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The post Tough Market | CR 201 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Starting At 8 | WTR 52

chris — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 08:40:09 +0000

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Liz is in service engineering at Microsoft working in a 20 person team of devs & program managers. She started her venture into technology at the age of 8 making websites.

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The post Starting At 8 | WTR 52 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Post Apocalyptic Linux Desktop | CR 192

chris — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 15:26:05 +0000

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Mike and Chris talk about bombing job interviews, picking the right Android device for development, writing code that’s easy to delete & Mike shares an Ubuntu update!

Plus… Has the show forgotten about VR? A new device from Mattel might change our tune, some feedback & much more!

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Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Mike bombs a tech screen! AKA The risks of getting set in your ways

Is there really one right way?
What effect does your team size have on your coding practices / project architecture?
If it ain’t broke, are you?

Hoopla

Most Android Devices still do not have M. S6’s Get it Starting Today, Does it Matter?

Files Copying Asks… Preferred Phone?

Is Coder Radio ignoring VR? Or do we just need something like this for it to take?

Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend

If we see ‘lines of code’ as ‘lines spent’, then when we delete lines of code, we are lowering the cost of maintenance. Instead of building re-usable software, we should try to build disposable software.

Mike’s Ubuntu Update

Finding Some Rough Edges
GTK Arc-dark theme

Feedback

The post Post Apocalyptic Linux Desktop | CR 192 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Code Saves Time | WTR 48

chris — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 12:39:04 +0000

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Coraline is a web developer for a health company, working to reduce the amount of screen time for doctors & nurses by providing better tools.

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The post Code Saves Time | WTR 48 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

I Am The Unicorn | WTR 46

chris — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 01:29:25 +0000

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Sara is a software engineer with a journalism and digital/social media startup background. She began to learn code using Codeschool & Codecademy.

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ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: Well, Angela, this week we have Sara joining us and she is a new coder out in Austin and she talks us through her journey and just some really awesome stories about how she got here and what’s she’s been through. It’s a great interview.
ANGELA: It is. And before we get into it, I just want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. That is a general bucket that supports the entire network, but more specifically, because you listen to Women’s Tech Radio, you are supporting us as well. So go to Patreon.com/today.
PAIGE: And we get into our interview today by asking Sara what she’s up to in technology today.
SARA: Essentially, right now, I”m a software developer. I live in Austin, Texas. I was a journalist and i worked in digital media for ten years prior to making that transition, which I did with the help of a code bootcamp in Los Angeles called Sabio, which focuses particularly on women and minorities, trying to diversify the tech scene out there. So currently I’ve been working on UIs, utilizing Angular, Bootstrap, and C#.
PAIGE: How do you wrap the C# into that?
SARA: So, essentially, you’re building the UI out for this device and the back end is being written in Java, so we’re writing a dummy backend or whatever in C# just to be able to test the UI out.
PAIGE: That makes sense. Awesome. So it sounds like you’ve had kind of a fun journey. Did you start in Austin and end up back there? How did that all go around?
SARA: Yeah, sure. It’s kind of a funny story, just because I ended up moving between LA. I ended up back and forth between La and Texas so many times I would literally be in Austin saying hey, I’m going to LA and everyone asked me, didn’t you just move here? And I’be be like yes, but I”m going back. ANd then I’d be back in LA and everyone is like hey didn’t you just move to Texas?
ANGELA: Wow.
SARA: So my family is actually from a town here on the Texas border called Eagle Pass and my dad went to grad school in LA at UCLA. And so, ended up living in LA for part of my childhood. And then moved to San Antonio, finished high school out here. Went to school in California. Worked in Texas. Moved to California. Moved back to Texas. Moved to California. Moved back to Texas. So it was really just something that, I think you know, you become a grown up and you say hey what kind of quality of life is for me and personally I, most of my family is in Texas and the pace is just a little bit more my speed, because being stuck in traffic in LA just wasn’t as fun for me anymore. So, yeah, so Austin is great. I think sometimes it as a little bit of a small town for someone who’s use to something bigger. But what I really like about Austin, what I really appreciate, particularly in the tech scene and a lot of the work I do with Women Who Code, is that it’s really easy to know people and get to know people and network with people. And you can literally meet a CEO somewhere, connect with them on LinkedIn, get coffee with them. It’s really kind of a more intimate community, I think, than like a place where LA where there’s just, first of all, it’s just hard to meet people because you have to go across this huge 60 square mile area just to get anywhere. And then you can’t even just get there, you have to fight traffic. And once you get there everyone is very much interested in who are you, what can you do for me, why would I want to talk to you.
ANGELA: It sounds a lot like Austin is very much like Portland.
SARA: Uh, yeah, you know, I haven’t-
PAIGE: This is a frequent comparison that is made.
SARA: Really?
ANGELA: Is it?
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s why we share the slogan keep it weird.
SARA: Keep it weird.
ANGELA: Yeah. Paige is from Portland, so.
SARA: Oh, that’s cool. My brother went to Reede. He’s a graduate, so that’s really the only time I’ve ever been to Portland. I can’t really speak, but it was really nice when I was there. Just a little bit cold for my taste.
PAIGE: It is. The seasons are a bit, it gets cold. I would rather live in the LA area mostly, but I detest cars and traffic for the most part. If I can avoid using a car I will opt for that every time.
SARA: I feel you girl. I’m right there with you.
PAIGE: What do you think is, besides the, so you’ve kind of outlined why LA is not the scene that Austin is, but what do you think it is that makes Austin the scene it is? Because I’ve been to other small tech cities and they don’t, like even in Portland, I would say you have to kind of work to get to meet a CEO. Like, and we have a fair number of startups, the startup scene, because everybody is migrating north from Silicon Valley and they’re winding up in either Portland or Seattle.
SARA: Oh, okay.
PAIGE: But, you know, we have a pretty good scene. It’s a couple years old now really of kind of getting going, but trying to, networking that is still sort of difficult. So what do you think makes the community in Austin tight?
SARA: I think that, you know, my father is a history professor and so I frequently fall back on things like context and history to kind of think about things like that. So Austin has been traditionally a really small town in Texas. So most recently, I think Austin has experienced, probably the last decade in particular, a lot of growth. Compared to what it was historically, Austin was the smallest major city in Texas. I mean, Dallas/Fort Worth were bigger, Houston was bigger, even El Paso was bigger. San Antonio certainly was bigger. So Austin’s growth has been really recent and so I think that that kind of small town flavor, that small town culture is still very much kind of part and parcel of the community here. And I think that kind of the way that it came about was that, again, Austin is a small town, so then people started moving here from other parts of Texas, and, you know, it’s still a small town so people kind of adapt that culture. And then people start moving here from other part of the country and that’s the culture. And so I think it’s just kind of, I think that that’s due mostly to the fact that historically Austin was a pretty small town and still is compared to a lot of the other major Texas metropolitan areas. And so that being said, I know, I have a lot of–you know, obviously, I spent a good chunk of my life in California. I know people, I know there’s crazy people in Texas, but people are really nice. There is a good part about Texas that, there really is a good genuine friendliness in the culture here, which you may not know if you don’t get past the crazy gun stuff. But, you know, and I think that’s another part of it. It’s just, people are nice here. And to your point about the startups, you know, kind of moving and relocating, I have heard on more than one occasion that startup founders or venture capitalist will say things like, well Austin has a really good work/life balance if that’s what you’re into.
PAIGE: Yeah, I totally get that.
SARA: And so we’re a bad thing, right, to not be working all the time. KInd of to that point, there’s just so many, Austin is a really social networky town. I mean, you can literally be drinking every night of the week here, meeting people, if you wanted to do that. I’ve definitely had weeks where I’d go to two or three events, and you know, so those are my thoughts.
PAIGE: That’s a really good way to put that. I think Portland has some of that heritage, but it’s been a little, a little longer.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: And I think the influx is a little bit higher. The gentrification in Portland is starting to pick up pretty bad. I think we had like a 30 percent rent increase in the past year.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s pretty unreal.
ANGELA: Yeah, house values are going up here in Seattle, like a lot.
SARA: A lot.
PAIGE: Yeah, like a lot. It’s is literally like Silicon Valley is just spreading.
SARA: Wow.
PAIGE: So it will be interesting to see. I like the history as well, so it will be interesting to see the numbers come in in the next couple of years of how things change and why.
SARA: Yeah. Similar things are happening in Austin and everyone kind of has different feelings about it, but you can’t really stop demographic shifts, right.
PAIGE: Yeah, we just have to try to, i think, be conscious of them.
SARA: Absolutely.
PAIGE: We can’t stop them, but we can do it intentionally.
SARA: Absolutely. I agree.
PAIGE: So you started out in journalism?
SARA: Yes, so that’s, I get that question sometimes when people hear about my background. I went to school and actually thought I was going to go to law school. I took the LSAT and all that. And I was just thinking, hey I’m going to do this journalism thing for a year before I apply to law school. Well, once it came time to apply to law school I thought, oh my god, I do not want to go to law school. So I ended up making a career out of journalism and I loved it and I was really good at it and I did it in two languages. And, unfortunately, I came into journalism right at that turning point where the web was starting to overtake media in a really kind of forceful way. I’ve literally sat in meetings where people were saying, you know, we actually have more hits on our website than we have subscribers.
PAIGE: Yeah.
SARA: And then the recession hit and media companies, so I tell people sometimes, I’ve been laid off like three times. And they look at me with these, you know, horror in their eyes. I’m like, oh it’s no big deal, it just working in the media. And that’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality is, you know, every quarter you’ve got to have profits, because it’s a publically traded company and the first ones to go.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: So, yeah, so I worked in newspapers here in Texas. I worked in Brownsville, Austin, and San Antonio. So I actually lived here in Austin about 10 years ago, first time. And i loved it and was great at it and unfortunately it didn’t work out for me. And then I thought, okay, hey I’m going to be responsible, I’m going to change careers and I started a master’s in community counseling. Because through my work as a journalist people are always telling me all their problems anyways and I’m a real good listener. And I thought this will be really great, because I’m bilingual. You need more bilingual health workers, right, in Texas. And then I got pulled into a startup and I loved it. And so I started doing digital media. I worked in an industry publication called Inside Facebook, kind of covering the Facebook platform right around the time that Facebook was really deep into monetization, rolling out the pages product and things like that. So I have some pretty detailed memories, excruciatingly detailed memories about Facebook’s development as a monetized platform. But, yeah, and then I started this other startup. It was called News Taco and it was like a digital English language publication for Latinos. And then I worked at another digital startup when I moved to LA called Mitu, Mitu Network and it’s was a YouTube network. I think now it’s kind of more newfangled, new media company. So kind of through all of that I, you know, I see it as kind of like a steady progression of what media is, essentially these days. Anybody can write. Anybody can take pictures. Anyone can do video. So media really is more about medium, right, the medium is the message, right?
ANGELA: Yep.
SARA: So, and that medium is technology. My last position, I really kind of started to dig deep into some more technical things and YouTube’s backend stuff and I thought, hey I can handle technical stuff. I learned all this stuff. And it’s something I’d been wanting to do a while so I decided that I was just going to get a job, marketing job or content management, whatever I could get, and I was going to figure out how to learn to code. So, I”m doing this. I literally have these jobs I’m going to apply to. I had moved back to Austin. I was kind of freelancing. And, like, I’m fixing to apply to these jobs, like the next day, and my friend Liana (unintelligible) from LA, who I met when I was working in LA–we were actually in a room, we were in a Girls in Tech LA event and we were both like, where are the other Latinas. We kind of made a B-line for each other because there were literally on four of us there. That’s how I met her. She calls me up, she says Sara, she’s a cofounder of Sabio, this bootcamp that i mentioned. She says Sara, we have a spot for you. And I”m just like, wow, this is almost like faitful, you know.
PAIGE: Sometimes things just line up like that.
SARA: This really lined up. So I kind of said hey, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s literally knocking down my door, so I kind of dropped my plans to apply to these jobs. I started Code School, Codecademy, JavaScript, all this stuff. What’s Bootstrap? What’s Responsive Design? C#, SQL. So that’s what i did. And then I went to Sabio last year and then I moved back in December and I had an excruciating job search. I tell people, don’t look for a job in December and January. Especially as a newbie, it was hard. I mean, I wrote a story about it on my–I have a platform for Latinos in technology and STEM, it’s called MasWired and I had like 40 interviews between phone calls with recruiters and phone calls online and in-person interviews and technical interviews over the phone. And those kind of like shared develope, I mean, it was just, I counted them, right? And it took me months and I finally, when I did get a job offer I got two.
PAIGE: When it rains it pours.
SARA: Where were you guys all this time, you know. Why are you doing this to me. So, yeah, so since April, so it’s been about, going on seven months, I’ve been working as a software developer and it’s a little bit overwhelming, I’d say. LIke journalism. Journalism and writing and digital media stuff, I just got so good at it that i could do it with my eyes closed. And certainly that’s not something that you ever feel working in technology. So it’s been an interesting adjustment. But, yeah, so that’s kind of how I made that transition.
PAIGE: That is an awesome story.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
SARA: Than you.
PAIGE: That’s very cool.
ANGELA: Lots of moving.
SARA: Yeah. I definitely, I’m just like, ugh, I’m actually buying nice things now so, like, I’m only going to move one or twice more.
ANGELA: It sounds like you’re staying.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s when you know you’ve settled. I’m still not doing that.
ANGELA: Yeah, keeping the boxes broken down in the garage.
PAIGE: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: But, you know, I”m nomadic, so it works that way.
SARA: Oh yeah, I had my nomadic years.
PAIGE: I don’t think I”ll give them up. My dad said to me one time, he’s like, Paige, I’m pretty sure there’s not gypsy blood in the family. I’m like, dad I think you’re wrong. I have so many questions out of your story. I guess the first one is, do you feel like being at a bootcamp that was focused on diversity made a difference in the way that you learned or how you networked afterwards or the support that you got afterwards? Like any of that stuff?
SARA: Sure. So, I can’t really speak, because I’ve never been to any other bootcamps. That being said, I have been around other bootcamps, you know, here in Austin, certainly. And I’ve heard thing from–I’ve had friends who have gone through MakerSquare or General Assembly or whatever other ones, right. We have some Austin Code School or Austin Code Club or something. I would say, I think for me personally, you know, and journalism is also a very male dominated profession, so I wasn’t so freaked out around being around men, but the–I went to Stanford as an undergrad and I just remember being put off by those tech people. And so I was scared about that. And so, I think for me, going to Sabio was really kind of, much more warm and inviting and made me feel like technology was for me. And so that made a huge difference. I think, you know, there were other women there. There were other Latinos there. You know, um, you know, there was African Americans there. It was just kind of an environment that I felt comfortable in while learning this difficult material, right, in a very stressful environment. So, I think as far as the recruiting goes, you know, LA’s tech market, I think my job search would have gone a lot easier had I been in LA, because it’s just a bigger market. I think part of the trouble that I had in Austin finding a job, or why it took me so much longer than it should of is it’s just a smaller market and people here or the companies here seem to really be waiting for those unicorns to come along. You know, the–I saw a meme the other day. It’s like, we’re looking for someone in their 20s with 30 years experience.
ANGELA: Oh, yes, I’ve seen that one before.
PAIGE: Yeah, exactly.
SARA: And so-
PAIGE: Entry-level, seven years experience.
ANGELA: Right.
SARA: Exactly. And that’s kind of what I kept running into, is we want a junior developer for this position who is really, really, really, really, good. I’m like, okay. You know. So, yeah, what I think that I do appreciate about Sabio, and this is my experience, is they’re very focused on creating a community and a network. I think, because of this type of students the they’re focusing on, they understand that hey, you probably don’t have a network in tech, otherwise you would have a network in tech and you wouldn’t need to come to a code school. So there is a really, kind of, active alumni network that I go to all the time. Hey, what about this? Anybody know about this? Hey, you know, and like is this normal, what should I be asking, what should I do. And for me that’s been, that’s probably been one of the best things about my Sabio experience.
PAIGE: What tool do you guys use to do that?
SARA: We have previously used Yammer and now we’re on Slack.
PAIGE: Seems like everybody is on Slack doing this these days.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: It’s a great tool for it.
SARA: Absolutely, yeah. So, and then if you’re in LA they have Professional Development Seminars. They have recruiting events. It’s just really great if you’re in LA and you’re going to work in LA to have this tangible and virtual community. That being said, my mother still lives in LA so I”m going down there for Thanksgiving and there’s going to be a Sabio happy hour and I may get to visit with everybody. I think that’s amazing. A year after I haven’t seen these people, we’re going to get together and have drinks and it will be fun.
ANGELA: That is awesome.
PAIGE: How big was your class?
SARA: So we had eight folks.
PAIGE: Eight.
SARA: There was eight of us.
PAIGE: That’s nice. That’s a good size. So how, did you feel like your journalism skills, like did you find a way to kind of translate them? I think being bilingual should have given you some, there is some similarity between learning a foreign language and learning to code, because you are essentially just learning to talk to a computer. Do you feel like that influenced your learning process and/or did being a journalist who is used to kind of seeking out answers to questions, do you think that influenced it for you?
SARA: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think that one of the first–I think that anything that you have to learn changes you to a certain extent, and I would say probably one the ways that journalism changed me the most was just really not having any feelings about asking questions, which makes for some little awkward situations sometimes, because I end up like interrogating people about their personal lives without really meaning to. Just because I’m curious, but I think that served me really, really well in software. Okay, so you want this data on front end. What is it going to do once it gets there. How is this going to be used. Is this anywhere else? Just really drilling down deep into questions so that I can fully understand the task at hand. That has been really helpful. And I think my metaphor for writing code or creating an application, and certainly I”m not as proficient as I would like to be at this point, but kind of my goal is, there’s a really–so, for me, because I’ve been writing for so long as a profession, as a science almost, it’s very formulaic at the end of the day. I know some people, I know a lot of people struggle with writing, but once you’ve written like thousands of things it’s pretty much the same thing over and over again. It’s very formulaic, just like a function, right?
PAIGE: Yep.
SARA: Just like anything you’re going to write in software. It’s like, hey here is the beginning. Here’s a few details about the thing. Here’s how they all tie together. The end. I mean, it’s pretty formulaic for me. I could write anything in a variety of ways, but at its core, that’s what you’re doing. That being said, there’s a verbose way to do that and there’s a succinct way to do that and there’s a romantic way to do that, and there’s a funny way to do that. And that’s kind of how I look at software development, is like you can write the same thing multiple ways, right. So I kind of look at being software developer, my development as a software developer as looking at it like being a writer. I want to be an efficient, interesting, but very pointed writer. Nobody wants to waste words, especially in the digital age when if it’s not 140 characters who cares. I think code is kind of the same thing. Yeah, you can have, nobody reads the source code of Angular. I mean, it’s just too long and it’s too crazy. But people will love a code snippet, right. So how do you ingest all of this stuff and output the most elegant, quick, easy to understand solution. To kind of address your question, I see software development as–I see writing as a metaphor for software development in that it’s very painful to learn how to do it well, but once you get there it’s totally worth it.
PAIGE: I really like that idea. That’s really cool. Like the idea of your code having your voice behind it.
ANGELA: Uh-huh. Yeah.
PAIGE: And I definitely notice that. I think, I can usually tell who on a team has written something by the way it’s written.
SARA: Oh, that’s interesting. That makes sense, yeah.
PAIGE: I mean, unless you have like super song’s file guides someplace too.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Especially in some of the more relaxed languages like JavaScript or Ruby or Python.
SARA: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, actually, now that you say that. I can tell too.
PAIGE: Yeah.
SARA: Huh, that’s cool.
PAIGE: If you like the idea of software having a voice and being really readable, Ruby is a fantastic language for that. It’s actually one of the core foundations of the community. It actually kind of over the years shifted to the idea that even comments are not, shouldn’t be necessary. LIke your code should be human readable enough that you shouldn’t need comments.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Which, I really like that idea.
SARA: Yeah, that’s, I like that too.
PAIGE: So you mentioned that you had 40 job applications. So I have two questions in that.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: How long did that take in a town like Austin and what did you do while you were doing those to kind of keep yourself sharp or, you know, maybe you had to have a job or whatever. And if you had to have a job, like how did you find the time. I have a lot of, in my Women Who Code network we have a lot of bootcamp graduates who are really struggling with that process.
SARA: Sure. I totally lucked out in the sense that I was able to, you know, I’ve always kind of tried to have a side gig going, just to be able to save up money. And so by the time I moved out to Austin I was freelancing. I wasn’t making a whole bunch of money but I was sustaining myself. So I had all this savings, all this money that I had saved up so I was able to go to the bootcamp and work one contract, so it was actually, I was just colleague over lunch, I am way too old to go to bootcamp ever again. It was a great experience. I don’t ever want to do that again. It was like-
ANGELA: What is too old? What makes you too old?
SARA: I just, I just mean that I was going to bootcamp 10 to 12 hours a day.
ANGELA: Oh.
SARA: And then I was going home and I was working.
ANGELA: I see. Yes.
SARA: I was working one to two hours and then I was trying to make my lunch and it was just-
PAIGE: Yeah, like sleep and eat?
SARA: It was just, so tired. It was just so exhausting and I was stretched so thin. You know, when you’re 24, 25 you can do that.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: Because it’s, you know, and I”m not. So i’m just, it was just so intense and so hard and so-
PAIGE: I”m going to ask that personal question.
SARA: Yes.
PAIGE: How old are you?
SARA: Oh, I”m 32.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s kind of when it changes.
SARA: Yea, exactly. I say I’m an old lady, everyone’s like, you’re not an old lady Sara. And I’m like, I know, but compared to you I’m an old lady. I’m not 24.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: In tech we feel old.
SARA: Yeah, seriously. So, you know, that was kind of my thing. I was able to kind of do that. So the four month, it took me four months. I think. I came back in December, like a few days before Christmas. And I was still grump so I kind of ruined Christmas, but i forgive myself. But, yeah, so i came back December 19th and I found a job the third week in April. Almost towards the end of April. I started on April 27th. So it took a while and I think that part of it is, I think I mentioned earlier, in Austin, for whatever reason, all these startups think that they’re going to get senior devs. They’re all, I mean, it’s a limited pool. Again, Austin is like maybe, what, a million people. I don’t know what the population of Austin is, but it’s not huge. It’s not six million like LA or, you know, eight million like New York or whatever. Yeah, Austin is less than a million people. So, but they keep thinking that they’re going to, you know, everyone is holding out for that senior dev and so I’ve seen job postings–like I applied, check this out, I applied to, I saw a job that I applied to earlier this year when I was looking and they’re still looking for this person. So it’s going on a year that they’ve been looking for this person . And you just kind of have to ask yourself, maybe you’re not going to find that person dude.
ANGELA: Yeah, it’s a unicorn. Pretty much. You have to redefine it or something.
SARA: Exactly, something’s got to give. You know, it was really difficult. So, just kind of address your issue; so yeah, I had savings and I was working different contracts and stuff. So I wasn’t making money, but at a certain point I wasn’t losing a whole bunch of money. That being said, the balance still was going down instead of up.
ANGELA: Sure.
SARA: And I got, I mean, I, so I put, I told them this story. I literally got to the point where I said, okay, well, I can’t find a software job. I’ve tried, you know. I tried my best. It’s not going to happen for me. But I’m not going to give up. I just need to get a day job and I’m going to support my software habit, you know, and I’m going to see how, I’m going to still do this. And so I literally, again, I didn’t give up in a really sad, dramatic way, but I had just practically speaking said hey I need income, so I started applying to these content marketing, digital marketing jobs and, girl, like wildfire people would be calling me back. People were dying to hire me, because I’m so good at that stuff and I have ten years experience doing that.
PAIGE: You’re a unicorn.
SARA: Yeah, exactly. I am the unicorn. So I was literally, the day I got my first job offer I was going to have job interviews for these content jobs, and then I had to cancel them because I had got the offers. And so that was kind of where I was at. I thought, hey, you know what, I’m not going to give up on this dream, but I have to be realistic about these parameters. And so there is that. You know, like I said, I was getting a little bit nervous about the balance of my savings so, and then I think as far as the emotional stuff, I’m not going to lie. I mean, I gained weight during the bootcamp because I was working out regularly and I just had to sit there for like, you know, 14, 15 hours a day I was just sitting.
ANGELA: Yep.
SARA: The closest, the best I could do is go for a walk around the block. And so I gained weight. And I was like, great, so I’ve gained weight, I don’t have a job, nobody hires me, nobody likes me.
ANGELA: Your savings is going down.
SARA: My savings is going down. It was depressing. It sucked.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: And that’s, you know, I think what I, you know, I was telling my friends recently, you know, I’ve gotten to that point in my life where I know myself as a well rounded person, the good and the bad things. And I said one thing that I really like about myself, and I don’t think that this is because I’m an extraordinary person, it’s just the way that I am, is i bounce back. Sometimes it takes me a few years after whatever, the ups and downs of life, but I always bounce back eventually. And so, you know, I kind of knew that. Even when I was having bad days. And like, Sara, you’re going to get there, you always do. And I think the other thing is, I have worked in environments that were like sexist. I just was like, I am not going to let these bastards get me down.
PAIGE: Right on. That’s the attitude you’ve got to have about anything, really.
SARA: Like hell no. So that was another thing. So, yeah, and then that’s actually kind of where the Women Who Code came into the picture. I was sitting at home feeling all like, oh nobody likes me. I’ll never be a software developer. All feeling sorry for myself and pathetic. And I thought, you know what Sara, you need to get out of this house and you need to go talk to some other human beings, because I was working from home. I said, you need to go out and you need to meet people, because you can’t keep hanging out with yourself only anymore.
ANGELA: Hanging out with yourself.
SARA: So I went to my first Women Who Code event. It was a Tech Talk and it was okay. I wasn’t like super impressed by it. But then I went to another one and that’s when I met some cool people, I heard some great stories, I met Holly the founder of Women Who Code Austin and Trisha the other co-director of Women Who Code Austin. I felt good being there, because I thought, hey, you know, other people had struggles. I’m struggling. It’s not me. You know, I talked to Holly. I said hey this is great. I would love to be involved. Like, I mean, just off the top of my head I didn’t know how I was going to help, but I can tweet. I do digital marketing. I can help you with that. Can I help you with that? She’s like great. So that same day, that same night I got on, hopped on the Women Who Code Austin Twitter and I started living tweeting the lighting talks and after that I said, hey I’m looking for a job, like I’d love any help you can give me. Also, let me know how I can help. That was in February. And so, you know, kind of what happened from there was I really kind of started focusing on the Twitter account and really kind of stepped up the Women Who Code Austin messaging on Twitter and really cool stuff started happening. We started getting more sponsors. We started getting more members in the Women Who Code meetup. We started being able to have panels. We had a panel about women in technology. It’s been really great. And then I had this idea. I said, hey, you know, we have all of these women who are coming who want to work in technology but they don’t have portfolio. We should have, like a portfolio hackathon. And we should say, we’re going to focus on women and we’re going to focus on diversity, because nobody else in this town is focusing on diversity. We’re the ones. We are going to be the change that we seek, right. So it was a great idea and then randomly started having conversations with some of the ladies that work over at Capital Factory, which is an accelerator here in town. And they said, hey we would love to host you for your hackathon. And we can find you a happy hour sponsor. And I said, sure, great, let me know the dates. They’re like in three weeks. So we had a quick pow-wow with the Women Who Code ladies and we said you guys want to do this in three weeks. So we did. In three weeks, you know, we all kind of, we got sponsorship moneys. We got the messaging out. We had people help us invite their members. And we had, what, some person said it at their happy hour it was like the most diverse group of tech people they’d ever seen in Austin. And we had like 90 people show up to participate-
PAIGE: Wow.
SARA: -in the hackathon. We had a Ruby workshop. She had an IBM Bluemix workshop. I mean, i think next year we definitely want to try to have more workshops for beginners, but it was just such a cool event. I literally, girl, I showed up Saturday morning, because Friday night we had the happy hour, so I was all stressed out and tired. We got on TV, was interviewed by the local ABC affiliate, which is super cool.
PAIGE: Oh, that’s super cool.
SARA: And so by the time I got home I was just wiped out. So I wake up Saturday morning at like 8:00 and I’m like why is this happening to me. But I get to the Capital Factory and I’m just barely awake and I look and I”m like what are all these people doing here? I was really shocked that so many people showed up that early on a Saturday and it was great. So, after that, you know, Holly spoke to the Women Who Code organization and Trisha and myself became co-directors of Women Who Code Austin and so it’s just been, that’s something that I would say to folks who are kind of looking for that next job. You know, trying to get their break, catch their break. Go to a Women Who Code event. Start your own event. I mean, I’ve been so impressed. And I’m not like a super new agey person or anything, but we have a nice little group. The Women Who Code organizers and co-directors and volunteers and in the last few months two of them have gotten new jobs making a bunch of money and they’ve been helping the rest of us find jobs, get bigger paychecks. I mean, when we’re all together, we’re so much more powerful than we are when we’re on our own.
PAIGE: That’s exactly the point.
SARA: Yeah, and I’m a true believer. I’m not saying this because, I’m like, girl power, just for the sense of saying it, but, you know-
PAIGE: It’s not even just girl power. It’s any group that comes together with a purpose, with common experience, that’s where you find power. That’s why the majority has power, because they’re already together with a common experience. We can do the same thing.
SARA: Yeah, and it’s been really powerful moment in my life to be–you know, we have a, we call it, what is it called, ladies coding brunch, on Sundays and we get together. A lot of Women Who Code stuff gets done over brunch on Sundays. But, you know, hey I’m working on this project does anybody know Angular, da, da, da. Hey, I”m working on this job application, can you look at my resume, okay let’s go over your LInkedIn profile. It’s just tremendous. We can pull all of our resources together so we have this big pile of resources as opposed to each one of us out there trying to make it happen. And so I have to say, I wasn’t feeling so good about myself. You know, I didn’t have a job, money was going out, I was like overweight, I was just like woe is me. I’m so sad. And then I got these job offers and, it was just the Women Who Code community or whatever really kind of helped me. Like, it was something I could lean on before, while I got to where I wanted to go. So, and Holly started Women Who Code Austin when she was in a bootcamp, when she was here at Makersquare. I mean, she had moved from LA, didn’t know anybody in Austin. She had some health issues and she said, hey, you know what, I need a community. So she started one. And so that’s what I would say. If you don’t have a Women Who Code, you know, check out meetups. You know, I started a JavaScript study group just amongst the people that I know because we’re all trying to better our skills, for example, right? So create a community. Don’t do it by yourself, because that sucks.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can check out the show notes which includes a full transcription over at JupiterBroadcasting.com. Just click on Women’s Tech Radio and scroll down.
PAIGE: You can also hit us up on Twitter, @heywtr, or send us an email at WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com Thanks so much.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post I Am The Unicorn | WTR 46 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Internal Learning | WTR 41

chris — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 00:02:09 +0000

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Kristen is the founder of edifyedu, a consulting company geared at educating tech businesses on internal learning & people relations.

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kristen@edifyedu.com

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE:: So Angela, today we talk to Kristen who is a friend of mine from Portland and she is the founder of Edify.edu and she work with tech companies to help them develope learning plans and leadership and all kinds of things. We dig into a bunch of those topics with her.
ANGELA: Awesome. Before we get into that, I would like to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. It is a general bucket where the whole network is supported, but if you donate you will know that your funds are partially going to support Women’s Tech Radio. Go to patreon.com/jupitersignal.
PAIGE: We get started with our conversation with Kristen by asking her what she’s up to in technology these days.
KRISTEN: I have been working on my own company, called Edify, for almost a year now. In the middle of September we’ll reach a reach anniversary and that will be really fun. But Edify is a company that works with tech and creative companies on their internal learning. And so, I spent several years in the education world and in alternative learning environments, but over the past two years I’ve been really interested in how learning in a classical sense actually helps tech companies become better, become more diverse, and become more inclusive. And so I tried to take that work into Edify and kind of give that information in kind of that applesauce medicine format. So tech companies don’t necessarily know that’s what we’re doing, but that is what we’re doing.
ANGELA: Applesauce medicine. Can you describe that a little more? That’s really interesting.
KRISTEN: It’s possible that only my mom did this, but I definitely had to take medicines that I didn’t want to take and that didn’t taste very good when I was a kid. So she would crunch them up and put them in applesauce and so I didn’t really know until later that that’s what she was doing. And so you’re getting this really healthy medicine that you need, but it taste good. And so sometimes it’s really hard for tech companies who are run by, basically, all white men or have no women on their board, who have no women in upper leadership, to understand how diversity and inclusion and good workplace practices are beneficial to their work. But when they hear things like internal learning helps you with retention. Internal learning helps you with time to productivity. It helps your employees be happier, which helps your culture. Those are things that they pay attention to, but my work is built off of this understanding and this body of knowledge that knows that working in diversity and inclusion initiatives is not only the medicine that they need, it’s what they need to continue to grow. And it’s what everybody in this society needs.
ANGELA: Right. It’s well for, a commercial well-check.
KRISTEN: Yeah.
ANGELA: Yeah. What? Why did you look at me like that?
PAIGE: Oh, well-checkup, like, I didn’t know what you meant. Well-checkup like going to the doctor for your annual.
ANGELA: Yeah. They just call them well-checks. Yeah, not even checkup. Well-checks.
KRISTEN: Yeah, just to make sure you’re doing good.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: What exactly do you mean by internal learning?
KRISTEN: What Edify means by internal learning is something that the rest of the industry calls training and development or learning and development. And those two offices are typically within the HR department or sometimes they’re built out into their own department in larger companies. And they are groups of people, or sometimes one or two people, within a company who take it upon themselves to manage their company onboarding, so bringing in new employees. They typically will work on manager training. They’ll work on any kind of technical training that employees need to be successful. And I have a theory that’s kind of backed up by some research that I’ve done, and research that others have done as well, that for the past 30 or 40 years learning and development and training development haven’t really been very successful and they’re sort of a necessary evil. And so I don’t use that terminology when I talk about Edify, so I use the term internal learning. That helps my clients and future clients, hopefully, see we really care about the learning of the employees inside of this company. We care about how successful they are. We care about how easily they’re able to access information that they need to be good at their jobs and to give back to the company in their way that they were hired.
ANGELA: Okay. And your company, is it like, do you go in as a consultant or is it like a monthly ongoing thing? Is it temporary?
KRISTEN: Yeah. I go in as a consultant. And I joke, but I’m actually pretty serious about it, that I don’t think a company should ever have to hire me again. If they have to hire me again for the same thing, that means I did not do a really good job of helping them understand how to evolve the program or the process that we developed together. And so, typically, what consulting for me looks like is I’ll sit with a potential client who explains a problem. It usually comes out of a place of desperation or a place of fear. That could look like, well our company is growing very quickly right now and I don’t know how to handle onboarding new employees in multiple countries. Or they could say I just feel like our managers aren’t being as successful as they could be and we already sent them to leadership training, so I don’t know how to solve that problem. And that’s what Edify will come in and do. We’ll say, okay let’s do some time around discovering. What’s the lay of the land in this organization. How does your culture affect the way people work and the way people learn? How does the company’s marketplace affect the way people learn and need to be productive? So it’s a consulting engagement, but many problems are approached with different frameworks. I use a framework that I’ve developed called the learning culture framework to guide whatever kind of work we’re doing. And I believe that there is sort of a connection between each effort of learning. A connection between onboarding and a connection between succession planning for when an employee leaves. And so that’s how i approach consulting.
PAIGE: So internal learning. I’m getting my head around that. Learning culture. That all makes sense. I love the idea that succession planning. I haven’t even heard that term before. That’s pretty fascinating.
KRISTEN: Yeah.
PAIGE: You’ve got all this kind of stuff and it sounds like a pretty broad framework. What was it that sparked you to apply this to tech companies specifically?
KRISTEN: You know, I actually come from a very non-technical background. My background is in museum education, actually, and I’m more of an art historian than I am a technologist. I started my career in museums and in non-profits and was always pretty tech savvy and a decent earlier adopter of a lot of technical things. Like I hopped on TaskRabbit and Fiverr to figure out what those were and lots of different things early on. And I started to realize how unhappy I was in the situations that I was working in. And they were mostly museums and nonprofits. And I started to put all the pieces together and I realized these are management problems. These are learning problems where employees are being as successful as they could be, because they’re not getting the information and the knowledge that they need to do well in their jobs. And so I left in search of other things and that sort of landed me in a very random job. I was doing business development for a small web development agency here in Portland. And that was also short-lived. I was only there for about a year, but it was a huge learning curve. And I learned all about how WordPress work and how Drupal works and how and how D3 and Angular work. And I learned what Git was and started learning to code myself and realized that this whole industry of tech startups that i had been kind of ignoring, but knew about, is actually the way that companies are moving and starting to look at this idea that all companies are eventually going to be tech companies in some variety or in some way. I realized that if there are management problems inside of the nonprofit and museum world, and I also saw them at the development agency that I was working at, that there are probably issues elsewhere. And so as i made more friends in the tech environment here in Portland, they all started to tell me this education stuff that you’re working on seems really relevant to my job. Can you help me with this onboarding project. Or can you give me some tips for how I might educate my subordinate employee, you know, somebody who works under me. And I realized that that’s what I should be working on. At that time i had been working in a different way with Edify. I was doing lots of different educational processes and tools for small businesses that really didn’t have anything to do with internal learning. It was actually a lot of customer education. And then I realized I needed to switch from that and so it ultimately became this spur of everything is going to be tech and tech is very confused right now. So if I can add something that’s helpful I’m going to try to do that.
ANGELA: That’s really interesting, because one thing I’ve noticed about, I’ve been working with just random, different companies and they have a speciality, you know, be it like business or daycare or whatever, but all of them seem to have a tech problem.
KRISTEN: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: All of them.
PAIGE: I think the way that you put it where all companies are going to become a tech company at least in some way. I mean, look at your biggest standout. A lot of people talk about Sears. Sears is one of the oldest companies in America and even they had to, even many years ago, suck it up and become partly a tech company. They built one of the first available internal point of services softwares. It’s a Sears thing.
KRISTEN: I didn’t know that. That’s cool.
PAIGE: Yeah. Everybody touches technology at this point.
KRISTEN: Right.
PAIGE: It’s almost inescapable.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
KRISTEN: Right. You see companies like Honeywell, which used to be more of a home hardware kind of things. They would make fans and things like that. And they are really trying hard to get into internet of things right now. So there are companies that are not traditionally tech companies, but then there are a lot of companies that are definitely tried and true tech companies. Especially here in Portland and on the west coast in general. What I’ve seen as a pattern, and this is a broad generalization, but I’ve seen as a pattern that tech companies, startups are started by some person, typically some guy, with a passion for some problem. An engineer, some of us, entrepreneurs in general are problem seekers and problem solvers and we get really fixated on one thing. And sometimes when you’re fixated on one thing it’s really hard for you to see how the other things contribute to the one thing that you’re really interested in. And I’ve noticed that the companies that are successful and then are able to be nimble and move along and continue growth, they don’t just focus on the product. They focus on the people who make the product. And that’s a lot harder. And then so it’s a lot more time intensive. It doesn’t have to necessarily be painful or expensive, monetarily or resource wise, But it’s something that you want to plan for. And so I’ve tried to start my work with companies that are in that hundred to 400 person range so that they don’t make these mistakes when they’re the size of HP or the size of Intel.
PAIGE: They’re almost uncorrectable at that point.
KRISTEN: Right. I mean, I really don’t want to work for Intel, actually. Like 100,000 employees, I cannot imagine trying to get their, you know, everybody on the same page. I call for, in a lot of my, with a lot of my clients I request and we work on growth plans for each employee or for categories of employees and I can’t imagine doing that for 100,000 employees.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think in that scenario you end up in the train the trainer role as opposed to a (indiscernible) things role. Have you found that working specifically with tech and specifically with small tech companies that you kind of, have you run into the struggle of lack of soft skills on the founder and management side?
KRISTEN: Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. There’s a company who shall remain unnamed, but I discovered recently from several employees that there’s some behavior on their management team, on their leadership level C-suite team that was really deceptive and that was designed to basically get information that he wanted out of employees and kind of shame other employees that did not give him the answer that he wanted to see. And that’s a really, not only in that a manipulative behavior, it’s unfortunately typical. And you see a lot of people, and this goes many ways, but right now in the ecosystem it’s mostly male, you see these CEOs and these C level people trying to manipulate situations so that they will win. So that their product will win. And they don’t really care what happens to do that. And that is, again, kind of the undercurrent of the work that I do is to try to make those things not happen. I care that your company wins effectively in an ethical good way, but I also want you to care about the employees that help you get there. And so I do see a problem with soft skills and I don’t know if I want to make the generalization that it’s because they’re techies. I’m definitely not somebody who would call myself a techie. I obviously come out of a very low tech world. Most of the museums that I worked for are still on slides and they don’t have an internal system for that. And they’re still in the process of digitizing everything.
PAIGE: Are you like a microfiche expert?
KRISTEN: Unfortunately, yes. I haven’t touched any microfiche for a really long time, actually, maybe like three or four years, but I did a lot of research using them. Obviously, there’s a gap in soft skills and I’m not really sure, I kind of think of it as an epidemic so I’m not really sure how to approach that. I think the best thing that people could be doing, especially within code schools and other places where their, you know, you’re teaching sort of the next generation of business owners or the next generation of coders is to actually blatantly teach soft skills. And to teach people skills.
PAIGE: Yeah, this is actually a big discussion that we’ve been having with one of the code schools that I work at and work with is that the biggest problem they’re having with grads who aren’t getting hired isn’t their technical skills, it’s their soft skills.
KRISTEN: Right.
PAIGE: It’s their ability to interview, to present themselves, and how do you tackle that.
KRISTEN: Right. Yeah, That actually links very strongly to manager training. One problem i see in tech very often is that people, programmers, software engineers will be good at their job and as a company grows somebody will need to manage a team. And so, the best coder gets promoted to management. And that is actually a horrible way to (indiscernible) at your next level of management. Because of two reasons; one, just because you are good at one job does not mean that you’re going to be good at managing other people doing that job. And two, when you take somebody away from doing the thing that they love, they kind of lose a little bit of spark. They lose a little bit of what they’re interested in. And now they have to watch other people do what they like. And that’s actually really, really hard. That’s why many people actually try to get away from management and keep doing what they like and they have no management aspirations, because they see this happen over and over again.
PAIGE: That’s outside of tech even.
KRISTEN: Oh, yeah.
PAIGE: The old atican, like you get promoted to the level of incompetence and left there.
KRISTEN: Yes, you do. And the traditional way of dealing with that is to say, okay I’m going to send you to leadership training. I actually have a client who did that and they told me, okay well we’ve figured out that our managers weren’t doing a great job, you know, we had people leaving and citing the reason for leaving as my manager cannot give me good feedback. My manager cannot manage meetings. So they have very clear lines of distinction that their managers aren’t doing a good job, but they didn’t know what to do about it. So they sent them to a pretty expensive leadership training course and nothing happened. They came back, nothing changed. Effectively, the only thing that changed was that now these people knew their leadership style, which is pretty much useless. And I think people will argue with me about that, but I think knowing your leadership style has nothing to do with your ability to be flexible or to give feedback or to be a good manager. And sometimes you do need to be a good leader and leadership training can help, but it is really about those soft skills and it’s about your ability to read a situation and know what’s most effective for that situation. Or to know this person is not doing a good job, but maybe that’s not their strongsuit. So maybe I can give them some more training or I can move them to a different place in the company so that they can be more successful. That’s what kind of those soft skills are and unfortunately it’s almost like — have you ever heard of biological magnification, where a toxin will build up in an environment, in an ecosystem year after year and you’re sort of left with a really, really toxic set of eggs, like with DDT in the ‘70s. And so that happens in management. You add bad skills on bad behavior upon poor knowledgement or knowledge understanding of management and that’s what you get. So maybe code schools will listen to this and teach their students soft skills.
ANGELA: RIght. Now I have a question. When the C-level management is the problem, how do you address that? Do you, just in the politest way possible be like you’re the problem?
KRISTEN: I wish it were that easy.
ANGELA: Or do you work with the management underneath them to try to promote change upward and downward or how does, I’m just curious.
KRISTEN: Yeah. I’ve been in several situations where management, or say the executive director or the CEO really was the problem and the best thing that I’ve been able to find is to model good behavior and to get everyone else to start modeling good behavior and what’s funny about that is if people start to change the culture within an organization and then somebody isn’t wanting to change with them, what they’re going to find is the culture has shifted and left them behind and that they’re really different now or that the culture is really different from them. What that does is hopefully says to that person who is the problem, hey look, we’ve all made this decision because we think this is the right way to go and we hope you’ll join us. We hope you’ll kind of see this good behavior. The other thing is to work with people around that person who are maybe on the same level and get them to realize that. Unfortunately there are situations where maybe there’s only one person at the top, like in small organizations and there really isn’t anybody who is a peer. I had an experience, actually several experiences in nonprofits and in the web development agency that I worked at where there was no peer to the person at the top and it was very clear to everybody that the person at the top was the problem. And unfortunately, in those kind of circumstances sometimes it’s better for you to just leave and to find a different role outside of the company because you don’t want to continue to bang your head against a wall, basically in a mentally unsafe place. And so, sometimes you can’t change people. I hate to end on that note.
ANGELA: Yeah, I know. And now we all owe you a consulting fee, I think.
KRISTEN: No, no.
ANGELA: Just kidding.
PAIGE: I mean, it is definitely, stuff rolls downhill, you know.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: It always-
ANGELA: Stuff.
KRISTEN: Stuff. Lots of stuff. Good stuff, bad stuff.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s true. It’s true. It’s one of the talks we have about, in diversity, diversity rolls downhill. If you have a diverse senior team-
KRISTEN: Yes.
PAIGE: You have a diverse workforce that’s, you know, if you have an ignorance in your chain a lot of times you have an ignorant workforce.
KRISTEN: Yeah.
ANGELA: Right.
KRISTEN: I was actually just looking at a company that called me, actually, unsolicited, to see if I wanted to do some work with them, which is always great. Like business owners love that. It’s awesome. However, I went and I looked and I looked at their website and out of 20 people they have three women on their team and they are all in pretty low level positions. And it just immediately puts me off. I mean, I’m making, obviously I’m making some assumptions and some judgements, but I get the luxury of working with companies that I want to work with and I’m always interested, you know, I’ll always take a meeting or always take a call, but I think when you see companies that haven’t made an effort or they’re not talking about it or they’re not publishing their diversity numbers, it means that they don’t necessarily think or know it’s a problem.
ANGELA: Right, or prioritize it.
KRISTEN: Right.
PAIGE: Working with someone who is going to listen is very important.
ANGELA: Yeah.
KRISTEN: Yes. I have definitely tried to talk to people who did not want to listen and it’s a very frustrating experience.
PAIGE: I like to say, you know, I like to change the old aticom, like you can lead a horse to water, you can even make him drink. You can’t make him like it.
ANGELA: Yeah.
KRISTEN: It’s true. It’s true. I can definitely put people through trainings and awesome strategic planning processes, but they might not like it and they might not do anything about it.
PAIGE: Yeah. Exactly. Cool. Well, this has been an awesome conversation, Kristen. I’m always excited to hear what you’re up to. If people want to catch you online what’s the best way to do that. If maybe they want to talk to you about their company.
KRISTEN: Definitely. If you want to talk to me, I’m always on email. So the best way to do that is at my email, which is Kristen@Edifyedu.com or on Twitter. So those are the top two. And you can either talk to the @EdifyEdu Twitter the @KristenMaeve Twitter, which I think are both in the show notes.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find a full transcript of the show over at JupiterBroadcasting.com in the show notes. You can also use the contact form that’s at the top of JupiterBroadcasting.com and you can subscribe to teh RSS feeds.
PAIGE: You can also find us on YouTube or iTunes. If you’re on iTunes feel free to take a moment and leave a review. We’d love to hear what you think. You can also contact us directly at WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com or follow us on Twitter. our Twitter handle is @HeyWTR. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Internal Learning | WTR 41 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Pixel Perfect | WTR 36

chris — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 06:31:17 +0000

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Tiffany is a UX front end developer and makes things look pretty! She hates photoshop and the term “Pixel Perfect” though so don’t get her confused with being a designer!

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ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we’re joined by Tiffany. She is a UX developer and she goes into the differences between developer and designer, front end and back end, and all this really interesting industry industry kind of separation that has happened over the years and why it’s important. And we also get into a fantastic conversation about board games.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, if you’re interesting in supporting this show, if you’re listening to it week after week and you’re finding this content really awesome, which we do — we have a really good time every time we record and we always get something new from every single episode. It’s really awesome. You can go over to patreaon.com/today and that supports the whole network, but also, specifically Womens’ Tech Radio. And you can donate as little as $3,00 a month or whatever you’re comfortable with. And it’s a monthly basis, automatically comes out.
PAIGE: Yep. And we get started with our interview today by asking Tiffany what she’s up to these days.
TIFFANY: Right now, in the tech field, well I primarily identify as a UX developer. So, as i tell people that don’t really know what that mean, I make things look pretty. So, I prefer, and really more of a front end developer but I spend a lot of time on design teams and whatnot. So I actually also have a design eye. Some people mistake me for a designer. I hate PhotoShop, I hate design. But yeah. And right now I’m actually freelance and I’ve been freelance since November. I’m doing a whole bunch of hodgepodge jobs including some YouTube channel stuff, so day-to-day for me is just really random, because it just really depends on what contracts I have going and if I’m filing anything for YouTube or anything like that. My everyday is not a typical day.
ANGELA: Well, that’s awesome. I like that.
TIFFANY: It is. Yeah. It’s also really confusing.
ANGELA: Yeah. Especially when you don’t get Google SMS anymore.
TIFFANY: Yeah. Darn you Google. My life was made by that. Made or break.
ANGELA: Yeah. I guess you’ll have to maybe research another calendar app something; right?
TIFFANY: Yeah. Something like that.
ANGELA: Or write something to-
PAIGE: Yeah, so for our folks, because this going to go in the future. Google just turned of SMS alerts for calendaring, which I think I lame, because i used the crap out of the feature.
TIFFANY: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: But, we’ll figure it out. So, what is, if you don’t identify as a designer, what do you think is the difference between a UX developer and a designer?
TIFFANY: A UX developer is somebody who when they look at a screen and they look at — essentially, like what need to be done, they think about it in terms of code. Like, they think, oh I need to do this. I need to adjust this padding, this margin, etcetera, etcetera. UX developer is more of a, it’s the designer side. And then a designer, specifically a UX designer is usually, um, their partner in crime, if you’re lucky enough to have a UX designer and a UX developer. And they think of things in terms of actual pixels and the modification of actual PhotoSHop files and stuff like that. So, they don’t really code. So they’re dealing mostly in various visual software editing tools to get mock ups or interaction designs, which is a big one. And UX developers work with them to have those designs come to life, and also, UX developers, because they work so closely and always really have an eye for that kind of stuff, UX developers also are really awesome because we usually have an idea of what a goodish sense of design or interaction would be. And we focus primarily on user interaction when we code things, not always necessarily what’s the best way to code something from like an efficiency standpoint of your code, which gets some really good UX developers can write super efficient super awesome code that is also very user interactive and great for the user. But it’s like this, it’s like the unicorn balance effect of that kind of stuff.
PAIGE: So, like any other developer, you’re probably not an efficiency expert unless you’re an efficiency expert?
TIFFANY: Yeah. But I am a front end developer expert. So, I — like, it’s really, there is a phrase that we use, and people have kind of stopped using it in resumes and interviews, but it’s pixel perfect. And I feel that most UX developers, while we hate the term pixel perfect, it’s true. I can look at mocks, I can look at mock ups or specs or I can just look at a webpage and I can be like, oh, that’s four pixels, it needs to be two pixels. Or something like that. Or, oh, that’s five pixels and it needs to be six pixels. So it’s just like, usually we’re very visual and UX developers, all the ones I”ve met, really do actually want to be pixel perfect. Which, I hate that phrase, but it’s true.
ANGELA: That’s too bad, because I think that would make a great title for the episode. I feel like I need to ask you if that’s okay.
TIFFANY: Yeah, no. That’s fine. You can do that.
ANGELA: Okay. Maybe I’ll put it in the description. Like, even though hates the term, find out what pixel perfect is.
TIFFANY: The only reason I hate it is because, for years there when people realized that front end developers existed and needed to be a thing, so there was this transition seven years ago in the industry. I loved and worked out in Silicon Valley and there was this transition where they started realizing that having a software engineer does not necessarily mean that they can do every — they’re not full stack. You have front end software engineers and you have back end software engineers. Especially as more companies started developing products that were web based, like web apps and that kind of stuff, because the technology space between being good at making the front end of a web app is very different from being good at making the back end of a web app, because there’s just so many languages and concepts involved. And efficiency for both ends of those scale. And so, a lot of companies started posted job listings and one of the requirements was attention to detail, pixel perfect. And it just became this buzz word in the industry and if you were talking with somebody and they were like yeah I’m pixel perfect, like 90 percent of the time they weren’t and it was just really frustrating, because it was a buzzword and everybody used.
ANGELA: Right. And it just kind of became vague, it sounds like.
TIFFANY: Yeah. There’s this great — have you seen the nailed it meme?
ANGELA: Yes. With the, was it with the kid, little baby fist?
TIFFANY: Well, no, so the one — there was one that went around with Cookie Monster cupcakes.
PAIGE: Yes, with the bad, the Pinterest fails.
TIFFANY: Yes. So, and it’s a thing-
ANGELA: Oh, right.
TIFFANY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, where there’s like really beautiful something crafty and then somebody tries to make it and it’s like this horrible version..
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: Nailed it.
TIFFANY: We started doing that in the company that I worked at. The large mega corp that I’ve (unintelligible).
ANGELA: Sure.
TIFFANY: We started doing that to developers. Like, we would do the nailed it where we would have the mock up and then we would have like what they made. And we would do, like nailed it.
PAIGE: That’s awesome.
ANGELA: That’s great. I just did a Pinterest fail on Monday with my kids. It was some sort of a flour and salt dough mix and then you put pebbles in it to make a design and my butterfly did not look like a butterfly and none of them look good. The pebbles were too big and it cracked. It was just bad.
PAIGE: Yeah, Pinterest, it’s like a whole other rabbit hole of doom.
ANGELA: I know. Well, I didn’t go to — I don’t go to Pinterest. I make a point not to, because I’ll get sucked in. My friend did. It was a play date.
PAIGE: So youre friend is attempting to make you a Pinterest addict?
ANGELA: We jointly failed. No, I just let her do it. That’s funny though. That is great. Now, did that, was that good for comradery and — I’m sure it kind of framed the culture, but it wasn’t making fun of people that worked there was it?
TIFFANY: No, it wasn’t. It just started making fun of software development. It was-
ANGELA: Okay.
TIFFANY: Specifically we were on — I was on a design team and we fought tooth and nail to get some front end developers hired, because at the time I was on the design team and I was the rapid prototyper. So they would mock up some crazy ideas and then it was my job to just quickly make something that looked and they could click around. So there was a lot of fake Javascript connecting to empty calls. Lots of static text just being loaded in to pretend it was a database. But I was there rapid prototype maker and we really struggled. We’re like, our — my rapid markups of their stuff, proof of concepts would look like the specs and then the actual product when it went over to enginnering always looked really bad. So my boss made those nailed it meme jokes for a presentation with the higher ups who convinced them finally to hire front end engineers.
ANGELA: Nice.
PAIGE: Okay. The fact that you got memes in a corporate presentation in attempt to actually get headcount, that’s impressive.
TIFFANY: Yeah. And after that they started hiring people who specialized in front end development. That really made a big difference in the product. I think that’s — it’s starting to become more common. So when I went to college in 2005, when I started looking for degree programs, there was nothing that I could find that focused on UX front end development. Everything in computer science was computer science hardcore. There was nothing that specialized in front end and web or anything like that. I think there was one program in some random college on the east coast, and I had never even heard of the college. But now if you went and look for those kind of programs they’re popping up everywhere, because there’s such a demand for those positions.
PAIGE: I mean, even Stanford now has a full track for web and iOS. It’s crazy. That’s good. So where do you make the division between front end design, back end. I mean, I know where I do, but.
TIFFANY: Usually I make the division where anything becomes visual on the screen. So, if anybody — if you’re putting something on the screen, you’re dealing with front end design. Especially with the MVC model. So, model, view, and controller. You can really separate frontend and backend, because you work with backend team really closely to make sure that you’re making the correct connections in the middle area, and then you can focus primarily on the view. And if you need to go into the middle area, you can. But there’s definitely a lot of overlap between that area. That’s where the most code conflict happen, on check in. But I really make the divide. It it modifies a data structure that will eventually appear on the screen in some way, shape, or form, there’s an argument that that could be front end. But if it puts anything on the screen, it’s definitely front end development, in my opinion.
PAIGE: I would agree with that. That’s very cool. So you’re freelancing now. How did you get into freelancing? What are you struggles in freelancing? I’ve definitely met a lot of people who are kind of like not quite happy in a job or they feel like they’d like to try doing their own thing. What are some of the ups and downs for you, since you just started?
TIFFANY: Well, my case is — I don’t — it’s probably something that lot of people can relate to. I graduated from college in 2008 and I had a job before I graduated. I actually graduated early so that I could go and work at this job. And I almost burnt out. I was super close to burning out after three and a half years at this giant corporation, that shall not be named. I had a friend that worked at another larger corporation, not giant, but large, that also shall not be named. He was like, you should come work for us. It’s super awesome. I changed companies and I worked there. It was really awesome for a while and then that large company started to grow into a mega corp, like a very large company and it had a lot of growing pains and they had a lot of headcount reduction either through layoffs or people just leaving because they didn’t like the transition from small to large, or from large to extra large. And so in the three and a half — I was also there for three and a half years, that’s basically my boiling point. In the three and a half years that I was there, I was hired when there was 9,000 — or no, there was like 8,500 employees when I was hired.
ANGELA: Wow.
TIFFANY: When I quit three and a half years later, there was over 20,000 employees and we had a piece of software in the company that somebody made that told you how long you had been — it compared how long you had been at the company with everybody else and according to that script that somebody wrote, I had bene at the company more than 98 percent of the rest of the employees.
ANGELA: Wow. So big turnover.
TIFFANY: Massive turnover and massive influx of new people, which meant that there was just constant turmoil. I was, in my last year of evaluation, the last full calendar year that I was there and I had the employee evaluation thing, I had five different managers.
PAIGE: What?
TIFFANY: And so I was like — and I was in charge of a very large code base and I was working with people in Bulgaria (unintelligible) and so I burned out. I crashed out. They were transitioning, when i was there from FLex to HTML5 and so I was in this weird straddle between Flex and HTML5 and I kept telling myself when they first announced they were going to transition that I would stick around long enough to get my resume padded to be able to add the H5 technology officially and then I would quit. And two years later my fiance was like, when I met you you were talking about how you were going to quit soon and that was a year ago.
PAIGE: And you were like, little did you know, it was a year before that as well.
TIFFANY: Yes, exactly. So I decided, I looked at my finances and I discussed it with my partner and we decided that for my mental stability it would be best if I just quit. So I quit my job and I had a friend that was looking for some design work and web work and basically an everything person at his — he’s trying to kickstart a product, a home automation system and so he needed somebody to do that. So I lucked out in that I quit and then immediately had a contract that could pay all my bills for six months. ANd that contract actually came to an end in May and so now I’m looking for work elsewhere, more contracts elsewhere and I kind of — it’s funny because I kind of just keep like — I have a friend that is very involved in a lot of tech networks in Portland, and she’s probably one of the reasons we moved here, but she keeps throwing things over the fence at me and so I just keep accidently getting these jobs. Where she’s like, oh hey this is this thing and you should do it, and I’m like okay. So I feel really lucky in that regard. I haven’t had to actively search for some stuff. But I also am living very-
ANGELA: Frugal?
TIFFANY: Yes. My fiance is doing most of the — we’re basically on like a 1.5 income household right now. So, but we’re both fine with that because we own all the fancy technology gadgets we need and use so we don’t need to buy anything new. And Portland is significantly cheaper than the Bay area.
PAIGE: Oh my goodness, right?
TIFFANY: Yeah, so it’s actually kind of funny. Because if we had continued to live in the Bay area I would have had to get another job that was like an actual tech job because the cost of living is just so high. And that was part of the reason we moved to Portland was so that I didn’t have to get a traditional 9:00 to 5:00 tech job, because I’ve worked for three mega corps at this point. Well, two mega corps and a large company that was becoming a mega corp, and I just can’t do it anymore.
ANGELA: What was one of your favorite contracts that you’ve done since you left your most recent mega corp job?
TIFFANY: It actually wasn’t tech involved really at all. It was in — I do some video editing. I very much am into the board gaming community. And when I say that I don’t mean like just playing board games, I also review board games. I play test board games for designers. I”m friends with a lot of people at publishing companies, that kind of stuff. And also, I’m pretty, I’m not active on Kickstarter but I’m aware of the Kickstarter tabletop world and I usually know somebody that — I have two friends right now that are running Kickstarters on tabletop. So I had a contract from a friend where he wanted me to do his Kickstarter videos. And so part of that involved going to PAX South in Texas in January.
ANGELA: Oh darn.
TIFFANY: Yeah. Gosh darn. That was a fun contract because the game that he was making was about — it’s basically you’re doing a mini role playing as the Goonies. You’re four siblings and you’re going on this crazy adventure. And so it’s a coop and it’s storytelling and there’s actual numbers and stats that you can lose even if you can tell the best story in the world. So it was a lot of fun because I would go and my job was to film people playing it and people would just have such a blast telling these stories about how they were running around in the mysterious forest and throwing dung at trolls, and all this other fun stuff. But it was a blast. And then editing all of that footage was also a lot of fun into a video. So that was my most fun contract, but it’s not tech related.
PAIGE: Totally fine. I think that that’s one of the beauties of doing — you know, it kind of is tech related. Video is still technology. But being a freelancer, being a contractor is you kind of get some of that freedom to pick and choose projects to be involved in a lot of things. To be a jack of all trades.
TIFFANY: Yeah. I have a friend — I decided to paint. I brought my fiance in a copy of Imperial Assault, which is a Star Wars dungeon crawling game. And I decided stupidly while he was out of town one weekend I would surprise him and paint all of the miniatures in this game.
PAIGE: Oh wow.
TIFFANY: And there’s about — yeah, there’s about 40 miniatures. And they’re like super detailed Star Wars, like Storm Troopers and Darth Vader and ATSDs and the heroes like Han Solo, and Chewbacca, and Luke and all that. And it was stupid and insane, but at the end of it I was able to tell the internet, I was able to tweet about it, because I didn’t tweet while I was going it, because it was a surprise. One of my friends online was like, hey actually can I pay you to paint my set?
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
TIFFANY: Yeah, so it’s the weird funny thing where it was just like, because I’m freelancing I can just basically do whatever.
PAIGE: You can say, yeah that’s a project I’d like to do.
TIFFANY: Yeah. I can get money for painting miniatures. Which is hilarious to me and a lot of fun, but also makes my carpal tunnel way worse.
PAIGE: Yeah. Righit? Miniature painting is the worse thing for that. Okay, so it sounds like you are super into board games. You review board games? Do you have a YouTube channel or something?
TIFFANY: Yeah. I review board games and my YouTube channel is TheOneTAR. I also am on Twitter as TheOneTAR. I’m very active on Twitter. Most recently, if you go to my channel, most recently I was doing an unpacking series where when we moved we packed all our board games up and then somebody on Twitter was like you should make videos when you unpack them. And so I was like, okay. And then I did. And so I have 24 episodes of me just unpacking a box.
PAIGE: It’s like, re-
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Re-unboxings.
TIFFANY: Yeah. But people are apparently really into them, because they just want to know what’s in the box.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: So what is in the box, usually?
TIFFANY: All of my board games.
ANGELA: Oh, okay.
PAIGE: So they want to see your collection, really.
ANGELA: Right. Okay. So do you pack the box or is it-
TIFFANY: I did pack the box.
PAIGE: Because they moved.
TIFFANY: This was when we moved.
ANGELA: Oh. Oh, okay. I got it. I thought you were like — well I wasn’t sure if you were buying new board games and be like oh what could be in here? Or if you were like putting stuff in there for the show.
TIFFANY: Nope.
ANGELA: Okay, so it’s a result of moving. Got it. That’s great.
TIFFANY: Yeah.
PAIGE: Okay. So I”m a bit of a board game player myself. I’m not huge. I don’t have a YouTube channel, but I’m always interested in co op board games because I find that it’s the best way for me to get people who aren’t board game people to play with me. And a lot of my friends for some reason aren’t board game people. So what should I play?
TIFFANY: Well, what have you played?
PAIGE: Um Pandemic, Zombie Panic, Castle Panic, Forbidden Island, and Forbidden Desert.
TIFFANY: Okay. So if you feel like you’re ready for a level up on your co op experience and you want to go — if you like the zombie stuff there’s a game that’s really popular right now, it’s called Dead of Winter. It’s produced by Plaid Hat games and it’s designed by John Gilmore and Isaac Vegas, I think is his last name. But you are survivors. Every player — it’s kind of this weird — the theme is kind of weird but there’s — the zombie apocalypse has happened so there’s zombies everywhere. And it’s the middle of winter, hence the name of the game. Every player controls a group of survivors and you’re trying to work together to make sure there’s enough food stocked in your little base and also to make sure that no zombies break into the base. And you also can send your survivors out into the town at the various locations to look for things like food or fuel or that kind of stuff. So it’s co op in that regard. And in addition to that, everybody has a secret objective that they are working for. So, for example, your secret objective might be at the end of the game you want there to be five med kits in the base, right? And so those are secrets. So you’re all working together but you’re also trying to accomplish your goal and sometimes you trying to accomplish our secret goal might hinder the survival of the whole group. Because you’re like well my goad needs more med kids, but we actually need more food. Which do I play.
PAIGE: So it’s like coop with secret personal goals?
TIFFANY: Yeah, exactly. And if you want to take it a step up, you can include the saboteur when you deal out the secret goals.
PAIGE: Oh yeah.
TIFFANY: And the sabitor’s secret goal is to accomplish his secret goal and also ensure that the rest of the players don’t win. So it’s usually something like you kill so many survivors and also you get this much food and then you run away. Like that’s your secret goal or something like that. So it’s — the game has a lot — there’s so many components in the game and it can be really overwhelming when you open it up, but there’s a really good teaching series online by Rodney Smith called Watch it Played.
PAIGE: I love those.
TIFFANY: Yeah. He does a really good Watch it Played of how to play it and he also does a game with his son Luke, I believe.
ANGELA: That’s awesome.
TIFFANY: So that’s definitely a level up on your coop.
PAIGE: Very cool. Thank you so much for that recommendation. This has been a fantastic chat. We should totally get together and play some board games.
TIFFANY: Oh, yes.
PAIGE: Maybe we’ll have you back on to talk some more about how all of that ties together and you can tell us how your freelancing is going and we’ll definitely follow along. Oh, and if people want to follow you on Twitter, it’s TheOneTAR?
TIFFANY: That’s right. And it’s spelled out, so T-A-R or, sorry, The and then one is spelled out.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can contact us by emailing wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com. There’s a contact form at JupiterBroadcasting.com where you can drop down to Women’s Tech Radio to contact us. Or you can on Twitter. Our handle is heywtr.
PAIGE: You can also find us on iTunes. If you have a minute leave a review and you can check out the show notes at JupiterBroadcasting.com on our page and it will also incluide the transcripts if you have some people who might be interested in the show, but don’t have the time to listen to us, but are fast readers. Thanks so much.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Pixel Perfect | WTR 36 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Language Workbench | WTR 33

chris — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 09:52:44 +0000

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We met Andi at LinuxFest Northwest but had no idea how awesome her part in the community is! She came to linux through taking notes & caught on to how great it can be! Her & her husband have a language workbench you can check out!

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ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So Angela, today we interview Andi Douglas. She is a cofounder of the Language of Languages company. They are working on a language workbench. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about. We will dive into it during the show.
ANGELA: It’s actually a really cool idea.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: Stay tuned. But first, I want to tell you about DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. If you go to DigitalOcean.com and spin up a server, please be sure to use our promo code heywtr to support the show and get yourself a $10.00 credit. They have data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. Their interface has a simple intuitive control panel which power users can replicate on a larger scale with the company’s straight forward API. Be sure to use promo code heywtr for your DigitalOcean.
PAIGE: Yes. Sign up and you get your disgustingly fast solid state drive VPS. And we got started with Andi today by asking her what she’s up to these days in technology.
ANDI: I’m working with Language of Languages. It’s a language workbench for reinventing computer programing to revolutionize how we learn, understand and create in computing languages. And the whole idea is that when you work in the main specific languages you have, I think ten times, no, yeah, 10 times the productivity of when you work in a more general purpose language. But the main problem with that is there’s a great cost to creating a compiler and the libraries and all that kind of thing so that you can actually use them effectively. And this creates a shortcut so that you can automate your translation from one computer language to another, or you can develop your own domain specific language. I only do a little bit of programing. I’m actually more of the project manager. But this was a fascinating project because I’ve been going to conferences with my husband. My background is I’m an RN, but about 10 years ago I started going to computing conferences with my husband and started learning about computing and I was just fascinated and fascinated by the people. I got to meet Alan Kay and he’s all about the revolution in computer hasn’t happened yet. He really wants to get to that concept that Papert showed in Mindstorms that we need to work with computers in order to help ourselves understand thinking about thinking and to change the way we think. And also then in the process that changed the way we compute. And this has been a wonderful project. We had a session at the last Linux Fest. We’ve given talks at a couple universities. I love being at Linux Fest because people are wide open to different ideas there and that was a great experience.
PAIGE: Yeah. So we met Andi at Linux Fest Northwest this year where she was awesome and introduced herself. Andi, what was your talk on at Linux Fest this year?
ANDI: Bootstrapping a language workbench.
PAIGE: And for people who don’t know, because I think it’s kind of a more obscure term in the computing family, what is a language workbench. Like, from from the nuts and bolts, but sort of high level.
ANDI: Language workbenches have been around about 10 years and there’s actually a competition in that, but it’s all online. I haven’t seen any actual specific conferences where they do it. But a language workbench, in our case you — ever line of a code — every line of code is an idea that a human being has that they have to communicate both to the computer and to other people. And in order to translate to a different language we abstract that out to what’s commonly known as the AST, or in our case we called it the LET, which stands for language element tree. From that level you can then project it out into many different languages by simply copying and pasting the grammar in there and then writing a few rules of how to go from one language to another language and then automate the translation. It’s much less error prone and much faster than trying to do it line by line by human being.
PAIGE: So, essentially, a language workbench means that I can write code in say Ruby, use a language workbench, and have something come out in Java.
ANDI: Right. And this is an open source project on GitHub. It’s really still beginning. It’s in the early ages. We have some people contributing. Most recently, Jamie did a thing where he got a language called C Lite from the book programing languages by Tucker and Newnan. And he translated that. And he was working with another professor and he was able to do that in an afternoon.
ANGELA: So, is the point of it to — well, I don’t know about actually saying the point of it, but is the idea that you don’t necessarily have to learn a second language, you can still use one that you’re very fond of, but be able to be universal enough to use other — or to have it be converted fairly seamlessly to other languages?
ANDI: Yes. ANd also on big projects like building an airplane you’re going to have people working in many different languages or icien my case, my passion is about global warming and most of the computing in that is done is Fortran. A lot of it is very fragile legacy software that can break quite easily.
ANGELA: Right.
ANDI: And I think it’s really important to be able to revolutionize how we do the code so that it’s not constantly become legacy code and easily broken.
PAIGE: That’s really interesting that you bring that up.
ANGELA: Yeah it is.
PAIGE: One of my good friends just finished her PhD at the University of Minnesota in Mathematics and her job was she was remodeling the way that they do global warming predictions and climate change predictions in a way that you could actually model them on a personal computer with like Mathematica. Because they just actually, instead of coming at the perspective from a computer scientist, they came at it from the math side and were able to build much more efficient, much closer models and get the same sort of results with tiny, tiny fractions of the computing power and work.
ANDI: Yeah. And when you think about it, math is simply a domain specific language.
PAIGE: Yeah, exactly. It’s a way to talk to another set of logic in a way that we understand.
ANDI: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah. That’s super cool. You called out in your story that you were an RN first?
ANDI: Yes.
PAIGE: How and why did you make the transition into tech?
ANDI: Part of it was that my career was winding down. I’m 63 and eventually that kind of career wears your body out.
ANGELA: Uh, yeah. Yeah, it definitely would.
ANDI: So two years ago I did — I was still working or insurance company helping people with COPD and heart failure manage their diseases over the phone. I had done some telenursing where we had put a computer with a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope in people’s homes and called them and I would help them take their blood pressure and then listen to their heart and lungs over the phone using the computer.
ANGELA: That’s really cool.
ANDI: Yeah, it was really cool. And when you get into it there’s so many ways of using technology to distance. You can do counseling. Some surgeons will get online with some of the — specialist surgeons will get online with another doctor who’s doing a surgery and they can actually look through the special glasses that they use to see the blood vessels and help them do the surgery, can guide them through it.
ANGELA: That is awesome.
ANDI: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: So you had — that was the merging of being a nurse and introducing into technology, a little bit.
ANDI: Well, partially. A lot of it was I was going to all these conferences with Jamie and I”m his note taker, because he’s got a learning disability.
ANGELA: Ah.
ANDI: Smart but he’s got the dyslexia (unintelligible) thing. And so I was in there taking notes and talking to people like, you know, Alan Kay and, I can’t remember all the people. You know, people from SAP and all those places. And hearing about using genetic algorithms to do randomness, to add randomness to debugging programs and the idea that you do need some randomness, a little bit of chaos in your, in your programing world in order to really find the best solutions to problems. Simply using logic won’t get you where you need to go. That was amazing. That was, I had never heard anything like that. So it’s that whole thinking about thinking based on people looking and seeing how we’ve done it and what didn’t work and what did work. It just changes how you see everything in the world when you go through those experiences.
ANGELA: Yeah. I could see that. I — this is completely related, except not. Or completely unrelated, except a little bit. But, you know, the eyes of a construction worker are way different than my eyes. They can look at a wall and be like, I could take that out. I could, you know, or they see concrete and they see, we can just scrap that. And I see, how am I going to work around this concrete. You know, like, it’s really weird to be able to have your mind opened like that and be able to free those-
ANDI: Perceptions.
ANGELA: Perceptions, yeah.
PAIGE: Preconceived notions. Those things. Yeah. And that even ties into the idea of languages. They’ve run these studies where they show people a pallet of colors and they say can you identify differences in these colors? Are these colors the same, are they different? And someone who is a trained artist who has a lot of words to describe things, like they use things like sienna and burnt umber and whatever. They can actually see differences in two colors that a layperson, a non-artist can’t. To me, it would just look like to of the same oranges and to them it might be, this is a sienna and this is burnt umber.
ANDI: Yeah. I think when I was in intensive care — doing nursing in intensive care in my earlier career, you could look at a patient and look at their color and their breathing and even smell certain things that would tell you which way they were going.
ANGELA: Wow.
ANDI: I mean, you’d still want all the technology, the lines in the arteries and veins and the EKG and all of that, but there are certain ways people look that told you right away, oh gosh I’ve got to start the — I’m expecting a code to happen here.
ANGELA: Right. Advanced directives.
ANDI: So, Alan Kay had a great quote, and I think what he said was change in your viewpoint can change your your IQ by 85 points. Something like that. And he was talking about going from looking at the world through bear eyed to looking at the world through either a microscope or a telescope.
PAIGE: Did either of you see the movie Big Hero 6?
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: So, it’s a movie about a young, very young boy who is struggling to come up with a robotics idea and his older brother is very — you know, they’re both geniuses and is trying to help him and the younger brother is very stuck. And the older brother literally picks him up and puts him over his shoulder so that he’s upside down and shakes him around, and then he gets the ID. I think that’s-
ANDI: That’s great. Chaos changing your point of view.
PAIGE: And it’s a cute moment, but it is literally true. Change your perspective. So you guys are on GitHub? How do people find you?
ANDI: We’ve got a couple things. We’ve got — the GitHub site you’d put in Jamie Douglas/Languageoflanguages. I guess you can put either / or \ seems to work. And then also we had-
PAIGE: i think you have languageoflanguages.com?
ANDI: Yeah, languageoflangues.com is the other one. And if you go in there, we need to work on that site but you can actually use that that get to the workbench in there. And you can then go to the GitHub site if you want to contribute or want to take at the contributions people are making right now.
PAIGE: And you mentioned earlier that you — although you don’t do a lot of coding that you did do some. Um, what sort of tools did you either use to learn the coding that you’re doing or what, what tools do you use to do it? Kind of what’s in your stack right now?
ANDI: Well, at that point Jamie was really teaching me, because I wanted to learn. And he used that book, uh, with the code book. And he was teaching me using squeak, because that’s a language from Small Talk which was his favorite language at that point. And it’s a very user friend, especially for children. There’s tiles where you fill in certain numbers, but you actually pull the the tiles down and place them in your formulas. Not place them in your code. And I did the thing of drawing the racecar and then having it follow a line around. And then, you know, I had to get it to come back to the line when it’s lost the line and that kind of thing. And then I also learned some HTML and CSS online. Just a little bit so I could get an idea about what people were talking about.
PAIGE: Those graphical programing languages. There’s a couple out there. Squeak is one. Scratch from the MIT Media Lab is another very similar. Great for kids and adults. And I think that that’s something that gets overlooked a lot. Is like, oh that’s for kids. No, no, no. It’s awesome for adults too. We actually don’t learn that differently than children.
ANGELA: Yeah. I actually — I went to code.org and did the Angry Birds. I did an hour of that.
PAIGE: Oh, nice.
ANGELA: Yeah. And it was really interesting and it’s kind of complicating. I haven’t done it with DIllon yet, but I will be soon.
PAIGE: Yeah. He’s right about that age.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: Uh-huh. Very cool.
ANDI: I also took my granddaughter to a coding class over at Western where they were making computer games.
ANGELA: Right. Probably with Andrea.
ANDI: And that was kind of interesting. Actually, it was the person before Andrea. I think Andrea is a better teacher. That one, it was kind of a confusing class because there was all these highly advanced little boys in there who had their own LEGO Mindstorm robots at home.
ANGELA: Oh yeah.
ANDI: And we were true beginners in terms of any kind of robotics. So I think that they’ve worked on that to make it a lot better so that people of any entry level can get in there and actually get something out of it.
PAIGE: That’s always a challenge I have when teaching — even, most of the teaching I do is just with women because I’m involved with Women Who Code, but trying to find a way to make it interesting to someone who has done this before, but accessible to someone who has never touched code. That’s really cool. And, you know, if we get our little girls Mindstorm Robots, like they will — the boys are only doing it because they have access to it, in part. Like it’s not genetically different.
ANDI: Yeah, when I went to the conferences they said they’ll start off with little toys like the LEGO snap together toys for girls, for the little girls. And then progress to littleBits and then from there go to the bigger ones. And so I got the littleBits and sometimes I can get my granddaughter, the five year old, interested. Sometimes not. She’s very much into dolls, which is where the little girl LEGO toys come in. But I think she’s going to get there.
PAIGE: I do believe in the idea that at least at some level everybody should learn the idea of coding. Because it’s just logic and logic is useful throughout everything in life.
ANDI: That’s theme of the book Mindstorms is that Papert felt — and he’s work with (unintelligible), he felt that working with the computers changed how children thought about thinking and brought them up to a much higher level, to levels that some adults never actually reach. And in terms of being able to step back and think about thinking.
PAIGE: That’s really interesting. I wonder how that compares to like meditation. Where you’re actually thinking about thinking.
ANDI: Again, you know, that’s like allowing chaos to enter your brain so that you want to follow all these logical lines and you keep stopping yourself.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANDI: And then you get to see all the crazy stuff that will come through when you keep stopping yourself.
PAIGE: Right.
ANGELA: Right. Yeah.
ANDI: It’s a different way of knowing things.
PAIGE: That’s an excellent way to put that. A different way of knowing things. I like that. Well, Andi, this has been an absolute treat. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your journey, and we will definitely keep an eye on Language of Languages. And we’ll have all those links for you in the show notes. And thanks so much.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com to check out the show notes which includes a full transription of this episode.
PAIGE: You can also find us on iTunes or the RSS feed for the podcast is linked on our website. If you’d like to get in touch, please use the contact form on the website. Drop down will have a selection for Women’s Tech Radio. Or you can email us directly at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com. If you have any feedback or you’d like to recommend a guest for the show, we’d love to interview more exciting women. And also check us out on Twitter @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Language Workbench | WTR 33 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Better Open Source Options | LINUX Unplugged 97

chris — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 20:56:18 +0000

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What makes the Linux awesome? Community. This week we’ve got exclusive clips from SouthEast LinuxFest 2015 & an on the ground report from OpenTech 2015.

Plus why open source needs to follow the Apple model and get started with students, creating value around open source & how Red Hat stays connected to the community.

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Hack of cloud-based LastPass exposes hashed master passwords

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I’m Bryan Behrenshausen, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where I work on cultural studies of informatic technologies. I try to think conjuncturally about how the concept of information gets articulated differently across multiple discourses and domains.

bbehrens | Opensource.com

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Living The Linux Life | WTR 25

chris — Wed, 06 May 2015 04:17:19 +0000

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Live from LFNW Scarlett Clark tells us about her work with KDE and Kubuntu!

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Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: Angela, today we’re going to interview at Linux Fest Northwest live. We’re doing an interview with Scarlett Clark. She’s a developer on the KDE project and also works for Kubuntu.
ANGELA: But, before we get into the interview, I want to tell you about Patreon.com. You can go to patreon.com/jupitersignal to support Women’s Tech Radio and all the other shows on teh Jupiter Broadcasting Network. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and see if there’s another show that you might want to listen to in addition to Women’s Tech Radio. Again, go to patreon.com/jupitersignal.
PAIGE: And we got started with this week’s episode by asking Scarlett what she does with KDE and Kubuntu.
SCARLETT: I am a developer for Kubuntu, so I do a lot of the packaging for the software applications for the user to be able to easily install and whatnot. And then, on the other side of the spectrum I created, wrote all the code to automate job creation and job building for KDE’s continuous integration system. Which, it builds the software packages and then test them to make sure that its functional. And then after they all turn green like they’re supposed to, they’re ready to release to distributions like Kubuntu. And I also went the extra step, and we now are testing for OS X and Windows will be coming next.
PAIGE: Oh, wow.
SCARLETT: Yeah, all the code is already in there. It’s just figuring — Windows is a little more complicated because getting dependencies, you can’t tell the continuous integration system to, hey go to this website, download this file, and use it as a dependency. So, it gets little more complicated, but once we sort that out Windows will also be supported with KDE software.
PAIGE: Wow, I had no idea you guys were going for that. That’s really awesome. Before you did this project was their not test coverage for KDE?
SCARLETT: They had a very old system and it was not reliable. And it was also — the job creation was all manual, and OS X and Windows were not supported.
PAIGE: That’s pretty deep in the weeds. Like building, testing, and all that jazz –
SCARLETT: Oh yes.
PAIGE: – for such a big, robust piece of software. Was that you just woke up one morning and decided to do? How did you end up where you are?
SCARLETT: No, actually, Valerie, the gal you just spoke to, they do this season of KDE and it generally targets students. Obviously, I’m not a student. But, this project didn’t have anybody grabbing on it and she just asked me, are you interested in Dev Ops. I’m like, I’m interested in everything. So, she introduced me to Ben Cooksy, the main sys admin guy, and got rolling. I had no idea what I was getting into when I got into it. So, I ended up learning Groovy, Python, and Java on the fly. I had taken a few classes, but that was years ago in university.
ANGELA: What had you done prior to that? Was anything prior to that technology related other than the several classes you mentioned?
SCARLETT: A long time ago I was IT.
ANGELA: Oh, okay.
SCARLETT: But I had not had any real world experience coding. So, this is my first real world experience coding and i love it.
PAIGE: So, you went from no coding to developing a new test suite for KDE?
SCARLETT: Yes, the back end.
PAIGE: So, how was that journey? How did you go through that? Because learning that many languages and that much theory on the fly –
SCARLETT: Yes. At first it was very overwhelming and I just stared at the blank sheet going, oh no. Oh no. But then, I just bits and pieces at a time and things started coming together, and then oh that makes sense. ANd then it just all came together. And then when the final result, we just went live two days ago and it was smooth.
PAIGE: How long did that project take for you?
SCARLETT: It was several months.
PAIGE: Wow, only months?
SCARLETT: Oh yeah.
PAIGE: Wow.
SCARLETT: Actually, yeah, I surprised a lot of people with how fast.
PAIGE: So, doing all that and learning all that, were there awesome resources that you were using? Was it the community? Did you have books that were –
ANGELA: Online courses?
SCARLETT: Google was good.
ANGELA: Yeah, I bet.
PAIGE: So, I have a lot of ladies who are trying to get in tech, and their biggest holdback is learning how to Google the right things. Did you find that was difficult at first., like knowing how to ask the right questions?
SCARLETT: I’ve been using Google since they were in the garage.
PAIGE: Nice, but asking the right tech question.
ANGELA: Yeah, like sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know.
SCARLETT: I know. That’s actually that you have to develop over time, because I’ve learned to figure out what to ask and how to ask it, and sometimes you don’t get it right the first time and you just have to reword it. That can be challenging. That is just it. When I first started the project I didn’t know what I was looking. So, I actually branched off in wrong directions at first. I had a few setbacks because I wanted to go be a docker, which is the new cool technology. But, it wasn’t — with the OS X and Windows, that ended up being wasted time, because you won’t get native builds, because Docker is Linux. That didn’t quite pan out, but it was fun learning.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s always good to add new stack to your brain.
SCARLETT: Oh yeah. Yeah.
ANGELA: Yeah. Something will resonate and help you learn something else.
SCARLETT: Absolutely. Yelah.
PAIGE: So, tell me the story of why you were in IT before, and then you weren’t, and now you are again.
SCARLETT: That’s a story of — I had to give up my career to follow my husband to another state and I could not recover.
ANGELA: That’s too bad. Well, you have now.
SCARLETT: I have. Well, yes.
PAIGE: Was it really difficult for you diving back in afterwards, or did it just kind of re-spark that? We had a guest who talks about kind of the mental stimulation of being in this technical field.
SCARLETT: Yeah, I’ve been a Linux advocate/user since 1998. I have my big stack of Red Hat floppy disc. But I have always wanted to contribute, and I could never really find my way in. It’s a tight knit community. But I finally found my way in with Kubuntu and Jonathan Riddell. He just stepped up and, you want to learn how to package? I’m like, sure. He just showed me the ropes and I’ve just been riding the cloud since.
PAIGE: How did you get in touch with Jonathan? What was that?
SCARLETT: I knew Valerie from several mailing groups and stuff. She saw that I was doing documentation for KDE. Actually, an easy way in is doing documentation. And then she introduced me to Jonathan.
PAIGE: I think we have some people who are just getting started. What does doing documentation mean? What does that look like?
SCARLETT: The easiest way is to start with, like Wiki. It’s much simpler than Doc Books. You pretty much well have to know XML and the layout and everything. But Wiki is pretty much just plain text. You just find an app that you really love and just use it, and figure out — use cases of, well somebody might want to do this, and then you just instruct them how to do that and just build on it. That’s the easiest way to really get your food in the door, and it’s pretty simple because you figure out ways that you use the application and then just write about it.
PAIGE: I think, especially as a newer user of an application, sometimes you have an even more valuable input for that.
SCARLETT: Oh yeah.
PAIGE: Because you have just learned it. You know where the pain points are.
ANGELA: Yes. That is, in my current conversion to Linux, it’s very refreshing for the Linux Action Show audience to hear this new user perspective.
SCARLETT: Yes, absolutely. And a lot of times, developers don’t even think of things that a user would try or want to do with their application, so it’s a good way to also give feedback to the developers. I worked on KMail documentation and there was a lot of things that I ran into. I would talk to the developer, how do you do this. And they’re like, oh, well I need to fix that. Thank you.
PAIGE: Did you find being primarily in open source that reaching out to the developer, that was actually a welcomed thing?
SCARLETT: Not generally, but with KDE the are surprisingly very open and very, very nice. I’ve just felt really at home with KDE. It’s been a nice breath of fresh air.
PAIGE: So, you know, don’t give up looking for the right community.
SCARLETT: You’ll find it. Yeah. I’ve been looking for a long time and I just stumbled into it and didn’t expect it.
ANGELA: So, are you from around here?
SCARLETT: I live in Portland, Oregon.
ANGELA: Okay. Do you always come to Linux Fest? And are there any other festivals that you go to?
SCARLETT: This is my first one, but I will be from now on coming to Linux Fest.
ANGELA: I know, isn’t it great?
SCARLETT: Yes, but I go to Academy each year, which is in various places in Europe. This year we’re going to Spain. And then in September I’ll be going into a Random meeting which is in Switzerland for KDE.
ANGELA: Great.
PAIGE: Awesome.
SCARLETT: Yeah, fun and exciting.
PAIGE: So, you’re in Portland. Is the rest of the KDE team in Portland?
SCARLETT: No, KDE is all around the world.
PAIGE: How do you guys work together? What kind of tools do you use to keep in touch?
SCARLETT: IRC.
PAIGE: IRC?
SCARLETT: Yeah, I live in IRC.
PAIGE: Do you use version control to work together?
SCARLETT: Git.
PAIGE: Git, which is, of course of Linux. Linus, thank you. What’s your stack of tools look like right now. I always like to find out what other developers are using.
SCARLETT: I use Eclipse because it’s the only good Groovy plugin that I could find. And I use KDevelop for the Python work.
PAIGE: And do you have a favorite hardware, like laptop, tablet that you’re into? Or because KDE is so nice and friendly it works on just about everything?
SCARLETT: Yeah, I have Kubuntu on my desktop, my laptop, and then my phone has, you know, Android.
ANGELA: Nice.
PAIGE: Very cool. So, I guess last question, what are you the most excited about, about what’s coming down the pipe for technology? Either with Linux or just with general stuff.
SCARLETT: We are going to be porting our apps on to Android, so that’s kind of big.
PAIGE: Oh wow, that’s exciting.
SCARLETT: That’s what the whole Switzerland trip is about.
PAIGE: Oh nice. Very cool. We’ll have to keep an eye on that. That will be great. KDE on your Android.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to his episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget, you can email us, WTR@jupiterbroadcasting.com, or you can use the contact form that is over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
PAIGE: Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, @HeyWTR. You can also find us on iTunes or any of your other RSS feeds. The RSS feed is available on the website at jupiterbroadcasting.com. And if you have a minute, leave us a review or some feedback. We’d love to hear from you.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

The post Living The Linux Life | WTR 25 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Open Pivot | CR 152

chris — Mon, 04 May 2015 13:44:59 +0000

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Mike and Chris reflect on Microsoft’s Build 2015 conference & discuss the undeniable shift to open industry wide. Mike also announces his new business with a focus on open source.

Plus we discuss Visual Studio Code a bit, bad app ports, new ways for developers to make money & more!

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+ Microsoft Wants To Bring Azure To Your Data Center | TechCrunch

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Hoopla

Build 2015 Objective-C, Android apps, continuity, Visual Studio Code for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Microsoft hopes to court iOS apps to Windows 10 with Objective-C support
Microsoft’s new Code editor is built on Google’s Chromium | Ars Technica

What Microsoft didn’t say when announcing the new editor was how it built Visual Studio Code. In a move that might seem a little surprising, given the regular animosity between the two companies, the editor is built on top of Chromium, the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser.

The app is built using an open source desktop application framework developed by GitHub called Electron. Electron uses HTML5, JavaScript, and other Web technologies, using Chromium for presentation, and io.js (a fork of node.js) to tie it all together.

If you want Microsoft’s nifty Continuum for phones, you’ll have to upgrade | PCWorld

Continuum is a big deal for Windows Phone—both a technological advance and a means of escape from its lonely island of misfit apps. Microsoft’s plan to bring more Android and iOS apps to Windows 10 is another encouraging sign for the platform. It’s no fun for Windows Phone faithfuls to have to upgrade, but perhaps the right to brag about Continuum’s talents will be worth the expense.

Azure Stack will bring Microsoft’s technologies for software-defined networking, pooling direct-attached storage, handling (and securing) virtual machines and monitoring this cloud to on-premise data centers. It’s essentially a new private cloud solution for IT pros and makes it easier for developers to scale their apps across their existing data centers and then boost to the cloud if they need more capacity on short notice.

Open source won.

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Microsoft BUILDs for Linux | Tech Talk Today 165

chris — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 12:43:27 +0000

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Live commentary of Microsoft’s Build 2015 conference, as they deploy applications on Docker & blow our minds with their new Linux desktop app!

Plus Google Now just got better & Ubuntu goes back to the desktop!

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Windows + Android?

Microsoft will most likely announce this week that it will enable customers to run Android apps on their Windows 10 phones, tablets and PCs. The timing ostensibly makes sense, as the software giant’s Build conference, held this week in San Francisco, targets developers. But I wonder what message this change will send to developers and users, especially at a time when the company is also pushing a universal app strategy centered on Windows.

Spotify, RunKeeper, and other Android apps get their own Google Now cards

Spotify can recommend playlists based on your listening history; the same is true for TuneIn Radio and YouTube. Zipcar will remind users when their car reservation is set to expire and provide quick links for navigating to the drop-off location or extending the rental. Fitness apps from RunKeeper, Jawbone, and Adidas can now remind you of your daily goals and encourage you to work toward them. You can keep up with breaking news by enabling cards from ABC News, Circa, or Feedly. And there’s even an OpenTable Google Now card that will let you pay your dinner bill with a tap.

Announcing the next Ubuntu Online Summit

While the focus on development in the last few cycles has been on shaping up and implementing the phone, this doesn’t mean other key parts of the project have been left out. The phone has helped create the platform and tools that will ultimately bring all these projects together, into a converged code base and user experience. From desktop to phone, to the cloud, to things, and back to the desktop.

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Interview Gauntlets of Pain | CR 150

chris — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 14:13:23 +0000

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Mike’s thinking about making the big switch, a J.O.B., but the interview process has been a nightmare. He shares his perspective after sitting out of the race for a while.

Plus how Google convinced their engineers to become managers, your feedback & more!

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