Paige – Jupiter Broadcasting

Fiaura The Gamer | WTR 58

chris — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 08:06:11 +0000

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Fiaura is a semi-pro gamer & community contributor for many games & loves tanks. She enjoys all aspects of games which includes playing, reviewing & competing!

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Interview – Fiaura – @Fiaura_Tanks

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Impress with WordPress | WTR 57

chris — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 12:32:03 +0000

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Kronda makes wordpress sites, manages a blog & offers educational resources for learning wordpress!

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Interview – Kronda – @kronda

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Anita Borg Institute | WTR 56

chris — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 09:43:58 +0000

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ABI.chicago launched Oct 2015 as a 501.3c focused to women and men that are in all interests of technology. Its goal is to reach more beginners interested in transitioning to technology. LaShon Anthony is the Community Leader of the ABI.chicago chapter.

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Interview – LaShon Anthony – @visuals4u

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Oops, We Went International | WTR 55

chris — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 01:05:18 +0000

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Jewel is cofounder of Workfrom, an online resource for remote workers, freelancers, digital nomads & travelers to find a place to work from!

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Interview – Jewel Mlnarik – @juellez

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Let Accidents Happen | WTR 54

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

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

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Interview – Jo Wollschlaeger – @jo_wollsch

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Giving Clients Joy | WTR 53

chris — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 11:13:58 +0000

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Paige is the founder of ClientJoy, a gifting fulfillment business offering local goodies in packages for businesses to send to VIPs.

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Interview – Paige Hendrix – paige@clientjoy.com / @PaigeHendrix

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Starting At 8 | WTR 52

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

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

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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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ChickTECH The Nation | WTR 50

chris — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 02:19:27 +0000

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Janice is the founder of nonprofit ChickTECH, a Portland based company running programs for women to get into technology including high school, summer camps, job boards & so much more!

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Authentic Partnership | WTR 49

chris — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 12:33:04 +0000

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Jennifer is the VP of business development at Women Who Code, with over 50k members across 20 countries and 67 cities & growing!

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Code Saves Time | WTR 48

chris — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 12:39:04 +0000

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Coraline is a web developer for a health company, working to reduce the amount of screen time for doctors & nurses by providing better tools.

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I Want To Know All The Things | WTR 47

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

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

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

I Am The Unicorn | WTR 46

chris — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 01:29:25 +0000

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Sara is a software engineer with a journalism and digital/social media startup background. She began to learn code using Codeschool & Codecademy.

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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: Well, Angela, this week we have Sara joining us and she is a new coder out in Austin and she talks us through her journey and just some really awesome stories about how she got here and what’s she’s been through. It’s a great interview.
ANGELA: It is. And before we get into it, I just want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. That is a general bucket that supports the entire network, but more specifically, because you listen to Women’s Tech Radio, you are supporting us as well. So go to Patreon.com/today.
PAIGE: And we get into our interview today by asking Sara what she’s up to in technology today.
SARA: Essentially, right now, I”m a software developer. I live in Austin, Texas. I was a journalist and i worked in digital media for ten years prior to making that transition, which I did with the help of a code bootcamp in Los Angeles called Sabio, which focuses particularly on women and minorities, trying to diversify the tech scene out there. So currently I’ve been working on UIs, utilizing Angular, Bootstrap, and C#.
PAIGE: How do you wrap the C# into that?
SARA: So, essentially, you’re building the UI out for this device and the back end is being written in Java, so we’re writing a dummy backend or whatever in C# just to be able to test the UI out.
PAIGE: That makes sense. Awesome. So it sounds like you’ve had kind of a fun journey. Did you start in Austin and end up back there? How did that all go around?
SARA: Yeah, sure. It’s kind of a funny story, just because I ended up moving between LA. I ended up back and forth between La and Texas so many times I would literally be in Austin saying hey, I’m going to LA and everyone asked me, didn’t you just move here? And I’be be like yes, but I”m going back. ANd then I’d be back in LA and everyone is like hey didn’t you just move to Texas?
ANGELA: Wow.
SARA: So my family is actually from a town here on the Texas border called Eagle Pass and my dad went to grad school in LA at UCLA. And so, ended up living in LA for part of my childhood. And then moved to San Antonio, finished high school out here. Went to school in California. Worked in Texas. Moved to California. Moved back to Texas. Moved to California. Moved back to Texas. So it was really just something that, I think you know, you become a grown up and you say hey what kind of quality of life is for me and personally I, most of my family is in Texas and the pace is just a little bit more my speed, because being stuck in traffic in LA just wasn’t as fun for me anymore. So, yeah, so Austin is great. I think sometimes it as a little bit of a small town for someone who’s use to something bigger. But what I really like about Austin, what I really appreciate, particularly in the tech scene and a lot of the work I do with Women Who Code, is that it’s really easy to know people and get to know people and network with people. And you can literally meet a CEO somewhere, connect with them on LinkedIn, get coffee with them. It’s really kind of a more intimate community, I think, than like a place where LA where there’s just, first of all, it’s just hard to meet people because you have to go across this huge 60 square mile area just to get anywhere. And then you can’t even just get there, you have to fight traffic. And once you get there everyone is very much interested in who are you, what can you do for me, why would I want to talk to you.
ANGELA: It sounds a lot like Austin is very much like Portland.
SARA: Uh, yeah, you know, I haven’t-
PAIGE: This is a frequent comparison that is made.
SARA: Really?
ANGELA: Is it?
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s why we share the slogan keep it weird.
SARA: Keep it weird.
ANGELA: Yeah. Paige is from Portland, so.
SARA: Oh, that’s cool. My brother went to Reede. He’s a graduate, so that’s really the only time I’ve ever been to Portland. I can’t really speak, but it was really nice when I was there. Just a little bit cold for my taste.
PAIGE: It is. The seasons are a bit, it gets cold. I would rather live in the LA area mostly, but I detest cars and traffic for the most part. If I can avoid using a car I will opt for that every time.
SARA: I feel you girl. I’m right there with you.
PAIGE: What do you think is, besides the, so you’ve kind of outlined why LA is not the scene that Austin is, but what do you think it is that makes Austin the scene it is? Because I’ve been to other small tech cities and they don’t, like even in Portland, I would say you have to kind of work to get to meet a CEO. Like, and we have a fair number of startups, the startup scene, because everybody is migrating north from Silicon Valley and they’re winding up in either Portland or Seattle.
SARA: Oh, okay.
PAIGE: But, you know, we have a pretty good scene. It’s a couple years old now really of kind of getting going, but trying to, networking that is still sort of difficult. So what do you think makes the community in Austin tight?
SARA: I think that, you know, my father is a history professor and so I frequently fall back on things like context and history to kind of think about things like that. So Austin has been traditionally a really small town in Texas. So most recently, I think Austin has experienced, probably the last decade in particular, a lot of growth. Compared to what it was historically, Austin was the smallest major city in Texas. I mean, Dallas/Fort Worth were bigger, Houston was bigger, even El Paso was bigger. San Antonio certainly was bigger. So Austin’s growth has been really recent and so I think that that kind of small town flavor, that small town culture is still very much kind of part and parcel of the community here. And I think that kind of the way that it came about was that, again, Austin is a small town, so then people started moving here from other parts of Texas, and, you know, it’s still a small town so people kind of adapt that culture. And then people start moving here from other part of the country and that’s the culture. And so I think it’s just kind of, I think that that’s due mostly to the fact that historically Austin was a pretty small town and still is compared to a lot of the other major Texas metropolitan areas. And so that being said, I know, I have a lot of–you know, obviously, I spent a good chunk of my life in California. I know people, I know there’s crazy people in Texas, but people are really nice. There is a good part about Texas that, there really is a good genuine friendliness in the culture here, which you may not know if you don’t get past the crazy gun stuff. But, you know, and I think that’s another part of it. It’s just, people are nice here. And to your point about the startups, you know, kind of moving and relocating, I have heard on more than one occasion that startup founders or venture capitalist will say things like, well Austin has a really good work/life balance if that’s what you’re into.
PAIGE: Yeah, I totally get that.
SARA: And so we’re a bad thing, right, to not be working all the time. KInd of to that point, there’s just so many, Austin is a really social networky town. I mean, you can literally be drinking every night of the week here, meeting people, if you wanted to do that. I’ve definitely had weeks where I’d go to two or three events, and you know, so those are my thoughts.
PAIGE: That’s a really good way to put that. I think Portland has some of that heritage, but it’s been a little, a little longer.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: And I think the influx is a little bit higher. The gentrification in Portland is starting to pick up pretty bad. I think we had like a 30 percent rent increase in the past year.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s pretty unreal.
ANGELA: Yeah, house values are going up here in Seattle, like a lot.
SARA: A lot.
PAIGE: Yeah, like a lot. It’s is literally like Silicon Valley is just spreading.
SARA: Wow.
PAIGE: So it will be interesting to see. I like the history as well, so it will be interesting to see the numbers come in in the next couple of years of how things change and why.
SARA: Yeah. Similar things are happening in Austin and everyone kind of has different feelings about it, but you can’t really stop demographic shifts, right.
PAIGE: Yeah, we just have to try to, i think, be conscious of them.
SARA: Absolutely.
PAIGE: We can’t stop them, but we can do it intentionally.
SARA: Absolutely. I agree.
PAIGE: So you started out in journalism?
SARA: Yes, so that’s, I get that question sometimes when people hear about my background. I went to school and actually thought I was going to go to law school. I took the LSAT and all that. And I was just thinking, hey I’m going to do this journalism thing for a year before I apply to law school. Well, once it came time to apply to law school I thought, oh my god, I do not want to go to law school. So I ended up making a career out of journalism and I loved it and I was really good at it and I did it in two languages. And, unfortunately, I came into journalism right at that turning point where the web was starting to overtake media in a really kind of forceful way. I’ve literally sat in meetings where people were saying, you know, we actually have more hits on our website than we have subscribers.
PAIGE: Yeah.
SARA: And then the recession hit and media companies, so I tell people sometimes, I’ve been laid off like three times. And they look at me with these, you know, horror in their eyes. I’m like, oh it’s no big deal, it just working in the media. And that’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality is, you know, every quarter you’ve got to have profits, because it’s a publically traded company and the first ones to go.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: So, yeah, so I worked in newspapers here in Texas. I worked in Brownsville, Austin, and San Antonio. So I actually lived here in Austin about 10 years ago, first time. And i loved it and was great at it and unfortunately it didn’t work out for me. And then I thought, okay, hey I’m going to be responsible, I’m going to change careers and I started a master’s in community counseling. Because through my work as a journalist people are always telling me all their problems anyways and I’m a real good listener. And I thought this will be really great, because I’m bilingual. You need more bilingual health workers, right, in Texas. And then I got pulled into a startup and I loved it. And so I started doing digital media. I worked in an industry publication called Inside Facebook, kind of covering the Facebook platform right around the time that Facebook was really deep into monetization, rolling out the pages product and things like that. So I have some pretty detailed memories, excruciatingly detailed memories about Facebook’s development as a monetized platform. But, yeah, and then I started this other startup. It was called News Taco and it was like a digital English language publication for Latinos. And then I worked at another digital startup when I moved to LA called Mitu, Mitu Network and it’s was a YouTube network. I think now it’s kind of more newfangled, new media company. So kind of through all of that I, you know, I see it as kind of like a steady progression of what media is, essentially these days. Anybody can write. Anybody can take pictures. Anyone can do video. So media really is more about medium, right, the medium is the message, right?
ANGELA: Yep.
SARA: So, and that medium is technology. My last position, I really kind of started to dig deep into some more technical things and YouTube’s backend stuff and I thought, hey I can handle technical stuff. I learned all this stuff. And it’s something I’d been wanting to do a while so I decided that I was just going to get a job, marketing job or content management, whatever I could get, and I was going to figure out how to learn to code. So, I”m doing this. I literally have these jobs I’m going to apply to. I had moved back to Austin. I was kind of freelancing. And, like, I’m fixing to apply to these jobs, like the next day, and my friend Liana (unintelligible) from LA, who I met when I was working in LA–we were actually in a room, we were in a Girls in Tech LA event and we were both like, where are the other Latinas. We kind of made a B-line for each other because there were literally on four of us there. That’s how I met her. She calls me up, she says Sara, she’s a cofounder of Sabio, this bootcamp that i mentioned. She says Sara, we have a spot for you. And I”m just like, wow, this is almost like faitful, you know.
PAIGE: Sometimes things just line up like that.
SARA: This really lined up. So I kind of said hey, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s literally knocking down my door, so I kind of dropped my plans to apply to these jobs. I started Code School, Codecademy, JavaScript, all this stuff. What’s Bootstrap? What’s Responsive Design? C#, SQL. So that’s what i did. And then I went to Sabio last year and then I moved back in December and I had an excruciating job search. I tell people, don’t look for a job in December and January. Especially as a newbie, it was hard. I mean, I wrote a story about it on my–I have a platform for Latinos in technology and STEM, it’s called MasWired and I had like 40 interviews between phone calls with recruiters and phone calls online and in-person interviews and technical interviews over the phone. And those kind of like shared develope, I mean, it was just, I counted them, right? And it took me months and I finally, when I did get a job offer I got two.
PAIGE: When it rains it pours.
SARA: Where were you guys all this time, you know. Why are you doing this to me. So, yeah, so since April, so it’s been about, going on seven months, I’ve been working as a software developer and it’s a little bit overwhelming, I’d say. LIke journalism. Journalism and writing and digital media stuff, I just got so good at it that i could do it with my eyes closed. And certainly that’s not something that you ever feel working in technology. So it’s been an interesting adjustment. But, yeah, so that’s kind of how I made that transition.
PAIGE: That is an awesome story.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
SARA: Than you.
PAIGE: That’s very cool.
ANGELA: Lots of moving.
SARA: Yeah. I definitely, I’m just like, ugh, I’m actually buying nice things now so, like, I’m only going to move one or twice more.
ANGELA: It sounds like you’re staying.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s when you know you’ve settled. I’m still not doing that.
ANGELA: Yeah, keeping the boxes broken down in the garage.
PAIGE: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: But, you know, I”m nomadic, so it works that way.
SARA: Oh yeah, I had my nomadic years.
PAIGE: I don’t think I”ll give them up. My dad said to me one time, he’s like, Paige, I’m pretty sure there’s not gypsy blood in the family. I’m like, dad I think you’re wrong. I have so many questions out of your story. I guess the first one is, do you feel like being at a bootcamp that was focused on diversity made a difference in the way that you learned or how you networked afterwards or the support that you got afterwards? Like any of that stuff?
SARA: Sure. So, I can’t really speak, because I’ve never been to any other bootcamps. That being said, I have been around other bootcamps, you know, here in Austin, certainly. And I’ve heard thing from–I’ve had friends who have gone through MakerSquare or General Assembly or whatever other ones, right. We have some Austin Code School or Austin Code Club or something. I would say, I think for me personally, you know, and journalism is also a very male dominated profession, so I wasn’t so freaked out around being around men, but the–I went to Stanford as an undergrad and I just remember being put off by those tech people. And so I was scared about that. And so, I think for me, going to Sabio was really kind of, much more warm and inviting and made me feel like technology was for me. And so that made a huge difference. I think, you know, there were other women there. There were other Latinos there. You know, um, you know, there was African Americans there. It was just kind of an environment that I felt comfortable in while learning this difficult material, right, in a very stressful environment. So, I think as far as the recruiting goes, you know, LA’s tech market, I think my job search would have gone a lot easier had I been in LA, because it’s just a bigger market. I think part of the trouble that I had in Austin finding a job, or why it took me so much longer than it should of is it’s just a smaller market and people here or the companies here seem to really be waiting for those unicorns to come along. You know, the–I saw a meme the other day. It’s like, we’re looking for someone in their 20s with 30 years experience.
ANGELA: Oh, yes, I’ve seen that one before.
PAIGE: Yeah, exactly.
SARA: And so-
PAIGE: Entry-level, seven years experience.
ANGELA: Right.
SARA: Exactly. And that’s kind of what I kept running into, is we want a junior developer for this position who is really, really, really, really, good. I’m like, okay. You know. So, yeah, what I think that I do appreciate about Sabio, and this is my experience, is they’re very focused on creating a community and a network. I think, because of this type of students the they’re focusing on, they understand that hey, you probably don’t have a network in tech, otherwise you would have a network in tech and you wouldn’t need to come to a code school. So there is a really, kind of, active alumni network that I go to all the time. Hey, what about this? Anybody know about this? Hey, you know, and like is this normal, what should I be asking, what should I do. And for me that’s been, that’s probably been one of the best things about my Sabio experience.
PAIGE: What tool do you guys use to do that?
SARA: We have previously used Yammer and now we’re on Slack.
PAIGE: Seems like everybody is on Slack doing this these days.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: It’s a great tool for it.
SARA: Absolutely, yeah. So, and then if you’re in LA they have Professional Development Seminars. They have recruiting events. It’s just really great if you’re in LA and you’re going to work in LA to have this tangible and virtual community. That being said, my mother still lives in LA so I”m going down there for Thanksgiving and there’s going to be a Sabio happy hour and I may get to visit with everybody. I think that’s amazing. A year after I haven’t seen these people, we’re going to get together and have drinks and it will be fun.
ANGELA: That is awesome.
PAIGE: How big was your class?
SARA: So we had eight folks.
PAIGE: Eight.
SARA: There was eight of us.
PAIGE: That’s nice. That’s a good size. So how, did you feel like your journalism skills, like did you find a way to kind of translate them? I think being bilingual should have given you some, there is some similarity between learning a foreign language and learning to code, because you are essentially just learning to talk to a computer. Do you feel like that influenced your learning process and/or did being a journalist who is used to kind of seeking out answers to questions, do you think that influenced it for you?
SARA: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think that one of the first–I think that anything that you have to learn changes you to a certain extent, and I would say probably one the ways that journalism changed me the most was just really not having any feelings about asking questions, which makes for some little awkward situations sometimes, because I end up like interrogating people about their personal lives without really meaning to. Just because I’m curious, but I think that served me really, really well in software. Okay, so you want this data on front end. What is it going to do once it gets there. How is this going to be used. Is this anywhere else? Just really drilling down deep into questions so that I can fully understand the task at hand. That has been really helpful. And I think my metaphor for writing code or creating an application, and certainly I”m not as proficient as I would like to be at this point, but kind of my goal is, there’s a really–so, for me, because I’ve been writing for so long as a profession, as a science almost, it’s very formulaic at the end of the day. I know some people, I know a lot of people struggle with writing, but once you’ve written like thousands of things it’s pretty much the same thing over and over again. It’s very formulaic, just like a function, right?
PAIGE: Yep.
SARA: Just like anything you’re going to write in software. It’s like, hey here is the beginning. Here’s a few details about the thing. Here’s how they all tie together. The end. I mean, it’s pretty formulaic for me. I could write anything in a variety of ways, but at its core, that’s what you’re doing. That being said, there’s a verbose way to do that and there’s a succinct way to do that and there’s a romantic way to do that, and there’s a funny way to do that. And that’s kind of how I look at software development, is like you can write the same thing multiple ways, right. So I kind of look at being software developer, my development as a software developer as looking at it like being a writer. I want to be an efficient, interesting, but very pointed writer. Nobody wants to waste words, especially in the digital age when if it’s not 140 characters who cares. I think code is kind of the same thing. Yeah, you can have, nobody reads the source code of Angular. I mean, it’s just too long and it’s too crazy. But people will love a code snippet, right. So how do you ingest all of this stuff and output the most elegant, quick, easy to understand solution. To kind of address your question, I see software development as–I see writing as a metaphor for software development in that it’s very painful to learn how to do it well, but once you get there it’s totally worth it.
PAIGE: I really like that idea. That’s really cool. Like the idea of your code having your voice behind it.
ANGELA: Uh-huh. Yeah.
PAIGE: And I definitely notice that. I think, I can usually tell who on a team has written something by the way it’s written.
SARA: Oh, that’s interesting. That makes sense, yeah.
PAIGE: I mean, unless you have like super song’s file guides someplace too.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Especially in some of the more relaxed languages like JavaScript or Ruby or Python.
SARA: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, actually, now that you say that. I can tell too.
PAIGE: Yeah.
SARA: Huh, that’s cool.
PAIGE: If you like the idea of software having a voice and being really readable, Ruby is a fantastic language for that. It’s actually one of the core foundations of the community. It actually kind of over the years shifted to the idea that even comments are not, shouldn’t be necessary. LIke your code should be human readable enough that you shouldn’t need comments.
SARA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Which, I really like that idea.
SARA: Yeah, that’s, I like that too.
PAIGE: So you mentioned that you had 40 job applications. So I have two questions in that.
SARA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: How long did that take in a town like Austin and what did you do while you were doing those to kind of keep yourself sharp or, you know, maybe you had to have a job or whatever. And if you had to have a job, like how did you find the time. I have a lot of, in my Women Who Code network we have a lot of bootcamp graduates who are really struggling with that process.
SARA: Sure. I totally lucked out in the sense that I was able to, you know, I’ve always kind of tried to have a side gig going, just to be able to save up money. And so by the time I moved out to Austin I was freelancing. I wasn’t making a whole bunch of money but I was sustaining myself. So I had all this savings, all this money that I had saved up so I was able to go to the bootcamp and work one contract, so it was actually, I was just colleague over lunch, I am way too old to go to bootcamp ever again. It was a great experience. I don’t ever want to do that again. It was like-
ANGELA: What is too old? What makes you too old?
SARA: I just, I just mean that I was going to bootcamp 10 to 12 hours a day.
ANGELA: Oh.
SARA: And then I was going home and I was working.
ANGELA: I see. Yes.
SARA: I was working one to two hours and then I was trying to make my lunch and it was just-
PAIGE: Yeah, like sleep and eat?
SARA: It was just, so tired. It was just so exhausting and I was stretched so thin. You know, when you’re 24, 25 you can do that.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: Because it’s, you know, and I”m not. So i’m just, it was just so intense and so hard and so-
PAIGE: I”m going to ask that personal question.
SARA: Yes.
PAIGE: How old are you?
SARA: Oh, I”m 32.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s kind of when it changes.
SARA: Yea, exactly. I say I’m an old lady, everyone’s like, you’re not an old lady Sara. And I’m like, I know, but compared to you I’m an old lady. I’m not 24.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: In tech we feel old.
SARA: Yeah, seriously. So, you know, that was kind of my thing. I was able to kind of do that. So the four month, it took me four months. I think. I came back in December, like a few days before Christmas. And I was still grump so I kind of ruined Christmas, but i forgive myself. But, yeah, so i came back December 19th and I found a job the third week in April. Almost towards the end of April. I started on April 27th. So it took a while and I think that part of it is, I think I mentioned earlier, in Austin, for whatever reason, all these startups think that they’re going to get senior devs. They’re all, I mean, it’s a limited pool. Again, Austin is like maybe, what, a million people. I don’t know what the population of Austin is, but it’s not huge. It’s not six million like LA or, you know, eight million like New York or whatever. Yeah, Austin is less than a million people. So, but they keep thinking that they’re going to, you know, everyone is holding out for that senior dev and so I’ve seen job postings–like I applied, check this out, I applied to, I saw a job that I applied to earlier this year when I was looking and they’re still looking for this person. So it’s going on a year that they’ve been looking for this person . And you just kind of have to ask yourself, maybe you’re not going to find that person dude.
ANGELA: Yeah, it’s a unicorn. Pretty much. You have to redefine it or something.
SARA: Exactly, something’s got to give. You know, it was really difficult. So, just kind of address your issue; so yeah, I had savings and I was working different contracts and stuff. So I wasn’t making money, but at a certain point I wasn’t losing a whole bunch of money. That being said, the balance still was going down instead of up.
ANGELA: Sure.
SARA: And I got, I mean, I, so I put, I told them this story. I literally got to the point where I said, okay, well, I can’t find a software job. I’ve tried, you know. I tried my best. It’s not going to happen for me. But I’m not going to give up. I just need to get a day job and I’m going to support my software habit, you know, and I’m going to see how, I’m going to still do this. And so I literally, again, I didn’t give up in a really sad, dramatic way, but I had just practically speaking said hey I need income, so I started applying to these content marketing, digital marketing jobs and, girl, like wildfire people would be calling me back. People were dying to hire me, because I’m so good at that stuff and I have ten years experience doing that.
PAIGE: You’re a unicorn.
SARA: Yeah, exactly. I am the unicorn. So I was literally, the day I got my first job offer I was going to have job interviews for these content jobs, and then I had to cancel them because I had got the offers. And so that was kind of where I was at. I thought, hey, you know what, I’m not going to give up on this dream, but I have to be realistic about these parameters. And so there is that. You know, like I said, I was getting a little bit nervous about the balance of my savings so, and then I think as far as the emotional stuff, I’m not going to lie. I mean, I gained weight during the bootcamp because I was working out regularly and I just had to sit there for like, you know, 14, 15 hours a day I was just sitting.
ANGELA: Yep.
SARA: The closest, the best I could do is go for a walk around the block. And so I gained weight. And I was like, great, so I’ve gained weight, I don’t have a job, nobody hires me, nobody likes me.
ANGELA: Your savings is going down.
SARA: My savings is going down. It was depressing. It sucked.
ANGELA: Yeah.
SARA: And that’s, you know, I think what I, you know, I was telling my friends recently, you know, I’ve gotten to that point in my life where I know myself as a well rounded person, the good and the bad things. And I said one thing that I really like about myself, and I don’t think that this is because I’m an extraordinary person, it’s just the way that I am, is i bounce back. Sometimes it takes me a few years after whatever, the ups and downs of life, but I always bounce back eventually. And so, you know, I kind of knew that. Even when I was having bad days. And like, Sara, you’re going to get there, you always do. And I think the other thing is, I have worked in environments that were like sexist. I just was like, I am not going to let these bastards get me down.
PAIGE: Right on. That’s the attitude you’ve got to have about anything, really.
SARA: Like hell no. So that was another thing. So, yeah, and then that’s actually kind of where the Women Who Code came into the picture. I was sitting at home feeling all like, oh nobody likes me. I’ll never be a software developer. All feeling sorry for myself and pathetic. And I thought, you know what Sara, you need to get out of this house and you need to go talk to some other human beings, because I was working from home. I said, you need to go out and you need to meet people, because you can’t keep hanging out with yourself only anymore.
ANGELA: Hanging out with yourself.
SARA: So I went to my first Women Who Code event. It was a Tech Talk and it was okay. I wasn’t like super impressed by it. But then I went to another one and that’s when I met some cool people, I heard some great stories, I met Holly the founder of Women Who Code Austin and Trisha the other co-director of Women Who Code Austin. I felt good being there, because I thought, hey, you know, other people had struggles. I’m struggling. It’s not me. You know, I talked to Holly. I said hey this is great. I would love to be involved. Like, I mean, just off the top of my head I didn’t know how I was going to help, but I can tweet. I do digital marketing. I can help you with that. Can I help you with that? She’s like great. So that same day, that same night I got on, hopped on the Women Who Code Austin Twitter and I started living tweeting the lighting talks and after that I said, hey I’m looking for a job, like I’d love any help you can give me. Also, let me know how I can help. That was in February. And so, you know, kind of what happened from there was I really kind of started focusing on the Twitter account and really kind of stepped up the Women Who Code Austin messaging on Twitter and really cool stuff started happening. We started getting more sponsors. We started getting more members in the Women Who Code meetup. We started being able to have panels. We had a panel about women in technology. It’s been really great. And then I had this idea. I said, hey, you know, we have all of these women who are coming who want to work in technology but they don’t have portfolio. We should have, like a portfolio hackathon. And we should say, we’re going to focus on women and we’re going to focus on diversity, because nobody else in this town is focusing on diversity. We’re the ones. We are going to be the change that we seek, right. So it was a great idea and then randomly started having conversations with some of the ladies that work over at Capital Factory, which is an accelerator here in town. And they said, hey we would love to host you for your hackathon. And we can find you a happy hour sponsor. And I said, sure, great, let me know the dates. They’re like in three weeks. So we had a quick pow-wow with the Women Who Code ladies and we said you guys want to do this in three weeks. So we did. In three weeks, you know, we all kind of, we got sponsorship moneys. We got the messaging out. We had people help us invite their members. And we had, what, some person said it at their happy hour it was like the most diverse group of tech people they’d ever seen in Austin. And we had like 90 people show up to participate-
PAIGE: Wow.
SARA: -in the hackathon. We had a Ruby workshop. She had an IBM Bluemix workshop. I mean, i think next year we definitely want to try to have more workshops for beginners, but it was just such a cool event. I literally, girl, I showed up Saturday morning, because Friday night we had the happy hour, so I was all stressed out and tired. We got on TV, was interviewed by the local ABC affiliate, which is super cool.
PAIGE: Oh, that’s super cool.
SARA: And so by the time I got home I was just wiped out. So I wake up Saturday morning at like 8:00 and I’m like why is this happening to me. But I get to the Capital Factory and I’m just barely awake and I look and I”m like what are all these people doing here? I was really shocked that so many people showed up that early on a Saturday and it was great. So, after that, you know, Holly spoke to the Women Who Code organization and Trisha and myself became co-directors of Women Who Code Austin and so it’s just been, that’s something that I would say to folks who are kind of looking for that next job. You know, trying to get their break, catch their break. Go to a Women Who Code event. Start your own event. I mean, I’ve been so impressed. And I’m not like a super new agey person or anything, but we have a nice little group. The Women Who Code organizers and co-directors and volunteers and in the last few months two of them have gotten new jobs making a bunch of money and they’ve been helping the rest of us find jobs, get bigger paychecks. I mean, when we’re all together, we’re so much more powerful than we are when we’re on our own.
PAIGE: That’s exactly the point.
SARA: Yeah, and I’m a true believer. I’m not saying this because, I’m like, girl power, just for the sense of saying it, but, you know-
PAIGE: It’s not even just girl power. It’s any group that comes together with a purpose, with common experience, that’s where you find power. That’s why the majority has power, because they’re already together with a common experience. We can do the same thing.
SARA: Yeah, and it’s been really powerful moment in my life to be–you know, we have a, we call it, what is it called, ladies coding brunch, on Sundays and we get together. A lot of Women Who Code stuff gets done over brunch on Sundays. But, you know, hey I’m working on this project does anybody know Angular, da, da, da. Hey, I”m working on this job application, can you look at my resume, okay let’s go over your LInkedIn profile. It’s just tremendous. We can pull all of our resources together so we have this big pile of resources as opposed to each one of us out there trying to make it happen. And so I have to say, I wasn’t feeling so good about myself. You know, I didn’t have a job, money was going out, I was like overweight, I was just like woe is me. I’m so sad. And then I got these job offers and, it was just the Women Who Code community or whatever really kind of helped me. Like, it was something I could lean on before, while I got to where I wanted to go. So, and Holly started Women Who Code Austin when she was in a bootcamp, when she was here at Makersquare. I mean, she had moved from LA, didn’t know anybody in Austin. She had some health issues and she said, hey, you know what, I need a community. So she started one. And so that’s what I would say. If you don’t have a Women Who Code, you know, check out meetups. You know, I started a JavaScript study group just amongst the people that I know because we’re all trying to better our skills, for example, right? So create a community. Don’t do it by yourself, because that sucks.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can check out the show notes which includes a full transcription over at JupiterBroadcasting.com. Just click on Women’s Tech Radio and scroll down.
PAIGE: You can also hit us up on Twitter, @heywtr, or send us an email at WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com Thanks so much.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post I Am The Unicorn | WTR 46 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Sharing with Intent | WTR 45

chris — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 14:40:26 +0000

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Angela is the Operations Manager of “ALL THE THINGS” at Jupiter Broadcasting but also a mother of three. She discusses her journey in tech as well as her kids’.

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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, today, everybody, we put Angela on the hotseat, ask her a whole bunch of questions about Jupiter Broadcasting, about being a mom, about how technology has improved her life or changed her life, and a lot about sharing and connecting with other people. It’s a really good interview.
ANGELA: Well, I have to agree, if I say so myself. But, before we get into this interview about me, I’d like to mention that you can support the network and Women’s Tech Radio by going to Patreon.com/today. That is the Jupiter Broadcasting bucket. The main bucket where you can support pretty much any show on the network. And when you go there, specifically, you are supporting Women’s Tech Radio. Patreon.com//today.
PAIGE: And we get started with today’s interview by just chitchatting with Angela.
So, Angela, thank you for joining us on Women’s Tech Radio. It’s really fun to finally put you on the mic since you put me on the mic a while ago.
ANGELA: i know, like two months ago, at least.
PAIGE: Yeah, much longer, actually.
ANGELA: Really?
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s been quite a time.
ANGELA: Wow, time flies.
PAIGE: It does.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh, is it going to be a year in November?
PAIGE: I don’t know. We need-
ANGELA: I think we started in November.
PAIGE: We need what, eight more episodes after this to do 52.
ANGELA: Well, that’s if you count by episodes. But I mean, like time.
PAIGE: Well, yeah, time. It’s about November, yeah. That’s crazy.
ANGELA: Wow. Yay.
PAIGE: I love it. So, what people want to know, what I want to know, is kind of like what this journey has been like for you. And I think that we’ve heard some about how you got started in tech. How you, through the different interviews, and I guess I would like to know some of your story of like what it’s been like to really be immersed in tech, especially in this broadcasting end of things. Where we’re in this age of no gatekeepers, you know, you can just put things out on the interwebs, like we do with this show. What has that done to your life? How has it been interesting? How has it be, like kind of coming from a semi-technical background into this media that’s so richly technical on both sides; where the topics of Jupiter Broadcasting are technical and the work itself is technical. Talk to me about that.
ANGELA: Okay. So I think from that, I would like to talk about I have always been one that has wanted to help others and educate others, and that is kind of the foundation of anything I do. And the technology that has developed over the last 10 years just magnificently supports it. It just is. It’s completely natural and even in middle school when we first started using technology, you know, I have the LiveJournal account. You know, I was dabbling in the small parts of the internet, but then, well being with somebody that always wanted the latest technology really helped, you know. I started on a Mac and I really, for some reason, I guess it could have been anything. Actually, you know what, i didn’t start on a Mac, but once I started on a Mac, I guess is what I mean. I feel like it really opened up my opportunities. I started using Soundtrack. That was specifically the thing that I moved to Mac for.
PAIGE: So, for people who don’t know, what’s Soundtrack?
ANGELA: Soundtrack is recording and music compilation software and it, it was like some crazy amount of money, like $300 or $400 at the time. This would have been like 2002. I was writing songs and I was using software that ran on Linux before switching to Soundtrack. But when I went into that Apple store and they had Soundtrack on demo, I grabbed a couple tracks and I put something together and it was amazing. And then a couple weeks later I bought it and I tried it. And I assembled those same tracks and now I have a song that I made. It was really cool. So I am a very creative person and that is another way that the creativity and the educational or desire to educate aspect really do goh hand in hand. I was a mommy blogger. That’s kind of been on hiatus for a little while. I do the Fauxshow, which is really a show that is whatever I want to talk about, but I always to grab things that–like if I told you that I was going to do a show on a certain topic, you might be like eh, yeah. But once you were there, you would be interested in it, because it would be a lot of different sources. And whether they be right or not, that’s debatable, but it’s not a real show, you know.
PAIGE: Yeah, right. It’s a fake show, a faux show.
ANGELA: Yeah, so in terms of Jupiter Broadcasting, I was a lot of the backend behind the scene operational side. You know, the accounting, the, you know, all that behind the scenes stuff. But once we put up the green screen in our third bay garage and started doing show there, I started getting more interested in the chat room and would hang out after Jupiter At Night. And that’s kind of where the Fauxshow started. I started just talking to the audience and the audience talked back and it gave them a personal touch and also involvement. And I really think that it solidified a whole new community aspect of Jupiter Broadcasting. And just from there, I just started getting to know the community and being more active in the IRC, which automatically got me more involved with the technology stuff and then now here I am doing Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: Right. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I”ve always been really impressed by your ability to share across a lot of different platforms.
ANGELA: I think people would call me an oversharer.
PAIGE: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I think that you have a great way, like in person you connect with people really well, and I get to witness that. But I think that you, and I feel like that’s kind of a feature for me as well. But you also have this awesome way of bridging that to a digital audience. Like to people, like, even before I met you, I kind of felt like I knew you, because I had seen the Fauxshow and I had seen your Twitter. I had been following you on Google+ for a couple years. And then I showed up and I met you and I’m like, this is totally the Angela that I expect. You have a great ability to bring yourself across. How do you do that? Is that natural?
ANGELA: I guess it must be.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Does it just like occur to you, hey this is a moment that I should share or do you have to actively think about it?
ANGELA: Well, a lot of things, when I, when I make the decision to share something, it’s because I think that it will, likely it will help somebody else. That’s why I started MomVault, my mommy blog. Because there are things–it’s kind of like, it’s not that I want to share the hard sides of parenting or anything, because there’s a lot of harder articles in there, like getting allergy testing and cosmetic surgery for Dylan and things that people don’t want to relive or share or whatever, but there are so many moms and dads out there that kind of rely on knowing that they aren’t the only person that has to hold down their son while their ear is sewn back on.
PAIGE: I mean, it’s it’s the reason we do this show.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: It’s just to know that you’re not alone.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: That this is possible. You can get through it. You’re not alone.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: I think that’s a really important, that’s a really fascinating way. I’ve always struggled with sharing. Some of my friends have been like, you really shout tweet, and I’m like, I don’t know how to tweet. Well, I know physically how to tweet.
ANGELA: No, she doesn’t. I know her in person, she doesn’t.
PAIGE: It’s so true. I’ve had people, I’m as bad with Facebook too. Somebody was like, you need to change your profile picture on Facebook. It’s been there for a long time.
ANGELA: I was going to tell you that earlier.
PAIGE: Oh man, okay.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
PAIGE: I have to sit down and really, really dig around every time, because I just don’t do it. I’m just not a natural sharer. But I think, thinking about it as helping people, I like that.
ANGELA: Yeah, and I feel that due to my creativity and my directness, bluntness-
PAIGE: I like directness, that works.
ANGELA: And conciseness, or being concise, my articles aren’t, there’s not a lot of fluff and I’m not trying to make money. You know, like on MomVault, but it just, I just can, I don’t know. I do like helping people and I know that MomVault has helped a lot of people. I think Fauxshow has helped a lot of people.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think even your Instagram is helpful. I love seeing your Instagram stuff. It kind of, I’ll be like rolling along and then I’ll see this, you’re, they’re always so positive. You just have so much positivity in your photography.
ANGELA: Well, I try. There’s some negatives, but yeah.
PAIGE: Okay. Well they are by in large.
ANGELA: Yeah. The thing is, this is weird to say, but in the past somebody has asked me, oh my gosh, that’s a great picture, what camera did you use? And I kind of laugh. It’s not the camera, it’s the person.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: It’s me. Like, yes, it took a good picture, but I framed it. I worked with the depth. I worked with the colors and the lighting and figured out how to capture the moment. And I choose only to share those pictures, because I do take a lot more pictures than I share.
PAIGE: Yeah, well.
ANGELA: As would anybody. I don’t keep all those pictures. You know, there’s a lot of photo 101 things that I think I could probably do a whole show about.
PAIGE: Could you do a Fauxshow about it?
ANGELA: Probably. I have done quite a few Fauxshows about the photos, but anybody can take pictures of their kids. But what really–who cares about my kids? You know? Like who cares. There are people that care and they care because of the thought and the time and effort behind the picture.
PAIGE: Yeah, you put intention into it.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: And it’s not just, oh here they’re smiling again.
PAIGE: You made me care about a snail the other day. You had this picture of a snail and I was like, that is totally true.
ANGELA: Right. It was about the little things in life.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: Yeah. And I just– I didn’t step on him on the way to or from the bus stop. On the way to the bus stop I thought, I’m going to take a picture of that snail on the way back. And I did. I got down on the sidewalk and I took a picture of the snail. I took one where it had just the pavement as the background, and then I took another one, because I was like, oh the sun is shining over there. Maybe I can get a glow on the snail. So I took two pictures and I chose that second one that you ended up seeing on Instagram.com/MomVault.
PAIGE: Nice plug.
ANGELA: I know, right? So, I think everything I do has meaning and I hope that it would help other people in any way. I know that there are a lot of viewers, listeners of Jupiter Broadcasting that see my pictures on G+, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook that, not rely on it, but it’s very, very welcome.
PAIGE: It’s a value add to my day.
ANGELA: Yeah. Unlike maybe other people in their life that add pictures that don’t necessarily have the charm, the quality, or the focus. Which, I’m not trying to put people down, at all. I”m just-
PAIGE: No, you have a skill for that. It’s definitely there. And the intention, it means a lot. Like art without intention is just craft.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes.
PAIGE: I think.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: I think that’s the big differentiator between craft and art. Craft is something you can do; art is something with intention.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: And I realize that may be a really over simplification and some of my art major friends are going to be upset with me for saying that.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: But that’s my take. And I love that about your work. It’s part of working with you. You always intention, which is great.
ANGELA: And attention to detail. That’s for sure.
PAIGE: Yeah. Yeah. Which is a nice add to me.
ANGELA: But I really like the social networking. I love the fact that people from around the world watch my show or listen or see my pictures and comment on it.
PAIGE: Yeah. The way technology has changed that is mind blowing.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: I just can’t even really actually wrap my head around that.
ANGELA: Yeah. And honestly, it took me so long to get on instagram, and I was such a snob about it. I’m like, man, who wants all their pictures to be square. And now, like even though my phone has the square option, I still them full, but I, I’m like, okay, will that fit in a square.
PAIGE: You eye is automatically looking for a square.
ANGELA: Yeah, it kind of changes, it kind of changes how I take pictures.
PAIGE: I am going to call you out on something thought.
ANGELA: Okay.
PAIGE: You’ve got to fix the video thing. The portrait video has got to go, man.
ANGELA: Oh, that wasn’t me.
PAIGE: That wasn’t you? Okay. Good.
ANGELA: Yeah, that was, that was Jenny, yeah.
PAIGE: Okay. Good.
ANGELA: But yes, I am guilty of that though. And I am guilty of taking more portraits than landscape. I need to do more landscape.
PAIGE: Yeah. I’m a landscape junky, but that’s because I grew up–when I worked as a photographer for a while I was doing landscape photography and architecture photography, so it’s always landscape, especially for architecture.
ANGELA: Is landscape for landscape?
PAIGE: I know, shocking. Shocking.
ANGELA: It’s a lot easier to frame something square using portrait, to me. Even though, regardless, either way you know that-
PAIGE: How do you–so do you like still apply photography basics, like two thirds to square? Does that work?
ANGELA: I don’t know.
PAIGE: Do you know the two-thirds rule?
ANGELA: I don’t think so.
PAIGE: Oh, awesome.
ANGELA: I know, right?
PAIGE: The rule of thirds. So the idea is that if you break things up into three sections; one section, two sections, three sections. I’m using hand gestures which is super helpful for the radio. But that the, if you break a rectangle into three sections the focus of your photography should land on the separation between either section one and two or section two and three.
ANGELA: Oh, no. No. I don’t, I don’t use that. But, I’m not–okay, so a lot of people think a good picture is a centered picture.
PAIGE: No, that’s exactly what that’s fighting against.
ANGELA: No, I know. I know. And I do that. I do do centered sometimes. But there was a picture recently of Abby with a quote, and I intentionally had her off to the side so that I could put the quote there. So I don’t necessarily follow that rule, but I don’t stick to centering.
PAIGE: It’s internal, yeah.
ANGELA: Yes, correct.
PAIGE: Cool.
ANGELA: I have variety.
PAIGE: I believe that. I’ve seen it. So, a little talk, big switch here. I”m going to use some insider info. You’ve got three kids.
ANGELA: Oh man, now everybody knows.
PAIGE: No, that’s not the insider info.
ANGELA: Oh.
PAIGE: I know that they all use computers.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: And what do you think, like as a mom, how do you approach that? There’s a lot of information out there about-
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: It’s good, it’s bad. How do you–and I know that because we’ve just talked about the fact that you’re always acting with intention, how do you do that intentionally with your kids.
ANGELA: Okay. That is a great question, Paige. So i–my first born is a son and I imagined him holding a mouse and keyboard at like a year.
PAIGE: Yeah, well with the house that he’s growing up in, right?
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: But was actually not until his fifth birthday, right? No, sixth birthday, just before his sixth birthday that I introduced him to the keyboard and mouse.
PAIGE: Oh wow.
ANGELA: On my computer.
PAIGE: So before that, was he still using tablets or something?
ANGELA: Yes. He was using iPads, yes.
PAIGE: Okay.
ANGELA: And he understands them freakishly well. All three of my kids do. But there was a little bit if a curveball with Dylan with the keyboard and mouse, but Minecraft is a good motivation.
PAIGE: He’s determined because of Minecraft. It’s a good motivator.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes. Perfect.
PAIGE: Had he done Minecraft, so jumping in, had he done it on the iPad first?
ANGELA: Yes. Pocket edition.
PAIGE: Okay.
ANGELA: Yeah. And I honestly cannot do it on the iPad, because it’s weird.
PAIGE: I haven’t tried.
ANGELA: You have to use both hands. Which, I know, it sounds like a really–it’s just so weird on a touch screen.
PAIGE: You’re old now.
ANGELA: I know. Yeah, he reminds me of that every day when he’s like, oh mom ,did you know about this in Minecraft. I’m like, yeah, I’m been playing Minecraft for four years, but no, I never knew that. Or that’s new. That’s an update since I’ve played. Just all three of the kids have done really well with learning on Ipads. Once Dylan started on his laptop, Abby expressed interest as well. And I wanted them to be able to play Minecraft together. So she actually started just after she turned four, or I guess, yeah, ish. She is four right now and she is playing Minecraft on the computer. I made it fun. I did L and R for left and right on her mouse. I did different stickers so she could learn WASD. And then also added stickers for esc and one other one that I can’t remember. But basically, it made it a lot easier for her to learn it.
PAIGE: Wow.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Full disclosure. I was hanging out with Abby and she was obsessed and asking all night last night if she could show me how to play Minecraft.
ANGELA: I know, yeah.
PAIGE: Which is hilarious, because she would actually have to show me how to play Minecraft, because I have not ever played. Well, I played for literally five minutes on a Raspberry Pie once, because it’s the one thing they include on the Raspberry Pie.
ANGELA: Oh, that’s funny.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s it. At some point she will have to teach me how to play Minecraft.
ANGELA: Well, I ran into an issue where her iPad can no longer play Minecraft, because the OS is no longer updatabalbe.
PAIGE: Is iit a 2 or?
ANGELA: Yes. And I accidently did a Minecraft update just broke it. So she plays on her computer now. But that freed up her iPad so that Bella could play on it. And so there’s educational games on there. Learning her ABCs, learning how to count, just learning the whole touchscreen interface. And I rely on that heavily.
PAIGE: How old is Bella?
ANGELA: She’s two. She just turned two. I rely on that heavily in the morning when she gets up between 4:30 and 6:00. I leave the iPad on the beanbag in my room and she comes in on her own and sits down and plays it.
PAIGE: I’m really impressed. I have a nephew, he’s three, and he loves the iPad. It’s definitely a reward for him. It’s very careful, like when he can use the iPad and when he can’t. Especially because he’s a bit jack smash, so he likes to smash things. So, the iPad, of course, being a very expensive piece–and he hates the case–like we got one of the kid case things and that was good when he was two, but now it’s no, he won’t touch that one. He has to have the real iPad. But the amount that he has learned on the iPad is really impressive. I think the educational games have really stepped up their game from when I first looked at them. Do you think it’s like–do you worry about them spending too much time on these devices?
ANGELA: Yes and no. There’s something that I have done very right, and I can’t pinpoint what it is. But I can say that my kids have a really good balance of outdoor play, social play. And by social play I just mean like when we’re at parks they play with other kids. When we’re at the children’s museum they play with other kids. We’ve done a lot of play dates. I literally at one point would drive the kids to the park, let them out, let them play for two minutes, and then say okay let’s get in the car. Just to get them used to it. Because parks are fun and they want to stay there, but I needed them to get over the, I want to stay here. Why can’t-
PAIGE: This is going to sound terrible, especially to all the moms out there, but you worked on recall with your kids.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s what we call it with dogs.
ANGELA: Okay. Yeah.
PAIGE: They’ll come when you call.
ANGELA: Same thing with technology.
PAIGE: Oh, okay.
ANGELA: They don’t freak out when I say no to TV. They don’t freak out when I turn off the TV.
PAIGE: I have noticed that.
ANGELA: Yeah, they know that it will still be there tomorrow or later, or whatever and that I’m redirecting them, or that I’m redirecting them to something that could be equally or more fun. Or feed themselves.
PAIGE: So did you do the same sort of thing where you kind of set small time limits for a while so they got used to that or was it just kind of more natural on that?
ANGELA: It was very organic. There’s never really been a time limit. There was a slight concern when Dylan developed a tick where he was squinting his eyes a lot and I thought, oh gosh, maybe it’s because he’s sitting too close to his iPad.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: So I did limit it for two days as a temporary thing, but then he just got over it.
PAIGE: Okay.
ANGELA: I have never really done hard fast, but if in a pinch and I need to get work done and they can be–the older kids can be playing Minecraft and Bella can be on the iPad, yeah, we’ll do it.
PAIGE: And do you guys use the parental features on the iPad-
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: Where you can lock down certain apps?
ANGELA: Absolutely. I also use it on Abby’s computer, though I recently had to take it off, because Minecraft runs a lot of websites in the background.
PAIGE: Huh.
ANGELA: Yeah, I don’t know what that is about, but every five seconds it was popping up with a parental control. You can’t access this website. Allow once or always. And then I’d have to type in my password. Then it would happen again next time. So it was really–in fact, I guess OS 10 switched away from using, well I don’t know if it was OS 10 of Mojang, but the Minecraft launcher no longer uses Java and so when I got the new launcher it couldn’t fully download the executable, because the websites websites were blocked.
PAIGE: Interesting.
ANGELA: I couldn’t figure out why the launcher wasn’t working and so I signed out and then, or signed in as an administrator.
PAIGE: I have to say, for as big a market as kids are, I used to work professionally as an in-home technician and I would go places. And one of the most requested things was parental setups, because it’s so confusing. It’s so not supported by so many things.
ANGELA: Have you looked in OS 10 parental controls? It’s fantastic.
PAIGE: No, they’re really good, but they’re complicated for non-technical people.
ANGELA: Well, maybe.
PAIGE: Maybe.
ANGELA: Because the default is, you can strap down, no websites for these educational ones, and they’re actually meant for kids. It’s perfect.
PAIGE: Right.
ANGELA: Then you can add websites that are okay. Which, obviously, there are a lot of websites so you would run into the constantly being limited.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: But it has only allow the computer to be signed in during these times and after an hour, that was all very user friendly.
PAIGE: Oh, okay.
ANGELA: I haven’t used it yet, because Abby doesn’t really need it. They play Minecraft every once in awhile, but I was so impressed with that when I saw it. It would be, you could set it by day.
PAIGE: I actually used a parental control account when I first started working remotely to limit myself to only my work sites.
ANGELA: Ah, good for you.
PAIGE: Because I was having focus problems.
ANGELA: An you locked your phone, right?
PAIGE: I would log in-
ANGELA: You locked your phone away.
PAIGE: Well, at the time the phone was not great for that sort of thing. It was tiny. It was like iPhone 3 or whatever so it was a tiny, tiny screen. Not cool like they are now, but it’s really cool. So, you’ve kind of had this journey. You’re a mom, you’re working in a small business, it’s all in tech. Have you found that it just kind of flow together with your life? Do you feel like having a career that is technology based and kind of some of the, the freedom that we get because of that has worked well with being a mom? Has it been bad, because you can kind of–because you can work anywhere, do you work more? Like-
ANGELA: Right. Well, that is a very loaded question, because it’s not like working for a company remote, right? Like a different company.
PAIGE: Right.
ANGELA: When you work for yourself there, it’s really hard to limit yourself to 8:00 to 5:00 or whatever. I think it’s definitely been a struggle, because I had to adjust my perspective and expectations of working while having three kids. You know, getting mad at them because I can’t get a task done is just–it’s just not okay.
PAIGE: That’s just bad for everybody.
ANGELA: Yeah, and so, and because of that I decided that I needed solid blocks of time where I could focus and so about two years ago I hired a nanny that would come into the house a couple days a week, give me that ability to focus, and then the kids–I mean, I wasn’t neglecting the kids, but obviously, I can’t focus on them and the company at the same time.
PAIGE: Yeah, I mean, it’s not neglect. You’re setting up quality time for both, because it means that when your’e with the kids-
ANGELA: Exactly.
PAIGE: You’re with the kids. And when you’re with the company you’re with the company.
ANGELA: Right. Yes. Yeah. So it’s definitely a struggle and adjustment and I think it just varies, really from person to person and situation to situation, but you just have to–I’m of the mind–and this happened really early on when Dylan was an infant, or almost almost a year old, that really they are my life. They are the priority. They are the focus. And they will pretty much always come first.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: And that’s pretty well, I think, relayed in, in my photography.
PAIGE: Yeah, i think in the way that you share.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Also in the way that you kind of–the way you move through life it’s very obvious that your kids are that level of importance to you. But it seems so healthy. I’ve very impressed by that.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: I’m not going to lie. You really impress me as a mom and as a not mom. That’s kind of hard to do, because I don’t know a lot about momming.
ANGELA: Sure.
PAIGE: Is that a word? Momming.
ANGELA: Yeah, coined right here, Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: There you go. I think mothering is the appropriate term.
ANGELA: Mothering, yep.
PAIGE: Yes. Which sounds like, I don’t know.
ANGELA: Don’t add an S, it’s not smothering.
PAIGE: Oh, that’s terrible. I love it. You’re so funny.
ANGELA: I know. No.
PAIGE: So what has been the hardest part about tech for you? Because I know we’ve talked some and you’ve been–like some of interviews that we’ve done-
ANGELA: Yes. Right.
PAIGE: You kind of get this glassy look where you’re like, I wish I understood. And it’s not just a glassy look. It’s like a look of, I wish I understood more of what you guys were talking about.
ANGELA: Yeah, well, you know, the inferior complex or whatever.
PAIGE: Imposter Syndrome?
ANGELA: That is exactly what I meant, yes. That definitely happens, but not like–I feel like if I just, if I just learned a little bit it would give me enough in to have a better perspective, but because I haven’t been able to take a class or a course or learn one language or any kind of programing or whatever. I know a little bit of HTML, but I just, yeah. I feel like if I learned one language it would help me kind of better understand other languages.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: And other things.
PAIGE: Honestly, it’s the fundamentals help you, it’s vocabulary.
ANGELA: Exactly.
PAIGE: Most of learning programming is vocabulary.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes.
PAIGE: At the beginning at least. I mean later on there’s all sorts of other things.
ANGELA: Right. Right. And I haven’t exactly had the time to focus or–I’d really like to do Linux Academy.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: Or some other kind of-
PAIGE: Codecademy or whatever.
ANGELA: Yeah. To get to learn stuff. But I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know, because I don’t know it. I don’t know if that’s a direction. I know that I like database. But I don’t know if I could do that on a daily basis. You know? Or if that would my passion or career. Right now, I’m pretty satisfied with the business operational side of things.
PAIGE: ANd you are very good at it.
ANGELA: And social networking. But I’m not opposed to learning more.
PAIGE: You know, I don’t even think necessarily I’m going to look at you and say, well you should be a programer, it’s an excellent career. Well, of course it’s an excellent career. I like it. I love it. But I think that, you know, I’m not quite on the everybody should learn to code train. I think anybody who has interest should try it. You know, like anything else. How do you know if you like ice cream if you don’t try it.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: Trust me, you’ll probably like ice cream.
ANGELA: Right. Unless you’re my kids and you ask if it can be warm. Yeah.
PAIGE: Wow.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: That’s a thing. So do they like bread pudding?
ANGELA: I’ve never fed them bread pudding.
PAIGE: It’s like warm ice cream. You should try.
ANGELA: Gross.
PAIGE: It’s an English thing.
ANGELA: Okay.
PAIGE: I’m super English. It happens. Well, I think that I would totally be happy to commit to, we should do a lesson on air.
ANGELA: I think so too.
PAIGE: Okay. We’ll look up some stuff. We’ll talk about some options. We could either do a stack talk where we talk about what actually makes all the stuff function or we could talk about a specific language or maybe both.
ANGELA: Now, keep in mind that I’m very, very direct. So, and I’m going to ask stupid questions.
PAIGE: There is no stupid questions.
ANGELA: Well, okay. I’m going to ask questions that will probably make you giggle.
PAIGE: You’d be surprised. I’ve taught hundreds of beginners at this point.
ANGELA: Okay. Okay.
PAIGE: So, I’m not worried about it.
ANGELA: Okay.
PAIGE: Yeah, I think that, as long as people are asking questions it means they’re engaging.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: If you sit there and don’t ask question, that’s when I’m like, are you stupid or something son?
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Yeah, no, not quite.
ANGELA: Judgement.
PAIGE: Yeah, super judge. No, you know, I’m going to call you out. You should engage. Ask questions. Anybody who is out there trying to learn to code, don’t feel like it’s a stupid question. At some point somebody had to figure it out. And, you know, maybe you’re working with one of the savants who started coding when they were six, but the likelihood of that is rare.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: I remember, I spent almost six months trying to just understand the very, very basic concept of object oriented programing. Just understanding what it was. I just couldn’t even get my head around like waht is this? Not even just how to do it. That was a whole separate journey. It was like, I don’t get it. I don’t get it. And it look going to four or five different meetups, asking a whole bunch of questions, finally finding a book that kind of filled in those gaps. If I hadn’t asked those questions, I’d still be stuck. And they felt like, of course they felt like dumb questions. I was years into my programming journey and I don’t get this really fundamental concept, like what the heck.
ANGELA: Yeah. I took an environmental class in college where I was the only person to ever ask questions.
PAIGE: Oh my goodness, that’s terrible.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: I hope the rest of the class failed.
ANGELA: Well, I don’t know, but nobody really had very high grades. But I was complemented by other students about how I was able to ask questions regardless, you know, just because I wanted to know.
PAIGE: If you’ve got a question, especially if you’re sitting in a room full of people, likelihood is someone else has that same question.
ANGELA: I know.
PAIGE: And they’re just not willing to ask it.
ANGELA: Yep.
PAIGE: Yep. And it sucks. I’m totally that person. I step up and I ask questions, because I know that I can. I know that people need it, but I hope other people will do it too. The pivotal question, what are you the most excited about about technology?
ANGELA: I knew. I knew you were going to say that.
PAIGE: Well, then I’m going to ask you the stack question too, so.
ANGELA: Uh, I don’t know what that is.
PAIGE: That’s okay.
ANGELA: Okay. So, um, I don’t know anybody at st-, no that’s slack. Okay. Technology. I am really excited about user experience. Essentially one of the interviews that we did today. The Cornbread app has my mind blow. I really hope that we see more companies that provide something that creates an almost all inclusive personal touch experience built on a community. I’m really like the community oriented everything. That is just so cool to me.
PAIGE: What I said, technology for connection, not consumption.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes. Exactly. We can all be on the internet for hours consuming, but, well, I was going to say what is the value, but there is value in that. But I really like the connection.
PAIGE: Yeah. I do think that we’ve–you know, and I rail against this and a lot of my friends know I’m fairly anti-Facebook and even Twitter, I’m much more picky about things. Because I think that there’s a lot of this mindlessness that goes on now.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: You know, it’s the same with where TV is or was. You know, at the same time, you can just kind of sit there and you aren’t getting anything out of it except distraction.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: And distraction and escape can be really valuable. Like I don’t deny that. I definitely have my moments where I’m like, I’m just going to go look at Facebook for half an hour, because I just need to zone out. But that’s what I’m doing, I’m zoning out. I’m not adding to myself. I’m not adding to my community. And I think that being able to separate that and find the ways where we are providing value to ourselves and to each other is really important. I think that tech is, we’re on the verge of some of those breakthroughs again.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Like with Cornbread.
ANGELA: Also, i did a recent–well, I guess it’s probably been over a year now, but I did a Fauxshow on the Buy Nothing pay groups. The Buy Nothing groups on Facebook. It’s so amazing. In our city it was split into five different groups, because we’re big enough. And I am getting to know all of my neighbors. And so I posted on the Buy Nothing, where you can either give stuff away or accept things. You know, ask, hey I need this. I had put, you know, I am looking for anything owl related for my daughter’s birthday. She’s going to be two soon. You know, this was like in July. And one gal, she had an owl shirt that I could wear. And it was perfect. IT was one size too big, but, which is actually flattering, because, you know, so it was good. and it was black, which is perfect, with silver, and I love silver. It was just so perfect. And then as I was picking it up and meeting her she said, oh, do you have a cake being made yet? And I was like, well no. And she said, let me do her cake. And, you know, honestly the skeptic in me was like, I don’t know. I mean, I could see her living condition. It wasn’t horrible, but I’m like, I don’t know if I really want her, like can she ever make a cake. Is this one of those people that thinks they can do something.
PAIGE: You just never know.
ANGELA: But I’m not going to burst the bubble. I was like, yeah, sure.
PAIGE: Good. Yeah, step out in faith.
ANGELA: I’ll pick up and maybe, maybe it will go in the garbage and maybe it will be amazing. It was amazing. I was amazing.
PAIGE: I think it’s really, it’s sad awesome to me that we have to go out-
ANGELA: Yeah, I know.
PAIGE: We essentially have to send things into space and let them come back to connect us to the people right next to us. So, it’s sad and awesome. It’s like, oh man, I wish I could just go knock on my neighbor’s door, but at the same time-
ANGELA: Yeah, but we used to have to use horses.
PAIGE: Yeah. Yeah.
ANGELA: It’s not much different.
PAIGE: No, it’s not. And we’re definitely-
ANGELA: Like, there’s even more connectivity than back then.
PAIGE: Yeah. I agree with you. I love, as excited as I am about like wearables and internet of things and all these other interesting parts and smart homes, and some day I will build Jarvis. This is on my to-do list. The fact that I can start to use technology to connect with the people who are physically around me is so valuable to me. And especially someone who, I work remotely. I work by myself. Without things like meetup, I would be a really miserable person.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Meetup.com has changed my life.
ANGELA: Yeah, and really, the IRC changed my life. I’m like, wow there’s a whole community out there. There’s a lot of people. I don’t know. It really opens up possibilities. And then, since she made that cake–and she didn’t make it. She actually didn’t make it. She has a friend that works at a local grocery store that made it. She has since, she bought Bella and owl sweatshirt.
PAIGE: Aww.
ANGELA: Yeah, and it was so crazy. Yeah, I mean, it was just so cool that people can be so selfless. And that’s what I like to do. I like to give away things to the community. But I also buy, I also sell. I also use the buy/sell pages, which are also awesome.
PAIGE: No, there’s still value there. Like, I’m getting something cheaper than it would be in the store, for sure.
ANGELA: Right. Or getting rid of something.
PAIGE: Yeah, both sides of it are important. Yeah. I had this kind of pivotal experience, which I say a lot, but I traveled for two years in an RV all across the US and I loved it. It was really fascinating. But the thing that really impressed me, because I kind of always believed this, but didn’t really have proof, but people are good people. I think by in large anywhere you go, people want to do good things. We all, I think we’re wired for it. We get a lot of value out of providing for others. Out of helping out. It’s biogeochemical at this point.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: You know, we get dopamine when we do good things for people.
ANGELA: Right. Yeah.
PAIGE: It’s legit. I don’t know if I believed it until I did this journey and it was, like I really do. Like random things, like you know coming up to Chris at OSCON for the first time and being like, hey. And then meeting you guys. And you’re like, yeah, let’s do this thing. There’s no–we’re not getting anything.
ANGELA: This thing being Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: Women’s Tech Radio, yeah. We’re not–I don’t sound like Women’s Tech Radio is paying my bills or making me a fortune or anything-
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: I want to give back to the community and you wanted to too. And getting together and doing that is even more valuable.
ANGELA: Yep.
PAIGE: So, very cool. And I love that technology gives us space to do that.
ANGELA: Uh-huh. What’s your stack?
PAIGE: Okay. Stack question. So what are the tools that you use on a daily basis?
ANGELA: Oh, right. Yes.
PAIGE: What’s your stack is what we developers call it.
ANGELA: Whew, okay.
PAIGE: You got all like, flustered, possibly.
ANGELA: Yes. Here I go. Here I go. Um, wow. Okay. There’s a lot. So, Telegram for internal communication. We use Freshbooks for invoicing. Quickbooks for accounting. I use Google Docs. I use Excel. I use Pixelmator to do promotional artwork.
PAIGE: I love Pixelmator.
ANGELA: I use 99Designs, which I know isn’t an app you can go get.
PAIGE: No, it’s still something in your stack.
ANGELA: Yeah. I use 99Designs, in fact, one person in particular has designed all of our logo refresh that I started back in 2013, I think, ‘14. Yeah, the end of 2013. Let’s see, what else?
PAIGE: Instagram.
ANGELA: Yeah. Patreon, Instagram, Twitter, G+, Facebook, all of those. I’m trying to think. Reddit.
PAIGE: You really are like a social maven.
ANGELA: Yeah. I do a lot of social things here. Let me pull up my thing.
PAIGE: You mom frequent tabs?
ANGELA: Or just my Jupiter Broadcasting dropdown. So, I guess more Jupiter Broadcasting related, we have a lot of different subscriptions. A lot of people think I just start up a podcast. No, there’s a lot of backend subscriptions. We use Scale Engine. I’m not sure if BlipTV is still running. I don’t think it is. But we use Archive.org, Libsyn. There’s, we used to use Roku TV.
PAIGE: You guys use Dropbox too, right?
ANGELA: We definitely use Dropbox at the, where you have to pay a buttload now.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: I pay for Dropbox, even personally.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: It’s so good.
ANGELA: And we also rebranded email. And, of course, Colloquy for IRC.
PAIGE: Oh yeah.
ANGELA: I use Colloquy.. And sometimes LimeChat, but eh.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think the really impressive part about this stack is, like, barring a couple standouts, most of that is web apps.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: You can run almost your entire business from the browser.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: That’s very cool.
ANGELA: It is cool. It is.
PAIGE: That is a huge change in the world. If you think about business in the past couple years. It’s really been even in the past five years that can be true.
ANGELA: Yeah. I do very much dislike Google Docs.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: A lot.
PAIGE: It’s getting better.
ANGELA: Specifically spreadsheets.
PAIGE: Google Sheets is weird, because they went with their formula setup instead of using Excel so a lot of people have trouble translating.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: And then some of the major features that you’re used to in Excel-
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Aren’t there or are really hidden.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: And I think Google Docs is going to have the same experience that Microsoft had going from Office 2003 to Office 2007, which the thing was that they did this interview where they were like, okay people want in the next version of office. And they did hundreds and hundreds of interviews and 99 percent of the request were features that were already in Office.
ANGELA: Yes. Right.
PAIGE: And they were just, people didn’t know how to get to them.
ANGELA: Sure.
PAIGE: So that’s why we had the huge facelift between 2003 and 2007.
ANGELA: Yeah. Well, the thing is, the reason why I use Google Sheets is because you just can’t beat accessing it anywhere online.
PAIGE: Yeah. And the share.
ANGELA: Yeah. And sharing is very easy. Yes. Right. Yeah, I do not like–I had a bad experience using Dropbox and people editing, multiple people editing the same doc. It just does not work. The collaboration was not there. I’m sure there’s collaboration tools out there that would be better, but I haven’t used them.
PAIGE: Yeah, well, I don’t know. i really think that, honestly, as picky as I am, Google kind of has the market on the collaboration. Although, EverNote is picking up.
ANGELA: I haven’t used it yet.
PAIGE: I love it. It’s my second brain.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Maybe it’s my first brain at this point.
ANGELA: And, and of course we use Bitly.
PAIGE: Bitly, yep.
ANGELA: Yeah, to shorten links.
PAIGE: Very cool.
ANGELA: Oh, and some Markdown. Markdown browser add-ons.
PAIGE: Yeah. I’m still trying to get my head around the Markdown thing.
ANGELA: Yeah?
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: I did a Fauxshow on it.
PAIGE: Really? Oh, I should check that one out.
ANGELA: I did.
PAIGE: I will admit, I don’t watch all of them.
ANGELA: But, honestly, I’ve pretty much forgotten everything. I just use the add-ons now. It’s so easy. I’ll show you after the show.
PAIGE: Cool.
ANGELA: It’s really cool.
PAIGE: Yeah, at this point I just write things and then edit it later. I just write in plain text and then make it fancy later.
ANGELA: Uh-huh. Okay.
PAIGE: We’ll figure it out. Well, this has been super fun. We’ll have to do some more later.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: If you guys have questions for either of us, feel free to send them in. We are always listening to you on Twitter and we’re always interested in new guests that you’re like to hear about. Cool.
ANGELA: Yeah. Thanks for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Sharing with Intent | WTR 45 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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.

Technology For Connection | WTR 43

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

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

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

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.

Internal Learning | WTR 41

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

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

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kristen@edifyedu.com

Transcription:

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Millennials and Mentors | WTR 40

chris — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 13:02:22 +0000

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Elizabeth cofounded WWC NYC and is a front end engineer. She discusses her path as a millennial/youngling in the technology field.

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ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE:: So, Angela, today we’re going to dive into an awesome interview with Elizabeth, who self-identifies as a millennial youngling and talk about her career, her transition, what she thinks about coming up in a culture where tech was okay and all sorts of different juicy topics.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I’d like to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. You can subscribe for as little as $3.00 a month and support this awesome content. Go to patreon.com/jupitersignal.
PAIGE: And we got started our interview by asking Elizabeth what she’s up to in technology these days.
ELIZABETH: I am a software engineer, and I was previously at a corporate company that did all the media stuff, and now I’m looking for new opportunities.
PAIGE: Awesome. So what side of software engineering are you into?
ELIZABETH: Which of the cornucopia? I do mostly front-end software engineering, so lots of HTML CSS, mostly JavaScript, a lot of frameworks where I hope to do many more.
PAIGE: How do you feel about the exploding front-end framework–I would almost call it a problem. It seems like every day there’s a new one and everyone wants to jump on the new hotness.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, I started in technology about three years ago, and I remember I was, you know, the common I’m just entering into the industry problem is which framework do you start out with? And I thought Python. Python back then was–that was the jam. And it’s not to say it’s not now, but now everything is in JavaScript, so you can work in front end and back end, and I don’t need to learn another language and its intricacies, so I’m going to say JavaScript is the best. That’s a 2015 opinion. I reserve to change.
PAIGE: I’m going to hold you to that in five years, all right? I’m an advocate the same way. I run a JavaScript jam night, I guess, every week for Women Who Code, and the reason that I chose JavaScript is because it is so agnostic in the stack. Like you really can’t go from node all the way out to front end basic JavaScript and jQuery and angular. It’s a great choice for a first language, although it’s not as pretty or as easy to read as like a Revere or Python. It’s so practical.
ELIZABETH: It is. And there are so many things that are happening with it. The New York City JavaScript community has just exploded over the past year. There is Brooklyn JS and there’s a plethora of meetups that are just focused on JavaScript. And what is it–there’s all these fancy type of developers coming up, so there is the note–if you just practice note JS, there is a node JS engineer where I’ve seen a copious amount of job openings for.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s really starting to blow up. It’s interesting because everybody is like we want a five year experience node JS engineer. I’m like, are you sure you understand what you’re asking for there? Like time traveling node engineers?
ELIZABETH: Well, it’s all open source, so they’ll finagle those dates.
PAIGE: Right? That’s very cool. So you mentioned that you’ve only been doing this for three years. So how did you get into it? Tell me about your journey there.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, I’m a self-proclaimed Youngling. And about three years ago, I got accepted into a program for Google and so Google flew me out there for three weeks and talked to me about computer science and it was called Google’s Computer Science Summer Seminar. So like their version of incorporating all the students into what they do and into the application. And so it was Google. It was an amazing experience, my first time out in Mountain View, if not California, and I was just enamored with technology afterwards, as you would be, with so many pretty colors and all those octobikes. So that was the original start. And then I went into college for computer science, and unfortunately, college for me wasn’t the best experience. It wasn’t the right environment or the culture, and I think that just has to do more with the school that I chose and I didn’t know what I wanted out of a college. So it was a very unfulfilling experience. But then I dropped out about a year and a half ago, and I joined Time Inc. as an intern. That was a really good experience being involved in corporate and being involved in the media. Again, total 180s from what I had ever experienced in the past. And after I was an intern, I was on boarded full-time working as a mobile developer and then a developer evangelist and then just like a general software engineer. So I’ve gone through a couple of iterations there. And now I’ve got a little bit of time to relax, which is so well needed. I’m currently binging on The Good Wife and haven’t binged on a show in a while now, so I’m really happy to just kick back this weekend.
PAIGE: Sounds like you’ve been through the gamut of tech already so quickly. So it sounds like you’ve touched on a lot of different things. What was kind of like the hardest part for you stepping into that tech culture as a–what did you call yourself–a youngling I think?
ELIZABETH: A youngling, a millennial. The hardest part, I think it’s very easy, especially when you’re young, and especially when you don’t know something about the subject to be like oh, yeah, you know what? I’ll just apply the–all these TED talks say that if you do a hundred hours in it, you’ll be 80 percent of the way there, or like there are a couple of stats on that. And I think with technology, it’s really easy to fool yourself, especially when you haven’t delved into its guts, that to fool yourself into convincing yourself that you’re quite good at it. It’s like hey, it’s only going to take a hundred hours to learn JavaScript, isn’t that the dream?
ANGELA: That’s really interesting, because over confidence isn’t the thing that I really think that women have in the tech field, but I can totally see where you’re coming from with that.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, every time I think about learning a different language, I’m like oh, you know what? I’ll just spend ten hours on Codecademy or delve into a framework, and I’ll understand like 80 percent of it. And unfortunately, that’s never worked. But I think probably it’s more to fool myself into just getting started, and then those ten hours become 100 which becomes 1,000, and then I’m an engineer that says oh, I can do this thing, but I also know that I can’t do–there’s so much more to this field, right? You know what you don’t know.
PAIGE: Right. That is the eternal problem is that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. I actually, I think it is interesting, though. I think as the programming journey goes on, that 80 percent in ten hours really does start to happen. But it only happens if you’ve delved in deep enough somewhere where like you really understand the concepts behind what you’re doing as opposed to just how to do it. You know when I pick up a new framework now, I know the things to look for, I know how to look for like how are we handling flow, how are we handling IO, all of these different things and I can just really research like how that framework does it or how that language does it, and it really does–I do get that 80 percent in ten hours, but then that last 20 percent is like 10,000 hours.
ELIZABETH: And I haven’t gotten my 10,000 hours of programming yet, so I still don’t know what to look for as a junior programmer, so I falsely say to myself that I can do something very quickly, and I’m still getting there.
PAIGE: It was given wise advice to me when I first started working in tech was take your gut instinct for how long something is going to take, and then if you feel really, really confident that it’s going to take that long, multiply by three. And if you feel kind of confident that that’s how long it’s going to take, probably multiply by five.
ANGELA: Just keep multiplying it–
PAIGE: Yeah, especially, as much as we don’t have overconfidence in like the things that we can do, I think a lot of times humans are really good at being over confident with how fast we can do things, especially as computer geeks because we’re like, we’re so in such a fast culture or fast thing. Like the computer is fast, I must be fast. Like everything is quick.
ELIZABETH: You know what? I was having a really big problem with estimation of projects and I would be like oh, you know what, I’ll complete this in two days and it would end up taking ten days. So my just general rule of thumb is exactly that. Just multiply whatever my estimation is by five, and then I’m hoping for the day hopefully in the next couple of years that it will actually be my estimation.
PAIGE: Yeah, I have to say that I don’t think even for myself that I could do good estimations until I stepped back from programming and did a bunch of project management where I had to really sit down and break down things and charge people for things and like, oh, now I really kind of get it. So it wasn’t so much that my skill caught up in programming as my skill caught up in estimation. That was interesting.
ANGELA: Right. Interesting.
ELIZABETH: That’s really interesting that it would have to–the inclusion of a different field, if not a different industry entirely, what makes you understand this like archaic estimation tools.
PAIGE: Yeah, and I think–I don’t know–it’s like I love my journey and I love talking to a lot of people like you who have had kind of non-traditional tech journeys, because I think we do bring skills to the table that are that kind of cross over skills. Like the reason I know estimations is more for my time in Geek Squad or whatever doing those sorts of tasks. I have a better understanding of that, or like the fact that I run a volunteer group is actually why I can do project management. It’s not from tech. Your cross over skills are as important, if not more important.
ELIZABETH: You know, Paige, as you’re saying this, I told you beforehand, I just moderated a panel on Tuesday, and the panel’s title was Non Traditional Paths Through Technology. And it was focused on these four women that had different expectations, if not different career ambitions and just found themselves in technology. And one of them is working as a researcher, and another is delving into hardware. A third is organizing [indiscernible] center. So like these different paths into technology, the technology doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a software engineer. And so, it was, as you’re speaking to this nontraditional root, I’m also a huge believer that you don’t just need to go to boot camp and learn all the things. You can become a research–what is it– like so many UX research positions nowadays that are open? Yeah, so that whole concept of you don’t just need to make like a total jump, a total 180. You can use your skills from whatever other lifetimes and you’re actually going to be a lot more valuable than if you had just started fresh.
PAIGE: Yeah, we’re actually talked to a couple guests where they’ve been in companies that are tech companies and they’ve transitioned to development inside the company. So if you’re interested in technology and you’re not sure if development is for you, there are a lot of other roles–everything from community evangelists, data research, like all of these different things depending on the kind of background you have. It could be a bridge, and then you can get exposed to the culture. And then once you’re inside the company, especially a lot of companies these days are looking for internal growth because training and hiring in places is expensive. Yeah, they want to grow the ones they have a lot.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, oh my gosh. I’m such a big believer in like advocating for talent as well as keeping your talent, and if they would like to try something, that’s such an awesome way to expose them to a different culture or different industry as well as keep them within the company and attain those skill sets.
PAIGE: So as a millennial and kind of the up and coming generation in that stuff, what do you think it takes for a company to take you? Because one of the biggest problems that we’re having in technology that I’m seeing and I’m really trying to really react to is that we’re getting a lot women in technology, but we’re losing them just as fast, which is hard. So what would it take for a company to keep you hooked?
ELIZABETH: Actually, the Women Who Code New York City network just had its first conference a couple of, if not a month ago, and we were focusing on women approaching, if not at mid-career. And so, I’m sure you know, the statistic is that 57 percent of women in technology that are at mid-career leave the industry. And so it’s just this awful problem of, even the women that we are attracting into technology are leaving, and yet we’re just packing more into the funnel and not thinking about how to keep them. For millennials, I would have to say, what a difficult question that is because myself, I’m so, I’m like, I’m like constantly chasing after different butterflies. And so, whichever one is the prettier one, that’s the one I’m going to go to. Also, we have this kind of awful structure nowadays that if another company offers me a promotion, even if I have the same skillset, I am able, I am in the opportunity and position to take it because of how booming the technology industry is. So I think that’s the way most people are getting to manager, VP, CEO, founder levels without having “paid their dues” myself included, absolutely.
ANGELA: So I think part of what Paige wanted to know was, what is pretty? Is it the job, is it the company, is it the benefits? Is it the type of management style, culture? What is pretty to you? Or is it just better than what you currently have and it could be any of the above?
ELIZABETH: I was kind of spoiled in the sense that I had an amazing mentor to guided me at Time, Inc. And then fantastically, I had another couple of mentors that also joined that group. So I’m a core believer that a mentor is one of the things that is going to keep me at a company that would just keep me grounded. Another thing that I think is very important is, so now that you’re able to think three months down the line with your mentor, well, any little intricacies as well as micro aggressions that you happen to come across, any problems that you have that is natural in any job, you should be able to rant to someone about. And so, if there is no person near you that you have been introduced to that is at your skill level, that is at your experience level, that is probably at your age level as well, I’m going to call that person an informal rant partner. Like if there is not someone for you to rant to, and if there is not someone to guide you towards your goals, that’s probably not going to be a company that you’re able to vent as well as grow in.
ANGELA: Yeah, a buddy system.
ELIZABETH: A buddy system, yep.
PAIGE: I love that of all the things you could have said, you said people. I think that that’s really important, and I think it’s extra important to our generation, your generation–I’m a little older, it’s okay.
ANGELA: Just a couple years.
PAIGE: I would definitely not identify as a millennial, but that’s okay.
ANGELA: Who I? I don’t think I would either.
PAIGE: So the mentorship, and it’s actually some of the feedback that I’ve been giving and getting with a lot of the women’s groups that I’m working with with trying to figure out this retention problem is like how do we mentor and why, especially do we have such resistance. And I should ask this–why do we have such resistance in women for mentoring? And Elizabeth, were any of your mentors women?
ELIZABETH: All three were.
PAIGE: Awesome.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, I have been, I don’t want to use the word blessed, but I’ve been very fortunate to have one mentor that was absolutely phenomenal and then she introduced me to two others that were also like amazing and very, I don’t want to say high up the chain, but it was a different experience. It was a different experience that I had ever seen before. They weren’t software engineers, they were managers if not higher.
PAIGE: Yeah, and that is definitely something is I think looking outside your role can be very fulfilling. It might not be what you need as like a code mentor, but I think in some ways those are easier to–you can kind of poke any developer and be like hey, can you answer this question? And most developers are pretty cool with answering questions. But like getting that mentorship relationship is, I don’t know, it can be outside your field and that’s okay.
ELIZABETH: I’m also going to say that you can’t force it. I’m calling them mentors, but I’m not sure that they know that they’ve been mentors to me. Or like it’s not a oh, you are my mentor, you have to meet me every three months and to talk to me about my goals for one hour. That’s not forcing that sort of relationship.
ANGELA: Sure, but that’s natural. Like my son is in first grade, and he has a student in his current class that was in his last year’s class that he calls his BFF, but that kid, my son is not his BFF. It’s very natural.
PAIGE: Yeah, and I think informal mentorship is probably a lot more comfortable, especially for women I have found. Men seem to be more comfortable because it’s sort of that like higher work goal relationship that their hormones demand. But we are much more like hey, we are just coffee buddies–and I look up to you so much. That’s been kind of my journey lately is how do we encourage mentorship. Also, I will ask you this question, do you have anyone you’re mentoring?
ELIZABETH: I don’t. I don’t think at this level I have a lot of experience to give, unfortunately. Maybe that’s just like Impostors Syndrome talking.
ANGELA: Yeah, I would say so.
PAIGE: I would totally call you out and say that you should totally be an informal mentor. It sounds like you participate in Women Who Code.
ELIZABETH: I do. I cofounded the New York City Network a year and a half ago, so I’ve also never got in the– no one has ever come up to me and been like let’s–I wanna make our coffee dates more consistent and for my benefit.
PAIGE: I actually kind of fell into the mentor role as I started Women Who Code really in Portland, and in some ways, I kind of pushed it a little bit with some people and it’s been very rewarding for both of us where I just saw some young people with–some young women with very high potential levels and I saw them struggling. I said, you know, hey, let’s talk. And we don’t necessarily have a time table where we talk every x often, but it was definitely me opening the door, because I think there is a lot of fear. And I think this is cross gender. It doesn’t really matter, but there’s a lot of fear of asking for that sort of thing, and I found someone I resonated with and I said you know, let’s do this. Let’s get your career going. Let’s make the moves that you need. So I encourage you to look for someone.
ELIZABETH: I will, and the next time I talk to you–the first time that I come up to Portland, that will be my goal.
PAIGE: Awesome. We will jam. I think that’s a real benefit of being involved in a network like Women Who Code where I do believe a lot that everybody should have a mentor, a peer, and a mentee. It’s a very healthy thing professionally and personally in a lot of ways.
ANGELA: I need to add that to my bucket list I guess.
PAIGE: I have some recommendations of all of those.
ANGELA: I do need to get involved with the Women Who Code and once I can have enough time.
PAIGE: I like to call that magical free time. It’s like a designer who’s also a developer. Magic free time. Awesome, Elizabeth, this has been really fun. I just had probably one more question for you. If you could look back and give yourself, your four year younger self advice, what would you say?
ELIZABETH: You know, Paige, it’s really funny that you say this because I have a 12 year old brother, so that’s actually a question I think about a lot.
ANGELA: How you would help him?
ELIZABETH: Yeah, how I would help him, what would I do better if I was 12 again, what information can I impart onto him and what will he actually understand? And so the one that I keep coming back to is listening to other people and most importantly, having empathy for them and their situation. And it’s really hard I think, it’s really hard to have empathy when you haven’t experienced much, me included, like I don’t think I’ve experienced much of the world, but being exposed to those sorts of different people and understanding what they’re going through makes you a lot more aware of the details that they portray in real life and maybe why they’re acting a little bit weird that day, or how it all adds up into us being like humans and people and really great people. So empathy is going to be my winner answer.
PAIGE: Okay. I like that. I like how broad that is. There was a quote and I was going to look it up, but I couldn’t do it fast enough. Be kind because we all have a great and terrible burden that nobody is aware of kind of thing and I like to move through the world with that. I did have one more question that I thought of that I think was really important, sorry.
ANGELA: And she’s excited about it.
PAIGE: I am. So you’re probably one of the youngest guests that we’ve had on the podcast, and I was wondering if growing up, you felt like you could just do tech like it was no big deal, or if you did still feel that kind of like it’s for boys kind of feel?
ELIZABETH: Paige, I actually went to a science and technical high school.
PAIGE: So you cheated.
ELIZABETH: So it was never a gender thing. It was a, who can get the best grade in the class kind of thing, and therefore, who has to study the most for that. But I didn’t grow up thinking I would be in technology at all. I thought I would–my father was a mechanical engineer, and so I thought I would go to school for mechanical engineering and like work at a job for five to ten years and like switch around, but technology and apparently Google had different other paths.
PAIGE: And computer engineering is still engineering, right?
ELIZABETH: If you say so.
PAIGE: Front-end and stuff. It definitely is different, but it’s the same mental mind path I think. But I am really encourage to hear that you looked at your dad’s career and said I could do that, no problem. I think that gives me a lot of hope for where we’re going.
ELIZABETH: My dad was a serial entrepreneur and a mechanical engineer and like an all-around awesome man, and then my mom has a Ph.D. in pharmacology and like a plethora of other things. So I had no shortage of ambition to look up to.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find a full transcript of this show over at jupiterbroadcasting.com in the show notes. You can also go to the contact form at jupiterbroadcasting.com, be sure to select Women’s Tech Radio as the drop down show.
PAIGE: And you can add us on our RSS feed reader, or you can get us on iTunes. If you happen to have us on iTunes, please go ahead and leave us a review. We’d love to hear what you think of the show. You can also find us on Twitter @heywtr. Tweet us and we’d love to hear what you think.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Millennials and Mentors | WTR 40 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.