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

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Show Notes:

• Holly Gibson (@hollyglot) | Twitter
• Women Who Code ATX (@wwcodeatx) | Twitter
• SSD Cloud Hosting – Linode
• BlackLocus
• Women Who Code Austin (Austin, TX) – Meetup
• Welcome | Women Who Code

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Breanne is the owner & web developer for Nerd Nest Media. It provides web design, development, SEO work, brand consulting & social media marketing!

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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’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: Angela, so this week, my friend Breanne joins us. She is a solo founder for the company Nerd Nest Media, and she talks about her journey in technology, what’s like to be a solo founder a little bit, and just kind of the many hats that she has worn in her journey.
ANGELA: Awesome. Before we get into the interview, I want to DigitalOcean. They are the sponsor for this week. They are a cloud housing provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. And let me just tell you, I was faced with a situation a couple months ago where my son turned six and was really into MineCraft and had been playing the pocket edition on his iPad. But it just quite wasn’t enough. And of course I — well, I think I might have been able to find a way to play with him via my iPad, but I’m not sure. But regardless, I wanted to get a dedicated server up and running so that he and I could play on the same maps. So, I used a DigitalOcean droplet to spin up a MIneCraft server that will always be up and running. They have locations for their data centers in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. I don’t have to worry about if our house has a power outage. Well, I wouldn’t be able to play at that point, but anyway, wherever the server is hosted, I don’t have to worry about a power outage, because the server will always be up and running in the cloud. And it’s only $5.00 a month. And if you use the code heywtr, you can get a $10.00 credit, which is a two month credit. So, think about the projects that you could use DigitalOcean for and use heywtr promo code for it.
PAIGE: And don’t forget, if you already have a DIgitalOcean set up, but you haven’t used one of our codes, go ahead and pop it in there. Sometimes it just might work.
And out question for Breanna when we got started was to kind of give us a overview of what she does in Technology.
BREANNE: Hi. I’m Breanne Smith. I am the current owner and web developer for Nerd Nest Media. My company provides web design development, SEO work, brand consulting, social media marketing. And that is my current role in technology.
PAIGE: So, you’re kind of a many hat wearer? Would you consider yourself an entrepreneur?
BREANNE: I would. The entrepreneur side of me has definitely been coming out as each day progresses. But I really love technology, so I’ve just been kind of one of those closet nerds, if you will. Just researching, doing things on my own. And then it’s kind of given me the love for wanting to provide these services for people to get them to understand what the web is and how it can help their business.
PAIGE: So, it was kind of the journey for you learning to understand that made you want to kind of help others do the same?
BREANNE: Yes and no. You know, I went back to school later in life. I’m in my 30s now and just graduated in 2012. When I first went to college back out of high school I thought I wanted to write for Rolling Stone magazine. So, I was doing journalism, music theory stuff back then. Which is great, because now I still get to use my love writing and creativity, but just in a totally more technologically advanced way. So, that’s what I started doing. And then I moved from Indiana to Austin Texas and I started working for a nationwide property maintenance company. So, I was managing like 20 people at the time and had a portfolio of like 7,000 foreclosed homes all over the country that I was maintaining. So, it taught me a lot about professionalism, completing tasks on time. really kind of prepped me for that real world situation. And then, from there, I, we moved out to Oregon and I really didn’t have a job or anything going on. So I thought, you know what, I am going to take my love for technology and see what I could do with maybe going back to school and starting a business of my own. My parents owned a couple of furniture stores in Indiana and they’re actually who really catapulted me into wanting to start my own business, because as a small company themselves, they were paying this “web company” that was really not doing much for them, $350.00 a month to maintain their website, do social media posts, things like that. And my parents were getting frustrated and not understanding why they weren’t getting results and this web company was helping them. So, I asked, you know, hey I know a little bit about a little bit. Can I talk with them and maybe see what they’re doing and use the big technical terms and kind of coxe out of them what they’re doing. I called these people and turned out, they were just a marketing company who said they can do web work and were outsourcing this web work.
ANGELA: Oh my goodness.
BREANNE: To other people who knew nothing about my parent’s business. They knew nothing about their business practices. And so, getting off that phone call, I was the most frustrated I’ve ever been in my life for my parents. You know, that they’re this small company, they’re older, they don’t understand the value of the web and what it can do for you. They know, just from me harping on them, that they needed a website. And a the time, I didn’t have my degree so I didn’t know all the ins and out of it. So I literally went back to school solely to-
ANGELA: Help your parents?
BREANNE: Kind of negate these people. Yeah. Well, no. I actually don’t like to do business with my family.
ANGELA: Right.
BREANNE: Because it can — I don’t want to mix business with pleasure there, but it really kind of made me see what type of people are out there saying that they can do the stuff for small business and build their brand and build their company, but in reality they’re not doing anything. They’re just taking money and saying that they’re going to put this post up. And the post, you know, even on their social site, has nothing to do with what their business is.
ANGELA: Yep.
BREANNE: So, once my husband I moved out here to Oregon I thought, okay I’m going back to school. I’m getting my degree in web design and development, and I’m going to start company that has morals, wouldn’t treat people the way that these so called web companies were treating my parents, and really pride myself on kind of hand holding a lot of my clients through this process of understanding how their business can actually grow with putting a little money into the web side of it.
ANGELA: Right. That sounds-
BREANNE: I know that’s a little long winded but-
ANGELA: No, no, no. It sounds exactly like what I went through with my mom. Because she’s self-employed. She’s owned a restaurant in downtown Seattle for 20 years now. I think.
BREANNE: Oh wow.
ANGELA: Anyway. Yeah, and she recently was on the, I need to, I need the social media aspect. I was the one that forced her to do a Facebook page and she’s really popular on there. She post her specials there every day. But then a social media company, just like you said, came along and was like we can build your brand and whatever. And she went for it. ANd it’s really not yielding anything.
BREANNE: Oh man.
PAIGE: It seems like a market that seems so easy to take advantage of people, because you just have to use some jargon.
ANGELA: Yep.
BREANNE: You’re exactly right. And they think, oh wow, they’re using all these great buzz words. I’ve heard that word before but I don’t really understand it. And so, it took a lot of me sitting down with my parents and getting them to understand how they were taking advantage of my parents. Because they didn’t even really understand what they were or weren’t doing, to be honest with you.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
BREANNE: I was so frustrated. Seriously. I was just horribly frustrated for them and knowing that there’s hundreds of companies, probably thousands of companies like that out there, where there’s outsourcing everything. It really doesn’t give that personal touch. And it really just makes me feel like all these small businesses are just giving away money and not getting anything in return, and then getting a sour taste in their mouth about what the web can do for them.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: I’m going to pick your brain then. What’s a good thing to watch out for? If I can’t necessarily work with you, how do I know, if i own a business or something, like what’s the difference between working with someone like you and someone who is going to take advantage of me? How can I tell the difference?
BREANNE: A big thing is reading the name of their company. If they have the word marketing in their company, nine times out of ten they are a marketing company. If they can offer web services that’s great, but I would, as a small business I would talk to them about what their services provide and who is providing those services for me. Is there a point of contact I can call and talk to that person who is building my site and have them explain to me why it looks this way or talk to them about how I want it to look differently. If they’re impersonal with you and, oh I have to get back with you, and 13 emails later they’re still not answering your questions, if they’re dodging questions, dodging answers, things like that, those are big signs really, for me at least. And knowing that they’re just solely in for marketing and that hundred to $400,000.00 whatever it is montly fee that they’re getting. And honestly, it’s a gut thing too. You know, if you’re not getting the right service from somebody and you’re not feeling like they’re really being helpful, that’s another big key point that they’re probably — they probably don’t know what they’re talking about.
PAIGE: So you started out hoping to do music journalism.
BREANNE: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: And you ended up in web design and development, essentially, right?
BREANNE: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: What does that transition look like? Why? have you always been nerdy? Were you the kid with the Commodore 64 hacking away at the keyboard? What does that look like for you?
BREANNE: Well, for me I wasn’t — you know, I was always int, you know, we always had, my dad actually has always been very much so up on the technical side of things. Like, we always had the latest, greatest TVs and radios and as soon as the computer came out we had the computer, desktop in our house at the time. So, which was huge, mind you. So, you know, I always have been interested in it, but I don’t think I really grasped the understanding and really the power of technology until I was working for that management company, the property management company. And we had such a cool system we used on the back end and I saw just really how it helped their business. That kind of pushed me forward and shifted my gears. Like I said, I’m in my 30s, so I’m, you know, it really shifted my mind into thinking, okay how can this benefit every company out there. And so, I really, you know, I’ve always dabbled. I love video games. I always played video games as a kid, but I really don’t think it was until I got older and understood how it could compute to business that made me really want to start doing this as a career.
PAIGE: All right. So, I”ve got to ask. What was your favorite video game as a kid?
BREANNE: I mean, I’m old school though. I didn’t do, like I got a little bit-
PAIGE: We’re equally old school in this room.
ANGELA: Yeah. We’re your age too.
BREANNE: Okay, cool. So I was more in, I mean I loved Mario and Duck Hunt and, you know, all of that stuff too, but I love-
ANGELA: Donkey Kong. Say Donkey Kong.
BREANNE: Yes. Yes. I was going to say Donkey Kong, but I just am aging myself here, but yeah Donkey Kong. All those little games I loved to play. Mario Bros of course was my — I mean, that’s true to my heart. I always played it.
PAIGE: You know, I still know how to get all the warp zones, right?
BREANNE: Me too.
PAIGE: Yeah. Totally. Yeah, Mario, Legend of Zelda and original Tetris on the Gameboy for me. Those were the big ones. Especially in competitive mode, because I still have yet to meet anyone who can beat me on Tetris in competitive mode. Which is not normal mode people, it’s different.
BREANNE: What about Punch Out? Did anybody play Punch Out all the time?
ANGELA: Nope.
BREANNE: No?
PAIGE: I like the, we had the Olympics. We had the power mat and so you do the olympics thing. That was definitely better than (unintelligible).
ANGELA: Yeah, i remember that now.
BREANNE: That’s way cooler.
PAIGE: I learned very quickly, as did my little sister, that running on the powermat was not nearly as fast as sitting next to the powermat and hitting it with your hands like bongos.
BREANNE: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
PAIGE: Much, much faster. You can get way farther, and then you can jump infinitely because you just lift your hands and on the long jump you just win.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
BREANNE: Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.
PAIGE: Right. Yeah, it’s cheating.
BREANNE: Where were you growing up?
PAIGE: Massachusetts.
ANGELA: VIdeo game hacks.
PAIGE: Yeah. Well, you know, when you can’t go outside in the sun because you’re a ginger you have to do something in the summer. So, do you still pay video games?
BREANNE: Yeah, I do. I mean, and of course I’ve stayed true to Nintendo, so I just have a Wii, because I literally, like that’s how much I love Mario Bros. Like, I will play every single one that comes out.
PAIGE: Have you played the new Mario titles where you can play like four players simultaneously?
ANGELA: What?
BREANNE: I don’t have a Wii U, so I’m not sure if that’s new with the Wii u?
PAIGE: No. No. It’s a Wii title.
BREANNE: It is? Okay.
PAIGE: Yeah. You’ve got to check it out.
BREANNE: I haven’t played it.
PAIGE: Yeah. You can play four players simultaneously, and when you have a Yoshi you can eat the other players and then spit them.
BREANNE: Oh my gosh.
PAIGE: It’s amazing.
BREANNE: I”m typing this right now so I don’t forget.
PAIGE: So if you folks at home haven’t tried it out, it’s old now, but, and i think they just put out another new one, but I don’t have a Wii U either. So what do you use as tools to get your job done? Like, you — I know, because we’ve talked before, that you use WordPress, but either what do you use in WordPress, what sort of text editor do you use? What helps you get your job done?
BREANNE: So, text editor wise, I mean I love Sublime Text and Notepad ++. Those are both my go to text editors and things like that. But I do love WordPress and I love to work on content management systems, especially for my clients, because it really helps them be able to feel like they have a grasp on their website. And even go in, if I teach — I can teach them how to go in and make their own blog posts, their own changes. And then they don’t have to utilize me or pay me money. Especially if they’re a little bit on the tech savvy side, so thats’ why i use WordPress and why I love WordPress.
PAIGE: Yeah. I totally agree. I like to tell people, I’m like, if you can post on Facebook, you can learn enough WordPress to help yourself out.
BREANNE: Exactly. That’s exactly right. And I’m actually just — I just got done before this walking through my last client with his blog and getting him up to speed with everything. And he made his first blog post and uploaded the images and everything himself. So, and knows how to change the sidebars to what it needs to be. So it’s really empowering for me to see them get it and smile and understand they’re in charge. It’s not just me, it’s them. So, that’s why I love WordPress so much. I mean, it’s got it’s faults as far as security sometimes, but other than that, I mean, as long as you have a good security plugin in place, you’re good to go. But then I love Illustrator and PhotoShop and stuff. I do all — I love those for design and doing mock ups and things like that. That’s about all I use.
PAIGE: Did you learn most of that in your school program, self-taught? Did you have online resources?
BREANNE: I’m mostly self-taught. I loved school. I am — I think that’s where my nerdiness comes from is because I always loved school as a kid. I never missed a day of school from kindergarten to my senior year. Got a special nerd award for that at the end of my senior year.
PAIGE: That is a very special nerd award.
ANGELA: Yep.
BREANNE: I still have it. But, yeah, so I think my love of school really carried me through, you know, getting through college this time and helped me be more successful. I don’t want to tell someone who is in school that they shouldn’t be in school, but honestly, the type of work that we do, a lot of it is self-taught. ANd you have to continually educate yourself aster school even, you know, to keep up with the latest trends and keep your ear to the ground with technology. So, it’s not say that I didn’t — that I’m not glad I didn’t — went to school and got my degree, but, you know, to be honest with you, most of the stuff I’ve learned as been self-taught. I used Lynda.com a lot for things that — I don’t like to tell my clents no, ever. So if i don’t know it, I don’t tell them I don’t know it, I just research and learn and try, you know, and charge them less for that since I have to do more education time on my end. So that’s kind of how I feel. I’m more successful in this industry, because I am so willing to learn — so much more willing to learn all of the new technology that’s out there.
ANGELA: So, do your clients basically use you to get up and running or — do they do that and then they’re on their own and you also have continuing customers where you actually do the stuff for the?
BREANNE: Yes. I kind of am a one stop shop. I think Paige said, you know, I’m a woman of many hats. I can do a full service as far as if someone just comes to me and they’re like , I don’t want to understand this. I don’t care to understand this. I need a new website. I can do their hosting for them. I do hosting reselling. And also set up their domain, buy their domain, set up everthing from scratch. And then I can either help them maintain that every month if they want me to, or like I said teach them how and they can do that, and I take a back seat unless there’s an emergency I”ll come back in. But then, there’s that flip side of things where someone is already up and running. My main client that I have, I’ve had her for two years and when she came to me two years ago she had had a web designer who was getting frustrated with her. I love her with all of my heart, but she’s more into the pretty side of things and not the technical side of things, which is fine, but I don’t think it translate well if a web person isn’t able to kind of speak to her in those layman’s terms and get her to understand it and why she has to pay this money.
ANGELA: RIght.
BREANNE: So that web person left her and took her entire website down. So she was stranded with no website and she runs a very high end salon and so she was completely stranded with no website. So, I came in, got it back up, because it was a WordPress site. I was able to recover it and since then has helped maintain her site and am rebuilding that one plus a new one for her for a separate salon she’s doing currently. So, I’ve been working with her for two years and it’s been great. So, I love the ongoing stuff, but am able to just do one quick fix for clients and then they can about their business if they don’t need me anymore.
ANGELA: Sure.
PAIGE: Yeah. It think it sounds, I don’t know what (unintelligible) this is, but I think that if you have a small business working with other small businesses for your other services is really beneficial for both parties usually. As a small business, you can do things that as a giant business someone might not be able to, because they’re tied up in red tape or corporate policy or whatever . Like some marketing company that has all these standards and SOP and jazz.
BREANNE: Exactly. I really like it, because you can really, you know, dive into their culture and kind of really get to understand their company. And so, I think I do better work when I understand the business, obviously, and understand what they’re mission is and what they’re goals are. It helps me to really format the site to help their end user a lot better.
PAIGE: Yeah. I agree with that. Even as a developer, people think you’re just making computer stuff work, because I don’t really do design or when I do it’s terrible, but even understanding what the user experience is supposed to be or –and necessarily, the client doesn’t always know what they want in the experience. They’re just like, this is what we do and these are the customers i have, and being able to kind of craft that. I can do so much better when I can sit down and have talk time with them and get to know their business, or stop by their business, or whatever.
BREANNE: Exactly. I really love that so much more than — because I do — I have lived in many states so a lot of my clients are out of state. And so it’s — there’s something to be said about sitting down and having a cup of coffee or tea with somebody and explaining their business, versus being on Skype or something like that. Because there can be distractions and they’re not really into it. So if I can get somebody to focus with me it goes a lot easier.
ANGELA: Have you ever been to a sewing retreat?
BREANNE: I have not, but I do love sewing.
ANGELA: I recently went to a sewing retreat and it was so much fun. It was just two full — well two and a half days of sewing and it was just amazing. But what do you like to sew?
BREANNE: I like to sew anything. I love to make clothes. That’s what i started doing as a young girl. My mom made all my baby clothes when I was kid and so — and then she made these awesome dolls that she would sell to get more fabric to make my clothes.
ANGELA: Wow.
BREANNE: So, I learned from a very young age. Yeah, she’s really awesome. But I learned from a young age how to sew and to work around a sewing machine. But in more recent years I’ve been teaching myself to knit and crochet a little bit. It’s not my strong points but the sewing machine is my strongest point. And I love to sew anything. From pillows to clothes to anything.
ANGELA: Cool.
PAIGE: I have a love/hate relationship with sewing and crocheting. I’m amazing at sewing and crocheting in straight lines.
BREANNE: Yeah.
PAIGE: But not turning. So, if you have a pattern that is straight lines, I actually sew very well. It was — part of theatre degree is that you have to do costuming. I know how to do all the seeming and all the edging, but if i have to turn, not as good. Pillowcases, awesome.
BREANNE: Yep, just a square.
PAIGE: Oh yeah. Yep. No problem there.
BREANNE: Well you’ll have to tell me more about the sewing retreat. That sounds really cool. Can you bring whatever type of sewing stuff or is it-
ANGELA: Yeah. You just — in this case you — it was about 25 women and we went to Warm Beach, which is here in Washington, and we rented out a bunch of rooms and we just set up and we were able to keep out setup in this banquet room all weekend, and the beachfront was right there. It was amazing.
BREANNE: Sounds awesome.
ANGELA: And all the meals were catered. Yeah. I ate so much, I thought that I would literally weigh five to 10 pounds more when I was done, but I actually lost a couple pounds because I would walk. I would go for a walk on the beach after eating, which speeds up your metabolism. It was awesome.
PAIGE: I just wanted to ask one more thing.
BREANNE: Yeah.
PAIGE: If there is one thing in technology that kind of is either coming down the pipe or gets your really jazzed now what is it?
BREANNE: Wearables. I’m all about wearables right now and the power that they have.
ANGELA: So how is your Apple Watch?
BREANNE: I don’t have an Apple Watch.
ANGELA: I’m just kidding.
BREANNE: I’m an Android fangirl.
ANGELA: Ah, okay.
BREANNE: I have been Android from the start. We do not even have any Apple products in our house until my husband had to get a work phone and I said, well get an iPhone so I can test my websites on it and stop using emulators.
ANGELA: Perfect. Perfect, right? That works.
PAIGE: So, do you have an Android watch?
BREANNE: I do. But I started out with like Fitbit then other things like that, but I really love the blending of the fitness side of things with the nerdy tech smartwatch side of things.
ANGELA: With the practicality. Yeah. So, do you have the Pebble? Is that Android? I don’t even –
BREANNE: Uh, yes. Yes. It’s actually what I have. Yeah, I’m waiting for the two to come out though.
PAIGE: The Pebble is (unintelligible). That’s very cool.
BREANNE: I’m waiting for the Pebble 2.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
PAIGE: Nice. I am a little intimidated. So, Angela, in studio, has the Apple Watch and I keep watching her flip it and it looks really shiny and stuff, but I’m a little intimidated because I have found in my life right now, where I’m trying to get a lot of high volume work, high quality work done, like the less notifications I can have in my life the better off I am. Like, how do you balance that, the two of you?
ANGELA: I have certain people disabled for notifications and Telegram, it can only tell me so much on my watch and i can’t respond to it, so mainly it’s come in handy like if I”m at the bus stop and trying to get Dylan off the bus and put a stroller, I can just look at my watch real quick and see a notification or know that somebody is available.
BREANNE: Yeah, I agree with you on the integration of the watch with my phone. I think, you know, especially for me the working out more and stuff, I just my phone , or excuse me, my watch a lot more for that than i do my phone. I can keep it nearby but not have to carry my bulky phone around.
ANGELA: Uh-huh.
BREANNE: And then as far as, I use my phone more for like long winded emails. But if I just need to send something really fast I can use my watch. Or just notify my husband really quick, I”m on my way. Anything like that. It’s a lot easier on my phone to just reply with a little emoji or something than it is to pull out my phone, like you were saying, and mess with that. It’s just an (unintelligible) of use type of things for me. Anything to make my life easier I’m all for it.
ANGELA: And I was wearing a Fitbit as well up until I got the Apple Watch. And in fact, I wore both of them for two weeks on the same wrist, because I just didn’t want to let go of the social aspect of Fitbit.
PAIGE: Well, you can still use the phone for Fitbit.
ANGELA: Yeah. Oh, I don’t know, yeah, okay. Well it still had — so I still use my Fitbit at night for sleep though.
PAIGE: You can use both.
ANGELA: Really?
PAIGE: Uh-huh.
ANGELA: Okay. You’ll have to show me how to set that up.
PAIGE: I will show you that.
ANGELA: Because I have no idea.
PAIGE: Yeah. I like FItBit, but I don’t own a Fitbit device anymore, because I never got the wrist one and they’re small and I lose everything.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Well, so you guys have me interested. I have one other question. Were either of you watch wearers before you got your smart watches?
BREANNE: I was not at all. I literally only, I don’t even wear earrings anymore. I just wear my wedding ring. So it is like the only other thing besides my wedding ring I wear.
ANGELA: I wanted to be, but I am one allergic to nickel, I believe, and two I have very acidic skin. So any watch I’d wear it would literally corrode the metal. It’s weird. It’s not like the metal would wear away. The metal would explode from inside. It would, like a barnacle. You know, it was so weird. And it would cause rashes and stuff so I stopped wearing. but I have the sports band Apple Watch, which isn’t metal at all. And so far I”ve had no irritation from the back of the watch where it’s metal.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’ll be interested to see if your Apple Watch explodes.
ANGELA: I know, right?
PAIGE: If it does, we need pictures.
ANGELA: Well, it doesn’t literally explode. You know what I mean? So I would, I love having a watch.
PAIGE: Interesting.
BREANNE: A friend of mine has the Apple Watch and he has tattoos on his wrist, and they’re very dark as it gets down to his wrist, so he actually has to wear it on his other wrist, because it won’t read his wrist.
PAIGE: Yeah. It can’t read through the-
BREANNE: Because there’s dark. Yeah.
PAIGE: Because it’s an optical heart rate monitor, so it literally can’t read through your skin.
BREANNE: Yeah.
PAIGE: I think that they’ve adjusted so that people of darker color are okay, but tattoos are too much.
ANGELA: Wow. Yeah, I didn’t even think about that.
PAIGE: The ink is still too much in the way.
ANGELA: Huh.
PAIGE: Yeah, because it’s based on the same technology that the use in hospitals where they clip the little pulse monitor to your finger.
ANGELA: Right. Right. But I didn’t think about people of people of darker color. It’s kind of like Band-Aid coming out with skin tone, but only for Caucasian.
PAIGE: And correct me, audience, if I’m wrong, but as far as I know it works for skin but tattoo ink, especially in the very dark colors is too much, because it’s several layers of problems.
ANGELA: Oh.
BREANNE: And I’m pretty sure you’re right. That they’ve fixed the darker skin, but just not the tattoos. And his are like two big, huge black lines that come down towards his wrist. Not good. But I just — I actually read this morning that Google is actually trying to get this tiny, tiny little radar system that actually and sense your hand gestures and stuff, because I guess in their mind smartwatches and stuff aren’t taking off as well as they should be. And so, you know, it’s more like early adopters and stuff like that. Like us, that really, really want new technology and stuff that are getting it, not so much the general population. And so they’re trying to — and I guess Google’s thinking behind it is that they’re such tiny little touch screens that it makes the device difficult to control it, I guess. And so they’re developing this radar system that can sense hand gestures instead of having to just put your finger on the screen.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember that you can find the show notes with full transcription over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Just go to the shows dropdown and select Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: You can also use the contact form on the web page to select Women’s Tech Radio to get in touch with us, or shoot us an email at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com . You can also find out show on iTunes and you can follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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