or it has to be there from the beginning, because from the beginning, you're going to need some way to work with them and build some flexibility into your working relationship? ELI: So the relationships I'm thinking of where that trust has been present, and they've been really fruitful and positive relationships, it has been there just from the start, or given on faith, as it were. As I say, I became disabled fairly early on, it was three months out of university—fantastic, right—and I had just had a new manager. There has just been a shakeup in the management chain and the manager who I was then placed with had never known me not being ill and I was dealing with suddenly being ill, not knowing what was happening to me, and so on. I think it would have been a very different experience had he trusted me that I was being honest and not just trying to skive and get away with being in a cushy software job without doing any work, which is very much how that situation did play out. I think if the trust isn't there from the start, it's going to be very hard to earn and I think that part of hiring somebody and expecting them to work with you, if you don't trust them to be able to do that and manage their needs, expectations, and abilities, you have no business hiring them, in my opinion. JOHN: It struck me like, as you were saying that, that if the person is coming to that situation as, “Oh, you've got to always keep an eye on people because they're always trying to get one over on you and find ways to not work very hard,” or whatever. That person is never going to have a fantastic relationship with their rapports and then once you add in the other marginalizations on top of that, it just goes down and he'll leave him faster. ELI: And that's something that I think we've seen over the last year with reluctance, or resistance to moving to work from home, where if somebody who is managing has been very used to being able to walk around and see what's on everyone's screens and have this sense that they are keeping an eye on. They’re making sure nobody is secretly playing Minecraft for 8 hours a day, or whatever. But moving to work from home requires that trust and it reminds me of there's some advice I've had about having a long-distance romantic relationship where you've got to be really, really good at trust and communication. Those are two things that you should have in any serious relationship whether romantic, or not. I think that maybe working from home over the last year has exposed, in some relationships, but I think about work relationships where those things haven't been present. But it's not that working from home created them as that it exposed them and the companies, I think that are doing the best now at maintaining and building those relationships between co-workers in their management structure are ones that probably already had that and probably has set themselves up for success by just having a healthy environment to begin with. MANDY: So I have a tendency when I start with a new client—I'm an independent contractor; I work for several companies—my tendency is to always under promise and over deliver and then I do that and I'm really good at doing that. But then things inevitably come up, I get sick, and then I feel like I'm letting them down because it's like well, they expect the bar to be here and now it's down here. And then I'm disappointing them and they're like, “Well, where's the Mandy that we hired?” and it's like, well, you did hire that Mandy, but that Mandy is not here today. Do you have those feelings, first of all, and if you do, how do you deal with them? ELI: Yeah, the guilt. Whenever I have to take a day off sick, my goodness and it has definitely been compounded by the experiences that I've had of not being trusted. If I say that I need to take a day off sick and people go, “Oh, well, couldn’t you come in anyway?” I've been very fortunate in the last couple of jobs that I've had where I've had really, really supportive relationships with managers that were full of trust. So I'm slowly starting to creep back from that a little bit. One of the ways that I think I got to that point, though, or one of the things that really helped me was upfront managing expectations. So I take days off now when I get sick, as opposed to having overdone it with fatigue and it’s got to a point in my fatigue where I need to take days off just to rest by cutting back to 4 days a week. That's one of the things where I say actually, I'm going to factor in that Eli isn't here today, that Eli won't be here one day a week. So don't hire me on that day and that was a choice I made because I wanted to stay in work, essentially. That was the only way I could consistently, in good faith, promise to be able to deliver a consistent amount of at the time being in the office. That's the big thing that I've done. I think there's a lot of shame that comes with having a chronic illness, not being at your best 100% as well. I think that in the tech industry, in particular, there’s this mentality of you’ve got to hustle. The rockstar developer and admitting that you can't be that. I even said the word admitting as if it was a failure, but stating that that's not possible for you can be seen as and can certainly feel like it being a failure and that's not fun, but at the same time for me, it's certainly true. I'm never going to be a rockstar developer putting in 70-hour weeks and cranking out loads of code. That's just not me. So tackling that head on and just admitting it and saying, “If this is a problem, then it's not going to work out.” I have had a lot of places that I have been pinged by recruiters and then I say, “I can do a 4-day week. These are the terms that I can work on,” and they don't want it and that's their call to make. I hope that that will change. I hope that will change soon as a result of the recognition that flexible working [chuckles] is good actually for parents, for people with disabilities, for all kinds of people. But that's one of the big ways that I've managed those feelings and cut down on the situations where there's feelings of rise, but it's definitely it's something I massively relate to. I still do struggle to take time off and I'm really lucky at the moment to have. I had my checkup with Ian this week and one of the first things he said was, “When you're going to take some time off soon?” because I've been working a lot recently and that was really lovely. So having supportive coworkers and they lead by example as well, they take time off just whatever, and it's great and it doesn't make us less productive, or I think it makes us healthier as a team and it certainly helps me navigate all the issues that I have surrounding it, which are myriad. JOHN: You touched on an interesting point right there at the end there about how not only is it useful for you to have obviously management buy-in with working and the flexibility that you need, but having the team culture of everybody around you, also them taking the time that they need and working on the flexes that they need to flex is an incredibly important part of supporting you in feeling like it's okay for you to do those things. ELI: Yeah. It reminds me of, I guess, the push to put pronouns in your bio, or your screenname regardless of whether, or not you are somebody who people get your pronouns wrong. Because there's this phenomenon where strictly speaking, something is allowed, but if it's outside the norm, you still feel odd. You might feel ashamed of doing it. So even if you are allowed to take mental health days at your place of work, if nobody else does, you're still not allowed. Socially, you're not allowed almost. So setting healthy norms opens doors for everybody, including those who need the doors open for them, as it were. Like me. [laughs] I don't always have the energy to advocate for myself because of the reasons that I need to advocate for myself. Leading by example on the part of the people that I work with and the people who have the clout organizationally, even though we have quite a flat structure at Anvil. That's one of the things my manager at my last place as well, was really, really fantastic about was setting good examples. Definitely reducing the stigma around taking care of yourself, removing the onus from the person who will have the hardest time advocating for themselves. REIN: Well, I think there's a pretty general statement here, which is that managers that don't trust their employees are bad managers. ELI: I think it's very hard to be a good manager if you don't trust your employees. I'm thinking of, it's not in tech, but I did work a retail job and I think across that industry, that's just it. That’s not a thing; you're not trusted by your manager if you work in retail just as a default. The places where you are a unicorn land rare. I think I would agree with that general statement. I hesitate to make sweeping statements just in general because humans are so fast, complex, and complicated that there will almost always be a counterexample to whatever sweeping statement. But I think trust has to be the basis of any healthy relationship. If you're working together towards some shared goal as a relationship is whether, or not that's to have fun hanging out, or to get some work done, you have to trust that you're both committed to that, I suppose and lacking that trust for why you hired that person, why they're working for you, I suppose. REIN: In human factors on safety science, there's an old view of human performance, which is that people are a problem to be managed. People make mistakes; they have to be trained, they have to be watched, they have to be supervised. They can't be trusted to make decisions. People are a problem to be managed. The way you get a safer workplace is by dealing with problem employees and making sure that they don't screw up. The new view of human performance and safety is that people are the source of your success. ELI: Thinking about humans as problems and eventually, by eliminating any aspect of humanity that causes problems, you're just going to end up with nothing. It reminds me of that bot that was trained to debug code basis and it just deleted the code base. It was like, “There's no bugs because there's no code!” And there'll be no problems with us no humans, but there’ll be no success either. REIN: So I think that managers who look at people like they’re a problem to be managed are the source of a lot of these issues. ELI: Yeah, that definitely resonates with me in the sense that that's how I felt in my negative experiences, especially when it comes to managing my ability to work and viewing my marginalizations as problems to be managed instead of just ways that I am. REIN: Yeah. ELI: Which is a difficult one to navigate with chronic fatigue. I didn't always have this disability and it has limited my life, but it's also, I think made me think very deeply about things that I wouldn't have otherwise. So in my case, I think there's been a silver lining and now it is a part of the way that I am and you can take it, or leave it, but it's a package deal with me working for you, or me being friends with you, or me being part of your D&D group and it has to be accepted and can't be managed away. I think that's been the case as well with my other marginalizations Mandy rattled rattling off the whole litany of various things that I am and I have definitely had instances. So for example, with my Jewishness, where I have been expected not to bring it to work almost. Of course, in the UK, we don't actually have separation of church and state, we are actually a Christian country. Everyone does Christmas and you've got all the loads of the bank holidays and what not, Easter. Whenever I would make a remark that I did not fall into this norm, and actually I would be celebrating Passover instead of Easter and it was a slightly different time, it was viewed as like I was causing problems for being different almost even though it was just an aspect of the way that I am. So I think that's an attitude that definitely pervades and it's definitely harmful on more axes than just disability and ability to work. MANDY: I actually think that that’s an attitude that that needs to go. I've worked for people where I've totally been afraid to be my best self because I'm afraid they'll fire me. Like, I pretended to be a conservative for a very long time with a client and boy, was that stressful! [laughs] For me, a lot of it is fear and being rejected and then all of a sudden, I don't have a job and then all of a sudden, I can’t pay my bills and then it just spirals from there. So it leads to a lot of almost pretending to be someone that I'm not for fear of looking good, or looking a certain way, or being perceived as a certain person and it becomes really, really stressful. ELI: The way that I handled being genderqueer is I just based on vibes whether, or not I'm going to come out and at what stage. So at my current place, on my first day, I was like, “By the way, I use they/them pronouns. I’m genderqueer,” and absolutely plain sailing. It was totally fine. A couple of jobs ago, I decided not to and let everyone just assume that I was a woman, which is how I present essentially, or that's what most people assume by looking at me. Part of the reason for that was that the CTO was a Trump supporter who, it was one of the people who had jokes for everybody in the office. He had little funny jabs that he would make. “Funny jabs” and his funny jab for me was that I drank instant coffee and it was not real coffee. I just thought if he is going to make fun of me every morning for not drinking real coffee, what kind of fun is he going to make of me for not having a real gender and I thought, you know what, safer probably just to not bring it up. It is stressful and I felt dishonest and I'm not sure if I were in the same situation now, I'd be looking for another job, but I'm not. [chuckles] But being able to bring your whole self to work, I definitely tried before and been rebuffed and this is the first time that I think it's sticking with my current place, which is such a joy, honestly. I cannot overstate it and part of it is an intentional effort on the people creating and it's enshrining the culture to allow that. I think there's probably some truth to the idea that with norms the way that they are and with norms that don't allow you to be your whole self and that will punish you for being certain ways, it does require an active effort on people creating culture to go against that, which is a shame because if you're trying to get a business up and running, that might not be your highest priority, but as soon as you let it slip even a little bit, it's just going to spiral. JOHN: Yeah. You're right that it takes intentional effort that a culture like that does not happen by accident, or just falls into that. [laughs] One of the things I'm curious about is were are you able to suss out that aspect of the culture before you started this job, or did you get there and then realize that you'd locked into it? ELI: One of the things that was funny about what I was interviewing for this job was that I'd actually met one of the founders. We met at a social event in Cambridge briefly and I think not caught his name, not followed up, but we met, talked briefly, really vibed. And then when I went to this interview for oh, it’s a developer advocate job, that sounds great. The company looks nice. The product is cool. And I went into the interview and I was like, “Oh, it's you!” Somebody that I’d met briefly, really got along with. One of the things that Anvil did and that Meredydd and Ian did was, very deliberately, make sure that they were trying to be gender inclusive in their hiring from a very early stage. So even when I interviewed, there were four people and one of the core platform developers was a woman. I say was as if she's not with the company anymore; she is. [chuckles] Very early on in me working at Anvil, one of the things that one of them said to me was we were very conscious that if we got to a stage where it was 10 men and we're trying to hire our first woman, that woman being interviewed is not going to be inclined to take the job and be the only woman in the room with 10 guys. I guess, I got lucky in the sense that they found the woman candidate, Bridget, who was incredible and that they didn't happen to end up finding that the best candidate every single time was a guy. But they’re certainly intentional and it's something that we send her when we're trying to find new people as well because it's done us well so far! It's something that I have looked for in the past as well is when I’ve said, thinking about which jobs I'm able to take, trust with the managers and the ability to be myself, because it's so exhausting when you have to create and impersonate a whole other person. MANDY: There is a lot of context switching. ELI: Oh, yes. I’m trying to remember who's out where. My fiancé is genderqueer as well and there was a time when we were each out at each other's jobs, but we weren't out at our own jobs. So we were each being read as a cisgender at our own jobs, but with a genderqueer partner and it was just so confusing. I barely got enough brain to handle my day job, [laughs] let alone being two, or three different people in different places. MANDY: Now, I'm curious about that, if I can ask. So I'm actually going through that right now. I’m bisexual and not a lot of people know that and it's like, “Do I need to make a grand announcement?” ELI: I just like to pepper into conversation that I think Lucy Lou is really hot, or something. I don't know. It's a hard one. That's how I came out to my parents is that I was just loudly interested in women in front of them and never really said anything, but it's too much to my memory. I got very lucky with my parents as well because my younger brother is transgender as well. He actually came out before me and paved the way and so, when it came time to come out to them as genderqueer, I just gave him a phone call. I said, “By the way, I'm genderqueer. My friends are using they pronouns for me. You can, if you want,” and just left it. No, that is a difficult thing. Coming out, it's hard at any stage because that I've always felt is that I fear I've deceived people, but actually it's not me. It's the norms and assumptions that are being made completely in good faith by people that's not necessarily the people are being malicious when they assume me to be a woman, or assume me to be straight, but that I have to inform them that they're wrong and that's scary. I don't like conflict and oh, there's a potential for conflict here because I have to tell them that they're wrong and nobody likes to be wrong. Nobody likes to have made an incorrect assumption. It's difficult every time and I think the way that I get through it these days is just by being obnoxiously confident of people. Just saying, “Oh, if you were taking it back. I'm sorry, get over it.” [laughs] MANDY: Yeah, I’ve just been slowly peppering it into the people I trust and it’s like I do feel that level of deceit. I’m like these people have known me as a straight woman for—I'm not going to disclose my age—this many years and now all of a sudden, she's not? Like, is this a phase, is this a – you have those people and then to me, people who have been queer, or bi, am I gay enough? Am I – you know? [laughs] So it’s like there’s this whole spectrum of I don’t know where I am, somebody please help me! [laughs] ELI: Oh, that am I gay enough? I still have that. So I'm genderqueer and I've had top surgery. I wanted to have a flat chest and I was able to do that and sometimes, I still go, “But I'm not trans enough to have done that.” [laughs] The level to which you can absorb that kind of rhetoric, it's really quite impressive actually. Am I gay enough? Gay enough of what? Yeah, and the thing about is it a phase, “Everything's a phase, mum, show me the permanent state of the self, there's no such thing.” MANDY: One of my favorite affirmations is I am allowed to change at any time. I like to look at myself in the mirror and if I decide I'm with a woman and then all of a sudden, it doesn't work out and I want to go back to being with a man and I'm stringing. Again, I am allowed to change any time. I don't owe anybody that and I'm working on that. It's taken a lot of therapy for me to get to that stage, [chuckles] but all I owe is to myself. ELI: I have a friend who had been going through a crisis of identity and basically to me, it seemed very clear that they were much, much happier in one label than the other and so, to me, that's what automated the decision. But obviously, it's not so clear when you're in the middle of it and one thing I said to them that I helped was, “Even if you turned around tomorrow and said, ‘Oh no, I'm actually this other thing.’ If you lose any friends for that and somebody says, ‘Oh, you are fraud. You were lying to me all this time.’ That wasn't your friend to start with. It will be okay.” You are allowed to change. You are allowed to decide where and how and what label makes you comfortable and which behaviors in yourself you want to celebrate, or accentuate. MANDY: Yeah. I feel like that's very important to hear. As I've been navigating this, this past few years, I’ve realized I'm not alone. So I think some of the listeners out there, if you are going through new identity crisis, or I’m not going to call it an identity crisis, but if you're struggling with who you are, I think everybody is to one extent, or another. Even as a person, not just a gay person, or not just as a straight person, or not just as a political person, I think everyone out there is just struggling; who am I and right now, especially. ELI: Yeah, that’s something that with this friend I was discussing is the idea of an objective truth about yourself and whether, or not that exists. Would I be a ciswoman if this thing of my past was different, or I'd had a different balance of hormones while I was in the womb, or any of those ways that people try to find causes, or pathologize, or rationalize the ways in which humans are complex, different, and unique. I think I found comfort and peace in the idea that there isn't necessarily an objective truth buried at the heart of me underneath layers of experience, or whatever. I am who I am at this moment; that is broadly continuous one moment to the next, but it might change. At some point, I will have found that I've crossed a boundary over time maybe. I used to identify as a woman and then I don't think anything about myself abruptly changed, but one day, I was like, “No, actually I'm not. Yeah, women are great, but I'm not one. I'm not one of them.” That's not dishonest and it's not disingenuous to change over time, or to find that your surroundings have changed around you and that you relate to them differently. So for example, going back to the oh, what if the objective truth about myself, if I had grown up in a culture where being a woman looks different than it does now, or than it has in my life, I might have thought differently about my gender over time. But that doesn't mean that the way that I am is not real. REIN: This gives me the opportunity I've been looking for to name drop Virginia Satir. [chuckles] ELI: Ooh. REIN: She wrote a poem that I really love called I Am Me and I'll just read a little bit of it. It says, “However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turned out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest and invent something new for that which I discarded.” And later it says, “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.” ELI: As someone with a customized body, I love that. [laughs] MANDY: I love that. ELI: I love that as a way to approach therapy as well. I'm somewhere for whom, I'm very lucky in the what is recommended as the basic bitch first line therapy here in the UK, cognitive behavioral therapy, works well for me. And that is very much, I am objective looking at my thoughts and trying to encourage the ones that I agree with and discourage the ones I don't; engineering debug my brain. REIN: It might not surprise you that she was a family therapist. ELI: I like that. More therapists should be poets, [chuckles] in my opinion. I've had therapists that have said some incredibly profound things. I like the idea of as well, the imagery of discarding things which no longer fit you whether that's labels, or behaviors, or friendship groups, or political alignments, or whatever in the same way that you would with clothes. This is something where I've recently read Marie Kondo's incredible book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, and really loved the idea of everything you own which sparks joy and that you can look at something which no longer fits you and say, “Thank you for the role you've played in my life. It's over now,” and put it away and donate to charity, or whatever. I think applying that same method to non-physical aspects of our lives that we've outgrown that need to be put away, I think it certainly helped me to avoid the sense of shame, or guilt, or feeling disingenuous that comes with growing and changing as a person. MANDY: I feel the same applies to sobriety, which is also a thing that I struggle with. Like, drinking alcohol? It was fun while it lasted. We had some good times. We had some not so good times, but it no longer serves me so we're not going to do that anymore. [chuckles] ELI: Yeah. That's another axis on which I want to circle back to accessibility and tech because here in the UK, we have a really strong drinking culture and from my understanding, it varies across the States and but here in the UK, it is very much we are getting drunk at house parties from our early teens. The first place I worked had a very strong drinking culture. All of your work relationships were to be strengthened down the pub over a pint. Every work party was drink-y. I have a friend who is teetotal not due to, as far as I know, any religious, just a completely personal choice and actually that was one of the factors in them leaving that role at that company was because they were not allowed to be their whole self at work because being at work meant drinking to a certain extent, if you want it to be successful, popular, get the good projects and obviously, that locks so many people out. People who are sober for whatever reason. People who might not be drinking because they might be pregnant. People who just don't like to drink. [overtalk] MANDY: [inaudible] drinking. ELI: Yeah. People for religious reasons, or health reasons. It's one that I think again, sing the praises of my current place, when we hang out COVID safe ways we dislike lunchtime picnics and stuff and we've got new parents at our company who we want to be able to include in social gatherings and make sure that it's not predicated on drinking and being out late to be able to socialize with your coworkers, if you choose that that's something that you want. I think it's probably another thing where you have to take an active stance on it. So it's not to just absorb paradigms from the greatest society that you're embedded in. MANDY: I'm not going to say I'm not nervous for running conferences on Zoom because conferences do have a very big drinking culture and that’s a socializing thing and I’m very nervous about how I'm going to navigate that. It just seems like it's everywhere, but I’ve come to the place where I’m just going to say no and I have some fancy mocktails I like so that's what I'll be doing. [chuckles] ELI: Yeah. Something I really liked recently was—I do drink and I do like to drink—but I was at Python web conference and after the day it was done of talks and things, there was fun social event afterwards and it was all virtual because it's March and it was somebody making cocktails in their kitchen and showing us all of his fancy cocktail gear and the virgin ones, the non-alcoholic ones were given equal parity, like time and attention were paid to them. It was just presented as completely not noteworthy at all that somebody might not drink alcohol and I think that was a really nice way of framing it. It was just, here is the alcoholic question and here is non-alcoholic version and there's no value judgment being made about the two. I think that was also an active choice on behalf of the person doing that presentation and the people organizing the conference. But so many different ways that not paying attention to these things can lock people out of the industry and contribute to that good old leaky pipeline that we all know and love. JOHN: When we come to the end of every show, we like to do what we call reflections, which is to talk about the things that struck us about the conversations, or the ideas that we're going to be thinking about later. For me, something you said Eli, just recently was that your marginalizations are not problems to be managed rather they're just the way you are, they're just who you are is such a powerful statement about identity and how it should be thought about and treated that I really didn't like the phrasing of it is something that can be just repeated to drill it into everybody's head. MANDY: For me, I really liked the Virginia Satir poem that Rein shared, especially the last bit of “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.” I think that is so relevant and such a good way for everyone to keep in mind. I really believe that people shouldn’t be afraid of change. No, let me say that again because I think you can be afraid of change, but it's going to be okay and you are allowed to be afraid of change and it can be overwhelming and it can be scary, but you can get through it and I’m going to get through it. Thank you for allowing me to tell a little bit of my truth for the first time and in the tech world and on this podcast! JOHN: It's really great to have you on the show, finally. Your show. REIN: Yeah, you know in Lincoln, the welcome to your house scene? This is like the welcome to your podcast scene. MANDY: It’s not just my podcast. It’s all of ours. ELI: Bugs Bunny meme. Oh, podcast. REIN: I thought I might close this out by reading another part of that poem. She says, “I own everything about me. My body including everything it does. My mind including all its thoughts and ideas. My eyes including the images of all they behold. My feelings, whatever they may be—anger, joy, frustration, disappointment, excitement. My mouth and all of the words that come out of it—rude, or polite, sweet, or rough, correct, or incorrect. My voice loud, or soft. And all of my actions, whether they be to others, or to myself.” MANDY: I love that. Thank you. Eli, how about you? ELI: I guess I'm just thinking about all the different ways that people can be and how complicated, complex, beautiful, different, and diverse it is to be a person, the same person over time even. If space isn't made for that, including, or not including things that we understand to be marginalizations in our current model, it harms people and the places that put effort into making space for people to be people in all the messy, complex, weird ways that they are. I've got to do better! That's well deserved. REIN: Yeah, it turns out that that's good business, but it's also the right thing to do. ELI: Fully agreed, yeah. MANDY: Well, again, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eli. It has been absolutely wonderful having you and I’m so glad it’s been you here to be on my first episode as a panelist of Greater Than Code and for listeners out there, I hope you like what you’ve heard and maybe you’ll see a little bit of me in the future. But if you would also like to talk to the rest of the panel, we do have a Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. You can join it for as little as a dollar and if you cannot support it, or you don’t want to support it, just get in contact with me and I will let you in anyway. Thank you for much for listening and hopefully, I will talk to you very soon. Special Guest: Eli Holderness.
238: Contributing to Humanity and Mutual Aid – Solidarity, Not Charity
01:00 - Mae’s Superpower: Being Able to Relate to Other People and Finding Ways to Support Them 03:42 - Contributing to Humanity (Specifically American Culture) * Title Track Michigan (https://titletrackmichigan.org/) * Climate Change * Clean, Accessible Water * Hate & Divisiveness; Understanding Racial Justice 07:01 - Somatics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatics) and The Effects of Yoga, Meditation, and Self-Awareness * Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)) * Kripalu (https://kripalu.org/?) * PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) * Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cognitive-behavioral) * Debugging Your Brain by Casey Watts (https://www.debuggingyourbrain.com/) 12:20 - Mutual Aid: Solidarity, Not Charity * WeCamp (https://weca.mp/) * Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) * Harm Reduction * Encampments * “We keep us safe.” * Rainbow Gatherings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Gathering) * Burning Man (https://burningman.org/) * Big Big Table Community Cafe (https://www.bigbigtable.org/) 33:17 - Giving vs Accepting Help; Extending and Accepting Love, Empathy, and Forgiveness * Collective Liberation * The Parable of Polygons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Polygons) * Listening: What could be of use? * 99 Bottles of OOP (https://sandimetz.com/99bottles) – Sandi Metz (https://twitter.com/sandimetz) 48:25 - The Mental Health Challenges of Being a Programmer * Celebrating Small Wins; “Microjoys!” Reflections: Casey: The word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Also: help and be helped! Jamey: Valuing yourself and the way that helps the communities you are a part of. Mae: Engaging with users using the things you're building is a reward and a way to give yourself “microjoy!” This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 238 of Greater Than Code. I am your host, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here today with our guest, Mae Beale. Mae spent 20 years in and out of nonprofit-land, with jaunts into biochemistry and women's studies degreeing, full-time pool playing, high school chemistry and physics teaching, higher ed senior administrating, and more. She went to code school in 2014 (at 37 years old) to gain the technical skills needed to build the tools she wished she'd had in all the years prior. So glad to have you, Mae. MAE: Thanks, Casey. Thanks, Jamey. Same for me. JAMEY: So you may be ready for the first question that we're going to ask you, which is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MAE: Yeah, thank you. I think that my superpower is being able to relate to other people and find ways to support them. How did I get good at that? Well, I've dealt with a lot of pretty complicated people in my life that you have to do extra thinking to figure out. So I think I got my start with that and I've done lots of different things in life and met lots of different people and felt lots of different feelings and thought lots of different thoughts. So I think that's mostly it: living. JAMEY: I was going to say that I know from knowing you that you've done lots of things, but even our listeners who don't know you probably already know that just after listening to your bio, so. [laughter] MAE: Yeah, and there's plenty more that didn't make it in there. That's something that is fun and a joke is no matter how long people know me, there's always still something that they didn't know and so, that's fun for me. I like to surprise other people and I love being surprised by people. So it's like a little game I have with all my fun facts. JAMEY: I love that. CASEY: I've got a question: what's on your mind lately. MAE: What is on my mind lately? So many things, I don't even know where to start. One is where and how can I contribute to the future of humanity [chuckles] and American culture in particular and in the circles that I'm in, drawing it down even more. So I think about that a lot. I think about my house a lot. I just bought a house and I'm going to do each room with a color theme so it'll end up being, you walked through the rainbow. Pretty excited for that, lots of things there. And I think a lot about how to empower others and be a more and more effective communicator. I think about that a lot. Probably those are the top ones and maybe Dominion. I play that every day. So I think about that a little bit. CASEY: [chuckles] Love that game. JAMEY: Me too. CASEY: This is great. All three are really interesting. I want to start on your first one. What opportunities do you see lately, or what have you done recently, or what do you hope to do to help the world help American culture help make an impact? What are you working on? MAE: From where I sit, it seems like the most important things that any of us can attune to about even a portion of is the environment and whatever's going on with our ability as humans to respond to climate change and water, like clean, accessible water for people, and hate and divisiveness. Those three things I think are our biggest challenges. So I try to do things that end up in those spheres, if not in things that ideally have some mix of those rather than having them be silos. One of my jobs is working with Title Track Michigan, and they are a relatively new nonprofit that brings creative practice to complex problems and is specifically focused on water protection, racial equity, and youth empowerment. Once all the uprising started in 2020, we created an Understanding Racial Justice course for white people in Northern Michigan and so, I've been helping to facilitate those courses and taking as many opportunities to rethink my orientation to all those topics as well. CASEY: That's so cool. You found a group that does all of those things in one. MAE: Amazing, right? CASEY: Wow. Title Track Michigan, huh? MAE: Yeah. I found them because my life radically changed a few years ago. A lot of things changed at once like, not just a lot, all of the things. So I went on this walkabout just trying to find ways to be of service in the world without expectation, watch who I met, and where I ended up. I ended up in Michigan and getting introduced to these people who then were creating a new nonprofit Title Track. Another thing I do is I have a consultancy that I have a flagship enterprise product for nonprofit, small business administration. That is a little bit of a Trojan horse for change management and organizational development and sustainable longevity planning for organizations. So the fact that I ended up there with them at that time and way more cool synchronicities happened. That's how I met them. So it just feels right and great to have landed in that space and then to have 2020 be what it became, we were already formed and positioned to try to be of help. JAMEY: This is an abstract question. MAE: Okay. JAMEY: But what does it feel like to feel like you're doing the right thing in that way like, the right place to be? I got the sense from you telling this story that things just came together in the right way at the right time and that's a beautiful thing when it happens and you said it feels right. What does that feel like? MAE: Mm thanks, Jamey. Well, my first thought is another thing that Title Track does in that Understanding Racial Justice course and a lot of circles I've ended up in have a focus on somatic and so, body centered awareness and engagement. So I used to always think my answer was going to be emotional when people ask me, “How do I feel?” and now I hear and think of my body first so that's cool. I'll answer a couple of ways, if that's okay. When for me synchronicities happen and I feel most alive, or of use, which is important to me, my heart literally feels bigger and almost breathing like I can feel air. I don't know how to explain that. I definitely will be smiling more, my back is straighter, and I usually have a lot more to say. All of a sudden, I'll have a lot to say. Other times, I have nothing to say! For how I might've answered that question previously would be closer to having a lot of things to say, like I'm a lot more creative, making connections, getting excited, and wanting to create new things together with other people. How about you two? CASEY: Just hearing you describe that, I have thought back on times I felt really proud and engaged and I noticed my posture improved, too. That's so interesting. I've had a nerve injury for 2 years. My hands go tingly sometimes. So I'm working on my back and noticing posture all the time. Interesting how my mood like that could affect the posture. I believe it, too. JAMEY: I'm not sure that I would have called out posture specifically in that way, but now that I'm thinking about it, I think what I would say is I feel lighter. MAE: Yeah! JAMEY: So to feel less bogged down, I can see in what way that's related to posture. [chuckles] MAE: Totally. Yeah. CASEY: We all have a lot to say on this, I love it. [chuckles] This reminds me of the Flow State. So when your skills match a need and it's challenging the appropriate amount, you're in a great concentration state, but if your skills aren't enough, or if the need isn't important enough—either one—feels a little way less good, not good. JAMEY: Totally. MAE: I lived at a yoga retreat center for a little while in Massachusetts called Kripalu—it's the largest yoga retreat center in North America. I had never done yoga and I was like, “Oh, cool. I'll just go live there [laughs] and see.” Anyway, I was there for three months and they have a part of their organization dedicated to optimal human performance. They have a partnership with Tanglewood and some other places around there to see if yoga and meditation can induce more Flow State, more of the time for top performing musicians, and just to be able to have more “scientific evidence” about how physiologically we can do things to get ourselves closer to those states more often. Pretty cool work. JAMEY: Yeah. That's really interesting. CASEY: I was just doing some research on the effects of different types of yoga and meditation on anxiety. I was trying to read some of the primary sources. I like to go to PubMed first—that's my go-to. Some people do Google Scholar. It's interesting, the framing sounded in a couple of papers like, “Well, it's not as good as CBT,” and my takeaway was, “Well, it helps an amount, huh? Great, good.” [laughter] So people who can't get access to CBT should consider that and that's true anyway. Science has shown this thing we knew was helpful anyway, is helpful in an empirical sense and that’s great. MAE: Totally. Casey, for anybody who might not know what CBT is, would you be willing to…? CASEY: Thank you. CBT here is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is one of the most common and effective forms of talk therapy you would do with a therapist. It focuses on what some maladaptive, unhelpful thought patterns are and helps you change them. MAE: And that's coming from a psych major, right, Casey? CASEY: That's right. I talk all about that in my book, Debugging Your Brain. It's funny, but you're flipping the script here. Usually we do this to our guests. MAE: [laughter] Great! CASEY: Love it. JAMEY: There's another project, Mae that I know that you've worked on that. I'm a little bit surprised that you haven't brought up yet, but I'm going to bring it up, which is your Mutual Aid program. MAE: Thank you. JAMEY: I think that when you are talking about doing something to make an impact on the world, like that was the first thing I thought of since I know you're involved with that and I would love to hear you talk about it. MAE: Yes. Thank you. Thanks for bringing that up and I did want to talk about that and I was looking forward to hearing what you have to say about that topic as well. So when the pandemic started, you may have seen these, or become involved, but there was a whole bunch of spreadsheets starting like Google Sheets of people who had some needs and people who wanted to offer some things. Google spreadsheets are really easy first pass for people with low tech skills and no budget to just come together. But I started being invited to all these different spreadsheets from around the country that include people's name, address, phone number, CashApp name, their exact vulnerabilities and identities, and current struggles in a spreadsheet that's downloadable. It really freaked me out and I started coding that day about how can we start to do something to make these people not have to have their identity so exposed and through like WeCamp networks, Ruby for Good networks, and different Slacks I'm in of varying programmers, I started saying, “Does anybody else want to get involved?” and several people did. So we have built a platform to support mutual aid groups and what we did immediately was find some groups to figure out what their needs were instead of just what we might imagine. They were doing a lot of, we call it dispatch moderated setups where people fill out a form and then volunteers read the forms and then match people and do all the communication manually, but not having peer-to-peer things go on. The system was originally designed to support that dispatch moderated set up and once people started to go back to work in the fall and there weren't as many people able to devote as much time to volunteer, and as varying groups, especially ones that hadn't been around as long, realized they would probably need a lot more training in social work, ask things just to be more effective and figure out how to route people correctly within their community to services that might be able to help them a little more. Since the fall, we've to coding peer-to-peer solution. We have several different mutual aid groups around the country and right now, most closely working with groups in Michigan and New York state, just because that's where our networks are. Getting to launch some peer-to-peer stuff, but mutual aid itself has become a buzzword and like, what is that anyway? [chuckles] So that topic I love talking about. There's like a mutual aid saying, “Solidarity, not charity.” The whole thing is we're all in it together and we're not going to rely on different structures, or institutions that were set up most often in ways that institutionalized various forms of oppression. Just empowering people to connect with each other, have stronger networks, and build more resiliency is what's up with it, but mutual aid has been around for over a 100 years, at least as a term and a thing, but it generally, almost always springs from communities that have been disenfranchised. So when the pandemic started and a lot of new groups formed, not everybody had already checked what's already happening and a lot of different people, especially in communities of color, were surprised by like, they didn't hear that term, that's just what they do. There's been a big—along with everything else—learning of how those structures already were in place and how we can continue to grow them, and support each other as we navigate this world we're in. Jamey, I was going to ask you about your involvement with mutual aid, too and if you had anything to add to that definition. JAMEY: I was going to say that I really liked what you said about finding new ways around things that have been institutionalized. Because I think one of the things that's so beautiful about mutual aid is the way that people can help each other realize what kind of help is available and what kind of help they even might need. A story that I really like to tell that and I think about a lot is I have a friend who's involved in mutual aid in Buffalo, where I'm from and he does repair work and just is very handy in that way. So he does a lot of mutual aid repair for people and he told me that the way that this started for him is that there was a request in our mutual aid Facebook group where someone was saying, “I really need $200, or something like this because my window is broken and I need to buy a space heater because it's been getting really cold. So I need this money to buy a heater and all of this stuff.” My friend came in and was like, “Okay, but what if I just fixed your window?” It had not occurred to this person that she could ask for that. MAE: Oh, boy. JAMEY: She was coming up with all these solutions around it. So this idea of like coming together as a community and saying, ‘Yeah, I can help you, but can we help a little bit closer to the source than what you even just asked for?” I think is really powerful. MAE: Yes. I love that, Jamey. Yeah, it's the closer we can be in community with each other, the easier those asks are. Something that you said about figuring out your own needs, there is a thing and it's related a little bit to some of the other topics we've talked about where there's like the white savior thing. People want to do something for people who they think are less – they have less than them. There's a power dynamic there and mutual aid—mutual, that's the main part. So you really aren't doing mutual aid if you're not accepting help. All of us have things that we could be supportive with and things to offer. I love also having that not – there's a lot of mutual aid that is about just giving money and/or like reparation stuff. But I love when money isn't part of the equation and quantification of value isn't part of the equation. It's just like, “I have something to give and I could use something and this is how we're going to stay in community and in network and lower those barriers to have offers and asks be even easier in the future.” JAMEY: For sure. I think it's about meeting people where they are, too, because I agree about some programs are focused on money, and some people have money and can put that into the community and that's great. But maybe they don't have time to show up and do these things and other people might think like, “Well, how can I help because I don't have money,” but they have time, or they have skills. I think that everyone bringing in and saying, “This is what I have to offer with what's going on in my life right now,” and maybe it's money, or maybe it's time, or maybe it's something else that I didn't even think of that they're going to offer. [chuckles] MAE: Totally. When you were saying that, I just got a chill thinking if really every single person just that question you just said, “How can I help?” If we all did one thing, this is how to effect broad change. CASEY: How can people find the mutual aid groups near them? If they just search mutual aid, that probably gets a bunch, but they don't all say it, right? MAE: Yeah. It's a really great point. There have been some different efforts to link together mutual aid networks and there's a map, but not every network is on it because not every network even knows about it. [chuckles] So because mutual aid is so grassroots, it's not – CASEY: Right. MAE: A number of them have form 501(c)(3) is just to not be doing illegal financial transaction stuff that is problematic by having all this money go through their personal Venmo, or something. But that is what a lot of people have done. So mostly there's the Google option and the term mutual aid is getting used more and more, but there are some other phrases. I'm forgetting it right now. What's the name when they hand out medical supplies? Harm reduction, there's a bunch of harm reduction efforts. Also, in cities where there are a lot of homeless shelters, there's things around encampments and like becoming community with those folks to advocate. Another piece, major piece of mutual aid that I forgot to name is it inherently has a political engagement component in it. So one of the reasons why it is this solidarity thing is you're seeing all the humans as inherently equally valuable and that you're identifying the structural things that led to people having a different experience, or a different privilege, or a different outcome to what's going down for them. So then by identifying those together, you try to change the system to not create the problem. Whereas, to go back to that phrase charity, a lot of charities—which are awesome, I'm not trying to knock those—but a lot of them have more of a it's your fault, or shortcoming, or need that has put you where you are. Mutual aid is the way in which this is all rigged and on purpose, or not on purpose, or just the impact of the structures is how you ended up where you are so let's rejigger. JAMEY: A phrase that comes up a lot, in the protest community specifically, is, “We keep us safe and we say that at protests about security, medics and things, and wearing masks—I've seen people start to use that phrase. But I think that that's a phrase that really speaks to like what mutual aid is about, too. It's about we are doing something together for ourselves as a community, and we're not looking for something from the outside that comes in a hierarchical structure. We're just making this decision as a group of people to take care of ourselves and our neighbors and I think that's what I really love about it. [chuckles] MAE: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. And back to what you were saying, Casey, the how can people find those things? There's also just, “Hey, I've got some extra seeds,” or put a cabinet in your yard with some food in it and say free food. You don't have to associate with a “mutual aid group” to do mutual aid. It's like, that's just a blanket term, basically that offers a little bit of a cue about what those people might be up to. But it's really, in whatever way you are sharing and developing relationships with your fellow community members. This is mutual aid. JAMEY: I thought of another example of that. MAE: Yay! JAMEY: We have this in Buffalo, but I think it's a thing that we're seeing other places, too. Separate from our mutual aid network, we have a Facebook Buy Nothing group. MAE: yes. JAMEY: And people will post like, “Oh, I have this, I'm going to get rid of it. Someone come pick it up.” “Oh, I was going to donate these spoons from my kitchen. Someone can have them.” When you said seeds, that's the kind of thing you'll see on Buy Nothing and I think that's been a revolution in anything even separately from it, because I do think that money plays a part in a lot of mutual aid stuff, because folks need money for things. But in Buy Nothing, it's pointedly without money and I think that that's a very fun and cool dynamic, too. MAE: Totally. Yes. I have a couple of things I would love to say them. One is that the bringing up Facebook has started to support mutual aid. But also, I don't know if y'all have seen The Social Dilemma and just become aware of all of this tracking that's going down. There's something that is another motivator for us on the mutual aid repo is this is open source code that anybody who wants to use it can stand up their own instance and if you partner with us, connect with us, we will help you if you need us to. But it's intentionally not a multitenant app so that people have small datasets that they own and there isn't like this aggregate thing going on about local data. It’s basically a small tech for the win, which is also pretty mutual aid-y. Our group, like the programmers who are most involved, meet a couple times a week and know about what's going on in each other's lives. We are mutual aid for each other, too. The energy of what, how, who we are, and what we're doing is getting put into the thing that we're building that hopefully has that same effect. So there's this nice spiral thing going on in there that I'm proud of. I think there's a lot about what we referenced earlier, institutionalization of oppression, that has to be like, there are ways to create other options and they take cultivation of and building new structures. Stuff like this as an example of that and an experiment in it. Another one that it reminded me of is when I was younger, I used to go to rainbow gatherings. I don't know if y'all know about these. It's a super hippie thing and there's regional gatherings, but there's a national gathering at a national forest every year. All these people just show up and then they build earthen stoves. There's a bunch of people who do not participate in main society; they just go to these different gatherings and travel around as a… There's plenty more to talk about rainbow tribe and even the usage of that word tribe and what goes down. I'm not going to try to touch into that, but something I love about it is there's a whole exchange row where people just sit out with things and there's no money. You're not allowed to use money. I think I was 18 when I went to my first one and I was just like, “What? This is amazing.” Like, just to imagine my life not through a currency, or that evaluated exchange, it was so inspiring to me. It still is and so, some of what you said, Jamey, reminded me of that. JAMEY: I relate a lot to that, too. Burning Man events are also no money allowed. MAE: Ah. JAMEY: When I first entered that space, that was one of the things that really spoke to me about it too. In fact, it's also no barter allowed in Burning Man. It's a purely gifting economy where if you give someone something, a lot of times they become inspired to gift you something back right there and there's an exchange that happens. But culturally, the point of it is that there's not supposed to be any expectation of exchange when you gift something to somebody. MAE: Do you know about that restaurant in San Francisco that is free, but you pay for the person behind you if you want? JAMEY: I don't know about one in San Francisco specifically, but we have a program like that similar in Buffalo. It's called Big – I'm going to look it up so I can link it up. MAE: How about you, Casey? I’m getting excited so I keep saying things. CASEY: I’m reflecting on the award mutual aid a lot through all this. I like this idea that mutual aid as it is in action and that mutual aid groups do mutual aid, but individuals can, too. MAE: Yeah. CASEY: That's a pretty powerful theme. It makes the term more approachable, especially since it's a jargon word lately. It's just grassroots-y helping each other out, however that looks. MAE: Totally. CASEY: I'm thinking a lot about what communities I'm a part of, too, that naturally have that phenomenon. It's like, I'm queer, I’m in a lot of queer groups. I’m in interest groups like musician groups and they help each other do stuff. They carpool to the practice or anything like that that’s this. There's also a formal ones like D.C. Ward 6 has mutual aid groups that are named that. That's its own thing. And then even my Facebook friends, I just post like, “I have a crackpot, who wants it?” MAE: Totally! CASEY: But before today, I might not have used the word mutual aid to describe any of that because I'm not part of a formal approved mutual aid group, which is not the point of that term. MAE: [laughs] Yeah. CASEY: Just people helping people. MAE: When I was thinking about getting into tech, I, as a pretty outspoken woman who will address injustice directly if I see it, when I see it in myself and others, I wasn't sure if that was going to be a place for me. I had had some not awesome experiences with tech people before I was in tech. So I reached out to a bunch of people who were already in the biz and they spent hours talking to me about their experiences, answering all of my questions, and offering to help me. As I took the leap and went to code school and participated in a meetups and just, everywhere is mutual aid in programming, everybody is helping each other. “I have a question,” “I'm wondering about this.” This podcast is mutual aid, in my opinion. It's been really inspiring for me to be a programmer because I feel a part of a worldwide network of people who try to, especially with mixing in the open source piece, build things and offer what they can. It's awesome. CASEY: I have a challenge for people listening to this podcast. This week, I'd like you to help someone and accept help from someone, both in the spirit of mutual aid. MAE: Yes! CASEY: I'm not surprised; accepting help might be the harder half for a lot of people. MAE: Yes. JAMEY: I think that's true. [chuckles] MAE: One way I've said it before is that that is your gift to the giver. The giver doesn't get to be a giver [chuckles] unless you accept the gift from them and that people can, including myself at times, tend to over-give and that is its own challenge. So if you need to stay in the giving frame, [chuckles] you can be like, “All right, well, I'm providing this opportunity to the other person.” [chuckles] CASEY: Sometimes I've playfully pushed on an idea to people. I'm trying to help them and they say, “No, no, no. I can't accept your help because I would be indebted,” and I'm like, “You would deprive me of this good feeling I would get from helping you? Really?” [laughter] MAE: Yeah. CASEY: Thinking of it a little bit, I'm not like – [overtalk] JAMEY: [inaudible]. CASEY: Right. I'm just thinking that way a little bit, flipping it, helps some people accept the help then. MAE: Yeah. JAMEY: I think that people have so much harder of a time of extending love and empathy, and forgiveness, and all of these nice things that we might really value extending to other people, but not to ourselves. MAE: Yo, that's for real, Jamey and still on this theme, the seeing each other as equals as in community. My Mom used to say this great phrase, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” She was raised Catholic so it's got that in there, but I love that of this could definitely be me. There's a cool Buddhist practice that I learned from Pema Chödrön about you extend release of suffering to others and then you widen the circle to include yourself in it, but you don't start there. So similar to how you're saying, Jamey, that that is a challenge for a lot of people, it's just built into that practice where when you can't give yourself a break, [chuckles] imagining others in that situation and then trying to include yourself is an angle on it. JAMEY: I like that. I think also related to Casey's example of his joke. It's thinking about how what you do affects other people, I think sometimes we're better at that and if you're treating yourself bad, especially if you're in one of these tight mutual communities. If you're treating yourself bad, that's affecting the people around you, too. They don't want to see you being treated bad and they don't want to see you being miserable and they want the best for you. When you're preventing yourself from having the best, that's affecting the whole community, too. MAE: Yo! JAMEY: I hadn’t really thought about it like that until right now. So thank you, Casey, for your joke. CASEY: Powerful thought. Yeah. Like the group, your people, your team, they need you to be your best. So if you want to help your team, sometimes the best way is to help yourself. It's not selfish. It's the opposite of selfish. MAE: Exactly. Another thing I've heard a bunch of the different activist groups, some phrasing that people have started to use is collective liberation and no one's free till we're all free and if we are suffering, the other people are suffering and vice versa. So figuring out how to not be so cut off from ourselves, or others, or that suffering and seeing them as intertwined, I think is one of the ways to unlock the lack of empathy that a lot of people experience. CASEY: There's a really cool visualization I like that that reminds me of. It's called the Parable of the Polygons and you can drag around triangles and squares. You can see how segregation ends up happening, if you have certain criteria set up in the heuristics of how they move. Or if some people want to be around diverse people, it ends up not happening, or it ends up recovering and getting more integrated and mixed. It's so powerful because you can manipulate the diagrams. There's a whole series of diagrams. Look it up, it's the Parable of the Polygons. MAE: Cool! That is awesome. CASEY: So I want to be around people who aren't like me and that helps. It helps with this phenomenon and the more people do that, the better. MAE: Yeah, and having grown up in a small city, that's pretty homogenous on multiple levels. When I went to college and learned that people thought differently, my world was this very rigidly defined, this is how things are. [chuckles] My biker dad, that's still his way, his lens. When you start to experience people who are not like yourself, you let that challenge your assumptions, then you end up transformed by that. I was a double major in college—biochemistry and women's studies—and I remember being in an organic chemistry class and the professor said, “Well, if that's too hard for you, you can go take a sociology class.” I raised my hand and was like, “My sociology classes challenge me on every single thing I think about the world. Your class requires me to provide rote memorization, which I'm awesome at luckily and that's how I ended up in your class.” But that is not harder. That's that story. CASEY: The last episode that I recorded was with Andrea Goulet. One of the things that kept coming up was the old-timey programming interview questions were all about math. MAE: Yes. CASEY: Which isn't necessarily what programming is about. That reminds me here of rote memorization in that class versus complex systems thinking in sociology. MAE: Totally! CASEY: With these two choices, I might choose a sociology person to do architecture work in my software than the rote memorization person. MAE: Totally, definitely, every time. Yeah, and that's a different lens that I have coming in to the industry from having been an administrator for so many years is our perception as programmers about what's going to be helpful is very different than someone whose day job is to do repetitive work like very, very, very simple apps. When I was in code school, I really wanted us to figure out how to make even our homework assignments be available for nonprofits and that's how my whole system in business ended up getting spun up. Oh, it was before that. My job before that, when I interviewed, I said, “Well, how long do you need someone here for? How long would you need me to commit?” and he said, “A year,” and I said, “All right, well, I'm not sure I'm the best candidate for you because I'm going to go to grad school and get a degree and be a consultant as businesses and nonprofits.” And then I was at that job for 8 and a half years before I went to code school. [laughs] But the thing about what could be of use just requires so much humility from programmers to defer to the actual employees and the workers about their experience and what could help them. Because so often, we think that we're the ones with the awesome idea and we can just change their lives and disrupt the thing. A lot of the best ideas come from the people themselves. I went to a project management training in Puerto Rico and it was a very rarefied environment of people who could pay for people to get PMP training, or whatever. The people that were in my cohort were factory project planners and not a single one of them knew anyone who worked in the factory. Like, they didn't get to know them as part of that project and they didn't have anyone in their sphere and my parents were paper mill workers. So when I'm sitting there and listening to these people talk about the worker and their lack of wherewithal, I guess, there'll be a gracious way to say it right now, I was just appalled. I try to take that into any time we are building software in a way that honors all people. CASEY: Yeah. My favorite leaders are the ones that listen to their employees and the users. I am happy with my roles in leadership positions, but the thing that makes me happy with myself is listening and if I ever lose that, I don't trust myself to be a good leader, or manager. MAE: Totally. CASEY: I could. I know it's easy when you get promoted to stop listing as much. It's the incentive structure of the system. I wouldn't blame myself if I lost it, but knowing I value it and don't want to lose it helps me hold on to my propensity to listen. MAE: Yes, Casey! Totally that. CASEY: Sometimes people have asked me, “What makes you think you'd be good at leading this?” That is literally my answer is like, “Well, I won't forget to listen.” MAE: Yeah. JAMEY: I think that it's weird the way that people create this hierarchy of good ideas and better ideas and which idea is better and put that kind of value judgment on it. When really, when you're dealing with software and trying to create something that works for the people that are using it. It's not about whether your idea is good or bad, it's about whether it's the right one for that group of people. My background, my first tech industry job was in agriculture and so, all of our customers were farmers and people that worked at farms, To admit I don't know what it's like to work on a farm in that way, it's not a value judgment about whether you're smart, or good at programming, which people act like it is. It's just a true fact about whether, or not you've ever had that experience. [laughter] CASEY: Sometimes I run workshops where we think about all the pros and cons to different ideas and when we need it, we pull out a matrix. We get a spreadsheet that has columns and rows, and rows are the ideas. A lot of decisions are made with one column, naturally like, “What's the best?” You just say like, “1 to 10, this one's the best.” But when we break it out, we have lots of columns, lots of variables like, oh, this one's easier to build, this one's higher impact. And when we break it out even further, we can weight those columns then do the matrix math and people like that, actually. Even people who are math averse. They can fill in the numbers in each of the cells and then they trust the spreadsheet to do the thing. That gets us on the same page. It depends on the context, which columns matter, which factors are important and that can completely change the situation. Even if you all agree on this one's harder than that one, the outcome could be completely different. The columns, or the context in my matrix model. JAMEY: We’re reading at work 99 Bottles of Object-Oriented Programming, which Mae knows because we work together, which we haven't said yet on the show. But we're doing a book club. Your description of the matrix columns and what is relevant reminded me of the thesis of that book because it's like, there are tradeoffs. It's not that one tradeoff is necessarily more valuable than another tradeoff, it's just like what makes sense for this context that you're using and building it in, then you have to think about it in a nuanced way if you want to come up with a nuanced answer. MAE: I am so grateful to and inspired by Sandi Metz. Her ability to distill these concepts into common sense terms is so genius and moving, welcoming, accessible. So grateful, so really glad you brought that up, Jamey. One of the things that really stuck out from various talks of hers that I've been to is even if you aren't changing that code, that code does not need to change. That's bad code, but it works. That's great code, [chuckles] like working code, and splitting some of the bikeshedding that we do on code quality with business impact is a teeter-totter that I really appreciate. JAMEY: I like the way it puts value on everyone and what they're working on. Because my big takeaway from starting to read this book has been that I tend to write fairly simple code because that's what I find easy to do. [chuckles] I always felt well, other people write more complicated code than me because they know more about X, Y, and Z than me and I don't know enough about it to write something that elegant, or that complex, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I had placed this value judgment on other people's code over mine and to read about code that's dissecting the value judgments we put on it and determining hey, just because maybe it's not always the best thing to overengineer something Maybe it doesn't have to be because you don't feel smart enough to overengineer it. Maybe it can just be because that's not the right choice. [chuckles] MAE: Cool. JAMEY: I thought that was really valuable to think about. MAE: Love that, Jamey. JAMEY: Boost people's confidence, I hope because I think a lot of people need their confidence boosted. [chuckles] MAE: Yo, I had no idea what I was getting into as far as the mental health challenge of being a programmer. To maintain one's self-respect, especially as an adult who was successful in her career prior to then be like, there is a whole thing about the adult learner. But to have your entire day be dealing with things that are either broken, or don't exist yet, that's your whole day. Nothing works ever basically and the moment it does, you move on to the things that aren't, or don't exist. So it's so critical to try to remember and/or learn how to celebrate those small wins that then somehow feel like insulting that you're celebrating this is just some simple things. [laughs] And then it's like, why are we making a big fanfare? But those microjoys—I've never heard that phrase as opposed to microaggression, or something. Microjoys, if we could give each other those, it could go a long because the validation is a very different experience than I have seen, or heard about, or experienced in any other industry. It's a real challenge. JAMEY: Not only is everything broken, or doesn't exist. But once it's working, you never hear about it again until it's broken again. [chuckles] MAE: Yeah. [laughs] CASEY: That’s so true and it's such an anti-pattern. At USCIS, you would have every developer, who was interested, see an interview—we’re working on an interview app—watch the user use the app every month at least, if not more and they loved those. They saw the context, they saw the thing they just built be used. That's positive feedback that everyone deserves, in my opinion and it's just a cultural idea that engineers don't get to see users, but they should. They do at some companies and yours can, too. MAE: Yes, Casey! We are working on that at True Link financial as well. Figuring out how to work that more in so that we all feel part of the same team more and we're not like the IT crowd and in the basement and all we have to say is, “Hello, have you tried turning it on and off again?” [laughs] JAMEY: Casey, I love that because even as you were telling that story, I was like, “Yeah, it's useful to see how people use it because that'll help you make better decisions,” and blah, blah, blah, which I feel strongly about. And then what you actually said at the end was, “and you get satisfaction out of being able to see people using your thing.” I hadn't even thought of that dynamic of it. CASEY: Yeah. It’s both, happier and more effective. That's the thing I say a lot. These user interviews make you happier doing your job and make you more effective at doing them both. How can you not? MAE: Yeah. JAMEY: What’s not to like? [laughter] It's true, though about knowing that people use your app. I started in consulting and a lot of the things I worked on felt a little soul crushing and not because I thought that they were bad, or unethical in any way, but just like, who is this for? Like, who cares about this? One of my most joyful experiences was one of the other products that wasn't quite like that, that I worked on when I was in consulting was an app called Scorebuilders and it was for physical therapy students have a specific standardized test they have to take and so, it's study prep for this specific test. There's like two, or three and we had different programs for them. And then I, a few years after that was, in physical therapy myself, because I have back problems and they have interns from college helping them in the physical therapy office that I went to and they were talking about studying for their test, or whatever. I was like, “Oh, that's funny. I haven't thought about that in a while. Do you use Scorebuilders to study in?” They were like, “Oh yeah. We all use it. That's what you use if you're in this program,” and I was like, “Oh, I built that,” and they were like, “What?!” They were calling all of the other people from the next room to be like, “Guess what?” and I'm like, “This is literally the best thing that's ever happened.” [laughs] MAE: Yay! CASEY: Yeah! That's such a good story in the end, but it's such a bad story. You never got to meet anyone like that earlier, really? JAMEY: Yeah. CASEY: That's common, that’s everywhere, but that's a shame. You can change that. [overtalk] JAMEY: I just realized since it was consulting and not like, I didn't work for Scorebuilders. CASEY: Oh, I’m sure. It's even more hard. JAMEY: Yeah. CASEY: I'm so glad you got that. JAMEY: Thank you. It happened like 5 years ago and I still think about it all the time. [laughs] Well, we've been having a great discussion, but we've pretty much reached the point in the show where it's time to do reflections and that's when everyone will say something that really stood out to them about our conversation, maybe a call-to-action, something that they want to think more about. So, Casey, do you want to start? CASEY: Yeah. I said this earlier, but this is my big takeaway is the word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Especially since it is, by definition, grassroots-y. There is no formal stamp of approval on a mutual aid group that formalizes it. That's pretty powerful. I'll be thinking about what communities I'm part of that do that through that lens this week and I challenge listeners to help and be helped sometime this week, both. JAMEY: I think one thing that I'm going to really try and keep in mind is what we were talking about, valuing yourself and the way that that helps the community. I really liked Mae’s story about including yourself after other people and using that way to frame it in your mind. Because I think that that will make it easier and thinking about like, this is something I struggle with all the time. I think a lot of us do. So I think that I really want to take that one into my life. Next time I realize I'm treating myself unfairly, I want to think, “Well, how is this affecting the other people around me who probably don't want to see me to do that?” [chuckles] MAE: Thanks, Jamey. Yeah. I have so many answers of reflections! The one I know I'm going to use immediately is this most recent one of engaging with users using the things you're building as a reward and a way to be able to get microjoy. I'm definitely going to use that word now more, microjoys, but I agree with both of what you said, too. JAMEY: Well, Mae thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us. This was really great and I think people will really appreciate it. MAE: Yay. I loved it! Thank you both so much. What a treat! CASEY: I feel like we could keep talking for hours. JAMEY: I know. [laughter] This is how I feel after a lot of my episodes. [laughter] Which is always good, I guess, but. Special Guest: Mae Beale.
237: Empathy is Critical with Andrea Goulet
01:13 - Andrea’s Superpower: Distilling Complexity * Approaching Copywriting in a Programmatic Way * Word-land vs Abstract-land 09:00 - “Technical” vs “Non-Technical” * This or That Thinking 16:20 - Empathy is Critical * Communication Artifacts * Audience/User Impact * Programmer Aptitude Test (PAT) 33:00 - Reforming Hiring Practices and Systems * Core Values * Exercism.io (https://exercism.io/) * Retrospectives 39:28 - Performance Reviews * Continuous Feedback * Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan (https://www.bravenewwork.com/) * Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (https://www.amazon.com/Team-Teams-Rules-Engagement-Complex/dp/1591847486) * Continuous Improvement & Marginal Gains “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” ~ Arthur Ashe Empathy In Tech (https://www.empathyintech.com/) Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/) Reflections: Mando: Empathy is being able to view and identify other perspectives. Jess: Help happens when you have empathy for individuals who aren’t the great majority of people using the software. Casey: The best way to develop empathy for someone else is to get their feedback. Do it during an interview! Andrea: Diving deeper than code is valuable! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JESSICA: Good morning and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 237. I'm Jessica Kerr and I'm happy to be here today with my friend, Mando Escamilla! MANDO: Hey, Jess. Thanks. I am happy to be here with my friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey and we're all here with Andrea Goulet. Andrea is a sought-after keynote speaker for conferences around the world, empowering audiences to deepen their technical skills for understanding and communicating with others. She is best known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, a framework that helps software engineers anchor their decisions and deliverables on the perspectives of the people who will be impacted by what they create. Andrea is a co-founder of Corgibytes, a software consultancy that helps organizations pay down technical debt and modernize legacy systems. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist. Welcome, Andrea. ANDREA: Hi, welcome! Nice to be here. CASEY: We always like to start with a question, which I think you’re prepared for, that is what is your superpower, Andrea, and how did you acquire it? ANDREA: Yeah! First of all, I just love that y'all ask this. I think it's just such a nice way to get to know different people. I was thinking about this because you sent it a little bit ago and I was thinking maybe empathy, given the work I do. But I don't actually think that's it. I feel like I'm constantly trying to learn more about empathy, but I do think that what my superpower is, is distilling complexity. So I went back and looked at what the thread is of all the recommendations I've got on LinkedIn and things like that. It's not something that I would necessarily say that I noticed, but it's something that other people have noticed about me. The idea of taking a really abstract and big, gnarly, complex topic, and being able to distill it down to its essence and then communicate either what the importance is, or what the impact is to other people. I think that's why I've gravitated towards big, gnarly things like legacy code. [chuckles] Because what motivates me is impact and how do we have the work that we do make as big of an impact as possible? So the way I got into software was really a twisty and windy road. I started out as a copywriter and I think that's where the distilling complexity comes down because I would sit with clients and learn all about their businesses. And then I would write typically, a website, or some kind of marketing material and they would say, “You said what was in my head and I couldn't say it.” JESSICA: Wow. ANDREA: And when I got into software, I had a friend of mine from high school, Scott, who's my co-founder at Corgibytes, he came up to me because I had been writing about my writing and he said, “You're not a writer, you're actually a programmer because the way that your brain works, you’re thinking in terms of inputs and manipulating data and outputs, and that's exactly what a programmer does.” So then, he wanted to fix legacy code for a living. I didn't even know what that was at that point, thought it was a good thing and I found that my ability to both walk in and understand not just the syntax of what's going on, but the business challenges and how everything links together. With that, you can create a sense of cohesion on a team and getting different people to work together and different people to see each other's points of view, because when you're able to distill a perspective over here and say, “Okay, well, this is what this person's trying to say,” and still, this over here. “Okay, I think this is what this person's trying to say.” I feel like a lot of times I am kind of like a translator, but it's taken me a long time. I've been in software 12 years now and I still have massive imposter syndrome like, I don't belong because I'm not the fastest person on the keyboard. I really struggle with working memory. My visualization is really a struggle, but I do really great in an ensemble. When I started ensemble programming—sometimes it's referred to as mob programming—I was like, “I can do this. Oh my gosh, this makes sense and I belong.” I think just over the years, little things like hearing the joke – I was at a conference, Jess, I think this may have been ETE when you and I connected, but I heard a joke and it was, I think Phil Carlton had first said it and it was like, “There's only two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and naming things,” and then somebody else said, “Off-by-1 errors.” I remember I was like, “Y'all think naming things is hard?” Like, help me understand how that's hard because that’s – JESSICA: [inaudible]? Oh my gosh, that's hard. ANDREA: Yeah, and to me, it just comes so naturally. I think that's kind of the thing is figuring out where is your trait, where's your skillset. I remember when I first started doing open source contributions, I haven't done those in a long time, but just going in and modifying the language on help messages and turning them from passive to active voice. They got accepted, it was on some high-profile projects, and it was like, I didn't really feel like I was even doing much and I still feel like, “Is that even a big deal?” But I think that's kind of the definition of a superpower a little bit is that – JESSICA: Yeah, it’s easy for you. [laughs] ANDREA: You don't recognize that it's hard for other people. Yeah, and so it's neat now that it's like I'm starting to come into my own and leaning into that, and then helping other people see that the way that I approach naming things, the way I approach copywriting is actually in a very programmatic way. It's leaning on frameworks. It's leaning on patterns that I use over time. I know, Casey, you and I have talked last week about like when I first go to a conference like using open-ended questions versus closed-ended questions and these little kind of communication hacks that I've developed over the years. So now putting those together in a framework to help other people remember that when we're coding, we're not coding for a computer, we're coding through a computer for other people. The computer is just like a code is just a tool. It's a powerful tool. But a lot of times – CASEY: I have a question for you, Andrea. ANDREA: Yeah. CASEY: About that, I find myself switching gears between word land and abstract land. So if I'm coding and I'm not thinking of words, the naming is hard, but sometimes I can switch gears in a different head space. It's like a different me and then I'm naming things really well. Especially if I'm looking at someone else's code, I don't have to be an abstract land; they did that part already. Do you find yourself switching between the two? ANDREA: Oh, all the time. Yeah, and especially, too, when you're writing prose. There's two different kind of aspects of your brain. There's the creative conceptual side and then there's the analytical rational side and everybody has both. So it does require you to come out of the abstract side in that and then move into more of the analytical space, which is why I love pairing. I love coding as a group because then that way, it's like the mental model is shared and so, I can stay in my world of naming things really well, or I don't know that we need to be that precise if we try to – like, when I was in one group and they were trying to have a timing thing and it was like down to the millisecond and I was like, “Y'all, we don't need to be that precise. We just need to have this check once every 10 minutes,” and that saved like 6 hours of work. Just being able to say that thing and be the checkpoint. JESSICA: Yeah. Someone has to be super down in the details of what to type next and it helps to have someone else thinking about it at the broader perspective of why are we doing this? ANDREA: Yeah, and that's me, typically and I love that role, but it's very different than I think what goes through people's minds when they envision a software developer. JESSICA: Yeah, maybe they envisioned the things that software developers do that other people don't. Typing curly braces. ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: I still think of that when I'm doing it. When I think of myself as a software developer, I think of myself as the person who hasn't gotten up from their desk in 5 hours and just hunched over, just blazing fast hacking on something that probably is kind of dumb. [laughter] But when I don't spend my day like that, I don't really feel exactly like I've been doing my job and it's something that I struggle with because I know that's not the job in its totality by any means and it doesn't mean that I'm not getting good work done. JESSICA: Not even close to most of the job. MANDO: Not even close to most of the job, you're exactly right. JESSICA: Like you said, if you're sitting there for 5 hours by yourself, hunched over your computer, you're probably hacking on something dumb. MANDO: Right. [laughter] JESSICA: We had gotten off on a tangent somewhere without someone to be like, “Why are we doing this again?” MANDO: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. ANDREA: Well, and I think that that has been a personal challenge of mine as well. I know there was a really flashbulb moment for me. Scott and I have been running our business together for a couple of years. We had gotten on our first podcast and he was telling our origin story and he used the phrase, “Andrea, she's the non-technical founder.” When I heard it, I was like, “How dare you? I have for 2 years been sitting right next to you,” and then he said, “Well, that's the term you use to describe yourself all the time. We had been in a sales meeting right before I recorded that podcast and that's literally the words you use to introduce yourself. So once you start calling yourself technical, I'll follow suit.” JESSICA: Wow. ANDREA: It really made me think and I think some of it is because whenever I go to conferences, I don't look like other people who code especially 12 years ago. I don't talk like the people who are typically stereotypical developers and the first question I would get asked, probably 25 to 40% of the time from people I met were, “Hi! Are you technical, or non-technical?” JESSICA: Really? ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: Ugh. JESSICA: Huh. ANDREA: And that would be the first thing out of the gate. At the time, I didn't have the kind of mental awareness to go, “I'm at a technical conference. I think you can assume I'm technical.” The fact is I was scared to call myself technical and over the years, I'm just like, “What does that mean to be technical and why do we define people by you are either technical, or you have nothing?” Non-technical, you have zero technical skills, you don't belong. JESSICA: So after you had that conversation with Scott, did you switch to calling yourself technical? Did you change your language? ANDREA: It has been a journey. I became very conscious of not using non-technical. I'll sometimes then say like, “I struggle with syntax and I'm really, really good at these things.” When I phrase things that way, or “I have engineers who are so much better and have much deeper expertise in Docker and Kubernetes than I do. I'm really good at explaining the big picture and why this happens.” So it becomes, I think what we do in software is that because we're so used to thinking in binaries, because that's the way we need to make our code work—true/false, if/else, yes/no—and that pattern naturally extends itself into human relationships, too. Because I know that every single person who asked me that question in no way was trying to be rude, or shut me out. I know that the intention behind it was kind and trying to be inclusive. But from my perspective, when half the people walk up to you and go, “Do you belong here?” Then it's like, “I don't know. Do I belong here?” JESSICA: Yeah. ANDREA: So that's an example of how, if you're at a conference saying, “What brings you here?” That's very open-ended and then it gives everybody the chance to say what brings them here and there's no predefined, “Do you fit in this bucket, or that bucket? Are you part of us, or are you part of them?” JESSICA: It's open to surprise. ANDREA: Mm hm and I think that's something that I am really good at. That's my superpower is let's see the complexity and then let's see the patterns and let's figure out how we can all get good work done together. But you can't see the complexity unless you take a step back. JESSICA: Yeah, and yet Scott noticed that when you are thinking that way, you are thinking like a programmer. Because while software starts by getting us used to thinking in binaries—I should say programming. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: It’s just thinking of binaries, as soon as you get up to software and software systems, you have to think in complexity. ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: And like you were saying, Andrea, I find myself nowadays better recognizing when I'm falling into that trap when I'm not talking about work stuff. When I find myself saying, “Well, it's this, or it's this.” It's like, “Is it really this, or this?” JESSICA: Are these the only options? ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: Yeah. Do I have to eat Thai food, or pizza tonight, or could I just eat ice cream, or a salad, or…? [laughs] ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: You know what I mean? It's a silly example, but I don't know, there's something about doing this for a while that I find that kind of this, or that thinking wiring itself into my brain. JESSICA: Yeah. ANDREA: Yeah. Well, and I think that that's normal and that's human. We operate on heuristics. There's the whole neurons that fire together wire together and if you're spending the majority of your time in this thought pattern, adopting something else can be a challenge. So to me, it's like trying to describe how the way I navigate the world in being able to name things well and being able to talk to new people, connect dots, see patterns that I rely on frameworks just as much as I do when I code and trying to figure out what are those things. What are those things? JESSICA: Yeah, because you don't have to import that top level file from the framework in order to use it. So it's not explicit that you're using it. ANDREA: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that's been my challenge is that as Scott is like, “Well, help me understand.” I'm like, “I, uh. I don't know. I do this.” That was where I nailed on empathy as really critical and it's been fascinating because when I first started about 5 years writing and talking about empathy in software, the first thing I noticed were all the patterns. I was like, “A really well-written commit message, that's empathy.” That is taking the time to document your rationale so that it's easier for somebody behind you. Refactoring a method so that it's easy to read, deleting the dead code so that it's less burdensome, even logging. Looking at logging in C versus Ruby, it's night and day. JESSICA: Help messages. ANDREA: Yeah. There's a little moment. MANDO: Non-happy path decisions in code. Guardrails. All that stuff. ANDREA: Yeah. So I started thinking in terms of communication artifacts. All of these little things that we're producing are just artifacts of our thinking and you can't produce a communication artifact unless you are considering a perspective. What I noticed, of the perspective, is that a lot of software developers had been trained to take was that of the compiler. I want to make the compiler happy. I want to make the code work. That's a very specific practice of perspective taking that is useful if you're imagining okay, we don't have to get rid of that and we need to add the recognition that the perspectives taking needs to go the compiler into who will be interacting with what you're creating and that is on both the other side of the UI, if there is one, or working on the code that you've written maybe six months from now and that can be your future self. And then also, who will be impacted by the work that you create, because not everybody who is impacted by the decisions that you make will be directly interacting with and when I'm writing content, or that is the framework is getting to know the audiences really well, doing good qualitative research. So that's kind of the difference between the open-ended versus closed-ended questions. Then being able to perspective change and then along the way, there are little communication hacks, but just thinking about every single thing that you produce—and no, I have not come across a communication artifact, or a thing that is produced while coding that is not somehow rooted in empathy. JESSICA: Because it's communication and you can't communicate – [overtalk] ANDREA: It’s all communication. JESSICA: At all without knowing what is going to be received and how that will be interpreted. ANDREA: Yeah. Similar to test-driven development, where we're framing things in terms of unit tests and just thinking about the test before we write the code. In the same way, we're thinking about the perspective of other people—we can still think of the compiler—and anchoring our decisions on how it will impact other people. JESSICA: It's making the compiler happy. That's just table stakes. That's absolute minimum. ANDREA: Yeah. Well, it's been fascinating because this part of this project. So I'm writing a book now, which is super exciting and by far, the hardest thing I've ever done. But one of the things that, because I'm curious, I'm like, “Why? How did we get here? How did we get here where, by all objective measures, I should have been able to go into computer science without a problem and feel like –?” JESSICA: Think of yourself as technical without a problem. ANDREA: Yeah. Why do I still struggle and why did we extract empathy out of this? So looking at the history of it has been fascinating because as the computer science industry grew, there was a moment in the mid-60s. There was a test, like a survey, that went out to just under 1,400 people called the Canon Perry vocational test for computer programmers. It was vocational satisfaction, I think. But it was measuring the satisfaction of programmers and they were trying assess what does a satisfied programmer look like. There were many, many problems with the methodology of this, including the people who they didn't define who a programmer was, the people self-defined. So it's like, if you felt like you were programmer, then you were a programmer, but there was no objective. Like, this is what a programmer is prior to selecting the audience, the survey respondents and then when they evaluated the results, they only used professional men. They didn't include any professional women in their comparison study. So the women in the study, there are illustrations and the women are not presented as professionals, they are presented as sex objects in a research paper. The scientific programmers, they're the ones who get the girl and she's all swooning. The business programmers are very clearly stated as less than and they're shy. The girl is like, “I don't want you.” JESSICA: That have like comics, or something? ANDREA: It was comics, yeah. They had like comic illustrations in there. Okay, it's a survey, what's the big deal? Well, from 1955 through the mid-90s, there was an aptitude test from IBM called the Programmer Aptitude Test, the PAT. In there, Walter McNamara from IBM, who created it, went out, had empathy, and was like, “Okay, let's talk to our customers, what does a good programmer look like,” and determined that logical reasoning was the number one attribute. Okay, sounds good. But then he said, “Well, if logical reasoning is the most important attitude, then we need to create a timed 1-hour math test.” What's interesting to me is that in that, there is a logical fallacy in and of itself, called a non-sequitur, [chuckles] where it's like all humans are mammals, bingo a mammal. Therefore, bingo is a human. That's an example of a non-sequitur. That's what happened where it was determined logical reasoning is important to computer science and programming. All mathematics is logical reasoning. Therefore, mathematics is the only way to measure the capability that somebody has for logical reasoning. That, saying, “Okay, we don't care about communication skills. We don't care about empathy. We don't care about any of that. Just are you good at math?” And then the PAT’s study—I've been diving into the bowels of the ACM and looking at primary resource documents for the past several months—and there was an internal memo where Charles McNamara referred to the Canon Perry study in 1967 and said, “The PAT was given to 700,000 people last year and next year, we should incorporate these findings into the PAT,” and the PAT became the de facto way to get into computer science. So these are decisions that were made long before me and so, what you end up getting then – and then also in 1968, there was what's called, there was a NATO conference on software engineering and they said, “We really need to bring rigor into computer science. We need to make this very rigorous.” Again, there were no men at this conference. It was about standards and Grace Hopper wasn't even invited, even though she was like – [overtalk] JESSICA: There were no women in the conference. ANDREA: There were no women. JESSICA: No non-men. ANDREA: No non-men, yes. So you start to see stereotypes getting built and one of the stereotypes became, if you look like this and you are good at math, then you are good at programming. I'm very good at logical reasoning, but I struggle to do a time capsule. I have ADHD and that is something that's very, very, very challenging for me. So that coupled with and then you get advertising where it's marketed, too. MANDO: Yeah. ANDREA: So we need to undo all of this. We can recognize, okay, we can refactor all of this, but it takes recognizing the complexity and how did it all come to be and then changing it one thing at a time. CASEY: A lot of what you've just been talking about makes me think about Dungeons and Dragons and Skyrim for a little nerdy segue. ANDREA: Yeah. CASEY: You have skill trees. You could be a really, really good warrior, very good at math, very good at wielding your sword, and then if you measure how good you are at combat by how big your fireball spell can be, how many you can shoot, how accurate you are, you're missing that whole skill tree of ability, of power that you have. ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: What I find so fascinating is when I was going through the computer science program that I never finished and this was like a million years ago. When I was in college, there was a very specific logical reasoning class that you had to take as part of the CS program at UT. But it wasn't a math class, it was a philosophy class and I think that's pretty common that logistics studies fall under schools of philosophy, not the schools of mathematics. So it was really interesting to me that these dudes just completely missed the mark, right? [laughs] ANDREA: It is the definition of irony and not Alanis Morrissette kind of way, right? [chuckles] I think that's the thing it's like – and this isn't to say the Walter McNamara was a bad person like, we all make mistakes. But to me, again, this is about impact and if one, or two people can have the ability to create a test that impacts millions of people across generations to help them feel whether, or not they belong in even contributing to building software. Because I always felt like I was a user of software—I was always a superuser—but for some reason, I felt like the other side of the interface, the command line, it was like Oz. It was like that's where the wizards live and I'm not allowed there. It's like, how do we just tear down that curtain and say, “Y'all, there is no – no, this was all built on like false assumptions”? How do we have a retrospective and say, “When we can look at a variety of different perspectives, then we get such stronger products.” We get such stronger code. We minimize technical debt in addition to hopefully, staving off biases that get built into the software. I think it's very similar of human systems, very similar to software systems. It's like, how can we roll back? If we make a mistake and it impacts human systems, how can we fix that as fast as possible, rather than just letting things persist? JESSICA: When you're talking about who can be a good software developer, when you're talking about who is technical, who is valuable, you don't want rigor in that! ANDREA: Right! JESSICA: That's not appropriate. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: You want open questions. ANDREA: Yeah, and that is exactly what happened, was people conflate rigor and data with accuracy. There's a bias towards if it's got numbers behind it, it must be real, but you can manipulate data just as much as you can manipulate other things. So the PAT then said, “Okay, well, if you can't pass the PAT, then we'll create all of these other types of tests, so you could be a console operator, or you could be a data analyst.” What's fascinating is when you go back, the thing that was at the very bottom of the Cannon Perry survey, in terms of valuable development activities, was software maintenance. JESSICA: And that's everything now. ANDREA: Yeah! JESSICA: Back then, they didn't have a lot of software. MANDO: Yeah. JESSICA: They didn’t have open source libraries. If they needed something, they wrote it. ANDREA: But the stereotypes persist. JESSICA: Yeah. MANDO: 100%. ANDREA: The first evidence I found, again, was in 1967. There was a study of 12 people, all of whom were trainees at a company, which that would be a wild – they hadn’t even – [overtalk] JESSICA: So this is like even less than interviewing your grad students. ANDREA: Well, yeah. JESSICA: Or your undergrads for your graduate research paper, yes. ANDREA: They measured how quickly someone could solve a problem and they ranked them, and then they made the claim that you can save 25 times—this is the first myth of the 25x developer. Well, it got published in the ACM and then IBM picked it up and then McKinsey picked it up, and then it’s just, you get the myth of the full-stack unicorn who's going to come in and save everything! What's interesting is all of these things go back and I think they were formed out of good intention in terms of understanding our world and we understand now, exactly like you said, Jess. That's not the right way to go about it because then people who are really needed on software teams don't feel like they belong and it's like, “Well, do you belong?” JESSICA: That's an outsized impact for such a tiny study. ANDREA: Yeah. So that gets me thinking, what kinds of things am I doing that might have an outside impact? JESSICA: And can we make that impact positive? ANDREA: Yeah, and when we find out that it wasn't, can we learn from our mistakes? I think one of the things, too, is taking the idea of as people are coding. It's like, “Well, who's actually going to read this?” That's something I hear a lot. I used to feel that way about all tags. I’m like, “Who actually reads all tags?” But then my friend, Taylor, was in a car accident and lost his vision. and he was like, “I absolutely need all tags,” and I’ll tell you, that changed everything for me. Because it went from this abstract, “I have to check this box. I have to type something in, and describe this photo” to “I care about my friend Taylor and how can I make this experience as best for him as possible?” That is empathy because in order to have empathy, you have to connect with a single individual. Empathy is – and actually, when you do form empathy for a group, you get polarization. So empathy cuts both ways. It can be both very positive, but also very – [overtalk] CASEY: [inaudible] on the individual goes a long way. So for our discussion here, I can share an individual I've been talking to about this kind of problem. I have a friend who's a woman trying to get her first software developer role and she has to study how to hack the coding interview for a lot of the places where she wants to work, which is literally studying algorithms that you probably won't use in the job. I had an interview a few years ago that was the Google style algorithms interview for a frontend role. Frontend developers don't write algorithms, generally. Not unless you're working on the core of the framework maybe. It was completely irrelevant. I rejected them. I think they rejected me back, too probably. [laughter] But I wouldn't work there because of the hiring process. But my friend, who is a woman in tech trying to get in, doesn't have that kind of leeway to project. She wants to get her first job whoever it is – [overtalk] MANDO: She wants a job, yeah. CASEY: That is willing to use the bias system like that and to hack that system to study it specifically how to get around it, which isn't really helping anyone. ANDREA: Yeah. CASEY: So how can we help reform the system so she doesn't have to do that kind of thing and so, people like her don't have to, to get into tech? I don't know, my boycotting that one company is a very small impact; how do we get a company's hiring practices to change is a hard problem. ANDREA: It is a very hard problem. I can share what we are doing in Corgibytes to try to make a difference. I think the first thing is that in our hiring process, we have core values mapped to them and these are offshoots of our main core values, one of which is communication is just as important as code. So we have that every single applicant will get a response and that seems so like, duh, but the number of people who are here who are just ghosted, submit an application and it goes out into the ether. That is, in my opinion, disrespectful. We have an asynchronous screening interview, so it’s an application and it's take your time, fill it out, and it's questions like, “What's an article you found interesting and why?” and “What do you love about modernizing legacy code?” Some people need that time to think and just to formulate an answer and so, taking some of that pressure off, and then at the end of our – we have all of our questions mapped to our core values. I'm still trying to figure out how we can get away from more the dreaded technical interviews, but we don't use the whiteboard, but we also have a core value of anything that someone does for us, in terms of whether they show up for an interview, they will walk away with just as much benefit. They will have an artifact of learning something, or spec work is I think, immoral to some of these core things. So we use Exercism for us, so Katrina Owens, as a way of like, “Okay, show us a language that you're like really familiar with.” And then because with what we do, you just get tossed into if it’s like, “Okay, let's pick Scala.” It's like you've never tried functional programming before, but then just, it's more of seeing the mindset. Because I think it's challenging because we tried getting rid of them all together and we did have some challenges when it came to then client upper-level goals and doing the job. So it's a balance, I think and then at the end of our interviews doing retrospectives telling the candidate, “Here's what you did really well in this interview, here's where it didn't quite land for me,” because I think interviewing is hard and like you said, Casey, especially now post-COVID, I think more and more people have the power to leave jobs. So I think the power, especially in software development, for people who have had at least their first position, they have a lot more power to walk out the door than they did before. So as an employer and as somebody who's creating these, that's what I'm doing and then if we get feedback and the whole idea with empathy is you're never going to be able to be perfect. Because you don't have the data for the perspective of every single person, but being open and listening and when you do make mistakes, owning up to them, and fixing them as fast as possible. If we all did that, we can make a lot of progress on a lot of fronts really fast. CASEY: I'm so glad your company has those good hiring practices. You're really thinking about it, how to do it in a supportive, ethical, and equitable way. I wonder, we probably don't have the answer here today, but how can we get more companies to do that? I think you sharing here might help several companies, if their leadership are listening. and that's awesome. Spreading the message, talking about it more—that's one thing. Glad we're doing that. MANDO: Yeah. The place that I work at, we’re about to start interviewing some folks and I really like the idea of having a retrospective with the candidate after maybe a couple of days, or whenever after the interview and taking the time, taking the 30 minutes or whatever, to sit down and say, “If I'm going to take time to reach out to them anyway and say, ‘You're moving on to the next round,’ or ‘We have an offer for you, or not,’ then I should be willing to sit down with them and explain why.’” ANDREA: Well, I think the benefit goes both ways, actually. We do it right in our interviews. So we actually say the last 15 minutes, we're going to set aside on perspectives. MANDO: Oh wow, okay. ANDREA: So we do and that's something that we prep for ahead of time. We get feedback of what went well [chuckles] and what we can do better and what we can change. MANDO: Yeah. ANDREA: Because otherwise, as an employer, it's like, I have no idea. I'm just kind of going off into the ether, but then I can hear from other people's perspectives and it's like, okay and then we can change things. But that's an example of, we think of employer versus employee and it's like that's another dichotomy. It's like no, we're all trying to get good work done. JESSICA: Andrea, how do you do performance reviews? ANDREA: We're still trying to crack that, but there's definitely a lot of positive psychology involved and what we are trying to foster is the idea of continuous performance, or continuous feedback is what we call it. So we definitely don't do any kind of forced ranking and that's a branch of things that have contributed to challenges. We have one-on-ones, we check in with people, but a lot of it, I think is asking people what they want to be doing, genuinely. As a small company, we're like 25 people. I think it's easier in a small company, but part of it is – and we were constantly doing this with ourselves, too. My business partner was like, “I really want to try to be the CEO. I've always wanted to be the CEO.” So I stepped back actually during COVID. We focus on being a really responsive team and so, then that way, it's less about the roles. It's less about rigidity. There's a really great book in terms of operations called Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan. It has a lot of operational principles around this. Team of Teams is another really good one. But just thinking through like, what's the work that needs to be done, how can we organize around it, and then thinking of it in terms of more of responsibilities instead of roles. JESSICA: I want to think of it as a relationship. It's like, I'm not judging you as a developer, instead we’re evaluating the relationship of you in this position, in this role at this company. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: How is that serving the company? How is that serving you? ANDREA: Yes, and I think that's a big piece of it is – and also, recognizing the context is really important and trying to be as flexible as possible, but then also recognizing constraints. So there have been times where it's like, “This isn't working,” but trying to use radical candor as much as you can, that's something we've been working on. But trying to give feedback as early and as often as possible and making that a cultural norm as to the, “Oh, I get the 360 feedback at the end, twice a year,” like that. JESSICA: Yeah, I'm sorry, if you can't tell me anything within two weeks, don't bother. ANDREA: Yeah. But one example is like we've fostered this and as a leader, I want people who are going to tell me where I'm stepping in it and where I'm messing up. So I kind of use – [overtalk] JESSICA: Yeah, at least that retrospective at the end of the interview says that. ANDREA: Mm hm, but even with my staff, it’s like – [overtalk] JESSICA: [inaudible] be able to say, “Hey, you didn’t send me a Google Calendar invite,” and they'd be like, “Oh my gosh, we should totally be doing that.” Did anybody tell them that? No! ANDREA: Yeah, totally. So I don't claim to have the answers, but these are just little experiments that we're trying and I think we really lean on the idea of continuous improvement and marginal gains. Arthur Ash had a really great quote, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” I think that's the thing, the whole point of the empathy during development framework is that if you're a developer working on the backend writing a nice commit message, or giving quality feedback on a pull request, instead of just a “Thumbs up, looks good to me.” That's a small act of empathy that you can start doing right away. You don't need to run it by anybody, really, hopefully. If you do, that's a problem [chuckles] your manager and we've seen that. But there are small ways that you can be empowered and leaning into those small moments, doing it again and again, and then creating opportunities to listen. Because empathy, I think the other thing is that people tend to think that it's a psychic ability. You're either data, or your Deanna Troi. CASEY: Jamil Zaki, right? ANDREA: Yeah, the Roddenberry effect. Jamil Zaki, out in Stanford, coined that. I think that's the thing; I've always been told I'm an empath, but I don't think it's telepathy. I think it's just I've gotten really good at spotting patterns and facial recognitions as opposed to Sky. He can just glance and go, “Oh, you're missing a semicolon here.” That is the same skill, it's just in a different context. CASEY: I love that parallel. JESSICA: Yeah. CASEY: Recognizing small things in facial expressions is like noticing missing semicolons. M: Mm hm. [laughs] CASEY: That's so powerful. That’s so vivid for me. MANDO: Yeah. Going back, that made what something that you said earlier, Andrea really click for me, which is that so many people who are professional software developers have this very well-developed sense of empathy for the compiler. [laughs] ANDREA: Yeah. MANDO: Right, so it's not that they're not empathetic. ANDREA: Yes! MANDO: They have learned over their career to be extremely empathetic, it's just for their computer. In the same way, you can learn to be empathetic towards your other teams, towards your DevOps group, towards the salespeople, towards anybody. ANDREA: The flip side of your non-technical is you're not good with people because Scott got this all the time. He's like, “You're good with machines, but you're not good with people.” When he told me that, I was like, “I've known you since we were 11, you're incredibly kind. I don't understand.” So in some ways, my early journey here, I didn't come with all the baggage and so, there is this, like, this industry is weird. [laughs] How can we unpack some of this stuff? Because I don't know, this feels a little odd. That's an example and I think it's exactly that it's cultural conditioning and it's from this, “You're good with math, but we don't want you to be good with people.” If you're good with people, that's actually a liability. That was one of the things that came out of the testing of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s. MANDO: I can't wait till this book of yours comes out because I'm so curious to read the basis of all these myths that we have unconsciously been perpetuating for years and I don't know why, but there is this myth, there are these myths. Like, if you're technical, you're not good with people and you're not – you know what I mean? It’s like, I can't wait to read it. ANDREA: You can go to empathyintech.com. You can sign up for the newsletter and we don't email very often. But Casey actually helps me run a Discord channel, too, or Discord server. So there's folks where we're having these conversations and it doesn't matter what your role is at all. MANDO: Yeah. ANDREA: Just let's start talking to each other. JESSICA: Andrea, that's beautiful. Thank you. That makes this a great time to move to reflections. At the end of each episode, we each get to do a reflection of something that stood out to us and you get to go last. ANDREA: Awesome. MANDO: I can go first. I've got one. The idea that empathy is being able to view and identify other perspectives is one that is something that I'm going to take away from this episode. I spent a lot of my career as a software developer and spent another good chunk of my career as someone who worked in operations and DevOps and admin kind of stuff. There's this historic and perpetual tug of war between the two and a lot of my career as a systems administrator was spent sitting down and trying to explain to software engineers why they couldn't do this, or why this GraphQL query was causing the database to explode for 4 hours every night and we couldn't live like that anymore. Stuff like that. To my shame, often, I would default to [laughs] this idea that these software engineers are just idiots and that wasn't the case at all. Well, probably [laughs] not the case at all. Almost always it wasn't the case at all. Anyway, but the truth of the situation is probably much closer to the idea that their perspective was tied specifically to the compiler and to the feature that they're trying to implement for their product manager, for customer X, or whatever. And they didn't have either the resources, or the experience, or the expertise, or whatever that was required to add on the perspective of the backend systems that they were interacting with. So maybe in the future, a better way to address these kinds of situations would be to talk about things in terms of perspective and not idiocy, I guess, is the… ANDREA: Yeah, a really powerful question there is what's your biggest pain point and how can I help you alleviate it? It's a really great way to learn what somebody's perspective is to get on the same page. MANDO: Yeah, like a lot. JESSICA: Nice. I noticed the part about how a lot of the help happens when you have empathy for the individuals who aren't on a happy path, who aren't the great majority of the people using the software, or the requests that come through your software. It's like that parable, there's a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray and the shepherd is going to leave the ninety-nine—who are fine, they're on the happy path, they're good—and go help the one. Because some other day, it's going to be another sheep that's off the happy path and that one's going to need help and that's about it. MANDO: Yeah. Today you, tomorrow me, right? That's how all this works. CASEY: The thing I'd been picking up is about feedback. Like, the best way to develop empathy for someone else is to get feedback, to get their perspective somehow. I've done retros at the ends of meetings, all the meetings at work I ever do. I even do them at the end of a Pomodoro session. A 25-minute timer in the middle of a pairing day, I'll do them every Pomodoro. “Anything to check in on? No? Good. Okay.” As long as we do. But I've never thought to do it during the interview process. That is surprising to me. MANDO: Yeah. CASEY: I don't know if I can get away with it everywhere. The government might not like it if I did that to their formal process. [laughter] Maybe I can get away with, but it's something I'll think about trying. I would like feedback and they would like feedback—win-win. MANDO: Yeah, I've never done it either and it makes perfect sense. I have a portion, unfortunately, in my interviews where I say right at the beginning, “This is what's going to happen in the interview,” and I spend 5 minutes going through and explaining, we're going to talk about this, we're going to talk about that, or just normal signposting for the interview. It never once has occurred to me to at the end, say, “Okay, this is what we did. Why don't you give me some feedback on that and I give you some feedback about you?” That makes sense. ANDREA: Awesome. For me, I have been wanting to come on your show for a really long time. I was telling Casey. [chuckles] JESSICA: Ah! ANDREA: I was like, “I love the mission of expanding the idea of what coding is.” So I just feel very honored because for the longest time, I was like, “I wonder if I'm going to be cool enough one day to –” [laughs] JESSICA: Ah! We should have invited you a long time ago. ANDREA: Yeah. So there's a little bit of fangirling going on and I really appreciate the opportunity to just dive a little bit deep, reflect, and think. As somebody who doesn't mold, it's nice to get validation sometimes that the way I'm thinking is valuable to some people. So it gives me motivation to keep going. JESSICA: Yeah. It's nice when you spend a lot of energy, trying to care about what other people care about, to know that other people also care about this thing that you care about. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: Thank you so much for joining us. ANDREA: Thank you for having me! MANDO: Thank you. ANDREA: The fastest way to reach out to me and make sure that I see it is actually to go to corgibytes.com. Corgi like the dog, bytes, B-Y-T-E-S, .com and send an email on the webform because then that way, it'll get pushed up to me. But I struggle with email a lot right now and I'm on Twitter sporadically and I'm also on – MANDO: That’s good. The best way to do that. ANDREA: I am a longform writer. I'm actually really excited that I have a 100,000 words to explain myself. I do not operate well in the 140-character kind of world, but I'm on there and also, on LinkedIn. And then the book website is empathyintech.com and there's a link to the Discord channel and some deeper articles that I've written about exactly what empathy in tech is and what empathy driven development is. I'm writing it with my friend, Carmen Shirkey Collins, who is another copywriter who is now in tech over at Cisco, and it's been a joy to be on a journey with her because she's super smart and has great background in perspective, too. JESSICA: And if you want to work on meaningful, impactful legacy code in ensembles, check out Corgibytes. ANDREA: Yeah. JESSICA: And if you want to talk to all of us, you can join our Greater Than Code Slack by donating anything at all to our Greater Than Code Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. Thank you, everyone and see you next time! Special Guest: Andrea Goulet.
236: Connecting Arts and Technology – The Power of Print with Marlena Compton
01:07 - Marlena’s Superpower: Bringing the Arts to Tech * Coming Into Tech as a Creative 04:42 - Parallels Between Art and Computer Science/Software Engineering * System Architecture * Spatial Thinking & Representation * Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky (https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Motion-Action-Shapes-Thought/dp/046509306X) * Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (https://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011) 09:33 - Sketchnoting and Zines * The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking by Mike Rohde (https://www.amazon.com/Sketchnote-Handbook-illustrated-visual-taking/dp/0321857895/ref=asc_df_0321857895/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312021252609&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6623941144735025539&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9006718&hvtargid=pla-454389960652&psc=1) 14:19 - DIY Publishing and Physicality – The Power of Print * The Pamphlet Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars) 20:33 - Zines at Work & Zines in Professional Settings * Slowing Down Our Thought Processes * Using Diagrams to Ask Questions & For Exploration * Graphic Facilitators 31:11 - Target Audiences, Codeswitching, & People Are Not Robots 37:58 - How We View, Study, and Treat Liberal Arts – (Not Well!) * Formulating Thoughts In A Way That’s Available For Consumption 43:01 - Using Diagrams and Images * UML (Unified Modeling Language) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language) * Collaborative Whiteboarding Software and Shared Visual Language (Drawing Together) 50:41 - Handwriting Advice: Decolonize Your Mind! * SLOW DOWN * Write Larger * Practice * How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (https://www.amazon.com/How-Do-Nothing-Resisting-Attention/dp/1612197493) 59:45 - The “Let’s Sketch Tech!” (https://appearworks.com/) Conference * Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/letssketchtech?fan_landing=true) * Podcast (https://anchor.fm/appearworks) * Newsletter (https://appearworks.activehosted.com/f/7) Reflections: Damien: Decolonize your mind. Jamey: Zine fairs at work and valuing yourself by taking up space. Rein: Creativity is good for individuals to explore, but when we share it with people it’s a way we can become closer. Marlena: Connecting arts and technology. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hello, everyone and welcome to Episode 236 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jamey. And I’m another one of your hosts and I’m here with my friend, Damien Burke DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here in addition to with the host, our guest today, Marlena Compton. Marlena Compton is a tech community organizer, designer, and collaboration artist who has worked in the tech industry for 18 years. She grows tech communities and organizes conferences such as “Pear Conf” and “Let’s Sketch Tech!” Marlena has worked for companies like IBM and Atlassian. This has left her with a life-long appreciation for quality code, empathy, and working together as a team. When she isn’t working, Marlena enjoys lettering, calligraphy, and walking her dog. Welcome to the show, Marlena. MARLENA: Hi, thank you so much. DAMIEN: So I know you're prepared for this. Same thing we do for all of our guests, we're going to start with the first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MARLENA: Yeah, so my superpower is bringing the arts to tech and that is teaching people the value of creative arts—such as writing, sketching, music, and more—and how this relates to the tech industry, helping creative types feel more at home in tech, and helping folks who are mostly in the science track in school learn why they need the creative arts for critical thinking and thinking through problems. So it's like, you have to give people a space to do this learning from a peer perspective versus top-down perspective. This includes building community for folks to explore these things. JAMEY: So you came to tech from art previously, is that right? MARLENA: I have a wild academic background of interdisciplinary studies, which will not get you a job for anything but like, renting a car. [laughter] Or whatever and also, later I did computer science, but while I was getting my liberal arts degree, I did a lot of art history, a lot of painting, and a lot of theater. JAMEY: I wonder if you could speak to coming into the tech industry as someone who is already an artist and considers themselves an artist, like, how that translated for you. Like, what skills from being an artist, do you think were helpful to you as you were starting in tech? MARLENA: Sure. So I think that if you know that you're an artistic type, like I knew how important arts were for me. But I think for children often they get a lot of pressure to find something that will get them a job and it's not like this isn't for good reason, it's like we’ve got to be able to pay our bills. On the other hand, when you're a creative type, it's such a core part of your personality. You can't really separate it from anything and if you try to just tamp it down, it's going to come out somehow. So I was this college graduate and I was having a really hard time getting a job and figuring out what I wanted to do that would make enough money to support me. Computer science was literally the last thing I tried and I seem to do okay at it so I kept doing it. [laughs] And that's how I got into it. I wish that we had bootcamps when I started learning computer science, but there weren't any and so, all I could do was go back to community college. So I went to community college. I had to take every single math class over again. Calculus, I had to take three times, but I stuck with it. I didn't know if I could do it, but I kept taking the classes and eventually, it worked. So [laughs] that's how I got into the tech industry and it's like, it's totally okay to do this just to make money. That's why I did it. DAMIEN: So then coming in with this art background, which seems really broad and you didn't talk about anything specific, what insights and connections were you able to make between art and computer science, and art and software engineering? MARLENA: Sure. So for me, building software is a creative process. In fact, this is something I've believed for a very long time, because as soon as I got out with my newly-minted CS degree and I knew that I needed to create, draw, write, and do all of those things. Eventually, I started looking around for okay, what in computer science is kind of more visual place and it used to be people would think of diagramming software, HoloVizio, Rational Rose, which is that is quite a throwback. Who here –? DAMIEN: UML. MARLENA: [laughs] That UML, yes! I would look at these things, like system architect, where it's like the idea was that you could literally draw out pieces and then it would make your code, which was [laughs] I think an epic fail if you look at it from, did it actually ever write successful code? I have never – REIN: There's another option, which was the expense of architects draw the boxes and then the chief engineer put the code in the boxes. MARLENA: Well, but see, you need a brain in there and this is all about the brain. [laughter] MARLENA: Yeah. I think one transformation that my thinking had to go through so, I had to go from this computer science perspective of find a way to chop up all your thoughts into little, discreet, logical pieces so that you can make classes, objects, and things like that and instead look at the brain as an organ in your body. We take more of a holistic perspective where it is your brain is connected to your thoughts is connected to like your internal axes, GPS system, and mapping system and how all of that comes together to problem solve. REIN: Yeah. I love it. Without bodies, we couldn't think about things MARLENA: Indeed. This past year, I've spent a lot of time specifically investigating this connection. One of the things I did was read Barbara Tversky's book, Mind in Motion, and the premise of her book is that spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought. That is how you orient yourself in the world and how you perceive a space around you and yourself in that space is what allows you to organize ideas, take perspectives that are based in imagination, and things like that. REIN: Yeah, and this ties into Wyckoff's work on basic metaphors because basic metaphors are how we structure our thought, but they're all about the world. So thinking about the metaphor of containment, you have a thing, it has an inside and an outside, there may be a portal that gets you from the inside to the outside. So this is how houses work, right? This is how we think about houses. This is also how we think about relationships. It's how we think about code. And then there's you combine that basic metaphor with the metaphor of traveling; starting at a place, traveling along a path, ending up at another place. You put those two metaphors together, you can have complex thoughts about achieving goals. But these are all metaphors based on, like you're saying, our perception of living in a world that has 3D space. Yes, and maps are such a big part of that. So when I was reading through this particular book, she goes into things like maps, how we map ideas, and things like that and there is quite a bit of science behind it. And even for metaphor, she writes that metaphor is what happens when our thoughts overflow our brains and we need to put them out into the world. DAMIEN: So putting these thoughts, these ideas back out into the world and into some sort of spatial representation, is that how you view the tech notetaking, or diagramming sort of thing? MARLENA: Absolutely. So I guess, for listeners, I want to back up a little bit because I think something that Damien knows about me and also Jamey and Rein from looking at the biography is that I'm very into sketch notes. Just to bring us out of the depth [laughs] a little bit, I can tell you about why I turned to sketchnoting and why I started doing it. It was because I was trying to learn JavaScript and yes, Damien, I know how you feel about JavaScript, some of us like it. [laughs] DAMIEN: I don't want to show my cards too much here, but I will say the fact that you had difficulty with it is telling. MARLENA: Well, but I also had difficulty learning C, Java, Erlang. DAMIEN: So how did [inaudible]? MARLENA: Well, so I went to CascadiaJS and this was my first – well, it wasn't my first, but it was the language conference and I was just learning JavaScript and I didn't understand half of it. It just went over my head. So to try and create some memory of that, or try to figure it out, I started drawing. I had seen sketch notes on the web. They were experiencing a bump in popularity at the time. I think my Mike Rohde’s book had just come out and it helped. That was what introduced me to this whole world and eventually, we're talking about when thoughts overflow and you turn to metaphor, this is exactly what was happening for me was Barbara Tyversky refers to these pictures we draw as glyphs. They can be more complicated than language and that is why when we're really trying to figure something out, we're not going to be writing an essay, maybe sometimes, but for the most part, we'll start diagramming. JAMEY: I also wanted to talk about zines while you were on. I was thinking about zines when you were talking about this because I feel like there's a few different mediums of art that I do and some of them are more intentional than others. To me, zines are about like, “I'm thinking this and it needs to exist in physical space and then it will be done and I can stop thinking about it,” because it exists. MARLENA: I love that so much and it's exactly what zines are there for. So zines are DIY publishing and zines are the publishing that happens for topics that, I think it happens a lot for people who are underrepresented in some way. Because you're not going to have access to a publisher and it's going to be harder for you to get any official book out. But then sometimes it's also just, maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want your zine to be a more informal publication. I love zines how kind of – they are all so super niche like, you can put anything. Define the word zine, ha! [laughs] JAMEY: It's so hard. People will argue about this in the zine community for like days and days. Hard to define the word. MARLENA: And that's actually part of the power of zines because it means it can be whatever you want, which means whatever you want to create is okay. I think that's really what we're trying to get down into here is having different ways of expressing and problem solving be okay and accepted. REIN: Just something to point out that containment is a metaphor we use for categories. So we're talking about what is inside the zine category? DAMIEN: I want to go back to the well, Marlena, you said zines were do-it-yourself publishing, DIY publishing, but blogs are also do-it-yourself publishing. So zines have a physicality to them and feels like that's an important aspect. Can you talk about that, or why that is? MARLENA: Well, there are also digital zines, so yeah. [laughs] But. DAMIEN: Maybe five containerization and categories. MARLENA: [laughs] Well, if we wanted to talk a little bit about physical zines, that even is interesting and Jamey, maybe you have a few thoughts about this that you can share, too because there are just so many different ways to format a zine. JAMEY: Well, I know that digital zines are a thing and I've read some digital zines that I've very much enjoyed. To me, the physicality of zines is a big part of them and a lot of what's appealing about them for me. I think that part of the reason for that is that, as you were getting at, people can write whatever they want, people who might not have a chance to write in other formats and most importantly about that, you can't censor a zine. It's impossible because someone makes it themselves and then they give it to whoever they want to have. It's a very personal experience and there's no middleman who can like tell you what you can, or can't say. So I think that having that physical piece of paper that you then hand directly to someone is what makes that possible and not putting it on the internet is also what makes that possible. Like, you have this thing, nobody can edit what's in it. It's all up to you. Nobody can search for it on a search engine. If you don't want someone to see it, then you don't give them one and it's just a holdover from what a lot of media was more like before the internet and I appreciate that about them. [chuckles] DAMIEN: Yeah. To me, it sounds so much like the Federalist Papers, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense. JAMEY: Oh, those were zines for sure. DAMIEN: I wrote this thing, [inaudible] about, I'm hazing him out of here, read this. [chuckles] Those are zines, okay. JAMEY: And political zines are a huge subsection of pamphlets and all sorts of political ideology. REIN: And that's where printing started was with the publishing of zines, that's my argument. MARLENA: This is the power of print. It's the power of print and that power, it's something that you don't necessarily get with the internet. Zines are an archive as well and I don't think we can just say – So when I did the first Let’s Sketch Tech! conference, I had an editor from Chronicle Books come and she talked about publishing. When I was talking to her about doing this talk, what I thought was most interesting about our conversation was she said, “Books aren't going away. Books are never going away because we are so connected to our hands and our eyes.” Books are always going to be there. Printed, words printed, pamphlets, zines, I think they're going to outlast computers. [chuckles] Think about how long a CD, or magnetic tape is going to last for versus the oldest book in the world. DAMIEN: Yeah. REIN: And by the way, if you don't think that printing was about zines, go Google the pamphlet wars. We think it's about publishing the Bible, but the vast majority of stuff that was printed was pamphlets. Zines! DAMIEN: And we can look at things that have survived through a history and it's really truly about paper from Shakespeare's works to the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is how things have survived. MARLENA: And on another aspect of this is the fact that we are human, we have human eyes and those eyes have limits as to how much they can look at a screen. Looking at paper and also, the physical manipulation of that paper, I think is a very important aspect of zines. So my favorite scene ever, which is sadly lost to me, was this very small print zine and it was the kind that is printed literally on one piece of paper and this folded up. But it had the most magnificent centerfolds where you open it up and this is awesome picture of Prince and the person even taped a purple feather in the centerfold part of it and it's like, that's an experience you're only going to get from this kind of printed physical medium. DAMIEN: So yeah, I'm seeing a pattern here, communicating ideas through physical mediums. JAMEY: And I think that because zines are so DIY and low tech that people do really interesting things with paper to express what they're going for. Like, I've been doing zines for a long time with friends. But my first one that I ever did by myself, I had this black and white photo of a house that had Christmas lights on it and I was trying to be like, “How am I going to express this feeling that I have about this picture that I want to express in this media?” I'm like, “I'm going to go to Kinko's and make copies of this for 5 cents and how is it going to look the way I want?” So I ended up manually using a green highlighter to highlight over all of the Christmas lights in every single copy of the zine so that everyone would see the green Christmas lights that I wanted them to feel what I was feeling about. I think that's a pretty simple example because it's not extremely a lot of work to put highlighter in your zine either. But I think that people have to think about that and how they want to convey something and then people have done a lot of really interesting things like taping feathers into their books. MARLENA: Yeah. This is a way of slowing down our thought process, which I don't think we talk about enough because right now, in our culture, it's all about being faster, being lull 10x and making a zine is a great way to reflect on things that you've learned. So I would really like to take a minute to just talk about zines at work and zines in a professional setting because I've noticed that one thing people think as soon as I start talking about zines is why do I need this in my job? Why do we need this in tech? I think that zines are a great way to help people on teams surface the unspoken knowledge that lives in the team, or it's also a way to play with something that you're trying to learn and share with other people. I’d like to hear Jamey, do you have thoughts about this? JAMEY: I have a thought, but I'm not sure how directly related it is to what you just said and I feel self-conscious about it. [chuckles] But I like to teach people to make zines who aren't familiar with zines, or haven't made them before and the thing that I try to teach people that I think zines can teach you is that you can just do this. It's not hard. Anyone can do it. It doesn't take a specific skill that you can't just learn. So they're accessible in that way, but I think it's also a bigger lesson about what you can do if you want to do something and that's how I feel about tech. If you want to learn to code, it's not magic, you can learn how to do it. If you want to do a zine, you can learn how to do it. To me, those thoughts go together. I feel like that wasn't exactly what you just asked, I’m sorry. DAMIEN: I liked it, though. [chuckles] MARLENA: It does tie into the fact that it's important to help people feel at home at work. Well, you're not at home at work, but to feel as though they are in the right place at work and this type of making zines and allowing people to surface what they know about your system, about what you're building, about ideas that your team is tinkering with. This kind of format gives people the space to surface what they're thinking even if they're not the most vocal person. DAMIEN: So one of this really ties into what I was thinking. When you said zines at work and there's a couple of great tech zines which I love and I think should be in a lot of offices. But the idea of actually creating one at work, something happened in my chest when I thought about that idea and it's because it's a very informal medium and tends to be informal and whimsical and you just kind of do it. I realize how much that is counter to so much of how tech teams and tech industry runs where it's very formal. You can't just ship code, you’ve got to get a pull request and reviewed by the senior engineer and it's got to fit our coding standards and run in ordering time, or less. [laughter] That can be very, I'll say challenging. JAMEY: I think that's also exactly why it’s easy and fun to learn about tech from zines because it feels so much more approachable than a formal tutorial and you're saying like, “Oh, will this be too hard, or what will I learn?” There's all of this baggage that comes along with it where it's like, “Oh, the zine is like cute and whimsical and I'm going to read it and it's going to be interesting,” and then like, “Whoa, I just learned about sorting from it.” DAMIEN: Yeah. Just because you’re writing software, or doing computer science doesn't mean we have to be serious. [laughter] Probably needs to be shouldn't be. REIN: It also makes me think about a shift that I would really like to see in the way diagrams and things like this are used, which is that when you're asked to produce an architecture diagram, you're generally asked to produce something authoritative. It has to be the best current understanding of what the organization has decided to do and that doesn't leave any space for exploration, or for using diagrams to ask questions. I think that's bad because naturally, on a team, or in an organization, everyone has their own models. Everyone has their own local perspective on what's happening. If there's no opportunity to surface, “Hey, here's how I think this works. Can I compare that with how you think this works?” You can't maintain common ground. I don't think producing a lot of words is a great way to do that. I think that's very inefficient. I also think that having an hour meeting with twenty people where you all talk about it is also inefficient. So I'm wondering if diagrams can be useful here. Relatively, it’s a little bit quicker to draw some boxes and connect them with arrows than it is to write a 1-page report. I'm wondering if we could promote more people putting out these low fidelity diagrams that are, “Here's what's in my head,” and sharing them, if that would help us maintain common ground. MARLENA: Absolutely, and I love the way that you brought up this situation where everyone is – because I think we've all been in these meetings where it's like, there are some technical hurdle, decisions have to be made, technology needs to be chosen, libraries needed – that type of thing. What I experienced was it was hard for me to get a word in edgewise. REIN: Yeah, like if you have twenty people in a meeting, at most three of them are paying attention and about half of them are going to be underrepresented in the meeting for a variety of reasons, if not more. MARLENA: Yeah, and well, I'm just going to say yes. For underrepresented people, this happens a lot. So one of the things that I like to promote is taking apart the traditional jam everyone into a room, let the conversation naturally happen. I'm just going to say it. I don't think that works too well and honestly, I think that a zine format, or even if it's just like take a piece of paper, let people diagram what they think is interesting, then trade, then your team is having a zine fair. [laughs] REIN: Or if you do that to prepare for the meeting and then the meeting is going over them. MARLENA: Sure. Yeah, and maybe the discussion is like a facilitated discussion. I did a lot of Agile team stuff, including I had to go down the route of learning how to facilitate just because I couldn't get a word in edgewise on my team. So I started looking at different ways to how do you have a discussion when it's like, there are two, or three people who always talk, nobody else says anything, but everyone has thoughts. It's really interesting what happens when you start trying to change how a group is having discussions. REIN: It also seems like it's super valuable for the person doing the facilitation because they have to synthesize what's happening in real-time and then they come away with the meeting, with the synthesis in their brains. Part of which they've been able to put into the diagrams, the drawings, and whatever, but only a part of it. So it seems like if you have some external consultant come in and draw diagrams for your team, that external consultant then leaves with a bunch of the knowledge you were trying to impart to everyone else. MARLENA: I don't know if that's necessarily true. In the world of graphic recording, those folks go to all kinds of meetings and I think it's true that they are going to come away with a different set of thoughts in their head, but they're also not going to have the context of your team. REIN: Yeah. MARLENA: And that's a pretty big part of it. But I know Ashton Rodenhiser, she's a graphic facilitator who does this and she'll go into meetings like the one we're describing, and while people are talking, she's drawing things out. It's really interesting what happens when people see their discussion being drawn by a third party. I've seen this happen at some conferences; it's really great way to change the way you have discussion. REIN: Yeah. So for example, we do incident analysis, we do interviews with the people who are there, and we review slot transcripts. What we find is that the people who are doing the interviews, conducting the analysis, facilitating the reviews, they become experts in the systems. MARLENA: Ah yes, because so much – it reminds me of how teaching somebody to do something, you teach it to yourself. So they are having to internalize all of this discussion and reflect it back to the team, which means of course, they're learning along with the rest of the team. REIN: Yeah. So I think my point was not don't hire consultants to do this, it was keeping them around after you do. MARLENA: [laughs] Wouldn't it be amazing if having a graphic recorder, or a graphic facilitator was just a thing that we all had in our meetings? REIN: Yeah, or even something that was democratized so that more people got the benefits of – I think doing that work has a lot of benefits to the person who's doing it. JAMEY: This is making me think a lot about the way that you engaged with something, or the way that you express it, depending on who your target audience is. Like, if I'm taking notes for myself in my own notebook, my target audience is just myself and I write things that won't make sense to anybody else. If I'm writing like a document for work, the target audience is my team, I'm writing in a way that reflects that it's going to be read and understood by my team instead of me. I think that a lot of what we're talking about here with zines, diagrams, and things like this is kind of an interesting hybrid. When I write a zine, I'm doing it for me, it's benefiting me, but not in the same way as notes in my notebook where I don't want anyone else to ever look at it. So it's like, how do I write something that's benefiting me, but also has an audience of other people that I'm hoping will get something out of it? I think that's a bit of a unique format in some ways. DAMIEN: That's interesting because everything I hear from novelists and screenwriters, it's always “Write the book, write the movie that you want.” You're the audience and if you love it, not everybody's going to love it, [chuckles] but there are other people who will, chances are other people will love it. If you write something for everybody to love, nobody is going to like it. MARLENA: Yeah, I think so, too and you never know who else is going to be thinking the same way you are and sometimes, it's that people don't have a way to speak up and share how they're feeling in a similar way. So I actually love that zines allow – I think it is important to be making something that is from your perspective and then share that. That's a way to see who else has that perspective. DAMIEN: But I also understand this need to, well, I'll say code switch. This need to code switch for different audiences. [chuckles] Rein brought up UML. I learned UML in college back in the long-ago times and I hated it. It was an interesting thing to learn, but an awful thing to do because all of my UML diagrams had to be complete, authoritative, and correct because I was doing them for my professor and I was a TA. I thought, “Well, if I had large amount of diagrams describing large systems, looking at them could be very informative and useful.” But no one in the world is going to write those things because this is way too much work unless I'm allowed to be informal, general, not authoritative, or complete and so, I'm realizing these tensions that I've been going on in my mind for decades. MARLENA: Well, and there's programs. Using those programs was so clunky, like adding a square, adding a label, adding a class, and pretty soon, if you were trying to diagram a large system, there was not a great way to change your perspective and go from macro down to micro and zoom out again. Whereas, this is, I think what is so great about the human brain. We can do that and we can do that when we're drawing with our hands. DAMIEN: Yeah. There were promises of automated UML diagrams that you get from type systems and static analysis and I think I saw some early versions of this and they created correct UML diagrams that were almost readable. But going from correct and almost readable to something that's informative and enlightening, that's an art and we don't have computers that can do that. MARLENA: Right. Like, humans are not computers. Computers are not human. [laughs] When is it not Turing complete? [laughter] I think that initially people really wanted to be robots when they were sitting down at the computer and I think we're going through a period right now where we're rethinking that. REIN: Well, in part it was management that wanted people to be robots. DAMIEN: Which reaches back to the industrial revolution. MARLENA: And still does. What I love is that having this conversation about how we work and how to build software, it brings up all of these things, including this type of management wanting people to be robots, but we're not. What's interesting to me and what I think is that if we could shift our perspective from let's make everyone a machine, we're all robots sitting, typing out the stuff for people. If we could shift to thinking about building software is a creative process, people are going to need sleep. If you want them to solve your problems, they're going to need different ways to express themselves and share ideas with each other. REIN: It's really important to uncover facts about work and human performance like, even if you have rules, policies, and procedures, humans still have to interpret them and resolve trade-offs to get them done. You can have two rules that are mutually exclusive and now a human has to resolve that conflict. Also, that we think that the old paradigm that Damien was talking about, this Taylor’s paradigm, is that manager decide how the work is to be done and then workers do what they're told. But workers, to do this, have to think about high level organizational goals that are much more abstract than what the people designing the work thought they would have to think about. I think if you can uncover – this is all creative problem solving and it's a part of the day-to-day work. DAMIEN: Yeah, that command-and-control structure was always a fantasy, less so in some places than other places, but always, always a fantasy. REIN: Even the military is reevaluating what C2 means in the face of overwhelming evidence that humans don't work that way. DAMIEN: It's nice to pretend, though. Makes things so much simpler. MARLENA: What's interesting about this changing paradigm in how we view this management and control piece is how this is manifesting in the world of academia, especially in the world of liberal arts, because liberal arts colleges are not doing well. [laughs] In fact, Mills College here in the Bay Area is not going to be taking freshmen next year and they're going to close. But I think there's a theme of education in here, too in how people learn these skills, because we've been talking about zines. You do not have to have a degree to know how to make a zine and that's awesome! [laughter] Along with these other skills and I know that there are a lot of people in tech, who they went through computer science program, or even a bootcamp and maybe they did some science before, maybe not, but they're still going to these creative skills and it may be, I think a lot of folks in the US and in tech, it's like you weren't in a position to be able to study art, or to get that much exposure, because it was about survival. Survival for your whole family and there's just not the time to try and explore this stuff. I would love to see more space in tech for people to explore all of the creative arts and see how does it help you express yourself at work. The most concrete example I have of this is writing up a software bug. So I used to be a tester and I could always tell who had writing skills and who didn't based on how they would write up a bug. [laughs] DAMIEN: No, and I can definitely feel that. I work on a team of one for several projects. So sometimes, I have to write a user story, or a bug and I have a very strict format for writing bugs. It's basically, it’s write on a Cucumber and yet I will take minutes and minutes and minutes to properly wordsmith that bug report for me [laughs] so that Tuesday – MARLENA: As you should! Doing a good job! DAMIEN: So that Tuesday, when I read that I know right away what it means and what it says. Whereas, I can write something quickly that might be accurate, but would be difficult for me to understand, or I can write something quickly that could be in complete assuming that I found the bug. I'm the one who put the bug in there; I know everything there is to know and still come back to this, no clue. I don't even know what the bug is. I actually have to throw away a feature this week because I had no clue what I meant when I wrote it. MARLENA: I used to actually give a talk about this, how to write up bugs, because it was such an issue and if you don't train developers and other folks who are looking at an app to write them, then it ends up, the testers are the only ones who can write it up and that's not okay. [laughs] DAMIEN: And when you talk about a talk, how to write a bugs, there's some obvious mechanical things. How do you reproduce this? What did you expect to happen? Who's doing it? That sort of things and these are very clear and obvious, but then there's the actual communicating via words issue. [chuckles] How can you write those things down in a way that's easy for the next person to understand? I spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing. It's hard. It's an art, I guess. REIN: I want to turn this into an even more general point about the importance of the discipline of formulating your thoughts in a way that's available for consumption. So as an example, I used to write notes in a shorthand way where if I thought I knew something, I wouldn't include it because I already knew that I don't need to take a note about it and what I've found is that I couldn't explain stuff. I couldn't integrate the new knowledge with the old knowledge when it came time for me to answer a question. The approach I've been taking more recently is formulating my thoughts in a way that if I had to write a blogpost about that topic, I can copy and paste things from my notes, ready to go, and just drop them in. That's the thing I do for myself, but what I've found is that I actually understand stuff now. DAMIEN: Yeah. I've had the same experience writing things that I thought I understood. This is the rubber duck story. You think you understand something so you try to explain to somebody else and go, “Oh, that's what it was.” But since we have Marlena here right now, [chuckles] I want to talk about using diagrams and images in that process for a person who doesn't work that way usually. MARLENA: Indeed. Well, one of the things that I think we hint at in the world of tech—this is interesting because we've all been bashing the UML and all that stuff, but it did give us a set of symbols for visual representation of programming type things. Like, you make the rectangle for your class and then you put your properties in the top and the methods in the bottom, or something like that. Something that I've noticed in the sketchnoting world is that sketchnoting 101 is how to draw at all. How to feel confident enough to put your pen on the paper and draw a line, draw a box, draw a circle, make them into objects, whatever. But once you're past that introductory, when 101 level of sketchnoting and you've done a few, the next level up is to start creating your own language of visual representation, which I think people kind of do, whether they intentionally do it, or not. I kind of find myself doing it. The way that I contain categories of information in a sketch note, I've kind of come to a particular way that I do it. That type of thing is because we don't talk about creativity and representation; we don't take the time to do these things. They're not really a practice. Everyone kind of just does their own and I've been on teams that, or I've tried to be on teams that had a fairly mature way of having a wiki, you're going to talk to each other, Agile teams. Still, we might have a wiki, but it's not like we were always drawing together. I'm interested in have you all had experiences on your teams of drawing together, collaborating on one drawing at the same time? REIN: Yeah. We use a collaborative whiteboarding software to do various things and one of them is drawing boxes that represent systems and architectures. One of the exercises we sometimes do is we say, “You get this part of the board, you get this part of the board, you get this part of the board. I want you each to diagram how you think the system works now and then in 15 minutes, we're going to look at them together.” MARLENA: Yes. That type of thing, I think it's so important and I wish that more folks did it on their teams. Have y'all found that you have any visual representation that has started repeating itself, like say certain part of a system you usually draw in a certain way? REIN: Yeah. We've definitely developed a language, or a discourse over time and some shorthand, or mnemonics for certain things. We’ve not standardized, I think is the wrong word, but we've moved closer together in a more organic way. DAMIEN: Which is how language develops. MARLENA: Indeed, indeed. But this way of having this shared visual language together is going to give you a shorthand with each other. Like, when you have a map, you have a legend, and I think that it's important Rein, like you mentioned, not necessarily having standards, but having some common ways of drawing certain things together. That type of drawing together is very powerful for developing your collective way of visualizing a system and thinking about it. REIN: And another thing I want to highlight here is that if you ask four people to diagram and architecture and you get four different diagrams, that doesn't mean that one of them is right and three of them are wrong. What that usually means is that you have four different perspectives. MARLENA: Yes. We all have our internal way of mapping things and it is not a right, or wrong, a good, or bad. It's just, every person has a different map, a way of mapping objects in the world, that is brain science stuff. DAMIEN: I get the opportunity to reference my favorite, what I discovered just now, today, I’ll just go with today's zine, Principia Discordia. JAMEY: Oh my god, that’s my favorite! DAMIEN: Marvelous work of art. They say in Principia Discordia that the world is chaos. It's chaos out there and we look at it through a window and we draw lines in the window and call that order. [chuckles] So people draw different lines and those are the diagrams you’re going to get. JAMEY: That’s so beautiful. REIN: I have to interject that John Haugeland, who's a philosopher, said something very similar, which is that the act of dividing the universe into systems with components and interactions is how we understand the universe. It's not something that's out those boxes. Aren't something that are out there in the universe. They're in here in our heads and they're necessary for us to even perceive and understand the universe. DAMIEN: Which gives us a whole new meaning to the first chapter of the book of Genesis. But [laughs] we don't have to go that far down the road. MARLENA: Well, even if we think about color and perceiving color, everyone's going to have a different theme that they see. It's going to like – REIN: Yeah, and there's philosophically no way to know if red for me means the same thing as red for you. MARLENA: Mm hm. DAMIEN: So applying that same standard to our technical systems. Some senior architects somewhere might draw a diagram and goes, “This is the truth of what we have built, or what we should be building and that there is no external representation of truth.” “Oh, look, the map is not the territory! We can go through this all day.” [laughter] REIN: And the interesting thing for me is that this is something that there are Eastern philosophies that have figured out long before Western philosophy did. So while Descartes was doing his stuff, you had the Jainism principle of Anakandavada, which is the manifoldness of the universe. There's no one right truth; there are many interlocking and overlapping truths. JAMEY: How does this relate to a GitHub [inaudible]? [laughs] DAMIEN: [overtalk] It means your diagramming is direct. REIN: It certainly says something about distributed systems and in distributed systems, we call this the consensus problem. [laughter] DAMIEN: I love the fact that Git was built to be this completely distributed, no single authority source control system and now we have GitHub. MARLENA: Indeed. REIN: I want to know how I, as someone who has terrible handwriting, can feel comfortable doing sketching. MARLENA: Sure! I just did a whole meet up about that. It's not just you, I think that it's 75% of engineers and we emphasize typing. So what I tell people about handwriting, the very, very basics, is slow down. Not what you want to hear, I know, but it makes a huge difference. So this past winter, my pandemic new skill that I learned is calligraphy, and in calligraphy, they tell you over and over and over to slow down. So that's tip number one is to slow down and then number two is try writing larger. Whatever it is you're writing, play with the size of it. Larger and slower generally gives you a way to look at what you're writing and which pieces like, there are probably some letters that you dislike more than others when you are writing and you can take those letters that you really dislike. Maybe it's just a matter of reviewing like, how are you forming the letter? If it's all of them, it'll take you longer, but. [laughs] JAMEY: When I was a kid learning cursive for the first time, I really hated to do the capital H in cursive. I think it's like an ugly letter and I think it's hard to write and it was hard to learn. My last name starts with H so I had to do it a lot. I just designed a new capital H and that's what I've been using in cursive since I was like a little kid [laughs] and nobody notices because nobody goes like, “That's not how I learned cursive in class,” if they can read it. That's how I feel that language, too and we're talking about the way language evolves. People will be like, “That's not a real word,” and I'm like, “Well, if you understood what I meant, then it's a word.” DAMIEN: Perfectly fine with it. JAMEY: And that's kind of how I was just thinking about handwriting too like, what is there right, or wrong if you can read what I'm expressing to you? [chuckles] DAMIEN: Yeah. If you look at the lowercase g in various glyph sets, you have to actually pay attention and go, “This lowercase g is not the same symbol as this lowercase g.” [laughs] You have to totally call your attention to that. They are vastly, vastly, different things. MARLENA: The letters that look the same, though are capital T, I, and F. DAMIEN: You don't put crossbars on your eye? MARLENA: Well, I'm thinking in terms of like, for calligraphy, when I got into the intermediate class, I had to come up with my own alphabet, typography, design my own alphabet. Those letters were so similar, they just gave me fits trying to make them all different. But I think it's important for people to practice their handwriting. I know that we all just scribble on the pad for charging, or whatever. You just scribble with your fingernail and it doesn't look like anything. But keeping that connection to your handwriting is also an important way of valuing yourself and this space that you take up in the world. I think it's really good if you can get to a place where you can accept your own handwriting and feel comfortable with it. Since I am into stuff like calligraphy and lettering, it's definitely part of my identity, the way that I write things out by hand. It's physically connected to you, to your brain, and so, things like that, we want to say everything is typing in tech, but there is a value for your confidence, for your brain, and for how you process information to be able to write something by hand and feel confident enough to share that with somebody else. JAMEY: That was really beautiful, actually. But I was going to ask, how do you think your handwriting relates to your voice? Because when you were saying that about feeling comfortable with your handwriting and how it's like a self-confidence thing, it made me think of the way that people also feel and interact with their voice. Like, you always hear people, “Oh, I hate listening to a recording of myself. I hate listening to my voice.” MARLENA: Well, there's that whole field of handwriting analysis, just like there's that whole field of body language and that includes what someone's voice sounds like. It is attached to your personality and how you're thinking and how you're working with ideas. [laughs] So it's not like I'm judging someone when I look at their—sometimes I am, I'm lying. Sometimes I am judging people when I look at their handwriting. I mostly don't. Honestly, I think we've lost so much education about handwriting in schools, what I dislike about that is, we were talking about the power of print earlier. Well, if you feel uncomfortable writing your name, if you feel uncomfortable writing down what you believe and sharing it, that's the type of censorship, isn't it? So I think handwriting is important for that type of thing, but I think it is connected to your personality. JAMEY: It says something about you and when you put something out into the world that says something about you in that way, it's kind of a vulnerable experience. MARLENA: It is, and you're showing people how you value yourself. I think that's partly why a lot of times in tech, we've minimized the role of handwriting so much that nobody feels comfortable sharing their handwriting. Well, it's not nobody, that's a big generalization, but a lot of people don't feel comfortable sharing their handwriting and that is a loss. That is a loss for everyone. DAMIEN: I love what you said, in part because I didn't want to hear it, when Rein asked, “How do you improve your handwriting?” You said, “Write slower and write bigger,” and I knew right away that that was correct because that's the only thing that has worked when I was trying to improve my handwriting. But I gave up on that because I didn't want to; I don't want to write slower and bigger because of what you said—taking up space. If you look at my handwriting historically, it's been not taken up – very little space, very little time. I don't want anybody to have to wait for me to finish writing. I don't want to use this whole page. I don't want to think my writing is so, so important that it's all big on the page, but allowing myself to take up space and time is how I get to better handwriting. So that was just such a beautiful way of putting it. MARLENA: Well, I read this book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and it's a wonderful book where the book blows me away and it's hard to talk about it because she has packed so much into it. But it's thinking about how we make ourselves go so fast and it's about the attention economy. How we are trying to speed ourselves up so much and I think that handwriting is part of this. If we are going to take back our own lives, that includes being able to slow down enough to write your name in a way that feels good to you and share it. I like what you wrote in the chat, Damien, but I'd like to hear you say it. DAMIEN: I wrote it in the chat so I wouldn't say it. [laughs] “Decolonize your mind.” It was a message to myself, decolonize your mind. The idea that you don't get to do nothing, you don't get to take up space and time. Yeah, and so that's just, it's all these things are so tightly connected. MARLENA: So I think y'all are ready for me to tell you the story of how I came up with a first Let’s Sketch Tech conference and this conference happened maybe 2017, 2018. I always forget the exact year, but it was post Trump getting elected. Now the Women's March, right after Trump got elected and sworn into office, was a major point in time and wake up call for me. I've always tried to learn about politics, intersectionalism, and things like that, but this March showed me the power of making something with your own hands and showing that and sharing it to someone else. I wanted everyone to feel like, even in this era of Trump, we still have the power to make something meaningful and share that with our own hands. So that was when I decided to start emphasizing more and learning more about the connection between art and tech. I'd been doing sketch notes and it sort of struck me that there was not much of a community out there that handled this topic, which I thought was just kind of strange. When I looked at sketchnoting itself, it seemed like more was happening in the world of design. Well, what about engineers? I've had to draw out things so many times to learn them, to teach somebody else, to understand what's happening and so, that's when I put together this Let’s Sketch Tech conference. I wanted people to be able to retain the power to make something with their own hands, because that can never be taken away from you, whether you have internet connection, or not. But even if you do have the internet connection, combining these together is just so powerful. So that is why I started this conference and this community and it's pretty deep. I don't bring it up all the time because it's kind of a lot, but yeah, and we had a great time. DAMIEN: Thank you so much, and thank you for sharing that story and everything else you've shared with us. How do we feel about going into reflections? I think I'm going to be reflecting on in the broad sense, it's what I didn't want to say earlier until Marlena called me out, decolonize your mind. But in a smaller sense, it's how much of my view of the tech industry, my work in there, and the environment there should be formal, structured, strict, authoritarian. I had all these ideas that are still, unbeknownst to me, having a huge influence about how we can work. The idea of a zine fest at work seems so outrageous to me because it doesn't fit into those ideas and so, I'll be reflecting on well, where else am I seeing this stuff and how has it prevented me from doing something so very effective? [laughs] I said, zine fest. I used to think I was too young to mispronounce zine, but whatever. [laughs] Who’s next? JAMEY: I can go next. So my two favorite things, I think that got said, one of them was also about like the zine fair at work. I host zine fairs in my hometown and the idea of like, well, if you both draw something and then you trade, you're having a zine fair. I absolutely love that. And then my other favorite thing was about the talk closer to the end about valuing yourself and the way and taking up space and all of those things. I feel actually like I want to mush those two things together because talking about valuing yourself, like really resonated with me the way that I do zines in my regular life, not in tech. But I think that inside of tech is a place where there are people that I really want to see value themselves more. It's a system that has a tendency to shut people down and keep talented people and I want to imbue that kind of confidence into a lot of engineers, especially newer engineers. So I think that I really like this idea of a zine fest at work, and maybe that can, in addition to helping teach us about our systems and stuff, help us encourage each other to take that time to value ourselves. REIN: I think what struck me about this conversation the most is that creativity is good for people, personally, individuals to explore our creativity. But when we share it with other people, that's a way that we can become closer. I think that for the work to happen—because to some extent, I tried to apply these ideas at work—people have to build and maintain common ground with each other. I think that encouraging people to be creative and to share that creativity—you typically wouldn't ask a junior engineer to draw an architecture diagram, but I think you should. MARLENA: I hope that after listening to this, people definitely ask their newer folks on their team to draw a diagram, then we’ll share and trade with them. I think what I've learned from this conversation is, well, I think that it validated, more than anything, the ideas that I'm trying to spread about connecting arts and technology. It was wonderful to hear each of you talking about the struggles and challenges that you have at work in bringing this together because it is a different way of thinking. But I feel so positive whenever I talk about this and seeing people be able to recognize themselves and seeing some doors and windows open about how they can incorporate the arts a little bit more into their tech lives is the reason why I do this and it's been such a privilege to share this with all of you and your listeners. So thanks for having me. DAMIEN: It's been a privilege to have you. The idea that we can start out with like, “Let's draw pictures as engineers,” and ended up with, “Oh my God, how do I become fully human?” [laughs] It's really amazing. JAMEY: Yeah, this was really great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. MARLENA: It was a lot of fun. DAMIEN: Marlena, why don't you give your Patreon and your podcast? MARLENA: Sure. Well, I started the Patreon because it was an easier way for folks to sign up for the meetups that happened in Let's Sketch Tech. We do a monthly meetup and I'm starting to plan the conference for this year. There's a free newsletter, but if this podcast is giving you life, if you're getting oxygen from this conversation, I highly suggest checking out the Let’s Sketch Tech Patreon, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to my podcast, Make it a Pear! I talk a lot about creative process in tech. DAMIEN: Awesome. Thank you so much and thank you for joining us. Special Guest: Marlena Compton.
235: RailsConf Scholars: 2021 Remote Edition
The RailsConf Scholarship Program (https://railsconf.org/scholarships) 03:12 - Tram’s Superpower: Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Per Night! 04:08 - Leah’s Superpower: Being a Companion to Long-Distance Runners 04:55 - Stefanni’s Superpower: Doing Things She’s Terrified of Doing 05:34 - Being Afraid and Grappling with Self-Doubt * Asking Questions and Being Vulnerable * Call-Out Bad Behavior 12:34 - Team Psychological Safety 17:20 - Education & Learning Environments; Tech Journeys * Ada Developers Academy (https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) * The Turing School (https://turing.edu/) 27:52 - Making & Noticing Progress; Comparing Yourself to Others * The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know (https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Code-Science-Self-Assurance-What-Should/dp/006223062X) Reflections: John: Finding new ways to be of service to other people. Leah: What can we proactively do to make our space safer and more conducive to diverse thought? Mando: It’s okay to make mistakes and not be perfect. Steffani: How common it is to openly talk about these things in the Rails Community ❤️ Tram: Representation matters! Humanization and inclusivity. Calling people out. Lending Privilege -- Anjuan Simmons (https://anjuansimmons.com/talks/lending-privilege/) Transcript: JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 235. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, John. And I'm here with three RailsConf scholars who are going to be joining us today, which I'll like to take turns introducing yourself, maybe starting with Leah? LEAH: My name is Leah Miller and I’m a Platform Engineer at Highwing, which is an insurtech startup based out of Denver. Before making over the switch to tech, I spent almost a decade in the insurance industry primarily working as a production underwriter. In my spare time, I enjoy running and craft beer and frequently, the careful combination of the two. I’m also a new dog mom to a rescue pup named Orla. MANDO: Great. Tram, you want to go next, please? TRAM: Yeah. So hi, everyone. I'm Tram Bui. I’m currently attending Ada Developers Academy, which is a tuition-free coding program for women and gender-diverse folks in Seattle. The program includes an internship match with a Seattle tech company. So currently, for my internship, I work as a Developer Relations engineer and what this means is that I try to make it easier for Rails developers to deploy their apps to the cloud. Outside of coding, I try to maintain it and improve my high school tennis skills. I also like to read books and also, thinking about my next great public transportation adventure and volunteering for local nonprofits. And then Stephanie, I can pass it on to you. STEPHANIE: Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm Stephanie and I've been working with Rails for the past 4 years, but now I'm trying to transition from dev full-time to having my own projects. And besides software, I also like to talk about plant-based diet, financial independence, and mental health. Also, if you have noticed my accent, I'm from Brazil, but I live in Vancouver, BC and yeah, I'm really happy to be here. JOHN: Awesome. Welcome to the show, everyone. So this is just a little setup here. Not every year at RailsConf, but most years at RailsConf, we do have a special episode where sometimes, we've got many of the panelists are together and so, we can record in the same room, which is obviously very novel for us. This year of course, it's all online. One of the things we’ve also done is bringing in some of the people who are part of the RailsConf Scholar Program, which is the program to expand access to tech conferences to people that are underrepresented and to give them some guidance on how to make the most of their experience at the conference. We always think it's great to get the opinions of people that are brand new to this industry and see what their perspective is on everything. So we're going to start off with our usual question which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? We can go really in any order. Who would like to go first? TRAM: I can go first. So my superpower would be the ability to get 8 hours of sleep a night [chuckles] and I think I acquired this power – I think I was very just like, I loved nap time as a kid and I grew up knowing the importance of a good night's rest. I think for me to be my best self, that’s one of the big things that I need to have. I think growing up and going to college, it was very like, “Oh, sleep is not important,” but I always had noticed the importance of sleep and I think it does hustle economy, too. People are very fast to just cast aside and was like, “You can sleep when you're dead,” but I'm like, “No, if you don't sleep, you will die faster.” So I'm going to take every opportunity that I can do at least get a full night's rest. LEAH: I am so jealous of that superpower. [laughs] I think mine feeds into a little bit of the opposite of that, but my superpower is the ability to keep people company when they're running through the night during a 100-mile races, or ultra-marathons. So people running it 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, getting really down, needing someone to lift them up, I can run alongside them and sing, or just be a companion to keep them motivated. I think I acquired this skill from being a middle child. I spent a lot of time just entertaining myself and being pretty independent and if you can entertain yourself, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that to others, keep people going, so. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: I would say that my superpower currently is a work in progress actually, but it's doing things even if I'm terrified of the way I always struggled a little bit with self-confidence. How I acquired that, I actually had to go to therapy first to build the foundation, but now I think I've been getting pretty good at it and the feeling of doing the things that you're scared at the end is a really good feeling. You feel like a superwoman. [chuckles] JOHN: Oh, those are all such great answers. I want to dive into each of them, I think oh, my thoughts are jumbling up because I want to ask questions to all of you. Well, I think I'll start with Stephanie. That's an amazing superpower and it's definitely going to serve you well. It's something that I've had to learn as I develop my speaking career at the same time. Even just thinking that it was possible for me to get up on stage and do that, that took a while to get there and then actually doing it also took a lot of practice. So certainly, that's going to be awesome. MANDO: Yeah. It's so easy to just keep doing the things that you're good at and try to ignore, or maybe push off the things that you're not so good at, or you don't have that confidence in, Stephanie, like you were saying. It's funny, I keep relearning this lesson over and over again, there's this project at work that I've been putting off and pushing the JIRA ticket over just because I kept telling myself that it wasn't important and that I could do – other things were higher priority. It's just because I was kind of scared, but I wasn't going to be able to do it as well as I could do the other things. I just had to sit down and do it and then I pushed up the PR and it got ripped to shreds by the other wonderful, [laughs] amazing engineers that I work with. But it's good. I didn't die. [laughs] So it’s funny how we have to keep learning these lessons over and over again sometimes, I think. JOHN: Yeah, that reminds me that there's a related skill in there also, which is realizing when you were afraid of something. Sometimes you think, “Oh, it's just not important that happened right now.” MANDO: Yeah. JOHN: As an excuse, but once you realize, “Oh, I'm actually afraid of how this is going to go.” It allows you to approach it differently. You can be like, “Oh, okay, well that's what this is. All right, then now I know how to like face it, head on rather than pretending it's some other reasons.” So I think that that's really important as well. MANDO: Absolutely. Yeah, and it took me a couple of days to [laughs] realize that that's what I was doing and it wasn't until that was the last thing I had to work on for the sprint after I had reshuffled and moved everything over and then looked at my other teammates, JIRA boards to see if they had any stuff that I could help out with [laughs] that finally I was like, “Well, okay, I guess I'll just do this one.” TRAM: Yeah. I think sometimes for me, the anticipation, or the thought of it is even scarier than actually doing the task itself. I've had this happen to me so many different times. For instance, with the podcast, I'm like, “Yeah, this is something that I want to do because I like listening to podcasts,” but I was like, the nervousness and the scariness of putting myself out there and just thinking about it leading up to this moment, it's so much scarier than actually being in the moment and talking with y'all. So yeah. LEAH: I think part of it, too is recognizing that your feelings are not existing in a vacuum. There's other people that experience the same insecurities, or just going through what you're going through. We were interviewing someone a couple weeks ago at my company and just talking about the stressors of being from a bootcamp and being hired into an engineering organization as either a junior developer, or a mid-level developer, or whatever level, but just knowing that your background isn't a CS degree, or it's just a little bit different than what other people have. And then having that insecurity of I'm pushing up a PR and then are 20 people going to make comments on this and then that gets pushed to Slack and everyone sees all 20 comments. Am I going to be laughed at, or looked at as less than? So it's just nice to express that to someone else and have them regurgitate the same feelings, or just reflect back to you that you're not the only one who's having self-doubt in that way. MANDO: Yeah, and it's tough for me at least to remember sometimes that I come from a very different place privilege wise than other folks on the team. So it can be a lot easier for me to do stuff like, just push this PR up and ask for comments because my experience may be very different than someone who doesn't have my same background, or the amount of experience that I have, or the kinds of relationships that I may have with other folks on the team. I strive to help create spaces whether at work, or wherever where people can feel comfortable asking questions and not worrying about people coming in and being overly critical, or negative, or whatever. But my lived experience is very different than others. That's something that I need to keep in mind that you can't always just assume good faith that everyone's going to treat you the way that you would maybe treat them and I have to actively work and actively communicate to people that this is that kind of place. JOHN: Do you find that there are specific things that you do to communicate that, or at least to make that ambiently knowledgeable to the other people in the team? MANDO: That's a good question. I think the easiest thing you can do is make sure that you're modeling both sides of that behavior like, asking a lot of questions, putting yourself in vulnerable situations, and then also, making sure that you always jump in and respond positively when others do that so that you can help set a baseline. I think of what the behavior should be and what behavior is expected, and then the second thing is always making sure to call out behavior that doesn't hit the bar. I can't remember where I first heard this, but my buddy, Jerry, he's the one who always drops the phrase to remind me, he says, “It's as simple as saying, ‘We don't do that here.’” It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be a huge problem, or anything. Just when there's behavior that you don't do here, you say, “We don't do that – [laughs] we don't do that here.” It's as simple as that. LEAH: I love that. MANDO: Yeah, Jerry's awesome. JOHN: I think this is a really interesting topic because I'm always looking for examples of ways to make that easily communicated in a team environment. So have any of you had experiences where maybe someone else on the team was able to communicate some thoughts of psychological safety, or things that made you more comfortable being who you were on the team? LEAH: So I can speak to the team where I work. We're a startup. We have about 15, I think maybe officially 16 people now and we have, I think just hired our fifth female to join the team, or a fifth non-male to join the team. We have created just a private channel for all non-males on the team in Slack where we can communicate with each other and we've set up a happy hour once a month where we can meet. You don't have to drink alcohol. You can just sit and chat and we just have an hour set aside where no conversation topic is off limits. It's just really helpful to just set aside that time where there's no outside influence and it's just the five, or six of us, or however many there are right now [chuckles] who can join and just chat through what's a win for the week, or what's a struggle for the week. I think part of it is giving each other the space to express what's going well and also, express what's going wrong, and then see if others of us on the team can be a champion for the other person and just offer support where possible, or step in when something's happening that we need to maybe put a stop to. Our private channel is lovingly called The Thundercats, [laughs] which I'm pretty fond of. MANDO: [laughs] That's fantastic. You make it almost sound like a union kind of [laughs] where y'all can have this place where you have this ability to do collective action, if necessary. I think that's just fantastic. That's amazing. LEAH: And I should say that the men on our team are fantastic. So this is not like a – [laughs] [overtalk] MANDO: Of course, yeah. LEAH: Escape hatch like, we're all upset about stuff, but it's just nice. Regardless of how wonderful the men on the team are, it's nice to have a space for not men. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think that for me, from my experience, the one that I was more comfortable with was at my first Rails job. It was still in Brazil and the team was totally remote and they did lots of peer programming. They did a great job in onboarding people, but peer programming was way more than onboarding. It was a common practice and I was just like, “Wow, this is so cool.” You could learn so much more beyond just a code and besides that, I felt really comfortable in seeing that no one was scared of doing anything wrong like, there was a really good communication. So I think that the main thing that needs to be worked at, when you're working in a team, is to make sure that everyone feels safe to do their stuff and they don't feel like, “Oh, I'm going to be judged,” or “I don't want to try this because I don't want to have to handle with anything from management,” or whatever. So maybe having that feeling, “Oh, we make mistakes here. We are humans, but we try to make the best to learn from them.” That's a good way to improve this team behavior, I guess. [chuckles] JOHN: So you were able to see the other people on the team, that you were paired with, making mistakes and being okay with it and just that became obvious to you that that was the thing that happened all the time and it was fine. Right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, and especially because I was also self-taught. I actually went for computer science for one year, but I dropped out. I always had this idea that people with more experience, they know everything. [laughs] That was like a mindset that I changed and it made me feel way more human, more than anything at first, and that's when I started seeing how much it's important to think of your team and how much that affects everyone and in your company as well. MANDO: First of all, shout out to comp sci dropouts. I made it just a little bit farther than you, but I know exactly where you're coming from. I had that same thing in my head for a very long time that these folks with their degrees obviously must know so much more than me and I have no idea what I'm doing. That's one of the things that I've always loved about the programs, like the RailsConf Scholars, is that for me, one of the things that helps combat that imposter syndrome thinking is working with folks directly who are earlier in their careers, or have less experience. So not only do you get to help them, guide them, and show them things and stuff, but it really does help serve as a reminder of all the stuff that you do know. There's nothing better than talking about something with someone, being able to explain it to them and help them, and then you walk away and you're like, “Oh yeah, I do know some things, that's kind of nice.” TRAM: I think in talking about dropping out of a major, or switching majors, my experience and my journey into tech. In college, I was quite afraid. I had a requirement to take a CS class, but hearing all these horror stories from other people made me delay taking it. I actually took my first CS class, my junior year of college and while it was really challenging, I definitely enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. But since I took it too late in my college career, I couldn't switch my major, or couldn’t minor, or major in it and that really stuck with me because, I think going and finding the ADA Developers Academy, which is a coding program, it’s like it was my second chance at doing something that I wanted to do, but didn’t have the time, or didn't have the confidence to do in college. One thing that is nice, that I keep thinking about, is that even if I did do a CS major in college, that environment instilled with the competition of it and instilled with, I guess, people who may think that they know more than you may have not been conducive for my education. But what I really enjoy about the current coding program that I'm in is that it's all women, or gender diverse folks and we all come from all different walks of life. But one thing that we have in common is being really empathetic to each other and that environment, I think made all the difference in my ability to learn and to see that there is a community that would champion me and that would also try to uplift other people. JOHN: Yeah. I think that highlights the importance of that initial learning environment. If your first exposure to tech is a weed-out course when you’re trying taking CS in college, you're probably never coming back to it. But having an environment that's specifically designed to actually be supportive and actually get you through learning things can make all the difference, really. MANDO: Yeah. My oldest son is going through a computer science course, or computer science curriculum at UT Dallas here in Texas and his experience is a little bit different, I think because of the pandemic and he doesn't have that in-person structure. Everything's different. He's not having in-person classes. So it's forcing it to be a little more collaborative in nature and a little less kind of what you were saying, John, like waking up at 8 o'clock in the morning to go to some 300-person weed-out class. I think it has served him a little bit better having things be a little weird in that regard, but it is funny to see how little the curriculum and set up around getting a computer science college degree has changed in the 20 years since I took it. That's a shame and I think that that's why the places like ADA Developers Academy and other folks who are showing people and especially employers, that there's different ways for people to get these skills and get this knowledge as opposed to a strictly regimented 4-year, whatever you want to call it, degree program. Leah, you came into technology, you were saying, through a different path other than your traditional computer science degree? LEAH: Yeah. So I majored in math in college and wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with that and when I graduated, it was 2009, to age myself. [chuckles] It was 2009 and the economy was not doing very well and a lot of my peers were really struggling to find jobs. I went for a leadership program at an insurance company and ended up staying there and moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, which I had no desire ever to go there, [laughs] but it worked out fine. I ended up in this insurance company for almost 10 years. Met some really wonderful people and I got to do a lot of really great things, but just kept having that question in my mind of if it hadn't been a poor economy and if it hadn't been whatever factors, could there have been another path for me? I just kept thinking about what I enjoy doing at my job had nothing to do with the insurance side of things. I found that I got really into writing Excel formulas, [chuckles] those were the days that I was having the most fun and I was working remotely, living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time. After chatting with a few friends, I found the Turing School of Software & Design out in Denver. So I quit my job and moved out to Denver and two days after I moved there, I started the bootcamp program. After an entire week of school, I still hadn't unpacked my bag of socks and several other things from my car. So it was just kind of a whirlwind, but I picked Turing because they had an emphasis on social justice and that was really important to me and I think it served me very well as far as being able to meet a lot of people who are like-minded—who also picked Turing for similar reasons—just wanting to better the community and be a force for good with technology. So yeah, that was my rambling answer. [laughs] MANDO: I know that I struggle a lot with knowing the “good programs” and the not-so-great bootcamp style programs. Like anything else, when stuff becomes something that's popular, it attracts folks who are speculators and usurious, I guess, for lack of a better word. [chuckles] So you hear these horror stories about people who go through and spend all this money on bootcamp programs and then can't find a job, don't really feel like they learned the things that they were supposed to learn, or were told they were going to learn. It's nice to hear good stories around those and some good shoutouts to solid programs. LEAH: It was definitely stressful and we had a hallway that we deemed “the crying hallway.” [laughs] But I think it did serve me well and has served many people well in the several iterations that Turing has had over the years. MANDO: Yeah. Just because it's a solid program, or a positive program doesn't mean that it's easy by any stretch. LEAH: Totally. MANDO: I remember one time I was talking with an old coworker and she was telling me about her experience going through the CS program at Carnegie Mellon. This woman, Andrea, she's easily one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life and she's fantastic at everything that I've ever seen her do. So to hear her talk about going through this program and finding stairwells to cry in and stuff as she was a student really shook me and made me realize that the stuff's not easy and it's hard for everybody. Just because you see them years later being really, really fantastic at what they do doesn't mean that they spent years trying to build those skills through blood, sweat, and tears. LEAH: Yeah, I think one of the things that was hard, too is you have no idea what playing field everyone is starting from. It's easy to really get down on yourself when you're like, “This other person is getting this so much faster than I am,” and come to find out they've had internships, or have been working on random online courses teaching themselves for years, and then finally made the decision to go to a school versus other people who haven't had that same amount of experience. It's another lesson and [chuckles] just level setting yourself and running your own race and not worrying about what other people are doing. TRAM: I totally agree with that, Leah. I feel like sometimes I compare my starting point to someone's finish line and I'm like, “Oh, how did they finish already? I'm just starting.” It can be really hard to think about that comparison and not get down on yourself. But I think it's also really good to keep in mind that we only know our journey and our race and it's so hard to have all of the other information on other people, how they got there. So it's just like, I try to remind myself that and it's like, I think the only one that I'm trying to compare myself with is me a month ago, or me a year ago instead of someone else's journey. LEAH: Totally. JOHN: Yeah, that's actually something I'm trying to build into a conference talk because it's so hard to see your own progress unless someone points it out to you. Especially as you're grinding through a curriculum like that, where it's like you're always faced with something new and you're always looking ahead to all the things you don't know. Like, when am I going to learn that, when am I going to get to that, when am I getting to know all these things like everybody else? It takes extra work to stop and turn around and look at, like you said, where you were a month ago, where you were three months ago and be like, “Oh my God, I used to struggle with this every day and now it just flows out of my fingers when I need to do a git commit,” or whatever it is. Being able to notice that progress is so important to feeling like you're not completely swamped and struggling the whole time; that you're always looking to the things you don't yet know and never looking at the things you do know, because you don't have to struggle with those anymore. They don't take up any space in your mind. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I can relate to that as well. Something that I've been doing that it's working a lot is okay, I look to others, but I try to see what they did that I can try to look forward. Like, “Oh okay, so they did this and this looks like something that I want to do,” but I only compare myself to my past self because it can be really – I don't think it does a lot of good to anyone, in fact, when you compare yourself to others, just for the sake of comparing. But if you do see that as an inspiration, “Oh, look, this person is showing me that what I want to do is possible and that's great because I have now more proof that I'm going the right path.” It definitely takes some time to change this little key in your head, but once you do, it gets so much easier and so much lighter. You see even people in a different way because you start asking, “I wonder if this person is struggling with this as well because it's not easy.” [laughs] So this is something that it's helping me. MANDO: Yeah, that's something that I'm struggling with right now with my daughter. She plays high school softball. She's fantastic, she's an amazing athlete, and she's really, really good, but she's a freshman on the varsity team at the highest-level high school team. So she continually compares herself against these other girls who are like 2, 3, 4 years older than her and have a lot more playing time and playing experience and they're bigger and they're stronger. I keep trying to look for a way to help her understand that, like you said, Stephanie, she can compare herself to herself yesterday and she can look to these other players as inspiration as to what's possible. But what she can't do is get down on herself for not being there yet. That's just not fair at all and she may never get there. There are a lot of other factors, outside of how hard she works and what she does, that will contribute to how she's going to finally be. That's another thing that I have to [laughs] work on just me personally is that we all have our own built-in limitations and we all make choices that set us down only so far down a path. I choose to not keep my house completely spotless because there's only so many hours in a day and I would rather go watch my daughter's softball game than deep clean a bathroom. I'll eventually clean the bathroom, but today, [laughs] it's not going to be cleaned because that's the choice. But yet for some reason, I still get down on myself when I come home after the game and I'm like, “Ugh, why is this house so dirty?” STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think now that you mentioned that you have a daughter, I remember this chapter from this book called The Confidence Code. It’s a really, really good book and it talks about all the reasons women are the ones that more self-confidence and how we can put ourselves to compete. There is a chapter for parents and how you can help your daughters to not go through the normal route because it will happen. Not that much anymore, but we are still, in terms of society, expected to behave differently and the book brings you really good tips for parents. I think you would be nice for you. It looks like you want to learn more about that? MANDO: Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Stephanie so much. I'll take a look at that and we'll include a link in the show notes for that and some of the other stuff. Any and all help [chuckles] is very much appreciated. JOHN: We've come to the time on the show where we go into what we call reflections, which are just the takeaways, or the new thoughts, or the things we're going to be thinking about that we've talked about on this episode that really struck us. So for me, it's a couple of different things. First Leah, you were talking about being a companion to long distance runners, which is something I had never thought about being a thing, but of course, the moment you say it, I'm like, “Oh yeah, if you're running a 100 miles, it'd be nice to have someone keep you a company.” That sounds great and it's something you need to be suited to. You need to be able to run and talk and so, finding new ways to be of service to other people, I think is really interesting part of that. I think the other thing that struck me is we're discussing different ways of increasing psychological safety on the team and the ways that you can communicate that to the people that are there. Those are the things I'm always keeping an eye out for because I always want to be able to provide those to my team and so, hearing your examples is just always good for me just to have even more different ways of doing it in the back of my head. LEAH: Well, thanks, John. Yeah, I think the big takeaway for me is just what can we proactively do to make our space safer, or just more conducive to diverse thought? I think, Mando, maybe you asked the question of what we were explicitly doing at our companies, or if anyone had ever done something explicit to make us feel safer, or invite us to participate fully in the community of developers? I think there is a lot more that can be done to help people feel as though they're a part, or that their opinion matters, or their belief matters and their contribution will only make the team better and stronger. MANDO: Yeah. I think that was John who asked that and then I rambled on for about 20 minutes afterward, so. [laughter] LEAH: Sorry. MANDO: But that reminds me, or that that leads into my reflection. Stephanie was talking about the one of the things that helps reinforce that psychological safety for her was seeing people make mistakes and having it be okay, and having that general attitude that we're going to make mistakes and bad things are going to happen and that’s okay. It's something that Leah, like you, I work at a really, really small startup. There's five people at the company total. So the pressure to make sure that everything is done right the first time is pretty high, the pressure that I put on myself, and it can easily spiral out of control when I start thinking about how long I've been doing this and then the should start to come out. “You should know this,” “You should be able to do this,” You should get this stuff done quickly, or faster,” or “It should be perfect.” I need to keep reminding myself that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to not have it be perfect the first time, it's okay to not be perfect. So thank you for that reminder, Stephanie. STEPHANIE: You're welcome. I have to remind myself every day as well. [chuckles] It is a daily practice, but I can guarantee you that it's so much better, things like life in general is so much better, so it is worth it. I think that my takeaway here, not only from this talk with everyone, but also from the RailsConf in general and the Rails community is how common it is to talk about these things at our community. Like, yesterday at the keynote, I saw the diversity numbers and I was like, “Whoa, wait a second. I think this is the first time that I go to a conference and someone is talking about this openly.” I think that's one of the reasons why the Rails community is so important to me and I want to continue the legacy. I think that talking about these names is what makes our community unique and I'm really grateful to be part of the community. TRAM: Yeah, I think my main takeaway is what I've been reflecting on the past few days and this conversation is one thing following the psychological safety theme of how can we have more inclusive and safe environments and like Leah said about representation matters. The people you see around you and the environments that you are in can help you to feel a certain way and when there's such a monolith of people in a certain company, that can make me feel very scared and open up to what I think, or my thoughts are. So I think the diversification of type is very, very important, but also just humanizing people and that's one thing that we can do today is highlight, be open about our mistakes, but also have an environment that is inclusive enough where people can speak up about their mistake and that inclusivity begets inclusivity. You're not going to just say that you're inclusive and don't have actions to back it up. Also, I think what Mando said about calling someone out. Sometimes being a newcomer to a company, I don't feel like I have the power to do that and sometimes, it's uncomfortable for me to do that. So having someone who is in upper management, or someone who has a little bit more power showcase that that's something that they have the power to do, but something that I can do also is really helpful. So that's something that I would try to reflect more on and act upon because it's been a really wholesome conversation and I'm glad to be a part of it. JOHN: Wonderful. Yeah, and to your point, Tram, there's a talk that was actually at RailsConf a couple of years ago by Anjuan Simmons called Lending Privilege. One of his points is that those of us who have the higher levels of privilege, we can wield it for good and we can do things like putting ourselves out there to say, “No, that's not okay on this team,” or to lift someone else up and say, “Hey, you just talked over, what's her name.” Like, “Please Stephanie, say what it was you were going to say,” or like, “Stephanie mentioned that idea tenured 10 minutes ago and we ignored it.” So using that privilege, or the position on the team. I've been at my company for 10 years so I have a lot of social capital; I can use that for a lot of good. I'll post a link to that talk as well in the show notes because I think it's really important concept. All right. Well, we've come to the end of our show. Thank you so much to all of our scholars who were able to join today, Leah, Stephanie, and Tram and thank you, Mando for being here. This was a wonderful conversation. MANDO: Yeah, thanks everyone. LEAH: Thank you. MANDO: It was fantastic. STEPHANIE: Thank you! TRAM: Thanks, ya’ll. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guests: Leah Miller, Stefanni Brasil, and Tram Bui.
234: Civil Society and Community Relationships with Michael Garfield
02:13 - Michael’s Superpower: Being Able to Creatively Digest and Reconstruct Categories * Integral Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_theory_(Ken_Wilber)) * Creative Deconstruction – Michael Schwartz (https://ideas.repec.org/f/psc306.html) * Creating Truly Novel Categories – Recognizing Novelty as Novelty 09:39 - Recognizing Economic Value of Talents & Abilities * Invisible Labor * Ecosystem Services * Biodiversity; The Diversity Bonus by Scott Page (https://www.amazon.com/Diversity-Bonus-Knowledge-Compelling-Interests/dp/0691176884) 18:49 - The Edge of Chaos; Chaos Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory) * “Life exists at the edge of chaos.” 23:23 - Reproducibility Crisis and Context-Dependent Insight 28:49 - What constitutes a scientific experiment? * Missed Externalities * Scholarly articles for Michelle Girvan "reservoir computing" (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Michelle+Girvan+reservoir+computing&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart) * Non-conformity 38:03 - The Return of Civil Society and Community Relationships; Scale Theory * Legitimation Crisis by Juergen Habermas (https://www.amazon.com/Legitimation-Crisis-Juergen-Habermas/dp/0807015210) * Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West (https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Organisms-Cities-Companies-ebook/dp/B010P7Z8J0) 49:28 - Fractal Geometry More amazing resources from Michael to check out: Michael Garfield: Improvising Out of Algorithmic Isolation (https://blog.usejournal.com/improvising-out-of-algorithmic-isolation-7ef1a5b94697?gi=e731ad1488b2) Michael Garfield: We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks By Realizing We Are Networks (https://michaelgarfield.medium.com/we-will-fight-diseases-of-our-networks-by-realizing-we-are-networks-7fa1e1c24444) Reflections: Jacob: Some of the best ideas, tv shows, music, etc. are the kinds of things that there’s not going to be an established container. Rein: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.” ~ Heinz von Foerster Jessica: Externality. Recognize that there’s going to be surprises and find them. Michael: Adaptability is efficiency aggregated over a longer timescale. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 234 of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I’m joined with my co-panelist, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jacob and I’m here with my friend and co-panelist, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Thanks, Rein and today, I’m excited to introduce our guest, Michael Garfield. He’s an artist and philosopher and he helps people navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and cultivate the curiosity and play we need to thrive. He hosts and produces two podcasts, The Future Fossils Podcast & The Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast. Yay, complexity! Michael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers—a practice that feeds his synthetic and transdisciplinary “mind-jazz” performances in the form of essay, avant-guitar music, and painting! You can find him on Bandcamp, it’s pretty cool. Refusing to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, Michael walks through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice. Michael, welcome to Greater Than Code! MICHAEL: Thanks! I’m glad to be here and I hope that I provide a refreshingly different guest experience for listeners being not a coder in any kind of traditional sense. JESSICA: Yet you’re definitely involved in technology. MICHAEL: Yeah, and I think the epistemic framing of programming and algorithms is something that can be applied with no understanding of programming languages as they are currently widely understood. It’s just like design is coding, design of the built environment, so. JESSICA: And coding is a design. MICHAEL: Indeed. JESSICA: Okay, before we go anywhere else, I did not prepare you for this, but we have one question that we ask all of our guests. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MICHAEL: I would like believe that I have a superpower in being able to creatively digest and reconstruct categories so as to drive new associations between them for people and I feel like I developed that studying integral theory in grad school. I did some work under Sean Esbjörn-Hargens at John F. Kennedy University looking at the work of and work adjacent to Ken Wilber, who was trying to come up with a metatheoretical framework to integrate all different domains of human knowledge. All different types of inquiry into a single framework that doesn't attempt to reduce any one of them to any other and then in that process, I learned what one of my professors, Michael Schwartz, called creative deconstruction. So showing how art can be science and science can be art and that these aren't ontologically fixed categories that exist external to us. Looking at the relationship between science as a practice and spiritual inquiry as a practice and that kind of thing. So it's an irreverent attitude toward the categories that we've constructed that takes in a way a cynical and pragmatic approach to the way that we define things in our world. You know. REIN: Kant was wrong. [laughs] MICHAEL: It's good to get out of the rut. Obviously, you’ve got to be careful because all of these ideas have histories and so you have to decide whether it's worth trying to redefine something for people in order to open up new possibilities in the way that these ideas can be understood and manipulated. It's not, for example, an easy task to try and get people to change their idea about what religion is. [laughs] JESSICA: Yeah. More than redefined. It's almost like undefined. MICHAEL: Hm. Like Paul Tillich, for example. Theologian Paul Tillich said that religion is ultimate concern. So someone can have a religion of money, or a religion of sex, but if you get into these, if you try to interpose that in a debate on intelligent design versus evolutionary theory, you'll get attacked by both sides. JESSICA: [chuckles] That’s cosmology. MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's like – [overtalk] JESSICA: Which is hard to [inaudible] of money, or sex. MICHAEL: Yeah, but people do it anyhow. JESSICA: [laughs] Yeah. So deconstructing categories and seeing in-between things that fits through your walking through walls, what categories are you deconstructing and seeing between lately? MICHAEL: Well, I don't know, lately I've been paying more attention to the not so much tilting after the windmills of this metamorphic attitude towards categories, but looking at the way that when the opportunity comes to create a truly novel category, what are the forces in play that prevent that, that prevent recognizing novelty as novelty that I just – JESSICA: Do you have any examples? MICHAEL: Yeah, well, I just saw a really excellent talk by UC Berkeley Professor Doug Guilbeault, I think is how you say his name. I am happy to link his work to you all in the chat here so that you can share it. JESSICA: Yeah, we’ll link that in the show notes. MICHAEL: He studies category formation and he was explaining how most of the research that's been done on convergent categorization is done on established categories. But what happens when you discover something truly new? What his research shows is that basically the larger the population, the more likely it is that these categories will converge on something that's an existing category and he compared it to island versus mainland population biogeography. So there's a known dynamic in evolutionary science where genetic drift, which is just this random component of the change in allele frequencies in a population, the larger the population, the less likely it is that a genetic mutation that is otherwise neutral is going to actually percolate out into the population. On an island, you might get these otherwise neutral mutations that actually take root and saturate an entire community, but on the mainland, they get lost in the noise. You can look at this in terms of how easy it is for an innovative, artistic, or musical act to actually find any purchase. Like Spotify bought the data analysis company, The Echo Nest, back in 2015 and they ran this study on where emergent musical talent comes from. It comes from places like Australia, the UK, and Iceland, because the networks are small enough. This is a finding that's repeated endlessly through studies of how to create a viral meme that basically, or another way – JESSICA: You mean a small enough pool to take hold? MICHAEL: Yeah. That basically big science and large social networks online and these other attempts, anywhere we look at this economies of scale, growing a given system, what happens is—and we were talking about this a little before we got on the call—as a system scales, it becomes less innovative. There's less energy is allocated to – JESSICA: In America? MICHAEL: Yeah. Bureaucratic overhead, latencies in the network that prevent the large networks from adapting, with the same agility to novel challenges. There's a lot of different ways to think about this and talk about this, but it basically amounts to, if you want to, you can't do it from the conservative core of an organization. You can't do it from the board of directors. JESSICA: Oh. MICHAEL: You have to go out onto – like why did they call it fringe physics? It's like, it is because it's on the fringe and so there's a kind of – JESSICA: So this would be like if you have like one remarkably lowercase agile team inside your enterprise, one team is innovating and development practices. They're going to get mushed out. Whereas, if you have one team innovating like that in a small company, it might spread and it might become dominant. MICHAEL: Yeah. I think it's certainly the case that this speaks to something I've been wondering about it in a broader sense, which is how do we recognize the economic value of talents and abilities that are like, how do we recognize a singular individual for their incompressible knowledge and expertise when they don't go through established systems of accreditation like getting a PhD? Because the academic system is such that basically, if you have an innovative contribution, but you don't have the credentials that are required to participate in the community of peer review, then people can't even – your contribution is just invisible. The same is true for how long it took, if you look at economic models, it took so long for economic models to even begin to start addressing the invisible labor of women in at home like domestic labor, or what we're now calling ecosystem services. So there's this question of – I should add that I'm ambivalent about this question because I'm afraid that answering it in an effective way, how do we make all of these things economically visible would just accelerate the rate at which the capitalist machine is capable of co-opting and exploiting all of these. [chuckles] REIN: Yeah. You also have this Scott Seeing Like a State thing where in order to be able to even perceive that that stuff is going on, it has to become standardized and you can't dissect the bird to observe its song, right? MICHAEL: Totally. So obviously, it took almost no time at all for consumer culture to commodify the psychedelic experience and start using to co-opt this psychedelic aesthetic and start using it in advertising campaigns for Levi's Jeans and Campbell Soup and that kind of thing. So it’s this question of a moving frontier that as soon as you have the language to talk about it, it's not the ineffable anymore. REIN: Yeah. MICHAEL: There's a value to the ineffable and there's a value to – it's related to this question of the exploitation of indigenous peoples by large pharmaceutical companies like, their ethnobotanical knowledge. How do you make the potential value of biodiversity, something that can be manufactured into medicine at scale, without destroying the rainforest and the people who live in it? Everywhere I look, I see this question. So for me, lately, it's been less about how do we creatively deconstruct the categories we have so much as it is, what is the utility of not knowing how to categorize something at all and then how do we fix the skewed incentive structures in society so as to value that which we currently do not know how to value. JESSICA: Because you don’t have a category for it. MICHAEL: Right. Like right now, maybe one of the best examples, even though this is the worst example in another way, is that a large fraction of the human genome has been patented by Monsanto, even though it has no known current biomedical utility. This is what Lewis Hyde in his book, Common as Air, called “the third enclosure” of the common. So you have the enclosure of the land that everyone used to be able to hunt on and then you have the enclosure of intellectual property in terms of patents for known utilities, known applications, and then over the last few decades, you're starting to see large companies buy their way into and defend patents for the things that actually don't – it's speculative. They're just gambling on the idea that eventually we'll have some use for this and that it's worth lawyering up to defend that potential future use. But it's akin to recognizing that we need to fund translational work. We need to fund synthesis. We need to fund blue sky interdisciplinary research for which we don't have an expected return on investment here because there's – JESSICA: It's one of those things that it’s going to help; you're going to get tremendous benefits out of it, but you can't say which ones. MICHAEL: Right. It's a shift perhaps akin to the move that I'm seeing conservation biology make right now from “let's preserve this charismatic species” to “let's do everything we can to restore biodiversity” rather than that biodiversity itself is generative and should be valued in its own regard so diverse research teams, diverse workplace teams. We know that there is what University of Michigan Professor Scott Page calls the diversity bonus and you don't need to know and in fact, you cannot know what the bonus is upfront. JESSICA: Yeah. You can't draw the line of causality forward to the benefit because the point of diversity is that you get benefits you never thought of. MICHAEL: Exactly. Again, this gets into this question of as a science communications staffer in a position where I'm constantly in this weird dissonant enters zone between the elite researchers at the Santa Fe Institute where I work and the community of complex systems enthusiasts that have grown up around this organization. It's a complete mismatch in scale between this org that has basically insulated itself so as to preserve the island of innovation that is required for really groundbreaking research, but then also, they have this reputation that far outstrips their ability to actually respond to people that are one step further out on the fringe from them. So I find myself asking, historically SFI was founded by Los Alamos National Laboratory physicists mostly that were disenchanted with the idea that they were going to have to research science, that their science was limited to that which could be basically argued as a national defense initiative and they just wanted to think about the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. So what is to SFI as SFI as to Los Alamos? Even in really radical organizations, there's a point at which they've matured and there are questions that are beyond the horizon of that which a particular community is willing to indulge. I find, in general, I'm really fascinated by questions about the nonlinearity of time, or about weird ontology. I'm currently talking to about a dozen other academics and para-academics about how to try and – I'm working, or helping to organize a working group of people that can apply rigorous academic approaches to asking questions that are completely taboo inside of academia. Questions that challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions of maternity, such as there being a distinction between self and other, or the idea that there are things that are fundamentally inaccessible to quantitative research. These kinds of things like, how do we make space for that kind of inquiry when there's absolutely no way to argue it in terms of you should fund this? And that's not just for money, that's also for attention because the demands on the time and attention of academics are so intense that even if they have interest in this stuff, they don't have the freedom to pursue it in their careers. That's just one of many areas where I find that this kind of line of inquiry manifesting right now. REIN: Reminds me a lot of this model of the edge of chaos that came from Packard and Langton back in the late 70s. Came out of chaos theory, this idea that there's this liminal transitionary zone between stability and chaos and that this is the boiling zone where self-organization happens and innovation happens. But also, that this zone is itself not static; it gets pushed around by other forces. MICHAEL: Yeah, and that's where life is and that was Langton's point, that life exists at the edge of chaos that it's right there at the phase transition boundary between what is it that separates a stone from a raging bonfire, or there’s the Goldilocks Zone kind of question. Yeah, totally. REIN: And these places that were at the edge of chaos that were innovative can ossify, they can move into the zone of stability. It's not so much that they move it's that, I don't know, maybe it's both. Where the frontier is, is constantly in motion. MICHAEL: Yeah, and to that point again, I tend to think about these things in a topographical, or geographical sense, where the island is growing, we're sitting on a volcano, and there's lots you can do with that metaphor. Obviously, it doesn't make sense. You can't build your house inside the volcano, right? [laughs] But you want to be close enough to be able to watch and describe as new land erupts, but at a safe distance. Where is that sweet spot where you have rigor and you have support, but you're not trapped within a bureaucracy, or an ossified set of institutional conventions? JESSICA: Or if the island is going up, if the earth is moving the island up until the coastline keeps expanding outward, and you built your house right on the beach. As in you’ve got into React when it was the new hotness and you learned all about it and you became the expert and then you had this great house on the beach, and now you have a great house in the middle of town because the frontier, the hotness has moved on as our massive technology has increased and the island raises up. I mean, you can't both identify as being on the edge and identify with any single category of knowledge. MICHAEL: Yeah. It's tricky. I saw Nora Bateson talking about this on Twitter recently. She's someone who I love for her subversiveness. Her father, Gregory Bateson, was a major player in the articulation of cybernetics and she's awesome in that sense of, I don't know, the minister's daughter kind of a way of being extremely well-versed in complex systems thinking and yet also aware that there's a subtle reductionism that comes in that misses – JESSICA: Misses from? MICHAEL: Well, that comes at like we think about systems thinking as it's not reductionist because it's not trying to explain biology in terms of the interactions of atoms. It acknowledges that there's genuine emergence that happens at each of these levels and yet, to articulate that, one of the things that happens is everything has to be squashed into numbers and so it’s like this issue of how do you quantify something. JESSICA: It's not real, if you can't measure it in numbers. MICHAEL: Right and that belies this bias towards thinking that because you can't quantify something now means it can't be quantified. JESSICA: You can’t predict which way the flame is going to go in the fire. That doesn't mean the fire doesn't burn. [chuckles] MICHAEL: Right. So she's interesting because she talks about warm data as this terrain, or this experience where we don't know how to talk about it yet, but that's actually what makes it so juicy and meaningful and instructive and – JESSICA: As opposed to taking it out of context. Leave it in context, even though we don't know how to do some magical analysis on it there. MICHAEL: Right, and I think this starts to generate some meaningful insights into the problem of the reproducibility crisis. Just as an example, I think science is generally moving towards context dependent insight and away from – even at the Santa Fe Institute, nobody's looking for a single unifying theory of everything anymore. It's far more illuminating, useful, and rigorous to look at how different models are practical given different applications. I remember in college there's half a dozen major different ways to define a biological species and I was supposed to get up in front of a class and argue for one over the other five. I was like, “This is preposterous.” Concretely, pun kind of intended, Biosphere 2, which was this project that I know the folks here at Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe at the Institute of Ecotechnics, who were responsible for creating this unbelievable historic effort to miniaturize the entire biosphere inside of a building. They had a coral reef and a rainforest and a Savannah and a cloud desert, like the Atacama, and there was one other, I forget. But it was intended as a kind of open-ended ecological experiment that was supposed to iterate a 100 times, or 50 times over a 100 years. They didn't know what they were looking for; they just wanted to gather data and then continue these 2-year enclosures where a team of people were living inside this building and trying to reproduce the entire earth biosphere in miniature. So that first enclosure is remembered historically as a failure because they miscalculated the rate at which they would be producing carbon dioxide and they ended up having to open the building and let in fresh air and import resource. JESSICA: So they learned something? MICHAEL: Right, they learned something. But that project was funded by Ed Bass, who in 1994, I think called in hostile corporate takeover expert, Steve Bannon to force to go in there with a federal team and basically issue a restraining order on these people and forcibly evict them from the experiment that they had created. Because it was seen as an embarrassment, because they had been spun in this way in international media as being uncredentialed artists, rather than scientists who really should not have the keys to this thing. It was one of these instances where people regard this as a scientific failure and yet when you look at the way so much of science is being practiced now, be it in the domains of complex systems, or in machine learning, what they were doing was easily like 20 or 30 years ahead of its time. JESSICA: Well, no wonder they didn’t appreciate it. MICHAEL: [chuckles] Exactly. So it's like, they went in not knowing what they were going to get out of it, but there was this tragic mismatch between the logic of Ed Bass’ billionaire family about what it means to have a return on an investment and the logic of ecological engineering where you're just poking at a system to see what will happen and you don't even know where to set the controls yet. So anyway. JESSICA: And it got too big. You talked about the media, it got too widely disseminated and became embarrassed because it wasn't on an island. It wasn't in a place where the genetic drift can become normal. MICHAEL: Right. It was suddenly subject to the constraints imposed upon it in terms of the way that people were being taught science in public school in the 1980s that this is what the scientific method is. You start with a hypothesis and it's like what if your – JESSICA: Which are not standards that are relevant to that situation. MICHAEL: Exactly. And honestly, the same thing applies to other computational forms of science. It took a long time for the techniques pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute to be regarded as legitimate. I'm thinking of cellular automata, agent-based modeling, and computer simulation generally. Steven Wolfram did a huge service, in some sense, to the normalization of those things in publishing A New Kind of Science, that massive book in whatever it was, 2004, or something where he said, “Look, we can run algorithmic experiments,” and that's different from the science that you're familiar with, but it's also setting aside for a moment, the attribution failure that that book is and acknowledging who actually pioneered A New Kind of Science. [chuckles] JESSICA: At least it got some information out. MICHAEL: Right. At least it managed to shift the goalpost in terms of what the expectations are; what constitutes a scientific experiment in the first place. JESSICA: So it shifted categories. MICHAEL: Yeah. So I think about, for example, a research that was done on plant growth in a basement. I forget who it was that did this. I think I heard this from, it was either Doug Rushkoff, or Charles Eisenstein that was talking about this, where you got two completely different results and they couldn't figure out what was going on. And then they realized that it was at different moments in the lunar cycle and that it didn't matter if you put your plant experiment in a basement and lit everything with artificial bulbs and all this stuff. Rather than sunlight, rather than clean air, if you could control for everything, but that there's always a context outside of your context. So this notion that no matter how cleverly you try to frame your model, that when it comes time to actually experiment on these things in the real world, that there's always going to be some extra analogy you've missed and that this has real serious and grave implications in terms of our economic models, because there will always be someone that's falling through the cracks. How do we actually account for all of the stakeholders in conversations about the ecological cost of dropping a new factory over here, for example? It's only recently that people, anywhere in the modern world, are starting to think about granting ecosystems legal protections as entities befitting of personhood and this kind of thing. JESSICA: Haven’t we copyrighted those yet? MICHAEL: [laughs] So all of that, there's plenty of places to go from there, I'm sure. REIN: Well, this does remind me of one of the things that Stafford Beer tried was he said, “Ponds are viable systems, they’re ecologies, they're adaptive, they're self-sustaining. Instead of trying to model how a pond works, what if we just hook the inputs of the business process into the pond and then hook the adaptions made by the pond as the output back into the business process and use the pond as the controlling system without trying to understand what makes a pond good at adapting?” That is so outside of the box and it blows my mind that he was doing this, well, I guess it was the 60s, or whatever, but this goes well beyond black boxing, right? MICHAEL: Yeah. So there's kind of a related insight that I saw Michelle Girvan gave at Santa Fe Institute community lecture a few years ago on reservoir computing, which maybe most of your audience is familiar with, but just for the sake of it, this is joining a machine learning system to a source of analog chaos, basically. So putting a computer on a bucket of water and then just kicking the bucket, every once in a while, to generate waves so that you're feeding chaos into the output of the machine learning algorithm to prevent overfitting. Again, and again, and again, you see this value where this is apparently the evolutionary value of play and possibly also, of dreaming. There's a lot of good research on both of these areas right now that learning systems are all basically hill climbing algorithms that need to be periodically disrupted from climbing the wrong local optimum. So in reservoir computing, by adding a source of natural chaos to their weather prediction algorithms, they were able to double the horizon at which they were able to forecast meteorological events past the mathematic limit that had been proven and established for this. That is like, we live in a noisy world. JESSICA: Oh, yeah. Just because it’s provably impossible doesn't mean we can't do something that's effectively the same thing, that's close enough. MICHAEL: Right. Actually, in that example, I think that there's a strong argument for the value of that which we can't understand. [laughs] It's like it's actually important. So much has been written about the value of Slack, of dreaming, of taking a long walk, of daydreaming, letting your mind wander to scientific discovery. So this is where great innovations come from is like, “I'm going to sleep on it,” or “I'm going to go on vacation.” Just getting stuck on an idea, getting fixated on a problem, we actually tend to foreclose on the possibility of answering that problem entirely. Actually, there's a good reason to – I think this is why Silicon Valley has recognized the instrumental value of microdosing, incidentally. [laughs] That this is that you actually want to inject a little noise into your algorithm and knock yourself off the false peak that you've stranded yourself on. JESSICA: Because if you aim for predictability and consistency, if you insist on reasonableness, you'll miss everything interesting. MICHAEL: Or another good way to put it is what is it, reasonable women don't make history. [laughs] There is actually a place for the – JESSICA: You don’t change the system by maximally conforming. MICHAEL: Right. JESSICA: If there is a place for… MICHAEL: It’s just, there is a place for non-conformity and it's a thing where it's like, I really hope and I have some optimism that what we'll see, by the time my daughter is old enough to join the workforce, is that we'll see a move in this direction where non-conformity has been integrated somehow into our understanding of how to run a business that we actively seek out people that are capable of doing this. For the same reason that we saw over the 20th century, we saw a movement from one size fits all manufacturing to design your own Nike shoes. There's this much more bespoke approach. JESSICA: Oh, I love those. MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's like we know that if we can tailor our systems so that they can adapt across multiple different scales, that they're not exploiting economies of scale that ultimately slash the redundancy that allows an organization to adapt to risk. That if we can find a way to actually generate a kind of a fractal structure in the governance of organizations in the way that we have reflexes. The body already does this, you don't have to sit there and think about everything you do and if you did, you’d die right away. JESSICA: [laughs] Yeah. REIN: Yeah. MICHAEL: If you had to pass every single twitch all the way up the chain to your frontal cortex JESSICA: If we had to put breathe on the list. [laughs] MICHAEL: Right. If you had to sit there and approve every single heartbeat, you'd be so dead. [overtalk] JESSICA: Oh my gosh, yeah. That's an energy allocation and it all needs to go through you so that you can have control. REIN: I just wanted to mention, that reminded me of a thing that Klaus Krippendorff, who's a cybernetics guy, said that there is virtue in the act of delegating one's agency to trustworthy systems. We're talking, but I don't need to care about how the packets get from my machine to yours and I don't want to care about that, but there's a trade-off here where people find that when they surrender their agency, that this can be oppressive. So how do we find this trade-off? MICHAEL: So just to anchor it again in something that I find really helpful. Thinking about the way that convenience draws people into these compacts, with the market and with the state. You look over the last several hundred years, or thousand years in the West and you see more and more of what used to be taken for granted as the extent in terms of the functions that are performed by the extended family, or by the neighborhood, life in a city, by your church congregations, or whatever. All of that stuff has been out boarded to commercial interests and to federal level oversight, because it's just more efficient to do it that way at the timescales that matter, that are visible to those systems. Yet, what COVID has shown us is that we actually need neighborhoods that suddenly, it doesn't – my wife and I, it was easy to make the decision to move across country to a place where we didn't know anybody to take a good job. But then suddenly when you're just alone in your house all the time and you've got nobody to help you raise your kids, that seems extremely dumb. So there's that question of just as I feel like modern science is coming back around to acknowledging that a lot of what was captured in old wives’ tales and in traditional indigenous knowledge, ecological knowledge systems that were regarded by the enlightenment as just rumor, or… JESSICA: Superstition. MICHAEL: Superstition, that it turns out that these things actually had, that they had merit, they were evolved. JESSICA: There was [inaudible] enough. MICHAEL: Right. Again, it wasn't rendered in the language that allowed it to be the subject of quantitative research until very recently and then, suddenly it was and suddenly, we had to circle back around. Science is basically in this position where they have to sort of canonize Galileo, they're like, “Ah, crap. We burned all these witches, but it turns out they were right.” There's that piece of it. So I think relatedly, one of the things that we're seeing in economist samples and Wendy Carlin have written about this is the return of the civil society, the return of mutual aid networks, and of gift economies, and of the extended family, and of buildings that are built around in courtyards rather than this Jeffersonian everyone on their own plot of land approach. That we're starting to realize that we had completely emptied out the topsoil basically of all of these community relationships in order to standardize things for a mass big agricultural approach, that on the short scale actually does generate greater yield. It's easier to have conversations with people who agree with you than it is – in a way, it's inexpedient to try and cross the aisle and have a conversation with someone with whom you deeply and profoundly disagree. But the more polarized we become as a civilization, the more unstable we become as a civilization. So over this larger timescale, we actually have to find ways to incentivize talking to people with whom you disagree, or we're screwed. We're kicking legs out from under the table. REIN: At this point, I have to name drop Habermas because he had this idea that there were two fundamental cognitive interests that humans have to direct their attempts to acquire knowledge. One is a technical interest in achieving goals through prediction and control and the other is a practical interest in ensuring mutual understanding. His analysis was that advanced capitalist societies, the technical interest dominates at the expense of the practical interest and that knowledge produced by empirical, scientific, analytic sciences becomes the prototype of all knowledge. I think that's what you're talking about here that we've lost touch with this other form of knowledge. It's not seen as valuable and the scientific method, the analytical approaches have come to dominate. MICHAEL: Yeah, precisely. [laughs] Again, I think in general, we've become impoverished in our imagination because again, the expectations, there's a shifting baseline. So what people expect to pull out of the ocean now is a fish that you might catch off just a commercial, or a recreational fishing expedition. It's a quarter of the size of the same species of fish you might've caught 50, 70 years ago and when people pull up this thing and they're like, “Oh, look at –” and they feel proud of themselves. I feel like that's what's going on with us in terms of our we no longer even recognize, or didn't until very recently recognize that we had been unwittingly colluding in the erosion of some very essential levels of organization and human society and that we had basically sold our souls to market efficiency and efficient state level governance. Now it's a huge mess to try and understand. You look at Occupy Wall Street and stuff like that and it just seems like such an enormous pain in the ass to try and process things in that way. But it's because we're having to relearn how to govern neighborhoods and govern small communities and make business decisions at the scale of a bioregion rather than a nation. JESSICA: Yeah. It's a scale thing. I love the phrase topsoil of community relationships, because when you talk about the purposive knowledge that whatever you call it, Rein, that is goal seeking. It's like the one tall tree that is like, “I am the tallest tree,” and it keeps growing taller and taller and taller, and it doesn't see that it's falling over because there's no trees next to it to protect it from the wind. It's that weaving together between all the trees and the different knowledge and the different people, our soul is there. Our resilience is there. REIN: Michael, you keep talking about scale. Are you talking about scale theory? MICHAEL: Yeah. Scaling laws, like Geoffrey West's stuff, Luis Bettencourt is another researcher at the University of Chicago who does really excellent work in urban scaling. I just saw a talk from him this morning that was really quite interesting about there being a sweet spot where a city can exist between how thinly it's distributed infrastructurally over a given area versus how congested it is. Because population and infrastructure scale differently, they scale at different rates than you get – REIN: If I remember my West correctly, just because I suspect that not all of our listeners are familiar with scale theory, there's this idea that there are certain things that grow super linearly as things scale and certain things that grow sub linearly. So for example, the larger a city gets, you get a 15% more restaurants, but you also get 15% more flu, but you also get 15% less traffic. MICHAEL: Yeah. So anything that depends on infrastructures scales sub linearly. A city of 2 million people has 185% the number of gas stations, but anything that scales anything having to do with the number of interactions between people scales super linearly. You get 115% of the – rather you get, what is it, 230%? Something like that. Anyway, it's 150%, it's 85% up versus 115% up. So patents, but also crime and also, just the general pace of life scale at 115% per capita. So like, disease transmission. So you get into these weird cases—and this links back to what we were talking about earlier—where people move into the city, because it's per unit. In a given day, you have so much more choice, you have so much more opportunity than you would in your agrarian Chinese community and that's why Shenzhen is basically two generations old. 20 million people and none of them have grandparents living in Shenzhen because they're all attracted to this thing. But at scale, what that means is that everyone is converging on the same answer. Everyone's moving into Shenzhen and away from their farming community. So you end up – in a way, it's not that that world is any more innovative. It's just, again, easier to capture that innovation and therefore, measure it. But then back to what we were saying about convergent categories and biogeography, it's like if somebody comes up with a brilliant idea in the farm, you're not necessarily going to see it. But if somebody comes up with the same brilliant idea in the city, you might also not see it for different reasons. So anyway, I'm in kind of a ramble, but. JESSICA: The optimal scale for innovation is not the individual and it's not 22 million, it's in between. MICHAEL: Well, I feel like at the level of a city, you're no longer talking about individuals almost in a way. At that point, you're talking about firms. A city is like a rainforest in which the fauna are companies. Whereas, a neighborhood as an ecosystem in which the fauna, or individual people and so, to equate one with the other is a potential point of confusion. Maybe an easier way to think about this would be multicellular life. My brain is capable of making all kinds of innovations that any cell, or organ in my body could not make on its own. There's a difference there. [overtalk] JESSICA: [inaudible]. MICHAEL: Right. It's easier, however, for a cell to mutate if it doesn't live inside of me. Because if it does, it's the cancer – [overtalk] JESSICA: The immune system will come attack it. MICHAEL: Right. My body will come and regulate that. JESSICA: Like, “You’re different, you are right out.” MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's not about innovation as some sort of whole category, again, it's about different kinds of innovation that are made that are emergent at different levels of organization. It's just the question of what kinds of innovation are made possible when you have something like the large Hadron Collider versus when you've got five people in a room around a pizza. You want to find the appropriate scale for the entity, for the system that's the actual level of granularity at which you're trying to look at the stuff, so. REIN: Can I try to put a few things together here in potentially a new way and see if it's anything? So we talked about the edge of chaos earlier and we're talking about scale theory now, and in both, there's this idea of fractal geometry. This idea that a coastline gets larger, the smaller your ruler is. In scale theory, there's this idea of space filling that you have to fill the space with things like capillaries, or roads and so on. But in the human lung, for example, if you unfurled all of the surface area, you'd fill up like a football field, I think. So maybe there's this idea that there's complexity that's possible, that’s made possible by the fractal shape of this liminal region that the edge of chaos. MICHAEL: Yeah. It's certainly, I think as basically what it is in maximizing surface area, like you do within a lung, then you're maximizing exposure. So if the scientific community were operating on the insights that it has generated in a deliberate way, then you would try to find a way to actually incorporate the fringe physics community. There's got to be a way to use that as the reservoir of chaos, rather than trying to shut that chaos out of your hill climbing algorithm and then at that point, it's just like, where's the threshold? How much can you invite before it becomes a distraction from getting anything done? When it's too noisy to be coherent. Arguably, what the internet has done for humankind has thrown it in completely the opposite direction where we've optimized entirely for surface area instead of for coherence. So now we have like, no two people seem to be able to agree on reality anymore. That's not useful either. REIN: Maybe there's also a connectivity thing here where if I want to get from one side of the city to the other, there are 50 different routes. But if I want to get from one city to another, there's a highway that does it. MICHAEL: Yeah, totally. So it's just a matter of rather than thinking about what allows for the most efficient decisions, in some sense, at one given timescale, it's how can we design hierarchical information, aggregation structures so as to create a wise balance between the demands on efficiency that are held at and maintained at different scales. SFI researcher, Jessica Flack talks about this in her work on collective computation and primate hierarchies where it’s a weird, awkward thing, but basically, there is an evolutionary argument for police, that it turns out that having a police system is preventing violence. This is mathematically demonstrable, but you also have to make sure that there's enough agency at the individual level, in the system that the police aren't in charge of everything going on. It's not just complex, it's complicated. [laughs] We've thrown out a ton of stuff on this call. I don't know, maybe this is just whetting people's appetite for something a little bit more focused and concise. JESSICA: This episode is going to have some extensive show notes. MICHAEL: Yeah. [chuckles] JESSICA: It's definitely time to move into reflections. JACOB: You were talking, at the very beginning, about Spotify. Like how, when unknown ideas are able to find their tribe and germinate. I was reading about how Netflix does business and it's very common for them to make some new content and then see how it goes for 30 days and then just kill it. Because they say, “Well, this isn't taking off. We're not going to make more of it,” and a lot of people can get really upset with that. There's definitely been some really great things out on Netflix that I'm like, for one on the one hand, “Why are you canceling this? I really wanted more,” and it seems like there's a lot of the people that do, too. What that's making me think about as well for one thing, I think it seems like Netflix from my experience, is not actually marketing some of their best stuff. You would never know it’s there, just in the way of people to find more unknown things. But also, I'm thinking about how just generally speaking some of the best ideas, TV shows, music, whatever are the kinds of things that there's not going to be an established container, group of people, that you can say, “We want to find white men ages 25 to 35 and we're going to dump it on their home screen because if anyone's going to like it, it's them and if they do, then we keep it and if they don't move, we don't.” I feel like the best things are we don't actually know who those groups are going to be and it's going to have a weird constellation of people that I couldn't actually classify. So I was just thinking about how that's an interesting challenge. JESSICA: Sweet. Rein, you have a thing? REIN: Yeah. I have another thing. I was just reminded of von Foerster, who was one of the founders of Second-order cybernetics. He has an ethical imperative, which is act always so as to increase the number of choices. I think about this actually a lot in my day-to-day work about maximizing the option value that I carry with me as I'm doing my work, like deferring certain decisions and so on. But I think it also makes sense in our discussion as well. JESSICA: True. Mine is about externalities. We talked about how, whatever you do, whatever your business does, whatever your technology does, there's always going to be effects on the world on the context and the context of the context that you couldn't predict. That doesn't mean don't do anything. It doesn't mean look for those. Recognize that there's going to be surprises and try to find them. It reminds me of sometimes, I think in interviewing, we’re like, “There are cognitive biases so in order to be fair, we must not use human judgment!” [laughter] Which is not helpful. I mean, yes, there are cognitive biases so look for them and try to compensate. Don't try to use only something predictable, like an algorithm. That's not helpful. That's it. MICHAEL: Yeah. Just to speak to a little bit of what each of you have said, I think for me, one of the key takeaways here is that if you're optimizing for future opportunity, if you're trying to—and I think I saw MIT defined intelligence in this way, that AI could be measured in terms of its ability to – AGI rather could be measured in terms of its ability to increase the number of games steps available to it, or options available to it in the next step of an unfolding puzzle, or whatever. Superhuman AGI is going to break out of any kind of jail we try to put it in just because it's doing better at this. But the thing is that that's useless if we take it in terms of one spaciotemporal scale. Evolutionary dynamics have found a way to do this in a rainforest that optimizes biodiversity and the richness of feeding relationships in a food web without this short-sighted quarterly return maximizing type of approach. So the question is are you trying to create more opportunities for yourself right now? Are you trying to create more opportunities for your kids, or are you trying to transcend the rivalrous dynamics? You've set yourself up for intergenerational warfare if you pick only one of those. The tension between feed yourself versus feed your kids is resolved in a number of different ways in different species that have different – yeah. It is exactly, Rein in the chat you said, it reminds you of the trade-off between efficiency and adaptability and it's like, arguably, adaptability is efficiency aggregated when you're looking at it over a longer timescale, because you don't want to have to rebuild civilization from scratch. So [chuckles] I think it's just important to add the dimension of time and to consider that this is something that's going on at multiple different levels of organization at the same time and that's a hugely important to how we actually think about these topics. JESSICA: Thinking of scales of time, you’ve thought about these interesting topics for an hour, or so now and I hope you'll continue thinking about them over weeks and consult the show notes. Michael, how can people find out more about you? MICHAEL: I'm on Twitter and Instagram if people prefer diving in social media first, I don't recommend it. I would prefer you go to patreon.com/michaelgarfield and find future fossils podcasts there. I have a lot of other stuff I do, the music and the art and everything feeds into everything else. So because I'm a parent and because I don't want all of my income coming from my day job, I guess Patreon is where I suggest people go first. [laughs] Thank you. JESSICA: Thank you. And of course, to support the podcast, you can also go to patrion.com/greaterthancode. If you donate even a dollar, you can join our Slack channel and join the conversation. It'll be fun. Special Guest: Michael Garfield.
233: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Matter with Jess Szmajda
01:22 - Jess’s Superpower: Playing ANY Instrument * Music & Technology * Cultural Expoloration 06:03 - Language Community Ethos (MINASWAN (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN)) * Human-Centered Design * The Joy of Programming Meetup (https://www.meetup.com/Joy-of-Programming-DC/) * Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis) 13:24 - Inclusive Language: Language Matters * Valheim (https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/) 17:19 - Active Listening and Expressing Point-of-View, and Using Loudness * Vocally For * Vocally Against * Quiet For * Quiet Against 21:51 - Shining Light on Marginalized People & Voices * BULQ (https://www.bulq.com/about-us/) * Metacognition: Asking ourselves, “What are we not thinking about?” * Leadership * Changing Mental Patterns; Take a Different Path 31:30 - Benefits of Having Diverse Teams (Resources) & Risks of Homogeneity * Diversity wins: How inclusion matters (https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters) * Why diversity matters (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters) * The Chevy Nova That Wouldn't Go (https://www.thoughtco.com/chevy-nova-that-wouldnt-go-3078090) * Google Photos labeled black people 'gorillas' (https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apologizes-after-photos-identify-black-people-as-gorillas/29567465/) * From transparent staircases to faraway restrooms, why these benign design details can be a nuisance for some women (https://archinect.com/news/article/150073631/from-transparent-staircases-to-faraway-restrooms-why-these-benign-design-details-can-be-a-nuisance-for-some-women) 37:29 - Storytelling * Representation Matters * Normalization Reflections: Jess: We are feeling beings that rationalize. Damien: How technology impacts culture. Casey: Taking loudness for diversity, equity, and inclusion with people who don’t always talk about it. Who is more open to it or not? This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. **Transcript:: DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 233 of Greater Than Code. I’m Damien Burke and I’m joined here with Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I’m Casey! And I’m here with our guest today, Jess Szmajda. Jess is currently a senior leader at AWS in the EC2 Networking organization. Previously, she was the first female CTO of a major media organization, Axios, and before that, the co-founder and CTO at Optoro, which helps top tier retailers nationwide handle their returned and excess goods. Jess got her start in tech in the 90s writing Perl to configure Solaris machines. Over the years, she’s contributed to Open Source and organized a number of communities. These days, focusing on the DC Tech Slack and the DC-based Joy of Programming Meetup. Outside of the tech world, Jess is a singer-songwriter, an improviser, a gamer, a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, and a Mom to the most wonderful, Minecraft-obsessed 6-year-old imaginable. Welcome Jess. DAMIEN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Jess. JESS: Thank you! It's nice to be here. DAMIEN: So I know someone has prepped you with our first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JESS: My superpower is that I can play any instrument you hand me and I – DAMIEN: Oh. JESS: [laughs] I acquired it by being a giant nerd. [laughs] I went to a special music high school here in the DC area called Suitland High School and I played all kinds of different instruments. I was the principal bassoonist of the DC Youth Orchestra for a while. Music's always been a lifelong love of mine and it's been a mission to find every strange instrument I can find to figure out how it works. So it's challenge [chuckles] to find something that I can't play. [laughs] DAMIEN: Oh, I'm so tempted and of course, the first thing I would have gone with is the double reed bassoon and oboe, but that's too easy. JESS: That’s right. DAMIEN: Banjo, of course, you’ve got steel drum. JESS: Steel drum and plate, yeah. DAMIEN: Cajon. JESS: Cajon. Oh, I have heard of it. DAMIEN: Aha! JESS: I haven't actually touched one. I'll figure it out. [laughs] DAMIEN: It's particularly easy. JESS: Nice. [laughs] CASEY: I don't know very many people who play more than just an instrument, or two. I think it might be like you and I are the two that come to mind for me, honestly. [laughter] I have an instrument in every color, by the way. That's the way I collect them. [laughter] JESS: Nice. CASEY: I’ve got a white accordion. How do you feel like this breadth of instrument ability has affected your life in other ways? JESS: I don't know. That's an interesting question. How has it affected my life in other ways? I mean, there's the obvious tie into music and technology. There's such an incredible confluence of musicians who are engineers and vice versa. I was actually talking to someone at the office earlier about that and she was theorizing it's because all of the patterns and rhythms that we think about and how that ties into a regular patterns and systems that we think about as engineers and I think it's a really interesting way to think about it, for sure. I do think that there's a certain element of cross-culturalism that you get from learning other cultures instruments. Certainly, the berimbau, the Brazilian martial art? [laughs] DAMIEN: Capoeira? JESS: Capoeira, yeah. The capoeira, the berimbau instrument that has the long string and you have the little – I think you learn a lot about what led to developing an instrument so relatively simple, but creating such an incredible art form in the culture where people just wanted to dance and share their heritage with each other and picked up whatever they could find that would make interesting and fun sounds and created an entire culture around that. So for me, it's as much cultural exploration and understanding as it is anything. I think it's wonderful. DAMIEN: Yeah. That's really amazing. I had a tiny insight on this recently. I saw an amazing video about a Jimmy Hendrix song with the basic premise being, what key is this song in? It's a really difficult question because—and I'm going to go a little bit music nerd here—the tonic is e, but the chord progressions and the melodic signature doesn't really fit that. Amazing 20-minute video, but the end conclusion is that using Western art music tonality to describe blues music, American blues music, it's a different tonality. So it doesn't really make sense to say what major key is this in, or what minor key is this in. JESS: Yeah, totally. My partner and I, this morning, we were watching a video about Coltrane's classic—my favorite thing is interpretation in the 60s—and how he's basically playing between these major and minor tonalities constantly. It's not necessarily tonal from the Western sense, but it’s certainly beautiful and I think it's certainly approachable and understandable to any ear regardless of how you decompose it. Anyway, giant music nerd, sorry. [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah, but it ties so closely to what you were talking about as an instrument being cultural. The guitar, the five-string guitar, is tuned for American music, which is a slightly different tonality from Western European music. So when you think about “Okay, well, that's very slightly different. Now, what is it like in Africa, in Australia, in Asia?” Then it gets all, it's got to be very, very different. JESS: Oh, yeah. I saw this guy in Turkey, he's modified a guitar to add quarter tones to it because a lot of Turkish music uses quarter tones and so, it's just like the fretboard is wild. It has all of these extra frets on it and he plays it. It's absolutely incredible, but it's wild. It's amazing. DAMIEN: So I want to tie this into different cultures, frameworks, and technology. How about that? JESS: Yeah, you bet, let's do it. [laughs] CASEY: Good segue. JESS: So actually, that's something that's been on my mind is this Ruby community diaspora in a way. I know Greater Than Code has a lot of Ruby folks on it and I'm not sure about the latest incarnation, but definitely a lot of Ruby roots. I think that we've seen this incredible mixing of culture in the Ruby community that I haven't seen in other places that drives this – well, I think [inaudible], it's a really fantastic way to sum it up like, math is nice and so we are nice. As much as that might be a justification to be nice, be nice anyway, but it's still this ethos of we are nice to each other, we care, and that is baked into the community and my journeys and other language communities, I think haven't shared that perspective that it is good to be nice in general and some of them even are, I think are focused on it's good to fight. [laughs] So I've been really curious about this movement, Rubius’s movement into other language areas, like Go, Rust, and Alexa, et cetera, et cetera, how much of that carries forward and what really can we do to drive that? DAMIEN: Yeah. So my question is how does a technological community, what is it about the community? What is about the technology? Why is it different? You and I both wrote Pearl in the 90s and so, that is a very different community. I look at Ruby and I write mostly Ruby now and I go, “Why is it different? What's different about it?” JESS: Yeah, no, it's a good question. A lot of the early conversation that I remember in the Ruby community was—and just contextually, I've been using Ruby since 2006, or so, so that era. A lot of the early conversation I remember was about develop the language to optimize for developer happiness. I think that's a really unique take and I haven't heard of that in any other place. So I'm wondering how much that might've been the beginnings of this. I don't know. DAMIEN: Something came up in a Twitter conversation, I saw a while back where they compared Ruby and Pearl, I'm pretty sure it was Pearl and well, one of the defining features of Pearl was that there's more than one way to do it and Ruby has that same ethos. Literally, in the standard lib, there’s a lot of aliases and synonyms. It's like, you can call pop, or drop and I can't keep it straight. [chuckles] But anyway, then I thought to myself, “Well, in Pearl, that's an absolute disaster.” I pull up a profile and I'm like, “I don't know what this is because I don't know what's going on.” Whereas, in Ruby, I've loved it so much and so, what's the difference and the difference pointed out to me was that in Ruby, it was for expressiveness. Things have different names so that they can properly express, or better express the intention and in Pearl, that wasn't the case. JESS: Yeah, no, totally. I think actually looking at Ruby and Python, I think were both heavily influenced by Pearl and I think Python definitely took the path of well, all of this nonsense is just nonsense. Let's just have one way to do it. [laughs] Having worked with some Python developers, I think that perspective on there is one correct path really drives that community in a lot of ways. I think some people find that releasing really simplifying for them because they're like, “I got it. I know the answer.” Like it's a math problem almost. As a Rubyist going into the Python community, I was like, “Oh, I'm so stifled.” [laughs] Where is my expressiveness?! I want to write inject, or oh, I can't even think of the opposite of inject. Collect. [laughs] Those are two different words for me. I want to be able to write both, depending on what I'm doing so. It's also interesting, like I see a lot more DSL development in Ruby than I see in any other language and maybe Alexa also. But I think that also comes from the same perspective of there is not one right way to do it. There's the best way for this problem and there's the best way for this kind of communication you're trying to drive. It's interesting, as I'm talking myself into a corner here a bit, Ruby almost emphasizes the communication of code more than the solving of the problem and I think that might actually help drive this community where we care about the other humans we're working with, because we're always thinking about how we communicate with them in a way. CASEY: I think about the term human-centered design a lot lately and that's becoming more and more popular term, a way to describe this thing. Ruby totally did that. Ruby looked at how can we make this easy for humans to use and work with and I think that's beautiful. I keep thinking about a paper I read a long time ago that a professor made-up programming language and varied features of it like, white space matters, or not, and a whole bunch of those and measured which ones were easier for new people to learn and which ones were harder for new people to learn. As a teacher, I want to use whatever is easy for the students to learn so they can get their feet wet, so they can start learning and building and doing things and get excited about it, not get hung up on the syntax. So human-centered design baked into Ruby is, I think partly why the community is so human-centered. I think you're exactly right. JESS: Yeah. That's really interesting. That's a large part of why the Joy of Programming Meetup, I think has been really fun is we get to learn from how different language communities build things. I think it was founded on that kind of thinking is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis for better, or worse theorizes language shapes thought and I think that that is to some degree, at least true in how we think about writing code and solving problems. So the kinds of solutions that you see from different language communities, I think very incredibly. I don't know, even just as simple as from like J2EE, which is the ivory tower of purity in XML [laughs] to obviously, I don't want to pick on Rails, but Rails is an open system. [laughs] An interpretive dance, perhaps. I think it's really interesting, the web frameworks even I see in Haskell almost feel like I'm solving a math problem more than I'm creating an API, or delivering content into somebody. So it's hard for me to separate, is this a community of thought of people who are attracted to a certain way of solving problems? Is this driven by the structure and format of the language? I don't know. DAMIEN: I know you mentioned the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and their research has been shown to be problematic. JESS: Yeah, for sure. DAMIEN: [laughs] But I will say that the hypothesis is that language shapes thought and I would say that the correct state – correct [chuckles] a better description for me is that language is thoughts and so, the language you use is the sort of things you're thinking about. So if you say inject when you mean collect, those are different things, you're going to get different things out of them. This is why we use get annotate instead of get playing. JESS: For sure. Exactly. So at AWS, this is big drive and I'm not speaking for AWS on this, I'm just speaking for me. But I'm noticing this drive for inclusive language and I think it's really beautiful. Connecting that drive, frankly, in the broader tech community to everything that's been going on in this last year in how we interact with each other as humans from different backgrounds, et cetera. It's like, what kinds of dominant culture paradigms have we baked into our code beyond even the very obviously problematic statements, but just the way that we think about, I don't know. Part of me is like, “Well, is object-oriented design driven by certain cultural expectations that we have, or functional?” I don't know. What paradigms would we get if we'd have had a different dominant culture developing technology? I don't know. It's fascinating. DAMIEN: Yeah, and [inaudible] is an excellent example of that. It's a punishment. This is wrong. I did a whole talk several years ago about specifications versus tests. I don't want you to write tests for your code; tests are something you do afterwards to see if something is suitable. Write a specification and then if the code and specifications don't match, well, one of them needs to change. [laughs] JESS: That's right. I love that. That's also kind of like the Pact Contract Testing space. It's like, I like this framework because it allows a consumer of an API to say, “This is what I expect you to do,” and then the API almost has to comply. Whenever I've talked about Pact, I think with a lot of developers, they're like, “Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense at all.” I'm like, “Well, no.” In a way, it's like the API’s prerogative to deliver what the customer expects and to be always right. The customer is right here, in this case and I think it's a really great way to look at this differently. CASEY: That should totally be the tagline for Pact: the consumer is always right. JESS: I love it. [laughs] CASEY: Another way language shapes things, I noticed lately is Valheim is a super popular game where you're a Viking and building houses. There's a command you can type called “imacheater” that lets you spawn in equipment and building materials. On all the forums online, people are harassing each other for doing their own creative mode for spawning stuff in because of that language, I suspect. So in a recent patch, they changed it from imacheater to devtools, or something like that and the forums have rebranded. There's a new moderator is posting things and the culture is completely changing because the devs changed that one word in the changelog and it's just so cool to see language matters. JESS: That's amazing. That's so cool. Actually, I'm totally hooked on Valheim also along with probably everybody else. I have my own little server with some friends. Anyway, we noticed on the Valheim server that there was somebody who sort of redid the loading screen and they really hypersexualized the female character in the painting and actually got a surprising amount of feedback like saying, “Please don't do that. We love Valheim because it's not clearly gendered, or particularly one way, or the other,” and the artist actually took that feedback to heart and put together a much better version of the thing where the woman was very well armored and looked ready for battle and it was really cool. I've been thinking about the whole tech community and there's so many connections to the gamer community as well. Ever since Gamergate, I think we've been putting a really hard light on this whole world. It's just so heartwarming and incredible to know that like this Viking destroying trolls game has people who actually care enough to say, “No, let's pay attention to what that woman's wearing. Make sure she wears something that's actually reasonable.” That's cool. We've come a long way. I mean, not perfect, but it's a long way. CASEY: Yeah, a long way. I always think about progress in terms of people in four groups. There's like people who are vocally for something like they would speak up in this case, people who are vocally against it, and then quiet people who are for, or against it. We can see the vocal people who are supporting this now and I love to think about how many people are moving in that direction who are quiet; we can't see. That's the big cultural shift under the covers. JESS: Yeah. That's a big question. That makes me think about when I was at Optoro, we were trying to understand our employee engagement and so, we used this tool, Culture Amp, which I imagine a lot of people have seen. We did a survey and we got all this data and it's like, “Hey, everybody's really engaged. Maybe there's a couple of minor things we can fix.” But then we were talking to some of our Black employees—those of you who can't see me, I'm white—and there was just a lot of like, “Wow, this doesn't represent us.” Like, “What are you doing? We actually aren't don't feel like this is a really great representation.” We're like, “Well, the data says everything's fine.” So what we actually did, the next survey we ran, we included demographic data in the dataset and then we were able to distribute the data across racial demographics and we saw, oh no, our Black employees are pretty much all pissed off. [laughs] We've done a really bad job of including them for a lot of reasons. For example, we had a warehouse and most of our Black employees worked in the warehouse and it turns out that we had a very corporate-based culture and we didn't pay enough attention and we didn't really engage everybody. The fact that they were basically all in the warehouse is kind of also a problem, too. So there was a lot of really great eye-opening things that we got to see by paying attention to that and looking not just at our Black employees, but all our different demographics. We learned a lot and I think we had a real humbling moment and got to listen, but it's really this quiet – either people who don't use their voice, or can't use their voice, or maybe don't know how to use their voice in a lot of different ways. These people, I think make such an incredible impact on the true feeling of a place, of a community, of a company and really sitting down and listening to those people, I think can be really hard in any position. So I was really happy we were able to do that, but I think you're totally right, Casey, that it's not just moving the vocal people to really change the Overton window, I suppose on what's acceptable in a community. But it's fundamentally, how do you change the people who you aren't hearing from? How do you frankly even know? CASEY: Yeah, it's a big question. There's no easy answer. There's a lot of approaches. I'm glad people are talking about that in the meta sense, that's huge. We want to do this as a community, but there's work to be done and then even once people are comfortable expressing their point of view, there are then further tiers we're going to have to go through like that other people around them understand. They're actively listening and they internalize it. And then beyond that, actually acting on it. I've had experiences at work where I'm usually very confident, I'll say my point of view regardless of the context. I like being outspoken like that and represent quieter people, but often leadership and other people around me don't understand, or even if they do, they don't incorporate that into the plan and then everybody is still very frustrated, maybe even more so in a way, because a light is shining on this problem. And that's the same for marginalized voices. If they can just be heard, that's great, but we have to go farther than that, too. JESS: I couldn't agree more. This is the thing that I struggle with sometimes. I love people. I'm very extroverted. I'm very gregarious, [laughs] as I imagine you can tell, and I like to engage with people and I try to listen, but I find that sometimes I have a big personality and that can be tough, [laughs] I think sometimes. So I super value people you Casey, for example, who I think are much better listeners [laughs] and are willing to represent that. So that's huge. I also, though on the flip side, I know that I can use that loudness to help represent at least one aspect of marginalized people. I'm trans and I'm super loud about that and I'm very happy to make all kinds of noise and say, “Don't forget about trans rights!” [laughs] Frankly, I think it's kind of a wedge into I'm one kind of marginalized community, I represent one kind of marginalized community, but there's a lot more and let's talk about that, too. Not to toot my horn, but like I think those of us who are allowed to have a responsibility to use our loudness in a way that I think supports people and also, to listen when we can. DAMIEN: Can we explore a bit into the into the metal problem of hearing from marginalized voices? I'm an engineer at heart, first and foremost, and so, how do we solve this meta problem? You gave a good example with the survey separated by demographics knowing that racial and gender demographics, or well, finding out that [chuckles] racial and gender demographics were important factors than you think, but how do we solve this on a broader issue? I don't know. JESS: No, that's a great question. I think we have so much calcified thinking that at every organization and every place in the world, there's so much like, “Well, this is the way we've done things,” and frankly, it's not even, “This is the way we've done things.” It's just, “This is the way it works and this is what we do,” and just thinking outside the box, I think it's hard. Finding these areas that we are being blind to in the first place, I think it takes a certain amount of just metacognition and patience and self-reflection, and that's very difficult to do, I think for any human. But driving that shows like this, for example, making sure that people care and think about these kinds of problems and maybe take a second. You as a listener, I'm going to challenge you for a second, take a minute at the end of this podcast and think about what am I not thinking about? I don't know, it's a really freaking hard question, but maybe you might find something. But it's politicians, it's media, it's our leaders in every aspect making sure that we shine a light on something that is different, something that is marginalized, I think is incredibly valuable. That's a first step. But then playing that through everything else we do, that's hard. I think it falls on leaders in every realm that we have like, community leaders, conference organizers, people who lead major open source projects. Making sure that people say, “I believe that Black Lives Matter.” “I believe that we should stand against violence against the Asian community.” Those, I think are powerful statements and saying, “Hey, have we heard from somebody that doesn't look like us lately, who doesn't come from our same socioeconomic educational background?” It's tough. I had food, but I grew up relatively poor, and I think even that is such a huge difference of experience and background to a lot of people that I end up working with and I've been able to talk about like, “How are we setting prices?” Well, who are we actually thinking about? We're not thinking about ourselves here. We're thinking about a different market. Let's make sure we talk to those people. Let's make sure we talk to our customers and make sure that this actually works for them. I was really proud. At Optoro, we built a new brand called BULQ where we took – so 2 seconds on Optoro. We took returns and excess goods from major retailers and helped them get more value out of it and a a lot of the time, we built great classification systems to say, “Oh, well this is a belt and I know how to price belts because I can look on eBay and Amazon and determine, et cetera.” But a lot of the times we couldn't build these kinds of models, like auto parts, for example, were notoriously difficult for us. So we could say, “Oh, this is an auto part. But I don’t know, carburetor, manifold? Who knows?” [laughs] So we were able to classify them as auto parts and then we put them into these cases, maybe like 3-foot square large boxes, and then we were able to sell those in lots to basically individual people who had time to learn what they were and then could resell them. The story that I love to tell here is they're a laid-off auto factory worker, knows a ton about auto parts, and can probably scrounge up enough money to afford this $200 to $300 box, brings it to their house, knows exactly what these parts are and knows exactly what the value is and then can resell them for like 3x to 5x on what this person bought them for. I was so proud to be able to have created this kind of entrepreneurial opportunity for people that we would otherwise often forget about because so much of tech, I think is focused on us. So, it's an interesting thing kind of being at AWS, which is very much a tech for tech company. I love it, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I think these opportunities to listen to the rest of the world, we miss out on. DAMIEN: Yeah. You challenged us to ask ourselves the question, what are we not thinking about and that level of metacognition sounds impossible. It might be impossible. It's close to impossible, if it's not. So I can't help to think the only way to really get that knowledge, that insight is to get people who are different from me, who have different backgrounds, who have different life experiences. You got a great example of someone who knows a lot about car parts, bring them in, they have years of experience in car parts and they can do this stuff that you can't do. But then also, along every axis, if you look around. If you look around the leadership and go, “Oh, there's nobody in leadership here who has this type of experience,” that knowledge, that insight and people like that are not going to be served because it's impossible for them. They don't even know. They can't know. JESS: Could not agree more and it is leadership. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. So many times I've seen, having been a leader, ultimately, you end up in a room with other leaders and you end up making decisions. And if you don't have other voices in there, if you don't have diverse voices, you don't get that benefit. Even if you've gone to the trouble of paying attention to diverse voices beforehand, there's always some data, some argument that comes up and it's like, “Oh, well, maybe, maybe not.” Yeah, I cannot agree enough. This is the other flip side of that is that as a business leader, I have to think about prioritizing the outcomes of the business, it is a fact of my position and I like to think that I work in a lot more data to what that means than other business leaders perhaps. Like, impact on the community. [laughs] Impact on the people. But a lot of times, we'll be having these discussions about who to hire and maybe we'll have done a really great job—and this isn't specific to any particular company that I'm talking about, but I know that this kind of thing happens. Maybe we've done a really great job of getting a diverse pipeline and having talked to a bunch of different kinds of candidates, but when it comes down to it, we're trying to make often the lowest risk decision on who to hire and so often, we are too risk averse to somebody whose background doesn't quite line up to what we're expecting, or to what we think we need. I like to think that I push hiring communities in conversations like that and say like, “Look, let's think beyond what's risky here and factor in more of these aspects to the conversation of getting diverse voices.” But too often, it's very easy, I think for leaders to think, “Well, we’re just going to hire the known quantity,” and I think that is again, on the meta, a major thing that we need to fix. There's so much more to being an effective leader than having the standard pedigree. DAMIEN: Well, there's also, like you mentioned, the risk aversion to not want to hire somebody who's not like all the other people, but then what are the huge risks of having only people who are alike in certain aspects? JESS: Exactly. Couldn't agree more. I think there's tons of examples. If we Google right now, we'd find like companies have made really dumb mistakes because they didn't have somebody in the room who could be like, “That?” The first one that comes to mind is the Chevy Nova, they tried to sell that in Spanish speaking countries, [laughter] “doesn't go,” “not going anywhere.” [laughs] I mean, like that could have been avoided, right? [laughs] CASEY: Nova. JESS: Nova. That might be a trivializing one, but there's been a lot worse and that's a major business risk and I think those arguments carry some weight. I love that so many organizations are prioritizing hiring more diverse leaders, especially, but this is deep pattern that we've gotten into. So that actually comes to mind when you're thinking about how to change your mental patterns. I'm an improviser, I'm all about trying to change my mental patterns all the time so I can try to be creative. Obviously, there's plenty of silly improv games that you get into, but something that's simple, I think that anybody can do is go for a walk and take a different path. Just turn a different way than how you used to. We, humans love to get into patterns, especially engineers, which I find to be highly ironic. Engineers are all about creating change, but don't like change themselves typically. [laughs] But do something a little different, turn left instead of right today, look up instead of down. Those, I think subtle physical changes really do influence our mental states and I think that can actually lead us to thinking in new ways. CASEY: I love it. That's very actionable. I've been doing a lot of walks and hikes and I actually try to go to a different hiking location each time because of that. I think about that idea all the time, take a different path, and it is great. Every time I do it, I feel amazing. I don’t know, more flexible, I think differently. Yeah, try it, listeners. I dare you. JESS: I love it. CASEY: I'm sure there are papers written showing that having diverse teams have very measured effects, a whole bunch of them, more than I know more, than I've read. Well, I guess first of all, I don't know that the data has been collected in a single spot I can point people to and that would be pretty powerful. But then secondly, even if we had that, I'm not sure that's enough to change minds at companies in any widespread way. It might just help some people, who already care, say their message very clearly. Do you know of anything like that Jess, or Damien, either of you? What's the one resource you would send to someone who wants to be equipped with diversity and inclusion data? JESS: Yeah. This study McKinsey did a while ago that, I think gets a lot of traction here where they demonstrated the companies have better total performance with more diverse groups of people and went into some depth with data. I think it's a fantastic study. It's definitely one that I reference often. I've used it to change minds among people who were like, “Wow, what's it really matter?” No, I’ve got data. [laughs] I know. I can see Casey here on video and Casey's mouth just went open [laughs] It's like, “Yes, no, it's, that's real.” No shade on the people I've worked with, I love them, but like, this is such a thing. There are cynics in corporate leadership who want to focus on profit and sometimes, you have to make a cynical argument in business and a cynical argument can come down to data and this data says, “No, look, if we get more people in here who look different from us, we're going to make more money and that's good for you and your bottom line.” So sometimes you have to walk the argument back to that, even if it feels gross and it does, it's like, “No, this actually matters to your bottom line.” DAMIEN: That's a great argument and it's a positive argument. In my view of corporations, I feel like the larger they get, the more you have an agency problem where people aren't looking to take risks to get the positive benefits, they're going to do things to avoid backlash and negative things. So I think larger company, more middle management, more people you’re answerable to, especially on the short-term, the more people are better motivated by fear. So for that, I want to pull out like, what are the risks of homogeneity? You mentioned the Nova. You mentioned like, oh, there was – [laughs] I pull this out far too often. There was an AI image classifier that classified Black people as gorillas. There was a store. Oh goodness, I think it was an Apple store. Beautiful, beautiful architecture, glass everywhere, including the stairs. These are all the harms that come from homogeneity. [laughs] What was the expensive fixing those stairs? It couldn't have been cheap. JESS: Oh my gosh. [chuckles] I don't even wear skirts that often. [laughs] DAMIEN: And I know that's a problem because when I heard that story, I was multiple paragraphs in before I realized the problem. I wear skirts less than you, I'm sure. [laughter] JESS: For sure. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, I think those stories are really important for us to be able to tell and to share with each other because diversity matters. I think it's easy to say that and especially among people who care, people who prioritize it. We almost take it as like a, “Well, of course,” but I think there is still, getting back to that quiet group of people who don't say what they actually think, there's a lot of people who are on the fence, or maybe frankly disagree. It's like, “Well, you can disagree and I respect your disagreement, but here's the data, here's the results, here's the impact. Let's talk about that. Do you have a better way to handle this? Because I don't.” DAMIEN: So I think the risk is especially acute in tech companies and in tech for tech companies where things are far more homogeneous. Next week on how to pronounce these words. [laughs] So what can we do? Is there anything special that we can do in those sort of environments? JESS: Yeah. Well, besides have the conversation, which I think is something we can all do. Not to fangirl too much about Amazon, but I really do like the company and I'm really enjoying my experience. A lot of it comes down to how we've expressed our leadership principles. We say this is our culture and our values and we actually apply it constantly like, if you ever come to talk to an Amazon person, I'm going to tell you about how I've disagreed and committed and what I'm doing to think big and how I'm customer obsessed. I'm going to talk about those things directly. To this, we say one of our leadership principles is that leaders are right a lot and that feels weird, right? Leaders are right a lot? “Oh, I just happen to know everything.” No, that's not what that means. We actually go into it in more depth and it's like leaders look to disconfirm their beliefs and seek diverse perspectives and we bake that right into one of our core cultural values. I think that that is absolutely critical to our ability to serve the broader tech community effectively. The fact that we hold leaders to being right through having gone through a crucible of finding out how they're wrong, I think is magical and I think that's actually something that a lot more companies could think to do. It's like, you as a tech person and you think, “Oh, I'm going to go sell this great new widget to all of my tech buddies.” Okay. You might be right. But how could you make that bigger? How could you make that better? Like go, try to find out how you're wrong. That should be something we value everywhere. It's like, “No, I'm probably wrong. I want to be right.” So the way to get right is to find out every way I'm wrong and that means talk to everybody you can and find out. CASEY: From our conversation here, I'm picking up a couple of tools we have to help persuade people to get them to be louder, or more proactive at least. Data is one. Telling stories from other companies is another one. And then here, I'm picking up get your own stories that you can really tell from your point of view and that's maybe the strongest of the three, really. The change is you, too. I love that idea. JESS: Yeah. We had a internal conference this week, the networking summit, and there was a great session last night from somebody talking about what customers love and what customers hate about our products. He was just telling story after story about customers saying, “Oh, I'm so frustrated with this.” “I would love to change that.” Those stories, I think have so much more weight in our minds. Humans are evolved to tell the stories to each other. So if we have stories to tell, I think those are so much – they connect at a deeper level almost and they help us think about not just that top of brain logical, almost engineering, binary yes, no, but it's more this deeper heart level. “I understand the story that led to this position. I understand the human that feels this way.” Personally, I think no matter how logical we think we are; [chuckles] we’re still walking bags of meat [laughs] and there's a lot to be said to respect that and to connect with that. So yeah, storytelling is huge. DAMIEN: You brought up, earlier in our conversation, about how things might be different with a different cultural paradigm. This is an enormous example of this. White Western culture overvalues logic and objectivity. It's a by-product of the culture and there's a conflation between objectivity and rationality and rightness. Weirdly enough, in my experience, that makes people less able to be rational and objective. It's quite amazing, ironic, and tragic. But if you follow the science, you follow the logic, you follow the rationality; what you'll discover is that humans are not naturally logical, rational beings. We are not rational beings that feel; we are feeling beings that rationalize. From the beginning from the birth of humans as a species, stories and communication have been how we navigate the world, how we see the world, how our beliefs and behaviors change and you can see that throughout all of history and it's the narratives that change everything. So that's something that is super important to have, to know and especially if you want to be effective. Having grown up in this culture, though, it amuses me to no end how little I use that knowledge. [laughs] I argue with logic and facts and wonder why don't people don't understand when I have all the logic and facts that tell me that that's not going to change what they do. [laughs] JESS: Oh, yeah. Honestly, I think our political climate right now is representative of that because it's like, I don't know, I feel like it's so logical and factual, my political perspectives, and then I'll talk to somebody else and they feel the exact same way. Having been in media, I've seen like a lot of what we end up believing is how we sold it to ourselves and the stories that we've told around it and what we've paid attention to. We've listened to it. It's so easy to develop this cognitive filter on the stories that don't line up to your expectations. I don't know. This is, I think an area that engineers really overlook time and time again, is the power of media and the power of the stories that we tell. Being a trans person, I didn't come out until I was in my late 30s because the stories, I grew up with of trans people were stories of serial killers, rapists, murderers, and people who were at the very edges of society and like, I'm like, “Well, I'm not that. I can't be trans.” [laughs] It wasn't until we had these news stories of love, or hate. Caitlyn Jenner, I think set a new story on the world and a lot of things changed around then where we were able to see ourselves in a light that wasn't just pain and I think that we've seen a lot more trans people come out because they're able to see themselves in these happier stories and better stories. So we need more stories like that. Like Pose, I think is amazing and great stories of standing up in a hard place and owning your power, even under all this adversity, I think it's incredible. Those set of stories, I think are just so incredible for everybody and we just need so much more. I could rant for a while. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. I'm totally on board with this as a queer man, I wasn't comfortable for a lot of my life being that because of the representation. I'm not into drag, but that's not a requirement. [chuckles] A friend of mine just shared a list of children's books that are incidentally queer and I just think that's so cool. The phrase, even. They're just regular storybooks, not about being queer as a topic, but just people doing normal stuff that happened to have including queer characters. JESS: I love that. CASEY: The world is changing. JESS: Yes, and I think we have a responsibility to be a part of that storytelling. Let's tell stories and it doesn't have to be a big deal that the person you’re talking about is a female engineer. No, she just happens to be an engineer. Let's tell stories where he has a husband. Who cares? He has a husband, it's great. It's not the focus of the story. It's just a part of the whole, the melior that we're in. That's really important. So, I think a lot of normalizing – a lot of acceptance comes through normalization and honestly, it's so complicated because there's this tendency to whitewash when you go into this normalizing place. It's like, “Oh, I don't see skin tone.” No, I think that's not the way to do it. I think it's like there are differences in us, in our backgrounds, in our cultures, in our experiences, and that is incredible and that is wonderful, and it's not the story, but it's a part of the story and that's an important part. DAMIEN: Yeah, as a Black man, I've definitely seen this. I like to say Black Panther was the best thing that happened to African-Americans in the history of cinema. Get Out is another example. It's very much about the Black experience, but it's not the old story of what being Black in America is like and so, it's very different. JESS: Definitely. Yeah. CASEY: We're getting near the end of time we have today, let's shift gears into what we normally do at the end, our reflections. What's something that you're going to take away from this conversation? Jess, or Damien, who wants to go first? JESS: I'll start because I already wrote it down here. Damien, you said, “We are feeling beings that rationalize.” That is going to stick with me. That was profound. I love that and it's so obvious, I think but I'd never thought to think of it that way, or to say it that way. So I’ve got to think about that one for a while, but that's, I think really going to stick with me. Thank you. DAMIEN: Thank you, Jess. That's quite an honor. I can drag out like probably a half dozen off the top of my head, or a dozen probably store of scientific studies that show that. [laughs] I never get enough of them mostly because I've been rationalizing more. Anyway, my reflection is really on how technology impacts culture, both within the technologists and how that relates to storytelling, communication, and language. All those things are creating culture and all those things exist in technology, in between technologists, and that's how we can make our culture. It's something that I want it to be, or more like something I want it to be. So thank you. JESS: That's awesome. CASEY: I think my takeaway is I'm noticing that I said I'm very loud and outspoken about a lot of stuff, and I care a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially when I’m groups of people talking about it, I talk about that all the time. But can I and how can I take that loudness for diversity, equity, and inclusion with people who don't always talk about it? Who can I approach and how can I tell who is more open to it or not? That's always a big open question for me. I guess, I'll be thinking about that especially this week. JESS: Well, this was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. DAMIEN: This was great, Jess. Thank you so much for joining us. JESS: Yeah, it was delightful. DAMIEN: I suppose this might be a good time to plug our Slack community, which is available to all Patreon for the podcast and also, all of our guests. So Jess, if you want to join us there and we can nerd out some more. I’ll keep throwing you instruments to try and stump you. JESS: Yes! Bring it on! [laughs] Special Guest: Jess Szmajda.