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According to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, an unnamed Samsung official says the company is conducting an investigation and is expected to announce the results this weekend or early next week. Samsung has indeed traced the explosions to the battery of the device and is in talks with Verizon and other U.S. business partners to figure out how to deal with the issue.

Hoopla

Qualcomm will reportedly not support Nougat on Snapdragon 800/801 Androids

Qualcomm “will not release graphics drivers” for either the 801 or 800 CPU, so the “HTC One M8 and other devices” based on said processors “won’t get official Android 7.0.” Going deeper, it sounds like this odd “refusal” to support a pair of still very robust SoCs relates to Nougat’s Vulkan API integration, a new high-performance 3D graphics standard the SD800 and 801 are simply not compatible with.

Apple Might Pull Your App!

Effective immediately Apple will be going through the App Store looking for apps that have not been properly maintained and ultimately will remove them from the App Store.

Seriously, turn in your Galaxy Note 7 before it explodes

A small percentage of units—35 have been identified so far—have exploded or caught fire while charging due to a flaw in the phone’s lithium battery. Yep, exploded.

In 1 minute, Slack founder will make you rethink how to sell innovation

What we are selling is _not _the software product — the set of all the features, in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this software product.

Apple Invites Media to September 7 Event: ‘See You on the 7th’ – Mac Rumors

Apple today sent out media invites for an iPhone-centric event that will be held on Wednesday, September 7 at 10:00 am at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California. Media invites (via The Verge) offer up a first look at the theme of the event and feature the simple tagline: “See you on the 7th.”

Spec Sheet Shows iPhone 7 Plus With 256GB Storage and Lightning EarPods – Mac Rumors

A photo claiming to show a specification sheet for a 256GB-capacity iPhone 7 Plus has been circulating online today.

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Pmbenjamin comments on Docker Dumpster Fire | CR 220

The post Bag of jQuery | CR 221 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Let Accidents Happen | WTR 54

chris — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 10:47:28 +0000

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

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Interview – Jo Wollschlaeger – @jo_wollsch

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The post Let Accidents Happen | WTR 54 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Starting At 8 | WTR 52

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

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

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Technology For Connection | WTR 43

chris — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 02:43:04 +0000

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Jaime is the founder of Neologic, digital destinations so far include cornbreadapp and Poetry for Robots. Two completely inspirational concepts created in their lab!

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ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: ANGELA: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: ANGELA: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: ANGELA: JAIME: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: PAIGE: JAIME: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: JAIME: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: JAIME: ANGELA: PAIGE: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
And I’m Angela.
So, Angela, today we’re going to interview Jaime, and she is–
Amazing.
Super amazing. She runs a digital advertising agency, and they have done lab work and they’re kind of producing these interesting futurist apps and we go down that awesome rabbit hole, and it’s a great interview.
And before we get into that, I just want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio and the Jupiter Broadcasting Network by going to Patreon.com/today. There is no minimum donation, but if you want to donate like $3.00 a month, it’s available. If you want to donate more, that’s great too. But Women’s Tech Radio is funded that way, so go to Patreon.com/today.
We rely on you, the listeners, to make sure these awesome shows keep coming out. So check it out. And we get started today by asking Jaime to tell us a bit about her agency and what she’s up to.
So, I run a company, it’s called Neologic, and we do digital marketing for all sorts of companies, but we also have a lab which is pretty common these days, but we’re an extremely small team, so for us, it’s challenging in the right way to keep the lab open. But in the lab, we’ve developed in-house app and also a website theory. I don’t really know how to describe it in two words. But yeah, we’re doing that in the lab and it’s been really exciting. We’re just hitting our year mark of being in business.
Awesome. Congratulations. So what is extremely small?
Five employees, and then we stretch into contractors, but that’s the core.
Okay. That is extremely small. Do you participate in the lab with 20 percent time? Or do you have dedicated employees that are just lab employees?
We’re not big enough to have fully dedicated people in the lab, but I would say the partners, we spend a lot of time doing labs projects. There is a lot of interesting marketing runoff that comes out of those projects too, so we kind of invest our time there. And then our team, I would say spends probably, yeah, about like ten to 20 percent of their un-billable time on labs work. And I’d like to increase it, obviously, but we need a few more people before we can do that.
So, for people who aren’t necessarily in the lingo, what does lab mean to you?
So, a lab to us is where we, if you use like the scientific analogy, it’s where we really mix up our chemicals and try to figure out what’s going to explode without doing that at a client’s expense. We’re in digital, we’re trying to be innovative. There is much to learn, but also for a small company, research and development I feel like is critical to growing and to making sure that you fill the market gap appropriately and that you flex when you need to. So it’s really our research and development time. It’s also our team building time. So if we’re all a bunch of people who are going to go home and drink Mountain Dew and try to build apps in our own time, why not just build time into the work day when we’re not trying to juggle family and kids and schedules, why don’t we just build that time in because we all love spending time together and we love working on creative projects. And so that’s what we’re trying to do. And I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done in a short time in the lab. So the app that we released, it took us about four months to design and develop it, and then we did a soft launch and then we just did a bigger launch. We already have about 400 people using that app, and that’s pretty cool for something that was really a short term project.
You’re talking about Cornbread?
We’re talking about Cornbread.
What is Cornbread?
So, Cornbread is a geocaching, for lack of a better term, it uses geocaching technology, and we think of it as an art based app. So, it’s location based and social, but you don’t have to be friends with certain people to see what they’ve left behind. So imagine you have a friend who went to Rome, and they have this app with them and they’re walking through Rome and they’re leaving you messages like they would if they were very romantic and they were leaving you a sticky note at the Pantheon and they told you you have to look around the side of this corner and I stuck it on this piece of brick, and go see if it’s still there. So they’re doing that, but digitally. So they’re leaving you messages on a map. You go to Rome, they’ve tagged you so you know that they’re there. You can see them on the map, but the actual art asset won’t pop up on your phone unless you’re in that location exactly on the map.
Wow. So within what kind of distance?
Right now it’s about 100. We’re trying to integrate Beacon technology so that we can hone that in a little closer. But right now it’s about 100 feet.
My gosh, that’s so cool. You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that the road trip would have been a great place for viewers-
To Cornbread. That’s awesome.
That’s exactly right, and so it’s been, name, people are like what? That’s a weird name. But the name is in homage to the original tagger. So there was this guy in the 60s, he was tagging his name all over the city in Philadelphia, which I happen to be from there.
Like spray paint tagging?
Spray paint. He was like the original I’m going to tag my name on something, and why don’t I go to Philadelphia Zoo and tag my name on an elephant? So he was that guy. And so it’s kind of for people who followed graffiti at all or graffiti art, they know him and so they get it. Like we did our soft launch in New York and everyone knew the background. On the west coast it’s a little more underground. Not as prevalent. Not that the app is graffiti, but in a way, you’re leaving his piece of art on a wall potentially and anyone can find it. There’s no closure, only my friend or a friend of a friend can see this. It’s like I’m just leaving this here and if someone opens it and I see it on my phone that someone opened my little memento that I left in a part somewhere in Austria, which I just did that this summer. If someone opens that, I am going to be so excited! Like I don’t need to get a million likes, I just need one person to open that little thing that I left behind. And you can leave audio and video.
And multiple people can open it, right?
Anyone can open it, yep.
But the person that originally left that digital art, they are notified? And not only notified that it was viewed, but also then could gain likes?
Yes.
Wow. That’s really cool and comments, right?
And comments, yep.
So it’s like a Facebook for travelers sort of–geo-based Instagram? It’s visual, right?
It is visual.
We could argue about that one.
You can’t lay in bed and look at people’s pictures. You can’t spy on people. It forces you to connect again-
And get out of the house!
You have to get out of the house. If you leave crumbs in your house, trust me, I’ve done it because I’ve tested this app a lot, they’re really boring. And then you realize when you live in an urban area and people walk 100 feet from your house and they can see your crumbs, you’re like ah! Delete, delete, my crumbs need to be cool! So it forces you to really get out there and think about what you’re seeing and document it in a way that means something to you. It’s not caption-y. There’s no caption, hashtag, at symbol, there’s none of that long form text. You can just leave-
Is it not even allowed? Like you cannot use a hashtag?
There’s a text box. Let’s just say it’s frowned upon. The whole goal is to leave sort of a whole list of assets. You don’t just have a photo, you click on the photo and you get to see the long poem that someone left with that photo and you get to hear the ambient sound when they took that photo. So it just enriches the moment that you’re standing in that space where that person was. And the best part is going to be in 20, 30 years when you’re like oh my God! Okay, maybe if this existed 100 years ago let’s say, there could be so many people that were like whoa, I just found Einstein’s crumb! This is amazing! He was sitting at this table writing out his algorithm on a napkin!
So let’s think about the future then. There is going to be a point where like, okay, everybody goes to the Eiffel Tower. Like a lot of people go there, and there’s going to be so many crumbs. Like how do you even differ? I’d be curious what the interface looks like. Is it just a list of all the different crumbs in the area? And do you have to like click on them kind of like an email? Is it like an inbox?
So, what happens is you get a notification that says there are crumbs here, and then what it is is it’s just a scrolling box. So you just scroll through all the crumbs that are there and then when there is one that looks interesting, you tap on it and it expands to the whole crumb.
And how do you know if it’s interesting? Is that text based or visual?
Visual typically. Or if you’re just like oh, this one got a million likes, what’s this one all about? But on the map, it is a problem that we’re going to have to solve, and I’m excited for that problem. But we call it crumb clutter, because on the map–we did a soft launch in New York. We just did another launch in Chicago, and once you’re in an urban area, crumbs start to crop up on the map and then there are so many you have to zoom in a lot to sort of specifically see where they are. If you just look at Chicago on the map, it’s just full of crumbs. You can’t see the word Chicago anymore. So it’s a good problem to have and a problem that’s definitely on the back burner of like new features to dive into, but we’re waiting for the problem to get a little bigger before we try to solve it.
Can you make private crumbs at all?
You will be able to, also a version two. Our dreamy version is that you leave a love note for your person, and you go to a bridge and it’s 5:00 and you’re watching this amazing sunset, and you tell them that they have to come to the bridge during a sunset, so certain time of the day, certain kind of weather, only come with an umbrella when there is a light drizzle, and the app will be able to pull in the API from the weather app and pull from all these various things so that it knows that nope, sorry, you didn’t hit the requirement.
Right, but if you do, it unlocks the crumb?
Yes.
Yeah, I could see proposals happening this way.
Yes, it’s very romantic. I feel like it’s a very romantic app, and I met some people recently and they were talking about wow, it’s like you’re leaving ghosts. Like you walk into a place and you wonder like are there ghosts in this room? Are there crumbs in here that I could see and start to see this kind of alternate universe that’s happening in this space?
This is a whole new level of like– it reminds me of QR codes.
I feel like this is some of the bridge that we’re getting to with the fact that AR is right on the horizon. Imagine when people are walking around with the glasses and there’s a crumb and the crumb is actually an overlay on your world.
Wow, my mind is blown.
Isn’t it fun? That’s why we want to have labs, because that’s stuff that we want to work on. That’s the stuff that blows our minds that we like to dream up and fantasize about and then just see if we can do it. and the story behind Cornbread that I just love, and it’s just so fun to me, like right around the time when we launched our business, so the developer and my other partner took a walk and they were standing by the skate park under the Burnside Bridge, and my partner Corey Pressman said, “You know, these guys are taking videos of themselves, but what happens to those videos? Like where are they? And if another skater comes here in an hour, what if he wants to see what that other guy just did and he can’t because it lives somewhere in that guy’s private phone, Cloud, private YouTube site or whatever-“
I have goosebumps. Goosebumps.
Wouldn’t it just be cool if he could drop a video of himself here, and then someone else can come back and see it and be inspired by that and then they leave a bunch? And literally they came back, I was like let’s go get lunch, they came back, they’re like Jaime, we’ve got this idea! I’m like what? And I was like this is amazing! This is going to be amazing!
You could even then, there’s a whole other market there where you can pile the videos into short clips so that people could see like here’s our park, all the different people that have–you run into a TNCs is going to have to be pretty expansive to cover publicly releasing those videos. But wow.
Yeah, super fun. And you know, at the end of the day, I’m kind of like the penny pincher project manager person in our business, and so I allocated a certain amount of hours and a certain amount of funds. We raised a little bit of seed money which was really exciting, and I was like you know, let’s just take it as far as we want to take it. Let’s just live with it in the state that it’s in. We don’t have to raise like $5 million. Let’s just let people use it. it’s free, people have all these ideas, and we get people coming up to us all the time with use case scenarios, and we’re like that is amazing! Do it. Like there’s nothing to stop you. Use it. Like go use it and see if it’s going to be great. We’re not in this like oh, we’re trying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. We run an agency and we love running an agency and we love working with our clients and we love working together. We have an amazing team, and so we’re good. I’m like, you know what? This is such an amazing project to work on as a team. Whatever comes of it, it was a positive experience. So great. You know, like it’s so nice to not have the pressure of like this is the only thing we’re working on. Like we have a revenue stream for the business, so we don’t have to put all our time and effort and like blow out our 401Ks and put all or dice on this one project. It’s like that’s just one project. We might come up with another one that’s even better.
And you have, right? Not necessarily better, but you have another project called Poetry for Robots.
That’s right.
And now that I read the, just the two questions that you have on the main page, it totally makes sense and it’s genius! So it says, “What if we used poetry and metaphor as metadata? Would a search for eyes return images of stars?”
Yeah, so this is why it’s like a website theory.
Yeah, it absolutely it’s Poetry for Robots. It’s beating the inhuman aspect of technology in a sense. Writing poetry for technology to get it closer to-yeah, wow.
Yeah, it’s fun. It’s trying to say rather than having all these interns at Getty Images putting these random tags on photos that are not–that have no metaphor, that have no poetry, they’re just like oh, tree, done. Tree.png, treewithsun.png. And so what we’re trying to experiment with is if we added more metaphor to the way we tagged things, can we train the robot, can we train the AI to give us a response that it’s not that we’re training them to be more human, we’re just training them to do what we do instead of trying to accommodate like some data push, okay, great, we have X number of hours to get these number of assets compiled and into this database, so we have to do it really fast. Like wait, just slow down for a minute. Like let’s think about the tags that we’re using because people could have more, and this is an interesting just overall search question, but people could potentially find what they’re looking for better because they’re searching for the terms rather than trying to conform the terms that they would search for if that makes any sense.
And for something that’s not so obvious as eyes, something like freedom. How do you find a picture of freedom? That would definitely work for something like that.
Yeah, so we’ve collected over almost 2000 poems, and they are from all over the world. It’s amazing. Like we have used a lot of Google Translate to get through some Portuguese and German and Spanish and French. It’s amazing. I love that part, number one because again, it’s this kind of like romantic, it’s a bridging of romance and technology and I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic. So we have all these poems, and so we built this back end. It’s very simple. The technology behind this is very simple, but we built kind of just a janky search tool to see what would start coming up if we searched the poems. So if you go to the search, I’m not sure if I’m ready to make it public, but I could send it to you guys if you just want to play with it, but if you go into the search engine and you search for sorrow, you see all of the pictures that come up that use that word in the poem. And it’s incredible. And what’s really fun, I’ve searched for things like alone, and the things that come up are surprising. Like there are pictures of crowds or something like that where you start to see the way people interpret that word, and multiple people. It’s not that we have this huge cross cut of people, but I mean, 2000 is a good small little case study.
You have enough to be statistically significant.
Yeah, right? And so anyway, so it’s just been really fun to see what comes up. And then the next version is that people are going to be able to submit their own photos, because right now we just have a lot of stock photos in there, things to unsplash. So, yeah, it will be interesting too when people have their own photos, and then other people are writing poems to other people’s photos. That’s going to be really fun.
Seriously, this blows my mind. I love it. It’s teaching search engines, you’re teaching them simile and metaphor.
Yeah.
It’s almost impossible.
In a totally community based way. Again, we’re not like oh, we’re going to run some ads and the more traffic we get to our website, which is what we do for our clients, right? We’re like let’s drive more traffic and we’re going to drive the traffic from here and there and then we’re going to follow the analytics it’s like we don’t care about that. This is all about romance. This is all about unbillable time that doesn’t matter because we have an awesome agency, and if we build a tool, this is what’s fun about it too. If we build this cool tool, we can go out and talk to clients that maybe we couldn’t talk to before and say you know what, this tool could be really effective in a fun way as you’re building a campaign, this might be a really interesting way to get people engaged with your content.
Wow, yeah.
So, it’s fine. We don’t have to run ads or get people to go there and buy something. I’m so tired of that.
The end goal is not to like be a Getty Images competitor, right?
Right.
But it is one venue or one option potentially for the tool.
Yeah, for sure.
I think everybody who listens should totally go check this out. It’s Poetry4Robots.com, and it will be the show notes, but I’m definitely going to write a poem or two in my crappy poetry. It’s fascinating. Definitely very cool.
And the poems are not crappy. That’s what’s so great.
You haven’t read mine yet.
I’ll reserve judgement, okay?
I’ll go there tomorrow and then I’ll pull out the crappy ones. Some of them, you know, I mean, everyone’s got their own take on the way that they see the world, but they’re all really worth reading. I would love to figure out some way to get permission to make them a little more public, because I love the community side of it. I love that somebody from Brazil thought it would be cool to go on this website and write a poem to the same picture that someone in North Portland is writing a poem to. And how do those two different people see, so that’s the other, we’re adding geotagging to the pictures too so we can see where people are when they write the poem if they choose. We’re not doing that in any conspiratorial way. They have to enter their ZIP code if they want that. But that part’s fun too. Wow, two people looked at the same picture and had two totally different takes on it.
Very cool. You should put the public option in the same way you put the ZIP code in. Like can we make this public?
Yeah.
That would be awesome.
Yeah.
Very cool. So, Jaime, how did you get into all of this? Like this is crazy all over the map. It sounds like you’re mostly into PM and being I would call you a futurist. How did you wind up here?
Yeah, it’s been a long road. I’m not young. I had to make a lot of mistakes and change career paths a couple times to get where I was going. But ultimately, I’m a film maker and I don’t make films anymore, but I still like to call myself a film maker. So I have this brain that thinks about things and I love science fiction. So I think about things as a story, and I think about things as what would this look like if it was a movie, and I think that helps me wrap my head around technology, because I think of technology the same way I would build the pieces of a film. And luckily because I have a production background, I know that it takes the steps from A to B to make something happen. And so I’m not just like a person who’s like you know what would be cool? Let’s do this blah, blah, blah, I’m like well, actually, that’s not going to be possible. So let’s bring it back down to reality and figure out how we can actually build something that we could actually launch and actually get out to the public sphere. But yeah, I have a film degree. I went from film to the big Silicon Valley days. So right when I graduated from college was when the tech industry was going crazy, and so of course, I couldn’t find a job in film, but I very easily found a job in software development just through networking. So I ended up learning how to code right out of college, and I didn’t really care because I was in my 20s and I wasn’t like oh my God, I have to be a filmmaker. I was like whoa, I graduated college and I’m making money. This is amazing! And the people were great. It was my first, I’ve basically exclusively been with startups ever since then and it’s really hard, it’s a grind, but I get it. I think that’s why I’ve been able to run what I hope is a successful business for a year without any major pitfalls. But anyway, so these guys started this company, it was web based software, it was way before there were like log in sites where a client could log in and use their own software. It was really cutting edge for the time. So I built web based software, and I did that for a while, and that was in California. And then I had some friends move up to Portland and they were trying to get me to come and I didn’t know what I was going to do, and then that company let me actually work from home. And so that was huge. So I was working for this amazing startup company with great people. They were seeing a lot of growth, and then I was like whoa, what? I get to sit in my living room at home and do this with my dial up internet connection? No joke. And so I did, and that was kind of like my launching point with Portland, but when I was in Portland, I wanted to work in film because it was also burgeoning at that time and you could actually go on set and meet [indiscernible]. I’m like whoa, what? My brain is exploding. Like these people are here and you can just like go and work with them? That doesn’t happen in California. So anyway, so I started working at the film center and the Northwest Film Center is where I met every single person that’s been critical to my career path, every single person. And one of them works for me right now. And the other one hired me to work in mobile. So that community for whatever reason was where I needed to be and I got, I volunteered there so it got me out of my house. Eventually I started working there. I did marketing for the film center for a number of years. Got me back into the film community, but I was still really interested in technology. And so, on the side, I started teaching technology classes to kids because I just loved that, and then eventually I started teaching at a school, I was like their IT support, which that was really funny because if you’re coding–a lot of people don’t know this–but if you’re a coder, you’re not a systems administrator. But somehow they thought that if I could work on a website I could also work on their network system for the whole school. So I tried to do that which was fine.
Aren’t you one of those magical Devops unicorns?
No, I’m not even a developer. I just like learned how to do HTML at a young age and got lucky. But I don’t even consider myself a developer coder. So anyway, yeah, I worked in the school which led me to working in summer camps which was amazing, and I also worked from home and I got to write technology curriculum for kids who wanted to learn coding and 3D game design and website design, and then there was this other opportunity to start a documentary film camp, so I started teaching kids how to do digital editing and after effects. So it’s like film and technology and that was a dream job. And then I met this guy, you know, age old story, met this guy and like started to get into fall in love and then career path didn’t seem as important. So I fell in love with this guy who happened to live in Europe, so I basically like quit my job and just moved to Europe and did that and just like taught and wrote and did that. And then when I came back, I got this amazing opportunity to work with a friend of mine from the film center helping grow her very small mobile agency, and it was called Night and Day Studios. And that was basically my MBA training, on the job training. That experience was so life changing and critical on every level. I just owe them everything. It was amazing. So, we built this amazing team, we grew from three people to 25 people in two years. We’ve opened an office in New York, we started working with very small companies, and at the end, we were working with Warner Brothers, Sesame Street, basically everyone like Thomas the Tank Engine, we were focused on kid’s media, and it was all education and all technology and bridging those two worlds of like what’s safe for kids, what do you want to release to kids and feel good about. And I got to combine everything that I had been doing my whole life like trying to work with kids. There was like this film component because there was animations and we had to do voice overs, and sometimes take like pieces of film and embed them in the apps, and it was exciting, super great. I guess part of that I probably shouldn’t talk about. So like all of the things I said I could talk about, there’s some details of that situation that I probably shouldn’t get into, but it was amazing! And then I went from that and went into advertising which was an interesting jump, but also same thing, I like owe that work so much. So I worked for Swift, and Swift is a digital marketing company. When I started there, they really were web focused, and during the time I was there they really shifted into focus on social only. But they did all the content creation, so they had a studio in house, they do videos, they do photography shoots, so it’s still tying into that, but I got to run the whole production team. So I got to really put my management chops to work, and see if that little tiny night and day studio thing was real. I could like test it in the real world working with more really big brands, really interesting work, and just fantastic people. The people that work at Swift are just amazing. I ran the producer team, and they got acquired and they just started growing really fast. And at that point, I was just thinking like I love that small team vibe. Like I love a startup thing where everyone gets to be a part of every decision. We get to collaborate, we get to dream up possibilities. We’re not in this like cranking out stuff that we may or may not feel good about, but everyone’s working like 13, 14 hours and we’re burning ourselves out and nobody gets to actually like use their creative energy because they’re using it all on stuff that isn’t really that creative. And I saw that grind and just knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do it for very long, so I decided to jump and I just jumped right into Neologic from there. And it was petrifying, very petrifying, but I had a lot of good support, and even people I worked with were so supportive. They’re like this is the right move for you, like this is where you need to be right now. And so yeah, so sorry, that was a long story, but that’s kind of the path.
That’s kind of the point and an awesome story. Your journey is really interesting and deep and it’s very cool to hear about it. I think we’ll have some links the show notes if you guys want to check out some more of that. I did have one last question for you, just because we kind of talked about it earlier. But if you could look down the pipe of what’s coming in technology, what do you think is either like the most exciting thing or the thing that you want to dig into the most?
Interesting question. That’s so good. It’s interesting because we’re all trying to keep pace with what’s coming, and so much of it, because I was in advertising, so much of it is based on that. So oh, what’s happening in mobile advertising and what’s happening with new ways to get content in front of people. That stuff doesn’t interest me, and I think at some point people are going to get really burned out on it. And I think people are already really savvy I think as technology grows, the consumer gets more and more savvy. We already know that audiences have become more savvy, but it’s just getting more and more. And the whole like driving traffic to advertising thing, I mean, it works and there’s formulas that work. But anyway, I think that level of technology and what’s happening with the watch, that stuff doesn’t interest me. It’s really, and I don’t want to sound like I’m tooting my own horn, but I mean, it’s really the stuff that brings people back together that interests me most. So new apps that aren’t necessarily social networks, but integrate ways to communicate with each other. So I would even say like things like Uber or apps and websites like Etsy, that’s the technology that interests me. Like the fact that you can be sitting in your living room making a necklace and then put it on a website, and the next thing you know, you get to divert your career into that, I love that level of technology. I love Airbnb, I love Uber, I love that a guy could like get off work, come pick me up, drop me off at home, and then go back home to eat dinner with his family, like so that’s the level of technology that I am interested in, and I don’t know that, I can’t like predict that there is something new on the horizon, but I think the more of those sort of game changing applications come out, I think the more relevant and applicable to people it will be and hopefully the big brands will understand that all they have to do is come up with something that’s going to help people, and they won’t have to worry about advertising so much.
Did you hear about Amazon’s latest move? You can deliver Amazon packages.
Oh, no, I did not.
If I remember correctly, it pays like $15. To $18 an hour and you can just show up to the delivery center and bring the package to a destination. Like if you’re already going that direction, or if that’s just what you want to do, be your own boss and deliver packages, then do it.
It’s like post maids and ship and all these different things. I think yeah, it’s where technology is kind of taking this turn where we’re looking again at technology as a tool instead of as like technology for connection instead of technology for consumption.
Right.
Exactly. That is a great way of fitting it. Exactly.
Very cool. Well, I am also excited about these things, and I will look forward to seeing what your studio puts out. Everybody should check out Cornbread, that’s super cool. I will definitely be trying to crumb.
Cornbreadapp.com.
Yeah, and Poetry for Robots.
And Neologic.co.
Yeah, awesome. Jaime, is there any way people can follow you? Are you a Tweeter or anything like that?
Yes, I’m @JaimeGennaro.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember that the show notes are available at JupiterBroadcasting.com. There is also a contact form, or you can email us directly, WTR@Jupiterbroadcasting.com
You can also find us on iTunes, and if you have a minute, we would love to hear a review from you. You can also follow us on Twitter @heyWTR. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Technology For Connection | WTR 43 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

A Computer Should Do This | WTR 38

chris — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 12:33:16 +0000

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Jen is an engineer at Esri portland R&D office. She lived out of a youth hostel when she came across a startup that got her on her path!

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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 speak with my friend Jen who is a developer at Esri. She works on a wide variety of awesome technology. So we get into talking a little about that and about her career and how she kind of took a leap and headed out to San Francisco and lived out of a youth hostel and all the crazy other things that she got into, and now how she’s influencing the community of Women in Portland.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, you can go to Patron.com/today to support Women’s Tech Radio. It is a monthly donation that automatically comes out. It could be $3, it could be $5, whatever you can afford. Whatever you think that this content is worth, really. It’s up to you. We are community funded, this show is, and if you find value in the show you can go over there to Patreon.com/today to support Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: And our first question today was to ask Jen what she’s up to at Esri.
JEN: Hey guys. I am an engineer at Portland R&D office and what I’ve been doing lately is working on an iOS SDK for our location enabled software. And occasionally I do things like Ruby and everyone once in a while in go, but right now I”m doing a lot of iOS stuff.
PAIGE: So, do you enjoy it? Are you in Swift? Are you still in Objective C?
JEN: Yeah, we’re still in Objective C because we’re doing the next iteration of an existing SDA, but hopefully eventually we will move to Swift. I haven’t actually gotten the chance to work in Swift yet, so that will be cool.
PAIGE: I definitely recommend playing around with the playground that they published. It’s very fun.
JEN: Yeah.
PAIGE: It definitely, I think they did a good job of answering a lot of those got yous that we have from Objective C, which was neat. So you work in kind of a wide range of technology there. You’ve got some mobile, some web, some really close to the middle stuff with Go. What’s your favorite?
JEN: I guess, I would say probably Rube, because, I don’t know, it’s just so, I think it’s so expressive compared to language, well I guess Objective C, you know, is going to kind of be around forever, but it is a bit clunky to write in and that is occasionally kind of frustrating. But, I don’t know, I guess I would say that in my career I’ve used Ruby the longest so that’s probably my favorite.
PAIGE: If you, when you say expressive for people who aren’t super familiar, either with Ruby or with programing, what do you mean by that?
JEN: Um, I guess I mean that you can kind of massage the language to sort of — they’re say like what you want to say in a variety of different fashions. Like how in a sentence you can say the boy jumped over a log, or over the log jumped a boy. Or, you know, in a bunch of different varieties. And you have some flexibility. And also, I think that Ruby is just, I enjoy it’s thorsness and its-
PAIGE: Readability?
JEN: Yeah. It’s readability. And you don’t have to write a ton of code to say something that you’re going to have to say all the time.
PAIGE: Can I just ask why other modern languages don’t have the each function? Like that just boggles my mind.
JEN: Yeah. It’s so nice, isn’t it?
PAIGE: It is very nice. Yes. And so that was a super inside developer joke.
ANGELA: I know.
PAIGE: That Angela is totally not clued on.
ANGELA: Shoulder shrug.
PAIGE: That’s okay. Very cool. So you do a lot of development in our day-to-day. What does your tool stack look like? What kind of tools are you using on a daily basis? Obviously, probably Xcode.
JEN: Yes, definitely Xcode. I use TeamX a lot in terminal.
PAIGE: I love it.
JEN: Yeah. I would say those are my two main things.
PAIGE: So I meat a lot of young ladies, or women, who are getting into technology because I teach an intro to Javascript course. And one of the things that people are the most scared about is the terminal.
JEN: Hmm.
PAIGE: What do you think I could say to people to get them through that? Because I am a TeamX vimmer. Like I spend the entire day in the terminal.
JEN: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s a — that’s an interesting question. It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around that because it’s just like where I live all the time, you know?
PAIGE: Yeah.
JEN: LIke what would it be like to breath underwater?
PAIGE: Well, as a fish, I would like to tell you, it’s like breathing.
JEN: Yeah, just tell them that. It’s like breathing. And don’t elaborate at all. Just be like, it’s like breathing.
PAIGE: So, is terminal, or really any of this, is this something you taught yourself? Do you have a degree? I actually don’t know any of your story on this.
JEN: Actually, I don’t have a degree. When I was growing up in New Jersey I went to Rutgers University in New Jersey and I studied there, more or less I guess you could call it studying, for a year. And then it was the height, well not the height, the beginningish of the first dot com boom in 1998. And I was like, I want to go out and be a part of that. So I moved to San Francisco and I lived in a youth hostel for six months. But then I eventually got a job at a startup and I just kind of was in the right place at the right time and they’re like hey you’re smart and plucky. Why don’t you be a developer? And I was like, all right.
PAIGE: Plucky is an amazingly good way to describe you, actually.
ANGELA: It is. I love that word.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s great. So you just kind of dove in at the startup level, what was that like? Like, especially, you know, as we’ve talked about on the show before, like we’re kind of in a minority in tech. And I know definitely at that point in history-
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: How did that all go for you?
JEN: Yeah. Oh, it was amazing. It was like — it was such a heady time and people are just crazy about technology. I worked like 80 hour weeks and slept under my desk. And I just wanted to learn everything that there was to learn about software development. And it was just so fun. I was definitely in a huge minority as a woman, but I don’t know. I guess I was very naive about that, being 19 years old. But it was a lot of fun.
PAIGE: What were you doing at first? In ‘98, I don’t even know what language that would have been.
JEN: Yeah. I first started out being a front-end developer and I was doing like — I worked at this emarketing company and so we got these HTML templates from these corporations that we were doing newsletters for. And so we had to convert the HTML into XML and use our proprietary tags in there for the different offers and links that people click on to track them. And so I found that very boring. So I decided to learn how to program so I could automate my job away.
ANGELA: Nice.
PAIGE: That is exactly how I got into real programing. I was like this is boring. A computer should do this.
JEN: Exactly. Yeah. And so the first language that I learned was Perl, because it was good at text manipulation. I think somebody just said you should use Perl and I was like all right I’ll learn that. And that was kind of how it all started.
PAIGE: Perl is exactly the reason that I took a 10 year hiatus from learning programing.
JEN: Oh really?
PAIGE: Yeah. I was in high school and I had gotten super into HTML and CSS and and building web pages. And this was before Javascript was really a thing. And I was like I kind of want to learn some stuff. ANd my friend was like, you should learn CGI Perl. And I was like, okay that sounds cool. He’s like yeah, get the llama book, which is the O’Reilly book which made the O’Reilly books famous, actually. And I kind of got through the first chapter and was ready to throw it out the window, because they dove right into what people call-
JEN: Yeah.
PAIGE: Perl Golf, which is the fact that with with Perl you can write very, very complex functions in 20 characters or less.
ANGELA: Hmm.
PAIGE: And it was just super intimidating and I didn’t understand any of it. And I was like, well I will do kind of designy things, maybe, for a little while. And so I did HTML and CSS just for funsies for years, because Perl had blow me out of the water.
JEN: Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting.
ANGELA: How did you learn Perl? Did you take a course? Did you find somebody that knew it that could teach you? Did you just Google it?
JEN: I actually, well, Google was kind of — probably wouldn’t have bene very helpful at that time.
ANGELA: Yeah. Yeah, I realized that as soon as I said it.
JEN: But I did-
PAIGE: You could Yahoo it.
ANGELA: Yeah. Yeah.
JEN: Yeah, I Yahoo’d it.
PAIGE: Or dog pile. Do you remember Dog Pile?
ANGELA: Ask Jeeves.
PAIGE: Oh, even better.
ANGELA: Anyway, go ahead.
JEN: And so I just read, I read Learning Perl. And I was just like — It was a huge flog to get through it. And that kind of, what Paige just said, reminded me of how hard it was to learn programming when I didn’t know how to do it. You know, now I read a book and it’s like oh how is this different from everything else I know.
ANGELA: Right.
JEN: You know, how is this new language different. But when I was first learning it, it was just, it was really hard. But I was just really motivated to not do this boring work anymore, I guess. And I thought it was really fun. Even though it was challenging to wrap my brain around. But it was — just reading a book and trying stuff yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, it was definitely a different ear. So since then you’ve learned several other languages. LIke what does your career look like from there to there. Because I know you’re not even in the same city anymore.
JEN: I do some of the same stuff. Like, I mean, it takes a lot less time to do stuff and I work on a larger team and on products rather than, yeah, service work. But I live in Portland now and I guess I’ve moved around a bunch since then. I lived in New York for a while and back to San Francisco and then now been in Portland about five years.
PAIGE: Crazy. Um, okay, so ‘98. You’ve been doing tech for 17 years?
JEN: Oh my god. Don’t say that out loud.
PAIGE: Well, but this brings up a really pertinent important question. That’s a long time, especially as a woman, to be in this field. You know, we know we’re kind of suffering this mass exodus of women from the tech field and have been for several years. How have you stayed fresh? How have you stayed in it, because almost every time I see you you’re super excited about things in tech or at least about women in tech
JEN: Uh-uh.
PAIGE: Like what is, what has kept you from burning out? From, from just saying screw it and walking out the door?
JEN: That is a good question. I, uh, I have nearly said screw it and walked out the door many times, definitely. ANd it has been a challenge to stay in the field. And I think that the longer that I stuck around the more that problems, which at the beginning i thought were because I was young and inexperienced, continued to linger and now I can’t really attribute them to like reasonable reasons, you know what I mean?
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
JEN: So it is, it is definitely a challenge to stick around. But I really get a lot out of doing volunteer work and working with women in tech stuff and getting other women on board and trying to change the environment, I guess.
ANGELA: Do you work with many other women?
JEN: I work with one other female developer, actually. And there are not many in this — well, not in — I don’t know about Esir at large, which is about 3,000 people, but in the Portland office there are not many developers and two of us are women.
PAIGE: So it’s not terrible, I guess. So you said you do volunteering. I happen to know that you — my understanding is that you are the lead or the director for Lesbians Who Tech in Portland?
JEN: Yeah. I am.
PAIGE: What is that organization about?
JEN: Well, we are mostly about creating a community for queer women and our allies in technology. And just sort of like getting people together and seeing what comes of it. Primarily like a social organization compared to some of the other ones in town that are more workshop based. I really enjoy seeing people become friends and just get together and they’re chatting about their jobs or their lives or what have you. It’s pretty rad.
PAIGE: I think that connecting in your professional space is super valuable on any level. Be it with people who identify the same way as you do or be it just with peers in your group. Super important. I actually get a lot of value. I have attended one or two of your events. I don’t know, yeah, I’m fairly busy. But I found them very edifying, i think is the right word for it.
ANGELA: You wanted to eat them?
PAIGE: No, uh-
ANGELA: I’m just kidding.
JEN: We’re very edible.
PAIGE: Not edible. Although I did eat at the meetup, does that count? I also had some excellent cyder. I’ve kind of been struggling personally lately with the burnout on that side too, where I’m so passionate about women’s issues in the tech sphere that I’m over extending. How do you reign that in carefully. Because I know that you’re involved in many of the same things that I’m involved in, and in fact, you even do more than I do frequently.
JEN: I don’t know about that, but that is definitely a balance challenge. I guess a lucky thing for me is that I often get to work on a little bit of volunteer stuff at Esri as part of our outreach. So that kind of cuts a few hours out the total numbers of hours that it takes to do stuff. But it definitely — I don’t know, it’s a labor of love. And can be a bit exhausting, but I find that people are — once you reach out to them for help everyone — not everyone but many people are more than willing to carry some of the burden and to give you ideas and to help out. So I find that relying on others is definitely a help.
PAIGE: Yeah, I can definitely agree with that lately. I’ve had a couple times where I’ve just had to say hey can somebody cover this meetup for me or can somebody help me with this task. And I was kind of surprised, pleasantly so, that so many people were willing to step up and help shoulder the load.
ANGELA: How many people typically come to the Lesbians Who Tech meetup?
JEN: We usually get around 20 people for kind of like the more happy hour type of stuff. For our next event, hopefully we’ll get a bunch more, because our head honcho Leanne Pittsford will be in town. Our numbers have been growing a lot since we got started in January.
ANGELA: Is there a website? Any easy website for that?
JEN: Oh, yeah. There is. Well, there is lesbianswhotech.org which is the main website. And also, we have a Facebook group, Lesbians Who Tech, Portland. And we also have a meetup group, Lesbians Who Tech PDX.
PAIGE: That’d be great. I mean, I just want to be involved in all the cool community things that are happening, because there’s so much happening. You and I have actually talked about this some at length, but I think there are so many women’s movements and I feel like if we could find the space and the time to kind of come together, we could change everything. Just everything. And I love that in Portland we’re actually kind of doing that. We have an upcoming meetup where all of the women’s groups bi-yearly, thanks to Jennifer, actually who started this, there’s kind of this group. We all get together. It’s just a happy hour, but our last one we had 150 women show up to.
ANGELA: That’s fantastic.
PAIGE: Yeah. It was just great. I did figure out my question though. How do you feel, especially as a senior developer at this point. You’ve definitely been in the industry a good long while, about mentorship? It’s a question that gets asked of me a lot. Both about finding a mentor, being a mentor. Do you feel like there’s a clear path for that? I feel like it’s kind of a valuable role in bringing junior developers up to speed, but it seems to be very hard to connect somehow.
JEN: Yeah. I think that is a bit murky as it currently stands. Kind of like, I know that at the meetups that I have and stuff like that, I definitely do, I think a lot of sort of informal mentorship. Because people will ask me questions about my job or my career and stuff and, you know, tell me their woes. And so in that way we kind of connect. But I haven’t had any formal mentorship situations yet. So, yeah. I think there’s definitely a space for that because it’s something that everyone seems to want, but no one really seems to know how to go about doing that.
PAIGE: It seems like, and I wonder if this is kind of reflective of some of the other issues that we have, specifically — and this is not exclusive to the women developer community. I also see this with male developers, but I can speak more personally to the women, obviously. And I find that the imposter syndrome is so strong that people are not willing to step out and say yes I”m someone who could mentor someone under me.
JEN: Interesting. That is a good point.
PAIGE: Yeah. And it’s definitely something that has really pushed me lately and I’m trying to — I’m working out of a boot camp right now and there’s — one of the students there has definitely decided that I’m essentially going to be her mentor. And it’s been wonderful. She comes to me, we talk about where she is in her journey, why she’s having trouble with different things. We got to have the long talk about breadth and depth of why you should learn more of one language before you learn lots of languages. Stuff like that. And then, you know, kind of advising her. Where she’s like, you know, I really, really was struggling with Python and Django, but as soon as I picked up Ruby in Rails, it just was like light bulbs went off. I’m like, you know, if that’s what lights your fire, even though we’ve had this other discussion, go down that path and I can help you with that. And I still feel, you know, many days like a junior developer. But there’s still someone under me who knows less.
ANGELA: Hi. That’s me.
PAIGE: Yeah. Which we are going to have some episodes.
ANGELA: She’s going to be my mentor.
PAIGE: We’re going to have some episodes where we teach-
JEN: Awesome.
PAIGE: -Angela some stuff.
JEN: Oh, nice. NIce.
ANGELA: Yeah.
JEN: It will be fun.
PAIGE: Yeah, so I would encourage you or anyone else to step out and at least — and it doesn’t have to be a formal relationship. I think we’re also scared of that, because everybody in the modern world is so busy and our time-
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: Our time is so precious.
ANGELA: We pack our schedules and, yeah. But you can always fit in an email here or a message there.
PAIGE: Yeah. Or just coffee or, you know, chat while you’re driving or whatever.
JEN: Yeah.
ANGELA: Or meetups.
PAIGE: Or meetups.
ANGELA: You’re already dedicated to be there.
PAIGE: Yes. Yeah. When I”m not leading, it’s helpful.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: You know, and do lightning talks. Everybody should do lightning talks.
JEN: Yeah. I need to like get over some public speaking fear.
PAIGE: Well, you should come. There’s a new event happening in Portland. It’s called Navigate IT. If anybody is in Portland and wants to check it out, it’s, we’re specifically trying to help with career skills as opposed to, like, coding skills.
JEN: Oh sweet.
PAIGE: So, like, we did an awesome workshop on imposter syndrome. And I think the next one, it’s up and we’ll get the link in the show notes, but I think one of the next ones is specifically public speaking.
JEN: Cool. That would be awesome. Yeah, we actually did one of those for Lesbians Who Tech for our last meetup. It was really good. I think everyone, I had Kristen Gallagher who is the founder of Edify.edu and she — you know her from the Act W Organizing team, but she gave a talk at the Act W Conference about doing talks and speaking in front of people. So I had her come and give everyone who gave a lightning talk some pointers and advice on what to try and how to improve their talks. And it was really good. It was very well received I think.
PAIGE: Awesome. Also, if you’re scared to even step out and do your first one, if you Google how to give a TED talk there is a great TED talk about how to give TED talks.
JEN: NIce.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: And I got a lot out of that. It was very informative.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget that we are on social networks, as it turns out. We are on Twitter, @heywtr. You can email us, WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com. We are on, well, JupiterBroadcasting.com. You can look at the back catalog of shows. And we’re on YouTube on the Jupiter Broadcasting channel.
PAIGE: You can also find us on iTunes where if you’ve got a minute you can leave a review and let us know how we’re doing with the show. If you want to get in touch, you can use the contact form on JupiterBroadcasting.com, selecting Women’s Tech Radio from the dropdown. Or you can email us at WTR@Jupiterbroadcasting.com. Thanks so much for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post A Computer Should Do This | WTR 38 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Technical Writing | WTR 37

chris — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 10:45:13 +0000

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

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Technical Writing | WTR 37 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

#talkpay Today | WTR 34

chris — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 04:01:26 +0000

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

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Transcription:

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post #talkpay Today | WTR 34 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Language Workbench | WTR 33

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

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

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Importance of Meetups | WTR 21

chris — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 12:20:23 +0000

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

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Unicorns Don’t Exist | WTR 15

chris — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 01:09:03 +0000

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

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Priyanka Sharma | WTR 11

chris — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 03:21:00 +0000

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

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WakaTime is fully automatic time tracking for programmers. Using open-source text editor plugins, you never need to start or stop a timer again.
3 Hacks to Increase Your Productivity
Priyanka on Twitter

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Backdoor Convergence | Tech Talk Today 32

chris — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 10:01:40 +0000

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We debunk the Microsoft convergence story surging through the press, Apple tries to debunk iOS backdoor accusations, the UK government chooses ODF & Firefox just made video on the web easy!

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Apple Addresses iOS ‘Backdoor’ Concerns by Outlining Legitimate Uses for Targeted Services

Earlier this week, forensic expert Jonathan Zdziarski attracted attention for his disclosures of what appeared to be “backdoors” in iOS that could allow for covert data collection of users’ information from their devices. While Apple issued a statement denying that anything nefarious was involved, the company has now posted a new support document (via Cabel Sasser) offering a limited description of the three services highlighted in Zdziarski’s talk.

Each of these diagnostic capabilities requires the user to have unlocked their device and agreed to trust another computer. Any data transmitted between the iOS device and trusted computer is encrypted with keys not shared with Apple. For users who have enabled iTunes Wi-Fi Sync on a trusted computer, these services may also be accessed wirelessly by that computer.

The three processes include:

com.apple.mobile.pcapd: Diagnostic packet capture to a trusted computer, used for diagnosing app issues and enterprise VPN connection problems.
com.apple.mobile.file_relay: Used on internal devices and can be accessed (with user permission) by AppleCare for diagnostic purposes on the user’s device.
com.apple.mobile.house_arrest: Used by iTunes for document transfer and by Xcode during app development and testing.

Apple Confirms “Back Doors”; Downplays Their Severity | Jonathan Zdziarski’s Domain

Apple is being completely misleading by claiming that file relay is only for copying diagnostic data. If, by diagnostic data, you mean the user’s complete photo album, their SMS, Notes, Address Book, GeoLocation data, screenshots of the last thing they were looking at, and a ton of other personal data — then sure… but this data is far too personal in nature to ever be needed for diagnostics. In fact, diagnostics is almost the complete opposite of this kind of data. And once again, the user is never prompted to give their permission to dump all of this data, or notified in any way on-screen. Apple insists AppleCare gets your consent, but this must be a verbal consent, as it is certainly not a technological consent. What’s more, if this service really were just for diagnostic use, you’d think that it would respect backup encryption, so that everything coming off the phone is encrypted with the user’s backup password.

I give Apple credit for acknowledging these services, and at least trying to give an answer to people who want to know why these services are there – prior to this, there was no documentation about file relay whatsoever, or its 44 data services to copy off personal data. They appear to be misleading about its capabilities, however, in downplaying them, and this concerns me. I wonder if the higher ups at Apple really are aware of how much non-diagnostic personal information it copies out, wirelessly, bypassing backup encryption. All the while that Apple is downplaying it, I suspect they’ll also quietly fix many of the issues I’ve raised in future versions. At least I hope so. It would be wildly irresponsible for Apple not to address these issues, especially now that the public knows about them.

iOS: About diagnostic capabilities

UK government officially adopts Open Document Format • The Register

The United Kingdom government has formally adopted the open document format (ODF) as the standard format for government documents.

The announcement says PDF/A or HTML are now the standard “for viewing government” while ODF is now expected “for sharing or collaborating on government documents.”

BBC News – Windows development set to be ‘unified’ by Microsoft

Chief executive Satya Nadella discussed the effort while briefing analysts following Tuesday’s earnings update.

“We will streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes,” he said.

It does bring Microsoft closer to another OS developer, Canonical, which has promoted the idea of its Ubuntu system powering both phones and desktops. Canonical previously highlighted that one benefit of this strategy was that a handset could double up as a low-power desktop PC if it was plugged into a monitor and connected to a mouse.

What ‘one Windows’ really means (and doesn’t)

Later in the call, Nadella attempted to clarify his remarks, but not in time to stop the breathless headlines.

1. A single team developing all Windows variants. This team has been in place since July 2013 when Microsoft created the unified Operating System Group under Terry Myerson. This team works on the Windows Phone OS, Windows Embedded, Windows (for PCs and tablets) and the Xbox One operating systems.

2. A single “core.” Windows Phone, Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Server are all built on top of a common “core,” known as the NT core. Because of Microsoft’s layered architectural approach, each OS builds on top of this core using different pieces that make sense for the form factor/hardware on which it runs.

3. A unified Store and commerce model across all platforms. Microsoft has taken steps toward unifying its Windows Phone Store and Windows Store over the past year. But it still has a ways to go to reach the holy grail: A single store that spans all platforms. The next major versions of Windows Phone and Windows (both codenamed Threshold) may be where a single Store debuts. I am not sure when Xbox apps will be added to that Store.

4. A unified developer platform. Microsoft execs have been promising for years that one day, developers will be able to write once and run on any Windows variant. To get there, Microsoft is working to unify, as much as possible, the core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and the developer tooling for building apps for Windows Phone, Windows and the Xbox operating system.

Here’s what “one Windows” doesn’t mean: There will not be one Windows SKU. Or even two. There will continue to be multiple versions of Windows.

Nadella stated this quite plainly on the earnings call:

“Our SKU strategy will remain by segment,” he said. “We will have multiple SKUs for enterprises, we will have for OEM, we will have for end-users…. We will be disclosing and talking about our SKUs as we get further along.”

Firefox 33 Integrates Cisco’s OpenH264

As promised, version 33 of the Firefox browser will fetch the OpenH264 module from Cisco, which enables Firefox to decode and encode H.264 video, for both the codec war on this matter. The module won’t be a traditional NPAPI plugin, but a so-called Gecko Media Plugin (GMP), Mozilla’s answer to the disliked Pepper API. Firefox had no cross-platform support for H.264 before.

The post Backdoor Convergence | Tech Talk Today 32 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

R.I.P. XNA | CR 35

chris — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:03:33 +0000

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Microsoft leaves developers in a lurch with the death of XNA, Blackberry 10’s early results look promising, Microsoft won’t admit they\’re an Enterprise company, and the mixed message the Surface Pro sends developers.

Plus the Python vs Ruby debate is finally settled, Mike publicly admits his chicken habit, and we answer audience questions.

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Feedback

Mark writes: “In your honest, and sometime brutal opinion, which language should prevail? Which language has the best win32com support/modules? All the machines at my job run Windows 7, while personally, I have a 13\” Macbook Pro with Mountain Lion dual-booting Ubuntu 12.04.”
Tushar writes: “since neither Apple or Google require you to release the source code of your app when you submit it for approval, you could hide stuff that activate themselves at the customers end. “
Michael writes in suggesting that the Ubuntu Phone is not targeted at the US market.

Dev World Hoopla

BB10 is out
Surface Pro?
Code Journal for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch
RIP XNA

Tool of the Week

Source Tree

Book of the Week

[asa]B00A22EXL8[/asa]

Follow the show

The post R.I.P. XNA | CR 35 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

HTML – Jupiter Broadcasting

Microsoft War Stories | Coder Radio 437

Project Catch Up | Choose Linux 30

OK Then | User Error 82

Blinking Eye Patches | User Error 77

PCLinuxOS + Hugo | Choose Linux 16

Bag of jQuery | CR 221

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Weekly Challenge (that’s not always weekly)

Hoopla

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Let Accidents Happen | WTR 54

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Interview – Jo Wollschlaeger – @jo_wollsch

Starting At 8 | WTR 52

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Technology For Connection | WTR 43

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A Computer Should Do This | WTR 38

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Technical Writing | WTR 37

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#talkpay Today | WTR 34

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Language Workbench | WTR 33

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Importance of Meetups | WTR 21

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Unicorns Don’t Exist | WTR 15

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Priyanka Sharma | WTR 11

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Backdoor Convergence | Tech Talk Today 32

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The three processes include:

*Nadella stated this quite plainly on the earnings call: *

R.I.P. XNA | CR 35

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Nadella stated this quite plainly on the earnings call: