CSS – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com Open Source Entertainment, on Demand. Wed, 27 Oct 2021 16:40:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-favicon-32x32.png CSS – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com 32 32 Microsoft War Stories | Coder Radio 437 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/146577/microsoft-war-stories-coder-radio-437/ Wed, 27 Oct 2021 05:30:00 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=146577 Show Notes: coder.show/437

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OK Then | User Error 82 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/138252/ok-then-user-error-82/ Fri, 03 Jan 2020 00:15:00 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=138252 Show Notes: error.show/82

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Blinking Eye Patches | User Error 77 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/136257/blinking-eye-patches-user-error-77/ Fri, 25 Oct 2019 00:15:23 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=136257 Show Notes: error.show/77

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PCLinuxOS + Hugo | Choose Linux 16 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/133762/pclinuxos-hugo-choose-linux-16/ Wed, 21 Aug 2019 23:15:07 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=133762 Show Notes: chooselinux.show/16

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Let Accidents Happen | WTR 54 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/97696/let-accidents-happen-wtr-54/ Wed, 16 Mar 2016 10:47:28 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=97696 Jo is cofounder & chief creative officer at cardsmith.co, a web-based software to double your productivity, provide clear visibility of your progress, capture & execute your ideas & projects, keep yourself organized & amaze your friends & family. Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 […]

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Jo is cofounder & chief creative officer at cardsmith.co, a web-based software to double your productivity, provide clear visibility of your progress, capture & execute your ideas & projects, keep yourself organized & amaze your friends & family.

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Interview – Jo Wollschlaeger – @jo_wollsch

 

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Starting At 8 | WTR 52 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/96996/starting-at-8-wtr-52/ Wed, 02 Mar 2016 08:40:09 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=96996 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. Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed […]

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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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Millennials and Mentors | WTR 40 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/87736/millennials-and-mentors-wtr-40/ Wed, 16 Sep 2015 13:02:22 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=87736 Elizabeth cofounded WWC NYC and is a front end engineer. She discusses her path as a millennial/youngling in the technology field. Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed Become a supporter on Patreon: Show Notes: […]

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Elizabeth cofounded WWC NYC and is a front end engineer. She discusses her path as a millennial/youngling in the technology field.

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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 going to dive into an awesome interview with Elizabeth, who self-identifies as a millennial youngling and talk about her career, her transition, what she thinks about coming up in a culture where tech was okay and all sorts of different juicy topics.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I’d like to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. You can subscribe for as little as $3.00 a month and support this awesome content. Go to patreon.com/jupitersignal.
PAIGE: And we got started our interview by asking Elizabeth what she’s up to in technology these days.
ELIZABETH: I am a software engineer, and I was previously at a corporate company that did all the media stuff, and now I’m looking for new opportunities.
PAIGE: Awesome. So what side of software engineering are you into?
ELIZABETH: Which of the cornucopia? I do mostly front-end software engineering, so lots of HTML CSS, mostly JavaScript, a lot of frameworks where I hope to do many more.
PAIGE: How do you feel about the exploding front-end framework–I would almost call it a problem. It seems like every day there’s a new one and everyone wants to jump on the new hotness.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, I started in technology about three years ago, and I remember I was, you know, the common I’m just entering into the industry problem is which framework do you start out with? And I thought Python. Python back then was–that was the jam. And it’s not to say it’s not now, but now everything is in JavaScript, so you can work in front end and back end, and I don’t need to learn another language and its intricacies, so I’m going to say JavaScript is the best. That’s a 2015 opinion. I reserve to change.
PAIGE: I’m going to hold you to that in five years, all right? I’m an advocate the same way. I run a JavaScript jam night, I guess, every week for Women Who Code, and the reason that I chose JavaScript is because it is so agnostic in the stack. Like you really can’t go from node all the way out to front end basic JavaScript and jQuery and angular. It’s a great choice for a first language, although it’s not as pretty or as easy to read as like a Revere or Python. It’s so practical.
ELIZABETH: It is. And there are so many things that are happening with it. The New York City JavaScript community has just exploded over the past year. There is Brooklyn JS and there’s a plethora of meetups that are just focused on JavaScript. And what is it–there’s all these fancy type of developers coming up, so there is the note–if you just practice note JS, there is a node JS engineer where I’ve seen a copious amount of job openings for.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s really starting to blow up. It’s interesting because everybody is like we want a five year experience node JS engineer. I’m like, are you sure you understand what you’re asking for there? Like time traveling node engineers?
ELIZABETH: Well, it’s all open source, so they’ll finagle those dates.
PAIGE: Right? That’s very cool. So you mentioned that you’ve only been doing this for three years. So how did you get into it? Tell me about your journey there.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, I’m a self-proclaimed Youngling. And about three years ago, I got accepted into a program for Google and so Google flew me out there for three weeks and talked to me about computer science and it was called Google’s Computer Science Summer Seminar. So like their version of incorporating all the students into what they do and into the application. And so it was Google. It was an amazing experience, my first time out in Mountain View, if not California, and I was just enamored with technology afterwards, as you would be, with so many pretty colors and all those octobikes. So that was the original start. And then I went into college for computer science, and unfortunately, college for me wasn’t the best experience. It wasn’t the right environment or the culture, and I think that just has to do more with the school that I chose and I didn’t know what I wanted out of a college. So it was a very unfulfilling experience. But then I dropped out about a year and a half ago, and I joined Time Inc. as an intern. That was a really good experience being involved in corporate and being involved in the media. Again, total 180s from what I had ever experienced in the past. And after I was an intern, I was on boarded full-time working as a mobile developer and then a developer evangelist and then just like a general software engineer. So I’ve gone through a couple of iterations there. And now I’ve got a little bit of time to relax, which is so well needed. I’m currently binging on The Good Wife and haven’t binged on a show in a while now, so I’m really happy to just kick back this weekend.
PAIGE: Sounds like you’ve been through the gamut of tech already so quickly. So it sounds like you’ve touched on a lot of different things. What was kind of like the hardest part for you stepping into that tech culture as a–what did you call yourself–a youngling I think?
ELIZABETH: A youngling, a millennial. The hardest part, I think it’s very easy, especially when you’re young, and especially when you don’t know something about the subject to be like oh, yeah, you know what? I’ll just apply the–all these TED talks say that if you do a hundred hours in it, you’ll be 80 percent of the way there, or like there are a couple of stats on that. And I think with technology, it’s really easy to fool yourself, especially when you haven’t delved into its guts, that to fool yourself into convincing yourself that you’re quite good at it. It’s like hey, it’s only going to take a hundred hours to learn JavaScript, isn’t that the dream?
ANGELA: That’s really interesting, because over confidence isn’t the thing that I really think that women have in the tech field, but I can totally see where you’re coming from with that.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, every time I think about learning a different language, I’m like oh, you know what? I’ll just spend ten hours on Codecademy or delve into a framework, and I’ll understand like 80 percent of it. And unfortunately, that’s never worked. But I think probably it’s more to fool myself into just getting started, and then those ten hours become 100 which becomes 1,000, and then I’m an engineer that says oh, I can do this thing, but I also know that I can’t do–there’s so much more to this field, right? You know what you don’t know.
PAIGE: Right. That is the eternal problem is that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. I actually, I think it is interesting, though. I think as the programming journey goes on, that 80 percent in ten hours really does start to happen. But it only happens if you’ve delved in deep enough somewhere where like you really understand the concepts behind what you’re doing as opposed to just how to do it. You know when I pick up a new framework now, I know the things to look for, I know how to look for like how are we handling flow, how are we handling IO, all of these different things and I can just really research like how that framework does it or how that language does it, and it really does–I do get that 80 percent in ten hours, but then that last 20 percent is like 10,000 hours.
ELIZABETH: And I haven’t gotten my 10,000 hours of programming yet, so I still don’t know what to look for as a junior programmer, so I falsely say to myself that I can do something very quickly, and I’m still getting there.
PAIGE: It was given wise advice to me when I first started working in tech was take your gut instinct for how long something is going to take, and then if you feel really, really confident that it’s going to take that long, multiply by three. And if you feel kind of confident that that’s how long it’s going to take, probably multiply by five.
ANGELA: Just keep multiplying it–
PAIGE: Yeah, especially, as much as we don’t have overconfidence in like the things that we can do, I think a lot of times humans are really good at being over confident with how fast we can do things, especially as computer geeks because we’re like, we’re so in such a fast culture or fast thing. Like the computer is fast, I must be fast. Like everything is quick.
ELIZABETH: You know what? I was having a really big problem with estimation of projects and I would be like oh, you know what, I’ll complete this in two days and it would end up taking ten days. So my just general rule of thumb is exactly that. Just multiply whatever my estimation is by five, and then I’m hoping for the day hopefully in the next couple of years that it will actually be my estimation.
PAIGE: Yeah, I have to say that I don’t think even for myself that I could do good estimations until I stepped back from programming and did a bunch of project management where I had to really sit down and break down things and charge people for things and like, oh, now I really kind of get it. So it wasn’t so much that my skill caught up in programming as my skill caught up in estimation. That was interesting.
ANGELA: Right. Interesting.
ELIZABETH: That’s really interesting that it would have to–the inclusion of a different field, if not a different industry entirely, what makes you understand this like archaic estimation tools.
PAIGE: Yeah, and I think–I don’t know–it’s like I love my journey and I love talking to a lot of people like you who have had kind of non-traditional tech journeys, because I think we do bring skills to the table that are that kind of cross over skills. Like the reason I know estimations is more for my time in Geek Squad or whatever doing those sorts of tasks. I have a better understanding of that, or like the fact that I run a volunteer group is actually why I can do project management. It’s not from tech. Your cross over skills are as important, if not more important.
ELIZABETH: You know, Paige, as you’re saying this, I told you beforehand, I just moderated a panel on Tuesday, and the panel’s title was Non Traditional Paths Through Technology. And it was focused on these four women that had different expectations, if not different career ambitions and just found themselves in technology. And one of them is working as a researcher, and another is delving into hardware. A third is organizing [indiscernible] center. So like these different paths into technology, the technology doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a software engineer. And so, it was, as you’re speaking to this nontraditional root, I’m also a huge believer that you don’t just need to go to boot camp and learn all the things. You can become a research–what is it– like so many UX research positions nowadays that are open? Yeah, so that whole concept of you don’t just need to make like a total jump, a total 180. You can use your skills from whatever other lifetimes and you’re actually going to be a lot more valuable than if you had just started fresh.
PAIGE: Yeah, we’re actually talked to a couple guests where they’ve been in companies that are tech companies and they’ve transitioned to development inside the company. So if you’re interested in technology and you’re not sure if development is for you, there are a lot of other roles–everything from community evangelists, data research, like all of these different things depending on the kind of background you have. It could be a bridge, and then you can get exposed to the culture. And then once you’re inside the company, especially a lot of companies these days are looking for internal growth because training and hiring in places is expensive. Yeah, they want to grow the ones they have a lot.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, oh my gosh. I’m such a big believer in like advocating for talent as well as keeping your talent, and if they would like to try something, that’s such an awesome way to expose them to a different culture or different industry as well as keep them within the company and attain those skill sets.
PAIGE: So as a millennial and kind of the up and coming generation in that stuff, what do you think it takes for a company to take you? Because one of the biggest problems that we’re having in technology that I’m seeing and I’m really trying to really react to is that we’re getting a lot women in technology, but we’re losing them just as fast, which is hard. So what would it take for a company to keep you hooked?
ELIZABETH: Actually, the Women Who Code New York City network just had its first conference a couple of, if not a month ago, and we were focusing on women approaching, if not at mid-career. And so, I’m sure you know, the statistic is that 57 percent of women in technology that are at mid-career leave the industry. And so it’s just this awful problem of, even the women that we are attracting into technology are leaving, and yet we’re just packing more into the funnel and not thinking about how to keep them. For millennials, I would have to say, what a difficult question that is because myself, I’m so, I’m like, I’m like constantly chasing after different butterflies. And so, whichever one is the prettier one, that’s the one I’m going to go to. Also, we have this kind of awful structure nowadays that if another company offers me a promotion, even if I have the same skillset, I am able, I am in the opportunity and position to take it because of how booming the technology industry is. So I think that’s the way most people are getting to manager, VP, CEO, founder levels without having “paid their dues” myself included, absolutely.
ANGELA: So I think part of what Paige wanted to know was, what is pretty? Is it the job, is it the company, is it the benefits? Is it the type of management style, culture? What is pretty to you? Or is it just better than what you currently have and it could be any of the above?
ELIZABETH: I was kind of spoiled in the sense that I had an amazing mentor to guided me at Time, Inc. And then fantastically, I had another couple of mentors that also joined that group. So I’m a core believer that a mentor is one of the things that is going to keep me at a company that would just keep me grounded. Another thing that I think is very important is, so now that you’re able to think three months down the line with your mentor, well, any little intricacies as well as micro aggressions that you happen to come across, any problems that you have that is natural in any job, you should be able to rant to someone about. And so, if there is no person near you that you have been introduced to that is at your skill level, that is at your experience level, that is probably at your age level as well, I’m going to call that person an informal rant partner. Like if there is not someone for you to rant to, and if there is not someone to guide you towards your goals, that’s probably not going to be a company that you’re able to vent as well as grow in.
ANGELA: Yeah, a buddy system.
ELIZABETH: A buddy system, yep.
PAIGE: I love that of all the things you could have said, you said people. I think that that’s really important, and I think it’s extra important to our generation, your generation–I’m a little older, it’s okay.
ANGELA: Just a couple years.
PAIGE: I would definitely not identify as a millennial, but that’s okay.
ANGELA: Who I? I don’t think I would either.
PAIGE: So the mentorship, and it’s actually some of the feedback that I’ve been giving and getting with a lot of the women’s groups that I’m working with with trying to figure out this retention problem is like how do we mentor and why, especially do we have such resistance. And I should ask this–why do we have such resistance in women for mentoring? And Elizabeth, were any of your mentors women?
ELIZABETH: All three were.
PAIGE: Awesome.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, I have been, I don’t want to use the word blessed, but I’ve been very fortunate to have one mentor that was absolutely phenomenal and then she introduced me to two others that were also like amazing and very, I don’t want to say high up the chain, but it was a different experience. It was a different experience that I had ever seen before. They weren’t software engineers, they were managers if not higher.
PAIGE: Yeah, and that is definitely something is I think looking outside your role can be very fulfilling. It might not be what you need as like a code mentor, but I think in some ways those are easier to–you can kind of poke any developer and be like hey, can you answer this question? And most developers are pretty cool with answering questions. But like getting that mentorship relationship is, I don’t know, it can be outside your field and that’s okay.
ELIZABETH: I’m also going to say that you can’t force it. I’m calling them mentors, but I’m not sure that they know that they’ve been mentors to me. Or like it’s not a oh, you are my mentor, you have to meet me every three months and to talk to me about my goals for one hour. That’s not forcing that sort of relationship.
ANGELA: Sure, but that’s natural. Like my son is in first grade, and he has a student in his current class that was in his last year’s class that he calls his BFF, but that kid, my son is not his BFF. It’s very natural.
PAIGE: Yeah, and I think informal mentorship is probably a lot more comfortable, especially for women I have found. Men seem to be more comfortable because it’s sort of that like higher work goal relationship that their hormones demand. But we are much more like hey, we are just coffee buddies–and I look up to you so much. That’s been kind of my journey lately is how do we encourage mentorship. Also, I will ask you this question, do you have anyone you’re mentoring?
ELIZABETH: I don’t. I don’t think at this level I have a lot of experience to give, unfortunately. Maybe that’s just like Impostors Syndrome talking.
ANGELA: Yeah, I would say so.
PAIGE: I would totally call you out and say that you should totally be an informal mentor. It sounds like you participate in Women Who Code.
ELIZABETH: I do. I cofounded the New York City Network a year and a half ago, so I’ve also never got in the– no one has ever come up to me and been like let’s–I wanna make our coffee dates more consistent and for my benefit.
PAIGE: I actually kind of fell into the mentor role as I started Women Who Code really in Portland, and in some ways, I kind of pushed it a little bit with some people and it’s been very rewarding for both of us where I just saw some young people with–some young women with very high potential levels and I saw them struggling. I said, you know, hey, let’s talk. And we don’t necessarily have a time table where we talk every x often, but it was definitely me opening the door, because I think there is a lot of fear. And I think this is cross gender. It doesn’t really matter, but there’s a lot of fear of asking for that sort of thing, and I found someone I resonated with and I said you know, let’s do this. Let’s get your career going. Let’s make the moves that you need. So I encourage you to look for someone.
ELIZABETH: I will, and the next time I talk to you–the first time that I come up to Portland, that will be my goal.
PAIGE: Awesome. We will jam. I think that’s a real benefit of being involved in a network like Women Who Code where I do believe a lot that everybody should have a mentor, a peer, and a mentee. It’s a very healthy thing professionally and personally in a lot of ways.
ANGELA: I need to add that to my bucket list I guess.
PAIGE: I have some recommendations of all of those.
ANGELA: I do need to get involved with the Women Who Code and once I can have enough time.
PAIGE: I like to call that magical free time. It’s like a designer who’s also a developer. Magic free time. Awesome, Elizabeth, this has been really fun. I just had probably one more question for you. If you could look back and give yourself, your four year younger self advice, what would you say?
ELIZABETH: You know, Paige, it’s really funny that you say this because I have a 12 year old brother, so that’s actually a question I think about a lot.
ANGELA: How you would help him?
ELIZABETH: Yeah, how I would help him, what would I do better if I was 12 again, what information can I impart onto him and what will he actually understand? And so the one that I keep coming back to is listening to other people and most importantly, having empathy for them and their situation. And it’s really hard I think, it’s really hard to have empathy when you haven’t experienced much, me included, like I don’t think I’ve experienced much of the world, but being exposed to those sorts of different people and understanding what they’re going through makes you a lot more aware of the details that they portray in real life and maybe why they’re acting a little bit weird that day, or how it all adds up into us being like humans and people and really great people. So empathy is going to be my winner answer.
PAIGE: Okay. I like that. I like how broad that is. There was a quote and I was going to look it up, but I couldn’t do it fast enough. Be kind because we all have a great and terrible burden that nobody is aware of kind of thing and I like to move through the world with that. I did have one more question that I thought of that I think was really important, sorry.
ANGELA: And she’s excited about it.
PAIGE: I am. So you’re probably one of the youngest guests that we’ve had on the podcast, and I was wondering if growing up, you felt like you could just do tech like it was no big deal, or if you did still feel that kind of like it’s for boys kind of feel?
ELIZABETH: Paige, I actually went to a science and technical high school.
PAIGE: So you cheated.
ELIZABETH: So it was never a gender thing. It was a, who can get the best grade in the class kind of thing, and therefore, who has to study the most for that. But I didn’t grow up thinking I would be in technology at all. I thought I would–my father was a mechanical engineer, and so I thought I would go to school for mechanical engineering and like work at a job for five to ten years and like switch around, but technology and apparently Google had different other paths.
PAIGE: And computer engineering is still engineering, right?
ELIZABETH: If you say so.
PAIGE: Front-end and stuff. It definitely is different, but it’s the same mental mind path I think. But I am really encourage to hear that you looked at your dad’s career and said I could do that, no problem. I think that gives me a lot of hope for where we’re going.
ELIZABETH: My dad was a serial entrepreneur and a mechanical engineer and like an all-around awesome man, and then my mom has a Ph.D. in pharmacology and like a plethora of other things. So I had no shortage of ambition to look up to.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find a full transcript of this show over at jupiterbroadcasting.com in the show notes. You can also go to the contact form at jupiterbroadcasting.com, be sure to select Women’s Tech Radio as the drop down show.
PAIGE: And you can add us on our RSS feed reader, or you can get us on iTunes. If you happen to have us on iTunes, please go ahead and leave us a review. We’d love to hear what you think of the show. You can also find us on Twitter @heywtr. Tweet us and we’d love to hear what you think.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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Technical Writing | WTR 37 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/85727/technical-writing-wtr-37/ Wed, 29 Jul 2015 10:45:13 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=85727 Jami is a technical writer for Agency Port Software, a web based software for P&C insurance. Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed Become a supporter on Patreon: Show Notes: Learn to Code by Doing […]

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Jami is a technical writer for Agency Port Software, a web based software for P&C insurance.

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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 Jami. She’s a technical writer with a company in Boston. She does a lot of interesting work trying to translate developers and in her position for developers. So we talk a little bit about that and we get into what it means to be a technical write and kind of dig into that whole career path.
ANGELA: And before we get into this interview, I would just like to say that you can support the network and the ongoingness of this show, Women’s Tech Radio, by going to pateron.com/today. And that is where you will find that we put out a podcast specifically to thank the patrons that are supporting the network. It’s Tech Talk Today. It’s a quick show that we do four days a week of the top headlines. And it’s just a thank you. It’s something that we’re able to launch because we are getting funding that way. So, again, you can support Women’s Tech Radio through patreon.com/jupitersignal.
PAIGE: And to get started, we asked Jami what she’s doing in technology today.
JAMI: I’m currently a tech writer. I work for Agency Port Software in Boston. We are a technology company that offers web-based software and tools to P&C insurance companies, and I’m pretty much responsible for creating and maintaining all of their product documentation and as well as the developer documentation site where all that documentation lives. So mostly my responsibilities are related to actual documentation. So I document any updates to the products and the release notes whenever releases go out. And then the other half is I’m actually dealing with the technical aspects of the site. So we make sure everything is up and running, everything is displaying properly, the styles look good, the features looks good. I”m working mostly in a tool called MadCap Flare. It’s an authoring tool. But I also work heavily in CSS and a little bit of Javascript and now learning a little bit more about Bootstrap.
PAIGE: So are you working in MadCap Flare? Is that like your internal program and then you’re also starting to author some of the stuff for the web and that’s why you’re diving into CSS and HTML and stuff?
JAMI: Yeah. So, MadCap Flare, it’s an external software component that you can use to actually build documentation sites. So you kind of organize everything and it builds HTML files that then compile out that you can build an actual site with. But we wanted something a little bit more modern and that we can customize a lot more than what’s built into the product. So that’s why we kind of bring in the CSS and the Javascript and the Bootstrap so that we can make it a little bit more modern and trendy to kind of meet our company’s branding.
PAIGE: So is this something — technical writing is actually — we haven’t had a technical writer on the show yet.
ANGELA: Uh-uh.
PAIGE: So this is kind of fun. What does it mean to do technical writing? I think you kind of grazed over it, but what do you do as a technical writer, like in the nitty gritty?
JAMI: Well, in my position now you’re working with the developers. You’re working with the engineers to find out exactly what is done on a project as related to a product. So whenever they make changes, we have to make sure that we’re relaying that information to whoever the audience is. So in my current case, our audience is actual developers who are customizing our software for clients. So they need to learn how to customize everything. So those updates go in for the content and we also relay the updates as for release notes. So we’re constantly keeping communication to our clients to what we’re being, what’s being done into the product.
PAIGE: So you’re kind of translating developers, and in your position, for developers?
JAMI: Yes. In prior positions where I’ve worked as a tech writer it was kind of the opposite. Where I was interpreting developers notes and trying to decipher it into a language that any man could understand, like they have no technical background but they need to understand. But in my current case it’s, I’m actually relaying developer information for another developer, if that makes sense.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Totally. So are you super technical? Are you a developer yourself? How does that work for you to kind of translate like that?
JAMI: I’m not really a developer per say. I mean, I’m starting to learn a lot more, especially in the past year or so. But I’m more of the content side of it. So I can understand it, but if you give me something to code completely in Javascript, i don’t know how to do that just yet, but I could at least read it and understand what’s going on.
PAIGE: Well, that’s actually a lot farther than some developers I know. So you’re doing really well.
JAMI: Thanks.
PAIGE: Is that something you went to school for? To be — either to understand Javascript or to be a technical writer?
JAMI: Actually, no. I actually don’t have really any formal training as far as even technical writing. My degree was actually in creative writing and journalism and I started working for a small IT company right out of college kind of helping with their help desk and I just gradually made my way up. And now today, I — since working with developers and having to actually look at code, it’s kind of forced me to learn, but also — I’m mean it’s not like a forcing, but — so it’s interesting to finally learn how to do some of this stuff. And then actually to learn more. I’ve been taking classes on Code School and Codecademy and trying to actually dig into code and try to figure it out so that I can understand what they’re talking about.
PAIGE: Very cool. So you’re self-teaching yourself so you can have more understanding at work?
JAMI: Right. Exactly.
PAIGE: And do cool things. Very cool.
JAMI: Right.
PAIGE: That’s actually how I got started.
JAMI: Very nice.
PAIGE: I always like to ask this sort of question, but how does it flip around? Do you feel like you have this creative writing and journalism background and you’re trying to learn code. Do you feel like any of the developers are actually trying to learn how to write more like humans?
JAMI: In some cases, yes. Yes.
PAIGE: Awesome.
JAMI: Or maybe we wish that they did, I guess.
PAIGE: Maybe somebody should write a Codecademy for technical writing so that we could learn how to write better documentation.
JAMI: That would be nice.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think they’re based out of Boston or New York. I think they’re in New York.
JAMI: I’m not sure. Yeah.
PAIGE: They’re very close. How did you get where you are? It sounds like you started out of college and you had the college degree. Have you always had an interest in tech or was it just kind of that random happenstance?
JAMI: Well, I mean, I’ve always been into computers and tech, and I’m really tech savvy. So just kind of, I kind of fit in right away in the department and I just — I love it. I mean, I’m always learning something new. It’s always evolving. So, I just — I’ve kind of found that happy medium where I’m writing, but I’m also getting the chance to actually work in tech.
PAIGE: I think it’s interesting how the tech — like if we look at it from a broad perspective. It really is a very deep field. It takes a lot of disciplines. You know, we’ve had so many different people on the show; artist, developers, designers, and writers now and there’s really — there’s room for all of us in this field to do good things.
JAMI: Right.
PAIGE: So why tech? You said you’re tech savvy. What does that mean to you and is it — what kind of stokes your fire in the tech end of things?
JAMI: Well, I think it’s kind of — because I have this personality where I like to kind of be a detective and try to figure things out. So I think in tech I kind of get that opportunity. Where it’s like, oh I don’t know why this page isn’t showing up right. Let me see why. Let me try to fix this. Okay, that’s not working. Let me try this. And just trying to find the answer. If it’s either online or talking to people. And it’s like you kind of get the opportunity to see what you did right away.
PAIGE: Yeah. We actually had an interview, a couple of weeks ago by now, where we talked to somebody about failing. And I think that willingness to explore and to fail forward, like oh does this worK? And to break it and then fix it is — that’s that mindset for me. It’s super important.
JAMI: Absolutely. Yeah, and it helps you learn because I mean for me I’m more of a hands on person, so actually digging in and trying to do things is how I’m going to figure out how to do it.
ANGELA: Is there anything tech related that you do outside of work, like hobby wise? Like blogging or?
JAMI: I did for a while. I was — I did blog for a while. I did some side freelance work for Bot.com for a while, for like two years. So I had to maintain their — maintain my — I had my own personal site and I had to do all that stuff. I was into photography for a while. So I was editing photos a lot. Right now I just really — I honestly haven’t had a whole lot of spare time to do a lot of outside tech related stuff, but I mean I’ve been using a computer for the past probably 20 years or so.
ANGELA: Yeah.
J; So it’s like attached to me. It’s just a part of our lives now. Tech is always around me.
PAIGE: Yeah, totally. You can’t get away from it anymore.
JAMI: No. It’s like a — it’s literally attached to you hip.
PAIGE: I guess you could move to Amish country in Pennsylvania.
JAMI: Yeah.
PAIGE: That’s about it.
ANGELA: I heard there’s a really good buffet.
PAIGE: Really?
ANGELA: Yeah, really.
PAIGE: I don’t know. I mean, are they offended-
ANGELA: My mom went to it and so did one of my friends.
PAIGE: I’ve had some of the best pancakes ever in Amish country, so maybe it’s relevant. I don’t know. Very fun. So you’re in the Boston community. How is the — kind of the tech community out there?
JAMI: It’s really booming right now, it seems. I mean, I’ve been here a little over a year, but especially in the area we’re in, we’re kind of near South Boston and just companies are moving in, startups and just everything. It’s very tech heavy right now.
PAIGE: I’m from the Boston area, I will admit.
JAMI: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: What is kind of your favorite thing about — I know you just moved up there. What’s kind of your favorite Boston thing so far?
JAMI: I’d say just being in the city to me is just exhilarating. Because I’m kind of from — I grew up in a small Florida town and kind of moved around Florida a lot where we didn’t really have that metropolitan feel. And of course the weather here. And summer/spring is very nice. Winter is a little bit challenging. But I love public transportation so getting on the train everyday to me is exciting.
PAIGE: Boston public transit, I had no idea how spoiled i was until I moved away from Boston, but it’s pretty much, once you get out of the Boston, New York, DC corridor, once you get out of there the rest of the country does not have the kind of public transport that the northeast has, and I had no idea.
JAMI: No. Yeah.
PAIGE: But I’m surprised you say summer. Well, I guess you’re from Florida. Honestly the worst part of New England weather to me is the hot, sticky summers, but Florida definitely takes the cake on that one.
ANGELA: Yeah.
JAMI: Right. Right. Yeah, it’s not that — I mean it’s been high 80s but it’s not that bad.
PAIGE: We also ask a couple of things that people do. So what else do you do with your free time?
JAMI: Well, I have a little dog named Penny so I like to spend time a lot with her. I like to research old train stations, which is kind of silly, but it’s kind of like a new thing since I’ve moved up here to New England. There’s a lot of — obviously a lot of history, a lot of hold history. But a lot of old train stations that have either been renovated into other things or they’re just kind of missing and you just kind of see pieces of them and you want to know why. Like why, what happened? And things like that.
PAIGE: That’s really fascinating. You should blog about that.
JAMI: It’s such a random thing. I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with it.
ANGELA: Yeah, no, seriously. Yeah, if you started a blog I bet you could get-
PAIGE: I would follow that.
ANGELA: Click revenue, because trains and stuff like that is really a popular thing.
JAMI: Probably.
PAIGE: Even if you’re in a for a casual ride, the Rail to Trail project that has happened through most of New England is fascinating.
JAMI: Yes.
PAIGE: And you get to go by a lot of those old train stations and things.
JAMI: Yes, we have one that actually runs right by our house. We haven’t been since fall, but we take the dog and it’s very interesting. Some of the old signals are even still there. And the old crossover bridges. It’s very cool.
PAIGE: New England is a really fascinating place for history. Definitely. Highly recommend. So you’re teaching yourself right now. What are some of the things that are hardest for you, even just learning like — is it jus getting your head around the logic of it? Like understanding terms? Like what is a variable? What is a function? Like what’s your sticking points and how are you getting over them or how are you not?
JAMI: I think it’s more the logic, because I’m kind of still in the midst of doing some of the online courses for Javascript. And it’s just — I don’t know if it’s the math portion or it’s just kind of all of it at once, like the, you know, if L statements and things like that. Sometimes it kind of throws me around. It’s just trying to figure it out. They give you a sample. Okay. Here’s some code, now try to fix it. Or you’ve got to write this yourself. here’s your variables and write it. So it’s just digging in and trying to figure it out is the best way how I get through it.
PAIGE: I like that. I also usually encourage people who are new to programming to write it out in plain English first.
JAMI: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: And then try to make it into code.
JAMI: Right.
PAIGE: Because if you write the logic in a way that you understand it and then translate, it can kind of help that step. Are you just doing stuff online? Are you going to meetups or anything?
JAMI: I haven’t gone to any meetups yet. I know there are a lot in the Boston area. I know there are couple of, especially for women they’re actually creating — there’s a lot of groups that are actually for women that want to code and you could actually get involved in these groups and they do meetups. And basically at any level you could just want to learn and you could get into the groups and start working with them and learn more. And that’s something I’d love to do. I just haven’t had the chance right now, unfortunately.
PAIGE: I definitely encourage you to check that out. I’m actually the director for Women Who Code Portland and I know that we have a Boston chapter.
JAMI: NIce.
PAIGE: And I think Girl Develop It is out there if you want something more workshoppy.
JAMI: Right.
PAIGE: I highly recommend both of those.
ANGELA: Do you have, at your job, are you the only technical writer or is there somebody else that you — that also does that?
JAMI: No, I am the sole technical writer. I was actually hired on last year to help their documentation section. They were using and old Drupal platform and they wanted something more robust and more modern that could actually kind of help users navigate it through better. So that’s kind of where I came along. I’ve had a little over six years’ experience as a tech writer so I kind of brought my expertise in and helped them find the MadCap Flare tool to build their documentation set. So I’m the sole person on that — in that full team right now.
ANGELA: Job security.
JAMI: Yes.
ANGELA: Have you ever met another technical writer? Like with either a partnering company or a client that has a technical writer?
JAMI: Yes.
ANGELA: Yeah? Is that-
JAMI: Yes.
ANGELA: Are you guys able to like share hidden jokes and — I don’t know.
JAMI: Sometimes. Yeah, so my last job before this one I was actually on a technical writing team. We had — I think at one time we had about five writers and a supervisor that we’d all been — you know, we were all tech writers. So we all knew the jokes, whether it be about a specific programmer or just the logic of things. Of, oh like, oh your authoring tool is doing something weird again. Oh no. You know, things like that. It’s mostly just weird little quirks.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: Did you ever put easter eggs inside technical documentation like we do with programs?
JAMI: Uh, no I haven’t.
PAIGE: You should consider it.
ANGELA: Yeah. You work on that. We’ll check back with you in six months.
JAMI: Okay. Yeah.
ANGELA: No, just kidding.
PAIGE: So, if someone was listening to the show and is a writer currently, they’re freelance or whatever they’re doing, or maybe they’re finishing a degree or something and they wanted to get into technical writing, what kind of advice would you give them?
JAMI: I would just say to get out there and read as much as you can about it. I mean, from my perspective, I didn’t have an actual formal tech writing training. I didn’t go to school for it. So you kind of have to be tech savvy in some sense, and you have to be willing to learn. You have to be open minded that things are going to change and that you have to kind of be up and current and to — you know, whether it be the current authoring tools platforms that are available or the other kinds of ways that you can make your documentation better. And it’s just to get out there and try to create something. Take online courses or tutorials and just do what you can. Because this is just how you can learn.
PAIGE: Do you have any courses you might recommend for technical writing?
ANGELA: Maybe not yet. I think you’re probably in the early stages of figuring out what it is that would have been helpful?
JAMI: Yeah. And I mean, back when I was starting to learn six years ago there wasn’t — I don’t think there was a whole lot free online, you know, tutorials like there are now. But there are books out there that you could look in technical writing. I believe there’s a site called technicalwriting.com, if that’s still available. I”m not sure. BUt I think that’s a community so you can share ideas and things like that.
PAIGE: We’ve had some people give the advice before of people who are even just looking to get into development to — if they wanted to kind of dip their toes in open source that actually doing documentation work for open source projects is valuable. Do you think that would be valuable for a technical writer as well?
JAMI: Yes, definitely. If you really want to just get your experience, get your foot in the door, and if you’re willing to either volunteer your time or something like that, it definitely — definitely find — or a startup. Or something like that, that really could use some documentation help. ANd if you’re open to learning along the way with them.
PAIGE: So just like development, just get your feet in and do the work and it will pay off.
JAMI: Correct.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget you can find the full transcription either in the YouTube description or on JupiterBroadcasting.com. Find the Women’s Tech Radio dropdown and you can also listen to our back catalogs. We have a lot of amazing shows on there.
PAIGE: So many great women have been on this show. You can also find us on iTunes. If you have a moment, leave us a review. We’d love to hear what you think. You can also contact us by dropping us a line at WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com or followng us on Twitter, @heywtr. Thanks so much for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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#talkpay Today | WTR 34 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/84892/talkpay-today-wtr-34/ Wed, 08 Jul 2015 04:01:26 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=84892 Lauren is the founder of May 1st’s #talkpay which is geared to encourage open discussion of pay to help employees have a better idea of what their talents are worth. Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | […]

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Lauren is the founder of May 1st’s #talkpay which is geared to encourage open discussion of pay to help employees have a better idea of what their talents are worth.

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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: So, Angela, today we’re going to talk to Lauren Voswinkel. She is a developer with Living Social. And she’s also the founder, I guess, of the movement #Talkpay. And so we get into a whole bunch of stuff about, kind of, getting started in programing. What it’s like to be a more experienced programer. And then we dive into a long, awesome conversation about #Talkpay.
ANGELA: Yeah. And it’s really epic. But before we get into that, I want to let you know how you can support. Women’s Tech Radio. You can go to patreon.com/jupitersignal. That supports the entire network, but specifically it also helps Women’s Tech Radio. And you can donate as little as $1.00, $3,00, $5,00 a month. You know, like a coffee or a beer. A bottle of wine is a little more expensive, like maybe $10.00 or $11.00, at least mine is.
PAIGE: Sponsor Angela’s Mountain Dew addiction.
ANGELA: Yes. Actually, there you go, yeah. About $2.00 for a 20oz Mountain Dew. So, if you’d like to support the network, you can go over to Patreon.com/today.
PAIGE: And we get started with this week’s episode by asking Lauren what she’s into and where she is in her career.
LAUREN: What I’m doing today is actually, I am in Portland going to Open Source Bridge, because I gave a talk about performance profiling with gperftools on Tuesday, which went really well. That’s not my normal day-to-day. My normal day-to-day is working remotely out of Pittsburg with the company Living Social as a senior web developer. So, that is afar more my average day.
PAIGE: Both of those days sound pretty awesome to me. What stack do you work in for your web development with Living Social?
LAUREN: So, I primarily work with Ruby on Rails. That’s typically what we’re dealing with. Although, we started recently doing things with Closure. Basically, working on making certain web services that allow you to handle much higher loads than a Rube service would. So basically I’m trying to learn that as we push forward. But primarily, it’s Ruby on Rails and some amount of JavaScript.
PAIGE: This is an interesting question. I have a lot of kind of young ladies that I’m mentoring as they’re getting into their development career and they all want to know should I learn multiple languages? Do I dive in? I usually say, you’re going to have to learn multiple languages over your career. As someone who is kind of doing that sort of shift now, where you’re shifting your mental aspects, how would you encourage a young person or how does it affect your day-to-day to have to be in Rails and then over in Closure and maybe again to Rails?
LAUREN: For me, it’s not that big of a problem. But I would, like, when I’m teaching someone how to get into development and whatnot, I typically want to see them get really good with one particular language first, because of how transferable that knowledge is typically. Like, learning Ruby or Python or what have you will basically get your really, really solidly started on knowing object oriented principals and whatnot, which will allow you to switch over to say Java or C# or PHP or what have you. So, rather than just kind of branching out into a whole bunch of different languages, my advice would be to learn one language really well, because that will help you pick up other languages as time goes on. And then it also gives you a little bit of an appreciation for the differences between different languages. Which is kind of funny, because one of the main things that we teach Girl Develop-It Pittsburgh is web development. And it’s actually really interesting watching how difficult it is for people to get into html and CSS development, specifically because of the multiple language switching back and forth. It’s very easy to get confused by switching from the markup syntax of html over to the CSS. And there’s a lot of confusion between, wait, so I don’t do the curly braces here? These are the angle brackets? So, wait, you mean I have to surround this in quotes? Why don’t I have to do that in CSS? So, those small little differences tend to add up if you don’t have a solid grounding in one of them. So that’s why I kind of recommend people just focus on one at a time. But switching between, after you get comfortable, for me is not that big of a problem even though like most other developers I spend the majority of my time looking up syntaxes and whatnot and the documentation. You never kind of get this — at least it feels like you never get this degree of comfort where you can just know all of the libraries for a particular language and you never have to look anything up. There’s always those moments of, wait what method did I want on this object again? Do I have a zip function for a hash or how does that even work? And so, you’re constantly looking things up. And so, another thing that I try to encourage in people is the fact that there is no shame in looking things up or not knowing something.
PAIGE: Yeah. Exactly. You know, you can be a professional developer. You’re still going to be going to the documentation, because a year from now they’re going to add new things to your language or take old things out. It doesn’t matter. If if you’re in just one language for forever, it’s going to change.
LAUREN: Yeah, absolutely.
PAIGE: So, you’ve learned multiple languages. You’ve clearly been doing this a while. How did you get into it? Were you kind of the nerdy kid who was always taking things apart? What’s your story?
LAUREN: My story was that I got, my family got a computer when I was fairly young. I want to say like eight or something. And I really, really enjoyed playing video games on the computer. The problem with that was that a lot of the games that I wanted to play required special configurations and whatnot. So, I would invariably start fiddling around in the command line trying to get a dos game to run. ANd it would be like, oh we need more extended more or extended RAM or what have you. And just trying to figure out what that even meant and just fiddling with settings. So much that I would end up breaking the computer and then have to start playing a game of fix the computer before mom and dad get home.
PAIGE: I have definitely participated in that game.
LAUREN: Yeah, so that trial and error, that constant push to want to figure something out is really what pushed me to enjoy working with computers so much. That early on understanding that failure is not a bad thing, per say, is something that I think was key to being able to be comfortable with learning program later in high school to a small degree and then in college after that. Because whenever you’re doing anything with computers you’re going to fail quite a bit and it’s perfectly fine if you do. The cost to make mistakes in programming is typically very small. You just need to change some text and you fix something instead of wasting like canvas or paints or various other materials. So, I often encourage people to fail quickly and get used to that feeling.
PAIGE: I think that’s really interesting that you make the analogy with art, because I actually come from an art background in theater, and our mistakes are much more costly, because there’s materials. There’s a lot more time and a lot more people involved. But there’s this paradigm that Samuel Beckett, the playwright, kind of gave that’s, the quote is “Risk, fail, risk again fail better, fail faster.” It’s something in that nature. And this is a prevailing attitude in the arts. Like go ahead, takes risk, and fail. And that’s okay. And then we don’t bring that over into programming where failure is so much less costly.
LAUREN: Yeah, so there’s kind of an irony to that, because there’s the paradigm in startup culture of move fast break stuff. Which is kind of lampooned in a lot of circles that are in, like people more diversity minded and what have you. So that’s kind of funny, because there is like, that thing of we can just keep moving and break stuff and then a couple down the line just be like wait we just painted ourselves into a corner. And that’s when the mistakes become a little bit more expensive. When you have systems that you are, that people are relying on. And it’s like, okay well now that there’s people relying on this, can we change this? And the answer typically in those situations is no. So, usually taking the time to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes as quickly as possible is by and far the better option. But, again, because of how cheap it is to fail with relation to tech, it’s not that big of a problem.
ANGELA: Well, I would really like to get into this whole movement of your #Talkpay. Can you tell our audience about that?
LAUREN: #Talkpay was something that started at Cascadia Ruby last year. I ended up having discussion with people about how imbalanced the relationship between workers and employers tends to be, particularly with relation to pay and pay negotiation. Mostly because employers tend to have all of these various resources that give them an idea of how much they should be paying for a particular type of talent, whereas individual works don’t have access to that information. And so, I kind of have a more socialist leaning bend, which is still like a dirty word in this country for terrible reasons. But the conversations that I was having with people led me to do a lighting talk. Which is a short form five minute talk about openly sharing salaries. And so I got on stage in front of everybody and like laid out this spill about how in a capitalistic society, basically our goal as individuals to be to make as much money as possible because of the system that we’re put in where that behavior is encouraged. And so because corporations and companies are looking to make as much money as possible, they are actively engaging in an antagonistic relationship with their employees. They want to pay employees as little as possible that still has them feel like they’re being well compensated, so they don’t move on to somewhere else. And so, I kind of told people in a salary negotiation to absolutely avoid talking about past salaries and then if they are staunchly saying no we need to have past salary information in order to be able to give you a number, then my suggestion was to basically lie about it, mostly because of various privacy laws in place, an employer cannot contact a past employer to obtain that information due to the pay structures being potentially company secrets. Which is part of the case law from various labor lawsuits and whatnot. But anyway, I laid out all of this information and then gave details about my career. The fact that I’m based in Pittsburgh working for a DC company. I have ten years of experience. I attend numerous workshops to work on my code quality. I help teach with Girl Develop-It. And I then gave my salary in front of everybody. Which, for the sake of transparency is $120,000. It’s a little bit more than that now. But at the time it was $120,000. And I just said that into this room of technologist. About like 300 of them or so. And then also asked for other people in the audience to do the same. And there was, I want to say there was probably like a good 15 people that immediately wanted to share that information. And it just started this conversation about like why we don’t talk about pay more often. And it basically started a couple of conversations where a woman came up to me and started talking about how she was managing someone, and she was a developer as well, so she was basically like a far more senior developer that was managing the team as well. And she learned that one of her employees that she was managing was making like $20,000 more than her. And how if everybody was sharing this information, that could not be allowed to happen. It would be obvious that people are getting, for lack of a better term, screwed out of literally tens of thousands of dollars of pay. Typically that ends up marginalized to people significantly more women, people of color, etcetera, so on and so forth, because of the social upbringing that we’re brought into that kind of says that people who are in underrepresented groups tend to appear to be push or greedy if they ask for more money. So that discourages women and people of color from asking for more money in a negotiation phase.
PAIGE: There’s also the balance there of if you are somebody who grows up in a minority environment or as a woman, you’re not encouraged to do that. But if you grow up — like I was listening to this story on The TIm Ferriss Podcast with the guy who founded WordPress. And he was like, yeah, you know, I was doing my thing and I was a high school dropout, or maybe just graduated high school. And I was a programer and some guy was mentoring me and he was like, you have to go down to this place and tell them that you want no less than, and it was some ungodly sum, like $200 an hour to do coding. He had no work experience and he was 19. And granted it was about in the boom, but he just went out there and did that, because he was encouraged to do it and it was expected of him as a successful blue collar white male in that area at that time. And I don’t think, like, I’ve had so many discussions with women who are like, well how much should I charge? Even just freelancing. And trying to talk someone into charging more than $20.00 an hour is a painful conversation.
ANGELA: Right. Yeah.
LAUREN: Interestingly enough, I’ve had this conversation a couple times at Open Source Bridge this year, because of the stuff with #Talkpay and how I actively push people to ask for more money. One person that I was encountering was like, oh well I was thinking about asking for this much, because I”m a junior developer, because I only have two years of experience. And I’m like, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why do you feel like you’re a junior developer? And she’s just like, I only have two years of experience. I’m like, there are people out there that are getting like senior jobs with two years of experience. So you asking, you basically putting yourself in that box is inherently eliminating what you’re doing. Also, then I went through some of the skills that she has and I was just like those are managerial level skills as far as a senior developer goes. You’re basically taking product requirements and breaking them into bite size tasks that a team could then easily act upon. That is a senior level skill. Do not sell yourself short. But again, women and people of color are basically taught to constantly undersell themselves and that has huge impacts on their pay over the long term. Put on top of that that so many employers base the salary that they offer on your previous salary, it leads to this really terrible multiple, multi-point impact where they’re paid less when they first start working and they continue to sell themselves short, and then also are affected by the fact that they undersold themselves in their first couple of jobs. It’s just-
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s a spiral.
LAUREN: It is this really terrible cycle. Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: That’s really interesting. I mean, the whole thing of how culture impacts this, how history impacts this, how capitalism at its heart impacts all of this. It’s a really interesting conversation. I really applaud you for getting up and standing up and being willing to say a lot of that. I think this sort of openness is really important. You know, we’re data geeks. Let’s get some data on the table.
ANGELA: Yeah.
LAUREN: Yeah, so that was actually one of the really funny things. I wrote an article for Model You Culture pushing people to share their salaries on May 1st. And there was actually a bit of backlash from Gamer Gate after a while. They were saying, oh this is all a ploy of (unintelligible). And what ended up happening was in the article I said, I don’t care what data we get when we start sharing this information. If we find out that women are making just as much money as men in various fields, that’s fine. But we need more concrete data to be able to make informed decisions about this. We need to have people that are first coming into this field, whether it be through hacker schools or people that are self-teaching. Those people need to have a good understanding of what their skills are worth in order to not undersell themselves. I have heard so many stories of people that graduated hacker school and they’re used to making $11.00 an hour. So when a company drops a salary of $40,000 an hour, yeah, that would be amazing, $40,000 a year, people are just like, oh my God this is so much money and they immediately will take that. Not realizing that even as a junior developer they could be making, depending on the area that they’re living in, 60, 70, $80,000 a year. And so basically that’s another thing that ends up leading to marginalized individuals or under represented individuals to enter into that spiral from the very beginning. LIke, the unrealistic expectation of what their skills can bring, hugely impacts that first salary.
PAIGE: Yeah. No, totally. We have a — I have heard of a company in Portland that specifically targets the self-taught/boot camp audience and they will sign you into a two-year contract at $35,000.
ANGELA: Wow.
LAUREN: Oh my god.
PAIGE: Yeah.
LAUREN: That is so predatory and it-
PAIGE: Yeah. And they do have a strong mentorship program where they’re really trying to run that, but it’s still like really guys? I don’t know. So have you recorded any of your pay talks yet?
ANGELA: Or the lightening talk?
LAUREN: The lighting talk was recorded. If I were to dig around I could provide a link, and I will probably email that to you all so that-
PAIGE: That’d be great.
LAUREN: -it can be attached to things. So that talk was recorded. I have not given a talk about — like a long forum talk about this, although I’m going to be giving one in Toronto on July 11th for Toronto AlterConf, which is funny because most of my information is based solely in like American history of labor. And so I get to dig into Canadian labor laws and labor history. It was kind of funny because I started digging into it when the hashtag was really going, like so May 1st or 2nd. But then I kind of wasn’t able to find the information I was looking for immediately and now this is pushing me to like broaden my horizons of what I know on that so that I cannot sound like the self-centered American that only we’re important.
ANGELA: That’ all the countries view us as.
LAUREN: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: Which is really interesting, actually. When we were at Linux Fest one of our listeners came up to us and was talking about this exact thing, but he was from Poland. He said, where we are, we don’t have the disparity in the tech field at all. Even at the university level, the classes are fairly split 50/50 and the salary diversity is all but nonexistent from what he was saying. So that might be — the international look at this might be really interesting. I love comparing what we’re doing to other modern cultures, I guess. Why it’s working and why it’s not working.
ANGELA: So, one thing I wanted to ask, we talked just before we started recording about the hashtag and I mentioned that there are a couple of twitter accounts that will anonymously post your information if you direct message them. Do you run either one of those?
LAUREN: No, actually I don’t.
ANGELA: Or any of them, I guess, there might be more than two, but I saw two immediately.
LAUREN: I don’t run any of them. That idea, I believe started because of, kind of a friend of mine. A friend of mine, Stephanie Marreo. who started collecting DMs from people. Particularly people of color and anonymizing it so that there would be less of a backlash against people of color.
ANGELA: Sure. Sure.
LAUREN: And so once she started doing that, I think other people saw that and said, you know what, we can automate this. Amusingly enough, somebody fairly recently, if I remember, used one of these twitter bots to just say butts or something. So that was kind of funny. I knew that the hashtag was going well when someone started using a tool like that to just be snide or snarky or what have you. So that was kind of funny. But no, I do not actually run any of them. So that all came about because of the conversation as a whole.
PAIGE: That’s really cool.
LAUREN: Which I am super happy about.
ANGELA: I wonder if anybody listening to this how and is interested in participating in that #Talkpay, because it’s not just on May 1st, but that will probably be a yearly thing, right? You’ll promote it, like okay it’s May 1st #Talkpay, or is it over?
LAUREN: I definitely want to continue this conversation going for as long as I possibly can.
ANGELA: Right.
LAUREN: There probably will be a push every May 1st.
ANGELA: Great.
LAUREN: To do that, because not a lot of Americans know, but May 1st is International Workers Day, which is why I picked that day in particular. Basically, as a way to kind of bring American workers, in particular, into the fold of a yearly celebration of workers as a class.
ANGELA: If you do use the #Talkpay hashtag, and I’m speaking to the audience, use also the hashtag #heywtr or #wtr so that we know.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’d be great. We’d love to hear. Perhaps we should participate.
ANGELA: Like, I’m all for open and transparency on salary, but at the same time I think I would prefer being anonymous, because I don’t really want to post like to all my family what I make. That’s still uncomfortable. I’d rather people in the industry know more than my family.
PAIGE: It’s an interesting part about American culture. We don’t like talking about money.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, there’s three things that we don’t like talking about and they’re also the three things we fight about the most; which is money, sex, and family.
ANGELA: Yeah. Can’t live without any of those.
LAUREN: So, what’s interesting is I kind of am still a little ambivalent about the anonymous contributions, because one of the things, one of the reasons why I started hashtag was basically to encourage people to attach their name to a number. And the reason why I wanted people to attach their name to a number is because there are already various services that Glass Door and whatnot that give ranges of salaries that people can look at if they want, but what i found ends up happening is that people from underrepresented groups who see those salary ranges find it very difficult to justify being in the higher end of those salary ranges.
PAIGE: Especially in things where it’s so huge a salary range.
LAUREN: Yeah.
PAIGE: I mean like the developer salary can start at like 50, 60 and ends up at 250.
LAUREN: Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of people have difficulties like putting themselves towards the higher end of that. And so what attaching names to these numbers actually does is they allow you to look at people and say what does this person know or do that is worth so much more than what I would value myself at. That ability to look at that is absolutely critical in being able to give someone a realistic perspective of what they should be making. Because it’s easy to say, oh I don’t know deserve $120,000 a year, because I don’t have X, Y, and Z. But when you realize that you coworker is making that much and they maybe have a year more of experience than you, or maybe they actually have less experience than you and you can look at their work and whatnot, you have something to concretely compare it to. That makes it a little bit easier to just say, you know what, I am worth that much money.
PAIGE: I totally agree. Before we go, is there anything else you wanted to throw out that the audience should follow you on or things you might be interested in that we should take a look at?
LAUREN: I dont’ know of anything in particular, but if anybody is — as a hobby I like to, as I say, play with fire doing fire ploy and fire breathing and whatnot, which is always entertaining. I don’t know of any videos of me doing it, but those are always really interesting to watch people play around with, just if you’re bored.
ANGELA: I actually, I have an online friend that does that. I know somebody.
PAIGE: Fire ploy is very awesome. That’s very cool that you do that.
LAUREN: It’s a great feeling. I’m not going to lie, but definitely don’t just try to go out and do that by yourself. There are communities for that that will teach you how to do it safely without setting yourself on fire, and definitely look around for that before trying.
PAIGE: How many times have you set yourself on fire?
LAUREN: Let’s see, I want to say about like three or four. Fortunately no accidents with fire breathing, which is probably like the most dangerous thing.
PAIGE: That is good, yeah.
ANGELA: Yeah.
LAUREN: But I have caught my hair on fire occasionally. I’ve caught my pants on fire.
PAIGE: The pants seems to be the most common one.
LAUREN: Yeah, no. That one is really, really easy to have happen. Because if you don’t have your plains just right when doing ploy, they will just brush past you, particularly in the very beginning of a set when the fuel is still very, very fresh and easily transferable.
PAIGE: I used to play fire lookout for a friend. Always have a friend at least.
LAUREN: Fire safety with a blanket ready, a fire retardant blanket ready at the — ready to go. If you don’t have that then you shouldn’t be spinning.
PAIGE: Right, awesome.
LAUREN: Yeah, so other than that no, just nothing really. I just am mostly just a giant socialist when it comes to pay transparency and worker’s rights and what have you. I also update people quite a bit on the goings on in the trans community and the LGBT community as a whole.
PAIGE: Very cool.
LAUREN: But that’s pretty much me.
PAIGE: Well, we shall have to keep an eye on hash pay or #Talkpay.
ANGELA: #Talkpay.
PAIGE: There it is. I’m not a Twitterer.
ANGELA: Twitterer.
PAIGE: i dont know if that’s a word, but I do stalk people on Twitter, but that’s about it. So thank you for so much for joining us Lauren. We shall have to get together and talk chat more again.
LAUREN: All right. Absolutely. Take care. Thanks for having me.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find the full transcription in the show notes. Go onto jupiterbroadcasting.com, click on Women’s Tech Radio, and just scroll down and all the transcription is right there.
PAIGE: Yeah. You can also find us on iTunes. If you’ve got a moment, please leave us a review. Let us know how you like the show or what we could do better. If you’d like to leave more direct feedback you can contact us at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com or find us on the contact form at jupiterbroadcasting.com. You’ll also find the RSS feed available there. And if you’d like to follow us on Twitter, we are @heywtr. Thanks so much.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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Language Workbench | WTR 33 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/84507/language-workbench-wtr-33/ Wed, 01 Jul 2015 09:52:44 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=84507 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! Thanks to: Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean Direct […]

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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

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Importance of Meetups | WTR 21 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/80157/importance-of-meetups-wtr-21/ Wed, 08 Apr 2015 12:20:23 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=80157 Caterina Paun is a front end developer and a product consultant. She stresses the importance of meetups and networking for getting into the technology field. Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed Become a supporter […]

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Caterina Paun is a front end developer and a product consultant. She stresses the importance of meetups and networking for getting into the technology field.

Direct Download:

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MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Foo

Show Notes:

Full transcription of previous episodes can be found at heywtr.tumblr.com

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Unicorns Don’t Exist | WTR 15 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/77992/unicorns-dont-exist-wtr-15/ Fri, 27 Feb 2015 01:09:03 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=77992 Liz Heidner is a designer at Substantial working on the user experience. Thanks to: Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed Become a supporter on Patreon: Show Notes: Substantial Substantial on Twitter Airbnb Women’s Tech […]

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Liz Heidner is a designer at Substantial working on the user experience.

Thanks to:

Ting

Direct Download:

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MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

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Foo

Show Notes:

Full transcription of previous episodes can be found at heywtr.tumblr.com

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Priyanka Sharma | WTR 11 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/76357/priyanka-sharma-wtr-11/ Wed, 28 Jan 2015 03:21:00 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=76357 Priyanka is a cofounder of Wakatime, a fully automatic time tracking service for programmers! Thanks to: Direct Download: MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube RSS Feeds: MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed Become a supporter on Patreon: Show Notes: WakaTime is fully automatic time […]

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Priyanka is a cofounder of Wakatime, a fully automatic time tracking service for programmers!

Thanks to:

Linux Academy

Direct Download:

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Foo

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HTML4++ | CR 27 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/28651/html4-cr-27/ Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:23:18 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=28651 HTML5 did well in 2012, but how are things looking for 2013? Some high profile moves away from HTML5, is the Internet’s darling fading or just getting started?

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HTML5 went big in 2012, but how are things looking for 2013? With some high profile moves away from HTML5, is the Internet’s darling fading or just getting started?

Plus where to start with game design, playing the app store game, and do we hate Firefox?

And much more on this week’s Coder Radio.

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Show Notes:

Feedback

  • Chris writes in:

“When I referenced \”beauty\” I meant the design of C++ as a language, and how one can write in it very freely.”

  • A web developer wants to know why we hate Firefox and sees a trend for web devs to focus on webKit.
  • Jason asks:

So, here is where I am really stuck. How do you sit down and design something like a game? What tips would you give for actually laying out the design of the code, and the UI that you need? I come from a heavy web background, and have been doing mostly procedural languages for the past 10 years. I have the training in OO, but haven\’t been using the skills.

Mostly, I\’m curious about the design side of apps and gaming. How do you do this so it doesn\’t take on a life of its own, but still gives me the direction I need to move forward?”

  • Harley shares that Goto’s are still used and can be useful in generated code and also that Vala depends on Glib
  • Charles wrties in to share Just Java 2 for AP Comp Sci students and does not recommend CodeAcademy.
  • Anthony asks is the money to be made on the Ubuntu Software Center
  • Kyle shares https://www.greenteapress.com/thinkapjava/ for you AP Java student

This Week’s Dev World Hoopla

Pick:

[asa]B008PFABI8[/asa]

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Lies++ | CR 24 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/27706/lies-cr-24/ Mon, 19 Nov 2012 12:03:58 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=27706 Mike and Chris debate if proprietary software holds the industry and platforms behind at the benefit of an individual, or a group of individuals.

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Mike and Chris debate if proprietary software holds the industry and platforms behind at the benefit of an individual, or a group of individuals.

And the practical fallout from the outings of Sinofsky from Microsoft, Forstall from Apple, and the lead Compiz developer from Canonical.

Plus your feedback, a solid C++ tease, and much more!

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Show Notes:

Feedback

This Week’s Dev World Hoopla

Book of the Week

[asa]0321776402[/asa]

Tool of the Week

Follow the show

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