technology – Jupiter Broadcasting

Docker 1.12 for building and running containerized applications
Node.js 6.9.1, the latest version of the popular server-side JavaScript engine
Support for Rust, a faster and more stable system programming language
PHP 7, offering improved performance and reduced memory usage
Multiple Python versions — 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 — to help run test suites across several Python configurations, as well as PyPy, PyPy3, and Jython

Wayland in Fedora 25

Fedora 25 Linux arrives with Wayland display support

The big news for desktop users in Workstation is the Wayland display server has finally replaced the legacy X11 Window server. Wayland has been in the works since 2008. The point of Wayland is to provide a smoother, richer experience for graphical environments. X also had a huge amount of functionality that was no longer being used.

On top of Wayland, Fedora 25 Workstation runs GNOME 3.22. This latest desktop claims to offer multiple file renaming, a redesigned keyboard settings tool, and additional user interface improvements. If, like me, you’re not a GNOME fan, Fedora 25 also supports spins with other default desktops. These include KDE, XFCE, LXDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.

Changes/WaylandByDefault – FedoraProject

How To Test

Boot a fresh F25 workstation install.
Verify that the login screen is running under Wayland (you can do so by looking for a process called gdm-wayland-session in ps -ef output)
Verify that the session chooser offers ‘GNOME’, ‘GNOME on X11’ and ‘GNOME Classic’, and that ‘GNOME’ is selected by default.
Log into all three of these sessions and verify that ‘GNOME’ gives you Wayland (you can verify this by bringing up the GTK+ inspector in a gtk3 application and checking what backend is used), while the other two end up with X11.
Change the gdm configuration by adding WaylandEnable=false and reboot
Verify that the login screen comes up under X
Verify that only X-based sessions are offered in the session chooser
Log into the Wayland-based session again
Use the desktop normally, and verify that there are no obvious instabilities, or Wayland-specific bugs or performance problems

FreeMedia

The Fedora Free Media Program is a volunteer initiative by local Fedora Ambassadors and contributors to distribute Fedora Media (DVDs) for free to individuals who can’t afford to buy or download Fedora. There is no funding from Fedora for this initiative. The media comes from volunteers from around the globe that coordinate their efforts using Fedora Infrastructure.

Questions – Ask Fedora:

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

My Mower Runs Linux

After about 6 months of doing research on hardware and embedded systems I finally have a decent working prototype and it runs LINUX! All design, programming, GIS tools, and supporting tools, like field HUD, are all linux (Arch and Ubuntu).

Open Source at DigitalOcean: Introducing go-qemu and go-libvirt

Desktop App Pick

Midnight Commander

After last week’s app pick many wrote in to suggest we take a look at…

GNU Midnight Commander is a visual file manager, licensed under GNU General Public License and therefore qualifies as Free Software. It’s a feature rich full-screen text mode application that allows you to copy, move and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files and run commands in the subshell. Internal viewer and editor are included.
Midnight Commander is based on versatile text interfaces, such as Ncurses or S-Lang, which allows it to work on a regular console, inside an X Window terminal, over SSH connections and all kinds of remote shells.

Spotlight

The $89 ARM Laptop

Sent in by Dennis K.

PINEBOOK is a 11″ or 14″ notebook powered by the same Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit Processor used in our popular PINE A64 Single Board Computer. It is lightweight and comes with a full size keyboard and large multi-touch touchpad for students and makers.

Using the mini HDMI port, the PINEBOOK can be connected to a larger external HDMI diplay or TV for presentations.

Build-in MicroSD Card slot allows users to expand their data storage up to 256 GB with a microSD Card (SD, SDHC, SDXC).

Stickers – Super Key Sticker with Any LAS Sticker While They Last!

JB Stickers – Imgur

Chris’ Personal YouTube Channel – MeetBSD and Behind the Scenes Noah Vist Videos Soon

— NEWS —

Do you want nerdy, boring, file syste… – Straw Poll

Tor Phone Is The “Super-secure Version Of Android”, Developed By Tor Project

Aptly named Tor Phone, this new phone has been designed by Tor developer Mike Perry. It’s based on Copperhead OS, an Android distribution that comes with multiple security enhancement. In the past, Google’s Android security team has accepted many Copperhead patches in their Android code base.

Mission Improbable: Hardening Android for Security And Privacy | The Tor Blog

Systemic Threats to Software Freedom

Unfortunately, not only is Copperhead the only Android rebuild that supports Verified Boot, but the Google Nexus/Pixel hardware is the only Android hardware that allows the user to install their own keys to retain both the ability to modify the device, as well as have the filesystem security provided by verified boot.

This, combined with Google’s _increasing hostility_towards Android as a fully Open Source platform, as well as the difficulty for _external entities_to keep up with Android’s surprise release and opaque development processes, means that the ability for end-users to _use, study, share, and improve_the Android system are all in great jeopardy.

UbuCon Europe 2016 – Welcome & UBports Announcement – YouTube

FSOSS 2016 – YouTube

Debian putting everything on the /usr

One of the reasons for the change is that the current hierarchy _creates “busy work”_for developers, as Russ Allbery explained in January. He argued the change would mean “we don’t have to try to harass a thousand package maintainers into doing essentially untestable busy-work to try to move things around between __/usr_, _/bin_, and _/lib__to support a tiny handful of systems for which other approaches are available.”

Jay (Microsoft project manager) knows the score when it comes to Linux performance

Tor Phone – The Secure Android

The Tor Project has released Tor Phone–a privacy-focused and secure version of Android mobile OS. It’s based on Copperhead OS, a hardened Android distribution. Tor Phone also uses OrWall to force all the connections over Tor network.

Upcoming XFS Work in Linux v4.8 v4.9 and v4.10+, by Darrick Wong )

For the past year I have been working on a bunch of new features for the
XFS filesystem on Linux. Modern-day XFS is a direct descendant of the
original XFS code from SGI Irix that was donated long ago. The goals
are the same — XFS is intended to behave consistently as it scales to
large storage and many files.

Feedback:

Mail Bag

Name: Craig
Subject: UPS that Will Come via UPS

Message:

Hey Dudes,

Not a direct related Linux question, but it does have to do with my System76 Ratel so there is that. So I have been using my Ratel for a few months now. Real nice machine. plug plug. With the winter approaching and possible electricity failures due to ice and snow, etc.; I am now serious on the lookout for a Uninterrupted Power Supply for my Ratel. Not sure where to start. You guys are IT Gurus, what would you suggest my options should be?

Thanks for LAS and all the shows!

Amazon.com: CyberPower OR700LCDRM1U Smart App LCD UPS 700VA 400W SNMP/HTTP Rackmount: Electronics
Name: Peter D.
Subject: Arch Trackpad Problems solved by GDM
Message:

Noah,

I recently installed Antergos on my Oryx Pro and experienced similar problems with the trackpad.

I found that by replacing LightDM with GDM fixed the problems with the trackpad. After switching to GDM, additional setting show up for the trackpad including tap to click.

Also after switching to GDM, the two finger scrolling worked better in particular the horizontal scrolling.

Call in: 1-877-347-0011

Catch the show LIVE SUNDAY:

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Chris’s Twitter account has changed, you’ll need to follow!

Chris Fisher (@ChrisLAS) | Twitter

Hang in our chat room:

irc.geekshed.net #jupiterbroadcasting

— NOAH’S STASH —

Noah’s Day Job

Altispeed Technologies

Contact Noah

noah [at] jupiterbroadcasting.com

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The post Hats Off to Wayland | LAS 445 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Air Gap Vulnerability | TTT 256

chris — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 19:05:05 +0000

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Show Notes:

Kickstarter of the Week:

Put2Go: Car Mount with Wireless Charging, Ultra Convenient by Put2Go.com — Kickstarter

The post Air Gap Vulnerability | TTT 256 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Anita Borg Institute | WTR 56

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

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

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Interview – LaShon Anthony – @visuals4u

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WTR Transcription Poll

The post Anita Borg Institute | WTR 56 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Starting At 8 | WTR 52

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

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

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WTR Transcription Poll

The post Starting At 8 | WTR 52 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Tech Conveniences Today | TTT 232

chris — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 11:54:41 +0000

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Amazon takes on Unity, Kickstarter has some big news, Super Bowl stream stats impress, the hot $19 Billion that might be wasted on “cyber security” & more!

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— Episode Links —

The post Tech Conveniences Today | TTT 232 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Live Long and Floppy | TTT 228

chris — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 11:23:40 +0000

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We cover the breaking news out of CES, Ford’s new found love for the Amazon Echo, the first big LastPass release after LogmeIn & how Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s words were freed from old floppy disks.

Plus our Kickstarter of the week & more!

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The post Live Long and Floppy | TTT 228 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Keyboardio | WTR 44

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

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

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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.

Gridless H4X0R | TTT 218

chris — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 11:30:49 +0000

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A new big tech trend right under our noses? A new generation of nomadic high-tech workers living off the grid, while staying always connected.

These developers ask why is there is much pressure to buy the biggest house, buy the best TV, get a great car?

Before us now is an entire world of possibilities & cultures, some of us have been completely blind to. The ability to live comfortably, in a tiny home, or an RV & move about or bring your home with you when you travel is an amazing way to live. We look at a few remarkable examples.

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Off the Grid, But Still Online | Motherboard

For the last 61 days I’ve been traveling throughout California while living out of my Corolla, collecting stories from people living off the grid.

The people I’ve met have abandoned the chase of the American Dream; they are not battling traffic to work a nine-to-five job in order to live in a big house or buy a fancy car. Instead, their values are centered around new life experiences, connecting with nature, building their own homes, growing their own food, and having a full sense of control over their lives—including managing the amount of time they spend on the internet.

The average American feels lost going a day without logging onto their social media accounts via smartphone, tablet, or computer. By contrast, these people know exactly how much power their solar panels need to generate to charge their phones or watch a DVD on their laptops, and they moderate their usage in the same way they would measure out exactly how much water they need to cook dinner and take a shower.

Joey Hess

So I’ve built etckeeper (managing /etc with git, for sysadmins), ikiwiki (wikis and blogs in git), and git-annex (applying git to very large files). I’m funded by a Kickstarter project in 2012-2013 to build something not unlike DropBox, based on git-annex, that automatically version controls and syncs files between computers.

I’m also a long-time Debian developer, having been involved in building the Debian installer, and I run a 30-year delayed Usenet feed at olduse.net.

joeyh (Joey Hess) · GitHub

This place is nicely remote, and off the grid, relying on solar power. I only get 50 amp-hours of juice on a sunny day, and often less than 15 amp-hours on a bad day. So the whole house runs on 12 volt DC power to avoid the overhead of an inverter; my laptop is powered through a succession of cheap vehicle power adapters, and my home server runs on 5 volt power provided by a USB adapter.

WatsonsWander

Since 2012 we have traveled the U.S. while living and working from our renovated 25-foot Airstream. Follow us on our crazy journey in search of beautiful scenery, fun adventures, interesting people, tasty foods, and more…

Watsons Wander Live

Since June 2012 we have traveled the U.S. while living and working from our 25-foot Airstream. We’ve crafted this interactive infographic, which is updated daily with the data from our journey.

WatsonsWander (@WatsonsWander) | Twitter

Technomadia | Adventures in Nomadic Serendipity

We’ve been perpetually on the road since 2006 combining technology and travel (tech+nomad).

We’re currently full time RVers roaming around in a geeked out vintage bus conversion.

We work remotely as technology & strategy advisors, app developers and authors.. always sucking up mobile internet bandwidth.

We love sharing a slice of our life from the road, provide a little inspiration and some lessons learned over the years.

Best RV Internet Access Options: The Learning Banks Uncensored at dc404 Sep 2015 – YouTube

06:05 Free Wifi – the reality
10:20 Cellular Internet – the reality
19:33 Put it all together
20:23 DIY RV wifi antenna repeater + Verizon (~$200 — Score: C)
26:40 WiFi Ranger + Wilson cradle booster and antenna (~$875 — Score: D-)
36:39 MaxxFi Standard (includes CradlePoint router, plus dual Wilson boosters and antennas (~$1700 — Score: C+)
53:50 Best RV internet options for the DIYer ~ $380
59:39 Part 2: Our solar power setup
1:01:00 Our goals for solar power
1:03:20 Expectation hardware needed
1:04:55 What did we install?
1:12:06 Solar power success!
1:14:26 In a perfect world
1:17:48 Parts list
1:20:26 Q&A

The post Gridless H4X0R | TTT 218 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Technology For Connection | WTR 43

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

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

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Millennials and Mentors | WTR 40

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

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

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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

Butterflies & Backronyms | TechSNAP 224

chris — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 09:42:38 +0000

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The Backronym vulnerability hits MySQL right in the SSL protection, we’ll share the details. The hacker Group that hit Apple & Microsoft intensifies their attacks & a survey shows many core Linux tools are at risk.

Plus some great questions, a rockin’ roundup & much much more!

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Backronym – ssl stripping mysql connections

Researchers have identified a serious vulnerability in some versions of MySQL that allows an attacker to strip SSL/TLS connections of their security wrapping transparently.
Researchers at Duo Security realized that even when they set the correct option to initiate an SSL connection with the MySQL server, they could not make the client enforce a secure connection.
This means that an attacker with a man-in-the-middle position could force an unencrypted connection and passively sniff all of the unencrypted queries from the client to the MySQL database.
The vulnerability lies within the behaviour of the ‘–ssl’ client option, which on affected versions it is being treated as “advisory”. Therefore while the option would attempt an SSL/TLS connection to be initiated towards a server, it would not actually require it. This allows a MITM attack to transparently “strip” the SSL/TLS protection.
The issue affects the ssl client option whether used directly or triggered automatically by the use of other ssl options.
The vulnerability affects MySQL 5.7.2 and earlier versions, along with MySQL Connector versions 6.1.2 and earlier, all versions of Percona Server and all versions of MariaDB.
The vulnerability is nicknamed BACKRONYM (Bad Authentication Causes Kritical Risk Over Networks Yikes MySQL) by the Duo researchers, who also put up a site that riffs on the recent trend of researchers putting up sites for major vulnerabilities.
What does BACKRONYM stand for? Bad Authentication Causes Kritical Risk Over Networks, Yikes MySQL!
They say: “We spent countless hours analyzing the BACKRONYM vulnerability to come up with a human-readable description that would convey the underlying root-cause to infosec professionals.”
What do I need to do to fix BACKRONYM?
Step 1: PANIC! I mean look at that logo – your database is basically exploding!
Step 2: Tell all your friends about BACKRONYM. Use your thought leadership talents to write blog post about BACKRONYM to reap sweet Internet karma. Leverage your efforts in responding to BACKRONYM to build political capital with the executives in your organization. Make sure your parents know it’s not safe to shop online until BACKRONYM is eradicated.
Step 3: Actually remediate the vulnerability in any of your affected MySQL client-side libraries (also MariaDB and Percona). Unfortunately, there’s no patch backported for MySQL <= 5.7.2. So if you’re on MySQL 5.6 like 99.99% of the Internet is, you’re basically out of luck and have to upgrade to the MySQL 5.7 “preview release” or figure out how to pull in libmysqlclient >= 6.1.3. Backporting security fixes is hard, apparently.
Additional Coverage: New PHP release to fix backronym flaw
The BACKRONYM Vulnerability

Hacker Group That Hit Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft Intensifies Attacks

The hacker group, which security researchers from Kaspersky Lab and Symantec call Wild Neutron or Morpho, has broken into the networks of over 45 large companies since 2012.
After the 2013 attacks against Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft were highly publicized, the group went underground and temporarily halted its activity.
Symantec has named the group behind the attacks “Butterfly”.
Butterfly is technically proficient and well resourced. The group has developed a suite of custom malware tools capable of attacking both Windows and Apple computers, and appears to have used at least one zero-day vulnerability in its attacks. It keeps a low profile and maintains good operational security. After successfully compromising a target organization, it cleans up after itself before moving on to its next target.
The first signs of Butterfly’s activities emerged in early 2013 when several major technology and internet firms were compromised. Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft disclosed that they had been compromised by very similar attacks. This was done by compromising a website used by mobile developers (that we covered before on the show) using a Java zero-day exploit to infect them with malware.
The malware used in these attacks was a Mac OS X back door known as OSX.Pintsized. Subsequent analysis by security researcher Eric Romang identified a Windows back door, Backdoor.Jiripbot, which was also used in the attacks.
Symantec has to date discovered 49 different organizations in more than 20 countries that have been attacked by Butterfly.
Butterfly has also shown an interest in the commodities sector, attacking two major companies involved in gold and oil in late 2014. In addition to this, the Central Asian offices of a global law firm were compromised in June 2015. The company specializes in finance and natural resources specific to that region. The latter was one of at least three law firms the group has targeted over the past three years.
Butterfly has also developed a number of its own hacking tools. Hacktool.Securetunnel is a modified version of OpenSSH which contains additional code to pass a command-and-control (C&C) server address and port to a compromised computer.
Hacktool.Bannerjack is meanwhile used to retrieve default messages issued by Telnet, HTTP, and generic Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) servers. Symantec believes it is used to locate any potentially vulnerable servers on the local network, likely including printers, routers, HTTP servers, and any other generic TCP server.
The group uses Hacktool.Eventlog to parse event logs, dumping out ones of interest, and delete entries. It also kills processes and performs a secure self-delete. Hacktool.Proxy.A is used to create a proxy connection that allows attackers to route traffic through an intermediary node, onto their destination node.
Based on the profile of the victims and the type of information targeted by the attackers, Symantec believes that Butterfly is financially motivated, stealing information it can potentially profit from. The group appears to be agnostic about the nationality of its targets, leading us to believe that Butterfly is unaffiliated to any nation state.
Links:
Butterfly: Profiting from high-level corporate attacks | Symantec Connect Community
Hacktool.Securetunnel | Symantec
Wild Neutron – Economic espionage threat actor returns with new tricks – Securelist

Core Linux tools top list of most at-risk software

The CII (Core Infrastructure Initiative), a Linux Foundation effort assembled in the wake of the Heartbleed fiasco to provide development support for key Internet protocols, has opened the doors on its Census Project — an effort to figure out what projects need support now, instead of waiting for them to break.
The Census, with both its code and results available on GitHub, assembles metrics about open source projects found in Debian Linux’s package list and on openhub.net, then scores them based on the amount of risk each presents.
A copy of the census data downloaded from GitHub on Friday morning showed 395 projects in the census, with the top-listed projects to be core Linux utilities. Ftp, netcat-traditional, tcpd, and whois all scored 11 out of a possible 15.
High scores in the survey, said the CII in its page on the project, don’t mean a given program should be ditched, or that it’s to be presumed vulnerable. Rather, it means “the project may not be getting the attention that it deserves and that it merits further investigation.”
Apache’s https Web server, a large and “vitally important” project with many vulnerabilities tracked over the years, ranked as an 8 in part because “there’s already large development & review team in place.”
Busybox, a project found in many embedded Linux applications that has been implicated before with security concerns, ranked even lower, at 6.
One of tricky issues that bubbles up is the complications posed by dependencies between projects. For the libaprutil1-ldap project (with a score of 8), the notes indicate that “the general Apache Portable Runtime (APR) appears to be actively maintained. However, it’s not as clear that the LDAP library in it is as actively managed.” Likewise, anything that uses the Kerberos authentication system — recently implicated in a security issue — typically has “Kerberos” in the notes.
linuxfoundation/cii-census · GitHub

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The post Butterflies & Backronyms | TechSNAP 224 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Early Tech Obsession | WTR 30

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

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

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Transcription:

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

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

The post Early Tech Obsession | WTR 30 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Don’t Do It Alone | WTR 29

chris — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 07:31:50 +0000

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Moira is the President and CEO of Galvanize Labs, an edutech startup that brings together learning through gaming!

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Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I”m Angela.
PAIGE: Angela, today we interviewed a good friend of mine, Moira Hardek, and she is the CEO and President, sole founder, of Galvanized Labs, and they’re a edutech startup. She kind of gives us the lowdown on what that means, and what that looks like, and kind of how she’s using her experiencing in gaming to bring technology and education together.
ANGELA: And into gaming, because it’s technology and education in games.
PAIGE: Yeah, its’ crazy. It’s like this awesome hybrid mashup that she goes on to kind of explain what that means. It’s a really neat interview, I think.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I’d like to mention Digital Ocean. If you go to digitalocen.com and use the promo code heywtr, you can save on simple cloud hosting, dedicated to offering the most intuative and easy way to spin up a cloud server. You can create a cloud server in 55 seconds, and pricing plans start at only $5.00 a month. That’s 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabytes SSD, One CPU, and one terabyte transfer. Digital Ocean has date center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. The interface is incredibly simple, intuitive. The control panel is awesome. It will help you design exactly what you need, which empowers users to replicate on large scales with the company’s straightforward API. Check out digitialocen.com by using promo code heywtr.
PAIGE: And we got started with our interview today by asking Moira to explain her role in technology.
MOIRA: I’m the President and CEO of Galvanize Labs. We are a hybrid tech company at the moment. What we’re working on is ed tech, so educational gaming and technology education. My role is a little bit of everything. In startups, in small companies, it’s kind of everything from the business side to the tech side, the design side. I get to do a little bit of everything, which is probably really good for me. It keeps me excited. It keeps me interested, and it’s certainly never boring,. It’s kind of broad, but also really exciting.
PAIGE: What is a hybrid technology company?
MOIRA: I like to think of it as a hybrid, because we’re focusing on education and we have such a strong emphasis and validating the educational side of what we’re doing. Not just throwing out the term of, hey this is an educational product. We really want to be accredited and validate that educational status. So, we’re kind of half an educational company and the other half of it is a gaming studio. Everything to do within the game is all in house. Nothing is third party. Nothing is purchased. We do everything inside. So, everything from soundtracks to all the digital assets, to the game design, to the voices is all in house. That’s where I kind of feel the hybrid is. It’s great educational emphasis and then this fun game studio.
PAIGE: Has it been a challenge to kind of combine those two worlds? I mean, you don’t typically think of education and gaming at all.
MOIRA: It has been really interesting, because I just don’t think it’s been done in this way before. You really do have these two totally separate industries of gaming, which is so much more classically identified as entertainment. You know, I think of, game releases now are almost like movie release weekends and billion dollar release weekends. It’s entertainment and it’s really what it does so well. Education is obviously kind of almost the flip side of that. Not to say that education isn’t fascinating, but you certainly don’t see, you know, a billion dollar education weekend. And so, as far as how the money flows and how the tech works, it’s entirely different. So, when you try to put educational gaming together, you don’t see gaming classically as an industry really turning its considerable talent towards the education industry, because it just doesn’t have the same type of return. That leaves education a little bit off on an island, that although gaming is a really powerful tool that can be utilized within education, they really don’t get to use the great talant of the gaming industry. And so, that leaves educators to kind of self-educate when it comes to gaming. So, gaming inside of education, or edugaming, which that’s always a great term, has been a little bit lackluster, because it doesn’t bring this entertainment quality. Kids today, I mean, I like to call them the 3DS generation. They’re the first one, if you give them a crappy game, they’re going to tell you this is a crappy game. When they’re used to things like Battlefield and Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft. Visually stunning games with tremendous dynamics that keep them really engaged. Edugaming really can’t compete. What we really wanted to bring to this was a level of entertainment quality gaming with real educational validation. And that was a challenge. We really kind of were able to pull that off for the first time. We live in between these two worlds, and yet we don’t wholey belong to one or the other. There’s pros and cons to that.
PAIGE: Always, whenever you’re bridging a gap it’s always strengths and weaknesses.
MOIRA: Right. Yeah, first to market, again there’s bonuses and there’s drawbacks.
PAIGE: So you do everything in house. What kind of tools do you use to do that for education for gaming?
MOIRA: Oh my god, we do. I feel like there’s a little bit of, just, everything. The game and built and designed entirely from the unity engine. So, obviously, we do a lot of work in unity. All of the web interfaces. All of your guy’s favorite stuff from node to angular to the tremendous list of the custom APIs that we create. The game is hosted within Amazon, right, so AWS, and god bless them for that. And there’s just there’s so many little pieces that we’re able to put together and custom design. Half of the time that we spent building the original platform for launch, before we actually built the game, we built proprietary tools that we were going to use to build the game, and make production even easier going forward. So, the custom scripting system that we were able to create. All of the techs and all the interaction that you see in the game isn’t actually hard coded into the game. It’s actually all dynamically being pulled through our custom scripting system. And so, for our writers and our game designers, we actually have a web portal where now when we write scripts for games going forward, is we’re actually just — when we create those storyboards and write those scripts, we’re dropping the scripts into a web portal that’s then dynamically being pulled into the game when the game is hard coded. So, it’s great tools like that. We have an in-game currency that’s called jewels. It’s like gold coins in Mario Bros or rings in Sonic. To make, again, production much more efficient, instead of hardcoding exactly where those little pieces of currency are going to be in every level, we have a custom coordinate and mapping system. So, again, it’s on the back end. We get to go in this great little web portal that we’ve created and drop the coordinates for where these are going to go, instead of hardcoding in the game where they are. That just gives us a lot of freedom. So we can change levels, and we change maps, and we can build new things, and keep the game and the future games really dynamic and updated for the kids. So, it’s a great experience for our users. So, from the game itself to the tools we’ve created to make production more dynamic, there’s so much stuff that we’re using, and a lot of stuff that we’re creating on our own.
ANGELA: What is your target age?
MOIRA: The age range is remarkably large, because of the type of content that we’re offering. I kind of like to call the beginning platforms — right now, Taken Charge is a serious of four games that are played sequentially, and then we actually have three games that are about to kind of roll off the production line, and then we have 30 more that are currently up on the storyboard that are in production. The first, beginning part of our platform, I like to call as b.c. it’s before coding. So, its’ fundamentals, right. Its’ really getting kids to kind of work up into coding and those advanced topics. Because we’re talking about these fundamentals, that actually gives us a tremendously large age range. The only thing that you need to play Taken Charge is a third grade reading level, and a browser, and an internet connection. So, I have kids playing this that are from third grades to — we just completed a really fun pilot, actually here at a Chicago high school, and it was freshman, sophomores, and juniors in high school that were playing it. So, its’ really all about what level of knowledge the user or the player has, or in this case doesn’t have. And a lot of students in American are lacking these technology fundamentals. And then gaming, being this great universal language, can speak to a large range of audiences. So, the exact same game is just as fun and interactive for elementary school kids as it is for high schoolers. It kind of has that Minecraft effect, right?
ANGELA: Yes.
MOIRA: You know, ten years old playing Minecraft, and then very popular in the 55 plus market too, it’s tremendous.
ANGELA: Right. Where do you see the kids going after they use your product? Are you planning to develop something after that for more advanced? What is your vision on where they go after?
MOIRA: There’s kind of multiple ways to look at it. Obviously, the company being as young as it is, we are building extended platforms. So there are, again, three games coming and there’s 30 more games to come. So, this will be quite a large marketplace of options and of topics. It all begins to get more advanced. So, we’re all kind of about this progressive learning model and being able to progress kids through technology as a subject. Because, I feel like, technology is always kind of treated as this one off when it’s addressed educationally, and we certainly don’t do that math, right? And you always see, like, let’s throw kids into coding. Because coding and robotics, those are really sexy technology topics. And those are great, great, great topics. But when we teach kids math in school, when they have no background in math, we don’t start them in long division. We go back and start with addition and subtraction and multiplication. And then we move them forward. We make sure that they grasp these topics so that they don’t get frustrated, they walk way. When we teach kids technology, we’re throwing them to coding and there’s this huge assumption that they have this underlying knowledge, when I’ve got the benefit of working with kids hands on for the last decade. Ninety percent of the kids that we work with don’t know where a file goes when you download it through a browser. But we’re like, (unintelligible) go to coding. So, what we really want to do is build this progressive model, have them move forward. So, yeah, our platform will move into things like coding. It doesn’t move into things like 3D modeling and different stuff like that, so yeah, there are those options. We partner with a lot of youth development organizations that offer, again, more advanced programs. And we’re also kind of working with, now, other types of technical sites that are a little bit more adult driven. That, if you can get this really solid, kind of, base line in your younger years, then why couldn’t you go into — think of what’s out there in tech ed for adults. And things like Linda and portal site, and all those great educational sites that you can continue your own education online. So, there’s so many places to go after this, once you establish this great baseline. So, we’re working in a lot of different arenas to see where you can go.
PAIGE: Have you always been involved in gaming? Did you start out as a game developer or anything like that?
MOIRA: No, certainly not. I mean, I’ve always had an interest in games dynamics. I’ve always applied them in a lot of the work I’ve done. And game design as pure game design, was something that kind of came later. It really kind of came in the second half of my career and the decade that I spent at Best Buy. It really came for me when I really was able to recognize what a powerful tool gaming was going to be, and it could be in that educational realm. I had just had a particular passion point around teaching, and particularly in the youth market. Gaming just seemed to be at the center of that for me. Immediately, I think, kind of any other entrepreneur, I just looked at gaming and what it could be and was urked that — my point was view was, we’re not doing it right. I wanted to do something different with it. I had to get involved. So, gaming came much later for me.
PAIGE: So, you’re been a lifelong gamer yourself. What are some of your favorites?
MOIRA: I go all the way back to my Apple IIe when I was younger. I totally just dated myself and gave away how old I am. That’s fine. I still play like mod of number munchers from when I was a kid, because that’s all we had when we were in school. So games like that. And then Day of Tentacle I felt was really great. I still have the original box too, it’s one of my prized possessions. For me though, really, really advanced gaming. I have told this story a million times. It was the very first Civilization by Sid Meier when i was Civ, and that really pushed me over the top into my love of gaming. I really kind of like this closeted gamer in college, because I didn’t know any other girl that gamed. So, yeah, I always hung out with the geeky guys, because I worked at the student union, and they introduced me to Counter Strike and things like that. It’s been this really slow progression. I was really kind of an isolated individual gamer until after I got out of college. Then, when you go to work for a company like Best Buy, that sells games and consoles. the addiction got out of control from there.
PAIGE: I had a very similar experience. I got into games a little bit in high school and then (unintelligible) Civilization, definitely one of those. And the Sims.
ANGELA: Yeah, I never did do Sims.
PAIGE: I had to actually — I had a burned copy back in the day of the Sims and my freshman year I had to take it out of my drive during finals week and literally break it in half so that I would pass my finals and stop playing the Sims.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
MOIRA: Yeah, see. I think it still is. I believe it is still like the number one game for women. I believe it is still sitting out there as the number one game for women.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’m pretty sure.
ANGELA: I got into Minecraft in 2011, I think. And I really like it. Now, I’m playing it with my son and that’s really fun, but I did Battlefield 1942 and some of the other first-person shooters. And it was my husband and me and his friends. No other women, but it was great.
PAIGE: It’s one of my geek cards of shame that I’m epically bad at first-person shooters.
ANGELA: Oh, I am epically good.
PAIGE: Really?
ANGELA: They call me hidden angerz.
PAIGE: Oh man, that’s awesome.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes, I’m a sniper.
MOIRA: Very nice. I am epically mediocre.
PAIGE: Well, we run the gamut now.
ANGELA: Yeah, all three of us.
MOIRA: I can at least hold my own and not be at the bottom of it, but if I go to talk trash, then I totally get rocked. And so I’m just kind of somewhere in the middle. It Sim games that just dominated me. So like SImcity, that was the one that I had to get rid of, because I was going to never have a social live again with Simcity. And then, I was one of those that was so depressed when Simcity came out, you know, with EA last year, and it was so bad. But now, thank you Skylines, is amazing. And if you haven’t played that yet, do it. I’m afraid it’s going to very, very negatively impact Galvanize right now.
ANGELA: You know, in the same way that I’ve avoided Pinterest, I avoided Sims. Because I would get consumed. I have chosen not to do that, intentionally.
MOIRA: Don’t avoid Pinterest, it’s so good.
ANGELA: No, you know what, I use Instructables. It’s way better, because they actually show how to do it, right there. You don’t have to click on somebody’s blog so they can get ad revenue, or wonder, just because they didn’t put any link on how to do things. Instructables is way better. I tried to get into console games, like Donkey Kong I really liked on Super Nintendo. But Poker Smash on XBox is amazing.
MOIRA: I’ll have to look at it.
PAIGE: Like Poker, the card game?
ANGELA: Yes. And it’s like Tetris, but with poker. You match poker hands to clear lines.
PAIGE: Whoa.
ANGELA: It’s really cool. You go up levels. There’s different music, I just love it. Anyway.
MOIRA: This is it. Gaming is just universal. And this is why it’s just so, so powerful as a tool. This is why.
ANGELA: Yep.
PAIGE: I’m a competitive Tetris junkie. I like it. A lot of people are like, I”m really good at Tetris. I’m like, you don’t understand, competitive Tetris is different. Where you send lines to each other and stuff.
ANGELA: Do you have the Tetris lamp from ThinkGeek?
PAIGE: No, but I should.
ANGELA: Yeah.
MOIRA: Clearly.
ANGELA: I can’t find the power brick. The straight — it’s the straight brick. I can’t find it, but I have all the other ones.
MOIRA: I bet you anything it doesn’t exist, because like in the game, it’s never there when you need it.
ANGELA: Yeah, I have real life Tetris in my house with that lamp.
MOIRA: So, ThinkGeek didn’t actually ever create one, just to give you the same level of frustration that the game does.
ANGELA: No, I did — it did — I did have it. I have three kids and one of them took off with it somewhere and it is somewhere else in the house.
MOIRA: Your kids also are functioning completely the way the game Tetris does. That’s fantastic.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: Somebody has made off with my ilen piece. Where is it?
ANGELA: Yep.
MOIRA: So awesome.
PAIGE: So, you’re the CEO of your own company now?
MOIRA: Yep.
PAIGE: And having done that, and having been in the gaming space as a woman, have you been able to find other women to work with in your company? Other women gamers? How is that working?
MOIRA: I mean, I will definitely say, obviously there is women at Galvanize. I won’t overplay that, that I went out and went on some big search for women and everything, because quite honestly, my team and I have been together for a long time. We’ve worked together at previous companies. So, sadly that wasn’t this big recruiting coo. And I haven’t expanded the company incredibly. We’ve stayed in a very, very lean model as we’ve gone on to do this. You know, kind of going to Reddit way and staying real lean, so I haven’t done a lot of that. But, from a networking standpoint, it’s hard. I don’t see — I don’t come across a ton of other female startups in this genre. Certainly not, kind of, in gaming, and not locally. I think I mentioned I was on a Skype call last week, and that happened to be a female game designer and she was up in Canada. But the two worlds were completely different. Being on the business side here, right, and we’re monetizing the game. There’s is more kind of social game and kind of grant based. That kind of stuff. So, those were two a little bit different worlds that we lived in. Gaming is still, obviously very, very male dominated. I still get bathrooms to myself at PAX and GDC. And you guys know how that goes. I don’t come across a lot of that. What has been, I think, a little bit different for me is because of how we started the company, the fact that it was kind of bootstrap and angel funded, I didn’t do things like Y-combinator or Sim Connector, or kind of any of those incubators to kind of get this started. I went a different path. And then we moved right into a revenue model. I was networked a little bit differently. I didn’t have access to a ton of that stuff. It has been a little bit isolating. And that’s been not the greatest feeling in the world.
PAIGE: So, if other women are kind of out there with a big idea, and kind of some cohones to make it happen, it’s always sad to me that there aren’t more women out taking risks. What would you say to someone who’s got an idea and wants to try to be an entrepreneur?
MOIRA: Take a risk. I don’t see why not. I really — I don’t see any difference in a woman taking the risk than a man taking the risks, and the startups that they have. Quite honestly, my favorite kind of part of it is always strength in numbers. I don’t think it should be one or two female entrepreneurs at a time. I think we should be doing this in big groups and big numbers. Are there special challenges for us? I think, yeah. That certainly can be the case. But I also think women have a really, very particular point of view. I think it’s very powerful. The way that women look differently at how to solve problems. I think in the world and the way the marketplace today, I think the woman’s point of view is very, very powerful. And I’d love to see that out there way more than it is. The very simple answer to that is, yeah get out there and do it. I don’t see any reason why not. The same risk is involved. It is, it’s scary. I think my dad says it best. It kind of feels like you’re trying to thread a needle while jumping out of an airplane. It feels like that for everybody, no matter what gender you ar.
PAIGE: The diverse thinking is so important. We had an interview with Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack, and she’s a CEO of Fresh Mint and has done a lot of work in the tech space as a woman entrepreneur. And she’s like, it’s not even just women. It’s just getting a group together that doesn’t all think the same way. You can have a diverse group of all different colors of the rainbow; all different genders, all different sexualities, and put them in a room. If they’re all Harvard grads, they still all think the same.
MOIRA: That’s true.
PAIGE: Diverse thinking is more than just gender, but gender is a huge piece of that.
MOIRA: Agreed. Agreed. I’m a very, very big advocate of that. I think you see it all the time. I am members of different women’s groups and I can’t help but see it in a lot of different scenarios that I’ve put in, and these very stark differences. And I think that point of view is just so powerful, and I really want to see that voice and that point of view come to the forefront a lot more.
PAIGE: If there was one piece of advice you could give someone who is about to get started, what would you say?
MOIRA: I think is one I give every time I hear this one, and it’s so true. It’s just, don’t do it alone. I think there are a lot of people out there that think that when you do this and the startup culture is — it’s kind of either one of two things. Either you already have to be incredibly well-networked, and if I’m not then I can’t do this. And that’s not true. And the other side of it is, I have to have all the answers. I can’t do this if I don’t have all the answers. There’s this kind of misconception of I’m doing this alone. You’re not. You’re never actually really doing it alone and don’t try to do it alone. You don’t have to have all the answers. Don’t try to be the lone ranger on this. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to bring other people in. It’s better to do it that way. It is scary, but it’s not scary for the reasons that you think it’s scary. Scary comes later, but don’t do it alone.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget, you can contact us by going to jupiterbroadcasting.com. There is a contact form. You can also do the show drop down to find all the Women’s Tech Radio shows, and find the show notes for each of the shows with tons of links and resources.
PAIGE: You can also check us out on iTunes, where you can subscribe to the podcast. Or, if you’d rather use the RSS feed, that’s available on the Jupiter Broadcasting site. You can also follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Or, you can check out our tumblr that has all of the transcripts of the past shows at heywtr.tumblr.com. And if you have a minute, shoot us an email. Leave us some feedback wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

The post Don’t Do It Alone | WTR 29 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Living The Linux Life | WTR 25

chris — Wed, 06 May 2015 04:17:19 +0000

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Live from LFNW Scarlett Clark tells us about her work with KDE and Kubuntu!

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Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: Angela, today we’re going to interview at Linux Fest Northwest live. We’re doing an interview with Scarlett Clark. She’s a developer on the KDE project and also works for Kubuntu.
ANGELA: But, before we get into the interview, I want to tell you about Patreon.com. You can go to patreon.com/jupitersignal to support Women’s Tech Radio and all the other shows on teh Jupiter Broadcasting Network. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and see if there’s another show that you might want to listen to in addition to Women’s Tech Radio. Again, go to patreon.com/jupitersignal.
PAIGE: And we got started with this week’s episode by asking Scarlett what she does with KDE and Kubuntu.
SCARLETT: I am a developer for Kubuntu, so I do a lot of the packaging for the software applications for the user to be able to easily install and whatnot. And then, on the other side of the spectrum I created, wrote all the code to automate job creation and job building for KDE’s continuous integration system. Which, it builds the software packages and then test them to make sure that its functional. And then after they all turn green like they’re supposed to, they’re ready to release to distributions like Kubuntu. And I also went the extra step, and we now are testing for OS X and Windows will be coming next.
PAIGE: Oh, wow.
SCARLETT: Yeah, all the code is already in there. It’s just figuring — Windows is a little more complicated because getting dependencies, you can’t tell the continuous integration system to, hey go to this website, download this file, and use it as a dependency. So, it gets little more complicated, but once we sort that out Windows will also be supported with KDE software.
PAIGE: Wow, I had no idea you guys were going for that. That’s really awesome. Before you did this project was their not test coverage for KDE?
SCARLETT: They had a very old system and it was not reliable. And it was also — the job creation was all manual, and OS X and Windows were not supported.
PAIGE: That’s pretty deep in the weeds. Like building, testing, and all that jazz –
SCARLETT: Oh yes.
PAIGE: – for such a big, robust piece of software. Was that you just woke up one morning and decided to do? How did you end up where you are?
SCARLETT: No, actually, Valerie, the gal you just spoke to, they do this season of KDE and it generally targets students. Obviously, I’m not a student. But, this project didn’t have anybody grabbing on it and she just asked me, are you interested in Dev Ops. I’m like, I’m interested in everything. So, she introduced me to Ben Cooksy, the main sys admin guy, and got rolling. I had no idea what I was getting into when I got into it. So, I ended up learning Groovy, Python, and Java on the fly. I had taken a few classes, but that was years ago in university.
ANGELA: What had you done prior to that? Was anything prior to that technology related other than the several classes you mentioned?
SCARLETT: A long time ago I was IT.
ANGELA: Oh, okay.
SCARLETT: But I had not had any real world experience coding. So, this is my first real world experience coding and i love it.
PAIGE: So, you went from no coding to developing a new test suite for KDE?
SCARLETT: Yes, the back end.
PAIGE: So, how was that journey? How did you go through that? Because learning that many languages and that much theory on the fly –
SCARLETT: Yes. At first it was very overwhelming and I just stared at the blank sheet going, oh no. Oh no. But then, I just bits and pieces at a time and things started coming together, and then oh that makes sense. ANd then it just all came together. And then when the final result, we just went live two days ago and it was smooth.
PAIGE: How long did that project take for you?
SCARLETT: It was several months.
PAIGE: Wow, only months?
SCARLETT: Oh yeah.
PAIGE: Wow.
SCARLETT: Actually, yeah, I surprised a lot of people with how fast.
PAIGE: So, doing all that and learning all that, were there awesome resources that you were using? Was it the community? Did you have books that were –
ANGELA: Online courses?
SCARLETT: Google was good.
ANGELA: Yeah, I bet.
PAIGE: So, I have a lot of ladies who are trying to get in tech, and their biggest holdback is learning how to Google the right things. Did you find that was difficult at first., like knowing how to ask the right questions?
SCARLETT: I’ve been using Google since they were in the garage.
PAIGE: Nice, but asking the right tech question.
ANGELA: Yeah, like sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know.
SCARLETT: I know. That’s actually that you have to develop over time, because I’ve learned to figure out what to ask and how to ask it, and sometimes you don’t get it right the first time and you just have to reword it. That can be challenging. That is just it. When I first started the project I didn’t know what I was looking. So, I actually branched off in wrong directions at first. I had a few setbacks because I wanted to go be a docker, which is the new cool technology. But, it wasn’t — with the OS X and Windows, that ended up being wasted time, because you won’t get native builds, because Docker is Linux. That didn’t quite pan out, but it was fun learning.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s always good to add new stack to your brain.
SCARLETT: Oh yeah. Yeah.
ANGELA: Yeah. Something will resonate and help you learn something else.
SCARLETT: Absolutely. Yelah.
PAIGE: So, tell me the story of why you were in IT before, and then you weren’t, and now you are again.
SCARLETT: That’s a story of — I had to give up my career to follow my husband to another state and I could not recover.
ANGELA: That’s too bad. Well, you have now.
SCARLETT: I have. Well, yes.
PAIGE: Was it really difficult for you diving back in afterwards, or did it just kind of re-spark that? We had a guest who talks about kind of the mental stimulation of being in this technical field.
SCARLETT: Yeah, I’ve been a Linux advocate/user since 1998. I have my big stack of Red Hat floppy disc. But I have always wanted to contribute, and I could never really find my way in. It’s a tight knit community. But I finally found my way in with Kubuntu and Jonathan Riddell. He just stepped up and, you want to learn how to package? I’m like, sure. He just showed me the ropes and I’ve just been riding the cloud since.
PAIGE: How did you get in touch with Jonathan? What was that?
SCARLETT: I knew Valerie from several mailing groups and stuff. She saw that I was doing documentation for KDE. Actually, an easy way in is doing documentation. And then she introduced me to Jonathan.
PAIGE: I think we have some people who are just getting started. What does doing documentation mean? What does that look like?
SCARLETT: The easiest way is to start with, like Wiki. It’s much simpler than Doc Books. You pretty much well have to know XML and the layout and everything. But Wiki is pretty much just plain text. You just find an app that you really love and just use it, and figure out — use cases of, well somebody might want to do this, and then you just instruct them how to do that and just build on it. That’s the easiest way to really get your food in the door, and it’s pretty simple because you figure out ways that you use the application and then just write about it.
PAIGE: I think, especially as a newer user of an application, sometimes you have an even more valuable input for that.
SCARLETT: Oh yeah.
PAIGE: Because you have just learned it. You know where the pain points are.
ANGELA: Yes. That is, in my current conversion to Linux, it’s very refreshing for the Linux Action Show audience to hear this new user perspective.
SCARLETT: Yes, absolutely. And a lot of times, developers don’t even think of things that a user would try or want to do with their application, so it’s a good way to also give feedback to the developers. I worked on KMail documentation and there was a lot of things that I ran into. I would talk to the developer, how do you do this. And they’re like, oh, well I need to fix that. Thank you.
PAIGE: Did you find being primarily in open source that reaching out to the developer, that was actually a welcomed thing?
SCARLETT: Not generally, but with KDE the are surprisingly very open and very, very nice. I’ve just felt really at home with KDE. It’s been a nice breath of fresh air.
PAIGE: So, you know, don’t give up looking for the right community.
SCARLETT: You’ll find it. Yeah. I’ve been looking for a long time and I just stumbled into it and didn’t expect it.
ANGELA: So, are you from around here?
SCARLETT: I live in Portland, Oregon.
ANGELA: Okay. Do you always come to Linux Fest? And are there any other festivals that you go to?
SCARLETT: This is my first one, but I will be from now on coming to Linux Fest.
ANGELA: I know, isn’t it great?
SCARLETT: Yes, but I go to Academy each year, which is in various places in Europe. This year we’re going to Spain. And then in September I’ll be going into a Random meeting which is in Switzerland for KDE.
ANGELA: Great.
PAIGE: Awesome.
SCARLETT: Yeah, fun and exciting.
PAIGE: So, you’re in Portland. Is the rest of the KDE team in Portland?
SCARLETT: No, KDE is all around the world.
PAIGE: How do you guys work together? What kind of tools do you use to keep in touch?
SCARLETT: IRC.
PAIGE: IRC?
SCARLETT: Yeah, I live in IRC.
PAIGE: Do you use version control to work together?
SCARLETT: Git.
PAIGE: Git, which is, of course of Linux. Linus, thank you. What’s your stack of tools look like right now. I always like to find out what other developers are using.
SCARLETT: I use Eclipse because it’s the only good Groovy plugin that I could find. And I use KDevelop for the Python work.
PAIGE: And do you have a favorite hardware, like laptop, tablet that you’re into? Or because KDE is so nice and friendly it works on just about everything?
SCARLETT: Yeah, I have Kubuntu on my desktop, my laptop, and then my phone has, you know, Android.
ANGELA: Nice.
PAIGE: Very cool. So, I guess last question, what are you the most excited about, about what’s coming down the pipe for technology? Either with Linux or just with general stuff.
SCARLETT: We are going to be porting our apps on to Android, so that’s kind of big.
PAIGE: Oh wow, that’s exciting.
SCARLETT: That’s what the whole Switzerland trip is about.
PAIGE: Oh nice. Very cool. We’ll have to keep an eye on that. That will be great. KDE on your Android.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to his episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget, you can email us, WTR@jupiterbroadcasting.com, or you can use the contact form that is over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
PAIGE: Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, @HeyWTR. You can also find us on iTunes or any of your other RSS feeds. The RSS feed is available on the website at jupiterbroadcasting.com. And if you have a minute, leave us a review or some feedback. We’d love to hear from you.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

The post Living The Linux Life | WTR 25 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Reformed Litigator | WTR 24

chris — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 14:56:20 +0000

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Darci is a former health attorney that is now assisting in the healthcare extraction of rules and regulations to the electronic age.

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Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below or also at heywtr.tumblr.com

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Womens’ 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 interviewing Darci Freedman and she works at the same company as me. She’s actually my bosses’ boss, so it’s pretty fun to get her on and talk about the awesome ways the company was founded , and how we’ve involved women right from the get go and all the kind of cool things we do as a company.
ANGELA: Yes indeed. It is a good interview. But, before we get into it, I just want to mention that you can support this network and this show by going to Patreon.com/today. I think our lowest subscription, and you might be able to go lower, but our lowest subscription is $3.00 a month, and that supports all the shows on the network. It keeps us up and going. We have a lot of technology podcast, other ones, that you can check out in addition to Women’s Tech Radio, and just show your support for the show there.
PAIGE: And we got started with the interview today by asking Darci what her role is at the company.
DARCI: I manage a team of about a dozen people who handle the acquisition of content for a proprietary platform that is targeted towards non-legal regulatory professionals in the compliance arena. So, a lot of big data.
ANGELA: Wow, that is a title. That’s great.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANGELA: That says a lot and nothing at the same time.
DARCI: I know.
PAIGE: And it’s so beautifully jargonized.
ANGELA: It is, yes. That’s exactly.
PAIGE: So, for full disclosure for everybody on the show, Darci is actually one of my bosses, and so we work for the same company. And I am one of those people that she managers in her awesome way to help acquire this content — although, you make it sound like we’re pirates. I know of like it. We’re going to acquire content.
ANGELA: Arrg.
PAIGE: Which we’re not.
ANGELA: I know.
P; We use open government data to do this awesome work.
DARCI: Yes.
PAIGE: So, I know Darci, that you have kind of an interesting non-traditional story. You are actually not a technical person by background. What is your actual background?
DARCI: All right, here it is. It’s interesting. I’m an attorney. I am a former litigator. Actually, the way I say it is I’m a reformed litigator. Which, if you were a legal audience you’d be laughing hysterically at. But, I was a health lawyer, and basically I had the corporate job where the hours were enormous and the time commitment was just huge, and it just took a huge chunk out of me personally to do that. And I was, you know, I really enjoyed it, but after I had my first child I just really didn’t see how it was going to jive practicing and that level of commitment, and kind of the drain on me personally and in my personal life with how I wanted to raise my child. So, I actually stopped working for eight months after I had my first child. And I didn’t do anything. And that wa really weird.
PAIGE: Except be a parent, which is a full-time job.
ANGELA: Which is enough.
DARCI: Well, right. Yes. I didn’t do anything for air quotes “work”. Of course, I was doing a ton at home with my son and I had a kind of extreme situation with his birth, but when I started thinking I would like to get back to my intellectual pursuits and start something professionally, I had a relationship with somebody and he had a startup company. It was in the health arena. He said, why don’t you come work for us and start doing some writing. You know, you’re a subject matter expert in this area, come on and do some writing. And so, that’s how i started. I actually worked with a couple of other attorneys at this startup and anybody in startup experience knows, it’s kind of all hands on deck. You go in, you’re not in a defined role. You throw in any help you can render in any way that is needed at the given moment. And so, I started learning about the platform. How we acquired content for it. And things just kind of snowballed from there.
PAIGE: So this was a tech startup that you got involved with?
DARCI: Yes, and then it was later — I think it was 2007 we were acquired by a large Dutch based publishing company and, you know, I’ve been at the company for almost a dozen years now, and it’s been really interesting time to watch publishing and traditional print-based communications and tools, and the transformation of that into electronic products and workflow tools. So, we kind of — we were this startup that was acquired by this big publishing company, and we really pushed the envelope, because we didn’t have this huge project plan with dates planned out for ten years. That’s just not how we operated. And we really kind of were — we were known in the beginning as a bit of rabble rousers, because we didn’t conform to this kind of corporate ideal, and the normal way that a publishing company did things.
PAIGE: It’s almost like you got to come on — you know, we talk about technical debt, and it’s almost like the other company had publishing debt.
DARCI: They did, and they still do. I think most publishing companies are still working to move towards electronic, but to me print was something that I had only done in my legal background and it was not something that I did at this startup. We were all electronic. Indeed, the person who founded the company had another company — another startup at a different point in time, and he was the first person to put the federal register, which is this huge daily document that the federal government puts out that says here are the laws, and rules, and regulations from all of these agencies for the day. And that used to be only in print. I mean, just huge rainforest that were killed publishing that. And he put that federal register online in electronic form, and so he was very innovative. And he had this fabulous model, which was exactly in tune with what I wanted. He thought, there are all these really, really talented technical and non-technical women that want to raise families, and want to have a great work life balance, and he hired them. And he hired them into all of these different kind of scenarios. You could work from home, you could be in the office, you could work at night, you could work during the day when your children were sleeping if you were at home watching them. And he really capitalized on a lot of talent that otherwise really didn’t have an outlet or a place to go.
PAIGE: I didn’t know that actually. That’s really fantastic. So, do you think that made a huge difference with the way the company was kind of founded and got started, like to have that flexibility, but also to have that female talent onboarded so easily?
DARCI: It absolutely did. And I benefited from that model, and it is exactly how I operate today. In fact, I think when I came on board, other the actual founder of the company, I don’t think that there was — there was only one other man. Everybody else was a woman, and they were all over the country. At that time I think it was Denver Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire. Texas, and that is still the way I operate today. I just want people that are really talented. And there are a lot of really talented women out there, but here are these kind of barriers that we bump into.
ANGELA: Right, Paige briefly kind of talked to me about what you guys do, and it definitely applies to me, or applied to me, I guess. I worked in the medical industry for a while and I got to learn the retail side of it. What we would do is we would go onto like the DSHS website and print out these massive fee schedules, like you said, a forest, you know?
DARCI: Yes.
ANGELA: And everybody would have one at their desk. We had these desktop things where you could hole punch and then slide sections in, and it would be about 12 inches long full of all these different things. And we’d have to tab the pages, and of course, they release a new one almost every quarter. How does what you guys do change that?
DARCI: Well, in the beginning, because your example is right on. Fee schedules, code boos, that’s right up our alley. We have a whole line of coding and reimbursement products. I actually have to fight against that type of historical perspective on a daily basis. This just happened to me yesterday. I will literally have people that scan and PDF pages of the hard copy code book and send it to me and say, it doesn’t look like this. We need to make it look like this. These are people that I work with in the products that we’re developing. And I have to say, no we’re not trying to make — the online electronic experience in looking at a book, you have to move away from the antiquated notion that all you’ve done is take the book and put it up online. I mean, that’s a PDF.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: That’s very different from a workflow tool. A book that is in electronic format that you can actually use. So, that’s something we’re constantly struggling with. And the way that we kind of get — I push the envelope. We ask those questions. Why? Why would I reproduce exactly what’s in the book?
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: I mean, unfortunately I have to buy — I buy those books so that I can say, but yeah look, this is — it doesn’t work the way they’ve set it up. Let’s restructure or modify some of the meta tagging so that we get search results in a certain way, and kind of get people away from the notion of, oh the book is electronic, it’s online, but it should be exactly the same as the hard copy.
ANGELA: Right, well to support that, what we’d have to do, specifically if we were shipping diapers. There’s a lot of age restrictions and quantity restrictions on that on a monthly basis. But also ,certain ICD-9 codes have to be used with it, and then that determines — and then also HCPCS codes. So, you have to use the fee schedule, the ICD-9 book and the — you know, so having an online resource — none of them say — the ICD-9 code doesn’t say, you also need to choose this HCPCS code with it, or this quantity limitation. What I did, which is like sudo what you guys do, is I modified our proprietary software so that it had identifier codes that would automatically tell the customer service rep, hey it has to be this diagnosis, or hey it’s this quantity. You know, you can’t have more than 150 or whatever. So, I tried and I made a cheat sheet that combined all three of those resources that really helped streamline then. But, I am super excited. I really want to check out your product now, because I think it could really help. I still have a relationship with that former employer.
PAIGE: That’s hilarious. You just named three of the things that make my head hurt, because I go in and I’m the person that does all the interlinking between ICD-9 codes and HCPCS and our current regulations.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh, yeah.
DARCI: It’s a lot. We do have a set of tools and a set of reimbursement calculators that we’ve developed that work, as Paige just indicated, in conjunction with the more explanatory material you might read out of the code book.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: ANd so, we put in different elements in the UI that flag things for folks.
ANGELA: Exactly. Right.
DARCI: So, you know, a little red flag, literally. If you want to code this, you have to think about this. It’s extremely complicated. I will tell you, I had — this is something that I fight against a lot. It’s really interesting. I have really, really talented developer types that we work with and we’re doing a revamp of some of those tools and calculators. We have a database fellow that, I mean, he knows the ins and outs of Medicare and Medicaid and all of — you know, ICD-9, ICD-10, HCPCS, CPT. I mean, he just knows it. He has a subject matter expertise, and then he’s a database guy. We hired him specifically because of that expertise. He was getting in pulled in all of these other directions and I kept hitting a wall. I kept saying to these folks, you know, we need this fellow back to work on these products. He was hired for this. Oh, we have other database folks. They’re used to working with really complicated data. They can dig into it. And we exposed it to them and they were like, wow the health care Medicare, Medicaid, medical coding, reimbursement payment is extremely complicated, and they backed right off and said wow you really do need to oftentimes have some underlying subject matter expertise in order to handle this type of data.
ANGELA: Yep. And I know, I worked on a federal grant in King County for a little while, here in Washington, called New Freedom. I was actually the pioneering purchasing agent for that. I would meet with the people going on to the program and try to figure out what they should their government dollars to make them more independent. That was the new freedom part. It was really hard, because I had come from mainly the retail side of things. Not necessarily services. And now I could offer a wide range of, you know, they could hydrotherapy or massage, different things. And it was so hard to find the fee schedules and know that I had the right one and figure out what they could get covered and not have to use their dollars for.
PAIGE: We’ve kind of talked about two different angles of your job. You work with a publishing company and you work in the medical field. Which of the two do you think it’s been harder to drag into technology?
DARCI: I would say publishing, without a doubt. And the reason for that is simply financial. For Medicare and Medicaid, the government has — generally, when they make a change and they want a program or a payment system to go electronic and be more modern in that sense, they do incentive programs. So, we will pay you more if you move in this direction. And then, they have a period of time that’s kind of — then the incentive payment goes away and if you aren’t where you need to be from an electronic perspective, you will get a penalty. So, that’s how they do it. So, they’ve been — providers and folks in health care industry payers/payees, they’ve been motivated by dollars. Publishing, I think it took them a long time to wake up to the fact that they weren’t going to be able to sale books on paper forever. I mean, really.
PAIGE: Yeah, I have to say, being in some of the meetings I’ve been in, it was really surprising to me that meetings this year people are still talking about growing the print publishing business.
ANGELA: Mm-hmm.
DARCI: Mm-hmm. I know that our company has made it a decisive part of their BDP to move from print to electronic. The dollars show that that’s where you need to be. And not just electronic, right? So, we need to move beyond, you know, I tend — we all fall prey to using these terms, but not just electronic, to workflow tools. Things that you can — that just integrate into your job and make it easier. So, that’s where we hope to be headed. There are a lot of barriers there, but there are some really good things that have been going on too. We — Paige, not on the team you’re on directly, but on some of the other teams that I manage, we have started with agile scrum and that’s helped a lot. That’s helped a lot and brought us a lot forward with development activities, but you still run into some walls with management who want a nice waterfall timeline.
ANGELA: Speaking of, what is Paige’s work ethic. No, I’m just kidding. I thought I’d slide that in there somewhere.
PAIGE: That was very subtle.
ANGELA: Yeah, I know, right?
DARCI: Well, you know, so here, I will kind of indirectly respond to that. We are a thin and trim team of people, and we handle a huge volume of data compared to some of our counterparts in other parts of the company. We may have been rabble rousers initially, but when you look at our bottom line in terms of the number of people that we have on the team and the actual content that they process, the volume of data is just huge compared to some of the other parts of the company that really get bogged down in process. So, to that end, we are a highly producing team and it’s because of the people. I really think it’s because they have a lot of flexibility. I always say when I’m hiring somebody, you need to have some core business hours that you’re available for meetings and whatever else, but I’m flexible. You can work when you want. You can work the hours that you want. We have some of those mad programer types who are working at 2:00 a.m. and that’s when they’re beautiful stuff is outputted. And then we have others who keep to a more traditional schedule, but I think that in part it’s that flexibility. That recognition of creativity. Which, I think people don’t often think goes along with a tech role or a tech background. I think they think of some person in front of a keyboard and all these white numbers running up on the screen, but there’s a lot of creatively in tech and I think you just kind of have to let that happen and out of it these amazing things come. That’s what I think of my team and everybody who’s on it.
PAIGE: Yeah, the flexibility at the company is what keeps me creative, keeps me going, so I totally agree. I think being a modern facing company and having a remote workforce and managing it so well has been an amazing experience for me to be part of. I wasn’t sold on remote work before, but now it’s part of my life.
DARCI: I think ten years ago, I mean I was working remotely ten years ago. I think that now — ten years ago people used to say, working you have to manage that and not everybody can work remotely. Everybody can work remotely. You just have to have management and a team that are in communication and that’s all you really need. There’s a lot of to-do that’s often made about remote teams. A lot of that is logistics, and I don’t really think that people need to be in an office, as long as you’ve got the open lines of communication going. I think then you’re good.
ANGELA: What tool do you use most to keep in communication with your team?
DARCI: For development purposes we use VersionOne for all of our tracking of our backlog items. It has a conversation tool and we use that, I would say primarily.
PAIGE: And VersionOne, for people who don’t know, is an agile software development process management tool.
ANGELA: Is it the number 1 or spelled out? Do you know? Number 1?
DARCI: Oh, it is spelled out.
PAIGE: It is spelled out, yeah.
ANGELA: You had a 50/50 chance there Paige.
DARCI: I think it’s all –
PAIGE: It’s bookmarked on my browser.
DARCI: I think it’s all one word too with the –
PAIGE: Yeah, VersionOne.
DARCI: And then, of course, we use some of the other chat type of tools. But I would say in VersionOne there’s a lot of conversation that happens in that tool. There’s a dedicated kind of team meeting room that you can design and we use that quite actively.
PAIGE: My team uses Skype a lot.
DARCI: Yeah.
PAIGE: So, Darci, we’ve talked some about being the small lean machine team inside the bigger company, and being kind of originally founded as a women’s centric company. Have you found transitioning into the bigger company with kind of it’s more traditional setup with gender norms difficult or have you had any pushback there?
DARCI: It’s a yes and no answer. The head of our company is a woman. The head of the business unit that I’m in is a woman, but those aren’t per se the tech parts of the organization. So, from that perspective that’s really heartening that I work for a company where the CEO is a woman, and the lead in my business unit is also a woman. And there are several other women in key roles. Not as much in the technical part of the company. And that’s been a little bit disheartening. We had kind of a restructuring in the last few years, and I remember my first exposure to the more kind of technical unit that kind of came out of that. And going into a meeting and being very exciting and having the head of that put up a slide deck so that we could see who all of his people were. And I just remember thinking, wow that’s pretty white, and that’s pretty male, and middle aged. It was really a little off-putting. So, we’re working to change that. I have a lot of really talented people on my team that I can see moving up through the ranks that I try to get a lot of exposure to. I think that’s one of the things that I really try — I try to do it for my entire team, is really get them exposure to the other parts of the company and other technical groups and organizations in the company, so that they can hopefully rise up through the ranks. But I think there are unfortunately some barriers there. I’ve experienced them myself. Sometimes they’re really subtle. Sometimes they’re more overt, like an org chart that reveals that it’s just all men.
PAIGE: What would an example of a subtle one look like?
DARCI: Actually, it just happened fairly recently. Basically we had — there was a technical issue with a resource and he was being kind of cross-utilized and we needed him on something, and he was supposed to be a dedicated resource to our project. Myself and my business counterpart, who happens to be a woman, reached out to our appropriate chain of command and flagged the issue. Ended up in a telephone call with a bunch of other senior level managers and myself and the other person who had raised the issue. And I got on the phone and it was just one of these conversations where it started — you know, it’s a very subtle thing. It’s actually been in the news a lot lately, this notion of subtle prejudice or subtle sexism. The Google conference that they had where their CEO kept interrupting their CTO, and he did that much more than he interrupted anybody else on the panel. It was kind of one of the things like that. They weren’t aware of the nomenclature and the tone with which they were handling the conversation. And it was — instead of it actually being an issue, it was let’s get on the phone ladies and let’s talk about the facts. Let’s try to tone down the emotion. It was that kind of tone to the whole conversation.
PAIGE: Wow.
DARCI: And I just kept getting angrier and angrier as the conversation went on, because I thought, I don’t understand what’s going on here. I have a valid issue based in hard numbers that I can show to you. I”m not being emotional. You know, it was that kind of thing. And i called them out on it. I instilled a lot of panic in the few moments that I called them out on it, but I just said I need to raise your attention to an issue, and I don’t know if you’re aware of what you’re doing here. Here’s what you’re doing. You’re starting the conversation off saying that we need to talk in facts. Somehow suggesting that the two women on the phone and the issue that they have raised is not fact based, it’s more emotion based. And then you’re using language like that. I think we were described on the phone as acting like the walking wounded and needing to tone things down and rachet back the rhetoric. All of these kind of phrases and terms that you would — I just was like okay, it’s not 1920.
ANGELA: Right, meant to knock you down a peg.
DARCI: Right. Do you realize what you’re doing? And I had calls — of course they freaked out right, because I called them on it. I had a couple of good calls afterwards with the individuals that were on the phone. One, who was very thoughtful and said I didn’t realize what I was doing, but I have four daughters and they’re just starting their careers, and I want to understand where you’re coming from and what you’re thinking, explain it to me. And we had a really great conversation. The other person, I think, that i had a conversation with, he thinks of himself as a lot more involved than he actually is — tried to tell me that that’s how he always runs his calls.
ANGELA: Oh my goodness.
DARCI: And if I’m on a call with other folks, I will see that they are run indeed the same way.
PAIGE: Well, either way, regardless of if you’re a woman or not, that’s not a great way to handle a call.
ANGELA: No.
DARCI: I agree. I agree, but it definitely had that related to kind of patronizing and you guys are emotional and you can’t really handle this kind of thing. I was like, whoa what is going on here? So, even in a company that is trying to evolve, those kinds of things happen. To me, the most important way to handle those things is to call people out on it. I think we have developed in some way this culture that — where you get this negative backlash for saying anything, right? And I’m just not going to be a part of that. If I feel uncomfortable with the way something is going down, I’m going to let you know.
PAIGE: If you see something say something, right?
DARCI: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: No, I totally — it’s the biggest problem with privileges. You don’t understand that you have privilege if you have it.
DARCI: Right.
PAIGE: The only way to see it is to not have it.
ANGELA: Right. Or to be called on it.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s — exactly.
DARCI: Yeah.
ANGELA: Perspective shift.
PAIGE: It’s our responsibility too to participate in the conversation. We can’t just sit back and say we wish things were different.
ANGELA: Right.
DARCI: Absolutely. I think it’s really important — I have these two little — I ended up with two sons, and a male dog, and two male cats, and my husband.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
DARCI: So it’s like the alpha-male. I work really hard in trying to call their attention to these kinds of things. Even if it’s just really simple language things.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and from there you can do the show dropdown and find all the Women’s Tech Radio shows. You can also use the contact form to contact us directly, or you can email us WTR@jupiterbroadcasting.com.
PAIGE: The Jupiter Broadcasting website also has our RSS feed or you can find us on iTunes. We’re also heywtr.tumblr.com for transcripts of the show, or you can follow us on Twitter @heywtr.

The post Reformed Litigator | WTR 24 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Network Is Your Net Worth | WTR 23

chris — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 15:35:00 +0000

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Juliet works as the Director of IT and Creative Services for Hearing Care Solutions. She made her way into the tech field because she likes money!

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Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below or also at heywtr.tumblr.com

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: Angela, today we’re interviewing Juliet Meyers who is a friend of mine, and she works for Hearing Care Solutions as an IT and web manager. She wears a lot of hats, and we get to talk about a whole bunch of that in the show.
ANGELA: And I hear she likes money.
PAIGE: I have heard that.
ANGELA: SO, before we get into the show, I want to tell you about how you can support this show. If you like this show, you can go to patreon.com/jupitersignal. That is how you support the whole network. Today represents Tech Talk Today. It is a show that we put on as a thank you for the people that subscribe to our network. By subscribing, you support the shows of the network, not just one in particular. And, as I mentioned, Tech Talk Today is the thank you show. You can also look forward to some interviews because we will be at Linux Fest Northwest this weekend, and it is going to be amazing. We hope to get some interviews and just some good content to talk about in a future show.
PAIGE: Women’s Tech Radio will be there along with most of the other hosts of the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, so come by and say hi if you’re there.
ANGELA: Yep, it’s in Bellingham, Washington.
PAIGE: And we started our interview today by asking Juliet to explain what she’s into in IT now.
JULIET: Hi there. My name is Juliet and I’m really excited to be on the show today. I’m the director of IT and creative services for a hearing aid company, and my role is to support all of our WordPress sites, of which there are multiple, desktop support as well as doing all the Photoshop, managing all the social media. I’m really a jack of all trades for my company, on top of trying to manage my VM ware boxes. I really run the gamut between doing more local box stuff as well as some of the server stuff, and as well, of course, running around and chasing people down through the internet for various different tasks, things like that. And, it’s a really varied role and I’ve learned a ton in the last couple of years, so I’m really, really excited to get to talk a little bit about it today.
ANGELA: So, any hats. I think that is a common theme of a lot of our interviews. IT can’t be pegged down to just one particular task. It’s not a button pushing job, that’s for sure. Like, not one single tasks. Can you elaborate on the social media aspect of what you do?
JULIET: One of the things that I do, I do a lot of the SEO installs for our various different websites, and then I also deal with some of the social media aspect. Social media is something that I have worked with throughout my last four jobs. I was a super early Twitter adopter. I think my Twitter handle is from 2007, my original one. I got to watch social media evolve. I used to be a community manager actually, for a company that went from having one million users to 13 million users.
ANGELA: Wow.
JULIET: Yeah, that was an experience. I’ve got some war stories from that. I used to work for a group called MapMyFitness and so I had the pleasure of watching them grow from an angel invested company all the way through to three rounds of VC funding and they actually got bought out by Under Armor in the last year, after I departed the company, but I really got to see social media as it started to grow. Back when they were just starting the F5 conferences, things like that.
PAIGE: So, do you enjoy your social media role?
JULIET: I do. The demographic that I work for is actually 55 and over, so a lot of the social media that I do presently is more answering questions and kind of directing people to the website. So, you know, we don’t have — we have more of a passive social media presence at the moment than we do an active one, where you might see in a startup or a tech firm.
ANGELA: Now, does that mean that the hearing aide company, I mean obviously mainly is geared towards elderly, but do you offer children’s hearing aids and young adults?
JULIET: We can, mostly we do a lot of Medicare and Medi-Cal, Medicaid.
ANGELA: Oh, okay, sure. Right.
JULIET: So, the majority — we have done children’s aids, but they are the rare exception, not necessarily the rule. But we do have some individuals who come in through Facebook every now and again, but it’s important for SEO and SEM to have those social media links and to push your blog. We get a lot of blog traffic, actually, through a couple of our different sites. So, that’s been really interesting to see. Obviously that’s a big deal in terms of your SEO rating.
ANGELA: Right. You know, interestingly enough, even though elderly is your target demographic, it’s probably their kids helping them –
JULIET: Yep, exactly.
ANGELA: – getting the hearing aids. So, yeah, it’s definitely not all for not.
PAIGE: That’s interesting, because I was actually going to ask. It’s fascinating to me that you’re even getting questions on social medial about stuff.
JULIET: We do. You know, it’s funny, if you talk to — obviously you’ve got kind of the newer end of social medial, but the kids now, like the tweens, you early 20s looks at Facebook as the old people network.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh, no way.
JULIET: I kid you not. I kid you not.
PAIGE: No, that’s true.
JULIET: It breaks my heart. I remember when — I mean, obviously you guys do too — when Facebook and Myspace started hitting the scene.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: Well, when Facebook first came out you had to have a .edu to even get on.
JULIET: That’s correct.
PAIGE: You had to be in college.
JULIET: Exactly, which is why I didn’t join initially, because I thought that was elitist.
ANGELA: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I’m like no, Myspace is fine.
JULIET: Right. I had two Myspace profiles, one for my radio persona and then one for me, because I used to work in radio. I used to be cool.
ANGELA: That’s news to me.
JULIET: But, it’s really fascinating to see — because both of my parents are well over 55 and they both have Facebook pages. They both use them to connect with family. So Facebook is not what it once was. I mean, what it is, one in six people on the planet has a Facebook.
ANGELA: Geez.
PAIGE: Yeah.
JULIET: I think I read that statistic somewhere on the internet, which means it has to be true.
PAIGE: Statistics don’t lie.
ANGELA: As long as it was @fact on Twitter I think you’re good.
JULIET: Right.
ANGELA: I believe everything that one says, no.
JULIET: Clearly you should. And I believe everything Reddit tells me, so we’re about even.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: So, you’ve talked some about SEO, and for those in the know, what does SEO mean/stand for?
JULIET: SEO is Search Engine Optimization. You’ll also occasionally read SEM, which is Search Engine Marketing. What that is, is basically trying to kick Google in a way that Google likes to be kicked to put your webpage up at the top.
PAIGE: Okay, and is that a skillset like you went to college for to learn search engine marketing or whatever?
JULIET: No. Yeah, right, no. I’ve been out of college a while. So, my degree is actually in broadcast journalism. My background is in television and radio. I know of organically — that’s a fun word — fell into this area of tech. My journey kind of started — I left Las Vegas and CBS in 2009 and actually got a job here in Denver working as a quality assurance tester. My background for QA is actually in video games. I worked for Petroglyph Studios for a number of years (inaudible) out of Las Vegas. And I think they have a new game out. They always have a new game out. I don’t recall what it is, but — Grey Goo, I think is the name of it. Anyway, I started doing quality assurance and testing for MapMyFitness in software and I ended up moving into their customer service division, which included all of — there was 12 employees when I started and I think it was around 100 when I departed. So, I ended up in customer service and became their CSR Manager, and that meant I was doing all of the software testing and then doing all of the releases on Facebook, all of that fun stuff on Twitter, and through all of their different marketing channels. So, I kind of learned about SEO and SEM in the field as it was becoming more prevalent around 2010. So, I just got very lucky in that I got to grow up with the position and kind of grow into SEO marketing. It was a huge part of what we did for MapMyFitness, because everything had to be very geotagged. Which is to say, I live in Austin, Texas, and I want to find all of the great runs or cycling routes. And so, everything that we did for that company was very, very built into — we actually had a great development team — everything was very, very stringently built into the code to encourage people to, when they Googled trail Austin, Texas, that’s what would come up. So it’s a marriage of marketing as well as an agile development team, and I mean that more in the actual term of agile, not just the developmental style.
PAIGE: Obviously, you didn’t start in tech, and you’ve kind of wound up in tech. What was that moment like or kind of the transition? Why the transition? What kind of spurred you to get out of radio to move over to do QA?
JULIET: I like money.
PAIGE: I can understand that story.
ANGELA: I like money.
JULIET: Yeah, that’s really the base part of it. I was living in Las Vegas and I worked for NPR for a number of years, and that was absolutely fantastic. It was a great experience, and I did a lot of different things for them, and then decided that I wanted to travel a little bit more. So, I wandered off to Guam for six months. Came back to the United States and just kind of wanted to get back into radio, but I wanted to get back into commercial radio. Commercial and non-profit radio are very, very different, and I wanted to live that lifestyle, but part of the joy and detriment of radio is that it is a lifestyle. You are literally eating, sleeping, and breathing radio. I mean that is — that’s all of it. So, I went back to school, go another set of certifications and got into it. Had a great time, met some really interesting people, did some interesting things, and then decided that I didn’t want to work three jobs to support my radio habit, because the only way you can truly support yourself in radio is if you have the morning show or you are the afternoon drive show and/or have an wealthy spouse. So, I worked four jobs, 70 hours a week to support the radio habit.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh. Wow.
JULIET: Yeah, I loved it though. I mean, it was great. I did it for a number of years, and it was fantastic, but then I kind of was starting to stare down the barrel of my 30s and a buddy of mine said hey we have an opportunity, why don’t you come out to Denver and I said I really would like to stop working like a crazy person.
ANGELA: Okay, so I have a question.
JULIET: Sure.
ANGELA: In my background, I worked for five years at a medical supply company, and I started in the shipping department and worked my way up. Then I moved to purchasing, and then I moved upstairs to customer service, and then I kind of just became the operations manager without the title.
JULIET: Oops.
ANGELA: Oh, it’s fine. It’s because there was an operations manager, but anyway, the point is, I had to learn all about the billings aspects and all the different — have you had to learn that and has that been an adjustment? Do you enjoy it? What is your level of participation?
JULIET: I love my job right now. Every day is different for me. It’s fantastic. I get to — you know, from the little things of why doesn’t my printer work to, oh God, oh God, it’s on fire, why are the servers not responding. Oh God, Oh God, please help. Crisis management is something I’m very accustomed to when you work in radio and there is flooding happening, or you have to suddenly change things, or someone says a naughty word on the air. There are a series of fire drills that go with that. And then I jumped directly from that particular pan right back into the fire, which is to say a startup. And anybody who has worked in a startup knows what that comes with. It is like a four letter word. I still had PTSD from something called the Tour de France. So, crisis management is something that I live for, I’m very comfortable in, and I’m very lucky that the company I work for now is actually run and managed by women. All of our executives — the majority of our executives, excuse me, are women who are exceptionally skilled in their field. They’re visionaries in their field and are absolutely fantastic. So, you know, I’ve been given the opportunity to really learn how to use a VM ware machine. Obviously, my background was not necessarily in that. I have an extensive Photoshop background, so I’ve gotten to learn more about CSS. I’ve gotten to really get to know WordPress in a very intimate fashion, because we do a lot of — we are very agile in our website development here. So, we make a large number of changes, and so it’s my job just to never say no. So, I’m sure you guys understand where that goes.
PAIGE: That is the IT magic, right? Never say no.
JULIET: Right. So, my job is to say yes and get it done as (inaudible) and with pizazz and a smile on my face, and I absolutely love the company I work for. I cannot say enough good things about them. They take great care of their team members, and empower their executives and their management to make those decisions that are going to make the company better. We are doing something amazing. We are really helping people get hearing aids, because it’s a bloated market. People can pay up to 3,000 — Three, four, $5,000.00 per hearing aid and we offer them for significantly less, so I get to go home feeling good about what I do.
PAIGE: Yeah, that’s huge is when your job feels like it makes a difference. What is the hardest part for you? You like the crisis. It seems like you like the learning and the job. What are your pain points with IT?
JULIET: I have learned a lot, but there are still some things that I don’t necessarily understand. You know, when something doesn’t work, I use an Asterisk phone system and I don’t program in Asterisk, in fact, I don’t program much in anything, except maybe HTML. I’m a WordPress jockey, I’m not a dev. So, when I run into something where I’m going — my problem is maybe, you look at a problem and you know it’s above your skill level, and it’s that moment of I need to get everything back online and back okay, but I’m not exactly sure how to do that. Fortunately, we have a wonderful offsite IT team that I can call on and say hey guys, this is above my pay grade, so what’s broken. And they’re fantastic. They’ve actually been great tutors and have been very helpful. So, it’s been a really, really good experience. But definitely my challenges are when I come across something where I just have absolutely no idea. I had to teach myself Active Directory. I had to teach myself how to deal with a Microsoft Exchange server. I have several things that run on SQL. While I’ve done a ton of SQL quarries, which I hate by the way, if I had to choose one thing to hate, I’m going to go with SQL quarries.
PAIGE: That’s not a bad choice.
JULIET: Yeah, I don’t feel like it is. I think my biggest challenge — I don’t — I think if I worked in a different company that had a different management — I think if I had a different management team my experience would be very different. I remember in other companies there’s that jockeying for tech supremacy, or who knows the most things about X, Y, and Z. And I have an incredibly supportive management team. I think probably dealing with the Mac is probably my least favorite. Fortunately, my boss, the COO of the company is fantastic and speaks Mac more fluently than I do.
PAIGE: Yeah, that tech superiority, I’ve definitely run into that. I think one of the biggest problems I had when I was working in IT was the IT culture where what you know is what makes you valuable, so sharing what you know is not necessarily a good move on your part. And so kind of breaking down those walls of, hey let’s make this information open, it’s all online anyway now guys. Like, we have to be a team.
ANGELA: Yeah.
JULIET: Stack overflow is your friend.
PAIGE: But especially with geek culture, what you know and how smart you are is how valuable you are. Kind of breaking those barriers down is very difficult in some of these older (inaudible) IT departments. So, that’s really cool that you found a space that that’s not the case. Very rare.
JULIET: I’m so protective of my company, because they have been so good to me, but it is rare. And you find that, I think, more in male dominated culture. In some of my previous companies, and I won’t name names, people were retained because of the knowledge that they have, or because they built something that was vital. Even though they had no business being in the company anymore. They were jaded. They were bitter. They were upset.
PAIGE: Yeah.
JULIET: But they were retained because they had a certain skillset or because they had coded something that only they knew how it worked. Because you run into that technical debt issues if you want to try and fix that particular code base.
ANGELA: That’s a great term for it, technical debt.
JULIET: I did not come up with that term. I stole that from someone else. It’s a buzzword.
PAIGE: It’s a perfect duplication of the word though. It is that, you know, you have to pay back this technical debt or you have to deal with some jerk. Your choice.
JULIET: Yep.
PAIGE: And most companies are going to choose the jerk, because it’s cheaper.
JULIET: Yep, it’s so expensive to bring on new people, especially at that level.
PAIGE: It is really fascinating once you dig into HR management at all, is like the most expensive part of people is onboarding. We are very, very expensive to onboard.
ANGELA: Oh yes.
JULIET: Yep.
PAIGE: Your productivity in most companies doesn’t hit its normal until at least six months in.
JULIET: Yep. And it’s a miserable place to be in. I mean, fortunately we’re not bringing any high-end tech people out there, but even my call center representatives or any of that kind of middle management section, it’s a long time before they’re onboard. And we find that here, even though we’re not an overwhelmingly technical company.
PAIGE: You’ve talked a lot of about learning a lot of different things on the job. What are you favorite resources?
JULIET: My boss.
PAIGE: Nice.
JULIET: Honest to God, she’s my favorite resource.
PAIGE: So, that one on one kind of mentorship almost, is really super valuable for you?
JULIET: You know, being able to sit down and talk to somebody who — because her background is actually in — she did a ton of QA work. She’s done project management. She’s extremely valuable and she knows the business so, so well. The team here is absolutely the best resource that I have. My peers are fantastic. My bosses are fantastic. That’s really a great resource. But, in terms of tech, if I run into something that I have no idea on or my boss has no idea on, but it’s still my responsibility, and it’s not something I can hand off to our offsite folks, Skype and G Chat to be perfectly frank. I have a huge network of friends who are developers, who are DBAs who I’m still in contact with. And so when I run into something that I just can’t seem to crack, I will absolutely reach out to them. Either they’ll direct me to a blog or they’ll direct me to something that they’ve worked on, or they’ll simply write the SQL query for me.
ANGELA: Yay.
PAIGE: So, you’re living the, your network is your net worth?
JULIET: Yes. And that is true in my personal life as well. My skillset is my Verizon network. I’ve got friends who spent the last few years working in WordPress, and so when I run across something that’s rough like that, really it’s your ability to use Google. How good is your Google-Fu. If you don’t have a network to reach out to, how good is you Google-Fu?
PAIGE: Alright, so one more question on that. How do you get over that fear of asking questions, because I think a lot of people that we talk to kind of have that initial fear. And a lot of people that I talk to who are just getting into software are like, you know, I don’t want to sound dumb, or I don’t want to feel like a burden. What kind of let you have that transition to not feel that way?
JULIET: I spent a lot of time interviewing people. I’m an extrovert, unlike most of my comrades in tech. I know there is a lot of introverts in this field, and it makes sense because you truly geek out about this stuff. Like, I could I could sit here and talk about Google algorithms for hours, but I think it’s — getting over that hurdle for me is understanding that I didn’t start out in this field. I accept that here are, I know nothing John Snow. I — there is a lot of kind of — there’s a lot of sections of this that I know nothing about, and I’m okay with that. But the only way to learn is to ask. And more importantly, most tech folks, if you ask them, they’ll talk ad nauseum (sic) about this stuff. They absolutely love to goob about it. I have a lot of experts in various (inaudible). Like, I’ve got people who work for cloud storage companies who could talk endlessly. I’ve got a buddy who’s an evangelist for Solid Fire, one of the cloud companies out in Boulder, Colorado, because that’s where all the cool tech things are these day, apparently. So, it’s human nature. Folks like to talk about what they do for a living. They like to talk about tech. Really, just asking them, they’re happy to yammer about it.
PAIGE: Yeah, the one thing that I’ve found is that most geeks are introverts, which is always hard to deal with, but they have passions and that’s what makes us geeks. Being passionate about something is why we call it geeking out on something. So, if you can kind of find those people in your network or meet those people at meetups, and find their geeky thing. You’re like, oh that’s the thing I need to know about.
ANGELA: And then they turn extravert, just momentarily.
JULIET: Yeah.
PAIGE: You just pull the string on a little toy that talks and it just goes. Very cool. Actually, I think that’s actually an interesting thing that you brought up is the art of the interview. I think, you know, I got really super into radio and the PRN stuff, and I love the art of the question. I think kind of setting that, as a geek, because I geeked out on it, I feel like I was able to incorporate that skill too. I would also recommend if you’re feeling like you don’t even know how to start a conversation, check out interviewing.
JULIET: Listen to NPR for a few hours, Morning Edition or Fresh Air.
PAIGE: Yeah, totally.
I had one other question as we wrap up.
JULIET: Sure.
PAIGE: What software piece do you spend the most of your day in? What are your tools of the trade for your job?
JULIET: Photoshop I think is at the tippy, tippy top. What is Chrome for $500 Alex. I love Chrome. I love the extensions on that. I’ve got CSS viewer, I cannot live without. I cannot live without that plugin, oh my God.
PAIGE: You’ve got to try Firebug, Juliet, I’m telling you.
JULIET: Oh, if I’m in Firefox and I’m QA’ing, Firebug 100 percent.
PAIGE: Oh, they put Firebug in Chrome now too.
JULIET: Really?
PAIGE: Yeah.
JULIET: Oh, I need that. I need that a lot. I thought I could only use it in Firefox so I have both browsers. So, if I’m doing QA work or something is not working, Firebug is absolutely my go to.
PAIGE: Yeah, awesome dev tools.
JULIET: So good. So good. There’s a couple of other ones that I use. Really, the Adobe suite, because I do a lot of PDF conversions, so In Design, I spend a lot of time in In Design. Obviously, WordPress, WordPress, and more WordPress. I can’t live without Dropbox. Microsoft Office, they’ve done some cool stuff with PowerPoint recently. I know it’s really rare to actually give props to Microsoft for anything, but I really do love PowerPoint, as well as Excel. But yeah, I think Photoshop and Chrome are really where I spend the majority of my day. There are so many good resources just (inaudible) as it is. That’s really where I spend a lot of my time. And I can’t live without Spotify, just for the record.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can contact us using our contact form at www.jupiterbroadcasting.com , which is also where you can go to the show’s dropdown and look at all the Women’s Tech Radio episodes that have been released. There you will also find the transcription of the episodes, which you can also find at www.heywtr.tumblr.com.
PAIGE: You can also check us out on iTunes or follow us on Twitter at heywtr. If you have a moment, take the time to leave a review on iTunes and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter – transcription@cotterville.net.

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