programmer – Jupiter Broadcasting

Brunch with Brent: Heather Ellsworth | Jupiter Extras 57

Wes Payne — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 04:00:00 +0000

Show Notes: extras.show/57

The post Brunch with Brent: Heather Ellsworth | Jupiter Extras 57 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Impress with WordPress | WTR 57

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

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

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

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Show Notes:

Interview – Kronda – @kronda

Are you looking for the transcription? Please let us know you use it and we may bring it back!

WTR Transcription Poll

The post Impress with Wordpress | WTR 57 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Keyboardio | WTR 44

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

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

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

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Show Notes:

Transcription:

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Millennials and Mentors | WTR 40

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

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

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

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Show Notes:

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Millennials and Mentors | WTR 40 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Humanitarian Tech | WTR 31

chris — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 10:29:04 +0000

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

Lisha is the Executive director of Geeks without bounds, an accelerator for humanitarian projects. She has found a great way to mix her desire to do humanitarian work along with technology!

Thanks to:

Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

MP3 Audio | OGG Audio | Video | HD Video | YouTube

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | OGG Feed | iTunes Feed | Video Feed

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Show Notes:

Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below:

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we interviewed Lisha Sterling. She is the executive director for Geeks Without Bounds. She has a pretty awesome story where she started out actually doing humanitarian aid work, ended up in programing, and then wound back up in humanitarian aid work with programing. It’s a fascinating story. Geeks Without Bounds is a great program, and I’m super excited to have her on the show.
ANGELA: Me too. But before we get into the show, I want to tell you about DigitalOcean. If you go to digitalocean.com and you use the promo code heywtr, you can save $10.00, which turns out is a two month rental of a server. Right? Because it’s only $5.00 a month. They have datacenter locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, AMsterdam, and London. And basically, they’re a cloud hosting provider. You can spin up a cloud server in 55 seconds. That include 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabytes SSDS, i CPU, and i terabyte transfer. And they also pay authors $100 to $200.00 to technical tutorials. So, if you happen to already use DIgitalOcean or want to try it, and then like it so much that you want to write about it, you can get paid for that. After, of course, you save on two months of service.
PAIGE: Yeah, and their tutorials are bar none some of the best on the internet. I even end up there for things not for my DIgitalOcean VPS, which by the way, with those SSDs is disgustingly fast.
ANGELA: So, if you use heywtr, you support Women’s Tech Radio. ANd turns out, if you did not remember to enter a promo code when you started DigitalOcean, just go try to put in in there.
PAIGE: Yeah. I actually did that and it totally worked for mine.
ANGELA: After the fact.
PAIGE: Like a couple years ago when Coder Radio had it. That was sweet.
ANGELA: Yep, so you can still use it. So heywtr. Go to digitalocena.com
PAIGE: Yeah. And we got started with our interview with Lisha by asking her to explain her current position and what she’s up to in technology.
LISHA: I’m the Executive Director at Geeks Without Bounds and we support humanitarian open source projects through a combination of hackathons and an accelerator program. So, my work these days sort of entangles both my early career in international aid work and charity work and my academic side. I studied Latin American studies in college. And the rest of my professional life, which has been software development and systems engineering. And now I get to use technology to do disaster response and humanitarian aid and international development work.
PAIGE: Wow. That’s a pretty awesome way to use technology.
ANGELA: Yeah it is.
PAIGE: So that sounds like a pretty big jump from, you know, international aid work into software development. Can you tell me the story of like how that came to be for you?
LISHA: Yeah. So, first off, being, you know, a privileged white kid, i had my first computer when I was eight years old. Actually, my dad got me two Timex Sinclair 1000s. One for his house and one for my moms’ house. And connected it up to the black and white TV and put rubber bands around it so that the extra 16K of memory wouldn’t disconnect while we programmed. And thus I began my journey as a new programer learning basic and then going there’s a thing called Assembly Language. And I got involved with a computer club and was your basic tomboy geek girl. Then I had my first kid when I was 17 and went off to El Salvador. Did aid work during the war and during the first year of the peace. Came back to the US, did a bunch of work with refugees. Had another kid. Decided that I should probably go to college. And since I’d been working with Central American and in Central America, it was obvious what I was going to study. I was going to study Latin American studies and go do more of the same sort of stuff. But being a mom with two small kids, I, and no real skills or degree, I was able to make $4.25 an hour and my childcare cost like $7.50 an hour. The math doesn’t add up.
ANGELA: No. Now that I have three, daycare just isn’t even an option.
LISHA: Yeah. So one of my friends from my young computing days, a young man that I dated when I was like 11 and 12, and our first date was actually to a tech conference at the Moscone Center.
ANGELA: That’s adorable.
LISHA: So, you know, we’re still friends as adults. And he said to me, why don’t you get a job as a programer? And I was like, you’re crazy. I don’t have a degree in CS. I can’t program. He’s like, don’t be stupid. Nobody cares about your CS degree. Just tell them you can program. Show them some code and they’ll let you do it. But his caveat came. You must charge $25 an hour. I was like, I can’t charge $25 an hour. He’s like, no if you do not charge $25 an hour I will never speak to you again.
ANGELA: Oh my goodness.
PAIGE: So I’m going to pause you there, because this is a really interesting question that I always dig around. Why could you not charge $25 an hour?
LISHA: Well, because I was getting $4.25 an hour. The idea-
ANGELA: Perceived value. Perceived value.
LISHA: Right. The idea that I was going to go to somebody and have balls enough to say, yeah I’m a programer. I don’t have any degrees or any proof that i can actually do this, but you should totally pay me $25 an hour for it.
ANGELA: Inferiority complex. Yep. I’m familiar with all of that.
LISHA: Yeah. Yeah. So, but, you know my friendship was on the line and my need to take care of my children was on the line. So I did it and just about keeled over the first time somebody said, yes we will hire you.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: What did it take to get your foot in the door? Was it really just like you friend said? You just showed up and were like, look I can program. Let’s go.
LISHA: Actually, yeah. It literally was that easy. So I went for low hanging fruit right at the start, since I was at community college at the time. And so at the time I was working as an administrative assistant for Sybase. This probably puts the timing into, into perspective.
PAIGE: Your choice of computerm, your choice of computer at the top made that pretty clear.
LISHA: Right. Right. Right. Yeah, so I was working for Sybase as an administrative assistant and had gotten the opportunity to play with web stuff there on the side. The first browsers were out, but nobody was really using them. So even at Sybase they were like, this is stupid. Why are you wasting your time with this? But of course I was going to college so I went to all of my professors and I said have you seen this thing called the web? You should check this out. You can put your research up and you can put your classwork stuff up.
PAIGE: Which is exactly what the web was originally built for, was to share research.
LISHA: Right. Exactly. And they said, oh wow that’s neat. And yeah could you do that for me. So that was how i got my foot in the door. ANd then, you know, I got a little bit braver and I went to the administrators of the Parelta College District. So I went to the administrators at the Parelta COllege District and said, you know, you guys should really have a better website. And they said, you know what, you’re right. And so I got to do some contracting for them. And then I found out about dice.com and atually the saem friend that told me that I had to charge $25 or neer speak to me again told me about Dice. And at the time, almost nobody knew about it and you had to get your Dice listings off of Gopher. And he told me, don’t tell anyone about this, because when everyone knows about it then it’s going to start getting harder to get jobs. So you’re not allowed to tell anybody about it. So, you know, there I was in the early ‘90s using Dice by Gopher. But I found some jobs and then recruiters started contacting me and I found that I could actually work from home, which by that time was actually the UC Berkeley family housing. I was able to basically pay for my own schooling with scholarships, pay for my kids’ daycare and private school with programming. And everybody kept saying why aren’t you studying computer science, and I would say I’m already working in computer science, why would I get a degree in it? But then eventually I finished my bachelor’s degree and I intended to on with grad school, but I had that moment where it’s like I need some time without poverty and working just enough hours to keep us afloat is, we’ve done that for a while. I need to spend some time working full time. And then work ended up eating my life for oh, 20 years.
PAIGE: So at that point you got a full time job in computer science somewhere?
LISHA: Yeah. At that time I ended up getting full time work. I worked, while in the mid-90s I worked at Wells Fargo Bank doing problem and change tracking during the Y2K reprograming stuff. Anybody who says that the Y2K thing was nothing, was not there to program all the fixes.
PAIGE: Yeah. It only wasn’t a thing because you guys were doing it.
ANGELA: Yeah.
LISHA: Right. Exactly. It wasn’t a thing because there were a lot of people working really hard to make sure it was not a thing. So I was there. I worked, i did random contracts for media companies and whatnot in the San Francisco Bay area. Amazon, I worked at Amazon in the UK. That kind of thing.
PAIGE: And then eventually stumbled back into Geeks Without Bounds?
LISHA: Yeah. So my first sort of hit between the eyes was 2001 and after 911 I said I’m not working on any more Microsoft or any more closed sourced from here on out. I’m only going to do open source, because I’ve already sold my soul and I’m not doing humanitarian work, at least I’m going to do code work that I care about. So from 2001 onward I was working almost exclusively on open source software. And then even that kind of hit me at some point. I’m like, I went to college so that I could do humanitarian work. Why am I still writing code? And so I decided to just quit everything and figure out what I was going to do with my life, when I grow up. And I declared myself an un-graduate student. If you’re familiar with the idea of unschooling, which is like homeschooling without a curriculum.
ANGELA: Yep.
LISHA: There’s also such a thing as un-college. And I don’t know, there might be somebody else in the world who came up the with idea at about the same time I did, or even before I did, but I came up with this sort of independently. Where I had been thinking about going back to grad school and then said why would I get myself into more debt? I’m going to un-grad school. So that’s what I did. And that ended up getting me into an organization called The School Factory, which is the fiscal sponsor for Geeks Without Bounds. And then that, of course, led me into Geeks Without Bounds. I started out as a volunteer. Then i was the developer coordinator. And then last year I became the executive director.
PAIGE: Congratulations.
ANGELA: Yeah.
LISHA: Thank you.
PAIGE: That’s a really awesome journey. It’s all over the map, but it’s very personal . And I love that about tech. It’s not a straight and narrow path.
LISHA: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s lots of ways you can come to tech and there’s lots of things you can do with the tech once you’re in it or playing with it. It’s not just one tool. It’s like all these different tools. It’s kind of like saying, what can you do with wood? Well, you can do all sorts of things with wood.
PAIGE: Right. What do you want to do with wood?
LISHA: RIght.
PAIGE: Yeah. So, I think a lot of people would hear you story and stay, well you kind of had perfect timing. You’re like in the Bill Gates timing era, where if you just caught on to the right thing at the right time you were good to go. How would you respond to somebody saying that in today’s climate? Oh, I couldn’t just show up and say I know how to code, pay me $25 an hour, let’s go, kind of a thing. Because I would argue that in some ways we’re kind of seeing that again, but what’s your thoughts?
LISHA: I think we’re absolutely seeing that again. I think that right now is a really good time to ride the wave of open source into your dream job. ANd so, a little shameless promotion here. At Geeks Without Bounds, one of the programs that we have is an internship program and we take novice developers who have, who have learned some programming skills but have either never gotten any job experience or they don’t know how to use GitHub and work in a team, or go through issue tracking and figure out how to pick a project out of the issues, you know, that kind of thing. We give them mentorship. We have them work on some of the humanitarian projects in our ecosystem and we try to shove them at as many other opportunities to get a real job as possible. Sometimes we also manage to get a grant here or there to get them a stipend, but most of them are sort of slave labor in exchange for lots of mentorship. And they’re code up on GitHub so that they can show it to other people. And we have had some really great success with people coming into that program. Doing some amazing work on one project or another over the course of three months, five months, six months, and then going on to get a real job in programming. We had one guy who had studied aeronautical engineering. Got all the way through his degree and realized that that was not what he wanted to do with his life and what he really wanted to do was be a programer.
PAIGE: That’s a big investment to make that shift.
LISHA: Exactly. And I snagged him and I was like, let me put you to work. And it was fantastic. He got projects that he really enjoyed working on. He learned a whole bunch of stuff very fast. He managed to get a stipend and then he got a paid internship and then, you know, he’s working full time as a developer in Chicago and, you know, you can totally do that. And you don’t have to have to have a bachelor’s degree to begin with either. Anybody really can do that.
PAIGE: So do you take a lot of people who have maybe done either a lot of self-taught stuff on the internet now or boot camp graduates? How do you people kind of end up ready to go into Geeks Without Bounds internships?
LISHA: All of the above. I’ve had people who were in their junior or senior year of college decide to spend the summer working on projects with us. I’ve had people that were totally and completely self-taught. And there’ve been people who’ve done some sort of boot camp like experience. So they knew a bit more about how to work in teams and things like that, but they just wanted to get some more work experience while they were looking for a job. They already knew how to look for a job, they just wanted to keep their, the code lines on GitHub up while they were looking for that job. So, yes.
PAIGE: And that’s, I mean that’s one of the biggest recommendations I give to anybody who’s going through boot camp is keep committing. Just keep getting it up there.
LISHA: Absolutely.
PAIGE: So that’s kind of the intern side of it. How about in the nonprofit side. How does a nonprofit get involved with you? Are they just finding you online? Are you doing events or something to kind of bring them in? What does that look like?
LISHA: We end up meeting people in all sorts of situations. Sometimes as conferences or at say disaster response drills. Sometime we’ll meet people there. Sometimes it’s literally look for who’s in the area that needs support right now. And sometimes people come to us. And then, basically we just kind of have lots of conversations and develop relationship over time and let people know that if they have challenges that they think that technology could help them with, that we are happy to help them craft that into a challenge that somebody can actually address. And when we’re crafting or curating challenges for hackathons, we try to create a challenge that can actually be addressed in a weekend. So there might be back story and a problem that clearly this is not going to be solved in a weekend, but here’s the backstory and here’s the piece we want to accomplish this weekend.
PAIGE: So you guys kind of handle the project managy end of that prepping it to go into the hackathon?
LISHA: Right. Exactly. And then, so once you get a starting point basically, if you’ve got, say an app that sort of is attempting to deal with the big pictures, um, then you can break that down into lots of different challenges and you can take that from one humanitarian hackathon to next to the next. And the great thing about that is that you start with a couple of people who got interested in the project at the first hackathon and maybe on those, maybe two people will stay on board and keep working on the project over time.
PAIGE: Which is one of the biggest challenges with hackathons is actually getting people to commit, almost.
LISHA: Exactly. So you take the project to the next hackathon. And let’s say four or five people work on it and one of those people decides they want to keep working on the project long term. So now you’ve just snowballed your team. You’ve got two people or three people instead of just the people from the original hackathon. And then you take it to the next one and it gets stickier. And the more work has been done and the larger the core team is, the stickier the ball gets as it goes from one hackathon to the next.
PAIGE: It builds momentum.
LISHA: Yeah. It builds momentum and you get to a certain point where you can actually have a whole hackathon where all the challenges that are being presented are all based around that one piece of software. So, for instance, one of the projects that started at a hackathon, Taarifa, that project has had multiple hackathons that are just about Taarifa. Where all of the challenges are all, either bug fixes or feature request for Taarifa that have ranged from improved the documentation to create a Swahili translation for all of the text, to fix the security bugs, to create new features. And that team is one of, one of the most amazing teams that we’re working with right now, actually. I’m pretty impressed with where that project has ended up. It’s being used by the World’s Bank in many countries in Africa. We at Geeks Without Bounds are part of a consortium that is being supported by HDAF, UK aid to put Taarifa into the water system in Tanzania in order to allow citizens to report to the government when water pumps and spigots and other water points are broken. And allows the government to keep track of what is working and what is broken in the water infrastructure everywhere in the country.
PAIGE: Crowdsourcing water maintenance. That’s awesome.
ANGELA: That is awesome.
LISHA: Exactly. Exactly. And Taarifa was originally developed for water management, actually. But now it’s being used for tracking education systems, healthcare systems, and this summer I’m going down to Ecuador to work with people from the Kofan community in Northern Ecuador in order to use Taarifa to track pollution and encroachment in the Amazon Jungle. So pretty awesome little piece of software there.
PAIGE: Yeah. So you have a formal commitment in your life to only work on open source software. Is that something that’s carried forward that Geeks Without Bounds is also doing when they’re doing these projects with nonprofits?
LISHA: Yes.
PAIGE: Are you largely open source, mostly? What’s the deal?
LISHA: It’s all open source. We specifically work on open source humanitarian projects. So open source projects that for whatever reason we can’t find a way to call it humanitarian, we don’t work on those. We’ve managed to find ways to call lots of ways humanitarian though. Today we were working in PGP email app for Firefox OS phones.
PAIGE: Wow.
LISHA: And I consider that to be a humanitarian issue because Firefox OS phones are marketed to low income people in developed countries. And to people in the least developed countries on the planet. So, in other words, Firefox OS phones are being marketed to vulnerable people. And as a system it doesn’t have the security and privacy pulls that an iPhone or an Android phone has. And at the moment there’s no guardian project for Firefox OS. So we’re trying to kick one off, basically.
PAIGE: Yeah. So I’m going to jump in just for anybody listening who doesn’t know, PGP is an email encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy. It’s kind of the de facto standard right now for email encryption. Usable by anybody. If you’re interested in having encrypted email, there’s tons of stuff online. And one of our former guests, uh Snubs, has some awesome tutorials on Hak5 about how to do that if you want to check it out. But yeah, so privacy and security.
LISHA: And for newbies to PGP who use hotmail or yahoo mail or Gmail, I would recommend looking up a program called Mailvelope. It’s a Firefox and Chrome plugin. So you just plug it into your browser and then it recognizes that you’re on a webmail site and it will allow you to encrypt your email in webmail. Which is pretty cool.
PAIGE: Yeah. That’s pretty awesome. I mean this project you’re involved with, I’m not going to lie, it touches my heart in a very special way. I think that technology can change the world if we let it. And I think getting more people involved at that level is just phenomenal. The way that you’re doing it is great. If people want to find you how do they do that? To find Geeks WIthout Bounds, to get involved either as a nonprofit or as a coder, whatever?
LISHA: Whatever, yeah. So we’re online at gwob.org.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com for the show notes and a full transcription, as well as the contact form. Drop down the show drop down to Women’s Tech Radio and send us your feedback or suggestions on who you’d like to hear on the show.
PAIGE: You can also check us out on iTunes and our RSS feed is linked at our show page on Jupiter Broadcasting. If you have a moment, please leave us a review on iTunes. Those help out the show and also lets us know what you think. And also, follow us @heywtr on Twitter. We’ll talk to you soon.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Humanitarian Tech | WTR 31 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.