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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

• Workfrom — Best Places to Work Remotely in a City
• jewel mlnarik (@juellez) | Twitter
• Workfrom (@workfrom) | Twitter

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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

• Jo Wollschlaeger (@jo_wollsch) | Twitter
• Cardsmith (@gocardsmith) | Twitter
• Cardsmith
• Cardsmith
• Custom Sticker Printing – Sticker Mule
• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth: Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares: 9781591848363: Amazon.com: Books

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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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• Megan Bigelow (@meganfabulous) | Twitter
• Search
• PDX Women in Tech (@PDXWiIT) | Twitter
• Jama Software – Product Delivery & Requirements Management Solution

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Brook is a support engineer at puppet labs. She discusses so many tools used on a daily basis, be sure to check the links in the show notes!

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• brook shelley (@brookshelley) | Twitter
• Puppet Labs: IT Automation Software for System Administrators
• prompt
• The Toast – A willing foe, and sea room.
• Lean Out
• nvALT (@nvALTApp) | Twitter
• nvALT – BrettTerpstra.com
• Byword • Simple and efficient text editor for Mac, iPhone and iPad.
• Confluence – Team Collaboration Software | Atlassian
• Zendesk.com | Customer Service Software | Support Ticket System
• Vagrant
• The Official YAML Web Site
• HipChat – Private group chat, video chat, instant messaging for teams | HipChat
• Markdown Basics – User Documentation

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we’re going to interview Brook Shelley. She is a fantastic support engineer at Puppet Labs which is a great startup out of Portland. And she goes on to tell us about Puppet. About being a support engineer. We talk a bunch about life and her journey from being an English major to a professional in a technology field.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I want to mention that you can support the network and Women’s Tech Radio specifically by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. Now, it’s today because we have Tech Talk Today which is our thank you show of daily headlines that we do four days a week and it’s kind of like a thank you for supporting us, here’s just a little bit more and different than what we offer in any of our other shows. And it’s specifically for the people that support the network. I mean, anybody can watch it, really, but there’s some exclusive content that you get access to and updates about your network on the inside when you become a patron. So, go to patreon.com/jupitersignal to support Pagie and myself on Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: And we get started with our interview with Brook by asking her what she’s up to today and where she is in her career.
BROOK: My name is Brook and I work at a company called Puppet Labs. Right now I do support engineering. I’ve been doing tech work for around 10 years. Usually in the IT, sys admin supports fields. And so I guess I’m somewhere in my mid-career. I just keep working in different places learning different fields. This is my first job where I’m working with a server automation, whole new thing for me. And it kind of falls under the dev ops worlds, which I think the term is hilarious but it seems to be what people are using these days.
PAIGE: Isn’t dev ops another, another version of the developer designer unicorn?
BROOK: Yeah. Something like that. I mean, it’s just like, what if we got ops people and dev people to work together in harmony. I also call d’ops because I think that’s funnier, but-
ANGELA: Oh, I thought it was Duh Ops. Duh ops.
BROOK: Oh, yeah.
PAIGE: But that’s kind of also true, right?
BROOK: That works too. Yeah, I like that a lot.
PAIGE: That’s good. So what is, for people who aren’t familiar, because i know this is actually kind of a unique position at Puppet and a couple other companies. What is a support engineer?
BROOK: So, for us, what that means is, we sale a product that is an enterprise software, so we sell Puppet Enterprise. And it sort of puts together a bunch of open source components and a few other things to help large companies, and small companies, manage their server infrastructure. So when those people implement it or get their software implemented by — our software implemented by our engineers, our professional services folks, then when they have trouble with it, or if they have questions about it, they usually file tickets via email with us. And then my team is responsible for talking to them about their issues, reproducing them, filing bugs with our engineering team, directly fixing things ourselves. So we’re kind of the glue that holds it together once it’s shipped, because like any other software it works really, really well until you have it configured in a custom way and it’s all these moving parts and then you start going oh, there’s a few things I’m confused about. So that’s what my team does. We’re sort of a 24/7 team. We have people in Malaysia as well. I think there’s like eight or nine of us and we’re all pretty savvy experienced sys admin people. It’s also really rad because my team is, I think just about half women, which is super cool.
PAIGE: Oh wow. That is super rare.
BROOK: Yeah, especially for an engineering team. Yeah. So I feel really lucky that we have that. Both my boss and my boss’ boss are also women, which is really fantastic.
PAIGE: Oh wow. Yeah, womens’ leadership changes the whole team.
ANGELA: That’s great.
BROOK: Yeah, totally. It was a big factor in why I moved here to Portland and went and took this job, because I was like, oh man, if I can be surrounded by amazing, smart women, that’s my ideal goal.
PAIGE: I like it. So, I think, my understanding, and I would love you to correct me on this, is that Puppet as a product is an awesome wrapper to make a Docker more usable, especially in the enterprise environment? I think some of our viewers here are familiar — or listeners are familiar with Docker. I covered it on a couple other shows, but is that accurate?
BROOK: Uh, no. I would say it’s inaccurate. Docker is a separate piece of software. Docker is a way to bundle up applications and configurations into pendencies. Into little, like, container things and ship those out. But what Puppet does is Puppet installs, configures, and keeps in a steady state a myriad of server software and things. So, let’s say you have one Apache server and MySQL server and you’ve got some load balancers and whatever else. Instead of having to manually configure each one of those, you might set up Puppet and maybe create some modules to set all of those settings for you. And then when you want to launch a new server, you just start that node up, point it at your puppet master, and say hey this node gets this configuration. And you choose like a class or a role or something. It puts that on there and if someone, let’s say your employee, goes on that node and tweaks the configuration themselves, every 30 minutes that node checks back in with the master and says hey I look like this. ANd the master says that’s wrong. You should change your configuration. So, it also does some change management a little bit too. And that’s sort of the real rough outline of what it does, but it’s a pretty robust thing. We have customers that manage tens of thousands of servers with it. Some pretty big name customers too.
PAIGE: So, now you’re a support engineer. Have you always been in tech? Is this something as a kid you were taking things apart all the time? Do you have a degree in computer science? What’s your journey?
BROOK: So, yeah. When I was younger we were pretty poor, but my dad, when we were — I was maybe like in early middle school — my dad got a job in the defense industry and brought home a computer. And we’d had like an Apple 2E when I was really young that we inherited from somebody, but I just got on it a lot. And being a queer woman, I was looking for answers in community, because I was raised in a very Christian household and so I was like, I bet I can find stuff on here. So I started just like surfing around the internet and inevitably the computer would break in some way or I would get confused about how to connect to some IRC channel and so I started researching those things just to connect to find out what the hell was going on with me. And, that was impetuous for me to get started in tech was just fixing my own problems. And then, inevitably, I became the go to girl for my family and my friends whenever something would break. Like, hey can you help me with my computer or hey can you help me with my printer, and I just did those things. I went into the University of Texas at Austin and majored in English Literature.
PAIGE: So that’s not computer science.
BROOK: Not at all. I started working at the laptop help desk for the education department while I was there and — because i just fixed computers. And I was like, well it seems like people want to pay me money to do this, so I might as well take the money. I write now, but at the time I was like oh I want to be a novelist. I’m not going to try to do this tech thing. This is just temporary. ANd somehow temporary turned into ten years of doing this. I mean, it’s definitely something that’s always interested me. I think it’s fun to solve problems and it’s fun to sort of learn about new technologies. A lot of times my passions lie elsewhere and to some degree what I do as a job is a job. I didn’t necessarily get into tech as goal to become a programer and I don’t necessarily build servers or set up software on my free time, but it’s a job I’m very good at. It’s something that interest me and I kind of stumbled into it and kept going. But I’m actually also a college dropout. My situation was very bad when I was in college and for various reasons my dad stopped sort of filling out my financial aid information and so I couldn’t get loans anymore, which meant I had to drop out. And i was lucky enough that by that time I was already started in tech, so I’ve been able to continue with my career ever since then. I think my grandma hasn’t forgiven me about not finishing my degree yet, but at this point it’s been a while, so.
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s paper, right? At the end of the day.
BROOK: Yeah. And, I mean, I would love to go get a PhD in English, but it’s expensive so.
ANGELA: I know a lot of tech professionals that don’t have any college at all. You know?
PAIGE: Yeah. I even know a couple high school dropouts.
ANGELA: Yeah.
BROOK: And all the stuff I learned that I use every day are things that I picked up on my own, on the internet. And through friend and through mentors. So, my college classes taught me a lot about the socialist interpretation of Dostoevsky, but not necessarily the things that I do every day.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think one of the biggest values in education is learning how to learn. Especially once you mastered that, the internet is such an amazing worldwide resource. It really is changing lives. We have these stories of children in India who are ending up as millionaires because they’re teaching themselves how to build apps on the app store online.
ANGELA: Right.
BROOK: Totally, yeah. It’s amazing. And I think this is one of those — I have a lot of friends who are involved in things like Pi Ladies and other types of organizations that help women in other, like oppressed and minority groups in tech get involved with it. And the biggest thing I see a lot of times is just people not knowing that they can do something. Kind of feeling tentative. Well, I don’t know, that’s for somebody else. And it’s so amazing to see people kind of be able to in a more caring and free environment feel like they can succeed. And then when they feel like that, all of the sudden it’s like oh man you’re writing so many cools things and doing things I would have never thought of.
PAIGE: It’s like, people should have a podcast about that.
BROOK: I think so. Yeah. It turns out.
PAIGE: It turns out. Obviously, it’s a big passion of mine. I think that it’s just, you know, if you know that you could do it, you can do it.
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: It’s the biggest hurdle.
BROOK: Exactly.
PAIGE: So, Brook, you’ve mentioned that you kind of actually are one of the few people in technology who manages to leave their job and tech at work.
BROOK: Yeah.

PAIGE: So what else do you do with your free time?
BROOK: Well, I live in Portland and so that means I bicycle a lot between different places. I absolutely love food. Like, sort of, maybe too much. Right now I’m on a ramen kick. I didn’t do gluten for like five years so every opportunity I have to ramen I’m doing it.
ANGELA: Okay, wait. So are you like college student ramen’ing it or are you adding like sarata and egg and green onions? How are you?
BROOK: Yeah. I’m going to like ramen shops. like fancy ramen shops that do like, they put their own pork belly and do like a bone broth.
PAIGE: You have to help me on my quest then, because as you know, I recently moved to Portland.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: And when I was in San Francisco I found this ramen joint, because I am definitely gluten intolerant.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: Where they would sub cabbage in for the noodles and it was amazing.
BROOK: Okay.
PAIGE: So if you see a place in Portland that subs cabbage for noodles, I’m there.
BROOK: There’s a place in Portland that does like a yam noodle instead of the-
ANGELA: Wait, you don’t like sweet potato?
PAIGE: I love sweet potatoes.
ANGELA: Oh.
BROOK: This is like a shirataki, so it’s like a white yam. It’s actually, it’s weird deal, it’s like all in, it’s all in soluble fibers so it’s like celery, so you don’t really digest it, but it’s good. I don’t know. It’s strange.
PAIGE: It’s called a high resistance starch.
ANGELA: Better than a cheeseburger, probably. Better for you, I mean.
PAIGE: Yeah.
BROOK: Possibly, yeah. I mean there’s some cheeseburgers.
PAIGE: There’s actually some interesting nutritional research that we need more highly resistant starch in the diet to act as prebiotic to host bacteria in your intestines properly.
ANGELA: Holy moly.
PAIGE: Which is why people are encouraging things like the shiratakis and plantains.
ANGELA: Interesting.
PAIGE: And a couple other things.
ANGELA: I wonder if there’s going to be then a movement to support adding more of that — I think it’s called — no cellulose — yeah, I think it is.
BROOK: Yeah.
ANGELA: Like the wood pulp that’s in a filler in a lot of our food.
PAIGE: No. No I don’t-
ANGELA: Because you can’t digest that either. But it could host something, I’m sure.
PAIGE: Yeah, probably not the right things though.
ANGELA: Yeah.
BROOK: I just eat a lot of rocks. No, I’m kidding.
ANGELA: Let us know how that goes.
BROOK: I travel a lot for fun and to go see friends that I know through Twitter and various other places. So when I’m traveling I eat a lot of food. I also read pretty constantly. I’m in a book group here in town that’s like a lesbian book group. And then, I don’t know, I have a Goodreads challenge that I’m trying to complete this year of like, I think 60 or 70 books.
ANGELA: Wow.
BROOK: When I was kid that was really easy, because I never stopped reading. I was always like hiding and reading or walking around and reading. But now that I have a job it’s like oh I have to stop reading this novel so I can go to work. But I do that a lot. I used to make music. I haven’t done that recently. But it’s something that I –
PAIGE: How do you make music?
BROOK: Uh, I grew up playing bass and so I played in some bands. And then I also used to make electronic music, which is something I want to start doing again. And I write. I write a whole lot. i do sort of a daily meditative prompt thing. There’s this website called hellloprompt.com and they send you a daily prompt. Like yesterday’s was I think on like wedding proposal or something like that. And then the day before that was like a story about a bully or something. And so it’s just a bunch of different small prompts and you can write a few sentences or a few paragraphs and send them in and they all get collated anonymously. So the next day you see the previous day’s stories and then a new prompt. It’s really fun. I do that and then I write for The Toast occasionally. I just had a piece on a tarot website about why tarot is important to me as somebody who grew up as a Christian and also as a lesbian. And, yeah, just stuff like that. I’ve got a couple different things coming out and some books this year too, and writing is a big deal for me.
ANGELA: That is really awesome.
PAIGE: Very cool.
BROOK: Yeah, thanks.
PAIGE: So, if people want to follow you for this sort of stuff do you tweet about it?
BROOK: Yeah, I definitely do. Yeah, my Twitter account is probably the best place to see things like that. And I think the books is like orbooks.com/lean-out. So the book is called Lean Out and it’s a bunch of stories about misogyny in tech.
PAIGE: I see what you did there.
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: We will not lean in.
BROOK: Yeah, you want to lean out.
PAIGE: So what is your Twitter handle?
BROOK: It’s BrookShelley, so B-R-O-O-K-S-H-E-L-L-E-Y. And that’s kind of the name I use for everything.
ANGELA: Great.
PAIGE: Awesome. And that will be in the show notes.
BROOK: Awesome.
PAIGE: For sure.
BROOK: Yeah, and it’s fun. I mean so many people on there too. Like, I say a good amount of my friends these days are people I met through Twitter, which is kind of fun.
PAIGE: How do you meet people through Twitter? This is one of the, — I’m not going to lie. This is one of the fascinating — I’ve actually had several people recently be like oh I met this person through Twitter. And I’m like, it’s just a, it’s tiny microblogging platform.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: Which has sort of messaging, but not really.
BROOK: Yeah. I mean a lot of it is just like friends of friends. So some people I know through real like things. We’ll follow each other on Twitter. We’ll be chatting about something. Maybe one of their friends will pipe in and add something or make a joke. And I’ll sort of follow the people that my friends retweet, sometimes. And then I’ll make a joke or respond to something. Inevitably if we’re both funny and kind of enjoying each other’s company in the sort of microsphere or Twitter, then we’ll like DM each other or say like hey we should grab a drink sometime. Yeah, especially when I’m traveling. I was just in New York and I was just in LA and while I’m there I’m like, hey if I have any friends on here who live in this city and you want to show me something or go get a drink, let’s do that. And then I often meet up with people. New York was super busy because of that. And I stay with people that I meet through Twitter too. LIke people I’ve never physically met in real life.
ANGELA: That’s awesome.
BROOK: Yeah. It’s super weird though, because it’s like, I’ve never met you but I guess I’m going to crash at your house when I come there. ANd they’re like, yeah rad. It usually goes well.
PAIGE: That’s like couchsurfing but with more knowledge.
BROOK: Yeah. And you can also date people from Twitter. That’s the more-
PAIGE: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa, now.
ANGELA: Her mind just blew. It’s all over the wall.
PAIGE: Angela, I think we’re going to have to have like a teach Paige Twitter episode. We’ll do a video this time.
BROOK: It’s the best. And it’s so much better than like OkCupid or Tinder because where that’s like static information that you say about yourself-
ANGELA: Right.
BROOK: Twitter is what you care about. What you’re talking about. So you can see what somebody actually is like to some degree.
ANGELA: What their passion is too.
BROOK: Yeah. Yeah. And then also who their friends are. So, you’re like oh that person follows Ron Paul. Maybe I don’t want to hang out with them or whatever.
ANGELA: Caution. Caution.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: What if it’s like an ironic follow.
BROOK: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, they just follow to make sure that he’s not getting more dangerous or something. I don’t know.
PAIGE: So you can, whenever he says something stupid you can do that thing where your snub him or sarcasm back.
BROOK: Exactly. Yeah.
PAIGE: Okay. This is funny. What I’m — all I’m hearing in this conversation is like, Paige you’re social ineptitude via text will get you killed, but — or not killed, but you know. This will not go well.
ANGELA: Smited.
PAIGE: Yes. Smitten.
BROOK: I mean, you8 know, there’s a whole bunch of different ways to do stuff and I have — I — for me, I had a lot of people that I grew up around who are not really friends anymore. A lot of it due to my queerness and a lot of it due to me moving. ANd so, I’ve had to rebuild a chosen family and rebuild a group of people in my life in the past few years. And so it made me a lot more apt to try new things. I have a lot of people i know who, you know, they have the same friends from college or high school and so they’re impetus for making new friends isn’t as high. But yeah, it’s pretty fun.
PAIGE: I mean, it’s no joke that the tools that we have built, like Twitter, like Facebook, and all of these other different social networks can be used in this awesome way to build these intricate connected widespread communities. And, you know, I just happen to be really bad at sharing via text. I’m awesome in Meet Space. I swear.
BROOK: Yeah. There’s always, yeah, there’s always meetups and stuff too that are kind of fun. Although, I’m — I do better online. I do really well in one on one and small situations. If there’s a room full of like 10 or 20 people, I’m usually in the side of the room and like maybe want to read a book.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’m exactly the opposite, which is fairly unusual for a geek and I get myself in trouble that way sometimes, because everyone is like well we’ll just talk about it online. I’m like, do we have to? Can we talk about it now?
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: Can I bring a beer? How about pizza?
BROOK: You’re the person who calls people on the phone as opposed to like texting them?
PAIGE: Oh, let’s not go that far. Mostly, I’m actually the person that just shows up at your house.
B; Hey, I like that. That’s good.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Like old school. Like, hey can Brook come out and play?
BROOK: Exactly. I like it.
PAIGE: Awesome. So I did have one other question that I like to ask. I’d love to know what tools you’re using right now to do your job, because it’s always interesting to see what other developers and support technicians and all sorts of things are using in their jobs so that people can get a handle on it. What your job needs for skills.
BROOK: Yeah. My favorite tool of all time is nvALT which is like a — it’s a fork of a thing called Notational Velocity and at its basic level it’s just a plane text editor that does universal search. So the screen looks like, you’ve got a big box for text and you’ve got a left sidebar that lists all of the articles you’ve written or all of the things you’ve written. And then you’ve got a search bar as well. When you type in anything it will find all the notes that have those words in it. And if you press enter on the search it will create a new note with that as a title. So that’s like my brain dump. I found that I’m not very good at story arbitrary information like numbers and whatever else. But my computer is. So I have that synced up to Dropbox and then over to Byword on my phone. And that gets me really far. Other than that, we use Confluence here at work to store a bunch of internal information. We use Zendesk to do our ticketing. I use an inbox for personal stuff and Gmail for work stuff, Google Apps rather. And as far as server things go, obviously Puppet Enterprise, which is something I have to know really, really well. But because I have to bring up a lot of VMs really quickly and test various interpolations of them and be able to roll them back really quickly if I mess it up, we use Vagrant for that. So we have a bunch of different sort of VMs being managed by Vagrant. It’s a cool service. You can like — you template things to YAML and then you say like Vagrant up and create a new VM. You can log into it, mess with it. We have a snapshotting plugin for it, so you can create a snapshot as soon as it’s launched and installed so that if I go misconfigure it and break it, instead of trying to go fix it I can just roll back to the known good state. Let’s see, other than that, we use HipChat to talk to each other. That’s pretty important. And then Markdown, a lot of Markdown stuff. It’s how we write our documents. It’s how we do our ticket stuff in JIRA.
PAIGE: Is nvALT Markdown friendly now?
BROOK: Yeah, it is. The Markdown preview isn’t great, but I haven’t found a place that really has great Markdown preview. Yeah, I like it just fine though. Mostly I use it, especially because it’s very distraction free. It’s just a white box. So I can’t format-
PAIGE: I have used the exact setup that you have on that one and I liked it myself quite a bit with nvALT, Dropbox, and Byword.
BROOK: They’re fantastic. I really like it. I mean, every once in a while I’ll go check and see what else is out there as far tech stops go, but they’re always missing something key that I need, so I’m like all right, I’m sticking with this one.
PAIGE: Yeah. I ended up moving over to Evernote just because i have to deal with so much multimedia stuff with trying to do podcasts and meetups and things, but other than that I would much rather be in nvALT.
BROOK: Yeah, and I like Evernote okay, but for me I’m sort of paranoid and I’m like, well I don’t really trust them to stay around as long as plain text.
PAIGE: Very true. I might, I might be paranoid to export on a regular basis via (unintelligible) to my Dropbox.
BROOK: I love it. That’s awesome. It’s the best way to do it. And then we use like 13’ Macbook Pro retina computers and a second screen. Although, my personal computer that I use a lot when I’m here at the office is one of the new Macbooks. The little 12’ inch ones. And I’m like absolutely head over heals about this computer because it’s so tiny.
PAIGE: I actually was going to ask you that because I saw you had it the other night. And I’m still slightly on the fence because I’m always touchy about first gen technology, but.
BROOK: Sure.
PAIGE: What’s awesome?
BROOK: It’s so light and portable. It fits in my purse. I take it with me in my purse everywhere.
ANGELA: That’s awesome.
BROOK: Yeah. The retina screen is amazing. It’s not fast, but I don’t need it to be. It turned out that most of what I do is via SSH in a terminal and then things that I don’t do on a computer, sorry, on a server are things that I’m just, like I’m writing text. So I don’t need processing speed. And the GPU is good enough to let me throw game of thrones onto my TV. So it’s just what i need for a machine. And the battery life is a little bit less than I want compared to my old Macbook Air, which had like 14 hours. This one has like eight or nine. But eight or nine hours is still a long time so I’m pretty happy with it.
PAIGE: And one port life hasn’t killed you?
BROOK: No. I don’t plug anything into my computer except for headphones.
PAIGE: Yeah.
BROOK: I occasionally — I broke down and got the adapter so I could charge my phone with it, but that’s it. I don’t — I mean I connect to hard drives via a NAS. I don’t use secondary monitors when I’m at home or whatever. So I don’t really need much else. And if I project something onto a screen. Like, a lot of times people have Apple Tvs or whatever else. If I do talks and things like that, I don’t like using PowerPoint so I don’t worry about that either.
PAIGE: Nice.
BROOK: Yeah. I’ve radically simplified it.
PAIGE: Yeah. I really — I kind of did the same thing the first time I went down to a Macbook Air. It was just like, oh wait, I don’t really need, well because I don’t have time to play games anymore so I don’t really need crazy processing power, because mostly I’m just writing text code and it’s brower text code. So it’s not like I’m compiling anything.
BROOK: Yeah. Yeah, I’m alway confused when people are like, oh I need a really powerful computer. I’m like for what? But I think that’s like — that was the story of the ‘90s and the early 2000s was sort of like more power is always better and you’re always going to — except for the fact that websites and sort of the way people do Javascript stuff is more and more complex, generally you don’t need much.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find the show notes on the YouTube page or go to JupiterBroadcasting.com and from the show dropdown select Womens’ Tech Radio and find the episdoe that you want to listne to or ead about, and scroll down to those show notes. You can also use our contact form on the website, which you can select Women’s Tech Radio or any show on the network to email us about with any kind of feedback.
PAIGE: You can also find us on iTunes. If you have a moment please leave us a review. Let us know what you think about the show. You can reach out to us directly at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com or follow us on Twitter, @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Duh Ops | WTR 35 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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

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Show Notes:

• Societal Obstacle (@laurenvoswinkel) | Twitter
• Cascadia Ruby 2014- Lightning Talks – YouTube
• Let’s Talk About Pay | Model View Culture
• #talkpay hashtag on Twitter
• #Talkpay Topped Twitter — But How Many People Tweeted Their Salaries – BuzzFeed News

Transcription:

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Paige Hubbell, WTR cohost, discusses her theater work with her carpentry degree and all the random jobs she had along her technology journey!

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Show Notes:

• Priyank Sharma WTR 11
• Wakatime: Quantify your coding
• Vim editor
• Vim Adventures
• Geeksquad

Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below or also at heywtr.tumblr.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 are successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela. Now, Paige, today I want to ask you about how you stay energized. What is your favorite caffeine source?
PAIGE: That’s a really, kind of a loaded question, because I don’t stay energized with caffeine and it does give me a little bit of the focus kick, but I’m a non-responder for caffeine for the most part. I can drink three or four pots of coffee and go right to bed.
ANGELA: No…
PAIGE: I know. No, I wish that it weren’t the truth.
ANGELA: You’re a freak of nature is what you are.
PAIGE: Yeah, pretty much. I’m a true ADD candidate, but that’s okay. But, I love coffee. I really do. I will always, always pick a good coffee over almost anything else. Right now, I am blessed to live in Portland, which has Stumptown Roasters and they have this amazing cold press coffee that is nitrogen infused, so it comes out of a tap and it looks like a beer. It gets like a foam head and it’s so incredibly smooth, and I just hit it with a little heavy cream to smooth it out a little bit more, and it is like the best thing on almost any day.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Yeah, so Stumptown. And if you’re in the Pacific Northwest, they also sell it in little brown glass bottles in your grocers’ freezer. I think Safeway carries it and stuff.
ANGELA: Cool. Well, I don’t drink coffee. I don’t like coffee.
PAIGE: What? Get out. Get out.
ANGELA: But his is my house! Okay. I also have never done an energy drink, ever.
PAIGE: Ever?
ANGELA: Ever.
PAIGE: Oh man, I can pound those down, no problem.
ANGELA: No, it’s really great. Yeah, I know. Well, so I react to caffeine, even more so. Like, if I have caffeine after 11, I’m going to be up tonight. Like –
PAIGE: 11 in the morning?
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: Oh wow.
ANGELA: 11 in the morning.
PAIGE: You’re a real responder.
ANGELA: I have — so my source of caffeine is Mountain Dew, and I have it typically between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m.
PAIGE: Well, that’s totally normal though, because caffeine actually has a four hour half-life. So, for most people it’s still in your system, even from the morning.
ANGELA: Yeah, so, I have three young kids under the age of five so I really kind of need this energy boost. And I know it’s not the best place to get it, especially not, you know the flame retardant filled chemical yellow dye mountain dew.
PAIGE: You’re just preserving yourself for later.
ANGELA: Right? Yeah, right. I am not going to catch on fire.
PAIGE: Nope.
ANGELA: So, that is what I do.
PAIGE: What is it about the Dew that’s different for you?
ANGELA: I don’t know. I don’t know.
PAIGE: Has it just always been your drink of choice?
ANGELA: Yeah, I’ve liked it for a very long time. Dr. Pepper is right up there with it, but mostly it’s been Mountain Dew. And so, I have a daily Mountain Dew.
PAIGE: I’ll share a little secret today. Angela had both Cheetos and Mountain Dew, and I was like man, this is like nerd heaven right heaven right here.
ANGELA: Okay, it was an emergency snack in my backpack and I just needed something to eat.
PAIGE: You know, sometimes you’ve got to have that. We’ve talked about guilty snacks before.
ANGELA: I didn’t get breakfast this morning, so.
PAIGE: That’s okay. You should see me in the grocery stores right now, because the Cadbury Cream eggs are out.
ANGELA: Oh, yes.
PAIGE: So, today, we are doing something a little different and we’re flipping the mic and Angela is going to interview me. Hopefully this will give you guys a little more insight of my background and what I’m in to. We talk about different things like my journey, getting started, being a self-taught developer, and a couple other things.
ANGELA: And before we get into the actual interview, I want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to patrion.com/today. Now, why is it today? Because, Tech Talk Today is our thank you show that we produce four times a week with daily tech information as a thank you for people that are supporting the Jupiter Broadcasting Network using Patrion.com/today. So, if you go there, you can subscribe. Sometimes there’s bonus content and sometimes there’s announcements, things that you can do. We’re about to adjust the milestones, so if you are interested in supporting the network at a whole, which supports all the shows, you can go there. Patrion.com/today.
Okay, Paige can you tell me how you got into technology?
PAIGE: How I got into tech? So, it was kind of a long winding journey for me. I remember being kind of in like middle school, and I had a lot of friends who were dudes and they were super in to video games. I remember the first time I was like, okay I got the family computer. I talked my dad into letting me have the last one and keep it in my room. I really wanted to play — what was it — it might have been Diablo 1. You had to have a sound card, and I didn’t have a sound card. I was like, oh man I really want to play this game with my buddies. They’re all loving it. I don’t really care that much, but — I went out, I saved up my pizza money, or my paper money from various things and I bought myself a sound card. And then I had to open up the computer. Which is like, a big deal, because we don’t open up computers in my house. Nobody is technical enough I had to bust out the screwdriver and I was so scared. It was back when the whole U shape lifted off the desktop and you could slice your jugular open because they were so sharp.
ANGELA: Oh yes. Oh, yes.
PAIGE: And I totally did that the first time. I cut my hand real good. So, there’s blood involved in my journey right away. And I put the sound card in and I was so proud of myself. I didn’t — I ended up playing Diablo probably for like two hours, because you know, I like video games.
ANGELA: Oh, I was hoping you’d say you turned it on and it didn’t –
PAIGE: No. No, naturally gifted with hardware.
ANGELA: Awesome. Shocking, especially then. You know, put thing in slot, turn back on generally worked. And that just really got me started. My parents were pretty supportive. For major holidays they got kind of creative. A couple years later they got me a DVD drive, and it was before DVDs were — before you had them in your home theater. So, I had one for my computer. And they bought me Top Gun, because it was one of the first movies out of DVD, and oh man, I watched that movie so many times. But, I had to put the drive in the computer myself. I got pretty into hardware really early. And then in high school I was trying to impress some friends and so I started to learn a little bit of HTML. I think little, happy birthday, websites on Geocities and whatnot. That kind of got me started. And then, I spun off for a while. I wasn’t good at math necessarily. I was really good at science, so I went to college hoping to be a biology professor. That was kind of what I wanted to do. I wanted to teach anatomy and –
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Yeah, because I had an awesome experience in high school in anatomy class and I was dissecting cats, which is kind of gross.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: But it was just really fascinating. It really clicked with my brain. The biological organism just makes sense to me, so I was really fascinated with that. But, I got to college and it turns out that I’m really bad a chemistry. Like, I’m kind of bad at math. I’m epically bad at chemistry. And so, I flunked chemistry my freshman year, and that didn’t go well. So, I was like well, you know, you have to go through several more tracks of chemistry to stay a biology major, so I switched. I was like what am I going to do? I was a little bit in a rebellious phase so I was like, I’m going to be a theater major, which in my mind was the best way to go to college and become a carpenter. Yeah, because I kind of had a little bit of a back and forth with my dad where I was really interested in a lot of these more masculine things like carpentry or computers or whatever, and he didn’t know what to do with that. He was very supportive, but he just didn’t know what to do. And he’s an architect, so I was like theater is kind of in between that, and I’m going to learn some drafting and he can kind of help me out a little bit with that. It will kind of be an in between, but you also had to work in the shop, so I did learn a lot about how to use power tools, but also how to do design. That I’ve cared for a lot, so there’s definitely a lot of value there. But I got out of college. To have my first theater job I had to have my college education, my full degree, and I got to make $10.00 an hour.
ANGELA: Oh man.
PAIGE: So, you had to have a college degree to have this job, $10.00 an hour.
ANGELA: Yeah, so frustrating.
PAIGE: And it was 2003, so $10.00 an hour, it was livable, but definitely not comfortable, and definitely not college degree material.
ANGELA: Definitely not.
PAIGE: So, I did that for a couple years. And I loved the work, and the work became gradually more and more technical, because I was interested in behind the scenes theater, because I’m not an actor, although I play one on the radio.
ANGELA: Like right now?
PAIGE: Yeah, like right now.
ANGELA: Yeah, like on Women’s Tech Radio, okay.
PAIGE: Yeah, on Women’s Tech Radio, I’m an actor.
ANGELA: She winked.
PAIGE: I did. I did. Hard to tell on radio, which is why I’m not a good radio actor. So, I wasn’t into that. I was into design and tech stuff. And I worked professionally as a sound technician and a lighting technician for several years, and it got me really into things like signal flow and programing sound systems, because most sound systems in theaters at the time were transitioning over got a fully software based system, and you’d go in and you’d write your effects more — almost like a program, where you’d be like if I push this button does these things, and there’s these three speakers.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: So it had kind of some of that same feel.
ANGELA: Instead of a hardware or a mixer board or whatever.
PAIGE: And so I –some things I had as a mixer board and some mixer boards at the time were becoming programmable, which was pretty cool.
ANGELA: Okay.
PAIGE: So that was kind of neat to kind of learn some of that and start to learn programing again, because I had been interested in programing before. And in college, a friend had tried to talk me into learning some programing, but I got started with Perl, which turned out to be a terrible idea for me. It just didn’t make a lot of sense. It was very intimidating. And I can do HTML and CSS, but you guys can do this Perl thing. So, I kept helping my friends with all these HTML and with hardware problems, so I was doing all this, but then I was doing theater. And theater was what really kind of caught my passions, but it was just — it just didn’t pay. I just couldn’t really make a living doing it, and the work would kind of dry up and then go up and down in spurts. So, a couple of years doing that, and finally I got laid off enough times, because you’d go in and out of work depending on when shows were happening, that I took a job at Jiffy Lube.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Yeah, so I went from the prestigious career of theater to the prestigious career of Jiffy Lube. And luckily at that time, I also had a friend who was really involved in Geek Squad at a corporate level with Best Buy, and she was kind of doing a program to bring women into technology through Geek Squad and do all these cool things, and I got pretty — I started actually helping them before and she was like, let me work and let’s try to get you a job in Geek Squad so I can actually bring you on these projects. So, I’m at Jiffy Lube over the summer. It’s like 100 degrees, I’m working on engines. It was not pleasant. And so finally we get it set up and an opening comes up at Best Buy, I’m like oh this is great. Such a step up from Jiffy Lube to go over to Best Buy. I went over, started working there, and they gave me the job offer and they were like, we’re really sorry, we thought this higher paid job offer was going to be open and we were going to hire you for that, but would you be willing to take this other one, because we would really would like to have you and the move you up later. I was like, yeah cool, let’s do it. They were like really? We were surprised, we didn’t think you would take it. I was like, you have air conditioning. I’m good to go. You want to pay me minimum wage, okay. Anything to get out of the heat at that point.
ANGELA: Yeah, no kidding.
PAIGE: So I got out of Jiffy Lube, into Best Buy. And I kept building my hardware skills and my software skills, not programming. But in Geek Squad I started to have a lot more challenges that were really interesting and kind of an environment where — especially at the time it was very much like what can you learn on your own? There wasn’t a lot of support from Best Buy, but my coworkers were very adventurous in technology, and they were constantly like how can we automate things? How can we look at things as a different process? And my brain just really kind of clicked with that. It was like, kind of like it augments my natural laziness.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: You know, I like to tell people that I think programmers are a really neat mix of people, because they are eternally optimistic and severely lazy, because you’re always convinced that you can make the computer do something a better way, but you’re convinced it will work this time, because a lot of programming is like banging your head up against that wall. Why does it not work, and then, and then huzzah, and then why does it not work? It’s just that up and down, because it’s so binary in a lot of ways. So, I did the stint at Best Buy, Geek Squad, and it was a back and forth journey. I got to do a lot of really cool things. I did go work at corporate in Minneapolis, eventually, Geek Squad summer academy.
ANGELA: Oh yeah.
PAIGE: Where we would kind of travel all over the country every summer and bring camps to either girls or under-privileged kids who didn’t have a chance to touch technology, and we’d teach them things from digital music to some basic scripting to how to build the computer. And we’ve have races for desktop building and play DDR. And it was just a really phenomenal experience.
ANGELA: Can you tell me a little bit about what you do today?
PAIGE: Yeah, cool.
ANGELA: At least one of them.
PAIGE: So, I do a ton of things. I’m kind of an overachieving in my spare time. Mostly, I work as a sort of mid-level developer. I do a lot of automation on the server. Right now I write mostly in node.js, which is a JavaScript framework on the server. I also do automation in Ruby and I’m currently transitioning to a full-time developer position working with Angular, the new agency out of PDX Code Guild. So, we just started a PDX Code Guild agency.
ANGELA: Cool.
PAIGE: I’m pretty excited about that. It’s kind of a project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I’m very excited. I get to be both the project lead and one of the developers, and kind of really stretch myself. So, it’s very intimidating, but I’m very excited.
ANGELA: And PDX Code Guild, that’s in Portland?
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: And you do something else in Portland.
PAIGE: I also am the director for Women Who Code in Portland. I believe very strongly that meeting up in meet space is really important for us as developers. It’s too easy to hide behind the monitor and feel like you’re alone and not connect with the community. And of all the communities I’ve ever been in, the geek community is hands down the most welcoming.
ANGELA: Seriously.
PAIGE: The most understand. Because, we all have social issues. I know Angela well, so it’s easy for me to talk to her, but I have my shyness too.
ANGELA: Now. Yeah, she was concerned about starting the show, but we play really well together.
PAIGE: Yeah, the first time I met with you especially, because I had a little bit of start struckness meeting Chris and you, because, I’m like, I’ve been watching them on the YouTubes for forever and they’re like, stars.
ANGELA: Yeah, I know. We do get that.
PAIGE: This is crazy.
ANGELA: There is a small level of celebrity, but.
PAIGE: Well, in my eyes you were celebrities. It took a lot of guts. Actually, meeting Chris at OSCON that first time, I almost didn’t talk to him.
ANGELA: I am so glad you did.
PAIGE: It took, like a seriously — I felt really — I felt a little weird, because I definitely followed him around the floor, like sort of slightly trying to see if he wasn’t busy for like probably an hour.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Yep. So, and then finally they were sitting at little table instead of interviewing somebody, I was like, could you give me — I’ve been watching the show for a long time. Could you give me some podcasting advice? He was like — and we got talking and he was like, well we want to do that show. And the rest is history.
ANGELA: Yep, and then he said email my wife.
PAIGE: He did. He did, in fact.
ANGELA: And you did.
PAIGE: He was like, Angela is interested in this, because — I’m so glad that you were. It’s been fantastic.
ANGELA: Definitely. All right Paige, what tools do you use on a daily basis or that you recommend?
PAIGE: Sure, I’m a little out on the geek edge. I’m a VIM’er. I use VIM, which stands for Vi Improved. It’s an editor, a text editor that’s based in the terminal. It’s available on all of the operating systems, but it’s included with any Linux distro, pretty much, but a lot of other ones too. It’s all terminal based. There’s no mouse movement. You move with the keyboard, and it’s called a modal editor. It’s really a lot to get your head around, but I had some really bad repetitive stress issues. It started in college. In college I kind of got one of those crazy, funky keyboards.
ANGELA: Oh, yeah. Chris had one of those for a while.
PAIGE: Yeah, it helped, but it never really solved the problem. I started traveling a ton, and so I was working on my laptop all the time. You can’t bring a gigantic keyboard with you for the laptop.
ANGELA: Yeah, no.
PAIGE: It just doesn’t work. And so, my RSI got kind of bad again probably two years ago. And so, I was like what if I just suck it up and learn VIM, because I had heard a lot that it would help to not be going back and forth to the mouse, and have a lot more movement with the keyboard and just kind of keep your hands on that home row, and it totally does. It was a huge investment. I was slow. Like really slow the first week, the first couple weeks. It took –
ANGELA: Oh yeah, I can imagine.
PAIGE: – probably a month to get back up to speed. And so it was a huge time investment, and I definitely worked extra hours at work to try to make up for that. Two years later, I have no RSI unless I’m playing too many video games.
ANGELA: Yeah, right?
PAIGE: And that’s from the mouse. And I’m fast. I’m faster now in VIM than I am on any other text editor. I just fly. It feels like –
ANGELA: Great.
PAIGE: It makes me feel cool. It’s like that super nerdy thing. I’m like, I do this super nerdy thing. And I can log into any server on SSH and know that I’ve got a great text editor that I know how to use right there. I really encourage everybody to at least learn either nano or VIM, because if you’re going to be a developer, at some point you’re going to – hopefully at some point you’re going to touch the server and the server — if you learn that, it’s always available to you. And it is a huge learning curve, and as you like to ask, an awesome tool –
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: – to get started with this is a website called VIM Adventures. It gives you kind of this little due and you have to walk him along on this little adventure using only the VIM keyboard commands.
ANGELA: Okay.
PAIGE: And it builds them up for you as you go.
ANGELA: That’s great.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s a great way to get kind of the basics down.
ANGELA: Did you see, by chance, the most recent — not the most recent, but one of the recent Faux Shows where I talked about learning Markdown?
PAIGE: Yes.
ANGELA: Yeah, that was — it had a really good tool as well for learning Markdown. And you couldn’t move forward unless you did it right.
PAIGE: I should check that out. I forgot about that one, because Markdown has been a struggle I’ve been having lately.
ANGELA: Oh really?
PAIGE: Because GIT encourages you to write your read me files in Markdown or GIT Hub at least.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: And I don’t know Markdown. And every time I’m like why does this paragraph not work. I can’t remember.
ANGELA: Oh, do Huroo Pad –
PAIGE: Oh right, Chris talked about that on Coder Radio a while ago.
ANGELA: Yeah, well and we talked about it on that Faux Show. All you have to do is — it’s super easy. It’s just a GUI, I guess, a graphical user interface, and it automatically puts it into Markdown.
PAIGE: Oh, okay. That’d be a good cheaty way to learn it.
ANGELA: It is. It is. Yeah, you just select it. You say, this is a link and then it –
PAIGE: And that was like a — it’s an HTML 5 or a node kit app, right, so that it works on anything, I think?
ANGELA: Yeah, it does work across platform, yes.
PAIGE: Across platform. The wholly grail of cross-platform development.
ANGELA: Yeah. Now, I happen to know that you use Wakatime.
PAIGE: I do. And they have a VIM plugin, which is fantastic.
ANGELA: Oh really?
PAIGE: Yep.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Very exciting. And they also have an X-Code plugin. I’ve been doing a little bit of X-Code lately, trying to learn Swift. That’s a lot to get your head around. I love it. It actually really upped my game a little bit and made me more conscious of trying to — because one of the things that will happen at my job is I do a bunch of stuff outside of coding and if I go too many days not touching my JavaScript or my Ruby, I definitely notice the lag when I get back.
ANGELA: Uh-huh, yeah.
PAIGE: Like I don’t have the snappiness of the recall and I have to look up more functions and stuff.
ANGELA: Sure.
PAIGE: I really have to go to the documentation a lot more. So Wakatime kind of keeps me a little more honest about that.
ANGELA: So you want to — for people that haven’t listened to episode 11 of Women’s Tech Radio with Priyanka Sharma, do you want to briefly explain what Wakatime is?
PAIGE: Yeah, totally. I’ve been getting a lot of people into it lately.
ANGELA: Me too.
PAIGE: It’s a tool — statistics for you as a developer. So, we all are — especially developers are usually obsessed with statistics for our site, or people who do social media, you’re like what’s my bounce rate? What’s my load time? And you have all these awesome statistics for your site. What Wakatime is trying to do is give you those sort of feedback statistics for your coding. It’s not super finite yet, but it tells me, I’ve spent this much time in this language today. I’ve spent this much time in this project folder today. It also helped me with client work. I’ve bene able to track my client work easier, because I know I’ve actually spent three and a half hours today on this project for this client, and I can bill really easily because of that.
ANGELA: Nice. Yeah, because sometimes — well, I think with most people these days, we are all multitasking.
PAIGE: Mm-hmm.
ANGELA: Not only are we multitasking, but we typically don’t finish one thing before moving on to another, and then we go back to it. If it can — if you only worked in a certain programing language for that client and you just keep going back to it or whatever, it still — the total time you spent in that language was just for that client. It’s really easy to pull that out.
PAIGE: And they have plugins for everything. And they’re even getting programs — I’m super excited, I think they might be done, I know it’s on the list, they have a Photoshop one. So, I’ve been trying to talk some of my graphic designers that I’m working with into too. Be like, how much time are you actually spending in the browser and Photoshop, all that stuff. It’s really cool.
ANGELA: Wow, great.
PAIGE: Yeah, I got my buddy at PDX Code Guild Agency to install, and he was super excited because they had Pitron (ph.sp), I guess is the Python one, and so yeah, like everything.
ANGELA: Well, I want to ask you, what are you excited about? What really gets you going in technology?
PAIGE: What gets me?
ANGELA: What keeps you up at night?
PAIGE: I think it’s all the ways that everybody touches technology these days. There’s nobody who’s not interacting with technology on some basis. We’re at this point where because of that we can now use technology to change almost anyone’s life. And I’m really excited that I can look at somebody who is a mom and be like, well I know they’ve got a smart phone in their pocket, because everybody does. What itch can I scratch for them? What things — and I love — because of that I love talking to non-technical people. What are these problems they have? I was talking to my sister the other day and she was like, you should totally write an app for this. I need something where I can do home management. I can give my husband a chore and set a due date and he knows what it is and it shows up on him, and it shows up on him, and it pops up for his notification. I was like, I don’t’ need to write an app for that, there’s totally one out there. But knowing that these are problems that people are seeing, and I constantly have way more ideas than I can execute on.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: Which, I think anybody does really, who’s at all into this sort of stuff.
ANGELA: Well, and sometimes people just need the push too, like you just need to tell you sister go look for that app, you know?
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: I’ve been meaning to get an app for taking pills. Right? Because I take a thyroid synthetic hormone every night, and sometimes I forget. I’d like an app where I can tell it — like I can clear it and say yes I took I today. That way, at the end of the month I could be like, okay how many days did I forget, or did I forget it, or did I just take it? Like sometimes I forget, because I take it a night, and I lay down and I’m like, did I take it or not? Well, I’m going to take two tonight, or whatever.
PAIGE: I’m sure there’s an app for that.
ANGELA: I am sure there is. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and look for it.
PAIGE: Right. Also, that sort of thing would be a great project — first project for you.
ANGELA: You’re right. Yes. Stay tuned.
PAIGE: And I love teaching. The exciting thing about that, it’s the same thing. Because technology is touching so many lives, you know, I run Women Who Code Events. I teach an intro to JavaScript course. I teach it kind of weird, because a lot of people are like, oh I’m going to come and learn some JavaScript and I really don’t care if you know any JavaScript when you finish with my course, but if you can start to ask questions about programming, that’s so important. Because, for me, I’m a self-taught developer and it took years — many, many years, and a lot of hours, and a lot of blood sweat and tears. As we talked, literally blood sweat and tears.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes.
PAIGE: I think the biggest hurdle that I see, and I think the biggest hurdle that I have is that people don’t know how to ask questions, because you just don’t know what’s possible. You just don’t know what things mean.
ANGELA: You don’t know what you don’t know.
PAIGE: I mean, can you, as someone who is just getting into this stuff, tell me the difference between a programming language, a library, and a framework?
ANGELA: No.
PAIGE: Exactly.
ANGELA: They don’t even sound familiar — or I mean similar.
PAIGE: Yeah, and — and people — that’s a vital piece of learning programming, is, you know, a programming language is how you talk directly to the computer.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: Libraries are sets of tools that fit into that programming language, and then frameworks are a way of thinking and a way of organizing work in that framework. Each of those pieces adds functionality to the original language, but they’re all in the same language. Teaching people that and how to ask those questions, because if I have someone who is coming up and is like, you know, I have this question about rails, and it turns out what they actually have is a question about Ruby, and trying to explain the difference there. It’s really difficult.
ANGELA: Right. Right.
PAIGE: It’s so vital. And I like to explain things with cats. All my lectures have cat videos.
ANGELA: Okay. Well, Page is followable, her handle is Paigetech.
PAIGE: That’s true. P-A-I-G-E-T-E-C-H. And I’m pretty much just on twitter. That’s pretty much me. Mostly, if you want to follow me, check me out on Women’s Tech Radio, or come by if you’re in Portland. Women Who Code events, especially the JavaScript one, come by, take a class. They’re all free.
ANGELA: Good. Well, thank you for telling us more about you Paige. This is well overdo.
PAIGE: No problem. I look forward to flipping the tables.
ANGELA: Stay tuned for that.
PAIGE: Awesome.
ANGELA: All right, thanks.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Be sure to check us out at www.jupiterbroadcasting.com. You can check for the show notes, and you can also use the drop down for contacting us. Just select Women’s Tech Radio in that contact for. Or, you can email us, WTR@Jupiterbroadcasting.com
PAIGE: You can also follow us on Twitter @heywtr or on Tumblr at www.heywtr.tumblr.com. You can also find us on iTunes and if you have a moment please leave a review. We’d love to hear back from you.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter – transcription@cotterville.net

The post College Degree in Carpentry | WTR 22 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Liz Abinante began her journey at the age of 12 and is now a software engineer at New Relic! She also funded her way through school by selling knitting patterns!

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• Art Craft Code
• Art Craft Code Github
• Feministy
• Groupon

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The post OMG the Internet! | WTR 20 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Sheri refers to herself as a “non-tech founder of a tech startup” known as PDX Code Guild!

Sheri is the founder of PDX Code Guild which has a new boot camp class called Get Technical which is for non tech founders of tech startups. Her company is also a full professional services agency in addition to its developer bootcamps. She discusses her excitement with the community that has developed surrounding her services.

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• PDX Code Guild
• Sheri Dover on Twitter

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The post Sheri Dover | WTR 13 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Christina is the community manager for rethinkdb and discusses the various tools and experiences she’s had with its global community!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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• RethinkDB
• RethinkDB – Shirts for stories
• Hootsuite
• Tweetdeck
• Slack
• Stack Overflow
• Meetup.com
• Women Who Code
• Code Academy
• Hackbright Academy
• Community Leadership Summit
• Stitch Fix

The post Christina Keelan | WTR 9 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Angela & Paige interview Maureen Dugan, the outreach coordinator at Epicodus and aspiring web developer. She shares her useful resources & thoughts on development.

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• Support Jupiter Broadcasting on Patreon

• Maureen Dugan @moedu23

Outreach coordinator at Epicodus and aspiring web developer.

• Epicodus
• Learn how to program
• codepen
• Women Who Code
• Swift – Overview – Apple Developer
• Meteor

The post Maureen Dugan | WTR 4 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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

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Show Notes:

• Support Tech Talk Today creating DAILY PODCASTS

• OpenHatch – Community tools for free and open source software

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

• Ascend Project – Home

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

• Women Who Code

18,000+ Women Developers. 14 Countries.

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

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

Take great online courses from the world’s best universities

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

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

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

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

• CodeCombat – Learn how to code by playing a game

Learn to Code by Playing a Game

• Anybody can learn | Code.org

Join the Hour of Code
December 8 – 14, 2014

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