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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.

PDX Women in Tech | WTR 51

chris — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 01:41:41 +0000

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Megan works for Jama Software as manager of customer support & is the founder of PDX Women in Tech, a networking group to provide a platform for women to meet other women in tech.

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Keyboardio | WTR 44

chris — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 08:03:39 +0000

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Kaia is the CEO cofounder of keyboardio – premium ergonomic keyboard using open source and open hardware!

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ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: ANGELA: KAIA: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: KAIA: ANGELA: KAIA: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: KAIA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: ANGELA: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: PAIGE: KAIA: ANGELA: PAIGE: ANGELA: PAIGE: KAIA: 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 interviewing Kaia, she is from Keyboardio, which is a badass software company that is trying to reinvent the way that we use keyboards, and we talked to her about the Kickstarter process, the open hardware process, the open software process, and how she got involved in all that, so it’s a really fascinating 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. That is a general bucket of Jupiter Broadcasting support. We have a bunch of other shows, but specifically if you go there and you donate, it is also contributing to Women’s Tech Radio.
And we get started by asking Kaia what she’s up to in tech today.
I am Kaia Dekker and I’m currently the co-founder and CEO of a company called Keyboardio. We make premium ergonomic keyboards that are also open hardware, so they’re super hackable. We give you the firmware source, we give you schematics for the electronics, and still are selling it fully assembled as a finished product, but at the same time, it’s also open hardware. So if you want to open it up and hack it, you can.
So, an open hardware keyboard. How did you get there?
My co-founder who is also my husband had really bad wrists and cubital tunnel, like a repetitive stress injury from typing too much. He professionally had been a programmer for most of his life, and had tried out something like 20 or 30 different ergonomic keyboards, and none of them were really working for him. So he started out as sort of a hobby project trying to build his own that would be tailored specifically to him and have a working keyboard that wouldn’t make his wrists hurt too much. And he started sort of spending more time on this and I was just getting out of business school and was trying to kind of what I wanted to do next. I knew I didn’t want to go back to the companies that I had worked at before, but hey, we may be able to spin this into a business! And keyboards in particular were really interesting to me, mostly from a blank slate design perspective where it’s this thing that most of us are using for eight hours plus almost every day that we literally have our hands on every day. It’s a very intimate, long lasting relationship with an object, but it’s not something that had seen a lot of design or really thought put into the design. Innovation, the basic keyboard design, it’s based on what a typewriter looked like in the nineteenth century which was based on how you could build something in the nineteenth century. The technology has come a lot farther, the understanding of what makes for good design has come a lot farther, and there is no reason not to make something that would be better. So I was really attracted to the idea of being able to rethink this tool that we use all the time and what would it be like if you were to start over a little bit. We ended up with something, it’s a little weird, a little different. So the materials are different. We have an enclosure made out of wood as opposed to plastic or aluminum. The shape is really different. It’s based around originally research on different hand shapes and what keys people can reach easily, and iterated probably two dozen times before we ended up where we are today. It’s fully programmable, so it’s trying to be a little bit smarter as a piece of hardware as opposed to just sort of a dumb input device.
Right, and specifically one of the first things I pick up when I see your keyboard is that it’s the left and the right hand are separated. They’re broken in the middle if that makes sense. And we’ve seen Microsoft put out a keyboard like that, but what they did was they took a standard keyboard and just broke it in half essentially and moved it at an angle, whereas yours, the actual keys are placed differently with more focus on thumb work than any other keyboard that I’ve seen.
Yeah, so we’ve put the keys in columns because that’s the way, if you look at your hands and sort of bend your fingers, they move in a column. They don’t move in a sort of strange diagonal method, the staggered layout of a traditional keyboard. And we’ve actually somewhat subtly arched them to follow the actual arch that your fingers make. It takes a bit of retraining to follow an ergonomic layout, but once you do, it just feels a lot more natural, which makes sense. It’s building something designed around how your hands work as opposed to just following the sort of cargo culting the same thing that we’ve done for a very long time.
Now, I have a question. It is reprogrammable, but when I was taking typing classes back in seventh and eighth grade, I learned some history about keyboards, and that is that they used to be in alphabetical order, and this may or may not be accurate.
It’s accurate.
Okay. And that it was scrambled onto the keyboard because people were too fast. They learned it, they knew the prediction of where the letters would be based on the alphabet was too fast, so they scrambled them up to slow people down because the technology couldn’t keep up. Well, I think technology can keep up now, and I am wondering have you, well, because it’s reprogrammable, I think anybody can change how the letters are, but have you done any specific keyboards with it in alphabetical order instead of scrambled?
Yeah, so there are a lot of stories. It’s actually really fascinating the history of why people stuck with QWERTY when it isn’t a particularly good design. I still type QWERTY because I’ve been typing it for decades, and for me, learning a new layout wasn’t going to be enough faster, enough more efficient. For me the limiting factor isn’t usually how fast I can type, it’s how fast my brain goes. And so, until I learn how to think faster, I’m not going to worry too much about optimizing for speed. Definitely, some of the people we’ve had beta testing are people who used vorac or other alternative key layouts. There’s actually a very fascinating group of people who have a community online where they will basically track all of their key presses and then feed it into a program to figure out their own personal custom layout that minimizes finger movement. So you can have your own thing that’s completely different from anyone else’s. Otherwise, QWERTY is pretty standard. Vorac is pretty common, and then there is something sort of similar to vorac but based on a more recent and bigger purpose of data to figure out where to put the keys called culmac and that’s actually built into Mac OS and other things as well, so it’s pretty popular. Not as popular as vorac, and of course, not nearly as popular as qwerty, but those three plus one other alternative are built into the firmware by default, and then if you want to change what any particular key does, you are able to do that as well.
Now, if I go to keyboard.ao, there is a lot of information on here, and it shows the keyboard, but I’m wondering, what I don’t see is, and/or, are you planning to put out a ten key?
We’ve thought about it. Right now we are just about to ink a contract for manufacturing our first product, the model one, which is what’s called a 60 percent keyboard. It doesn’t have a separate tenkey pad, and I think once we’ve got that produced, or a little further down the line, we’re going to really kind of look at the product road map and figure out what comes next. Right now we’re a small company and we don’t quite have the resources.
Honestly, if the keyboard were better and more functional, easier to reach the numbers, maybe ten key, maybe it would eliminate that need which I think is what Paige was kind of snobbily implying with her–you didn’t even comment, but you said you and your tenkeys or whatever.
I have a lot of friends that I’ve gotten into this argument, because I have friends who won’t buy laptops that don’t have tenkeys.
Well, you could always get a USB tenkey.
How often do you actually use a ten key?
That’s the thing, if your work is in numbers, it is very handy.
If you’re an accountant or something.
Well, even some things I do, I would really prefer a ten key, so I was just curious.
We do have a numlock mode that turns kind of the right hand side into basically a ten key, which is definitely, I’m the one that gets stuck doing all of the accounting, and I switched to that for doing that. It’s easier.
That actually makes even more sense than a separate tenkey.
Yes, it does, you’re right.
So, you’ve been kind of on this journey. What was it like to go from kind of a business background kind of into this crazy tech world? You dove in deep. This is hardware, software, open source on both side, it’s a pretty complex crazy project.
Yeah, I’ve never been one for just sticking my toe in. I’m kind of a jump all the way in kind of girl. I’d always been interested in tech. I went to a technology magnet focused high school and then I went to MIT which has a very strong engineering culture and a lot of people building things for fun on the weekends and in the evenings, and I’ve always followed that and been interested in that. I ended up sort of in business almost somewhat accidentally. I had been a physics major and undergrad and thought that I’d been sort of pushed that way by teachers and so on, and I thought okay, this is what I’ll do as a career. And then I sort of realized junior year that I didn’t have, one the type of mind that works really well doing physics research, and two, I didn’t really have the temperament to live an academic type of life. You need to be a type of person who can work by themselves and be very driven and work in a very hardworking, but in many ways, a very slow paced environment. That just wasn’t, I realized by that time, that wasn’t the kind of environment where I did my best work or where I was happiest. I preferred working with other people, like things that are much more fast paced, even if you’re working on something that’s not as fundamental as understanding new things about the universe, I’m just happier when I’m working on fast paced things with a lot of different people to bounce ideas off of and to learn from. So I kind of pivoted I guess into doing then technology investment banking which has paid very well, but I sort of left as soon as I got my first bonus check, and I did managing consulting for a while, and then software marketing, then ended up doing this. It’s interesting. There is definitely things that you get used to when you’re working for large companies or on behalf of very large companies that just don’t apply in the startup world where you have to learn to get by with a lot fewer resources when you’re a startup, and there’s no one a lot of times where you can go out and find the person in such and such department who knows about something because you are the such and such department.
You’re every department.
Yeah, but it’s been great. We relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area which has been amazing just in terms of there is a community of hardware startups out here, and anything from you need to borrow a part last minute or getting someone to take a second look at your boards and trying to figure out why they’re not working or getting advice on how to choose a manufacturer, whether or not paying for a sourcing agent is worth it. Anything from the business end to a big architectural type decisions to just day to day prototyping help, like it’s been so amazing to be around so many really talented, really interesting people working on hardware. It’s really been amazing.
That’s really neat that the community would still play such a role. You would think hardware is so much more of a, I don’t know, a set thing, that there’s more like set ways to do it, but I think it’s just as mutable as software.
It’s much more so now than it was 20 years ago or even five or ten years ago and I think it’s still shaking out a little bit. Historically, at least, hardware was something that took huge investment and had very low returns and was something that you could only do if you were a big company or had a lot of money. The prototyping phase of things has gotten so much easier with it being very accessible to have rapid prototyping technologies like 3D printing or laser cutters and CNC mills and so on being much more accessible due to things like tech shop or Hackerspaces where they have these machines available and let people from the community access them, to things like Arduino or teensy or other microcontrollers or environments where the first embedded programming is done for you, so you don’t really have to start from scratch, you can hook together things and do a quick prototype without having to put in quite as much of an investment as you used to. And things like Digikey or Adafruit where being able to access, I need ten of a part is very easy and affordable now, and you don’t have to buy an entire real component to get it, you can find pretty much any component you want and order it in pretty much any quantity that you want. So the prototyping phase is a lot easier.
Yeah, it’s like we’re finally catching up with hardware where we’ve been with software for a long time. Like we’re building these hardware frameworks almost that kind of piece together in a way that makes things fast, easy, and accessible. I’ve seen so many things around Portland or other places where it’s like hey, come over and work on Arduino’s for the day, and just seeing like little kids up to big adults playing with hardware for the first time is really fascinating.
Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to make our product open source was that getting people, like the moment, whenever you have a programming language that you’re learning and you get Hello World to work, and when it’s like your first time programming anything, it’s a really magical feeling that like I got the computer to do this thing, and when you do it in hardware, when you get a light pattern to flash up or do things like that, it’s even more magical. It’s a tangible piece of the world that you are controlling through the code that you’re writing and it’s a really, really awesome feeling.
Yeah, I totally agree. This winter I played with my Raspberry Pie and some relays for the first time and made some lights light up and it was like as inspiring as Hello World is. This was even more like woah!
Yeah, and I think the question for hardware is like the prototyping phase, we’re finally catching up, and it’s getting from your first working prototype into production which is obviously not something that every project wants, but if you’re trying to build a company and build products, you do eventually have to make the change away from 3D printing and hooking things together with cables and Arduino and so on. You have to make a fundamental shift in the technologies you’re using to move to even small scale mass production, and that’s something where there is a bunch of different people trying to figure out how to make it easier and make it better. But it’s still just very complicated that there is, not only do you have all of these systems where the changes you make to your electrical layout are going to make your actual physical hardware layout change, and that involves, you might need to get mechanical engineering skill and electrical engineering skill and industrial design type of skill all involved just to make what seems like it should be a really small change, which I mean, that’s a hard problem. And then figuring out what does that do when you take it into production, how does that change things, and very small changes can make very big changes and very big costs down the line.
Your margin for error is very small.
Yeah, and it’s something from software where I think people have gotten so used to Agile or other sort of sprints to make quick changes in small increments and keep building on that, and it’s not something that transfers over to hardware necessarily as well, which is frustrating to someone who likes being able to fool around and try different things and realizing that there is much more kind of top down planning you have to do is not necessarily how people have trained to do it.
Yeah, you have to give a pivot for polish.
Yeah that’s a great way of putting it.
So, in that vein, you guys ran an amazingly successful Kickstarter, originally reaching for $120,000.00 goal, you hit $650. What was that like to go through? What are some of the challenges you’ve had afterwards or during? Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Sure. It was an amazing experience in Kickstarter. Especially as the person who ends up being in charge of the business stuff, there is always the primary question in my mind, and before we did the Kickstarter was like I think there is a market for this. We’ve got a bunch of people on our mailing list, people seem to think it’s really interesting, but does anyone actually want this? You don’t really trust that people will want a product until they put in their credit card number. So that was great and sort of took this thing that I’ve been worrying about for months and sort of just eliminated it really quickly. It’s like yeah, there are a lot of people who kind of get what we’re trying to do and see why we’re trying to do it that way. And yeah, the whole Kickstarter experience was really cool. We did a cross country road trip from Boston where we used to live to San Francisco and stopped at Makerspaces just about every day and did little meet ups talking about here is how you could build your own keyboard with the materials and tools that are in this Makerspace, and letting people put their hands on our product. It’s a somewhat weird and different product, and so being able to put your hands on it, actually see it, actually try it out is the time when a lot of people sort of get it for the first time, and it was also kind of a great way, like Kickstarter, or any crowdfunding is a lot of work where you have people writing you every day and you have to manage are you doing ads, and there is all this stuff you have to kind of manage and being able to have something that we were doing every day that took the focus away from–its hyper focused on this campaign, and let us look and see what people were doing at different Makerspaces was really cool. We were lucky that it was sort of something that was on grand for us that we are open hardware, we did come out of kind of a hobby maker type of place, but honestly, it’s always so cool to see like what people are making and what people are doing and talk to people who do cool things and put cool things together.
How big is your team? Is it just you and your husband and some 1099?
Yeah, we’ve floated up and down. We don’t have quite enough work in any one discipline to have another full time person coming on, but we have had in the past full time contractors from–currently we have a friend of mine who is working on EE, and she is, I don’t know, it will be a couple of weeks contract probably. We’re pretty close to being done with the electrical, and we’ve had people helping out with industrial design and mechanical as well at different points in the past, so I think peak size would be like five people and sometimes it’s just the two of us.
This is fascinating, a very cool story. I don’t know, I was wondering, so you said there is kind of embedded software for this. Do you guys actually run an embedded processor in the keyboard? Like is there something it’s actually running on like Arduino, Lennox, or whatever?
The chip is an Apple chip. It’s an 18 mega 30T4, which is the same thing that’s in an Arduino Leonardo, so it’s not technically an Arduino because we’re not buying a board from Arduino, but we’re what we call Arduino at heart where essentially what we’ve done is take the Arduino and squish it onto our own board and made a couple of little changes, but it’s compatible with the Arduino developer environment. So right now I can just pull up the Arduino ID, use it to make changes to the firmware and use that to flash the keyboard which is cool. When we were trying to decide which architecture to use, we had actually originally been using something else and ended up switching over to this branch of Arduino because you just, you’re going to have to have some kind of processor anyway, like why not pick one that has this huge ecosystem of other people writing code and making devices that are compatible with it.
That makes total sense. Making that approachable is huge. So just one final question for you before we get out of here. Oh, I have two actually. First, I would love to know what you work in day to day for tools. I love to know other people’s stacks like what kind of tools are you using. You mentioned the Arduino IDE. Is there anything else that kind of keeps you going day to day? Especially I’m always interested in the business stack because I don’t touch that most of the time.
We do sort of a mix of ad hoc tools and otherwise available tools. I would say the most important tool that we use is slack, which I’m sure you hear a lot is great for communication both within our team, with investors and contractors.
I think that might have actually been one of the first–you might be the first person to bring slack up on the show.
Okay. It’s a great tool. I’m happy to evangelize about it. it’s a team communication tool, and it’s an example of really good design where it sort of sets the norms for communication being friendly and kind of fun, but also very easy to–it’s designed by the team that had made flikr back in the day, or a lot of the same team anyway, and it’s really software sort of made with love.
It’s a fantastic tool. I’m in slack every day, and I agree. I think it’s interesting because in my mind, like as a super old nerd, it’s like IRC with user friendliness. But super useful.
We use hackpad for a lot of other things that don’t quite fit into slack in terms of communication, so daily to do lists, we’ve tried out probably most of the tools that are out there like Trello and so on for keeping track of thing and product management type tools, and every time we sort of just end up reverting back to Excel or Google Sheets in terms of they don’t add enough–the complexity that they add doesn’t add enough value to be worth it. And then some of the more mundane things like for payroll and accounting and stuff, I use Zero and Zenpayroll and all these SAS providers which are great and definitely much easier to use than some of the things that I had been using even a couple of years ago.
That’s a neat stack. I like that–slack is very cool. I definitely encourage people to check that out. I actually just signed up for the, there is a, I’m pretty sure it’s just Women in Tech Slack. It’s an invite only, but you can apply for an invitation and then you get invited and the community has been really great so far. They are very friendly and there is a lot of resource sharing and just general helping each other out which has been really cool. And my last question, before we ramble on any more is, looking at the future of kind of what’s happening in technology–be it hardware or software–what gets you the most excited?
I think the thing that excites me the most is the fact that there are companies out there that are taking things that we already have technologies for and really applying a lot of thought and design to them. I mean, slack is an example of that where Hipchat had been around there for a long time, IRC has been around for decades, but they aren’t adding a lot of new functionality, they’re just taking a user experience that hadn’t been very good and transforming it into something that’s awesome.
Sounds like Apple.
A lot of people make that argument for things like Airbnb. Really originally it was Craig’s List, but ten percent better.
And focused.
And focused, yeah, and Uber. Uber is just a cab service.
Yeah, and that’s a trend, as a user I completely appreciate and it’s starting to come into more enterprise tools as well. We just put in a preorder for a Glowforge which is a laser cutter which is something that is a great tool to have, but traditionally it costs $10,000.00 and you’ve ended up spending about a third to a half of your time with it trying to fix problems with different issues with it, and they’re coming out with a laser cutter at a lower price point that is also supported by software that takes away a lot of the pain points of using this tool. This is something that is a prototyping tool, it’s not used by consumers for the most part, but they’re still taking that philosophy and applying it to that. I think people’s expectations in terms of design have come up a lot, and that’s an amazing thing.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember you can go to JupiterBroadcasting.com for the show notes as well as a full transcription, and you can find us on Twitter @heywtr.
We’d love to hear what you think about the show. If you’d like to tell us, you can use the contact form on the website or email us at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Keyboardio | WTR 44 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Not a Bro-grammer | WTR 42

chris — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 09:35:41 +0000

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

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

No Crying In Coding | WTR 39

chris — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 03:40:09 +0000

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Carolyn went from working in data science to mobile developer at Lookout Mobile. She discusses writing “magic hands” to automate her old job & what it’s like to self teach.

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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 talk to Carolyn and she is a recent mobile developer at Lookout. She comes from a data scientist background and we have some really interesting chat about her transition and just all the things that she’s gotten into; what’s been hard, what’s been awesome, and it’s a really good time.
ANGELA: Yeah. And before we get into the interview I just want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to Patreon.com/today. It is a subscription based support of our network. It supports all the shows, but specifically this show, Women’s Tech Radio. So go to Patreon.com/today.
PAIGE: And we got started by asking Carolyn what she’s up to in technology these days.
CAROLYN: Yeah, so I have sort of an interesting story of, or at least I think it’s interesting, of how I got into tech. I was a business major, not sure what I wanted to do with my life. Ended up in operations at a big company, but I always really, really loved data and I just loved spreadsheets and i met someone that let me, sort of taught me SQL and taught me how to be faster with what I was doing with SQL and I found out I really loved SQL. So I sort of just started building from there. I ended up at Lookout which is a mobile security anti malware company and just sort of opened my eyes to a lot of technology. I started as a data analyst. Started managing the data warehouse and then earlier this year just moved over to Android development. So I’m learning a lot. So I’m new to engineering, but I have been speaking engineer, that’s what I say, for a very long time. So right now I”m working on a side project which we’ll be releasing at the end of this year and currently learning RxJava, which is pretty new. It’s really cool, but there’s definitely not really a lot out there about it. So I spend my days currently just really doing a lot of learning.
PAIGE: All right. So I will admit, I am not familiar with RxJava. How is it different than normal Java?
CAROLYN: It deals with like streaming data and so it’s really good for when you’re trying to chain things together without, you know, the data might not be available yet.
PAIGE: Oh, okay. So it’s Java non-blocking?
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: Cool. You can probably continue explaining that for the audience.
ANGELA: And me.
PAIGE: Oh yeah.
CAROLYN: Well I’m still wrapping, I was just, like, so I, earlier this year did an online Android boot camp while I was still doing my data job and managing the data team and just sort of doing 20 things at once. And now, once I started to feel like I really got a foothold in Java, we decided to use RxJava and now I’m relearning a lot of things. So it’s still, I’m still feeling like I’m in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. So I’m definitely, it’s made me actually have this huge respect for Netflix, because they are the ones that wrote the Android library for it and they’re just doing so much cool stuff over there. And they have a lot of good tutorials about it. So I definitely recommend, there’s a podcast about it and the head at Netflix is talking about RxJava. It’s really interesting. So I can add that to the show links for you guys too.
PAIGE: Netflix is really interesting because they, essentially their stack, they’re really stack agnostic where they look at their teams and they say do what you need to do to get your job done. And find the best way to do it. So I know that they have angular, amber, you know, they have imbedded team. The have the RxJava team and they all just kind of talk together because they really piece these pieces out. It’s really fascinating how they’re kind of making that work with being probably one of the biggest data companies in the world right now.
CAROLYN: Yeah. Well they’re definitely finding, you know, if there’s not a tool out there that meets their needs, they’ll build it. I have a friend who’s a doctor and I was explaining this concept to her and she was like this is so weird. She was like, why would they build it and open source it? You know. For me, personally, one of the things I actually stumbled upon in the tech community, which I didn’t really realize, is just the amount of support that people are willing, and companies are willing to give each other. I mean, there’s obviously companies that are competing and hate each other, but at the same time, I’m sure if you got their engineers together they would talk shop and share things they’re doing and it’s really cool. When I decided to be an engineer, late last year, I had so many people that were giving me free materials and helping me and the tech community, like every night of the week you can go to a meetup and have dinner and meet people and have people help you. Which was sort of a happy accident to find out about the tech community in general.
PAIGE: Yeah. I totally love that. And I love that it comes out of some of our roots of open source and being able to reach out and touch each other’s projects and just help out. I was listening to a podcast recently, ironically, and they were talking about how they’d opened sourced their website, kind of, It’s a paid service. The guy was like, I”m shocked because every week we get somebody who just pops in and was like hey I forked your website and made this change, because I found this problem and here it is back. And this guy that fix things is a paid customer of theirs, but he’s still jumping in to fix things for the company. It’s just like-
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: Really awesome.
CAROLYN: Yeah. Actually, the boot camp that I did, um, is Code Path, which is a link in the show notes. And what they do is they go out to companies and do consulting and then they also have a boot camp if you are an engineer that you can, if you’re already two or three years in you can go. So I wasn’t like a candidate to be part of their boot camp. And even part of the consulting, my company said they’d pay for it, but they said you really need to learn Java before you do this boot camp. So they gave me all the materials for free. And they just said I could learn it on my own, which was pretty awesome. And had calls with me and sort of got me started on my path, just totally pro bono, which is really awesome.
ANGELA: That is really awesome.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: Very cool. Okay. So as a developer, I have to ask, how is it that it was SQL that grabbed your attention, because most developers I know just absolutely hate working in SQL, like we will avoid it like the plague. I actually kind of got my start in SQL as well, so I do like it, but most people I talk to they’re like I love all this web stuff, please don’t make me write SQL.
CAROLYN: Yeah, so what’s funny is the engineers on my team, when I see the SQL queries are writing I’m like, I’m so happy because that’s a place I can teach them and be like whoa this is not good. So what happened was, I was working for Williams Sonoma, which is, they also own Pottery Barn and they run it as this big monolithic company where they don’t really care if people are efficient and they would be perfectly happy with people just entering data all day instead of making efficient processes or systems. It was my first job out of college so I didn’t really know that life didn’t really have to be like that. So I was spending a lot of time manually going in and doing things and I just so happened to meet someone in my company named Mark Grassgob [ph] who really opened the door for me. He’s like just learn SQL and you can do this job that took you all day, you can do it in like 20 minutes. So it was more just a fact of me being like this is pretty powerful. These people are really living in the dark ages. So we literally wrote a script that would do our jobs for you. We called it magic hands. And then we’d go to coffee and no one that i worked for really — they just wanted us to get the work done. They didn’t know that we could eliminate everyone’s jobs and we’re like — we called it magic hands. It was so funny. We’d unleash magic hands on three computers and then realize oh the system couldn’t take that much input so we’d bring it down to two. And then it would enter in a price of a million dollars for a couch instead of $1,000 or something and so we’d get a call from like, you know, tech team in India overnight when something process blew up, so we definitely had to fine tune magic hands. Then I moved over to the technical team after that, because they sort of saw she can actually be on this team and do this without having really a background. And then once I moved into data, it’s like SQL is king no matter what anyone says about big data and all these big data tools. It really, the backbone of everything is really SQL. So learning how to do efficient queries will make your job so much happier. If you write SQL wrong you’re going to give people wrong answers. So on the data side, you know, SQL just, to me, just made so much sense. But I guess it was sort of the first real programming I ever got my hands on. I love it.
PAIGE: I actually have had a couple friends recently who have asked me, because I kind of learned SQL the hard way by just throwing my head against Access, which is probably the worst interface ever.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: But do you have any good recommendations for books for online resources for SQL, because it’s kind of like this weird black hole where i can learn almost everything else online and I can’t seem to find anything good for SQL.
CAROLYN: The thing about SQL is that you will not be good at it. You will not really get your hands around it until you actually use it. So it’s one of those things where you need access to a dataset and you need questions to answer and then you’ll get it. So there are resources out there. I actually, when I was hiring data analyst as a manager I just created my own dataset and posted it for people and then had them answer some questions to show me they knew SQL or not. It’s really a learning by doing kind of thing. Which I guess most things are. But if you don’t have an interesting dataset to work with and you’re not trying to solve interesting problems, you’re just never going to pick it up. But I haven’t really found, there are available datasets out there and as bad as Access is and it gives you the graphical interface, don’t use that, you need to actually physically write it out. If you use Access, if you get access to a dataset dump it into Access and then use the, just handwriting the SQL, you know, you’ll get it.
PAIGE: Yeah, totally.
ANGELA: So in the form that you filled out before the show you said that you’re still trying to figure out why you never thought to be an engineer before.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
ANGELA: I think there’s a lot of people that don’t know that the way their personality and skills would make them perfect for a position. What would you recommend people do to figure out what best to be or do or try?
CAROLYN: I’ve been thinking about his a lot, actually. When I was younger, I grew up in San Diego and it was very much a beach culture, like very dude broey. It wasn’t cool to be smart when I was a kid. That’s how I felt. I was networking the internet in my parent’s house, like running the wireless, created their wireless, and I was one of the first people on Napster stealing music and creating CDs. I had this little computer in my room and my friends would come over and they’d be in their bikinis like beep, beep, let’s go to the beach. Did you make us CDs? I’m just like, you know, like stealing music off the internet. But to me, it was like, I mean this is like 1998 so I was really probably one of 10,000 people doing this.
PAIGE: We might have shared that stolen music together.
ANGELA: Yeah, I was just going to say, yeah 1998, that was golden year too for Napster and WinAmp.
CAROLYN: Yeah, totally.
PAIGE: It’s really kicks the llama’s ass.
ANGELA: Yeah.
CAROLYN: But for some reason it never crossed my mind that I was really good at this. I was way more interested in it than any of my friends. But instead I just was like, I’m just going to go to the beach and we’re going to try to get beer and do all these things. And I’m trying to figure out why it never crossed my mind to do that. But I also think it was a different time and technology wasn’t, people weren’t talking about technology. People weren’t interested in talking about apps. You know, like 1 in 20 people had a cell phone back then.
ANGELA: Right.
CAROLYN: So I think maybe it was just kind of like that time. When I went to college I was a business major and I thought I would just do business. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I think I had all the tools and I knew that i loved computers and I loved building things, but I never really had someone set me down. I never really had that career thought. I just sort of followed the path that I thought was laid out. And it really wasn’t until like mid last year that I thought I could really be an engineer and do it. It was really — what sort of tipped me was all these boot camps coming out and people just going and doing it. I had this deep — this thought of what would I do if I could do anything and I wasn’t scared to do it? To me, engineering was it. Lookout was incredibly supportive and let me move teams, which was really great and sort of a rare find in a company that would support someone to do this. So I got really lucky. But, you know, I think now with Women Who Code and a lot of organizations asking these questions of why women aren’t engineers, I think it’s because no one ever asked me and I never asked myself. And now that it’s sort of becoming the norm, you know, I’m hoping that more women will sort of naturally follow the path to be an engineer, because I think if there would have been more of that growing up that I probably would have found that path earlier.
PAIGE: That’s actually a part of why we started the podcast is because, you know, you say oh it was a different time then. And it was actually my conversation with a 16 year old that spawned me to start this, because I had this conversation and the 16 year old is good at math, enjoyed science, liked tech stuff, you know, didn’t do the assembling computers thing because nobody really do that anymore. But I was like, well have you considered being a programer? And she was like, no that’s for boys, right? And I was like, whoa.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: And this was last year.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: But I do think it’s changing. I think organizations like Women Who Code Girl Develop It, Chick Tech, all these different things are kind of getting in there and saying hey guys, or hey ladies you can do this too. And there’s no reason, like — like I like to say, girls type just as well as boys.
ANGELA: So I haven’t been to a boot camp, but it seems like that might be, aside from trying to join Women Who Code or another place like that that would support you, but the boot camp might help you. Is it like a conference where you can go and listen or watch different parts of development?
CAROLYN: I did a lot of research on boot camps at the end of last year and there’s some good and — there’s a lot of good, but there’s also a lot of bad. You can’t expect to just go somewhere for three months and then come out and be a fully fledged engineer and be ready to work, you know. So this boot camp is just a once a week for two hours for eight weeks kind of thing. Or I think it’s twice a week for two hours for eight weeks. But they are teaching mobile development to people who are already engineers. They just gave me — they record their lectures and they have all their assignments online and they just gave me access to their materials so I could write — I could work on apps on my own. I’d say it definitely took me a lot longer to get through it and I ended up just doing the parts of the boot camp that really applied to what I”de be working on at Lookout so I could just get up to speed faster, but, you know, their boot camp, there would be like a week of work would take me three weeks or something just to get done. Definitely was like, it took me a while to get through it. But it really is, I couldn’t say enough good things about Code Path. They do some really cool stuff. And they’re really smart guys. Actually, all men, but they do have a lot of women that go to their boot camps, so.
PAIGE: There’s definitely a really wide range of what we’re calling a boot camp right now. We have Codepath which is this kind of part-time thing. ANd there will be other online part-time things. And then there’s even in-person part-time things where you can go in the evenings and it’s a full five days a week. The boot camp that I worked out of is full five days a week. It’s a 16 week program if you do it at night or a 12 week program if you do it in the day. And it is full stack development. You go from the front end all the way through the back end. And I think that’s probably the most common is that it’s essentially two to three months. Some of them go out as far as six months of get in there, get your hands in code, have a portfolio at the end kind of a thing. But agree with you, Carolyn, that you can’t go into a boot camp expecting to come out the other end like a full fledged developer unless you work your butt off. And there are companies hiring beginners. I think that the market is getting a little bit saturated, because there are so many boot camps.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: I’m in Portland, it’s a fairly small city, and I think right now we have five boot camps.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: And one of them is turning out two classes of 60 people each every 10 weeks.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: So it’s getting a bit saturated, but the market is still there.
CAROLYN: Yeah, and so I have friends in San Francisco that are recruiters and when I was switching over they were like whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t do boot camp. Don’t do it. We can’t hire people out of boot camps. There’s like 1 out of 20 that are hireable, you know. And so I was like, okay. And I had some talks with them and they were like, you have to — if you’re going to do a boot camp you also have to have another strategy of how you’re still going to become and engineer, you know. You do the boot camp but where are you going to — who is going to take you on as a junior developer? You need to have all those things sort of lined up.
ANGELA: Right.
CAROLYN: Or else you’re just going to do the boot camp and then go do something else.
PAIGE: Yeah. And I think that there are some things coming into the market that are trying to fill that. There’s a couple places like Thoughtbot has apprenticeship programs. A couple of the other bigger dev shops have that where you can kind of transition from beginner into intermediate. And then there’s some online stuff like Think Full or Upcase where you can kind of build those skills after boot camp. And, of course, I’m always a fan; I think the biggest thing in our industry and most industries is mentorship. Like finding a mentor. Finding those people and going out and shaking hands.
ANGELA: Which you’d likely find at Women Who Code or Meetups or-
PAIGE: Totally.
ANGELA: The social aspect of it.
PAIGE: Meatspace as we like to call it.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: For nerd speak.
ANGELA: Whenever I hear meetspace I picture M-E-A-T.
PAIGE: That’s what it means.
ANGELA: Oh. Not M-E-E-T?
PAIGE: No. It’s it’s M-E-A-T.
ANGELA: Oh.
PAIGE: Meatspace.
ANGELA: Why?
PAIGE: Because we’re nerds and it’s not digital, so it’s fleshy, so it’s meat.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh. Okay. Interesting. Okay.
PAIGE: Sorry.
ANGELA: Wow, that’s a great, I’m glad, okay. Continue with the interview.
PAIGE: Yeah. So you talked a little bit. You’ve moved over to the Android team. What’s fun and what’s hard about Android? I haven’t really dug in on Android development. I’ve done some iOS.
CAROLYN: What’s really fun about Android is, you know, day one you can open up your Android Studio and download the STK and create a page. It has like a button, you know, and you can click the button and it can like play a song. You can do that in two days. You can publish it to the app store. You could put it on your phone. There’s definitely this — you can hit and API and pull data back. You know, you could do that in a couple days, learn all that from scratch. So there’s a very easy sort of, like, you know, there’s a link on Learning to Code in the notes where it’s a graph of — at first you, like, peek. It’s like a honeymoon at first. ANd everything seems really easy, but as you sort of start to unfold things, Android is really complicated and there’s 9,000 versions of Android that people are running out there and different sized devices and tablets and people are going to be using your app only on Wifi, and there’s so many things to think about. As you want to do more, you get royally confused very quickly. So it’s cool to just sort of get up and running and get started, but there’s a lot to learn. There’s things you have to think about like battery usage and memory and all these things that you don’t really deal with if you’re a web developer. So it’s definitely a lot to get started. I work on a team where there’s a lot of senior engineers and a lot of people that really know what’s going on, so it’s like, it’s fun but it’s also — you know, you take some hits to your ego a little bit, because I feel like I used to know everything about the data warehouse and stepping into something where you don’t know what’s going on and you really have to feel your way through it, it can be a shot to your ego and how you feel about yourself. I always say, like, sometimes i feel like Tom Hanks, like when I get code reviews, like in a League of Their Own where he’s like, “There’s no crying in baseball.”
PAIGE: Uh-huh.
CAROLYN: Like, I literally have to tell myself, there’s no crying in coding when I get a lot of comments on a code review or I just totally, like — it’s a lot of falling down. A lot.
PAIGE: I’m so glad I’m not the only person that says, there’s no crying in coding.
CAROLYN: Yes, I say that to myself all the time.
PAIGE: Me too.
CAROLYN: It makes me feel better, because at least I’m out there. I’m out there and I”m like, they’re always like, oh no you’re doing really, really good, you just have this — where you just want — I want to be — I don’t want to say, I want to be perfect, but I want to be contributing and I don’t — I want to be getting things done and moving forward and writing really good code and you’re not going to do that when you move into engineering for like a year or two, you know. So just setting those expectations. You just have to lower your expectations for yourself a little bit.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think — this is a talk that I have with a lot of — I meet a lot of junior developers through Women Who Code and explaining to them, like listen I”ve been doing coding for a lot of years as a professional now, and there’s rarely a week that goes by where I don’t go, wow I feel like I know nothing.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: I”m totally Jon Snow. It’s not fun.
CAROLYN: But then when I share that feeling with other developers they’re like, welcome to being an engineer.
PAIGE: Yep, exactly.
CAROLYN: That’s what everyone says to me. They’re like oh you were frustrated all day and the last 10 minutes of your day everything made sense and you got it to run, like that’s your life.
PAIGE: Uh-huh.
CAROLYN: And I kind of love that. Like, personally. I actually really love that. I love working all day on a problem . To me, the day goes by in 30 minutes to me, even if I want to cry sometimes. It’s fun and I feel like I’m using more of my brain than I ever did before.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s like 30 minutes of success after an entire day of the crying game.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: It’s totally, it’s where you’re at. And I think that knowing that going in, I like to say that programmers need to be eternally optimistic because it will work this time, I swear.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember you can find a full transcription of this show over in the show notes at JupiterBroadcasting.com. YOu can also subscribe to the RSS feeds.
PAIGE: And while you’re there you could also reach out to us on the contact form. Let us know what you think about the show or any guests you might like to hear. Don’t forget, we’re also on iTunes and if you have a moment leave a review so we know how we’re doing and how we can improve the show. If you’d like to reach out to Angela and I directly, you can use WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com for an email or check us at at Twitter, @HeyWTR. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post No Crying In Coding | WTR 39 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Early Tech Obsession | WTR 30

chris — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 06:35:12 +0000

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Shannon is a producer & podcast host on Hak5 and TekThing. She discusses her early obsession with technology & how she moved into the podcasting world.

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Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I”m Angela.
PAIGE: So Angela, today we had an awesome opportunity to interview Shannon Morse. She’s a new media podcasting host. She’s known for the show Hak5 and also TekThing is her new show. We got to talk to her about how she got into everything, gaming, and all sorts of fun topics.
ANGELA: Yes, we sure did. And before we get into the interview, I’d like to mention Digital Ocean. If you go to digitalocean.com and use the promo code heywtr, you can save on simple cloud hosting dedictated to offering the most intuative and easy way to spin up a cloud server. You can create a cloud server in 55 seconds, and pricing plans start at only $5.00 a month. That’s 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabytes SSD, 1 CPU, and 1 terabyte transfer. Digital Ocean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. And the interface is incredibly simple, intuitive. The control panel is awesome. It will help you design exactly what you need, which empowers users to replicate on large scales with the company’s straightforward API. Check out digitalocean.com by using promo code heywtr.
PAIGE: And we got started with our interview today by asking Shannon what’s she’s up to in tech these days.
SHANNON: So, I am a producer and host of several different tech shows on the internets, on YouTube and on RSS feeds all over the place. Specifically, my main shows right now are Hak5, H-A-K-5 over at Hak5.org, and TekThing, which is T-E-K Thing dot com. ANd both of these involve, well Hak is obviously about hacking and internet security. And then the TekThing show, that one is about technology in general for consumers.
PAIGE: So you’re like a new media entertainer? Would you fit into that category?
SHANNON: Yeah. Yeah, I guess you would say that. You know, I was just filling out my tax docs and I was like, uh, what do I put my profession as. I guess I’ll just pick journalism.
ANGELA: Yep, I know how that goes.
PAIGE: I get to fall under the consultant category for almost everything. So how did you get into that? New media is, such like a, if we can use that term, it’s such a new thing. It’s kind of all over the place. What started that for you?
SHANNON: Well, I’ve always been interested in technology and stuff like that. And then I didn’t discover podcasting or internet media until I was in college. So, it was probably like 2003 or 2004. And I was really, really in to video games at the time. Which, I still am even though I don’t have enough time to do it these days. And my friend and I discovered this podcast called Pure Ownage up in Canada.
PAIGE: Oh my god, I love Pure Ownage.
SHANNON: Yes, me too. I’m so excited that they’re working on their movie right now. I backed it on Kickstarter when they did that. Or Indiegogo. So, my best friend and I, we drove like 20 hours from Missouri all the way up to Canada for the weekend, just to see this live premier. I fell in love with the community, and I fell in love with like how there was no middle man between the host of the show and the characters and their fans. So you could just walk up to them and like chill at a bar after their live premier show. So, for me, it felt like it was the perfect middle ground of loving technology and being able to enjoy it with your fans as well.
PAIGE: That’s really — I would have never really thought of that end of it. That there’s no middle man between the fan and the person. Because I always think about it from the technology standpoint. To say there’s no — especially then — there was no middle man between me and the content. Like, that came right from the producers of the content to me as a consumer.
SHANNON: Yeah.
PAIGE: And back then they had to just host it on their site and you had to download it. There was no YouTube or anything.
SHANNON: Yeah. A lot of us who are working in podcasting, we don’t have agents or anything like that. So the only thing that’s holding us back from reaching out to people is actually getting out of our house and getting out from in front of the cameras and going outside into the sun and enjoying time with real people. So yeah, I fell in love with it. And then after that I just started talking to the right people. I ended up meeting the guys from Hak5 and they asked me if I wanted to move out to Virginia, as weird as that is. But I moved into the Hak house, as it was called back in day. ANd they invited me on the show after I did a little bit of camera work behind the scenes. At that time I just had a full-time job and I just kind of did it as a hobby. But eventually it turned into a big full-time gig. So I’m really happy that it did.
ANGELA: So, I obviously am into podcasting. We go to conventions in different places. Mainly local, like Washington, Oregon, California, but we did Ohio an Ohio fest for technology related stuff. I get a lot of people coming up to me saying, Angela. And I’m like hi, I don’t know you. But they know everything about me. You know, has that happened to you?
SHANNON: Yes. Very much so. Most likely it’s happened most often at a convention called DEFCON. Which is in Las Vegas. That’s the biggest hacker convention in the US and possibly the world. I’ll have to check my facts on that. But yeah, I’ll go there and I’m walking down to the room where we set up our booth and we do all of our interviews and everything. People will stop me and they’ll be like, oh my god congratulations on getting married. And I’m just like, I forgot I posted that publically. Thank you.
ANGELA: Right.
SHANNON: It’s a little awkward, but I’m like dude it’s so cool that people are willing to come up and be just be like, hey congrats, and I’m like cool, give me a hug.
ANGELA: Yeah. Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, I actually had that experience when I first met Angela, because I had been a follower of Jupiter Broadcasting for a long time and she post so prolifically about her kids and her awesome photography of her kids and I’m like, I feel like I just know you and we just met. It’s cool to get to know the person behind it, but definitely and interesting experience.
SHANNON: Yeah. Totally.
PAIGE: And like my experience with meeting Chris at the convention, because I was star struck. Before I asked him, I was like oh I’m so nervous. Maybe he’ll just give me some advice on podcasting and it will be great.
SHANNON: I don’t try to act too star struck whenever I meet other podcasters that I listen to all the time, but sometimes you just can’t help it.
ANGELA: Yeah, I’ve had people come up and their like, I don’t really know what to say. I’m like, but I’m — it’s really cool to actually meet you. It’s really neat.
PAIGE: Yeah, I have to make a confession that I was actually really nervous to ask Shannon to be on the show, because I have been watching Hak5 since before she came on Hak5 and I kind of watched her journey and that’s been really awesome to see. Especially because when it got started it was such a dude show and as a woman watching the show I was always like, yeah this is cool. And they had that one chick would kind of stop in and do some gaming stuff once in a while.
SHANNON: I’ll be honest, it was very intimidating when I first started on the show. I was not involved with the hacker community very at the time. And I was just kind of getting my feet wet into the whole process of learning all of the information that’s out there about hacking and internet security. But in the, god how long have I been doing this? Seven years? Oh my gosh, that’s a long time. So in the seven years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve learned so, so much. And I feel like a lot of this is, it’s just because I’ve gotten so involved and I made sure to ask the right questions. I come to it as a, no question is a stupid question. So I’m going to be person to ask that question, even though other people might look at me and think I’m stupid, I don’t care, because other people have those questions, but they’re afraid to ask them. I felt like I’ve grown so much just by being a part of this show and it’s been really informative for me. And I’m glad that I have some female fans out there. It makes me very happy.
ANGELA: What was your focus in college? Was it a technical degree?
SHANNON: It wasn’t, as weird as that is. I probably should have gone into theater at the time, but I didn’t, because I was obsessed with theater. I went into hospitality and restaurant administration. So I guess what I took out of college, mostly, was the business perspective. It helped me be a better public speaker, because we did a lot of presentations for our classes. And it also taught me a lot about how to run a business. So, we’ve been able to open up a store for Hak5 online. So we do a lot of ecommerce. We’ve also learned a lot about marketing and things like that.
PAIGE: So you said you’ve always been interested in technology. What did that look like as a kid for you?
SHANNON: Oh yeah. My dad had a computer in my nursery. He did. We didn’t have enough rooms in the house apparently. This is the story he’s told me. When I was a baby he just stuck his first computer, or one of his many computers, in my nursery and he would let me sit on his lap and pound at the keyboard until I figured out something that happened on the keyboard. So I’ve just been around computer my whole life. My dad was a really big influence on that for me. Also, for my Star Trek geekiness, because he watched it every single day after work, so I would sit down and watch it with him. I love my geeky influences. But yeah, I learned how to build computers when I was, probably an early teen, 11 or 12 I think was when I first built my computer with my dad. He got me into building websites when I was in middle school. So I learned a little bit about HTML and how to build a really simple anime fan gallery type website on GeoCities. So I learned a little bit there. I also got really involved with video gaming. I made a good group of friends at school who got me really obsessed with that kind of stuff. So it was just always a really good influence with me, like as far as the people that I was hanging out with. My dad was always there and he was always like, yeah come with me to the computer store. We’ll go to Best Buy and you can check out motherboards, back when they had motherboards.
PAIGE: Dude, you had the best dad ever.
SHANNON: He was awesome. He’s a great guy. He still gets really geeky with me. I’ll be like, let’s go to Fry’s and he’s like, yeah let’s go.
PAIGE: My friends call that Meca.
SHANNON: Oh yes.
PAIGE: So you did all this as a young person. And then why did you end up choosing hospitality instead?
SHANNON: A lot of it was because I really like working with people and I felt like if I went into a tech thing I wouldn’t get to work with people as much, like one on one or face to face. But I went into a lot of jobs during high school and during college where I managed restaurants or I was a server. I think I did assistant management at a Dominos Pizza for like five years. So it was really fun for me. I loved being able to make people happy and make perfect, perfect food for them and see the smile on their faces, and get really good tips out of it. So for me it was just all about really enjoying my job and being able to be around people. Because I’m a friendly person.
PAIGE: I had a very similar story where I was really involved in tech doing a lot of IT support and i kind of topped out desktop support and knew that the next step would kind of be to end up as a server monkey in a server farm, like just in the basement. I kind of had to transition. And the first interview I did where I was trying to transition, they were like well why would you want to leave this field? It’s lucrative, it’s good, it’s interesting. And I’m like, you know, I don’t want to just stare at server fans all day. I want to interact with other people.
SHANNON: Yeah.
PAIGE: Even if it’s in a non-technical space.
SHANNON: That’s why I love podcasting now, is because I can, I can use my tech experience that my dad’s taught me, and I can use what I can find online and through educational books that I can purchase and learn, and I can also use my theater obsession, and I kind of mixed the two together. And I can still talk to people face to face with interviews, and talking to fans, and going to conventions and stuff like that. So it’s the happy medium for all those different obsessions for me.
ANGELA: Mm-hmm.
PAIGE: What have been your biggest challenges with podcasting.
SHANNON: Being a woman.
PAIGE: Really?
SHANNON: Yeah, I think so. It’s been very tough for me to get over my own conflictions in my brain telling me, you know, whenever you’re around men who are in a certain technical community, they may talk down to you because you’re a female. Or if I am at a convention, I have to deal with people sexualzing me becuase I’m a woman and because I just happen to have girly parts. So it’s been very hard for me to get people to act mature whenever I’m talking on a show and I just happen to be wearing a shirt that has a little bit of cleavage or something like that. So, it’s been hard, but I think I’ve gotten to the point where I’m respected because I respect people just as much, and I’ve learned a lot about what I’m good at. ANd I also don’t lie to people. So, you know, whenever I’m on the show talking about a certain segment, I’ll tell them straight up. Hey, I”m not an expert in blah, blah, blah, but this is something that I studied and I know this is correct.
PAIGE: I’ve always been really impressed with your ability to kind of present a brand new topic and be humble about it, without being apologetic.
SHANNON: Yeah. Yeah.
PAIGE: That’s really key, especially for women. Our tendency is to be apologetic that we don’t know things. And it’s okay to not know everything, but it’s also okay to know what you know.
SHANNON: Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. And I’m totally willing on the show too to ask for support as well. Like, if there’s a certain thing that I run into, like a problem, which I’ll run into problems. Everybody does with technical aspects. I’ll ask the community. I’ll say hey has anybody else run into this problem. Can you answer this for me? Email and I’ll shout you out in the next show. So that way it’s rewarding for them and it’s rewarding for me to, because I love to learn. And I’m always willing to learn, because, you know, you can never learn everything that’s available in the world.
ANGELA: Have you done any kind of boot camp or any kind of online, specifically technical classes?
PAIGE: Yeah, like what’s your favorite resource for learning all the new stuff that you’re constantly teaching?
SHANNON: I’m a huge bookworm. So, if I can find an educational book that’s written by an expert in the field, I’m going to buy the book. I know that I could just Google it and probably find a great Wikipedia article about whatever I’m learning, but I prefer to use school textbooks.
PAIGE: I think you might be the first guest that’s said that.
SHANNON: I don’t know why, but I learn so much better whenever I can sit down and read a book. And I think it’s just because I’ve always been around books my whole life, so I’m a huge bookworm.
PAIGE: Yeah, I have to say, I kind of agree. Like when I really need to deep dive a topic, like I just recently had to start learning angularjs for my job, and trying to do it with the online tutorials I was getting some of it, but when I finally was like, okay I’m just going to get the O’Reilly book and sit down and plow through it, it all just comes together so much more richly.
SHANNON: Yeah, it’s really tough too with online articles, because a lot of them start at a, you know, a more advanced topic. When I choose to start my segments at a very beginner topic. So, if I’m just learning things, I can’t start from like halfway in, like the 201 series. I have to start with the 101 or else I don’t understand a thing. So I’m very logical. I’m very step-by-step and tutorial based. I like to teach people the same way that I like to teach myself.
PAIGE: Yeah, I have to say, I’ve definitely recommended you hack tip segments for several women trying to kind of get their head around some basic stuff for Linux.
SHANNON: Thank you.
PAIGE: Stuff like that.
SHANNON: I’m really happy to hear that.
ANGELA: Yeah, Paige is a huge advocate. She runs the Portland chapter of Women Who Code and does a lot of networking.
SHANNON: Oh that is awesome. Yeah, I’ve even had a few people email me and say, hey I’ve been using your hack tips as a series in my school or in my classroom. So it’s really, really inspiring whenever I have people email me and tell me that they’re using this to teach a younger generation.
PAIGE: So, what would you, I guess, I’m always interested because, especially with it being so accessible. Really, all you need is a computer, an internet connection, and some sort of microphone and you can get started podcasting. What would you say to people who are interested in sharing their knowledge in this way?
SHANNON: Definitely do it about something that you’re obsessed with. Not just something that you’re semi interested in and you kind of want to teach people about it, but something that you really know. Something that you’re willing to learn and really delve into and really become and expert on. Because if you’re not, it really come across in podcasting whenever somebody doesn’t know everything. And be willing to learn more too. And then as far as technical experience with podcasting, get a good mic. Audio is key. People won’t listen to a podcast if it doesn’t have good audio. And don’t worry about how many people are watching your show, because the ones that matter, they will be there from the beginning to the end. You don’t, it doesn’t matter if you have a million views. Don’t look at it as trying to make money, just look at it as sharing. Sharing something that you love.
PAIGE: The internet is an awesome place, because we’ve all taken the time to share.
SHANNON: I agree.
PAIGE: So we talked about your biggest challenges in podcasting. What keeps you in podcasting? What lights your fire about it?
SHANNON: For me, it’s really when I go to conventions or when I go to a meetup or something like that and I see a little boy or a little girl come up to me and be a a little bit shy about meeting me, but tell me that they’ve learned from me and they’ve been able to develope some of experience with whatever I’ve been teaching on the different shows. For me, it feels so good to know what I’m changing somebody’s view on technology. So it’s not just like, you know, when me and you grew up. It’s not like it feels geeky for them. Like, we’re look at as, looked down on, looked down up.
PAIGE: Yeah, I remember when geek wasn’t cool.
SHANNON: Yeah, it wasn’t cool back in our day, but now it’s more of a cool thing because you have these interesting people get into it that are so obsessed with it that we come across as like, I don’t know, BIll Nye’s. I remember watching Bill Nye in high school and thinking wow he’s so cool. He makes me so excited for science. I want to be that person. I want to be the person that gets these little kids excited about talking about internet security and hacking.
ANGELA: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: Right. Yeah, I’ve never seen anyone be able to light up a room about PGP the way that you can.
SHANNON: Yeah, I love seeing when a little nine year old girls comes up to me and her eyes light up, because she’s like oh my gosh I learned so much from you. I just makes me feel so good inside. And that’s really what keeps me going.
PAIGE: Yeah, I totally agree. Reaching out, helping the community, and just building it back. And I think hearing you talk at the beginning about how being involved in the community was what kind of jump started you into the knowledge and the place that you have in podcasting, this community, the hack community, the tech community is welcoming by in large. Like you said, no question is a bad question.
SHANNON: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve had a few people look at me and just be like, you’re asking that question? And I’m like, yeah I am, because guess what, the five people behind me, they want to ask that question too, but they’re too afraid to raise their hands.
PAIGE: Yeah. No, exactly. I talk a lot — I teach an intro to JavaScript course and one of the biggest things I teach is ask questions and let me help you learn how.
SHANNON: Yeah, absolutely. Because you’re not going to learn if something goes over your head. You have to ask those questions.
PAIGE: Yeah, and don’t be afraid to ask how to ask the question too, because sometimes it’s just that you’re missing that, you know, you’re asking these questions and you’re just asking the wrong question. So go ahead and ask what should I know here. What am I missing?
SHANNON: Absolutely. Oh man, I wish I could have taken your course in college.
ANGELA: And so then, we talked briefly about your nickname. On Twitter your /Snubs, or I guess @snubs. And your website is snubsie.com.
SHANNON: Yeah.
ANGELA: Can you tell us how you got that nickname?
SHANNON: That was in high school. I was hanging out with my friend Danny and I was really into video games at the time. I was learning that I really needed to get a screen name. And I thought Shannon is not that great of a screen name so I need something cool. So one of my friends, he was like well what about Snubsie Boo. And I was like, that’s so cute. Snubsie Boo. So over time it just kind of shortened down to Snubs, because it’s easier to spell and it’s faster to type.
ANGELA: That works.
PAIGE: Sometimes what our friends lay on us, it just sticks.
SHANNON: It’s a boring question, or it’s a boring answer, but I get it all the time.
ANGELA: I think the first time I had to come up with a screen name was for Livejournal. Well first of all, it was actually AOL and I wanted Curly, but there were apparently 8,500, 700. Anyway, it wa Curly85647. When I got to choose one creatively in high school for Livejournal, I just Googled, I put a random word into Google, just picked a random word and then did it again with a different word and picked a second word and it ended up being Scaling Dynasty.
SHANNON: Oh, that’s cool.
ANGELA: I know.
PAIGE: That’s pretty cool, actually.
ANGELA: I know. It is cool. I haven’t used it anywhere else, but yeah.
PAIGE: My friends always get a little bit weirded out when they find out my online handle, because I’m kind of like a tomboy girl, backwards hats and everything, and my handle is Feather.
SHANNON: Aw, that’s adorable. I like it.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: It works for me.
SHANNON: People get weirded out whenever I walk into like a Fry’s and I’m like, I want to build a computer. And I get these looks from the reps and they’re like, you sure you want to build a computer? Like, yes. I can do my manicures and pedicures and want to build a computer too.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Do you find that because you have a fairly feminine appearance, even for women in technology, that that sets you even farther apart?
SHANNON: Oh for sure. I did an experiment recently where, and it was just kind of a quiet experiment that I didn’t tell anybody about, but you can see it on TekThing if you look close enough. So, in one episode I wore a very floral shirt. It was very, like it had flowers all over it and it was pink and it very, very girly. I was talking about some kind of technical segment. I don’t remember what it was now, but I got a lot of harsh criticism on that episode. And I was like, well I know that I was teaching the correct facts, so I’m going to try something new on the next episode. So, on another episode of TekThing I decided to do another different shirt where I wore a gaming T-shirt. So it wasn’t flattering, it wasn’t girly at all. It was just a gaming T-shirt with a bunch of consoles on it. I got really, really good constructive feedback on that one. Nobody was negative. I was like, that’s strange. So I did it again, same thing. Isn’t that weird?
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Wow.
SHANNON: Yeah, isn’t that crazy. So I was like, huh. So, it totally has to do with how you show yourself on a show. And a lot of it is kind of sexist. And I don’t think it’s meant to be, but it’s just the way that we’ve grown up and the way that we perceive women as compared to men. So women generally are perceived as lesser or we don’t have as much education as men or as much experience. Not that I’m a feminist, necessarily, I might be sometimes. But, I’ve noticed a big difference depending on what i wear on the show.
ANGELA: Right. Well, and if you just put it into sentences that somebody reads, it’s like if the audience is thinking what does she know? She’s wearing flowers.
SHANNON: Exactly.
ANGELA: That sounds weird. But it was like, oh she might know something. She has a gaming shirt.
SHANNON: Yep.
ANGELA: That’s so bizarre.
SHANNON: It’s totally bizarre, but it’s true. And that’s the way our society has been taught.
PAIGE: It’s an unconscious bias and that’s the hardest part about it, is it is by and large an unconscious bias. I get treated very differently than most of my female counterparts because I wear baseball caps, I wear T-shirts and jeans, and most guys just treat me like one of the guys. So it’s kind of interesting because I feel sometimes like I get to be a double agent to like infiltrate and be like, advocate for women. And they’re like, but you’re one of the guys. What’s going on?
SHANNON: That’s hilarious. It’s terrible, but it’s hilarious.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: But at the same time, it’s interesting because I’ll get the unconscious bias the other way where I show up to women’s event and because I don’t look very feminine, I can get the judgement in the other direction too.
SHANNON: Oh yeah, for sure.
PAIGE: It’s very interesting. Although, the geek community is more accepting of that.
ANGELA: Accepting, yes.
PAIGE: Which is good. Speaking of dressing, interestingly, one last thing that I’m’ always fascinated by, who’s your favorite character to cosplay?
SHANNON: Oh, heck yeah. Um, I would say Sailor Mars. She’s my favorite.
PAIGE: Oh, good call.
SHANNON: From Sailor Moon. If nobody has watched it, Sailor Moon is amazing. So good.
PAIGE: Yeah, you went old school.
SHANNON: Yes, it’s totally old school but I made my first Sailor Mars costume when I was in college and I loved it so much. I even dyed my hair black and I grew it out so it would look like Sailor Mars. There are pictures. There are pictures on the internet of my Sailor Mars cosplay on my Twitter.
ANGELA: Yeah, I was just going to say, who are you dressed as in your current Twitter picture?
SHANNON: Let’s see, my current Twitter I think is just my, oh yeah, that’s my Renaissance festival costume.
ANGELA: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, awesome.
SHANNON: I just decided to dress as a Ren Fair person.
PAIGE: I’m trying to put together my very first cosplay costume and it is a big reach, because I want to cosplay as Baymax from Big Hero 6.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
SHANNON: Cool.
PAIGE: But I’ve been a costumer for a long time. I do a lot of Renaissance fair and all that jazz. I like costuming, but this is an interesting. I want to do the blow up and figure out how to make it work.
SHANNON: That is really cool. I wish you tons of luck. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.
ANGELA: i actually have a fan for material to blow it up.
PAIGE: All right. We’re going to have to talk.
ANGELA: Yeah. That’s great. It’s for a Hulk costume, but you could totally just use it for that.
PAIGE: Oh, that’s neat. I should look into that. So cosplay, what about cosplaying do you enjoy, Shannon?
SHANNON: I like being able to dress up and pretend to be somebody else. It’s the theater thing for me.
PAIGE: I always like the idea of be all you can be.
SHANNON: Yeah. Oh man, it’s so much fun.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s very fun. I highly recommend that if you’ve never played dress up as an adult, you at least give it a go. At the very least it’s an interesting psychological experiment.
SHANNON: It is. It’s kind of like Halloween every single day.
PAIGE: Yeah, with less candy.
SHANNON: Yes, with less candy. Well, unless you buy it from the grocery store next door to the hotel like I do.
PAIGE: Feel like you might have done that.
SHANNON: Maybe.
ANGELA: Might be from experience.
PAIGE: Just one last question. You have mentioned that you go to conventions. What’s the next convention that you’re headed to?
SHANNON: Let’s see, the next one will be this summer. If will be DEFCON again. This will be, I think like my sixth DEFCON. Wow, that’s a lot.
PAIGE: Oh wow.
SHANNON: And after that, I’ll be going to Dragoncon for my first time this year, so I’m planning to cosplay at that one.
PAIGE: Are you skipping PAX this year?
SHANNON: No PAX, yeah no PAX for me.
PAIGE: Oh bummer.
SHANNON: Do you go to PAX? Maybe I should go.
PAIGE: Yeah, we’re up here in Seattle, so I’m planning to go to PAX this year. It will be my first year. It will be a good time.
SHANNON: It looks amazing. I have friends from Missouri that go to PAX and i’m like, oh man, I live so much closer, I need to go.
PAIGE: You really should come up.
SHANNON: I’ll take you up on that.
PAIGE: Awesome. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us Shannon. This has been amazing. We’ll look forward to seeing you on your shows.
SHANNON: Thank you so much. And it was a pleasure talking to both of you.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find a full transcription in the show notes at jupiterbroadcasting.com or also at heywtr.tumblr.com.
PAIGE: And also, any links to Shannon’s shows will be in the show notes. So if you want to check her out, go ahead and take a gander there. You can also find us on iTunes. Subscribe to the show there. Or if you prefer an RSS feed, it’s’ available at jupiterbroadcasting.com under the heywtr show. And you can also follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

The post Early Tech Obsession | WTR 30 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.