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I Want To Know All The Things | WTR 47

chris — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 07:05:56 +0000

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Thursday came into tech as a writer, specifically writing about programming. She found herself joining and fitting in at PyLadies events & user groups.

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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, this week we talked to one of my friends, Thursday. She is an amazing writer. She writes in the technical space and we kind of dig into how she got into that and some cool stuff about conferences and some experiments She’s been working on. It’s just a great interview.
ANGELA: Yep. And before we get into the interview, I want to mention that you can support Jupiter Broadcasting and specifically Women’s Tech Radio, by going to Patreon.com/today. It’s a monthly subscription based support system. You can do as little as $3 a month or whatever is comfortable for you. Patron.com/today.
PAIGE: And we get started with this week’s interview by asking Thursday what she’s up to in tech today.
THURSDAY: I came to tech a little bit differently than I think a lot of people did. I’m first and foremost a writer and I’ve done a lot of writing about technology, especially programming, because the average freelance writer isn’t so interested in writing about programming. From that I started working with PyLadies which is a Python user group for women. I’ve recently just come off of organizing a Python community conference here in Portland. And I just get up to my eyeballs in all sorts of other technology related projects.
ANGELA: I always thing i pilates when I hear PyLadies. I know it has nothing to do with it, but.
THURSDAY: Yeah. I’m afraid that isn’t the first time I”ve heard that.
ANGELA: Oh really?
THURSDAY: No.
ANGELA: Oh, I’m not unique.
THURSDAY: No, we often have booths at different conferences and I manned the OSCON booth this summer and we had several male programmers come up to us and be like, pilates, why would pilates have a booth here at OSCON.
ANGELA: Oh geez.
THURSDAY: Like, oh, awesome.
PAIGE: So why Python? What struck you about Python? Or, I guess, in general, why tech as a writer? What about it pulled you in? Why were you willing to when so few other people were?
THURSDAY: Well, I grew up around people who were very invested in tech. My grandmother had email and gave it up in 1994, like she had had enough. She’d had it for several years at that point.
ANGELA: Wow.
THURSDAY: Yeah. She was a university librarian, so I learned a lot about technology from her. My other grandmother had one of the first personal computers out there, because she kept the books for family businesses and things like that. I just grew up around all these people who were using technology kind of ahead of curve and I just kind of became this total nerd. And it worked for me.
PAIGE: That’s really awesome that you kind of come from a long line. ANd you mentioned on both sides it was your grandmothers.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: That tickles me. I like it.
ANGELA: Well, and 1994 is a great year. It actually is my favorite year.
PAIGE: Really? Why?
ANGELA: Yeah. I don’t know.
PAIGE: Okay.
ANGELA: I think mainly because of music, to be honest.
PAIGE: Yeah, well it was a good music year.
ANGELA: But it’s also when my Jenny was born.
PAIGE: I don’t want to know things like that.
ANGELA: I know.
PAIGE: So what do you find are the challenges in covering technology? I know, like, people are always like Paige you should write a blog, and I’m like, well that’s why I do a podcast. But in general, I don’t always know how to frame things around technology. I feel like I have things that I would like to say, and I’m trying to say through this, but to put it down in writing, it seems so boring.
THURSDAY: I don’t think that boring is an issue that I run into a lot, but that must might be because I’m a little overly interested in everything. I want to know all things as it were, but one of the things that I have noticed a lot people struggle with is actually telling the story behind, here’s this new piece of technology or here’s this idea that I’m working on. Because, as humans, we don’t really understand things without context. So having the story, having the personal connection to why this is important is always necessary for us to really understand what’s going on.
ANGELA: Yeah.
THURSDAY: And when you look at, somebody has written a new math library or somebody has created an API that parses data or something like that, just tossing it up on the internet and saying here’s what this doesn, doesn’t actually get us to the point where we can use it or value it or understand it. We need that context. We need to see it in action. We need to understand why it’s important, much more than we need to understand how it works.
PAIGE: That’s a really great way to frame that. I totally agree. I think the, the pieces of technology that I’ve picked up on are ones that have good stories. I think even the recent frameworks I’ve gotten into, they’re usually because I read a blog post that’s like, hey this solved this problem that I had instead of this is a solution.
THURSDAY: Exactly.
PAIGE: I guess that leads into, in tech, my Python? Why PyLadies?
THURSDAY: Part of that is a question of community. In Python, community is very well valued and the story of the community is told very well. There’s a huge emphasis on diversity. Like, at Python conferences, having codes of conduct and sort of a welcoming environment is the norm rather than something that has to be hashed out every time somebody’s planning a new conference. I had actually had some experience with PhP, especially the WordPress community, before moving into Python. The difference when I started going to PyLadies’ events and some of the Python user groups was pretty phenomenal, just in the way that they made sure that I felt welcomed and a part of the community, even though I’m not primarily a programer and I don’t write a lot of code. So that sort of relationship and community aspect has been huge for me.
ANGELA: I’m on your blog right now, which is ThursdayBram.com, and you appear very well written. Do you, well obviously you’re a writer.
PAIGE: Is that a natural skill? Did you go to school for that?
ANGELA: Yes, right, the background. I mean, were you always a writer? Is that a little more recent thing? How did you get into writing?
THURSDAY: Sure, I’ve always been a writer on some level. Like, I freelanced as a writer even in high school and that’s always been my big strength. I went to school, I went to the University of Tulsa for undergraduate. I have a degree in Communications from there. And then I have a master’s degree in Communications Design from the University of Baltimore. But that was more, I’m already good at this thing,I can do well in these classes, than anything else. I’ve always really enjoyed writing and I’ve always felt that that’s one of my key skillsets. And what I’ve written about has changed, but not the fact that I spend most of my time putting words in a row.
PAIGE: That makes sense. I also know, because we’re friends outside of the podcast, I’m very fortunate to have Thursday as one of my friends, but I know that you’re also really passionate about helping dive into the industry and making those sorts of connections. I guess I’ve always wanted to ask you why.
THURSDAY: Just the whole building of connections fascinates me on certain levels. It’s such an un-obvious thing about any industry is the connections you need to get a new job or to become part of community or to organize a conference, or any of those things. It’s, no matter what industry you’re in it comes down to how you know and how you interact with people. But that’s not a skillset that’s really taught anywhere. It’s not something that we’re educated on. If you’re lucky, you grow up in a family that has those sorts of connections built in. Or if you come from a privileged background you might learn it through things like fraternities or sororities. But most people it’s not necessarily a skill that exist. So looking at how to teach that, how to make it a more thoughtful process, has just fascinated me forever.
PAIGE: I totally agree with that. I’ve actually been working lately with some groups that are trying to do some of that soft skill teaching. I mean, obviously, I love hard skill teaching, teaching Javascript has been great the past couple years for me, but kind of teaching out some of the social skills that I have because I came through a really non-traditional background. Honestly, coming from theater is like hacking the whole process for me. Because, you know, fake it until you make it is super easy if you have a degree in theater.
THURSDAY: And you’ve been trained to actually talk to people if you have a degree in theater.
PAIGE: Yep. And I was always kind of fascinated also in networking. I always say it, people kind of look at me funny, but people are the greatest puzzle.
THURSDAY: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: Even from an engineer standpoint. I try to express this to my engineer friends. I’m like, listen, if you don’t want or have these soft skills, reframe it for yourself. Perspective is everything. Make it a puzzle. And suddenly it’s way more fascinating to most geeky engineers. What do you find valuable in that mentor/mentee kind of space if you’re trying to build these networks? Like, I know, I’ve had a lot of discussions over the past year with people who are, like Intel, I had a talk with Intel and they were like can you help us get senior women into our program for technology. I was like, no, because there really aren’t any. I think we’re really struggling with how to make them.
THURSDAY: I would go deeper than just that surface level, honestly. It is kind of a question of the ecosystem, right? Because, when you’re talking about mentee and mentors, you’re talking about people who fill in both roles at different levels. Somebody might be very technically adept but need a mentor on the soft skill sides. Or somebody may be able to communicate effectively, but have pretty poor technical skills. So it’s this whole ecosystem that we need to develop of people who are able to recognize their own strengths and help where they have those strengths, but also recognize their own weaknesses and ask for that help. And without sort of that ecosystem approach, I don’t think we’re going to do that well in continuing to move forward. And I don’t think that it’s just necessary in terms of gender. I think that it’s very valuable in terms of gender but it, but it goes alot deeper.
PAIGE: Oh my goodness, yeah, of course. I mean we talk about it in a genderized context, because that’s kind of our focus, but those skills are really important everywhere.
THURSDAY: I honestly don’t see the tech industry as it currently stands as sustainable for most people. Just the way that most companies do their recruiting. How often people wind up changing jobs just to, to move up in their skillset. All of that is pretty impractical from an industry wide perspective.
PAIGE: Yeah, I totally, I always like to ponder the idea, like what are we doing, because we’re doing a lot of this you get promoted internally, out of a development role say, and you end up in management and they’re really very, very different skillsets. I think we kind of have this American idea of getting promoted to the level of incompetence and left there.
THURSDAY: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: So how do you run around that? And I think that’s part of why including diversity is helpful, but you have these people who have backgrounds that have made them good leaders and they might just be poor programmers, so far.
THURSDAY: Honestly, management and programming are such different skillsets that while a manager needs a good technical knowledge base, they don’t necessarily need to be good at writing code.
PAIGE: Yeah.
THURSDAY: And I think that that’s kind of a flaw in the way that, that a lot of companies operate. They take some of their best programmers and attempt to turn them into managers, but those aren’t, those are the people who honestly should stick to coding.
ANGELA: Right.
THURSDAY: Because that’s their strongsuit.
PAIGE: Yeah. I mean, it’s almost like having a path for someone as a developer is challenging to a lot of companies. Like, how do you let someone, like you kind of get to be developer and then you’re maybe a lead developer and that’s kind of the end of the road, which is the problem that I had doing IT repair/infrastructure stuff. It was like, I had gotten to the point where my next step was to essentially end up in a server room doing what would later become dev ops and, or nothing else. And how do you build a path for people to continue on? Because I think especially in today’s day and age and with your generation and generations under us, you need that. You want fulfillment.
ANGELA: I think it’s always good to even try another path. Like, not necessarily management, but develop another skill or see the company from another position, other than management. If not management, then another position. And some of that has been happening with our company, you know. One of our producers took over the production of another show and I’m seeing where things are kind of, well falling out, not quite being done the same way. But now they understand a different perspective and so do I. Actually, neither one of us really moved roles, but it’s just different, because it’s a different show.
PAIGE: Yeah, that makes total sense. So, Thursday, you talked some about the community organized conference. I’m pretty sure it’s PyDX.
THURSDAY: It is.
PAIGE: Can you give us some of an overview? I’m always fascinated by what it makes to take an event like this kind of come together. So I guess some of that and some of the why and all that jazz.
THURSDAY: PyDX took place in October. It was, I consider it a resounding success. We did not quite meet our goals for selling out. We came within four tickets, however.
PAIGE: Oh man. If I had known that I totally would have just bought those tickets.
THURSDAY: I told everybody that we had four more tickets for me to reach our goal, but-
ANGELA: Oh, what, on Twitter, because Paige isn’t good at that social stuff.
PAIGE: Yeah, this is a constant.
ANGELA: Yes. Yeah.
THURSDAY: Well, you will have your chance next year, because we are going to throw another one. The sort of idea of having this conference was sort of this multilayered approach. PyCon, which is the largest Python conference on this continent will be in Portland later this year and one of the-
ANGELA: Oh, wait. Wait, wait, wait. This year? 2015?
THURSDAY: 2016, sorry.
ANGELA: Oh, okay. Good. No, I”m just double checking. Okay. Go ahead.
THURSDAY: So one of the reasons we decided to have a community conference here was to sort of get the community a little bit more ready for all these people who are going to be coming to town. We got several speakers who gave their very first talks ever at PyDX and al already working on proposals for PyCon, because they feel much more comfortable about it. We did a beginner track so that people who were kind of trying to decide whether they even wanted to get involved with Python had six months to really go from the basics that we introduced them to at PyDX to a point where it’s going to be valuable to put down, I think the PyCon tickets will be 300. So that’s kind of pricey if you don’t know Python yet. But if you’ve had six months to work on it and you recognize that it’s valuable, then you can get a lot more out of a conference like PyCon. We also wanted to run some experiments so the organizing committee for PyDX was ⅘ women. We had a token gentleman on our team. We did some things pretty differently from the average tech conference. We had a completely dry conference. We provided childcare.
ANGELA: Awesome.
THURSDAY: We didn’t do a large conference party. We did birds of a feather dinners instead where people could actually hear themselves talk and follow up on what they had heard. All of these different things that we wanted to sort of try out and see how they worked. I think they worked out phenomenally well. So we’re pretty pleased with that.
PAIGE: So as a writer, honestly I haven’t looked at your blog in the past month, but are you going to kind of parse that data and bring that data back out to the community in the stories of both sides? Like, let us know how it worked and why it worked, because that seems really valuable. All those experiments are super cool.
THURSDAY: We didn’t collect a whole lot of data, but we are making some of it available. On top of that, we’re helping, our various organizers are helping with a lot of other conferences that are going on so we’re getting to put some of this information into play. Melissa Chavez is one of the PyDX organizers, but she’s also the woman who’s run logistics for Open Source Bridge for the past, I want to say, four years. She’s also organizing VegFest which is the large vegan festival here in Portland. We’ve got people working on everything from Puppet Conf to varying neishe projects as well. So we are making sure that our experiments get repeated in a couple of other places.
PAIGE: Awesome. Very cool. Well, I totally encourage you to collect some data and do that. Even if you’re just doing surveys. You know, data changes things. What gets measured gets managed.
THURSDAY: Absolutely.
PAIGE: Very cool. You mentioned, kind of both in your organization, I’m sorry, totally distracting your story of PyDX, but, some of these things are really cool. You kind of mentioned diversity at your conference and diversity of community and acceptingness of community. I was kind of wondering from a technical standpoint, do you think that part of that influence is the fact that Python, unlike a lot of other modern languages is used in so many different industries? You know, Python is well known as a math language and a science language. It’s also a web language. It’s a bot language. It’s kind of, of all the modern big guns it’s the most diverse.
THURSDAY: That’s a really interesting question to me, just because the languages that Python is often compared to, Ruby and PhP in particular, have gone such different routes in terms of community. PhP has, by default, because WordPress runs, I think an estimated 20 percent of websites now.
PAIGE: I think it’s even higher than that now.
THURSDAY: It just keeps growing. It just keeps getting bigger. But they have this community that is very different from what has happened with Python. And I think part of it is the examples set by the people who came early to the community. There is just some really good culture in Python that was established very early on. Some of the biggest open sourced projects in Python didn’t grow out of some place like Silicon Valley. Jango, for instance, was created in Lawrence, Kansas. Which is this tiny dot on the map in the middle of nowhere. The guys who worked on it were newspaper, I believe they were developers for a newspaper, but they worked with a bunch of journalist. They just came from this very different culture than i think a lot of programmers have. I guess it does tie into how many different industries Python has been used across. But because there’s so many people coming from non-CS heavy backgrounds, I think that that’s helped a lot in maintaining this more welcoming culture.
PAIGE: That’s really cool. I will be honest, it’s not a language that I have learned, but it is a language that I have always kind of enjoyed kind of observing, I guess. It’s a really neat culture.
THURSDAY: I’m always pleasantly surprised by the things that are happening in the greater Python community.
PAIGE: So the PyDX, would you say that you experiments overall, the conference, kind of, I guess finish us out on a story. Like, were they successful? Do you think you’ve accomplished your goal of setting up for PyCon? That sort of thing.
THURSDAY: I think that our experiments were very successful. We got a ton of positive feedback about having a dry conference. Several people actually said specifically that they chose to speak, they chose to attend, because it felt more welcoming. That they didn’t have to just plan on dealing with drunk people. Our conference was incredibly diverse without even much effort. We didn’t quite have 50 percent parody for gender, but over half of our speakers were diverse along some spectrum.
PAIGE: So, I’m going to pause there, because, that’s, I think, a really big topic right now. How did you do that?
THURSDAY: Part of it was my general tendency to go to people who I think are going to be able to say interesting things and demand that they put in presentations. I have a pretty wide network that I would say is fairly diverse. But, on top of that, having most of our organizers be women, we reached out to the people that we, we know personally first and foremost. And that led us to people who aren’t quite the same usual suspects that you see at most conferences. On top of that, we did several things very consciously. We published our code of conduct very far in advance and made sure that everybody was very aware of it. We gave out scholarships that were essentially diversity scholarships, but basically no questions asked during the applications process. It was, do you think you’re diverse? Do you think that you need scholarship money? Put in an email and as long as we have enough money to go around we’ll keep handing it out. Not forcing people to fill out a lot of paperwork or anything like that I think helped quite a bit. Having onsite childcare was also something that I think helped quite a bit, because people who for some reason or another might have decided to stay home, couldn’t find a sitter, couldn’t arrange for taking care of kids, they were automatically able to come even without having to pay extra for the child care.
ANGELA: Which is amazing, because I am literally, at this moment, mailing or texting every family member I know to see if they can take my kids.
PAIGE: It’s a huge issue and it’s not just a genderized issue. There are single dads out there.
THURSDAY: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: I guess, kind of one last thing, to wrap back around. I think it’s really interesting that you kind of, to get the diverse panel, essentially you asked for it, like directly. Very directly.
THURSDAY: Oh, absolutely.
PAIGE: And this is actually something that has some social proof behind it. I know there’s a couple studies, but in general women and, on top of that, other people of diversity need to be invited to do something. We’re not, as an underrepresented culture you’re generally not going to stick your neck out, because there’s a lot of risk and a lot of other things that kind of go along with that when you’re the only person in the room. It’s more difficult. You don’t have the support that’s there for everybody else, so you have to actually reach out and say, hey I know you’re a cool woman in technology. I know you’re a cool diverse person in technology. Come and share your technology with us. Not even, like, hey share about diversity, because that gets old pretty quick for anybody who’s talking about diversity in tech. But come and give a technical talk. Come and talk about your beekeeping habits, whatever.
THURSDAY: I think that creating the environment is a big step as well. If you are showing that you’re not just saying that we, that you want diversity, that you are backing it up with action is so important. I mean, it’s a little thing, but I don’t speak at conferences that don’t have codes of conduct anymore, because that’s the absolute bare minimum that an organizer can do to make sure that they are meeting the needs of a diverse audience. So many conferences still fight back about having a code of conduct, it boggles the mind.
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s such an easy step and there’s tons of open source codes of conducts. It’s not even a lot of work. A lot of the events that I run, we just pull down one of the MIT licensed codes of conduct or whatever and we’re like does this fit our needs? Yep. Sweet, let’s use it.
THURSDAY: What really drives me a little crazy, honestly, is we’re talking about people who see the need for an open source license. Or if they’re creating commercial products, they see the need for putting an end user license agreement on everything. But at the same time, these are people who don’t think that they need to discuss expectations and behaviors for an in-person event. It’s illogical.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: I think you should yell at people like that. It’s a pretty perfect argument.
ANGELA: Yep.
PAIGE: Well, we are about out of time. Angela has to run and I have to run.
ANGELA: Yep.
PAIGE: There’s lot of good things to do this weekend. You know, keep your eyes open in your community for awesome events like PyDX. There’s more and more going on all the time. And if you’re in Portland, look for Py DX next year and come on down to PyCon. I may make an appearance and we’ll have a good time. Thank you so much for joining us, Thursday.
THURSDAY: Thank you for having me.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Be sure to check out the full transcription of the show at JupiterBroadcasting.com. Do the show dropdown, select Women’s Tech Radio, and then just scroll down below the video. That’s where all the show notes, links, and like I said, the full transcription is right there.
PAIGE: And if you have people who aren’t podcast listeners, feel free to send them on over to our YouTube channel. They can check it out there. Sometimes that’s a little easier for people. You can also catch us on Twitter @HeyWTR and send us an email at WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com. Thanks so much.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post I Want To Know All The Things | WTR 47 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Internal Learning | WTR 41

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

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

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kristen@edifyedu.com

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Don’t Do It Alone | WTR 29

chris — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 07:31:50 +0000

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Moira is the President and CEO of Galvanize Labs, an edutech startup that brings together learning through gaming!

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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 are successful in technology. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I”m Angela.
PAIGE: Angela, today we interviewed a good friend of mine, Moira Hardek, and she is the CEO and President, sole founder, of Galvanized Labs, and they’re a edutech startup. She kind of gives us the lowdown on what that means, and what that looks like, and kind of how she’s using her experiencing in gaming to bring technology and education together.
ANGELA: And into gaming, because it’s technology and education in games.
PAIGE: Yeah, its’ crazy. It’s like this awesome hybrid mashup that she goes on to kind of explain what that means. It’s a really neat interview, I think.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I’d like to mention Digital Ocean. If you go to digitalocen.com and use the promo code heywtr, you can save on simple cloud hosting, dedicated to offering the most intuative and easy way to spin up a cloud server. You can create a cloud server in 55 seconds, and pricing plans start at only $5.00 a month. That’s 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabytes SSD, One CPU, and one terabyte transfer. Digital Ocean has date center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. The interface is incredibly simple, intuitive. The control panel is awesome. It will help you design exactly what you need, which empowers users to replicate on large scales with the company’s straightforward API. Check out digitialocen.com by using promo code heywtr.
PAIGE: And we got started with our interview today by asking Moira to explain her role in technology.
MOIRA: I’m the President and CEO of Galvanize Labs. We are a hybrid tech company at the moment. What we’re working on is ed tech, so educational gaming and technology education. My role is a little bit of everything. In startups, in small companies, it’s kind of everything from the business side to the tech side, the design side. I get to do a little bit of everything, which is probably really good for me. It keeps me excited. It keeps me interested, and it’s certainly never boring,. It’s kind of broad, but also really exciting.
PAIGE: What is a hybrid technology company?
MOIRA: I like to think of it as a hybrid, because we’re focusing on education and we have such a strong emphasis and validating the educational side of what we’re doing. Not just throwing out the term of, hey this is an educational product. We really want to be accredited and validate that educational status. So, we’re kind of half an educational company and the other half of it is a gaming studio. Everything to do within the game is all in house. Nothing is third party. Nothing is purchased. We do everything inside. So, everything from soundtracks to all the digital assets, to the game design, to the voices is all in house. That’s where I kind of feel the hybrid is. It’s great educational emphasis and then this fun game studio.
PAIGE: Has it been a challenge to kind of combine those two worlds? I mean, you don’t typically think of education and gaming at all.
MOIRA: It has been really interesting, because I just don’t think it’s been done in this way before. You really do have these two totally separate industries of gaming, which is so much more classically identified as entertainment. You know, I think of, game releases now are almost like movie release weekends and billion dollar release weekends. It’s entertainment and it’s really what it does so well. Education is obviously kind of almost the flip side of that. Not to say that education isn’t fascinating, but you certainly don’t see, you know, a billion dollar education weekend. And so, as far as how the money flows and how the tech works, it’s entirely different. So, when you try to put educational gaming together, you don’t see gaming classically as an industry really turning its considerable talent towards the education industry, because it just doesn’t have the same type of return. That leaves education a little bit off on an island, that although gaming is a really powerful tool that can be utilized within education, they really don’t get to use the great talant of the gaming industry. And so, that leaves educators to kind of self-educate when it comes to gaming. So, gaming inside of education, or edugaming, which that’s always a great term, has been a little bit lackluster, because it doesn’t bring this entertainment quality. Kids today, I mean, I like to call them the 3DS generation. They’re the first one, if you give them a crappy game, they’re going to tell you this is a crappy game. When they’re used to things like Battlefield and Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft. Visually stunning games with tremendous dynamics that keep them really engaged. Edugaming really can’t compete. What we really wanted to bring to this was a level of entertainment quality gaming with real educational validation. And that was a challenge. We really kind of were able to pull that off for the first time. We live in between these two worlds, and yet we don’t wholey belong to one or the other. There’s pros and cons to that.
PAIGE: Always, whenever you’re bridging a gap it’s always strengths and weaknesses.
MOIRA: Right. Yeah, first to market, again there’s bonuses and there’s drawbacks.
PAIGE: So you do everything in house. What kind of tools do you use to do that for education for gaming?
MOIRA: Oh my god, we do. I feel like there’s a little bit of, just, everything. The game and built and designed entirely from the unity engine. So, obviously, we do a lot of work in unity. All of the web interfaces. All of your guy’s favorite stuff from node to angular to the tremendous list of the custom APIs that we create. The game is hosted within Amazon, right, so AWS, and god bless them for that. And there’s just there’s so many little pieces that we’re able to put together and custom design. Half of the time that we spent building the original platform for launch, before we actually built the game, we built proprietary tools that we were going to use to build the game, and make production even easier going forward. So, the custom scripting system that we were able to create. All of the techs and all the interaction that you see in the game isn’t actually hard coded into the game. It’s actually all dynamically being pulled through our custom scripting system. And so, for our writers and our game designers, we actually have a web portal where now when we write scripts for games going forward, is we’re actually just — when we create those storyboards and write those scripts, we’re dropping the scripts into a web portal that’s then dynamically being pulled into the game when the game is hard coded. So, it’s great tools like that. We have an in-game currency that’s called jewels. It’s like gold coins in Mario Bros or rings in Sonic. To make, again, production much more efficient, instead of hardcoding exactly where those little pieces of currency are going to be in every level, we have a custom coordinate and mapping system. So, again, it’s on the back end. We get to go in this great little web portal that we’ve created and drop the coordinates for where these are going to go, instead of hardcoding in the game where they are. That just gives us a lot of freedom. So we can change levels, and we change maps, and we can build new things, and keep the game and the future games really dynamic and updated for the kids. So, it’s a great experience for our users. So, from the game itself to the tools we’ve created to make production more dynamic, there’s so much stuff that we’re using, and a lot of stuff that we’re creating on our own.
ANGELA: What is your target age?
MOIRA: The age range is remarkably large, because of the type of content that we’re offering. I kind of like to call the beginning platforms — right now, Taken Charge is a serious of four games that are played sequentially, and then we actually have three games that are about to kind of roll off the production line, and then we have 30 more that are currently up on the storyboard that are in production. The first, beginning part of our platform, I like to call as b.c. it’s before coding. So, its’ fundamentals, right. Its’ really getting kids to kind of work up into coding and those advanced topics. Because we’re talking about these fundamentals, that actually gives us a tremendously large age range. The only thing that you need to play Taken Charge is a third grade reading level, and a browser, and an internet connection. So, I have kids playing this that are from third grades to — we just completed a really fun pilot, actually here at a Chicago high school, and it was freshman, sophomores, and juniors in high school that were playing it. So, its’ really all about what level of knowledge the user or the player has, or in this case doesn’t have. And a lot of students in American are lacking these technology fundamentals. And then gaming, being this great universal language, can speak to a large range of audiences. So, the exact same game is just as fun and interactive for elementary school kids as it is for high schoolers. It kind of has that Minecraft effect, right?
ANGELA: Yes.
MOIRA: You know, ten years old playing Minecraft, and then very popular in the 55 plus market too, it’s tremendous.
ANGELA: Right. Where do you see the kids going after they use your product? Are you planning to develop something after that for more advanced? What is your vision on where they go after?
MOIRA: There’s kind of multiple ways to look at it. Obviously, the company being as young as it is, we are building extended platforms. So there are, again, three games coming and there’s 30 more games to come. So, this will be quite a large marketplace of options and of topics. It all begins to get more advanced. So, we’re all kind of about this progressive learning model and being able to progress kids through technology as a subject. Because, I feel like, technology is always kind of treated as this one off when it’s addressed educationally, and we certainly don’t do that math, right? And you always see, like, let’s throw kids into coding. Because coding and robotics, those are really sexy technology topics. And those are great, great, great topics. But when we teach kids math in school, when they have no background in math, we don’t start them in long division. We go back and start with addition and subtraction and multiplication. And then we move them forward. We make sure that they grasp these topics so that they don’t get frustrated, they walk way. When we teach kids technology, we’re throwing them to coding and there’s this huge assumption that they have this underlying knowledge, when I’ve got the benefit of working with kids hands on for the last decade. Ninety percent of the kids that we work with don’t know where a file goes when you download it through a browser. But we’re like, (unintelligible) go to coding. So, what we really want to do is build this progressive model, have them move forward. So, yeah, our platform will move into things like coding. It doesn’t move into things like 3D modeling and different stuff like that, so yeah, there are those options. We partner with a lot of youth development organizations that offer, again, more advanced programs. And we’re also kind of working with, now, other types of technical sites that are a little bit more adult driven. That, if you can get this really solid, kind of, base line in your younger years, then why couldn’t you go into — think of what’s out there in tech ed for adults. And things like Linda and portal site, and all those great educational sites that you can continue your own education online. So, there’s so many places to go after this, once you establish this great baseline. So, we’re working in a lot of different arenas to see where you can go.
PAIGE: Have you always been involved in gaming? Did you start out as a game developer or anything like that?
MOIRA: No, certainly not. I mean, I’ve always had an interest in games dynamics. I’ve always applied them in a lot of the work I’ve done. And game design as pure game design, was something that kind of came later. It really kind of came in the second half of my career and the decade that I spent at Best Buy. It really came for me when I really was able to recognize what a powerful tool gaming was going to be, and it could be in that educational realm. I had just had a particular passion point around teaching, and particularly in the youth market. Gaming just seemed to be at the center of that for me. Immediately, I think, kind of any other entrepreneur, I just looked at gaming and what it could be and was urked that — my point was view was, we’re not doing it right. I wanted to do something different with it. I had to get involved. So, gaming came much later for me.
PAIGE: So, you’re been a lifelong gamer yourself. What are some of your favorites?
MOIRA: I go all the way back to my Apple IIe when I was younger. I totally just dated myself and gave away how old I am. That’s fine. I still play like mod of number munchers from when I was a kid, because that’s all we had when we were in school. So games like that. And then Day of Tentacle I felt was really great. I still have the original box too, it’s one of my prized possessions. For me though, really, really advanced gaming. I have told this story a million times. It was the very first Civilization by Sid Meier when i was Civ, and that really pushed me over the top into my love of gaming. I really kind of like this closeted gamer in college, because I didn’t know any other girl that gamed. So, yeah, I always hung out with the geeky guys, because I worked at the student union, and they introduced me to Counter Strike and things like that. It’s been this really slow progression. I was really kind of an isolated individual gamer until after I got out of college. Then, when you go to work for a company like Best Buy, that sells games and consoles. the addiction got out of control from there.
PAIGE: I had a very similar experience. I got into games a little bit in high school and then (unintelligible) Civilization, definitely one of those. And the Sims.
ANGELA: Yeah, I never did do Sims.
PAIGE: I had to actually — I had a burned copy back in the day of the Sims and my freshman year I had to take it out of my drive during finals week and literally break it in half so that I would pass my finals and stop playing the Sims.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
MOIRA: Yeah, see. I think it still is. I believe it is still like the number one game for women. I believe it is still sitting out there as the number one game for women.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’m pretty sure.
ANGELA: I got into Minecraft in 2011, I think. And I really like it. Now, I’m playing it with my son and that’s really fun, but I did Battlefield 1942 and some of the other first-person shooters. And it was my husband and me and his friends. No other women, but it was great.
PAIGE: It’s one of my geek cards of shame that I’m epically bad at first-person shooters.
ANGELA: Oh, I am epically good.
PAIGE: Really?
ANGELA: They call me hidden angerz.
PAIGE: Oh man, that’s awesome.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes, I’m a sniper.
MOIRA: Very nice. I am epically mediocre.
PAIGE: Well, we run the gamut now.
ANGELA: Yeah, all three of us.
MOIRA: I can at least hold my own and not be at the bottom of it, but if I go to talk trash, then I totally get rocked. And so I’m just kind of somewhere in the middle. It Sim games that just dominated me. So like SImcity, that was the one that I had to get rid of, because I was going to never have a social live again with Simcity. And then, I was one of those that was so depressed when Simcity came out, you know, with EA last year, and it was so bad. But now, thank you Skylines, is amazing. And if you haven’t played that yet, do it. I’m afraid it’s going to very, very negatively impact Galvanize right now.
ANGELA: You know, in the same way that I’ve avoided Pinterest, I avoided Sims. Because I would get consumed. I have chosen not to do that, intentionally.
MOIRA: Don’t avoid Pinterest, it’s so good.
ANGELA: No, you know what, I use Instructables. It’s way better, because they actually show how to do it, right there. You don’t have to click on somebody’s blog so they can get ad revenue, or wonder, just because they didn’t put any link on how to do things. Instructables is way better. I tried to get into console games, like Donkey Kong I really liked on Super Nintendo. But Poker Smash on XBox is amazing.
MOIRA: I’ll have to look at it.
PAIGE: Like Poker, the card game?
ANGELA: Yes. And it’s like Tetris, but with poker. You match poker hands to clear lines.
PAIGE: Whoa.
ANGELA: It’s really cool. You go up levels. There’s different music, I just love it. Anyway.
MOIRA: This is it. Gaming is just universal. And this is why it’s just so, so powerful as a tool. This is why.
ANGELA: Yep.
PAIGE: I’m a competitive Tetris junkie. I like it. A lot of people are like, I”m really good at Tetris. I’m like, you don’t understand, competitive Tetris is different. Where you send lines to each other and stuff.
ANGELA: Do you have the Tetris lamp from ThinkGeek?
PAIGE: No, but I should.
ANGELA: Yeah.
MOIRA: Clearly.
ANGELA: I can’t find the power brick. The straight — it’s the straight brick. I can’t find it, but I have all the other ones.
MOIRA: I bet you anything it doesn’t exist, because like in the game, it’s never there when you need it.
ANGELA: Yeah, I have real life Tetris in my house with that lamp.
MOIRA: So, ThinkGeek didn’t actually ever create one, just to give you the same level of frustration that the game does.
ANGELA: No, I did — it did — I did have it. I have three kids and one of them took off with it somewhere and it is somewhere else in the house.
MOIRA: Your kids also are functioning completely the way the game Tetris does. That’s fantastic.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: Somebody has made off with my ilen piece. Where is it?
ANGELA: Yep.
MOIRA: So awesome.
PAIGE: So, you’re the CEO of your own company now?
MOIRA: Yep.
PAIGE: And having done that, and having been in the gaming space as a woman, have you been able to find other women to work with in your company? Other women gamers? How is that working?
MOIRA: I mean, I will definitely say, obviously there is women at Galvanize. I won’t overplay that, that I went out and went on some big search for women and everything, because quite honestly, my team and I have been together for a long time. We’ve worked together at previous companies. So, sadly that wasn’t this big recruiting coo. And I haven’t expanded the company incredibly. We’ve stayed in a very, very lean model as we’ve gone on to do this. You know, kind of going to Reddit way and staying real lean, so I haven’t done a lot of that. But, from a networking standpoint, it’s hard. I don’t see — I don’t come across a ton of other female startups in this genre. Certainly not, kind of, in gaming, and not locally. I think I mentioned I was on a Skype call last week, and that happened to be a female game designer and she was up in Canada. But the two worlds were completely different. Being on the business side here, right, and we’re monetizing the game. There’s is more kind of social game and kind of grant based. That kind of stuff. So, those were two a little bit different worlds that we lived in. Gaming is still, obviously very, very male dominated. I still get bathrooms to myself at PAX and GDC. And you guys know how that goes. I don’t come across a lot of that. What has been, I think, a little bit different for me is because of how we started the company, the fact that it was kind of bootstrap and angel funded, I didn’t do things like Y-combinator or Sim Connector, or kind of any of those incubators to kind of get this started. I went a different path. And then we moved right into a revenue model. I was networked a little bit differently. I didn’t have access to a ton of that stuff. It has been a little bit isolating. And that’s been not the greatest feeling in the world.
PAIGE: So, if other women are kind of out there with a big idea, and kind of some cohones to make it happen, it’s always sad to me that there aren’t more women out taking risks. What would you say to someone who’s got an idea and wants to try to be an entrepreneur?
MOIRA: Take a risk. I don’t see why not. I really — I don’t see any difference in a woman taking the risk than a man taking the risks, and the startups that they have. Quite honestly, my favorite kind of part of it is always strength in numbers. I don’t think it should be one or two female entrepreneurs at a time. I think we should be doing this in big groups and big numbers. Are there special challenges for us? I think, yeah. That certainly can be the case. But I also think women have a really, very particular point of view. I think it’s very powerful. The way that women look differently at how to solve problems. I think in the world and the way the marketplace today, I think the woman’s point of view is very, very powerful. And I’d love to see that out there way more than it is. The very simple answer to that is, yeah get out there and do it. I don’t see any reason why not. The same risk is involved. It is, it’s scary. I think my dad says it best. It kind of feels like you’re trying to thread a needle while jumping out of an airplane. It feels like that for everybody, no matter what gender you ar.
PAIGE: The diverse thinking is so important. We had an interview with Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack, and she’s a CEO of Fresh Mint and has done a lot of work in the tech space as a woman entrepreneur. And she’s like, it’s not even just women. It’s just getting a group together that doesn’t all think the same way. You can have a diverse group of all different colors of the rainbow; all different genders, all different sexualities, and put them in a room. If they’re all Harvard grads, they still all think the same.
MOIRA: That’s true.
PAIGE: Diverse thinking is more than just gender, but gender is a huge piece of that.
MOIRA: Agreed. Agreed. I’m a very, very big advocate of that. I think you see it all the time. I am members of different women’s groups and I can’t help but see it in a lot of different scenarios that I’ve put in, and these very stark differences. And I think that point of view is just so powerful, and I really want to see that voice and that point of view come to the forefront a lot more.
PAIGE: If there was one piece of advice you could give someone who is about to get started, what would you say?
MOIRA: I think is one I give every time I hear this one, and it’s so true. It’s just, don’t do it alone. I think there are a lot of people out there that think that when you do this and the startup culture is — it’s kind of either one of two things. Either you already have to be incredibly well-networked, and if I’m not then I can’t do this. And that’s not true. And the other side of it is, I have to have all the answers. I can’t do this if I don’t have all the answers. There’s this kind of misconception of I’m doing this alone. You’re not. You’re never actually really doing it alone and don’t try to do it alone. You don’t have to have all the answers. Don’t try to be the lone ranger on this. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to bring other people in. It’s better to do it that way. It is scary, but it’s not scary for the reasons that you think it’s scary. Scary comes later, but don’t do it alone.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget, you can contact us by going to jupiterbroadcasting.com. There is a contact form. You can also do the show drop down to find all the Women’s Tech Radio shows, and find the show notes for each of the shows with tons of links and resources.
PAIGE: You can also check us out on iTunes, where you can subscribe to the podcast. Or, if you’d rather use the RSS feed, that’s available on the Jupiter Broadcasting site. You can also follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Or, you can check out our tumblr that has all of the transcripts of the past shows at heywtr.tumblr.com. And if you have a minute, shoot us an email. Leave us some feedback wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

The post Don’t Do It Alone | WTR 29 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Change The World | WTR 26

chris — Wed, 13 May 2015 19:03:47 +0000

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Live from LFNW Andrea Frost discusses how she went from being a firefighter in Alaska to a computer science major.

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ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: So, welcome ANGELA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: ANGELA: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: ANGELA: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANGELA: ANDREA: PAIGE: ANDREA: No.
PAIGE: ANDREA: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology. I’m Paige.
And I”m Angela. Are you sure about that Paige?
Today I’m not. It’s been a long day at the conference here.
Yes.
So, we are live here at Linux Fest Northwest. And we got to pull some awesome people off the floor to do interviews today, and our first interview is Andrea Frost. Andrea is a current computer science major. She is getting her Master’s in Computer Science and she gets to talk to us today about robotics, and education, and community building, and a whole bunch of awesome issues that we just dove into.
And before we get into the interview, I want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio and the Jupiter Broadcasting Network by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. You can donate as little as $3.00 a month or whatever amount you want. There’s a swag level where you get free stuff in the mail, or you can just ,like I said, do $3.00 a month. But either way, it’s a giant bucket. It funds all the shows on the network, and specially Women’s Tech Radio, it keeps us going. And now we will get into the interview.
Yeah, so we started today by asking Andrea what she is into in technology right now.
to Women’s Tech Radio. I’m Paige
And I’m Angela.
And we’re here live at Linux Fest Northwest and we have an awesome guest joining us, and she’ll take a moment to introduce herself.
Hi, I’m Andrea Frost. I’m getting a Master’s in Computer Science at Western Washington University, and an active member of the WWU Association for Women in Computing.
Awesome. Andrea is joining us to tell us about some of her work as a student, and also her work with getting women involved in technology.
Extensive work in community building and getting more women in technology.
Yeah, we found her on the show floor, or she found us, or a little of both, and we’re just super excited to talk to you. So, could you tell us a little bit about what you’re up to for the community?
Sure, there’s a lot of things, so I’ll try to keep it short. More recently, or coming up pretty soon we’re doing and open source day on May 9th. So, basically what we’re doing is, we’re just trying to expose people to what open source is, and how do you find a project, how do you contribute. So, we’re still looking for mentors and sponsorship. But the event, there’s like 100 people coming. So, that’s super exciting. And then we’re also doing –
Hold on. Okay, May 9th, where?
Yes, May 9th at Western Washington University in the Viking Union 565. It’s the fifth floor.
Okay, how do people find out to volunteer or anything like that?
Well, you can email — can I give my personal email?
If you want to.
Yeah.
Okay, so my email is andreafrost@hotmail.com You can also look us up online, the Association for Women in Computing, and just do WWAWC and then you’ll find our website and there’s contact info there as well.
Awesome. So, they contact you via the Association for Women in Computing?
That’s right.
Cool, so that’s your first thing, and what’s your next thing?
The next thing is that I’m also cofounding a startup in Bellingham, which is a code school called Code Lily. This summer we’re going to be hosting a Whatcom Robotics Expo in cooperation with Western and the Association for Women in Computing, and all of the other robotics related groups. We’re going to bring everyone together under one roof and create that road map so that people can, no matter what age your are, you know where you can find other robotics activities and who are the right people to connect with, and connect everyone to each other.
That’s awesome.
And that’s a four-hour, would you consider it a workshop or a lecture?
It’s from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and it’s free. So, you can basically just drop in any time you want. We’re just going to have the room set up in demo style, so all the different groups are going to be demoing something and then they’re also going to have a way for you, the participants to actually be able to dig in with your own hands and build your own robots. There’s some Littlebits. There’s just a lot of different Robotics activities going on in Whatcom county that most people don’t know about. So, it will be both demos, but also workshops where you can get involved. Each group will be speaking a little bit about their group at some point throughout the day.
So, robots is one of your passions?
I love robots. It’s actually kind of a side thing, but it’s just such an accessible way to relate with technology and computer science specifically, because rather than working in a terminal where you can’t really see something happening, persay, with robots you can actually see it light up. You can see it move. You can actually watch the wheels turn. It’s very tangible. Where, I think, when you’re first starting out with computers that can be a big barrier for a lot of people. I just think robots are a really accessible way to get introduced to it all.
I think that’s a lot of the same reason web tech is that same draw, because you put something up and it’s there right away. How did you get started? What got you into it?
Well, I have a German degree from 2003, so I’m a returning student coming back to school. I traveled for most of my 20s and I was a (unintelligible) firefighter in Alaska. I hurt my leg and I couldn’t work on my feet anymore. I was really stuck. I was like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do now. I worked at a law office for a couple years and I was really under stimulated there. I felt under valued, under stimulated. I tutored my friend’s daughters in math and decided to go back to school to get a master’s in math to become a math teacher. I saw a pretty big problem just with the stigma around math. I couldn’t believe that so many girls get so far without learning the fundamentals of math and thinking that they suck at math. Or thinking I hate math. Math sucks. Math is in everything we do. Math is so beautiful. It’s in everything we look at in nature. So, I think we as a community need to do a better job of promoting women in science, stem, mathematics, all those things. My quarter back in school I took a computer programing class as a prerequisite for the math degree and I was like, what is that? I don’t know what I”m doing. But I ended up getting an A. I did really well. It just blew me away what we can do with a little bit of code on a screen. You can make tremendous changes in the world. I went to the Grace Hopper Conference a couple years ago and I met women from all over the world who are writing things — a simple cellphone app is changing the lives for millions of people in Turkey and Africa, everywhere. I think, women especially, really bring a social component that I personally believe is a little bit lacking currently. I wish there was more focus on morals and ethics and all that kind of stuff around computing too. I think the more diversity we have in computing, we just as a world, as a people will move in a better direction.
Definitely.
Technology is one of the most powerful tools we have right now, just in general. Diverse thinking is only going to make that better.
Absolutely.
And used in a more responsible manner.
Absolutely. Yeah, so diverse teams are basically essential. If you look at a standard computer science class you’re not going to see that many women. Our club is very, very focused on building, not necessarily tutoring each other or helping with homework, but just building community and support so that if we have a hard assignment or have a bad day, it’s like okay lets commiserate about that and then move forward. Where without that community and friendship, and being able to smile at each other in the halls. Things that are very simple, a lot of people without that just tend to give up for feel like they don’t belong there. What we do with our club has really changed a lot of lives. Especially the outreach that we do with kids in our community. It’s just really changing the whole direction of who is in involved in technology and what we can do with it.
What associations do you belong to that help support this?
Most recently we have the Creators and Innovators Club for GIrls, CICE for short. That is a pilot program started this year in Bellingham School District. We thought we we would have 15 girls or so, and we ended up having 57.
Oh my goodness.
Which is amazing.
It is amazing, but we don’t have enough robots for that many people. And we didn’t get enough funding for that many robots. It’s a really good problem to have, but that’s just been amazing watching these girls, or young women. We use Littlebits so they learn about — an accessible way to learn about circuitry and they’ve built their own robots. We did sewable circuits, so like LEDs into clothing. ANd we did NXT robots. All those things. The transformation we’ve seen in them with this program is phenomenal. Next year, we need to expand to four more schools. That is just amazing. So, we need more mentors. We need more funding, but it’s incredible.
Those are great problems to have. That’s awesome. Are you open sourcing your curriculum?
That’s up for debate right now. Mainly because of the fact that we’re having trouble funding these projects. I personally want everything to be open source, more or less, but it also could be potentially an opportunity for us to sale the curriculum and get the funding that we need in order to continue, so we desperately need the funding.
Sure. So, if people are interested in supporting you, how would they do that?
Well, we have, our web address is creatorgirls.com. And so, you can go to that website and send and email and also see some pictures of what we’ve been up to. You can also certainly email me, Andreafrost@hotmail.com.
And we’ll have links to all that in the show notes. That’s how we do things.
Cool. Yeah, that program has just been tremendous. We have a huge partnership with Western. With the Association for Women in Computing. We have, I think, probably eight to 10 of the mentors right now. So, probably half the mentors are from Western. Sydney Cool is the main woman behind all of that. Though, she, I think, in general tends to stay in the background a little bit. But she’s amazing. I mean, there’s a long list of people that got together to make it happen, but now it will be up to the support of the community in order for that to continue.
And that’s a hard, hard hurdle to overcome, but it’s totally something we can do together. And that’s — one of my passions right now is, there are a lot of women’s organizations and we’re duplicating a lot of work, because everybody is seeing this problem and really, I think, a lot of us are stepping up to say let’s fix it.
To be an advocate.
Yeah, and I would love to just see all of us kind of come together and work together.
Yeah.
And use contacts and stuff like that.
Share funding.
Yeah.
It’s so interesting to see the transformation. The first days the girls were so timid. They were very scared to actually touch anything. Now, they all want to be engineers and they’re super gung ho.
That’s awesome.
So that’s also where the Walk from Robotics expo came in, because we were like, when they’re done with middle school where are they going to go next. Most people just don’t know what are the options. So, it’s a good follow up to this pilot program for Creators and Innovators to then have a Walk from Robotics expo to help guide, not only that group, but the whole community in terms of if you want to learn about robotics where can you go to do that.
Do any of the high school up here have robot teams, like for robot fights or anything like that?
Yeah, the Sehome Seamonsters. They’re the first robotics team. I think they just went to the world championship.
What?
Wow.
Yeah, it’s amazing. They have an incredible robotics lab that I’m very jealous of.
I mean, you know, you just graduated your first cohort, but are there any existing girls on the high school team?
One girl.
One girl.
Her name is Ky, she’s amazing. She’s also a volunteer with Creators and Innovators, specifically because she’s the only girl. She’s okay with it. There are a lot of women who are totally cool being the only girl in the group, but there’s something very special that happens when women come together and support one another. Now we have 60 girls who want to go on.
That is so cool.
And your website is creative girls?
Creatorgirls.com.
That’s awesome. So, you’re kind of on the tail end of this. How has getting your master’s been? You went and said, I”m not going to have a traditional career path. You jumped out of planes to fight fire, you did all these crazy things, and then you’ve kind of come back around to education. How has it been being a woman in this more traditional path on the other end?
I am not going to lie. It has not always been very fun. There have been a lot of challenges and a lot of really incredible moments along the way. Going to that Grace Hopper conference was a really huge turning point for me, because I no longer questioned whether or not I belonged there. I was in the presence of 5,000 women. All female technologist from all over the world solving problems in incredible ways, and having fun while doing it, and building community with one another. If I hadn’t gone to that conference I would have only ever been exposed to my university, my class. I would not have realized how much potential there was. Now that I’ve seen that, it’s not even just what you see. It’s what you yourself can create in the future. Now I very much know that i belong here and have a place here, and I’m super excited to be able to spread that passion to other people. I think more people should be involved in technology. There’s tons of jobs. Tons of money. It’s intellectually extremely stimulating. There’s so many benefits to it.
You can change the world.
Yeah, you can change the world.
You can type things and change the world.
Yeah.
That blows my mind every day. You’re like the eight person I”ve talked to just today who says, I got into this but then the real pivot point, the real thing that I’ve needed, or the real thing that I’m excited about is community. Even the guys here, part of being at Linux Fest Northwest is that we come together and we’re all giant geeks together. And I love that. I have to say, there are a lot of women on the floor today.
There have been quite a bit and we have been catching them to get littles bits. It is awesome. I’ve been coming here, well over the last eight years at least six times, and there’s a lot more women here.
Yeah, everybody is saying that. There’s young girls. There’s dads with daughters. It’s changing and I’m excited to be a part of that.
Yeah, me too.
Our traditional last question is what are you most excited about about technology right now.
Well, I don’t know I mentioned earlier, I”m opening a code school. I’m a cofounder for codelily.education. There seems to be a lack of accessible education, so I’m really, really excited about being able to provide that for our community. Recently we taught classes in intro to HTML and JavaScript. I thought that the students who came would be reflective of the student body I see in my classes in college, so mostly guys and couple girls. When we promoted the classes in an open, collaborative, accessible environment, we had 100 percent women.
Whoa.
Wow.
Anywhere from 16 years old to 60 years old.
And that wasn’t your target?
Whoa.
I mean, we just put it out there to a few people. We didn’t even really advertise it that much. People are interested in learning, but they want to learn in a more collaborative space where it’s not super competitive and intense with grades and all those things. So, we’re able to provide an alternative route. The first class was 100 percent women. THe second class did have a couple guys. It was really an unexpected thing that happened there. So, I think the more we can move in the direction of building community and collaboration, all those things, we will see more diversity in computing. I’m most excited about being involved in that project, because it’s also very fun to be an entrepreneur and I work with an amazing group of people. I just feel really blessed for all of the opportunities in my life.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget that you can email us, WTR@jupiterbroadcasting.com. You can also go to jupiterbroadcasting.com to see the backlog of shows or use the contact form to contact us that way.
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And so, if you have people who don’t have time to listen but would like to read, head them that way. Thanks so much.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

The post Change The World | WTR 26 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Below the Clouds | BSD Now 88

chris — Thu, 07 May 2015 10:06:26 +0000

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This time on the show, we’ll be talking with Ed Schouten about CloudABI. It’s a new application binary interface with a strong focus on isolation and restricted capabilities. As always, all this week’s BSD news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

FreeBSD quarterly status report

The FreeBSD team has posted a report of the activities that went on between January and March of this year
As usual, it’s broken down into separate reports from the various teams in the project (ports, kernel, virtualization, etc)
The ports team continuing battling the flood of PRs, closing quite a lot of them and boasting nearly 7,000 commits this quarter
The core team and cluster admins dealt with the accidental deletion of the Bugzilla database, and are making plans for an improved backup strategy within the project going forward
FreeBSD’s future release support model was also finalized and published in February, which should be a big improvement for both users and the release team
Some topics are still being discussed internally, mainly MFCing ZFS ARC responsiveness patches to the 10 branch and deciding whether to maintain or abandon C89 support in the kernel code
Lots of activity is happening in bhyve, some of which we’ve covered recently, and a number of improvements were made this quarter
Clang, LLVM and LLDB have been updated to the 3.6.0 branch in -CURRENT
Work to get FreeBSD booting natively on the POWER8 CPU architecture is also still in progress, but it does boot in KVM for the time being
The project to replace forth in the bootloader with lua is in its final stages, and can be used on x86 already
ASLR work is still being done by the HardenedBSD guys, and their next aim is position-independent executable
The report also touches on multipath TCP support, the new automounter, opaque ifnet, pkgng updates, secureboot (which should be in 10.2-RELEASE), GNOME and KDE on FreeBSD, PCIe hotplugging, nested kernel support and more
Also of note: work is going on to make ARM a Tier 1 platform in the upcoming 11.0-RELEASE (and support for more ARM boards is still being added, including ARM64)

OpenBSD 5.7 released

OpenBSD has formally released another new version, complete with the giant changelog we’ve come to expect
In the hardware department, 5.7 features many driver improvements and fixes, as well as support for some new things: USB 3.0 controllers, newer Intel and Atheros wireless cards and some additional 10gbit NICs
If you’re using one of the Soekris boards, there’s even a new driver to manipulate the GPIO and LEDs on them – this has some fun possibilities
Some new security improvements include: SipHash being sprinkled in some areas to protect hashing functions, big W^X improvements in the kernel space, static PIE on all architectures, deterministic “random” functions being replaced with strong randomness, and support for remote logging over TLS
The entire source tree has also been audited to use reallocarray, which unintentionally saved OpenBSD’s libc from being vulnerable to earlier attacks affecting other BSDs’ implementations
Being that it’s OpenBSD, a number of things have also been removed from the base system: procfs, sendmail, SSLv3 support and loadable kernel modules are all gone now (not to mention the continuing massacre of dead code in LibreSSL)
Some people seem to be surprised about the removal of loadable modules, but almost nothing utilized them in OpenBSD, so it was really just removing old code that no one used anymore (very different from FreeBSD or Linux in this regard, where kernel modules are used pretty heavily)
BIND and nginx have been taken out, so you’ll need to either use the versions in ports or switch to Unbound and the in-base HTTP daemon
Speaking of httpd, it’s gotten a number of new features, and has had time to grow and mature since its initial debut – if you’ve been considering trying it out, now would be a great time to do so
This release also includes the latest OpenSSH (with stronger fingerprint types and host key rotation), OpenNTPD (with the HTTPS constraints feature), OpenSMTPD, LibreSSL and mandoc
Check the errata page for any post-release fixes, and the upgrade guide for specific instructions on updating from 5.6
Groundwork has also been laid for some major SMP scalability improvements – look forward to those in future releases
There’s a song and artwork to go along with the release as always, and CDs should be arriving within a few days – we’ll show some pictures next week
Consider picking one up to support the project (and it’s the only way to get puffy stickers)
For those of you paying close attention, the banner image for this release just might remind you of a certain special episode of BSD Now…

Tor-BSD diversity project

We’ve talked about Tor on the show a few times, and specifically about getting more of the network on BSD (Linux has an overwhelming majority right now)
A new initiative has started to do just that, called the Tor-BSD diversity project
“Monocultures in nature are dangerous, as vulnerabilities are held in common across a broad spectrum. Diversity means single vulnerabilities are less likely to harm the entire ecosystem. […] A single kernel vulnerability in GNU/Linux that impacting Tor relays could be devastating. We want to see a stronger Tor network, and we believe one critical ingredient for that is operating system diversity.”
In addition to encouraging people to put up more relays, they’re also continuing work on porting the Tor Browser Bundle to BSD, so more desktop users can have easy access to online privacy
There’s an additional progress report for that part specifically, and it looks like most of the work is done now
Engaging the broader BSD community about Tor and fixing up the official documentation are also both on their todo list
If you’ve been considering running a node to help out, there’s always our handy tutorial on getting set up

PC-BSD 10.1.2-RC1 released

If you want a sneak peek at the upcoming PC-BSD 10.1.2, the first release candidate is now available to grab
This quarterly update includes a number of new features, improvements and even some additional utilities
PersonaCrypt is one of them – it’s a new tool for easily migrating encrypted home directories between systems
A new “stealth mode” option allows for a one-time login, using a blank home directory that gets wiped after use
Similarly, a new “Tor mode” allows for easy tunneling of all your traffic through the Tor network (hopefully through some BSD nodes, as we just mentioned..)
IPFW is now the default firewall, offering improved VIMAGE capabilities
The life preserver backup tool now allows for bare-metal restores via the install CD
ISC’s NTP daemon has been replaced with OpenNTPD, and OpenSSL has been replaced with LibreSSL
It also includes the latest Lumina desktop, and there’s another post dedicated to that
Binary packages have also been updated to fresh versions from the ports tree
More details, including upgrade instructions, can be found in the linked blog post

Interview – Ed Schouten – ed@freebsd.org / @edschouten

CloudABI

News Roundup

Open Household Router Contraption

This article introduces OpenHRC, the “Open Household Router Contraption”
In short, it’s a set of bootstrapping scripts to turn a vanilla OpenBSD install into a feature-rich gateway device
It also makes use of Ansible playbooks for configuration, allowing for a more “mass deployment” type of setup
Everything is configured via a simple text file, and you end up with a local NTP server, DHCP server, firewall (obviously) and local caching DNS resolver – it even does DNSSEC validation
All the code is open source and on Github, so you can read through what’s actually being changed and put in place
There’s also a video guide to the entire process, if you’re more of a visual person

OPNsense 15.1.10 released

Speaking of BSD routers, if you’re looking for a more “prebuilt and ready to go” option, OPNsense has just released a new version
15.1.10 drops some of the legacy patches they inherited from pfSense, aiming to stay closer to the mainline FreeBSD source code
Going along with this theme, they’ve redone how they do ports, and are now kept totally in sync with the regular ports tree
Their binary packages are now signed using the fingerprint-style method, various GUI menus have been rewritten and a number of other bugs were fixed
NanoBSD-based images are also available now, so you can try it out on hardware with constrained resources as well
Version 15.1.10.1 was released shortly thereafter, including a hotfix for VLANs

IBM Workpad Z50 and NetBSD

Before the infamous netbook fad came and went, IBM had a handheld PDA device that looked pretty much the same
Back in 1999, they released the Workpad Z50 with Windows CE, sporting a 131MHz MIPS CPU, 16MB of RAM and a 640×480 display
You can probably tell where this is going… the article is about installing NetBSD it
“What prevents me from taking my pristine Workpad z50 to the local electronics recycling facility is NetBSD. With a little effort it is possible to install recent versions of NetBSD on the Workpad z50 and even have XWindows running”
The author got pkgsrc up and running on it too, and cleverly used distcc to offload the compiling jobs to something a bit more modern
He’s also got a couple videos of the bootup process and running Xorg (neither of which we’d call “speedy” by any stretch of the imagination)

FreeBSD from the trenches

The FreeBSD foundation has a new blog post up in their “from the trenches” series, detailing FreeBSD in some real-world use cases
In this installment, Glen Barber talks about how he sets up all his laptops with ZFS and GELI
While the installer allows for an automatic ZFS layout, Glen notes that it’s not a one-size-fits-all thing, and goes through doing everything manually
Each command is explained, and he walks you through the process of doing an encrypted installation on your root zpool

Broadwell in DragonFly

DragonFlyBSD has officially won the race to get an Intel Broadwell graphics driver
Their i915 driver has been brought up to speed with Linux 3.14’s, adding not only Broadwell support, but many other bugfixes for other cards too
It’s planned for commit to the main tree very soon, but you can test it out with a git branch for the time being

Feedback/Questions

Mailing List Gold

How did you guess

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv – we’d love to hear from you guys if you’re working on anything cool
The OpenBSD router tutorial has been reorganized and updated for 5.7, it has a new section on bandwidth statistics and has finally gotten so big that it now has a table of contents
This year’s vBSDCon has been formally announced, and will take place between September 11th-13th in Reston, Virginia (eastern USA)
There’s no official call for papers, but they do welcome people to submit talk ideas for consideration
If you’re in Michigan, there’s a new BSD users group just starting up – LivBUG
If there’s a local BUG in your area, let us know and we’ll be glad to mention it

The post Below the Clouds | BSD Now 88 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Women In Tech: The Book | WTR 14

chris — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 09:44:53 +0000

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Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack is the CEO of Fizzmint, a full end to end employee management HR service. She also has a book titled Women In Tech: The Book on kickstarter right now!

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The post Women In Tech: The Book | WTR 14 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.