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The post Impress with Wordpress | WTR 57 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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

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Transcription:

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Breanne is the owner & web developer for Nerd Nest Media. It provides web design, development, SEO work, brand consulting & social media marketing!

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Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: Angela, so this week, my friend Breanne joins us. She is a solo founder for the company Nerd Nest Media, and she talks about her journey in technology, what’s like to be a solo founder a little bit, and just kind of the many hats that she has worn in her journey.
ANGELA: Awesome. Before we get into the interview, I want to DigitalOcean. They are the sponsor for this week. They are a cloud housing provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. And let me just tell you, I was faced with a situation a couple months ago where my son turned six and was really into MineCraft and had been playing the pocket edition on his iPad. But it just quite wasn’t enough. And of course I — well, I think I might have been able to find a way to play with him via my iPad, but I’m not sure. But regardless, I wanted to get a dedicated server up and running so that he and I could play on the same maps. So, I used a DigitalOcean droplet to spin up a MIneCraft server that will always be up and running. They have locations for their data centers in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. I don’t have to worry about if our house has a power outage. Well, I wouldn’t be able to play at that point, but anyway, wherever the server is hosted, I don’t have to worry about a power outage, because the server will always be up and running in the cloud. And it’s only $5.00 a month. And if you use the code heywtr, you can get a $10.00 credit, which is a two month credit. So, think about the projects that you could use DigitalOcean for and use heywtr promo code for it.
PAIGE: And don’t forget, if you already have a DIgitalOcean set up, but you haven’t used one of our codes, go ahead and pop it in there. Sometimes it just might work.
And out question for Breanna when we got started was to kind of give us a overview of what she does in Technology.
BREANNE: Hi. I’m Breanne Smith. I am the current owner and web developer for Nerd Nest Media. My company provides web design development, SEO work, brand consulting, social media marketing. And that is my current role in technology.
PAIGE: So, you’re kind of a many hat wearer? Would you consider yourself an entrepreneur?
BREANNE: I would. The entrepreneur side of me has definitely been coming out as each day progresses. But I really love technology, so I’ve just been kind of one of those closet nerds, if you will. Just researching, doing things on my own. And then it’s kind of given me the love for wanting to provide these services for people to get them to understand what the web is and how it can help their business.
PAIGE: So, it was kind of the journey for you learning to understand that made you want to kind of help others do the same?
BREANNE: Yes and no. You know, I went back to school later in life. I’m in my 30s now and just graduated in 2012. When I first went to college back out of high school I thought I wanted to write for Rolling Stone magazine. So, I was doing journalism, music theory stuff back then. Which is great, because now I still get to use my love writing and creativity, but just in a totally more technologically advanced way. So, that’s what I started doing. And then I moved from Indiana to Austin Texas and I started working for a nationwide property maintenance company. So, I was managing like 20 people at the time and had a portfolio of like 7,000 foreclosed homes all over the country that I was maintaining. So, it taught me a lot about professionalism, completing tasks on time. really kind of prepped me for that real world situation. And then, from there, I, we moved out to Oregon and I really didn’t have a job or anything going on. So I thought, you know what, I am going to take my love for technology and see what I could do with maybe going back to school and starting a business of my own. My parents owned a couple of furniture stores in Indiana and they’re actually who really catapulted me into wanting to start my own business, because as a small company themselves, they were paying this “web company” that was really not doing much for them, $350.00 a month to maintain their website, do social media posts, things like that. And my parents were getting frustrated and not understanding why they weren’t getting results and this web company was helping them. So, I asked, you know, hey I know a little bit about a little bit. Can I talk with them and maybe see what they’re doing and use the big technical terms and kind of coxe out of them what they’re doing. I called these people and turned out, they were just a marketing company who said they can do web work and were outsourcing this web work.
ANGELA: Oh my goodness.
BREANNE: To other people who knew nothing about my parent’s business. They knew nothing about their business practices. And so, getting off that phone call, I was the most frustrated I’ve ever been in my life for my parents. You know, that they’re this small company, they’re older, they don’t understand the value of the web and what it can do for you. They know, just from me harping on them, that they needed a website. And a the time, I didn’t have my degree so I didn’t know all the ins and out of it. So I literally went back to school solely to-
ANGELA: Help your parents?
BREANNE: Kind of negate these people. Yeah. Well, no. I actually don’t like to do business with my family.
ANGELA: Right.
BREANNE: Because it can — I don’t want to mix business with pleasure there, but it really kind of made me see what type of people are out there saying that they can do the stuff for small business and build their brand and build their company, but in reality they’re not doing anything. They’re just taking money and saying that they’re going to put this post up. And the post, you know, even on their social site, has nothing to do with what their business is.
ANGELA: Yep.
BREANNE: So, once my husband I moved out here to Oregon I thought, okay I’m going back to school. I’m getting my degree in web design and development, and I’m going to start company that has morals, wouldn’t treat people the way that these so called web companies were treating my parents, and really pride myself on kind of hand holding a lot of my clients through this process of understanding how their business can actually grow with putting a little money into the web side of it.
ANGELA: Right. That sounds-
BREANNE: I know that’s a little long winded but-
ANGELA: No, no, no. It sounds exactly like what I went through with my mom. Because she’s self-employed. She’s owned a restaurant in downtown Seattle for 20 years now. I think.
BREANNE: Oh wow.
ANGELA: Anyway. Yeah, and she recently was on the, I need to, I need the social media aspect. I was the one that forced her to do a Facebook page and she’s really popular on there. She post her specials there every day. But then a social media company, just like you said, came along and was like we can build your brand and whatever. And she went for it. ANd it’s really not yielding anything.
BREANNE: Oh man.
PAIGE: It seems like a market that seems so easy to take advantage of people, because you just have to use some jargon.
ANGELA: Yep.
BREANNE: You’re exactly right. And they think, oh wow, they’re using all these great buzz words. I’ve heard that word before but I don’t really understand it. And so, it took a lot of me sitting down with my parents and getting them to understand how they were taking advantage of my parents. Because they didn’t even really understand what they were or weren’t doing, to be honest with you.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
BREANNE: I was so frustrated. Seriously. I was just horribly frustrated for them and knowing that there’s hundreds of companies, probably thousands of companies like that out there, where there’s outsourcing everything. It really doesn’t give that personal touch. And it really just makes me feel like all these small businesses are just giving away money and not getting anything in return, and then getting a sour taste in their mouth about what the web can do for them.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: I’m going to pick your brain then. What’s a good thing to watch out for? If I can’t necessarily work with you, how do I know, if i own a business or something, like what’s the difference between working with someone like you and someone who is going to take advantage of me? How can I tell the difference?
BREANNE: A big thing is reading the name of their company. If they have the word marketing in their company, nine times out of ten they are a marketing company. If they can offer web services that’s great, but I would, as a small business I would talk to them about what their services provide and who is providing those services for me. Is there a point of contact I can call and talk to that person who is building my site and have them explain to me why it looks this way or talk to them about how I want it to look differently. If they’re impersonal with you and, oh I have to get back with you, and 13 emails later they’re still not answering your questions, if they’re dodging questions, dodging answers, things like that, those are big signs really, for me at least. And knowing that they’re just solely in for marketing and that hundred to $400,000.00 whatever it is montly fee that they’re getting. And honestly, it’s a gut thing too. You know, if you’re not getting the right service from somebody and you’re not feeling like they’re really being helpful, that’s another big key point that they’re probably — they probably don’t know what they’re talking about.
PAIGE: So you started out hoping to do music journalism.
BREANNE: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: And you ended up in web design and development, essentially, right?
BREANNE: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: What does that transition look like? Why? have you always been nerdy? Were you the kid with the Commodore 64 hacking away at the keyboard? What does that look like for you?
BREANNE: Well, for me I wasn’t — you know, I was always int, you know, we always had, my dad actually has always been very much so up on the technical side of things. Like, we always had the latest, greatest TVs and radios and as soon as the computer came out we had the computer, desktop in our house at the time. So, which was huge, mind you. So, you know, I always have been interested in it, but I don’t think I really grasped the understanding and really the power of technology until I was working for that management company, the property management company. And we had such a cool system we used on the back end and I saw just really how it helped their business. That kind of pushed me forward and shifted my gears. Like I said, I’m in my 30s, so I’m, you know, it really shifted my mind into thinking, okay how can this benefit every company out there. And so, I really, you know, I’ve always dabbled. I love video games. I always played video games as a kid, but I really don’t think it was until I got older and understood how it could compute to business that made me really want to start doing this as a career.
PAIGE: All right. So, I”ve got to ask. What was your favorite video game as a kid?
BREANNE: I mean, I’m old school though. I didn’t do, like I got a little bit-
PAIGE: We’re equally old school in this room.
ANGELA: Yeah. We’re your age too.
BREANNE: Okay, cool. So I was more in, I mean I loved Mario and Duck Hunt and, you know, all of that stuff too, but I love-
ANGELA: Donkey Kong. Say Donkey Kong.
BREANNE: Yes. Yes. I was going to say Donkey Kong, but I just am aging myself here, but yeah Donkey Kong. All those little games I loved to play. Mario Bros of course was my — I mean, that’s true to my heart. I always played it.
PAIGE: You know, I still know how to get all the warp zones, right?
BREANNE: Me too.
PAIGE: Yeah. Totally. Yeah, Mario, Legend of Zelda and original Tetris on the Gameboy for me. Those were the big ones. Especially in competitive mode, because I still have yet to meet anyone who can beat me on Tetris in competitive mode. Which is not normal mode people, it’s different.
BREANNE: What about Punch Out? Did anybody play Punch Out all the time?
ANGELA: Nope.
BREANNE: No?
PAIGE: I like the, we had the Olympics. We had the power mat and so you do the olympics thing. That was definitely better than (unintelligible).
ANGELA: Yeah, i remember that now.
BREANNE: That’s way cooler.
PAIGE: I learned very quickly, as did my little sister, that running on the powermat was not nearly as fast as sitting next to the powermat and hitting it with your hands like bongos.
BREANNE: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
PAIGE: Much, much faster. You can get way farther, and then you can jump infinitely because you just lift your hands and on the long jump you just win.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
BREANNE: Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.
PAIGE: Right. Yeah, it’s cheating.
BREANNE: Where were you growing up?
PAIGE: Massachusetts.
ANGELA: VIdeo game hacks.
PAIGE: Yeah. Well, you know, when you can’t go outside in the sun because you’re a ginger you have to do something in the summer. So, do you still pay video games?
BREANNE: Yeah, I do. I mean, and of course I’ve stayed true to Nintendo, so I just have a Wii, because I literally, like that’s how much I love Mario Bros. Like, I will play every single one that comes out.
PAIGE: Have you played the new Mario titles where you can play like four players simultaneously?
ANGELA: What?
BREANNE: I don’t have a Wii U, so I’m not sure if that’s new with the Wii u?
PAIGE: No. No. It’s a Wii title.
BREANNE: It is? Okay.
PAIGE: Yeah. You’ve got to check it out.
BREANNE: I haven’t played it.
PAIGE: Yeah. You can play four players simultaneously, and when you have a Yoshi you can eat the other players and then spit them.
BREANNE: Oh my gosh.
PAIGE: It’s amazing.
BREANNE: I”m typing this right now so I don’t forget.
PAIGE: So if you folks at home haven’t tried it out, it’s old now, but, and i think they just put out another new one, but I don’t have a Wii U either. So what do you use as tools to get your job done? Like, you — I know, because we’ve talked before, that you use WordPress, but either what do you use in WordPress, what sort of text editor do you use? What helps you get your job done?
BREANNE: So, text editor wise, I mean I love Sublime Text and Notepad ++. Those are both my go to text editors and things like that. But I do love WordPress and I love to work on content management systems, especially for my clients, because it really helps them be able to feel like they have a grasp on their website. And even go in, if I teach — I can teach them how to go in and make their own blog posts, their own changes. And then they don’t have to utilize me or pay me money. Especially if they’re a little bit on the tech savvy side, so thats’ why i use WordPress and why I love WordPress.
PAIGE: Yeah. I totally agree. I like to tell people, I’m like, if you can post on Facebook, you can learn enough WordPress to help yourself out.
BREANNE: Exactly. That’s exactly right. And I’m actually just — I just got done before this walking through my last client with his blog and getting him up to speed with everything. And he made his first blog post and uploaded the images and everything himself. So, and knows how to change the sidebars to what it needs to be. So it’s really empowering for me to see them get it and smile and understand they’re in charge. It’s not just me, it’s them. So, that’s why I love WordPress so much. I mean, it’s got it’s faults as far as security sometimes, but other than that, I mean, as long as you have a good security plugin in place, you’re good to go. But then I love Illustrator and PhotoShop and stuff. I do all — I love those for design and doing mock ups and things like that. That’s about all I use.
PAIGE: Did you learn most of that in your school program, self-taught? Did you have online resources?
BREANNE: I’m mostly self-taught. I loved school. I am — I think that’s where my nerdiness comes from is because I always loved school as a kid. I never missed a day of school from kindergarten to my senior year. Got a special nerd award for that at the end of my senior year.
PAIGE: That is a very special nerd award.
ANGELA: Yep.
BREANNE: I still have it. But, yeah, so I think my love of school really carried me through, you know, getting through college this time and helped me be more successful. I don’t want to tell someone who is in school that they shouldn’t be in school, but honestly, the type of work that we do, a lot of it is self-taught. ANd you have to continually educate yourself aster school even, you know, to keep up with the latest trends and keep your ear to the ground with technology. So, it’s not say that I didn’t — that I’m not glad I didn’t — went to school and got my degree, but, you know, to be honest with you, most of the stuff I’ve learned as been self-taught. I used Lynda.com a lot for things that — I don’t like to tell my clents no, ever. So if i don’t know it, I don’t tell them I don’t know it, I just research and learn and try, you know, and charge them less for that since I have to do more education time on my end. So that’s kind of how I feel. I’m more successful in this industry, because I am so willing to learn — so much more willing to learn all of the new technology that’s out there.
ANGELA: So, do your clients basically use you to get up and running or — do they do that and then they’re on their own and you also have continuing customers where you actually do the stuff for the?
BREANNE: Yes. I kind of am a one stop shop. I think Paige said, you know, I’m a woman of many hats. I can do a full service as far as if someone just comes to me and they’re like , I don’t want to understand this. I don’t care to understand this. I need a new website. I can do their hosting for them. I do hosting reselling. And also set up their domain, buy their domain, set up everthing from scratch. And then I can either help them maintain that every month if they want me to, or like I said teach them how and they can do that, and I take a back seat unless there’s an emergency I”ll come back in. But then, there’s that flip side of things where someone is already up and running. My main client that I have, I’ve had her for two years and when she came to me two years ago she had had a web designer who was getting frustrated with her. I love her with all of my heart, but she’s more into the pretty side of things and not the technical side of things, which is fine, but I don’t think it translate well if a web person isn’t able to kind of speak to her in those layman’s terms and get her to understand it and why she has to pay this money.
ANGELA: RIght.
BREANNE: So that web person left her and took her entire website down. So she was stranded with no website and she runs a very high end salon and so she was completely stranded with no website. So, I came in, got it back up, because it was a WordPress site. I was able to recover it and since then has helped maintain her site and am rebuilding that one plus a new one for her for a separate salon she’s doing currently. So, I’ve been working with her for two years and it’s been great. So, I love the ongoing stuff, but am able to just do one quick fix for clients and then they can about their business if they don’t need me anymore.
ANGELA: Sure.
PAIGE: Yeah. It think it sounds, I don’t know what (unintelligible) this is, but I think that if you have a small business working with other small businesses for your other services is really beneficial for both parties usually. As a small business, you can do things that as a giant business someone might not be able to, because they’re tied up in red tape or corporate policy or whatever . Like some marketing company that has all these standards and SOP and jazz.
BREANNE: Exactly. I really like it, because you can really, you know, dive into their culture and kind of really get to understand their company. And so, I think I do better work when I understand the business, obviously, and understand what they’re mission is and what they’re goals are. It helps me to really format the site to help their end user a lot better.
PAIGE: Yeah. I agree with that. Even as a developer, people think you’re just making computer stuff work, because I don’t really do design or when I do it’s terrible, but even understanding what the user experience is supposed to be or –and necessarily, the client doesn’t always know what they want in the experience. They’re just like, this is what we do and these are the customers i have, and being able to kind of craft that. I can do so much better when I can sit down and have talk time with them and get to know their business, or stop by their business, or whatever.
BREANNE: Exactly. I really love that so much more than — because I do — I have lived in many states so a lot of my clients are out of state. And so it’s — there’s something to be said about sitting down and having a cup of coffee or tea with somebody and explaining their business, versus being on Skype or something like that. Because there can be distractions and they’re not really into it. So if I can get somebody to focus with me it goes a lot easier.
ANGELA: Have you ever been to a sewing retreat?
BREANNE: I have not, but I do love sewing.
ANGELA: I recently went to a sewing retreat and it was so much fun. It was just two full — well two and a half days of sewing and it was just amazing. But what do you like to sew?
BREANNE: I like to sew anything. I love to make clothes. That’s what i started doing as a young girl. My mom made all my baby clothes when I was kid and so — and then she made these awesome dolls that she would sell to get more fabric to make my clothes.
ANGELA: Wow.
BREANNE: So, I learned from a very young age. Yeah, she’s really awesome. But I learned from a young age how to sew and to work around a sewing machine. But in more recent years I’ve been teaching myself to knit and crochet a little bit. It’s not my strong points but the sewing machine is my strongest point. And I love to sew anything. From pillows to clothes to anything.
ANGELA: Cool.
PAIGE: I have a love/hate relationship with sewing and crocheting. I’m amazing at sewing and crocheting in straight lines.
BREANNE: Yeah.
PAIGE: But not turning. So, if you have a pattern that is straight lines, I actually sew very well. It was — part of theatre degree is that you have to do costuming. I know how to do all the seeming and all the edging, but if i have to turn, not as good. Pillowcases, awesome.
BREANNE: Yep, just a square.
PAIGE: Oh yeah. Yep. No problem there.
BREANNE: Well you’ll have to tell me more about the sewing retreat. That sounds really cool. Can you bring whatever type of sewing stuff or is it-
ANGELA: Yeah. You just — in this case you — it was about 25 women and we went to Warm Beach, which is here in Washington, and we rented out a bunch of rooms and we just set up and we were able to keep out setup in this banquet room all weekend, and the beachfront was right there. It was amazing.
BREANNE: Sounds awesome.
ANGELA: And all the meals were catered. Yeah. I ate so much, I thought that I would literally weigh five to 10 pounds more when I was done, but I actually lost a couple pounds because I would walk. I would go for a walk on the beach after eating, which speeds up your metabolism. It was awesome.
PAIGE: I just wanted to ask one more thing.
BREANNE: Yeah.
PAIGE: If there is one thing in technology that kind of is either coming down the pipe or gets your really jazzed now what is it?
BREANNE: Wearables. I’m all about wearables right now and the power that they have.
ANGELA: So how is your Apple Watch?
BREANNE: I don’t have an Apple Watch.
ANGELA: I’m just kidding.
BREANNE: I’m an Android fangirl.
ANGELA: Ah, okay.
BREANNE: I have been Android from the start. We do not even have any Apple products in our house until my husband had to get a work phone and I said, well get an iPhone so I can test my websites on it and stop using emulators.
ANGELA: Perfect. Perfect, right? That works.
PAIGE: So, do you have an Android watch?
BREANNE: I do. But I started out with like Fitbit then other things like that, but I really love the blending of the fitness side of things with the nerdy tech smartwatch side of things.
ANGELA: With the practicality. Yeah. So, do you have the Pebble? Is that Android? I don’t even –
BREANNE: Uh, yes. Yes. It’s actually what I have. Yeah, I’m waiting for the two to come out though.
PAIGE: The Pebble is (unintelligible). That’s very cool.
BREANNE: I’m waiting for the Pebble 2.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: Nice. I am a little intimidated. So, Angela, in studio, has the Apple Watch and I keep watching her flip it and it looks really shiny and stuff, but I’m a little intimidated because I have found in my life right now, where I’m trying to get a lot of high volume work, high quality work done, like the less notifications I can have in my life the better off I am. Like, how do you balance that, the two of you?
ANGELA: I have certain people disabled for notifications and Telegram, it can only tell me so much on my watch and i can’t respond to it, so mainly it’s come in handy like if I”m at the bus stop and trying to get Dylan off the bus and put a stroller, I can just look at my watch real quick and see a notification or know that somebody is available.
BREANNE: Yeah, I agree with you on the integration of the watch with my phone. I think, you know, especially for me the working out more and stuff, I just my phone , or excuse me, my watch a lot more for that than i do my phone. I can keep it nearby but not have to carry my bulky phone around.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
BREANNE: And then as far as, I use my phone more for like long winded emails. But if I just need to send something really fast I can use my watch. Or just notify my husband really quick, I”m on my way. Anything like that. It’s a lot easier on my phone to just reply with a little emoji or something than it is to pull out my phone, like you were saying, and mess with that. It’s just an (unintelligible) of use type of things for me. Anything to make my life easier I’m all for it.
ANGELA: And I was wearing a Fitbit as well up until I got the Apple Watch. And in fact, I wore both of them for two weeks on the same wrist, because I just didn’t want to let go of the social aspect of Fitbit.
PAIGE: Well, you can still use the phone for Fitbit.
ANGELA: Yeah. Oh, I don’t know, yeah, okay. Well it still had — so I still use my Fitbit at night for sleep though.
PAIGE: You can use both.
ANGELA: Really?
PAIGE: Uh-huh.
ANGELA: Okay. You’ll have to show me how to set that up.
PAIGE: I will show you that.
ANGELA: Because I have no idea.
PAIGE: Yeah. I like FItBit, but I don’t own a Fitbit device anymore, because I never got the wrist one and they’re small and I lose everything.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Well, so you guys have me interested. I have one other question. Were either of you watch wearers before you got your smart watches?
BREANNE: I was not at all. I literally only, I don’t even wear earrings anymore. I just wear my wedding ring. So it is like the only other thing besides my wedding ring I wear.
ANGELA: I wanted to be, but I am one allergic to nickel, I believe, and two I have very acidic skin. So any watch I’d wear it would literally corrode the metal. It’s weird. It’s not like the metal would wear away. The metal would explode from inside. It would, like a barnacle. You know, it was so weird. And it would cause rashes and stuff so I stopped wearing. but I have the sports band Apple Watch, which isn’t metal at all. And so far I”ve had no irritation from the back of the watch where it’s metal.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’ll be interested to see if your Apple Watch explodes.
ANGELA: I know, right?
PAIGE: If it does, we need pictures.
ANGELA: Well, it doesn’t literally explode. You know what I mean? So I would, I love having a watch.
PAIGE: Interesting.
BREANNE: A friend of mine has the Apple Watch and he has tattoos on his wrist, and they’re very dark as it gets down to his wrist, so he actually has to wear it on his other wrist, because it won’t read his wrist.
PAIGE: Yeah. It can’t read through the-
BREANNE: Because there’s dark. Yeah.
PAIGE: Because it’s an optical heart rate monitor, so it literally can’t read through your skin.
BREANNE: Yeah.
PAIGE: I think that they’ve adjusted so that people of darker color are okay, but tattoos are too much.
ANGELA: Wow. Yeah, I didn’t even think about that.
PAIGE: The ink is still too much in the way.
ANGELA: Huh.
PAIGE: Yeah, because it’s based on the same technology that the use in hospitals where they clip the little pulse monitor to your finger.
ANGELA: Right. Right. But I didn’t think about people of people of darker color. It’s kind of like Band-Aid coming out with skin tone, but only for Caucasian.
PAIGE: And correct me, audience, if I’m wrong, but as far as I know it works for skin but tattoo ink, especially in the very dark colors is too much, because it’s several layers of problems.
ANGELA: Oh.
BREANNE: And I’m pretty sure you’re right. That they’ve fixed the darker skin, but just not the tattoos. And his are like two big, huge black lines that come down towards his wrist. Not good. But I just — I actually read this morning that Google is actually trying to get this tiny, tiny little radar system that actually and sense your hand gestures and stuff, because I guess in their mind smartwatches and stuff aren’t taking off as well as they should be. And so, you know, it’s more like early adopters and stuff like that. Like us, that really, really want new technology and stuff that are getting it, not so much the general population. And so they’re trying to — and I guess Google’s thinking behind it is that they’re such tiny little touch screens that it makes the device difficult to control it, I guess. And so they’re developing this radar system that can sense hand gestures instead of having to just put your finger on the screen.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember that you can find the show notes with full transcription over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Just go to the shows dropdown and select Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: You can also use the contact form on the web page to select Women’s Tech Radio to get in touch with us, or shoot us an email at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com . You can also find out show on iTunes and you can follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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