education – Jupiter Broadcasting

Holly is a software engineer at BlackLocus, a big data analyzer for Home Depot. She discusses her journey into technology that started in college & took a big detour.

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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 are going to talk to Holly Gibson. She is a programer for BlackLocus. Yes, it was awesome, which apparently has a reference to black hole, which is bad ass. Anyway, she is working kind of on data science and she went through boot camp and she does all sorts of cool things. And we talk about all of them.
ANGELA: Yes. It’s a very good interview that we are going to get into as soon as I mention that you can support this show. If you’re listening week after week and you like the content and you would like to help in some way, you can go to Patreaon.com/today. It is how the whole network of Jupiter Broadcasting is funded, but specifically, when you subscribe you are helping out Women’s Tech Radio as well. Patreon.com/today.
PAIGE: And we get started with today’s interview by asking Holly what she’s up to in tech today.
HOLLY: I’m a software engineer at BlackLocus. It’s a subsidiary of Home Depot and they do data science for Home Depot. They do a lot of web scraping and track all of Home Depot’s product catalog and their competitor’s prices so that they can price their products accurately. So lots of big data.
ANGELA: That’s really cool, because in a previous episode we were discussing that, was it Sears that needed a total IT aspect to it.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: And so now this is similar. BlackLocus, you said?
HOLLY: Yes.
ANGELA: Yeah, for Home Depot.
HOLLY: Uh, Locus means place. They’re kind of like the black hole of the internet. They’re sucking in everything.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: I like that. That’s really cool.
ANGELA: Yeah, it is.
PAIGE: So we were essentially touching on the idea that at this point all companies are become tech companies.
ANGELA: Yeah.
HOLLY: Yes. Yes. Home Depot acquired them three years ago. They had become a client and immediately started negotiating to buy them, because their tool was so awesome.
PAIGE: Awesome. So you do data science, which I think of as kind of like a magical unicorn at this point, because no one is quite willing to nail down what that means in the tech sphere, so can you enlighten me?
HOLLY: Sure. I’m more on the software engineer side so I”m not writing the fancy algorithms that the data science people are. We’re working in Python and Java and Javascript to consume the data and wrap it and make it beautiful so that an average person can look at it and understand what it means.
PAIGE: Okay. So you write tools in Python and Javascript and stuff and then you take what they’ve done and make it so that someone like me can get their head around it?
HOLLY: Yes.
PAIGE: Very cool. What’s your favorite piece of that stack?
HOLLY: I really like all of it still. I”m a generalist engineer. I’m, you know, full stack as they say, but generalist. I dabble in a little bit of everything. I came out of a boot camp two years ago and my first job was working at an education startup doing everything from supporting the IT for the office to managing the serve and the databases, doing the front end and the back end. So I really like all of it. Mainly I like solving problems. So just let me solve problems. Let me use logic and my brain and I’m happy.
PAIGE: So, boot camp, is that the way that you got into the technology field?
HOLLY: Sort of. It was a reboot. I studied Javascript and databases in college and I took over the college website and I managed it for five years. And i really enjoyed it, but I was a one woman team and solo. So it was very lonely. I didn’t have any mentors at that time. You know, web applications were just coming out and it was before Facebook, so that’s how old I am. So people were just figuring stuff out and so I didn’t know how much I knew. I thought, I’m just a beginner. I don’t know very much. I’ve done this for five years. This is fun, but now I”m going to go try a bunch of other stuff. So I sold antiques on Ebay. I managed a restaurant. I did summer camps for kids with disabilities. And then two years ago I found out about a boot camp here in Austin, Texas, where I live, and my husband I signed up to do it together. It was a three-month program over the summer. The hardest thing I’ve ever done, but got through it and really enjoyed having teachers I could ask questions from, classmates along side of me. We were learning together. Building actual applications and projects. It was a really, really great experience.
PAIGE: What do you think was the major difference between studying at a university level and being in the boot camp. Maybe, was it the timeliness of it? Where the internet has grown so much and we have so much more to work with and so many more resources, or more like the way that the instruction was done? What was the real standout to you that made it stick this time around and didn’t last time?
HOLLY: The way the instruction was done. I think sometimes universities are behind the ball so the technology I was learning in school was already a couple years old. I went to a very small school and the classes were really little. Most of them I was by myself so the professor would hand me a text book and say go read this. Which was great, I was learning, but having the hands on experience of the boot camp really resonated with me. I’m a mechanical person. I like building. I like learning by projects. So it cemented the theory much more in my brain when I was actually doing stuff.
PAIGE: That makes total sense. So you mentioned in talking about your university that it was really confusing to you to tell what the next steps were and understanding how much you knew. Do you think that was — and then you mentioned a lack of mentors. Do you think that those two are kind of related and how have you tackled that this time around?
HOLLY: Sure. Yeah. The program that I studied in school wasn’t a traditional computer science program. It was a degree in Theology and they had just added web design, because they thought, well people might want websites. So I took all the classes, because I actually thought theology was boring. So I loved the web design and I wanted a job afterwards, and i didn’t want to be a minister. So the web design seemed like a good route to go, but then I, you know, after I had built some sites and when I was thinking about leaving the university, I wasn’t sure how to go about that, because I didn’t have computer science degree on my resume. I didn’t know anybody in computer science. All I knew is I liked web design and I had built some stuff, but I wasn’t sure how to translate that into getting a different job. And so I kind of just gave up and went and did other stuff where I knew I could sale myself in marketing, graphic design, and stuff. Since going through the boot camp, it was great because they had relationships with local companies. They recommended we go to meetups, that we looked for mentors, that we meet people in the local tech scene. And so immediately in the boot camp we started as a class going to different meetups. Going to the Javascripts meetup. Going to the Rails meetup. And then I was really lucky to go to a Women Who Code meetup that had just started here in Austin at our bootcamp. They had the first night there and I went and it was an informational meeting and I said how can I help? And the women said how would you like to run Austin Women Who Code. So-
PAIGE: The same thing happened to me.
ANGELA: Wow.
HOLLY: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, not kidding.
HOLLY: So I took it over and now two years later we have 1,200 members and it’s been awesome. So that’s really been a great avenue for me to meet other women in tech, to find mentors. But what i tell the women in my group is go to the meetups. If you see someone talking intelligently about something and you want to know more, go ask them questions. They could turn into a mentor. Like I mentioned, my first job was at an education startup by myself. So again, that’s like a one woman team and I knew I needed help. And I knew where to go. So I went to the meetups. I met some people and I was like can you help me? Explain this code. I”m not understanding this. You know, I’m all by myself. And I said, yeah, let’s meet for coffee. And I said I”ll buy you coffee. I’ll buy you tacos, whatever you want. So one guy, we started meeting weekly for about four months and he explained code to me and design patterns and different things, and really got me over the first hump in my job. And since then I’ve been kind of networking through his friends and going, so do you know of someone who knows this, and someone who knows that. And just finding where the holes are in my knowledge and who can help me with those. There’s lots of online classes and blogs and videos and those are great. I learn mostly sitting with someone in pair programming and so I’ll read books and I will look up blogs. My best source of learning is from an actual physical person. So I really do like meeting. I write. Now I’m learning Haskell and functional programing so I meet weekly with my mentor, who came through my first mentor. And it’s great, because he has a master’s in Computer Science and he’s been doing this for 15 years and I can ask so many questions. I have this wealth of knowledge in that brain.
PAIGE: So did you find it with these mentors, were they resistant to the idea of being an official mentor or were they welcoming? How did you get over the fear of asking them for that relationship?
ANGELA: Or do they know that they’re your mentor?
PAIGE: Yeah, also that.
HOLLY: That’s a funny question. Yeah, a lot of them don’t like the label mentor, but they’re getting used to it. Most of them have been fascinated to teach a woman how to program, because some of them haven’t worked as often with a woman in programming. And I”m fine with being a social experiment for them.
PAIGE: You’re their token female programmer friend.
HOLLY: Yes. And I’m fine. If they want to explain things and teach me, that’s fine. I just make sure that it’s someone i connect with, you know, on a personality level. I’m not going to work with someone who’s going to speak down to me, you know, or be a programmer. And the guys I work with have been very nice and very supportive and want to start a mentorship program for Women Who Code so that they can get more women into tech. First of all, I didn’t say will you be my mentor. I would just say will you explain some code to me. And then if they’re willing to meet, then I”ll ask do you ever mentor people. And if they’re like, no I, I don’t and I’m not sure what that means, I’ll say well I’m learning this, would you mind explaining stuff with me. Could you work with me on a weekly or a bi-weekly, bi-monthly basis. What would fit in your schedule. So far, the people I’ve met, have said oh yeah I can meet with you weekly. I”ll buy them coffee. I make sure that I’m thanking them in some way. And they have all been really casual and nice about it. And I do the same. You know, I meet with women from my Women Who Code group. We have a Sunday morning ladies coding brunch and we code every Sunday morning. And I explain things to them that my mentors are teaching me. I think it’s important that people keep giving and raising up the people below them.
PAIGE: That was totally going to be my question for you and you answered it. Do you mentor as well? That’s very awesome that you do. I love that it’s a brunch.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: That’s perfect. It’s just perfect. Very cool. So you go from like mentor first dating. Like, can you explain this thing to me? And then if it goes well you ask for more.
HOLLY: Yes.
PAIGE: So you filled out our awesome guest form and you mentioned this and I just have to ask about it, that you rebuilt a server from a remote cabin in Finland?
HOLLY: Yeah. So, last summer our server was hacked while I was on a two-week vacation in Finland. My mother-in-law is Finnish and she has a cabin on a lake. A lot of people do there. They have saunas and cabins and stuff. And so we were on — I was on the train with my husband and they have WiFI. Finland is, you know, great tech country. You know, that’s where Linux came from and Angry Birds and everything. So there’s WiFi on the train and I was checking my email and I saw that our server had been quarantined and over the next week I got to rebuild our server. I got a hotspot from the only electronic store in the village and had about three hours of sleep a night for a week.
PAIGE: Wow, that’s crazy. I do love that though about the modern world. It’s like you can be anywhere and do what we do.
HOLLY: Yeah. I was Facetiming with my boss. There was an eight hour difference and it would be 3:00 in the morning for her, but I was awake and telling her what I had fixed, where the progress was. And what happened is our app had been built by a backend team in Siberia and they had forgot to put a firewall on our elasticsearch engine, it has an open facing port and it didn’t have a firewall and a robot got installed and was DDosing other servers.
PAIGE: Oh man. That’s not fun.
HOLLY: No, but I got it fixed and that actually, that experience really made me feel like I can do this, because up to that point I’d been at that job straight out of the boot camp nine months. And it was nine months of being terrified. Do I know what I’m doing? I’m all by myself. You know, even with my mentor you have fear and sometimes the imposter syndrome and you can make things bigger than they really are in your head, because you’re not sure what’s going to happen. This is a whole new experience. You don’t know what’s coming down the road. And the unknown is more scary than the known. Well the worst thing that can happen to you is having your server hacked. But once I got through that I was like I can do anything. I’m not afraid anymore. I can solve anything.
PAIGE: Totally. So I can’t imagine that you went through that much ops during boot camp. At least with the boot camps I’ve been exposed to and know about, they don’t do a ton of server stuff. How did you dive into that? Was that something you brought from before or were you just kind of teaching yourself on the fly to fix this thing?
HOLLY: Everything I learned on the job. We used Linode so they did have some documentation. I knew the services that we used so I knew how to install them and set them up. Thankfully we used New Relic as a monitoring tool so I could see what processes were running and see that elasticsearch had a crazy amount of data being processed, because it was DdoSing other stuff. So having the right tools I think is also really important and thankfully the team in Siberia, even though they forgot the firewall, did set up New Relic and we have now — that company I had, after I came back we switched over to Herope so we didn’t have to worry about security anymore, but I still kept New Relic because I said I need to be able to see the different processes. I need to know the health of our application and what’s going on. I Googled a lot.
PAIGE: Right.
ANGELA: Yeah.
HOLLY: And Linode did have a brief document on how to deal with a quarantined server what tools to install to scan your files and make sure they weren’t corrupted. But mainly it was just me solving this big riddle of what happened, what’s going on, and how do I fix it.
PAIGE: That’s how I do things. You kind of dive in and start Googling.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
HOLLY: Google knows.
PAIGE: How did you get to the point where you could kind of know what to Google? I’ve had that question from a lot of ladies as I start to mentor them or they come into Women Who Code and they’re like, well I don’t even know what to ask. Was a lot of that — where did that happen for you or did that happen for you?
HOLLY: Sure. That was one thing that I really appreciated from the boot camp. They worked with us on how do you Google. In the beginning the teachers would say oh well just Google it and I said I don’t know what to Google. Like what? What terms? Like if I’m trying to solve this how do I Google? Like what’s the tech speak. And so having them work with us a few times, then you started to get comfortable with realizing, okay these are the terms I need to search and is this bringing a result on Stack Overflow. Then I’m probably searching the right thing. You know, if I’m getting results for tech forums then, you just keep doing it and if it’s not returning the right thing, then switching out some terms and just trial and error.
PAIGE: Uh-huh.
HOLLY: Really helped. And time. As you do it more often and often then you’re going to start to know what are the key terms to search and it will get easier.
PAIGE: It is definitely a practiced skill, I would say, personally.
ANGELA: So I wanted to ask about your Ebay selling and you mentioned already a little bit that you were selling antiques.
HOLLY: Uh-huh.
ANGELA: So how did you even — did you get into Ebay when it was super — I think it was like ‘99 or 2000 that it really-
PAIGE: Yeah, right about then.
ANGELA: Became popular. When did you get into it and why?
HOLLY: 2009 is when I got into it, because my mother-in-law is a power seller. Her whole job is selling on Ebay. She had been doing it since ‘96. So after I left the university and I was looking at other things to do, she said well I can teach you a skill that you can use all the time, no matter what job you’re at. And so she showed me how to set up a store, so again, mentoring is so important.
ANGELA: Yes.
HOLLY: And she showed me how to take good pictures. She bought me a light box so that I could place the items in the light box and take quality photos and a scale so I could say how heavy the things were for jewelry. The different things that people want to know in the description of antique stuff. So having her as a resource was really great. And then also where to find the stuff. We went to a lot of estate sales and since my mother-in-law had been doing this for about 14 years she knew what kind of brands to look for and how to find good deals and we would buy box lots and sift through the stuff and she knew what could be sold by itself. What could be sold as an assortment. Having her as a mentor was great and it was fun. I never made enough money at it, because it’s something you have to really work at full time to build up enough inventory.
ANGELA: Yeah.
HOLLY: But my mother-in-law does it and she makes a good income and loves it.
PAIGE: Great.
ANGELA: I actually just went to a garage sale recently and it’s people that I actually know and they buy storage units that are unpaid and it’s just the luck of the draw. Everybody bids on it, whoever is the highest gets it. And then they have a garage sale. It’s a really interesting model, but a lot of work. A lot of footwork, but interesting.
HOLLY: A lot of footwork. So if you like that stuff, great. I was like man I don’t want to do this. This is taking me hours to make a few dollars.
ANGELA: Right. Right.
HOLLY: So I want to go work in an industry where I can make a nice amount of money for just an hour of work.
ANGELA: Yeah. If you’re passionate about finding really unique antiques or something I could see it being a fun thing to do on the side, but yeah, definitely not-
HOLLY: Definitely fun on the side.
ANGELA: A primary thing.
HOLLY: I got my furniture through an estate sale and so it’s nice to have that resource.
PAIGE: It’s amazing how, like, the skills we accumulate over a lifetime and how they affect everything.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes, definitely.
HOLLY: Yeah, it actually came back to be a benefit, because I judged at a Paypal Ebay Hackathon here in Austin and I got to say yeah I’m an Ebay seller.
PAIGE: Yeah, there you go. It’s always interesting. So one last question before we go. I wanted to know, since you mentioned it kind of before, like what tools do you use on a daily basis to do the work that you’re doing now? You said you’re in Python and Javascript, but what’s on your laptop kind of a thing?
HOLLY: Sure. The text editor I use is Sublime Text. I really like it. I have installed a bunch of different packages that help me work with the code. I use Mac, Macbook so I use iTerm as my terminal. I’m running in a virtual environment for Python using VIrtual ENBS and, let’s see, for (indiscernible) testing we like to use Gulp or Karma. We are using Elasticsearch and Redis for our search engine. The whole team is on HipChat and then Slack if HipChat breaks.
ANGELA: NIce to have an alternative.
HOLLY: Yes. And we have a lot of fun making our own little GIFs to have emoticons. I would say those are the main tools that I’m using. We use AWS for our servers and our fancy ops guys do all of our builds at Debian packages so builds have to be done on a Linux machine, but most of the team is on Macbooks.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find the full transcript of the show over at JupiterBroadcasting.com in the show notes. You can also catch us on Twitter, @HetyWTR or email us, WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com
PAIGE: You can also find us and subscribe on any podcasting network of your choice, including iTunes. Or check us out on YouTube if you are not a podcast person or have a friend who’s not a podcast person. Please feel free to recommend us. You can also email us directly if you have comments, feedback, or people you’d like to hear on the show’ we’d love to hear about it. Our email is WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com Thanks so much for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Not a Bro-grammer | WTR 42 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Internal Learning | WTR 41

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

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

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kristen@edifyedu.com

Transcription:

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

.Net or .Not? | CR 165

chris — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 14:36:10 +0000

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Still smarting from his burn, Mike shares his hard learned lessons after flying too close to the sun. What really pushes us to move to the next big thing & becoming and staying employable by focusing on the right market.

Thanks to:

Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

Hoopla

The Unemployed Programmer

Keeping Current

Does a tech get too old?
Are devs really ever unemployable?
Is skill Rot a thing?
New Shiny or bust?

Feedback

The post .Net or .Not? | CR 165 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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Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below:

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.

Middle School Sex Ed Test | FauxShow 214

chris — Sun, 17 May 2015 20:14:28 +0000

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Angela & Chris take a middle school sexual education quiz from Buzzfeed along with the lower thirds help to see if they know the answers.

Jan Writes:

Hi, I’m watch your shows (semi-regularly since I was mainly a fan of STOked and I Still re-watch the old STOked episodes, mainly the Cutting the Cord “STOked 73”, because I finally managed to team up with Chris on that mission with my colorfull party suit )

I just have 1 question: Has there ever been any talk about “giving re-birth” to STOked with Chris as host? I think I know the answer for this but hey, I just wanted to ask.

Again, I love jupiter broadcasting and I miss STOked with Chris (and jman even tho he became a dev) and I hope you guys & gals at Jupiter Broadcasting continue to have fun doing what you do, because its awsome.

Great love from Norway!

Bob Writes:

I have been watching LAS for almost 3 years now. And i love the show. And love a lot of other shows like Tech Talk Today and Tech Snap

About 4 or 6 months ago you had a show. Not sure if it was on LAS, Tech Talk Today or How to Linux. You and a guest who I never seen before or since showed how to install the latest Gnome desktop on Ubuntu. I think with a PPA.

If you know what show this was. And have the time to get back to me. Would send me name of the show and the episode number?

The episode in question was episode 330 – Switching Ubuntu to Gnome!

WTR

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The post Middle School Sex Ed Test | FauxShow 214 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Linux Powered Schools | LINUX Unplugged 68

chris — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 17:35:40 +0000

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We’re joined by a classroom full of special guests, we talk with the students from Penn Manor School District, where they’ve given every high school student a Linux laptop & integrated the students into the help desk. We get the inside scope on the challenges, roadblocks & successes of this large desktop Linux deployment.

Plus a preview of our upcoming interview with Mark Shuttleworth & his take on the recent criticism and exodus from Debian & getting started in a Linux career.

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Lisa Hewus Fresh | WTR 1

chris — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 03:45:08 +0000

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In this first episode of Women’s Tech Radio, Angela & Paige interview Lisa Hewus Fresh. Lisa took part in several big projects including Mozilla’s Ascend project. She joins us to discuss her journey into technology & the role Ascend played.

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OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education.

Ascend Project – Home

Mentorship and barrier-removing accelerator program designed to explicitly invite, include, and support adult learners in making a first technical contribution to Open Source software.

Women Who Code

18,000+ Women Developers. 14 Countries.

Our goal is to connect 1 million women in tech by 2019.

edX | Free online courses from the world’s best universities

Take great online courses from the world’s best universities

FOSS Outreach Program – Free and Open Source Software internships for people from underrepresented groups

FOSS Outreach Program helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.

Google Summer of Code – Open Source Programs Office — Google Developers

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary student developers
ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects.

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The post Lisa Hewus Fresh | WTR 1 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Debian’s systemd Decision | LINUX Unplugged 27

chris — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:31:21 +0000

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One of the bumpier chapters in Debian’s history looks to be drawing to a close, at least for now. But what was all the drama about? And where do things stand now? We’ll dig into the latest developments in the Debian init system debate.

Plus inspiring a new generation to use Linux, your emails, and more!

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systemd will be the default init for Debian Jesse

I hereby request that you begin the procedure for removing Ian Jackson
from his position in the TC. He has consistently derailed debates, engaged
in dishonest tactical voting methods, and tarnished the good reputation of
the TC. He is a nuisance to the Debian project and a dishonest man to
entrust with such responsibility.

Bdale uses his tiebreaker vote to make systemd the default init system in jessie

Thank you, Anthony, for your analysis of the votes.

Per 6.3.2, I use my casting vote to choose D as the winner.

Therefore, the resolution reads:

We exercise our power to decide in cases of overlapping jurisdiction
(6.1.2) by asserting that the default init system for Linux architectures in jessie should be systemd.

Should the project pass a General Resolution before the release of \”jessie\” asserting a \”position statement about issues of the day\” on init systems, that position replaces the outcome of this vote and is adopted by the Technical Committee as its own decision.

Bdale

Mailsack:

14 Year old Linux users and the \’The Linux Situation\’

The post Debian's systemd Decision | LINUX Unplugged 27 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Backend Lockin | CR 85

chris — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 11:53:56 +0000

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Back-end services are really helping developers focus on their core competency, but how quickly will you need to go outside the box? What about vendor lock-in?

Plus: A ton of great feedback, resisting the urge to hate change, and much more.

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Feedback

BaaS Problems?

Backend as a Service takes on scalability, lock-in issues
> \”These back-end services are really helping developers develop their code quicker, knowing that there are going to be less bugs, and less issues,\” said Stephen Feloney, director of product management at Appcelerator, provider of Appcelerator Cloud Services, a BaaS solution. \”Because they have those well-defined services already developed, already time-tested, it makes development much easier.\”
> The BaaS approach is also said to address the looming issue of vendor lock-in.
> \”Vendor lock-in was always a problem with the mobile middleware providers,\” explained Forrester\’s Facemire. \”With all of the Backend as a Service space, I\’ve not seen any of the vendors specify that if you use us, you have to use us for the lifetime of the app.\”

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The post Backend Lockin | CR 85 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Dedupe Gone Wrong | TechSNAP 107

chris — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:19:55 +0000

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Oracle patches 128 vulnerabilities, you won’t believe how many of them are critical.

Plus how twitter can solve their hacking problem, ZFS questions galore, and much much more!

On this week’s TechSNAP.

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Oracle releases patches for 128 vulnerabilities

Java received a Critical Patch Update to plug 42 known vulnerabilities
19 of these have a CVE score of 10/10
39 of the vulnerabilities apply to Java Web Start, a plugin that can be remotely exploited with authentication
The update also includes 25 new security fixes for MySQL , only 1 of which is remotely exploitable without authentication
Compared to Oracle Database which had 4 remote exploits without authentication
Other Oracle products had a bad time as well, Oracle Fusion Middleware patches fix 29 CVEs, 22 of which are remote exploits
MAKE SURE YOU UPDATE JAVA
In other news, Mark Reinhold, the chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle announced via his blog Java 8 will be delayed until 2014 to focus on fixing security problems with Java 7, and ensureing Java 8 is not more of the same
Security Explorations has updated their status report to reflect that the recent Java 7 update 21 fixes most of the outstanding reported vulnerabilities except #54 and #56 which Oracle has claimed are allowed behaviours, and #61 which was reported after the patch was related.

Twitter account hack leads to drop in the stock market

The Dow Jones and S&P 500 dropped after the twitter account of the Associated Press was compromised and posted a fake story about multiple explosions at the white house, stating that president Obama had been injured
It is reported that the drop in the S&P 500 caused by the fake news wiped out more than $136 billion in market value
This setback comes less than a month after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that companies can use social-media sites to share market-sensitive news
In a similar story, CBS temporarily lost control of two of if its twitter accounts, including @60Minutes
Twitter has promised to implement two-factor authentication, mainly relying on sending a text message to the user with a single use token
This raises the question of how two-factor authentication will interact with systems like hootsuite
Standard Two-Factor authentication poses problems for multi-user accounts like those operated by Media Outlets, as there is no single mobile number to send the two-factor token to
It appears that the attack that compromised the AP account may have just been brute force attempts at the password, which poses the question, does Twitter do enough to prevent such attacks?

Feedback:

Tzvi leaves us a voicemail.
Does Freebsd lacks the daemon to provide the “Hot Spare” functionality to a ZFS spare drive?
ZFS DeDupe is KILLING my box!
- As mentioned in the FreeNAS post above, a common figure is 5+GB of ram per TB of data. I think this also gets worse if you use a stronger hashing algorithm. They recommend using compression rather than dedup
Cheap pfSense Router?

[asa]B007GGGBM2[/asa]

Has a few years to get ready to jump into IT, where should he start?
CISPA and the IT guy. : techsnap

Round Up:

The post Dedupe Gone Wrong | TechSNAP 107 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

education – Jupiter Broadcasting

Wrong About Pop! | LINUX Unplugged 375

AWS 411: Christophe Limpalair | Jupiter Extras 53

Cyber Security Mistakes You’re Probably Making: Duncan McAlynn | Jupiter Extras 52

Old Man Embraces Cloud | Coder Radio 369

Linux Without Borders | User Error 63

Desktop As A Service | User Error 16

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.Net or .Not? | CR 165

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Hoopla

Keeping Current

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Middle School Sex Ed Test | FauxShow 214

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Linux Powered Schools | LINUX Unplugged 68

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Debian’s systemd Decision | LINUX Unplugged 27

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systemd will be the default init for Debian Jesse

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Backend Lockin | CR 85

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Dedupe Gone Wrong | TechSNAP 107

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