Greater Than Code 463l7

01:03 - Not Giving Into Peer Pressure 02:31 - Reaching Outside of the Accessibility World (Demystifying Accessibility) Everyday Accessibility by Dr. Michele A. Williams Thinking About Disability Until It’s Everyone’s Normal Way of Thinking Power Structures and Erasing Innovation Recognizing Specialty Cormac Russell: Four Modes of Change: To, For, With, By 12:37 - The Real Work of Accessibility: Organizational Change Taking a Stance and Celebrating Innovation Inclusion 17:52 - Avoiding Dysfunctional Ways of Working The 5 Principles of Human Performance: A contemporary update of the building blocks of Human Performance for the new view of safety by Todd E. Conklin PhD Context Drives Behavior How Leaders Respond Matters Set Up The System So The Right Thing Is Easy 26:46 - Moral Obligations and Social Norms: Top Down PAPod 36 - Martha Acosta Returns - The 4 Things Leaders Control Roles Processes and Practices Values/Norms Incentives 31:20 - Personas: Translating Ideas and Principles Into Action Software Security: Building Security In by Gary McGraw 37:04 - Putting Accessibility Into Action Knowledge Building: Iterate Giving Access “Appreciate the bunt.” Clearer Consequences Greater Than Code Episode 162: Glue Work with Denise Yu 51:06 - “Disability Dongles” – Liz Jackson The Lows of High Tech – 99% Invisible Infrastructure Disables Blind Navigation The Models of Disability The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me by Keah Brown Reflections: Michele: Finding room for everyone to provide their perspective. John: The real solutions are infrastructural. Rein: Accessibility has to be built-in throughout the process of building and deg software. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: REIN: Hello and welcome to Episode 257 of Greater Than Code. I'm your co-host, Rein Henrichs, and I'm here with my friend, John Sawers. JOHN: Thank you, Rein, and I'm here with our guest, Michele A. Williams. She's the owner of M.A.W. Consulting (Making Accessibility Work). Her 16 years of experience include influencing top tech companies as a Senior Experience Researcher and Accessibility Consultant, and obtaining a PhD in Human-Centered Computing focused on accessibility. A W3C-WAI Invited Expert, international speaker, published academic author, and patented inventor, she is ionate about educating and advising on technology that does not exclude disabled s. Welcome to the show, Michele. MICHELE: Thank you so much, John and Rein. Thanks for having me. JOHN: You are very welcome and we'll start the show as we always do by asking our standard question, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MICHELE: I don't think I have the most creative answer to this. [laughs] I kind of hate those, “Oh, tell us something fun about yourself.” But the thing I thought about that came to mind was my ability to not give into peer pressure. [chuckles] And some ways that manifests for instance, I have a technology background and yet I'm almost the least technical person like I was probably one of the last people to get a smartphone. I love my flip phone and you couldn't take it from me. So this idea that everyone's doing this social media, all of that, I just ed Twitter last year. So I do things dagnabbit; when I need it, not necessarily just because there's groundswell. So I would say that's pretty good superpower. JOHN: All right. So you gave some examples there in your personal life with technology and social media. I assume that that's also a fairly powerful capability in a business context as well. MICHELE: I think so. Particularly when you're advocating for say, disabled people who aren't necessarily always advocated for, it definitely helps to have a more strong will and the ability to take a stance that turns others rather than consistently feeling like you're being turned around about what others want you to do. So I agree with that, thanks. JOHN: [chuckles] Excellent. And so it looks like you've been involved in the accessibility world on a number of different angles and capabilities and so, what have you found to be the most impactful of those? MICHELE: I tend to want to reach people who are outside of the accessibility world. Unfortunately, I think sometimes accessibility people can tend to talk to other accessibility people a little bit too much. I tend to like to recognize that it is something that everyone in the world should know a little something about. It is an expertise, but there are some ways that everyone can do it. I just recently wrote an article for A11Y Project called Everyday Accessibility. That's when you're making a Word document, for instance, using the Ribbon, using headings, and buttons, or bulleted lists. So I tend to want to bring everyone on board, and demystify accessibility and make it more attainable and easier to grasp and that feels so much like this expert field that takes years to break it down to those tangible pieces that still make a big difference. REIN: One of the things that I hear a lot when abled people are advocating for accessibility is, “Sure, this helps disabled people, but you should care about it because it helps abled people, too.” How do you feel about that? MICHELE: So that's a conversation that's been coming up a lot, too and I have a particular colleague that sent me their response, for instance and it's a stance that I don't particularly align with because the problem with that stance is you end up keeping the status quo. So there are real consequences to being in a society that does not value disability and you, as someone who doesn't have a disability, do not feel those effects. So until we are a more equitable society, we do have to call out the characteristics that make someone have negative effects. So the reality is yes, there are things like situational impairments, which is when the situation you're in mirrors the impact of a disability such as walking and texting—you're not seeing out of your periphery—or there's temporary disabilities, like you've broken your arm, and then there's just the natural process of aging. All of that is true and you can also figure deg for your future self for that last part. But again, I think that we have to be very mindful that right now we need to overemphasize and think about disability until it is our normal way of thinking. REIN: It also seems like it's conceding the ground that doing what's right for disabled people is enough of a justification. MICHELE: Explain that a little bit more, what you mean by that. REIN: So when you say it helps disabled people, but it also helps abled people, it seems to me like you're saying it's not enough for me to just say that this helps disabled people. I have to give you another reason. MICHELE: Absolutely, absolutely, and that ties back into ableism and the invisibility of disability and the devaluing of disability. Like you said, it's like a disabled person is not enough. It has to also include absolutely right with that way of thinking and that's another reason not to go that route of segmenting it in that way. JOHN: I think this ties into something that you had mentioned earlier that I find really interesting, this idea that able people are doing something for disabled people. MICHELE: Yes, and that's the big thing. When you say like, “What's been on your mind lately?” That's the one that comes to mind and it comes to mind for a couple of different reasons. None of them new, none of them – I did not discover any of this; people have been saying this for decades upon decades. But for me, my personal experience, I will give a talk, an accessibility talk, I might explain something about say, screen readers, or some other technology, or a particular disability and then the response is, “Well, it should work this way,” or “We should do this.” There's a lot of solutioning around what I've just presented without any context of ever having met say, a disabled person, or particularly a person in the disability community that has been talked about and that comes, I think from this idea, a couple of things. One, again, this idea of a power structure where, “Well, I'm doing this for you, disabled person.” Not understanding the empowerment that the disabled person has, or this misunderstanding and again, invisibility of disability in spaces like tech innovation and not understanding, okay, that touch screen you're using, that text-to-speech you love, those captions that you use at the bar; all of these things [chuckles] came from disability. We erased the innovation that came from someone deg for themselves and deg for their ability and it's assisted technology and therefore, it's an add-on when it's for disabled folks, but it's innovation when it's for people who don't have disabilities. I think we need to have a lot more discussion about this, particularly in spaces like experience, where we're supposed to be all inclusive and all about the . There's some ways that we really are reinforcing this mindset and this power structure, for sure. JOHN: So I want to check my understanding of what you're saying, just to make sure. Are you saying that when you present a problem, accessibility problem, the abled people, the other UX designers, the other people who want to be helpful jump in with, “Oh, we can do this, we can do that, or that” rather than saying, “Well, let's go talk to some disabled people and find out what they need and let that guide how we solve this problem rather than us just being like, ‘Oh, it would be great if dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.’” MICHELE: So to two stages to that. For the first one yes, that's the first thing that happens. In the assistive technology, broad accessibility world, this manifests in some very familiar ways. The first is the blind navigation. Every year, some engineer thinks they've solved blind navigation, pedestrian navigation. Meaning they’ve created a belt with vibrations on the left and right with an Arduino, or something and they go, “You don't need a cane anymore because it's going to vibrate left when you need to turn left and right when you need to turn right, and you can walk like a sighted person,” or some variation of that—robot guide dogs, smart cane, something like that, or the sign language gloves, or the stair climbing wheelchair. There's these sort of assistive technologies that always come out with very little context around whether it's actually happening, whether it's actually needed. But then there's something John, about what you said, too about let's see what people need and we'll build it. We have to be careful even with that, too because that assumes that I can't build for myself and that's not true either. [chuckles] Disabled folks are the most innovative people because the world is not accessible. There is a such thing as a specialty. Like I have an accessibility specialty, I have a design specialty, but I think we often think that’s someone without a disability. No, a disabled person can also have these specialties, or they can be someone who has the idea of what they need and you're partnering with them with your specialty in say, design to create those solutions. So again, I think we have to be very careful about our wording and our viewpoints of what's actually happening. REIN: There's a framework that I've been using for this that actually comes from aviation safety and there's a European aviation safety magazine where Cormac Russell published an op-ed called Four Modes of Change: To, For, With, By. The idea is that change to is the mode where change has done to us without us. So this is a sort of authoritarian top-down thing. We’ve got no say in the matter. It's not even necessarily for our benefit. Then change for is a benevolent top-down approach. “I'm trying to help you, but I'm the one who decides what to change.” Change with is a participatory co-creating the change. And then change by is change done by us for us where if I'm, for example, a manager, my role would be find out what you need so you can make the changes you want to make. MICHELE: Absolutely. Perfect. Thank you. I knew there was some reference. This appears in disability justice spaces, in any kind of space where you're talking about inclusion, we know that sometimes inclusion can be code for do things the way that the current power structure does it. Do things the way that the current people in charge of comfortable and assimilate rather than no, we're actually going to allow you to be your authentic self and come into these spaces. Part of the reason this has also been on my mind is because I fit into some of these other spaces as a woman and as a Black person. I think that sometimes my cohorts think well, because we have experienced some of that in our lives, we are immune to them giving that out to others. So as a Black person, a woman, even someone with intersectionality, I can't possibly do that to do was done to me to someone else. But we don't realize how much ableism is steeped into our society, such that it is very easy to do that with disability and not even realize it and not even realize you have the mentality that someone is inferior to you, incapable, and particularly when the disability has to do with neurological, or anything that we really don't understand. But even still, even that kind of categorization can go away because the idea is that any sort of disability triggers usually some sort of ableist response and these things can happen even if you've experienced it yourself. JOHN: So like so many of the other things we discussed on this podcast, it sounds like the real work of accessibility is organizational change. It's getting the power structures to change to allow these things to come into being rather than forcing them in there, or trying to – like you were saying, not forcing the change on the disabled people to fit in. MICHELE: I've been thinking about the roots of this, for sure. And thank you for that. Unfortunately, capitalism drives a lot of this and again, if we're talking specifically more to tech worlds and say, including accessibility into your tech, part of that is just because the buy-in sometimes comes from the internal stakeholders, not the end customer. Again, if you're not mindful, not careful, and don't have leadership that are careful. So the dirty little secret is for instance internally yes, you may be making education software for students, but you're really marketing to the teachers who are going to buy it, and you're then even more so really marketing to whoever the management structure is internally who's going to approve it to even be on the market. So you get further and further away from actually helping a student because you have all these other checks that it needs to impress, or you need to make the case for similar to what we were saying earlier, you have to make the case for disability. For instance, you have to say, “Well, blind people to do this.” You get this pushback of, “Well, blind people don't do that so we don't have to worry about it and you keep moving on.” So there is a shift that is hard, but I do think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about taking a stance. I think that people do need to individually start to take the stance that that may be how we do things now, or how it may even need to be done. But we do want to be careful buying into that completely because it's going to perpetuate the same. We know that that power dynamic internally of who the stakeholders are, again, also sometimes doesn't reflect the diversity of who we are deg for. We're going to keep getting the same result if we're not super mindful and super careful to take the stance that we are going to care about the diversity of the end s, the people that ultimately will have their hands on what we're making and celebrate that oftentimes those best solutions, again, come from the community who are doing the work. So celebrating the innovation that comes from being tied back to those end s rather than thinking the solution has to come from within. So changing that mindset around this difficult, but it takes taking a stand and recognizing it, too. JOHN: So it's trying to change my thinking around to the by style change around accessibility and my context is on the team of web developers who develop apps that are eventually used by some disabled people. So I'm trying to think about obviously, we need buy-in from the power structures as a company and to spend time on the work, but deciding what work gets done needs to be – that's where the inclusion comes in and I'm curious about what the steps are there that helped me get to that point where those people are included MICHELE: So here’s a few ways that that comes about. One of it could just be, okay, this is the feature we're doing and we're going to make sure that this feature that we're doing—however that came about—is assessable. That can come from anything from how you're going to code, like making the decision to use standardized elements that come with accessibility built-in, or whatever knowledge building you can do internally to just bake it into how you are creating that feature. Then there is what is the feature and making sure that that, if nothing else, is as inclusive as possible, or at least not exclusionary. You're not making a feature that will exclude people. Again, that comes from an understanding of who is the audience and making sure everyone understands that. No one, I don't think has fully solved for how to make accessibility the thing that everyone knows does – it's difficult. It takes time. It takes training. It takes science from top down as well as then knowledge from the bottom up. It's a journey. But I think that there are places where decisions are made, that you know you're going one way, or the other, whether it's, I'm using a div, or a button, [chuckles] whether it's we're going to wait to put captions, or we're going to go ahead and build in time to do that, whether it's, again, we're going to put in this very visual feature, or we're going to take a little bit more time to understand how to have an alternative to that feature. So there's lots of places where you can be very intentional, that you are going to take the steps to learn about accessibility from your point of view and then incorporate it. REIN: So let's say that your VP of engineering mandates that every project has to meet a certain accessibility score, or something like that, but you don't train the developers. So you were saying top down and bottom up have to come together. I have seen things like that lead to some pretty dysfunctional ways of working. MICHELE: I can see that [laughs] and I think part of that comes from a misunderstanding that accessibility is not just something you say we're going to do. Like, it's not like we didn't do it because we just simply forgot, or we didn't do it just for reasons that can then you can flip a switch and turn it on. People aren't doing it because they weren't taught it, they aren't fully aware of the diversity of it, they aren't aware of what's required, and then leadership isn't aware. Therefore, that steps have to be taken. So there's a lot of rally around let's be inclusive, let's be assessable, but then there's less so when you learn oh, that means we have to maybe take half of the time to train and disrupt our workflow, or we have to do our workflow differently, or we have to go back to the code we’ve already written and been using for years and fix it. Those are some real decisions and those are some real consequences sometimes to that, too when you're a business that is expected to constantly move forward, but they are decisions that have to be made in order to actually put it in place, not just say you are for it. REIN: Todd Conklin has a book, The 5 Principles of Human Performance, and there are two that I think are especially relevant here. One is that context drives behavior. So if you want to know why someone is behaving the way they do, the thing to look at is the context that they're operating in, and the other is that how leaders respond to matters. When I think about this, I think if you have a design systems team, is that design system built to be accessible from first principles? Is the easy thing to do grab a component that's already designed to be accessible, or is the easy thing to do is throw a div on the page? MICHELE: Yeah, and there are, I think that the number one takeaway is none of it is easy because all of it is late. So there are initiatives like teachaccess.org; we really need to be embedding it in how we even learn the things that we learned, because then it does feel like we're almost disrupting industry to do this. When in reality, we just learned it wrong. [chuckles] We learn to cheat and to make it look and feel the way I want it to look rather than learning that there was a reason there's this thing called a button versus this thing called a div. Now, recognizing, too, though that standards come after innovation. So you can't standardize something that hasn't really even been explored, or even invented yet. So we understand that as you want technology to advance, it's more difficult to then say, “Okay, there's a standard for this and that will guarantee us accessibility.” So for instance, using native HTML elements isn't all, or when we look at mobile, native mobile elements is more difficult to do. This is still a new space, a growing space and so, sometimes we don't often know what that looks like. But that then requires again, that awareness piece of what disability looks like and this is where they're trying to catch augmented reality and virtual reality with XR Access and accessibility initiatives. Because if you're at least aware of the diversity of disability, you can catch it early enough so that when the standards come out again, we're making it less hard. Someone on a I was on last week, talked about like tech debt and this idea of well, it can be overwhelming. Well, if you have less things you need to maintain, it's less overwhelming and that comes from using standards and being aware of standards. You lessen your tech debt; that becomes part of the overall responsibility of standards bodies, for instance. So there are some again, tangible steps that I think just need more awareness and talking about over and over again until we get it right, that can be put in place, should be put in place. Hopefully, it will be put in place to make this less daunting over time. REIN: Yeah, and then on the how leaders respond thing. If someone builds something that's not accessible to you, do you punish them to just drive that behavior underground, or do you say, “Why weren't they able to do it? Do they not have the right expertise? Were they under too much time pressure?” How can I make the context better so that people are more likely to do the behaviors that we're trying to lead them towards? MICHELE: Yeah. Thinking a lot about that, too. So I tend to have two ways. I guess, it's sort of the carrot stick kind of thing, or maybe some other dynamic like that, but we know some people are going to get the altruistic side. Again, awareness. They just weren't thinking about disability. It's not something that's in their life. It's not something that was exposed to them. Once someone is exposed and understands a little bit of the work that needs to be done, they're bought in and they go for it. There are other folks that just are ablest. They just will not care. If it has not affected them personally in their lives, they are going to look – maybe like you said, maybe their motivations are something like money, even though they don't realize they're excluding more consumers. Whatever those things are, they're just not going to buy in. That's when unfortunately things like the threat of lawsuits, or bad publicity has to be the way that you get those folks to turn around, or again, you just do it. [chuckles] So that's when maybe the folks on the ground can just do it regardless and the one thing, I think about is this video that went around with this little baby and there was a parent and a teacher aide. I presume the baby was supposed to be doing their sound it out cards, flashcards, but didn't feel like doing it. The little baby sitting on the floor back turned, the mom and the teachers, they did it. They did the sound out cards. The baby's looking back still playing, but keeps looking back and eventually, the baby goes, “Wait a minute, that's my game,” and next thing you know, they're playing the game. So there is something also, too to like you said, maybe it's just a peer pressure thing. No one else seems to be doing accessibility so why do we have to be the ones to do it? But if the cool kids start doing it, if the company start exposing that they are doing it, if there's enough groundswell, people will just get on board with the thing that everyone is doing, too. So I think maybe there are three ways now—maybe I've added a third in my mind. There are ways – as a experience person, I say experience the person that you're dealing with. Like you said, get in their head, what are they thinking? What do you think they would want? But ultimately, understand that it isn't always going to be because it's the right thing and the faster you learn that, the more you might be able to actually get some results, too. JOHN: Yeah. I like what you said there, Rein about set up the system so that the right thing is easy and I think obviously, there's a lot of work to get to that point where you have the whole system built around that. But once you can get there, that's great because then, like you were saying, Michele, there's so much less effort involved in getting the thing to happen because that's just how everyone does it and you're just pulling the components are, or copy pasting from the other parts of the code that are already accessible so that it that stuff is already built into the process. And then it doesn't have to be quite so much of an uphill. Like even just uphill thinking process where you have to think differently than you used to in order to get the thing done in an accessible manner. MICHELE: Yeah. Again, unfortunately it's not embedded within us to do this, but maybe the next generation will, maybe the next couple of generations If we keep talking about it and we take the effort to start to shift ourselves, maybe it will be the thing that people can't even when they didn't do it. I do feel like we're in a cool moment right now where that might be possible. I'm hearing it more and more. I didn't learn it in school when I was doing computer science and software engineering, but I know some students now that are coming out that are. So I'm kind of hopeful, but the conversations really need to be said aloud and often in order for it to happen, for sure. REIN: You mentioned the larger structural problem here, which is that deg accessible software is a moral obligation and we work in an economic system that's not optimized around moral obligations. Let's put it that way. MICHELE: Yeah. [laughs] That will dollar. [laughs] I think again, there's that school, are we changing that, or we're going to work within it. I think you can do both. Some people should – we should really be tackling both, any kind of inclusion efforts, same thing. Do you do it from within, or outside? Do you work within the structure, or do you dismantle it? I think there's benefits to both. I think there's benefit to basically editing what isn't working about what we're currently doing. There's always an improvement and I tend to look at it that way. It's not so much as it’s down with this and up with that. I think we just need to recognize, as human beings who can evolve and do things different, learn, grow, and get wiser, let's just do that. Let's do what we're doing better and when we recognize that we have a negative effect, let's solution something that is going to work better and just recognize that and do better. It's okay to edit. So I don't think we have to toss our hands up and say, “Oh, we'll never get there because of how this is.” That was invented, too. All of these things are constructs. At some point, the way we do things wasn’t the way we did things; we did things completely differently. Empires can fall and rise and be redone. So we don't have to stay stagnant, but we can, again, start to make these changes. REIN: I think that even within a capitalist system, there's still a place for social norms. There's still a place for deciding which behaviors we're going to accept and which behaviors we're not going to accept and what we're going to do about those. I just wouldn't expect that to be the CEO's job. I would expect that to be the entire community of the company. MICHELE: The entire community with the CEOs. So the two companies that are the pillars, for instance, of accessibility, Microsoft and Apple, you hear their CEOs say, “We do things accessibly.” So it's not necessarily on them to forego stakeholders and stock prices and all of that. Certainly, you can't do too much if you don't have a company, so they have to do what they have to do, but there is still an okay from that and that's part of that top-down. Again, we need training. Is there money in the budget for training? That has to come from management. So there is still a recognition and it's just always beneficial when everyone is on the same page that this is how we operate; the message then doesn't ever get disconnected. It just shifts to the role of a person and they put it into practice in their own particular way. REIN: Martha Acosta, who is one of the few original women in safety science, she says that there are four things that leaders can control, or have leverage over—there’s roles, there's processes and practices, there's values, or norms, and there's incentives. So I think this ties in with what you're saying about what the CEO's job could be. MICHELE: Versus stock prices? Yeah. [laughs] Versus yeah. Which unfortunately is, again, I think it's even upon the CEO to take a stance on what they are going to do with their company and their time. Because certainly, the pressures are coming to them sometimes not necessarily emanating from them. So I think there is opportunity, this is why there's opportunity for everyone to evaluate what are we doing. Like you said, we can decide what is important, how are we going to go about this? And if enough people start to be even more mindful than they were yesterday, shifts are going to inevitably happen. And people who disregard others, discriminate all of these other negative effects that we've seen will inevitably have less effects because the norm will be these other ways that we're trying to include and get better as a society. REIN: So one of the things I like to think about when we have guests, or ask guests to think about, is to think about this challenge from the perspective of a few different people. A few different personas. So I'm a manager, I'm a line level manager and the people that report to me are engineers. What can I do? Or I am a mid-level engineer, what can I do? How do we translate these ideas and principles into action? MICHELE: So what is to understand that there are, for instance, guidelines like there are web accessibility, web content, accessibility guidelines, or author and tool guidelines, because we do need to define what it means. At some point, there needs to be metrics and there needs to be measures that need to be placed to understand, did we do this? One way to do that is to translate those into those various roles. Some of that work has happened and some of it needs to happen. So there's understanding the tangible actions that can and should happen. But I think also, it's simply a matter of deciding that accessibility and inclusion and particularly in my world, disability is just going to be a part of everything. Every check that you make for whatever your role is. You were talking about different frameworks for different levels. Certainly, that's true. I think that we tend to separate out disability from those kinds of conversations as if it's different. It's not different. Making decisions for how you're going to manage your employees should be inclusive of disabled employees. The tools that you want them to use, the ways you want them to work, how “productive” you want them to be, how you're going to measure that. All of that should be mindful of the variety of people that you are ing. Same with I am a developer so that means that I am writing code on behalf of a group of other people and that means I need to know who these people are. It's funny you say personas because—I know that's not probably what you meant, but in my role, obviously that triggers the experience personas, which I'm not a fan of. That's all another podcast. [chuckles] But when we're talking about that so in experience we’re saying, “Oh, we're deg for these people, these target audience per se.” It'll be John who's the manager and he does this on his way to work and then there's Mary. Maybe she's a stay-at-home mom, but uses it this way. Dah, dah, dah, all these other characteristics. And then we'll go so now we need disability personas. No. [chuckles] John can also be quadriplegic. Mary can also have multiple sclerosis. So again, it goes back to the idea that we have separated out and made invisible disability. Oh, taboo. Even the word oh, it’s taboo. Can't talk about disability. REIN: Yeah. Like imagine having a separate persona for a woman, or a Black person. MICHELE: Thank you. We don't do it. We don't do the whites only school and we'll get to the Black people later. We know that intrinsically, but we do it in everything. So same thing particularly when we're talking about inclusion of disability in all of these phases of say, an organization, we go, “And disability.” No, no, no. If we really want to think about it, disability is the equalizer. Anyone can become disabled at any moment at any time, it does not discriminate. It is the one thing that any human being can become at any time and yet we still separate it out as if it's this taboo, or a terrible thing. Now, again, there are negative outcomes of disability. Not saying that, but we have this tendency to segment it in ways that just absolutely don't make sense and aren't necessary and are detrimental and make it more work, so. REIN: There's a book called Software Security by McGraw. It's kind of old now, but the premise is still very relevant, which is that to make software secure, you have to build security in at the beginning, and you have to keep constructing and repairing it throughout the software development life cycle. So it starts with design, but it includes, you talked about different touchpoints in the life cycle, where you want to sort of check in on whether you still are as secure as you think you are. So that includes design. It includes code review. It includes testing. I wonder if this sort of an approach works for accessibility, too; we just sort of bake it into the fabric of how you design soft. MICHELE: It should be how it works. The moniker is shift left. That's absolutely what has to happen to do it well. You have to be thinking about it all the time. Everything that you do. So that's how my mind works now. It took a long time to do that. But now when I'm sending an email and I put a picture in, “Okay, let me put the alternative text.” I'm making a spreadsheet, “Okay, let me do the heading.” Like, I'm always constantly checking myself as I'm doing anything. “Okay, if I'm doing a podcast like this, is there a transcript, or are there captions?” I'm just constantly doing these checks. That takes time to build up, but it is the way you have to do it to make sure nothing slips through the cracks so that all the hard work that say, the design team, or the dev team did, and then QA comes in and doesn't know how to test it. We're all interdependent so it has to be everyone all the time, all throughout the process in order to get it from end to end to work; the weak link in the chain will break that. So very much how it has to go. REIN: It also seems like this there are small, actionable things that you could do to move in this direction. So for example, when you do code review, ask some accessibility questions. Maybe build yourself an accessibility checklist. Now I don't like checklists, but that's a whole other podcast, but it's better than not thinking about it. MICHELE: Yeah. As you're learning something, sometimes the checklist is helpful because you don't yet have it in your own mind and you don't want to forget. Now you don't want to – I'm sure what you're saying is you don't want to tie yourself to the checklist, too. REIN: Yeah. MICHELE: But as you're building up knowledge, yes, there are so many just tangible did I do this things that you might as well just keep a sticky at your desk, or however you want to do it and just start doing those things. Again, we don't have to keep talking about it. It doesn't have to be this revelation of inclusive buy-in in order to put captions on your videos. [chuckles] These things, you know. REIN: Yeah. This also seems like an opportunity for tech leads to do leadership to say, “Hey, so I looked at this and the contrast ratio is a little bit low. Do you think we could punch this up in a code review?” MICHELE: Yeah. The only thing, though is back to the beginning—being careful about these directives, making sure you understand the directives that you're doing because again, a lot of times, particularly when people are new to accessibility, they overdo it. So they hear a screen reader and they think it needs to read like a novel so they want to add in a summary of the page in the beginning, a summary of this section, and they want to overly describe the alternative text, the image down to the pixels. There's some give and take there, too. There's some learning you want to do, but you can iterate. You can learn one piece, get comfortable with it. Okay, now that this next piece. Knowledge building it's just what it is, is what it is. So there's absolutely knowledge building that you can do to get more comfortable and we need everyone to do this. There's certain parts that should be specialty, but unfortunately, the specialists are doing what everyone else should be doing the basics and so, we've got to shift that so that the specialists can do the specialty stuff, the harder stuff that may not quite get – [overtalk] REIN: That's exactly the same problem is having a security person on your team. MICHELE: Absolutely. So it sounds like you all have a focus on implementation. Like you're implementing and you want to know how best to make – I'm turning it on [inaudible]. [laughs] So you want to know how best to make it work for you, or is that what I'm hearing? REIN: I guess, I lean towards practice. I want to understand the theory, but then if I can't put that theory into practice, the theory is not very useful to me. If that makes sense. MICHELE: Absolutely makes sense. My company name is Making Accessibility Work and a lot of what I say is put accessibility into action, because I am very much tied to this idea that you can be absolutely on board with accessibility and not have any clue how to do it. [chuckles] And then the inverse can be true, too. You can absolutely do not care, but because you care about semantic HTML, you're doing more accessibility than the person who cares. There are these places that people can be in their understanding that neither one is actually, or you think one is helping, but the other actually is. I think people think you have to care. You have to want to Sometimes, you know what, you don't. Sometimes I just need you to fix the color contrast, [laughs] or yes, it's great that you care, but in doing so, you're actually, co-opting a message. You care a little too much and you are actually not letting disabled people speak for themselves because you've now discovered accessibility and now, you're all about it. So I think we’ve got to meet in the middle, folks. Let's care, let's do, let's demystify, but also understand there are some harder problems to solve, but understand where those are. Putting headings on the page is not the hard problem we need to solve. Just put the headings, making math and science more accessible, particularly when we've made it so visualization heavy. Yeah, let's go over there. Let's tinker with that, folks and that's where we need to be putting all this massive brain power. We've had Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for 20 years. HTML5, which addressed a lot of semantics for accessibility, has been out a decade. Y'all, hurry up and learn that and let's get that going so we can get over to this harder stuff. Get this brain power over to these more complex issues and newer innovations. JOHN: Yeah. I think if you're one of those people that cares, like you were saying, a little too much, or perhaps just a lot, you can end up with option lock because you want to solve all the problems and then you're just like, “But what do we do? What are we doing here?” Like, I'll just put the headings in, put the alt texts in, we'll start there. You’ve got to get moving. And that's partly where I'm coming from with some of the questions I'm asking is that process of just getting that boulder rolling a little bit so that it takes a little bit less effort to keep going in the future. MICHELE: Yeah, and there's no perfect way to do it. I think everyone's looking for okay, well, how do we do it? You're going to spend a year on how and again, miss the year of what and doing it. It is messy because you're hiring people, you've got people working who don't know how to do it; it's going to be disruptive. We didn't come in with this knowledge. I know you didn't hire people to then train them up and send them to school but unfortunately, you’ve got to do that. People need to know what to do differently, what they're doing wrong. So some of it is going to be experimental, iterative, and messy, but in the end, start giving access. We talk about language even. Do we say disability? Do we say people with? Or do we say disabled people? And do we say differently abled? Even these – okay you know what, the reality is you do all of that and still don't get access. What would be better is if you have a person with a disability at the table to tell you themselves, but you're worried about language and yet can't even hire someone with a disability. So again, it's getting out of these little zones that we sometimes get in and recognizing the real work that needs to be done and can get done today. REIN: I think there's a real temptation to fixate on the hard, or interesting problems in the tech world that might be wanting to build this distributed database with five nines of durability. But your API server has a bug where 1% of the requests are an error. So if you don't fix that, your five nines over here are useless. MICHELE: The flashy thing, yes. [laughs] The shiny thing, we want to gravitate. Oftentimes, there's no glory in what was considered the grunt work, the foundational work. But I think that's where leadership could come in. I heard someone say years ago, “Appreciate the bunts” in baseball that oh, chicks dig the home run. We love the home run, but sometimes, that bunt wins the game. But that's where a leadership can come in and appreciate laying found a scalable foundation of code that does not add to tech debt, or the diminishing of the bugs that you've kept rolling year after year after year, you close 50 of them. That's where, again, a change in mentality of what we value. Sometimes again, accessibility is not put at the front because sometimes it's just code changes that aren't visible to s. So s are going to think you spent a year and didn't do anything to your code, or some of them will. But again, I think that's a messaging and that's an appreciation of really trying to do, and that's even appreciating software engineering versus just COVID. I have a software engineering degree and that's when I realized, “Oh, we're not just supposed to sit down and start hacking away and make sure it runs for the teacher to check it and we're done.” There's an engineering to this, but you have to value that. But also, I think there needs to be clearer consequences like speaking of engineering. If it’s a building, we know the building can collapse. I don't think sometimes we appreciate what can happen if we don't do that foundational work and I think that's a shift overall and then technology and appreciation of that work. REIN: And I appreciate what you did there, which was to subtly redirect me back to the context and to how leaders respond. Because if building that five nines database gets you promoted and fixing that bug doesn't, what are people going to do? MICHELE: Yeah. So what's valued and that's set. Someone sets that. That's made up. You can value whatever you want to value. You can praise whatever you want to praise. Complete tangent, but that takes me to my high school where they were intentional that the students who performed well were going to be recognized by the principal because oftentimes, it was the misbehaving students that went to the principal's office. So the principal knows all the misbehaving students, but doesn't know any of the students that are doing the actual work that the school is asking of them to do. Not trying to get too much into school systems but again, it's an intention that you will honor the work, the unseen work. We do these in other spaces; the behind-the-scenes work, the unsung heroes. That's an intentional step that you can take as well to celebrate that, too. REIN: We have an older episode on glue work and how valuable glue work is, but how rarely it's acknowledged, or appreciated, especially by leadership and also, how it has a gender characteristic, for example. It seems to me like it might be easy to put accessibility in the category of glue work rather than in the category of like you were saying, foundational things that make us have a reliable product and a product that works for everyone. MICHELE: And I don't know if how we've presented technology to consumers plays into that as well. Again, the new flashy wow. The other day, I just looked down at my keyboard on my computer and I just thought about we just take such advantage of the fact that I'm just sitting here typing on the keyboard. Someone had to decide what the material would be that doesn't scratch my fingertips. Someone had to decide how to make the letters so that they don't rub off, or how they light up in the back. There's so much detail that goes into almost everything that we use and we just get so dismissive of some of it. “What's next? Eh, that's okay.” So I think, again, it's a human condition. It’s the human condition to appreciate what people are doing for one another in front and behind the scenes and absolutely. But I think that also ties into, again, ableism, too. We see in assistive technology, or an adjustment because of disability as okay, that thing we can do later. But then when it becomes Alexa, when it becomes the vacuuming robot, when it becomes the new latest and greatest thing, then it's front and center and everyone wants to work on it. But it's the same technology. [chuckles] It's the same reasons that you should do it. It just happens to benefit everyone. It came out of disability, but you didn't want to think about it until you’ve found a benefit for all the “others.” Again, I think that's a human condition we have to correct. REIN: There's a thing that happens once a month on Twitter, which is someone will post an image of pre-sliced vegetables and they'll say, “What kind of a lazy loser needs pre-sliced vegetables?” And then someone will respond, “Disabled people need pre-sliced vegetables.” And then the response to that will either be blocking them, or saying, “Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I had no idea.” I think that there's maybe that dynamic going on here as well. MICHELE: Absolutely what I was thinking about, too, like Nike's shoes recently that you don't have to tie. Well, who doesn't want to sit down and tie their shoes? People who can't sit down and tie their shoes, but that was also a marketing issue. They refused to market it for disability. Like where were the disabled people? Where were the people with chronic illness, or chronic pain, or body size that just does not lend itself to bending over and tying your shoes? Why did it have to be marketed in that other way that then took away the messaging that this is a useful piece of equipment? REIN: Yeah. Like why is this fit model not able to tie their shoes? MICHELE: Exactly. Rather than take the angle that – again, they're all made up. Someone just happened to decide laces. We could have very easily decided this other way at the beginning. We could have very easily decided Velcro was the way. We just, I don't know, somewhere along the way, came up with laces. I think people in general have to go through their own journey of recognizing that what they were told was fact, truth, and stance just with someone's made up thing. Even these companies that we've just hold as pillars started in garages. They may have started in garages a 100 years ago, rather than just 50, or 20 years ago. But these things are just built. So we can build them differently. We can say them differently. It's okay. So taking away that stigma that things have to go a certain way and the way that they've been going, or at least perceived to have been going. We have got to start dismantling that. JOHN: Harking back here, a point earlier about the new shiny is always held up as always better. I read an article recently about prosthetic arms and how everyone's always really interested in building new robotic prosthetic arms. They're the new shiny, they're the cool thing to work on, and people feel good about working on them because they feel like they're helping people who need them. But that in a lot of cases, they're not better than the one that was designed 30 years ago that doesn't do a lot, but has at least a functional hook. They were following one woman through the article who had gotten one of these new ones, but it actually wasn't any better and she ended up switching back to the old one because she could get it to do the things that got her through the day and – [overtalk] REIN: Made with titanium. [laughter] JOHN: And you can clearly see that probably the people that are deg these probably weren't working with people bringing that into the process enough and it was designed for rather than designed by. MICHELE: Absolutely. So Liz Jackson coined the phrase “Disability Dongle.” That's another one that comes up. The prosthetic, the exoskeleton, absolutely. The thing that non-disabled people look at and awe and look at what technology is doing, disabled people are over in the corner going, “That ain't going to help us.” [laughs] If you had asked, we would have told you we don't need that. I think we've also reached a point where we're at the harder stuff and no one's willing to tackle, I don't think always the harder stuff. So for instance, going back to blind navigation, one of the things that makes navigating difficult as a blind person—and I learned this because I talked and worked with like 80 blind people. [laughs] So one of the conclusions that came to with that infrastructure disables blind navigation, you don't need a smart – a lot of people espouse a smart cane. Well, they had this white cane, but it needs an infrared and it needs buzzers and it needs – okay, you're going to give people carpal tunnel. The battery on that is going to die. It's not going to be reliable. And in the meantime, the thing you could have done is educate people on putting stuff at head level. So the way that we design our street signs, for instance, we do everything very car minded. We do a lot of things for cars and we forget people also have to walk and so you put obstacles, or you can educate people about trimming your trees, for instance so people aren't running into them, or how they park their cars so that they're not in the way. Some of it is also just not a technology solution. It may be more an environmental and human education solution, but you can't tell people, who have signed up to work in technology, that they must find a technology solution. So they end up solutioning amongst themselves in ways that actually aren't helpful, but they make themselves, like you said, feel better and they promote within themselves. It's difficult to get people to undo that. JOHN: Yeah, it strikes me like you were talking about the wheelchairs that can go ramps, the exoskeletons, and there are certainly use cases for those sorts of things. But I think the distinction there is those are a solution to make the disabled people more abled rather than making the world more accessible. Like what they need is lower countertop so that in the wheelchair, they can still cook. That's what they need. Not the ability to walk upstairs, or have like you said, this awe-inspiring exoskeleton that just draws more attention to them and probably doesn't even solve most of the problems. MICHELE: I'm just going to say amen. [laughs] That is it. That is the thing we need people to get. So you'll hear about the models of disability, too. Sometimes you'll hear about – you should hear about the models of disability and when people extract that and summarize that, they usually pull out two, which is the medical model, which is generally what we've been under, which is the effects of disability and how that affects the person. Therefore, these things need to happen to overcome and this sort of again, hospital, kind of what the body's doing, or what the mind is doing mindset, which is opposite of one that people often quote, which is the social model. The social model says, “No, no society, the world, my environment is disabling me. If you would just give me something more adaptive, more inclusive, I’d be good.” So a lot of examples of that, I recently read a Kia Brown's book with a book club and you'll have to insert [chuckles] the link. The Pretty One is what it's called. Kia has cerebral palsy and one of the things that was a feat for her was putting her hair in a ponytail and it made you think about scrunchies and the makeup of that. What if we just made the mechanism to have maybe a little bit more to it to grab your hair and put it in the ponytail rather than relying on the fact that you have two hands that you can do that with? So those are the differences in the mindsets of our views of disability that we need people to shift and even go sometimes again, deeper into what it is you're really doing when it comes to inclusion. Are you really being inclusive, or are you saying, “Hey person, come on to what I believe is the way of life”? JOHN: So reflections, then. MICHELE: My reflection, or takeaway would be that my hope is that we can find room for everyone. Everyone who wants to create great tech, everyone who has an idea, everyone who has a contribution. I hope that that doesn't continue to need to filter through say, a non-disabled person, or a certain status of job title. My hope is that we're starting to recognize that there's room for everyone to provide their perspective and it can be valued and it can be included in the ways that we operate at equal opportunity. So that's hopefully, my reflection and my takeaway. JOHN: All right, I can go next. I think really actually the point that that's really sitting with me is what I had just said, which dawned on me as I was saying it, as we were talking in the last minute there about how the real solutions are, like you said, infrastructural. They're changing the form of society to make the disabled person able to do what they need to do rather than bringing them up to the level of whatever was currently built, or whatever that – and even there's a weird value judgment in saying, bringing them up to the level. I'm uncomfortable saying it that way. So just changing the thinking, like you said, the social model is, I think a powerful change and thought process around this, and I'm going to keep turning that one around in my head. REIN: I think for me, I'm coming back to the idea that just like security, accessibility has to be built in throughout the process of deg and building software. You can't have a part of your software delivery life cycle where that’s the only place where you think about accessibility. You can't just think about it during design, for example, and you can't just have a team of accessibility experts that you go to sometimes when you need help with accessibility. It's really everyone's job and it's everyone's job all the time. MICHELE: I love it. I'm going to change the world. [laughs] Special Guest: Dr. Michele A. Williams. Greater Than Code

Greater Than Code Episode #170: The Case for Vanilla JavaScript with Chris Ferdinandi 02:50 - Project Gemini and Text Protocols Always Bet on JavaScript 07:05 - Overusing Analytics & Tracking Scripts Be An Advocate For Your s / Ethical Obligations 12:18 - Innovations: Making Accessibility The Default 14:48 - Ad-Tech and Tooling Partytown Fathom Preact Alpine.js petite-vue Svelte SvelteKit Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? | Transitional Apps with Rich Harris, NYTimes Astro 32:08 - HTMX 46:30 - Frontend Development is Hard SPA’s and Transitional Apps Federated Multipage Apps Micro Frontends Phoenix LiveView t Activity t Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering Reflections: Rein: Vanilla JavaScript + Privacy. Jacob: The web piqued at LiveJournal. Also, encouraging devs to think about what tool would be best for different jobs. Chris: Maintaining privacy on the web. Sign up for Chris’s newsletter at gomakethings.com! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Chris Ferdinandi. Sponsored By: The Local Maximum: Check out this new podcast called The Local Maximum. It's hosted by Max Sklar who is a Machine Learning Engineer at Foursquare. He covers a lot of fascinating topics: AI, building better products, and the latest technology news from his unique perspective. Max interviews a wide diversity of guests, including Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Creators of all types. You can see their bios at localmaxradio.com, and subscribe to The Local Maximum podcast wherever you listen! Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. Greater Than Code

02:47 - Anne’s Superpower: Empathy & Collaboration Feeling Accepted & Creating a Sense of Safety Creating Happy Bubbles Making People Feel They Matter on Teams No Matter Status (i.e. Employees vs Contractors) No Matter Geographical Location/Timezone Equivalence in Remote Work 17:45 - Framing and Shaping Relationships + Communication Changing Company Culture Sharing Concerns with Upper Management “We are all on the same team.” Silence IS a Response Working Through Challenging Conversations 29:47 - Helping People Learn – Work Therapists: Should/Could They Exist? 38:18 - Having Outside of Work: Networking Find Communities First; Individuals Second Attract Your Dream Job @pivotgrowhustle #BlackTechTwitter Making Sure People Know What You Do! 48:20 - Overcoming Job Responsibility Misperceptions Managing Project Ownership and Roles “Secret Agile” Reflections: Arty: Being able to find strength and solidity within yourself so you can be someone that helps to contribute to moving things in a positive direction. Casey: Coaching men on DEI. How could it be successful? Anne: The future of where we need to go as a society, especially a tech-driven society, is to ask yourself how do you bring what you love to the table and to do it with love. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Anne Griffin. Sponsored By: Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. Greater Than Code

01:17 - Danielle’s Superpower: Empathy & Communication 01:56 - Going From the Hospitality Industry => Tech @CodeSchoolQA / twitch.tv/thejonanshow 04:58 - Education Technology (EdTech) Disruption = Reinvention 07:18 - Anthropology + Tech / Working With People Anticipating Needs 10:25 - Making Education Fun + Inclusive Cultural Relevance Revamping Outdated Curriculum Connecting With Kids 16:18 - Transitioning Into Tech 27:57 - Resources Learnhowtoprogram.com Documentation YouTube Community #TechTwitter Virtual Coffee Twitch 32:39 - @CodeSchoolQA / twitch.tv/thejonanshow 34:08 - The Streaming Revolution New Opportunities For Connection Hybrid Events Introvert Inclusive Accessibility Reaching New Markets 39:45 - Making Tech Safe, Secure, and Protected Greater Than Code Episode 252: Deg For Safety with Eva PenzeyMoog 44:03 - Advice For New Devs: Work on Technical Things Sooner Reflections: Mandy: The secret in tech is that nobody knows what they’re doing! Danielle: Ask questions and lean into community. Tech needs you. Arty: Don’t be afraid to reach out to community for help. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 254 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hey, everyone! It's Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest today, Danielle Thompson. Danielle is a newly minted software engineer working in the education technology sphere of the nonprofit world, after making a major career change from working in hospitality and events for many years. As a code school graduate herself, she loves to help demystify tech for others with non-traditional backgrounds and works to open doors into tech with her friends at Code School Q&A, weekly on Wednesday nights at around 7:00 PM Pacific at twitch.tv/thejonanshow. Outside of work, she can typically be found with a nose buried in a book, hanging out with her doggo, and making delicious craft beverages. Welcome to the show, Danielle! DANIELLE: Thanks so much for having me, Mandy and Arty! MANDY: Awesome. It's great for you to be here. So before we get into the meat of our conversation, we always ask our guests the standard question of what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? DANIELLE: Totally. I think that my superpower is a combination of empathy and communication. I think I came by both pretty naturally—popped right out of my mom having both, I'm assuming. But both have definitely been amplified over the years by all sorts of experiences and hardships and just keep working to make them even more of a superpower. MANDY: That's really great. So I want to know about before we dive into your experiences as a new developer, I wanted to know about how you came into technology from your career change in hospitality, because I did the same thing. I was a waitress when my daughter was born 10 years ago and I was working for about a year before I was able to walk out. It was Mother’s Day, my boss was being a complete jerk to me, and I was making enough money at that point that I just said, “You know what? I don't need this. I quit,” and I started my career in tech full-time. So I'm curious about your journey as well. DANIELLE: Yeah. Obviously, COVID has happened in the last couple of years and that was one of the major factors in me getting to this point of leaving hospitality and getting into tech. But I had already kind of been thinking about what comes next. I've been a manager for a few years and was trying to figure out how else I could grow and what new things I can learn and challenge myself with. And outside of ownership, which is a major headache, there wasn't really much that I could push further into, within hospitality. So when COVID happened and I lost my job because I was working as an events and bar manager for a local catering company, it was pretty obvious that things were not going to be coming back for the hospitality industry anytime soon and I needed to figure something else out then. And so, I started looking into different returning to education opportunities because I actually have an anthropology degree, of all helpful things that I could have gotten a degree in. But I found a code school in Portland, Oregon and jumped on that within a few months of COVID hitting to the full-time track and connected with a number of my cohort mates that we started doing the Code School Q&A on Twitch with the director of developer relations at New Relic and have been doing that for almost a year now and have officially made it in the industry as a software developer, too in the last few months. So you can do it, you can get into tech. [laughs] It's pretty funny, too because the type of job that I ended up getting is in education and technology sphere and I actually had a job in ed tech about a decade ago when I was still in college and had a remote job working with some family friends that got me hooked up with their company. And here I am doing something a little bit more in-depth technically than I was doing a decade ago, but it's funny how things come full circle. ARTY: Well, education in particular is something that also really needs some reinvention and innovation and with all the disruption, where do you see that area going? Just curious. DANIELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I feel that a lot of the changes that we've seen in COVID with remote work being such a prominent thing now and people wanting more balanced, more time with their family, more time with their critters, more time just not being miserable and commutes and stuff. I think that that's going to have a really long-term effect on how education happens and trying to make education more quality as well. I think it's really rad what the company I do works for. Our whole mission is to work to make education in America more equitable. So we do that by working very hard to work with experts in the curriculum sphere that ensure that our curriculum materials are as inclusive and culturally relevant as possible, that they are representative of a large and diverse group of people, and they even do a ton of anti-racism work as well and work to embed that within our internal and external culture, as well as the products that we create. So I hope that our company will continue to grow and make changes in the education world in America in general, because I think what we're doing is really, really, really important. ARTY: Definitely important and with all the change and stuff happening, I'm expecting some new and cool and exciting things that do make things better. One of the upsides of lots of disruption is it's an opportunity for us to sit back and rethink how things could be. DANIELLE: Yeah. ARTY: And one of the benefits of not being entrenched in the existing fields of the way things have been is it's also an opportunity to look at all the stuff we're doing with a fresh set of eyes from outside of that existing world and bring some new fresh insights to tech. Maybe my anthropology degree will come in handy in some different sorts of ways. I imagine some of those skills that you learned in that have some applicability in tech as well. Have you found your degree helpful in other ways? DANIELLE: It's funny. I think I ended up using my anthropology degree as a bartender far more than I ever would have as an actual anthropologist. That whole study of humans thing is something that is directly translatable to working with people no matter what field you're in. I feel that both my anthropology degree and my many years of hospitality experience have all led to a specific skillset that is very different from a lot of people that come into tech with more traditional backgrounds especially folks that go to college and get computer science degrees, and then they go to the tech industry and that's all they've ever known. I've known so many other experiences outside of that and my ability to think about what other people need and want, to be able to respond to that, and embed that in all of the work that I do as an engineer to really be thinking about the and the people that are interacting with whatever I'm building and even just thinking about working on a team and how I have so many communication skills built up from what I've been doing for work in hospitality for many years. I think that it definitely gives me a very specific and unique way of moving through the world and way of being an engineer as well. That anthropologist hat definitely comes into play sometimes thinking about like, “Oh, like how do all of these dots connect?” and like, “How does this change over time and how do you see people like doing things differently now?” It's a definitely a fun lens to carry with me. MANDY: Yeah. Having been done hospitality, I'm just shaking my head because – [laughter] I know I've brought so many skills from being in that world for 10, 15 years at one point. DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: Just the way you talk to people and interact with teams and anticipate what other people need before they even know what they need, that's definitely a skill. DANIELLE: Yeah, definitely. I think that whole anticipating needs thing, too, it's like it can be both an internal and external benefit where you can think both about who you're building products for and also who you're building products with, and how best to communicate within teams, especially having management experience. That is definitely at the forefront of my brain a lot of the time, but then also thinking about like, “How can I make the best experience for somebody else that's actually going to be using this? How can I make this easy and intuitive and fun?” Especially within education, have to make sure that things are fun and interesting targeting kids that are K-12; it has to be meaningful, impactful, interesting, and engaging. MANDY: So how do you do that? What are some ways that you and your company make education fun for young kids? DANIELLE: I think I'm still figuring that out. We have many curriculum products that I'm still just touching for the first time, or haven't even looked at it yet and so, there's lots of fun, new things to discover. But I think the types of people that we bring on to work at my company, they're all experts in their field and renowned for the work that they do and so, I think that the quality of people that we bring into work with us and the kind of commitment that they have to work towards making education better and more inclusive, that is incredibly important. And how they also do an immense amount of work to make not just inclusivity a part of the major formula, but also that they work to make things culturally relevant. So like, thinking about how to tell stories to kids that actually means something to them today. I don't know, a weird example is thinking about some outdated curriculum that's talking ing a landline for a phone, or something. Kids are like, ‘What's that?” Actually integrating modern things like cell phones and things like that into the curriculum where kids actually touch that and use that every single day so it means something to them. Whereas, outdated curriculum that is just some story to them. It doesn't have tangible meaning. Being able to bring that into materials is really important to keeping things engaging and also, relevant and fun. MANDY: So the time when little Tommy was walking to the Xerox machine. DANIELLE: [chuckles] Yes, yes. MANDY: Somebody brought up a Xerox machine the other day. DANIELLE: Oh wow. MANDY: My goodness. DANIELLE: [laughs] Yeah, definitely. But I think it's just a constant looking at how we do things, and making improvements and making real connection with the people that are actually using our products to use. That both means working with teachers and getting a better understanding of what is helpful to them, what makes things easier for them, what helps them bring better quality curriculum to their classrooms? But then I think it's also connecting more directly with those kids that are engaging with our curriculum, too and figuring out what works and doesn't work for as many parties as possible. I think that's the anthropologist hat coming on again like, how can we bring as many people to the table as possible on the expert side, on the academic side, on the teacher side, on the student side? And even working to bring families to the table, too and looking at how families interact and not just parents, because it's really important to know that kids don't have just parents that are taking care of them—sometimes it's grandparents, sometimes it’s foster families. And really thinking about a wider range of who is around these kids, and how to get them onboard and make things easy for them to interact. ARTY: It seems like getting into tech and these new tech skills that you've learned are also relevant in figuring out how to teach kids tech because we've got this new generation of kids coming into the world and learning how to code becomes more like learning how to read and write is fundamental skills move forward in the future. Are there ways that some of the things that you've learned through your own tech experiences you can see application for in education? DANIELLE: Absolutely. From what I've been seeing, I feel like there are a lot more resources out there for teaching kids how to code and teaching them more things about technology. I think that's amazing and should totally keep happening. I think having been a bit more focused on adults in my own outreach for helping people find their ways into tech I might be a bit more acquainted with reaching out to those folks. But I'm sure that that intersection of being in education for K-12 students and this ion that I have of helping to find their way into tech, or build more technical skills because they are skills that are so transferable in many industries. I'm in education, but I have a technical job. So there's lots of ways that those technical skills can be incredibly valuable and frankly, life-changing. The amount of opportunity and even just financial stability that can be found within tech is one of the main reasons that brought me to this industry and has really been a life-changing opportunity. It has opened so many doors already and I'm just like three months into my first developer job. Even before I was ever actually officially an engineer, I was able to find community and able to find an outlet for helping others and outreach to immediately turn around and hold a handout to try to help others make their way into tech as well. I hope to continue doing that work in more meaningful and impactful ways over time, and have wider and wider reach as well. ARTY: You had mentioned earlier about some of the difficulties of getting into tech and some of the challenges with finding resources and things that you were specifically missing when you actually showed up on the job. I'm curious, what was your experience like going through coding bootcamp and what were some of the gaps that you experienced that once you got on the job, you were like, “Oh, I didn't learn that.” DANIELLE: Yeah, definitely. Coding bootcamp was an incredibly grueling experience for me personally. I was on a full-time track six-month program and [chuckles] not having much technical experience whatsoever outside of editing my Myspace profile back when that was a thing and having [laughs] about a decade ago doing some basic HTML, CSS editing and maintenance for the company that I worked for an ed tech originally. That was what I was working with when I started coding bootcamp. So it was a real hard learning curve and a very fast-paced program for me to just dive into headfirst. My poor partner was like, “I basically didn't see you for six months. You were just a basement dweller at your computer constantly.” I would literally get out of bed, roll myself downstairs, get to my computer with a cup of tea in hand, and I would stay there until easily 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 1:00 every night just trying to keep my head above water. But a few months in, things started to click and I wasn't fighting with all of these computer puzzles [chuckles] trying to do this. Like, I always feel like learning coding languages is a combination of algebra and a foreign language. So at a certain point, my brain just started getting into that better and things started making sense. That was a very exciting moment where I got much less miserable [chuckles] in my code school experience and in the pace at which I had to move to keep my grades up and everything. But the gap in between finishing code school and actually getting that first job is also another often-grueling process. There's so many jobs open in the tech industry, but basically, it's mid-level and above. It's like, I think two-thirds of the industry positions that are available are for mid to senior roles versus one-third of roles that are for junior associates. That is a big struggle, especially if you're not able to lean into community and building real connections, just sending applications out to the ether and never even hearing a peep back from companies. I think that whole experience, it's really hard for yourself esteem, especially having put in many months around the clock of work towards this new career that you've been told that you can get, that you can achieve. It's almost as much as a process getting that first developer job as it is to actually build those tech skills. I think one thing that is so important to stress in that in-between time is to lean into community, to connect with as many people as you can that are already in tech, even if they don't exactly have a developer job. Like, talk to anybody that will let you talk to them—talk to people in QA, talk to developers, talk to managers, talk to project managers. That was one of the things that I felt I needed to do early on in my coding experience to really have a better understanding of what was even an option for me of getting into tech and what could all these different jobs look like, and then making that transition to actually getting the first job. Yay, hooray for first jobs and being employed again. But I think one of the things that has been most striking in that change for me is going from this incredibly grueling pace. 8:00 in the morning, or so until 10:00 plus at night, non-stop coding for the most part, and then going to a 9:00 to 5:00 job where I can also make my own hours and I can take appointments as I need to. Like, I can go and get a haircut if that's something on my schedule and it's cool. As long as I'm getting my work done and showing up and contributing to my team, things are fine. So that transition of like, “Wait, I don't have to be at my computer a 1,000% of the time?” [laughs] and the pace at which you learn things, too is just much slower because you can have balance. That transition of feeling like you're not doing enough because you're so used to this hefty schedule, that's been a major transition for me. I think also coming from hospitality, too where you have to be there in person and oftentimes, somebody is going to call out sick at least every other week, or so. So you might be working like a shift and a half, or a double. There isn't a lot of balance in the service industry, especially now with COVID adding so many extra layers of complication to how that job works. Being able to just be like, “I need to go make a doctor's appointment,” and can just do that. It's like, “Okay, cool. Just put it on the calendar. You don't really need to tell me. As long as it's on the calendar, that's great.” [laughs] That transition has also been very strange. And I think maybe just the trauma of [chuckles] working in hospitality and not being able to just be a human sometimes and now all of a sudden, I'm like, “Oh, I'm a human and that's allowed? Okay.” Still have to check in with my boss frequently about like, “You sure it's okay? You sure it's okay that I'm a human, right? Yeah.” [laughs] MANDY: [chuckles] That was one of the things that I really loved coming into tech was the scheduling, open schedule, making my own hours. DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: And you're right, it was very strange at first. When I was waitressing, it was just always a go, go, go kind of thing and you had to be there, you had to be on, and if you didn't have tables, if you had time to lean, you had time to clean. DANIELLE: [chuckles] Yeah. Always be closing. You know, ABCs. [laughs] MANDY: So yeah, sometimes I still find myself on a random Thursday. I'll have my work done and I'll just be sitting here and I'm like, “Why are you sitting at your computer? Go do something, then check it and if there's stuff there –” Like, you don't have to have your ass in the seat from 9:00 to 5:00, or 8:00 to 4:00. You don't have to sit here for 8 hours and just stare at your inbox waiting for work. It's totally asynchronous and it's totally okay. I find myself having to give myself permission to leave my desk and just go and do something and work that asynchronous schedule. So tech is a really big blessing when it comes to that. DANIELLE: I totally agree. I think also, not being neurotypical myself, I have ADHD, and so, being able to actually allow my brain to work in the way that is best for how my brain just naturally operates. Like, I can sit at my desk and fidget constantly, and it's not going to bother anybody because I work from home, [chuckles] or I can shift between sitting and standing and sitting on my bed, or sitting on my stool and just move at my desk as much as I need to. I can also step away and go clean some dishes if that's what's making noise in my brain. I can go and take my dog on a walk and get some fresh air. That whole shift of having balance and being able to be empowered to advocate for what I need and how I learn and people are like, “Yeah, cool. Let's do that.” I think that's also very much a part of the company that I work for and the ethos that we have, which is all about making education better. So why wouldn't that also translate to the staff and how can we help you learn? It's such a wonderful thing to be a part of a team that's super invested in how I learn and helping me learn. I think another thing that was a big, strange thing about my transition into tech was I ended up getting a junior engineer role in a tech stack that I hadn't worked with, which is pretty common from what I've heard from mid engineer on. Because once you have some of the foundational building blocks of a handful of programming languages and some of those computer science foundations, you can pick up most programming languages. But it's not so common as a junior engineer to get that opportunity to work with a full tech stack that you haven't really worked with before. So that was another big transition like, “All right, you trust me time to figure this out.” ARTY: So it sounds like you walked into another big learning curve with your new job, too. It sounds like you were also in a much more ive culture environment with respect to learning and things, too. What was the ramp-up experience like at your new company? DANIELLE: In some ways, I still kind of feel like I'm in ramp-up mode. I'm about three months in. But because we have so much of our product that is built around very specific curriculum components, that has very specific contextual knowledge, it's just going to be a process to figure out which projects have what information and have certain numbers of records, and are tied to certain standards that are required in different states and for common core versus for some of the states that we work with, what that looks like. But figuring out a whole new tech stack was and continues to be a very interesting challenge. I have to remind myself when I have gaps in my knowledge that it's actually to switch gears back into learning mode, that that is a thing that's ed and encouraged even. I even have little sticky notes on my desk that say, “Start with what you know, not what you don't know,” and that tension of when I reached the end of what I know and then going and finding maybe not necessarily the right, or correct resources, because there's so much out there that's good. That can be helpful. I think it's more about finding something that does work with how my brain learns things and being cognizant of how I learn. But also, ing to dig into that fate that is being a developer, which is constant learning and ever-growing evolution of how we do things, and what things we do within the sphere of the developer. So I've signed up for perpetual learning and that's pretty great. MANDY: What are your favorite resources that you used and continue to use as you're still learning, and finding community, and things like that? DANIELLE: Yeah. I have certainly continued to lean on the curriculum for my school. It's online and it's free and that's rad. It's learnhowtoprogram.com. It's all put on online from Epicodus in the Portland area. Anybody can access it and that's wonderful. I'm a big fan of really great resources being available for free and making that more accessible. So continuing to use platforms that have that kind of ethos in mind is pretty great in my opinion. Reading the documentation is another great way to keep learning what you need to learn and sometimes documentation can be kind of dry, especially as a new developer, you don't always know what exactly it is that you're looking for. So being able to parse through documentation and figure out what's most important, but then also filling in the gaps of some of the things that you don't yet know, or understand with YouTube videos, or deeper dives into like, what does this one specific term mean? I don't know, let's go find out and plugging in some of those gaps is really helpful. I think figuring out how you learn, too whether that be very hands-on, whether that be visually, whether that be with audio, getting lots of repetition in; it's super helpful to lean into whatever works best for your brain for learning. I think perhaps even more important than digging into resources that are online is lean into community. I really can't say it enough, build community. If you work with Ruby, like I work with Ruby, build community within the Ruby community. Connect to people online, get on Twitter, connect to tech Twitter, follow different people that work with the languages and the tech stack that you work with, and places like The Virtual Coffee and other really rad developer spaces that are meant to help you find the answers that you need and to maybe do it in a way that's a little less arduous because you're with people that are like, “Yes, happy helper.” Like, “How can I make things easier for you?” It seems like a much easier way to go through tech when you can do it with others and , that there are human resources out there for you, too. MANDY: You also had mentioned that you were connecting with folks over Twitch. DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: Can you tell us a little more about that? DANIELLE: Absolutely. So a friend of mine in my Epicodus cohort, she reached out to the director of developer relations that had done a lunchtime chat with us at one point and she was like, “I don't know what I'm doing. I am so stressed out. I don't know if I can actually finish this school and let alone finish school, but actually make it as a developer and I have questions. Do you have some time for some answers?” And he was like, “Yeah, do you want to actually do this online on Twitch? And how about you bring a couple of friends and let's just ask lots of questions and I'm going to record it?” She reached out to me and another friend of mine and here we are many months later still answering questions online about how to get into tech and what even are some of these things that we're talking about technically, or let's look at other roles outside of just developer, or engineer, that you can get into. So that has been an ongoing theme of how can I help others? How can I help provide community for people that might not have been as lucky as I have been to already have a preexisting community with many of my friends and my partner that were in tech? How can I help create that advantage for others and how can I help reach more people and help them understand what their options are and connect them to the people that need to know to get jobs? I think Code School Q&A, we are super, super excited about open doors for people to whether that be better knowledge, whether that be real human connection; what's most important to us is just ing people as they are making transitions into the industry like we've been doing over this last year and a half. MANDY: So what is the Code School Q&A look like when you ? Walk me through it if I were to show up, what would I get? DANIELLE: Absolutely. So there's generally four of us on the stream and we ask a handful of questions, whether that be from our own experiences of like, “Okay, I'm a developer now and I've got some questions about some of these transitions that I am experiencing.” But we also lean into the audience as well and see what kind of questions they have, whether that be folks that are still in code school, or folks that are thinking about maybe potentially going back to school, whether that be computer science in a university setting, or bootcamp, or even self-taught people. We even have a number of folks that are already in their careers, too that are there to reach out and chat and provide additional and . So I really feel like it's a bunch of friends just getting together on Wednesdays and that group of friends just keeps building and expanding. It is very much like a group, but it's also fun. Like, our first question of the day is what are you drinking and how are you doing? Because we all hang out and chat, and drink while we're talking about how to get into tech and definitely try to make it as fun as we can and crack jokes and interrupt one another and it's a good fun time, but helping people is what's most important. MANDY: And this is all live? Unedited? DANIELLE: All live. Unedited. Yes, yes, and 7:00 PM-ish AV is a whole beast in and of itself. I just had to set up a Twitch stream for the first time in this whole time of streaming over the last year. I've been writing my princess and just shown up [chuckles] for every Twitch stream and now I know how much goes into that. I still had probably another few hours of set up to get past just a minimum viable product of we need to be online on the interwebs and you need to be able to hear and see me. Got there, but it's a whole thing. MANDY: Twitch is certainly interrupting the industry, I believe. DANIELLE: [inaudible]. MANDY: Especially since the pandemic. All of a sudden everyone's on Twitch. We're doing conferences live, we're doing like – how do you feel about the whole Twitch revolution and how is it different from how people traditionally came and connected in tech? DANIELLE: Yeah. Having been in events myself—that was part of what my role was within hospitality—I personally really love that there's now this whole new opportunity for connection. I think it also makes connection way more accessible because folks that were already living some kind of quarantine life because of autoimmune disorders, or disabilities, or whatever that looks like, they couldn't easily make it to those conferences and now they have a way to connect with those conferences because of hybrid events. I think it's a really rad innovation that we're seeing and it's a really wonderful way to even just as an introvert. I'm like, “I don't have to leave my house to be able to see my friends and have a good time? Yes! I am super interested in this.” I can – [overtalk] MANDY: [inaudible]. DANIELLE: Yeah. I can hang out with my dog and give him scritches whenever I want, and still see my friends and build community within tech. Heck yes. Very interested in this. I think that accessibility feature that it provides is just, it's really wonderful to know that more people can become a part of tech communities because there's now this whole online outlet for folks that couldn't otherwise afford a flight to get halfway across the country to make it to this conference, or couldn't afford to get in the conference. There's lots of ways that just makes things more accessible. MANDY: Do you think it's going to continue much beyond the pandemic? Like, do you think when it's all over, we're just going to be like, “Oh, we're back to conferences,” or do you think this is going to continue to the streaming and the slack chats and the live Q&As and things like that. Do you think that's going to continue? DANIELLE: I hope so and I think so. I think that even just from a business sense, you can tap into whole new markets by having this addition of hybrid events. You can reach a whole new subset of markets and I think quite frankly, it'd be kind of foolish to not take advantage of the new ways that we've figured out that we can still have meaningful and authentic community. [chuckles] There's definitely a way to monetize that and I'm sure plenty of people out there doing it, but I think it's also given voice to people that couldn't previously access those spaces and now they're like, “Don't take this away. This is community. This is this is what I've built,” and I think people are going to be willing to fight for that and I think that companies will see the business benefit of continuing to do both. ARTY: So anthropology question then. [laughs] DANIELLE: Great. ARTY: How do you think this will affect us as a society of connecting more virtually instead of in-person in that we're significantly more isolated now than we were before, too in of in-person connection? How do you think that's going to affect us? DANIELLE: One of the first things that comes to mind is infrastructure has to change. I think that for higher speed internet across the states across the world has become much more of a priority that is striking to people, especially thinking about kids having to figure out how to do online school. All of a sudden, when COVID first hit, some kids didn't have access to the internet, let alone a computer, or a tablet, or a phone that they could go to class and do their homework on. So I think that we're going to be forced to make technology and the internet more accessible by building better infrastructure to those things and I think it's only a matter of time before there is better social for getting technology in the hands of kids, especially, but getting them devices. Like, I know there are a number of initiatives out there that are giving small grants and stuff for people to be able to get computers, or tablets, or whatever and I think that we're going to just keep seeing more of that. Hopefully, fingers crossed because it's super important to be able to keep connection moving and I think keep moving our society in the right direction. ARTY: So do you have any concerns about that as well as how –? We all get plugged in and are affected and in not so good ways, too. On the flip side of that, where do you see things going? DANIELLE: My partner is in InfoSec. He is a security person. So that's definitely my first thought like, how do we keep the things that are most important to us and that are now online? How do we keep those things secure and safe and protected? Figuring out how to fill the gaps that are inherent within the security industry right now of there's just not enough bodies to fill all the jobs and build all of the security that needs to be built and maintain those things. That's going to be a whole new ball game that tech has to figure out and it's going to take a lot of manpower to make sure that we can protect people and protect the things that are most important to them, and even just protect those communities, too. Make sure that those communities can continue to thrive and also, be carefully moderated and curated so that there is safety for people to interact; that there is less bullying happening online, that there is less hate crimes that are being perpetuated online. Creating safe spaces for people and providing agency for them online is a whole new ball game when we're not even really that great at doing so in real life, in-person. There are a lot of groups that are going to have to fight harder to be heard, to be seen, to feel safe, and I think that's just an ongoing thing that we need to work at being better at. ARTY: So we need ways to improve the connectivity community stuff and then also, need ways as we do those things to create safety in our communities. DANIELLE: Absolutely. MANDY: Yeah, we just had a really great discussion with Eva PenzeyMoog about two episodes ago. She wrote the book Design for Safety and it was an excellent, excellent conversation about ways that as designers and engineers, we should be building our infrastructure safe from the beginning and not just going back – [overtalk] DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: And doing it after the fact, but realizing who the most vulnerable people are and protecting them from the get-go. DANIELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's actually something that my company works really hard to do while we're deg our curriculum products is deg from the most vulnerable within our communities and using that as a starting point for how we build things and how we continue to maintain them. Because if you can keep the folks that are most vulnerable in mind, more people are actually going to be allowed to be safe, allowed to have agency, and allowed to grow. It's a far more inclusive space when we can think about the folks that don't always have access, or don't always have safety, or don't always have agency and deg with those people in mind first. MANDY: And that's how we'll end up filling all these empty seats right now that are available in tech – [overtalk] DANIELLE: Exactly. MANDY: Is by not eliminating these people, deg a safe environment from the start, and attracting different kinds of people into tech because tech needs more diversity. DANIELLE: Tech needs more diversity. Yeah, absolutely and I think that's one of the reasons why I keep doing Code School Q&A is because I want to see more people that look like me in tech. I want to see more people that don't look like me in tech. I'm very excited to bring as many people to the table as possible because I think that's when we also get the most creative and innovative. When more tool sets are brought to the table, more diverse experiences are brought to the table, we build far more robust systems, products, and things just get better when we have more differences from which to pull and more experiences from which to learn. MANDY: As we said in the beginning, you're a fairly new developer. So I wanted to ask you the question: what was one thing you wish you knew, that you know now, that you would have known back then? If you could give Danielle advice a year ago, what advice would that have been? DANIELLE: I think that advice would have been to start actually working on technical things sooner; to start digging into the educational materials that were provided for me for free before I ever started school. I think that actually digging into those materials and having the courage to not just wait until I was in a classroom setting to be able to interact with coding languages and learning how to program, I would have had such a less fraught time getting through school and giving myself the opportunity to get a bit of a head start and more of a foundation before just diving in head first and hoping that I kept my head above water. But I think also, again, leaning into community and not being afraid to ask for help, not being afraid to advocate for myself because it took me a good 2 and a half months before a really felt like I could speak up and say what I needed. That's 2 months of time that I could have been getting more of what I needed, getting more help learning faster and more efficiently, and just being less miserable in the early stages of learning and entirely new skillsets. So don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't be afraid to advocate for yourself. I think especially as a woman coming into a technical space, there is some extra fears of not looking like I could do this, or not feeling like I belonged not knowing what I was doing. But the thing to was that nobody knew what they were doing; we were all figuring it out together in that school program. Being the one to be like, “Hold up, this is not making any sense to me. Can we start this over again? Can we dig into what's happening here?” Often times, other people were like, “Oh, I'm so grateful you said something because I also don't know what's going on.” MANDY: Well, with that, I think that's an amazing thing to end on and we can move over to reflections, which I can go and start off with right away is that's the secret. Like, nobody knows what we're doing in tech. DANIELLE: [laughs] Nobody knows, no. [laughs] MANDY: Nobody knows. DANIELLE: Nobody knows yet. MANDY: That's the secret. Ask questions. Lean on your community. There are so many people out there. I know you mentioned tech Twitter, #techTwitter. There are so many nice amazing people that will have your back if you just put those questions out there and even say, “Hey, tech twitter, anybody free? Do you want to pair?” They'll be like, “Yeah, let's hop on for an hour, or two,” and especially right now is when people aren't really doing much again. [chuckles] People are out there. So again, it’s a secret. Nobody knows. DANIELLE: [laughs] Yeah. I think I am totally on board with your reflections for the day lean into community and don't be afraid to ask questions. I think it's so important to know that tech needs you. Whoever you are, tech needs you and whatever valuable skillset you bring to the table, whatever diverse experiences you bring to the table, it's needed. You need more people that aren't traditional and whatever that looks like. There is space and there is need for you. I think come and ask your questions at Code School on Wednesdays. We need generally every Wednesday, 7:00 PM Pacific time. We are happy to answer your questions and help connect you to the people if we don't know answers because none of us totally know the right answer most of the time. MANDY: And how can people do that work? What’s the URL? DANIELLE: Yeah. Come visit us at twitch.tv/thejonanshow. We also have Code School Q&A is participating in Oktoberfest, too. So you can find us on GitHub by looking up the Oktoberfest hashtag tag and you can find us on Twitter at Code School Q&A as well. MANDY: Awesome. ARTY: I just wanted to add that a little bit with lean into community, I was thinking about Mandy, when you were mentioning your story, when I was learning electron new technology I didn't know. I had this code base that I had to learn. I didn't know what was going on, I was frustrated, I couldn't get anything working, and then I tweeted and asked for someone to pair with me. Lo and behold, some random person from the internet was like, “Sure! I'd be happy to help! Let's meet up air on this,” and I managed to get over the major hurdles I had with getting my environment to set up and getting unstuck, figured out how to run the debugging tools, and all those things really happened as a consequence of nothing afraid to reach out. Even when you might feel like you're struggling with these things alone, there really is a community out there and people that are willing to jump in and help and I think that's really great cool thing. MANDY: All right, well with that, I think we're pretty set to wrap up. If you want to us you are in Slack. Danielle will receive an invitation to us as well in our Slack community. It is a Patreon where you can fudge to us monetarily on a monthly basis. However, if you're not comfortable with that, or do not want to, you can DM anyone of the ists and we will get you in there for free. So with that, I want to thank you, Danielle, for coming on the show. DANIELLE: Thanks so much for having me for a great conversation. MANDY: Awesome, and we'll see everyone next week. Special Guest: Danielle Thompson. Greater Than Code

00:47 - Jen’s Superpower: Being Optimistic Recognizing Negative Loops Intentionality & Prioritization Preventing Security Vulnerabilities 10:13 - Working On Open-Source Projects vs Commercial Software/Products Gathering (RFCs) Baby Steps = Big Impact 12:57 - Major vs Minor Releases Semantic Versioning Deprecation Warnings Advanced Notice Incremental Rollouts 18:45 - RFC / Processes Dealing with Contradictory Reaching Consensus Visionary Leadership Additions 23:25 - The Ember Core Team ~30 People Funding LinkedIn (Corporate Sponsorship) Consultants & Consultancies Volunteers 26:31 - Doing Open Source Better Sponsor Company (Time) Knowledge Sharing Framing Work As How It Values Contributors Reframing How We Think About Open Source Sustainability (i.e. Company-Wide Open Source Work Days) Frame Value to Company Frame Value to s Frame Value to Engineering Teams Attitude Shifts 39:56 - Participation Encouragement & Engagement Tips Use The Buddy System Having Well-Scoped Issues Increasing Levels of Challenge (Subtle Cheerleading) Help People Spin Up Quickly 46:00 - Widening the Pool of Participants Being Easy to Reach Social Media Activity Working In The Open 47:36 - UX-Driven Design ( Experience-Driven Design) Reflections: Damien: Perspective of those impacted. Sponsors, s, etc. Arty: What it’s like to work on a big open source project and the challenges we face. Jen: Exploring small-project lifecycles. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone and welcome to Episode 253 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Starr and I am here with my fabulous co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: And we are here with our fabulous guest, Jen Weber. Jen Weber is a member of the Ember.js core team and is a senior software engineer at ActBlue Technical Services. Jen loves open source, rapid prototyping, and making tech a more welcoming industry. Jen, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. JEN: Thank you so much for having me. DAMIEN: So you should have gotten an email preparing you for the first and most difficult part of every appearance on Greater Than Code. Are you ready for this? JEN: I am. 
DAMIEN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JEN: All right. So I did get that email and I've been thinking about those for the last couple of days. I think my superpower is being able to imagine the ways that things can go well. DAMIEN: Wow. That's very special. JEN: Thank you. DAMIEN: How did you acquire that? JEN: So I used to be very good at imagining all of the ways that things can go badly. Those are still the patterns that my mind walks whenever I'm confronted with a challenge, but someone gave me some advice. I was recounting to them all of the ways that things could go badly, they were like, “What would it look like if things went well?” I've been trying to build that as a muscle and a skill anytime I'm working on a new project, or something hasn't gone well, something's already gone badly, and I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I found that helped me open up to more creative thinking. ARTY: I really think that is a superpower and in order for things to go well, for us to manifest good things toward a good direction, we have to be able to see the steps to get there, imagine ourselves walking in that direction to be able to do it. And if we're caught in a loop of worrying about all the things that are going to go wrong, anticipating those things going wrong, then it's like we're going to be waiting for him and doing things that help bring those things that we don't want into being. So if you find yourself in this mode, it sounds like this is something that you struggled with and learned this adaptive skill to break out of this pattern. So what kind of things do you do? Like, do you tell yourself things or ask yourself certain questions, or how do you snap out of that mode and get to a better place where you're thinking about things in a positive frame? JEN: Sure. I think for me, the first step is just recognizing when I'm in that negative loop and accepting that it's my first reaction, but that doesn't need to be my conclusion to my thought process. If I'm working on let's say, there's a real-world challenge. Just to give an example as part of my work on the Ember core team, I might think about how do I engage the community and announce that there's going to be this new version of Ember? If I imagine things going badly, I imagine like, “O, wow, nobody even retweets it a single time,” and if I imagine things going well, I think like, “Wow, it's this big moment in tech.” And if it was a big moment in tech, what would have the involved people done to get to that successful end point and trying to work backwards from that to connect the dots. It takes some intentionality, it takes having enough rest, it takes not being over-caffeinated to be able to unlock that kind of thinking. DAMIEN: But it sounds so powerful, especially as an engineer, or as an advocate. It's like because we're in the role of making things into what we want them to be, which is things going well, right? JEN: Yeah, and it's a little different than a wishful thinking, I would say, because you're still thinking in order for things to go, well, you have to overcome challenges, you have to solve problems, you have to prioritize, there's going to be difficult moments. So you're not just dreaming that this good feature is going to come into existence, but actually figuring out what are the nuts and bolts, and pieces, like, what are the ingredients to that recipe? When we think and reflect on that, how can we take those ingredients and apply them to right now to get where we want to go? ARTY: So you take that vision and then work backwards and translate that to actual action. These are things that we can do right now to walk the path of getting where we want to go. JEN: Mm hm, and it might take you somewhere totally different direction. It might be very different by the time you're done. But usually, you can figure out a few things here and there that are steps in the right direction, and the right direction could be one of many different directions. ARTY: Do you find yourself ever getting disappointed that things don't go the way you envisioned? JEN: Oh yeah, for sure. [laughter] Yeah, and I think that's a little bit part of the rollercoaster of being involved in software. Like every single day is a series of things going a little different than you thought they would. You read the code; you think it's going to go a certain way. You're wrong; you change your plan. You have this idea of a direction you're going to go, you've thought about what are the successful steps to get there, and then you end up in the wrong corner and you have to go back to the drawing board and surviving those cycles is just part of what we do. ARTY: So does that superpower help you escape those feelings of disappointment then? JEN: Oh yeah, I think so because not that I have some way to see the future, but more that I have tools for helping to figure out what my next step could be. ARTY: So then you're always focused back on action. JEN: Mm hm. ARTY: And how can I take what I learned and this vision of what a good direction would be, taking these new data points and things into , and then reimagine and translating that back into action. JEN: Yeah. ARTY: I think that qualifies as a superpower. DAMIEN: Yeah, I think about it, I guess because I was writing code this morning, and so often, when you're writing – when I'm writing code at least, it's like oh, the phrase was “defensive programming” from a long time ago. How can this go wrong? What happens if this is nil? What happens if some evil guy in a black hat comes in and tries to do something here? And what I've had to learn and still need to remind myself of is the good case. What is it that we're doing good for our s, or whoever else the code touches? What are they trying to accomplish and what experience are we trying to create for them? And so, both, as an engineer and a product manager, just being able to ask that question and see an answer on a small scale on a feature in stories, super important. JEN: Yeah, and even if you're thinking of that adversarial aspect where it's like, you're trying to think through all of the security risks that are involved in developing some software, you can still use this thinking to your advantage. What would a successful future be where somebody tries to exploit that vulnerability and they fail? You've got them. What are the things you built? What are the strategies and habits that that team had? What is the monitoring and infrastructure that resulted in successfully preventing this, or that problem from occurring? DAMIEN: It's not only a useful strategy and also, feels really good. JEN: Mm hm. DAMIEN: That’s great. ARTY: I like that, though just thinking from a standpoint of just vulnerability, or even a case where things go “wrong,” in the case that you do have somebody hacking your system, or trying to exploit some vulnerability, what's the logging and information infrastructure? What does that story look like where even though these things are happening, we're prepared, we have the right things in place to give us visibility into what's going on, and be able to catch it and address it quickly. Like what do all those things look like such that we're ready to go and can still have a success story, even in the case of these challenges that come up? DAMIEN: That sounds connected to something, I think we want to talk about today, which is what goes well when you get a major library upgrade, what does that look like? JEN: Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot lately; informed by two things. So one is that I'm involved in an Ember, which is a frontend JavaScript framework, and we're getting ready to do a 4.0 major release. So going through all of those exercises to have preparedness all comes back to how do we do this, or what do our s need, what are the resources that are missing? That's one thing on my mind and the other is that I've recently updated some dependencies in the apps that I work in and had a hard time. What can I learn for myself about what to do differently? What can I learn that might be takeaways for library maintainers? What can I share with my coworkers and my collaborators to make this easier next time? ARTY: What's it like working on an open source project and how does that feel different? What are the different aspects of that from working on a commercial product versus something in the open source community? JEN: There's a couple of pieces. The biggest one is that when you're working in your own code base, you have at least a fuzzy picture of what the product is, what the constraints are, how many s there are, and the things that the developers on your team generally know and the things that they don't know. You have all this information that would help you inform how do I roll out some new, big feature, or something like that. When you're working at open source, your universe of possible products, developers, and s is huge. Like, you could never write down a list of all the ways that somebody is going to be using that software and so, it becomes really different than having a set of well-defined products requirements; we want to get from point A to point B. It's like, we need to give everybody a path forward even though they're using this tool in all these different ways. To do that, a lot of effort goes into gathering from other people in the community. So we use a process called RFCs, or Requests for Comments where someone says, “Hey, I think this would be a good feature. Hey, I think this thing should be removed, or deprecated,” and you have to get . Because we can't imagine all the ways ourselves that someone could use this feature, or tool and then once there's consensus amongst the core team, then something can move forward. But everything goes through a lot of iteration as part of that process. So the overall progress can sometimes feel slow because you have to think through all of this extra weight—the weight of depending on thousands and thousands of developers and billions of s on you to make the right decision. It means you can't just “Oh, let's just merge this breaking change and I'll make this breaking change and I'll just post on Slack to everybody like, ‘Hey, watch out. I just changed this one thing. I documented it here. Good luck.’” You can't really quite pull that lever in the same way, but when you do have a step forward, it's a step forward for all of these apps, for all of these projects, for all of their s and so, little baby steps can still translate into really big impact. ARTY: So when you have something that's a major release in that context, like a major release of Ember versus a minor release. How are those different? What kind of things do you do in major releases? JEN: Yeah, that's a good question. So I'll just provide a little bit of background information on this vocabulary that we're using for anyone who's listening in. A lot of projects follow semantic versioning, which is a set of rules that a lot of projects agree to follow that if you ever see a version number that's like 4.2.1.—oftentimes, that's semantic versioning and action in the first number—is for major releases and a major release is one that has a breaking change. So that means that I make a change in that code base. I would expect that other people would have to change the code in their own apps and they would be forced to go through that—make that change—in order to that version for the library I'm working on. Minor is usually used for features. Patch, the last one, is used for bug fixes and internal refactors, things like that. Not all projects follow in the same way. Some projects have time-based cycles where they say, “Oh, we do a major release every six months,” or something like that. But for us major releases are breaking changes and the things that are different about them is that we have to give people a path forward to get to the next version. That could include putting some deprecation warnings, any code that's going to get removed or change any API that are going to shift in the next major version. We want to let people know, with a little warning, if they're using those older syntaxes, or APIs, whatever's going to be removed. We also want to try to give a lot of advanced notice about what's going to change, or be removed via blog posts, things like having a help channel set up maybe that's just for those upgrades. When it's time to actually do the major release, we try to make it boring. This is something that I would like to see happen across the rest of the JavaScript ecosystem. It does seem to be catching on more, which is that when you do a major version release, all it does is it removes the things that need to be removed. You make your breaking changes and that's it, and then in follow-up releases is when you add in all the new features. So let's say, some API is just the old way of doing things. It doesn't match up with a new rendering engine, or something like that. You're going to want to remove the old thing and then incrementally work to roll out these big splashy, new, exciting features. So maybe your exciting release is actually going to be 4.1, or 4.2, or 4.3. This has a couple benefits. It lets your major releases be a little less risky because you're not just removing code and then adding new code at the same time. It lets people not be as overwhelmed like, “Oh, first I have to deal with all of these things that are removed, or changed and then now I also have to learn this whole new way of thinking about how to write my app using this tool.” It lets you take little baby steps towards doing things in a different way. DAMIEN: Does this mean, in an ideal scenario, that if you don't have any deprecation warnings—if you're taking care of all the deprecation warnings—then your major release can go – you can upgrade some next major version without a code change. JEN: Yeah, that's the dream. DAMIEN: It does sound like a dream. JEN: Yeah, and it's not always perfect, but it's an important pathway towards including more people and participating in upgrades, app maintenance, and creating sustainable code bases so you don't have to follow the Twitter, the blog post, and be checking the JavaScript subreddit just to keep up on with what's going on. You're not going to be surprised by big sweeping changes. So coming back to this experience I had with upgrading a different library recently, I was upgrading major Jest versions and was very surprised to see that there were a ton of breaking changes in a changelog and I got a little bit frustrated with that. And then I went back and I read the blog posts and I saw a blog post from 2 years ago saying, “These are the things that we are doing, this is what is happening,” and that was great, but I wasn't doing Jest tests 2 years ago and so, I missed all of that. Can we use the code base itself to connect those dots, make those suggestions, and guide people towards the work that they do? DAMIEN: If they put those deprecation warnings in 2 years ago, you would've had 2 years to make those changes. JEN: Yeah. DAMIEN: And then when you finally upgraded, it would have been a dream, or have been painless. JEN: Yeah, and maybe they're there. Maybe there are some and I just need to the debug flag, or something. Hopefully, there's nobody who's shouting at their computer. But there's this one thing that we put it in the console log output, or something. It's possible I overlooked it but. DAMIEN: I want to rewind a little bit back to the challenge of dealing with a product that is used in so many contexts by so many people, like Ember is, and the RFC process. The first thing I thought of when you mentioned that is what do you do with contradictory ? Surely, you must have hundreds of engineers who say, “You have to get rid of this,” and hundreds who say, “No, this has to stay.” How does the core team manage that? JEN: Yeah. So I think the most important piece is the contradictory needs to be considered. So it's not just like, “Oh, let's collect these comments as annual forms,” or anything like that. [chuckles] This isn't like, “Oh, let's do some natural language processing on these comments to figure out if the sentiment is positive, or negative.” [chuckles] None of that stuff you have to actually read through them and think what could I do using this new feature to help meet this person's needs, or what's at the heart of the objection that they're making? If someone is saying, “This doesn't work for my team,” and entering that process with a willingness to iterate. In the end, we can't make everybody happy all the time, or no RFC would ever get moved forward. There's always going to be a point where you have to prioritize the pros and cons, and ultimately, the decision comes down to reaching consensus amongst the core team . So being able to say, as a group, “We believe that the has been considered. We believe that the iterations have been incorporated, the people's concerns have been addressed,” or “We're going to work to create tools that think that problem be not a problem for them,” and find a way to move forward with whatever the proposal is. Or sometimes, the proposals don't move forward. Sometimes, they get closed. ARTY: Is the work you end up choosing to do primarily driven by this process, or do you have some visionary leadership within the core team that drives a lot of things forward that aren't necessarily coming via ? JEN: That's a good question. I think it's a little bit of both. So certainly, a lot of RFCs have come from the community and from people asking like, “Hey, can we have this better way of doing things? I have an idea.” And then other times, you do have to have that visionary leadership. So to give an example, we have just started doing – well, I shouldn't say just started doing that. I think it's been like 2 years now. We have started doing this process called additions where if there's a big splashy set of cool features that are meant to be used together, we give it a name. That's separate from the breaking changes process, ideally. We can create nice, new splashy sets of features without breaking people's apps and trying to design that experience isn’t something that you can just piecemeal through RFCs waiting for to come through. There were quite a few of the core team that designed a new way of building Ember apps that was better aligned with focusing on HTML as the core of building for the web and focusing on JavaScript features as opposed to requiring developers to know and understand the special API syntaxes. You can just write JavaScript classes instead of needing to understand what an Ember object is. So aligning ourselves more with the skills that everybody, who works in the web, has at least a little bit of. That took a lot of brainstorming, a lot of planning, and ultimately, introducing those things still follows an RFC process. Somebody still has to say, “Here's the thing we want to change, or do, or add. Here's the greater vision for it.” But to get that big picture look still requires the big thinking. So the core team, I don't even know how much time. They must've spent countless hours trying to hash out those details. ARTY: How big is the core team? JEN: So there's several core teams. Though when you say the core team as a whole encomes people who work on the data layer, the command line tools, the learning tools, and then the framework itself. I want to say, could look this up, it's like upwards of 30 people, I think. ARTY: Wow. JEN: I can get you the exact number later, [chuckles] but everyone's pulling out their different area of domain and so, all of those teams also have to coordinate around these major releases because we want to make sure the work that we're doing is complimentary. If we do the framework improvements, but we don't fix up the docs, we’re not on the good path for a successful release. ARTY: Are people working on this stuff full-time? Are people funded, or doing this in their free time, or how does that work? Because there's this big picture challenge of we have this ideal of community sourced, open source projects, and then the realities of trying to fund and that effort bumps up to constraints of needing to make a living and things and these sorts of difficulties. How do y'all manage that? JEN: It's a mixture. So the Ember project is fortunate to have a major player—LinkedIn—that uses Ember and so, some of the core team , their work on Ember is part of their LinkedIn work because of the frameworks doing well, then LinkedIn projects that are going to be doing well. There's also a number of people who are consultants, or who run consultancies that do Ember work, they're involved. Their voice is an important part of making sure that again, we're serving a variety of apps, not just ah, this is this tool that's just for the LinkedIn websites. But it's like, they've seen so many different kinds of apps; they're working on so many different kinds of apps right now. And then there's people who help out on more of a volunteer basis. So I've been in my past work, it was at a different job. It was part of my job responsibilities to participate on the framework core team. These days, I'm more of a volunteer and I mostly help organize other volunteers—people who want to do some professional development to learn, people who want to network, people who found something that they're frustrated about enough that they want to fix it themselves. That’s how I got involved; I wanted to learn. So that's the sustainability of having people involved is always an ongoing challenge it is for every open source organization, I think. ARTY: Yeah. Do you have any ideas on how we can do those sorts of things better? As you said, it's a concern, in general with how do we do open source better with these kinds of constraints? And then two, I feel like there's been some cultural shifts, I guess, you could say over time of you think about when the open source movement first started. We had a lot more of this community ownership ideal where we really were going and building software together and now, there's a lot more of, well, there's all this free software out there that we use, that we build on top of to build our apps on, but that ownership piece isn't really there. It's an expectation that there should just be this free software out there that's maintained that we get and why is it falling apart? So I feel like, culturally, just over time, some of those things have shifted as far as expectations around open source and then you talked about some of the corporate sponsorship aspects with usage as being one way these things get funded. But I'm wondering if you have ideas on how some of these things could work better. JEN: People have done PhDs on this topic, I'm pretty sure. [chuckles] Like, theses. I read a white paper, a really involved white paper, a few weeks ago that was about, what was it? it was called something like the Burden of Maintaining Software, or something like that and it did this deep dive into how much goes in and just keeping the ship afloat. How much goes into just if there's a package that needs to be updated? That kind of ongoing, constant, mundane work that adds up really, really big. So for very large projects, I think it's a good thing to have some sort of an evolvement of a sponsor company, if you will and so, that sponsor company may not actually ever donate any money, but the time of their engineers that they say like, “Hey, we're willing to help this project” is really important. I think another piece is that the leadership of projects should consider the people involved, that that group is going to be rotating. That people's involvement is ephemeral. Every time somebody changes jobs, maybe they're not going to be involved in that project anymore. If we can think about that ahead of time, plan for it, and make sure that we are sharing knowledge with each other such that the project can survive somebody moving onto something else, it can survive somebody going on vacation for a while. So I think that's another key component of success is how do you make it so that you're not just relying on the same set of people still being there so many years later? We’ve been very fortunate within the Ember community that a lot of the same people have stuck around, but I try really hard not to bank on that. The group of contributors that I help organize, I think, “Hey.” We have a chat every time somebody s the learning core team and say, “Hey, we get that you're not going to be here forever. Please let us know what we can do to you. Please let us know when you're thinking of taking a break, or taking a step back. Please involve other people on any project that you're working on so that they will also continue your work and also you so you don't get burnt out. Another thing I try to do is always framing the work into how it values the contributor. Sometimes in open source you hear this discussion of like, “Oh, well, everyone should participate in open source because we all benefit from it.” There's a better attitude that we can have, I think, which is that for people who are interested in participating, what can they get out of it? What can I do as a leader to help them get something out of this? If you just approach it with this altruism of “This is a community and I want to help,” that'll get you like a little bit. But if you can say, “I want to help because I want to learn from other developers,” that's something I can deliver on. That's something that they can take. That's valuable for their future earning potential, income, confidence, maybe they'll make the connection that helps them find their next job. Even if someone isn't being paid to help out, is there something that they can take away from this? And lastly, just acknowledging that doing work for free is a privilege as well. We have to reframe how we think about open source sustainability, too. Not everybody can devote a few hours after work here and there and involving them and including them means that it's got to be part of their workday. So continuing to socialize from the company level that engineers should have a little bit of time here and there to try to help improve an open source project. Everybody doing that just a little bit helps with quite a few of the problems that these projects face. ARTY: I've been thinking about this myself and you work directly, you're significantly involved in a major open source project, and so, you see things that a lot of people don't have perspective on. So I appreciate your insights on this. I'm wondering what if major companies that were using open source software, if we made more efforts for companies to be a project sponsor and donate part of the company somebody who's on the company's time to help contribute to projects as like a thing. I feel like if that thing caught on, that the companies that were using this software for free [chuckles] had more of a sense of a social obligation to be one of the people that contribute some time to helping with that. Or get some companies that are big enough, too. It's probably easier and they have more interest in those sorts of things. But I feel like if we did make that more of a thing, that that would be useful because as you're saying, somehow realistically speaking, this has to be something that can be worked into the workday. JEN: Yes. ARTY: For us to be able to and sustain these things. And people that can do that outside of their workday as an extra free time thing. It really is a privilege. JEN: Yeah. I think a couple of strategies that can help here are to frame it in the value to the company and frame it as a value to the s, frame it as a value to the engineering team. So rather than having it be like, “Oh, you use free software, you should do this thing.” Instead more like engineers, we always need to learn constantly in order to keep improving our own skills and to keep up with things that are changing. So having an open source hour, or something like that—it takes a little more than an hour usually to accomplish much. But having a period of time that engineers were allowed to contribute to open sources. Professional development that you don't have to pay for a subscription. You don't have to pay for a licensing fee. You don't have to pay for somebody’s conference submission. If someone has the opportunity to reach outside of their sphere of knowledge, or comfort zone and it just so happens that if they succeed, it'll benefit your company maybe indirectly. Another piece is what's the value to the s? So there were a bunch of people who all contributed effort towards bringing some improved linting tools for the template system within Ember. When we think of linting tools, we usually think that's like, “Oh, here's this thing to remind me to use nice tidy syntax and don't make my variable names too long and space everything out in a certain way,” but they can also help us find real actual problems in our apps. So an example that this team worked on is they introduced some more linting rules for accessibility. If one person succeeds in introducing this new linting rule for accessibility, then it's there in their app for their team and they get to stop talking about, “Hey, make sure you do this one thing” over and over again because now it's enforced in the code base. Also, they've brought this benefit to all of the other apps that are out there. Again, sometimes you can tie it back in to that value for the product and for the s, and really trying to think creatively about that connection. Because there's so many different things we can all spend our time on, you've really got to sell it in a way that aligns with the goals, or values of that organization. ARTY: Yeah. I like that reframing. I can see just how important that is. Other things I'm thinking about if you had a dev team and one of your developers was really involved with the Ember core team, you'd have more knowledge about how things worked. So when something was broken, or something, you probably have more insight into what was going on and being able to help the team more effectively – JEN: Yeah. [overtalk] ARTY: To build stuff. And then if there's any suggestions, or things that could make things easier for your team, you'd have the ability to have influence with getting RFPs through to get changes made and things. I think you're right. It needs to be reframed as a value proposition. JEN: Yeah, and it also requires an attitude shift on the side of the projects as well. There's tons of people who've tried to do open source and hit running straight into a wall of they open up pull requests that are never merged, or even reviewed and that can be a really frustrating experience. And some projects just don't have the structure, or the governance structure that really allows open participation either. So that's something that I think is an ongoing journey with lots of projects. It's like, how do we communicate? How do we involve other people? What types of decisions do we say like, “Hey, implementer, or community, you're in charge, you can make this” versus things that have to some sort of review. It’s not just a one side of companies need to step up, but also, maintainers seem to have a long-term vision of how they're interacting with everybody else. DAMIEN: Yeah, I really love that frame of this is professional development and that you can get for free. That's like how would you like to educate your engineers and make them better engineers, especially on the tools you work on and not –? Yeah, that's really awesome. But then of course, on the other side, you need a welcoming environment. That's like, “Oh yeah, when you make a contribution, we're going to look at it. We're going to give you useful on it.” JEN: Yeah. I tried to get an open source project going a few years ago and I struggled for a while and eventually ended up giving up. But some of the things I ran into, I'd have somebody that would volunteer to help out with things and I'd work with them long enough to just start to get a feel for things and be able to contribute and then they would disappear. [laughs] And I go through that process a few times. It's like, “Oh, yay. I'm excited, I get –” another person has volunteered and so, then I go and start working with them and trying to – and I put a lot of attention into trying to get things going and then they disappear. t was difficult to try and get traction in that way and eventually, I went, “Well, I'm back by myself again” [laughs] and that I just need to keep going. ARTY: Right. So what kind of things have you found help with getting that participation aspect going and what kind of things are barriers that get in the way that maybe we can be better at? JEN: Yeah. So my advice is always start with using the buddy system. Trying to pair program with people, who I'm hoping to stay involved, and the leveling up version of that is the people who are contributing pair with each other. It's so much more fun. There's so much more of a learning experience when it's two developers working on the project. Left to my own devices, the projects that I work on, I have to really dig into my willpower to keep them moving if I'm the only person working on it versus if we're pairing, what's the value that I'm getting? It's like, I get to hear how the other person approaches the problem. I get to experience how they work. They teach me things. I teach them things. We have this good rapport. So I pair once a week with my friend, Chris, and we work on everything from this kind of mundane stuff to the big vision, like what would we do if we could totally change how this thing works, or something like that, and that kind of energy and get ideas, they build up. So that's one piece. The other, this one's difficult, but having well-scoped, well-written issues is a huge time sink, but also, it can be one of the best ways get people engaged and keep them engaged. If I stop writing really specific issues, people peter off. Someone will ask, maybe only once, they'll ask, “Hey, I want to help out, or something. What should I pick up next?” They don't usually ask a second time, but I don't have something right away to hand off to them. So what is the momentum? Can I keep writing up issues and things that other people can follow through with? And then presenting them with increasing levels of challenge of like, “I have this unstructured problem. We've worked on this a lot together. You can do this. How would you approach this? What do you think we should do?” I don't necessarily say,” You can do this,” because it’s more of a subtle cheerleading that's happening than that. But “I'd love to hear your proposal of what should happen next” just is a really powerful moment and sometimes, that can be the thing that catapults somebody into taking more ownership of a project and gathering together other people to help them out. And then people do come and go, but the commits are still there! So that's something, right? [chuckles] Like, things have taken some steps forward. DAMIEN: Yeah. People come and go, that's something you know you have to accept on an open source project, but it happens in other places, too. [chuckles] No team stays together for all of eternity. JEN: Right. DAMIEN: Is the project going to live on and how can you make it so that it does? So these are very good lessons, even for that. ARTY: It seems like just investing in thinking about, we were talking initially about planning for the success case, even when things happen. So if we think about the case of okay, people are going to leave the team. [chuckles] What's the success case look like? Imagining the way that things go really well when people are leaving the team, what does that look like? What are the things that we wish we had in place to be able to ramp people up quickly, to be able to find new people, to work on the project quickly? All of those things that we can think about and open source has this to a much larger degree and challenge so that you really have to think about it a lot. Where on a commercial project, it's one of those things that often happens when you wish it wouldn't and one of the things I see in corporate companies is you'll have a management change, or something will happen with a product that upsets a bunch of people and you'll have exodus phase on the project and then ending up often rewriting things because you lose your core knowledge on the project and nobody knows what's going on anymore and it actually becomes easier to rewrite the things than to [chuckles] figure out how it works. If we had imagined the ways that things could go well and prepared for those certain circumstances, maybe we wouldn't be in that situation. ARTY: Yeah. You mentioned something really important there, too, which is what can we do to help people spin up more quickly on something. That's another big piece of sustained engagement because you need a group of people spun up quickly. You need a group of people who can figure out the next steps on their own. And so, we've spent a lot of time, the projects that I work most actively on, making sure that everything is there in the Read Me, making sure that if you run npm start that things work if you're running it on a different environment. Those types of little things, reducing those barriers can also go a long way and just widening the pool of people who could potentially help is another big one. DAMIEN: How do you do that? Because you're a core contributor on the project. You have the curse of knowledge. JEN: Yes. DAMIEN: You have a development scene that is tightly home to work on this project. JEN: That's a great question. Ah, I do have the curse of knowledge. Being easy to reach so that if people do encounter problems that they can find you and tell you, which can be, it can be a small step. Just making sure that if you have a documentation page, it's got a link at the bottom that’s like, “Find a problem, open an issue!” That sort of thing. Also, I'm pretty active on Twitter. Sometimes other contributors, experienced contributors, they'll spot something that somebody else has posted and they'll say, “Hey, Jen, take a look at this,” and they bring it to my attention. There's this team effort to uncover those gaps. Another aspect is just working in the open. So having open meetings, having open chat channels, places where people can interact with the people leading the projects, they can come to the meetings, things like that means that we're more likely to hear their . So if we get , “Hey, this thing was difficult,” making sure that we address it. DAMIEN: Wow. Well. JEN: I'm really big into experience driven design. We've been talking about maintainability a lot, we’ve been talking about the code, and versions, and things, but coming back to what is the impact for our s. If you accept a experience driven way of developing software, it means that you're always going to need to be upgrading, you're always going to have to be flexing, changing, and growing because the products of 2 years ago versus the product of today can be really different. Open source library that you needed to rely on 2 years ago versus today. Maybe the web app ecosystem has shifted. Maybe there's new ways of doing things. Maybe there's new syntaxes that are available. Sometimes, it can be a little frustrating because you feel like, “Oh, there's this endless pile of work. We made all these wrong choices back in the day and now this thing's hard to upgrade,” and all that. A different mindset is to think about what do we know today that is different than what we knew yesterday? What are the things we know today about our s that inform our next move? How do these upgrades, or improvements, or my choice of open source library help the end have a better experience? And trying to come back to that big picture from time to time, because it can be pretty frustrating. When you get stuck, you think like, “Oh, I can't. I just tried to upgrade this major version and everything broke and everything's terrible. But what's the feature list look like, how am I going to use this to deliver something better to the s can really help?” DAMIEN: Wow. ARTY: So at this part of the show, we usually do reflections and finish off with any final thoughts we had, or takeaways from the episode. Damien, you want to start? DAMIEN: The big takeaway I got from this is kind of… it's perspective. Jen, you mentioned a experience driven design. I was already really close to that language, but from a perspective of contributors to an open source project, sponsors—both in of engineering and then money—and then also, s. Like, these are also s. These are also people who are impacted by the work we do. So in order to do it successfully, it's very important to think of how can this go well for them and then move to that direction. So thank you, that was really great. M: For me, the big takeaway, I feel like I learned a whole lot just perspective wise of what it's like to work on a big open source project. I haven't really had a conversation like this with someone that's been that involved with a major resource project before. So I found that really insightful. One of the big questions I asked you about how do we make this sustainable? [laughs] Like all the challenges around things. I know they're big challenges that we face in figuring that out and you had some really key insights around how we can frame things differently as opposed to framing it as an obligation, like a social obligation, or you should do this altruistically because it's the right thing to do as the appeal that we make is when you're talking to a contributor, how do you frame things to be a value proposition for them as an individual. When we're talking to a company, how do we frame things in a way so there's a value proposition for the company to get involved with doing something? And change the way that we frame all these things to be able to get folks involved because they realize benefits as individuals, as company, as people being directly involved in things? I feel like if we can do some work to maybe change some of the framing around things. That maybe there's a pathway there to increase engagement and of open source projects, which I think is one of those things that we really need to figure out. There's not really easy answers to that, but I feel like some of the insights you came to there are really key in finding a pathway to get there. So thank you, Jen. I appreciate the conversation. JEN: So for me, when I'm reflecting on the most is the story that you shared already of trying to get people involved and just having them leave. They show up for a little while and then they disappear and where does all that work go? I'm interested to explore a little bit more of that small project life cycle. I was pretty fortunate to just come in at a time where there was already a well-established community when I started getting involved in Ember and I'd love to hear more from other people about what are the success stories of those first few steps where someone began this little project and it really started to grow and take off. This might be a case where like some of the strategies I described, they work when you already have an established community. So it's kind of like a catch-22. I don’t know, that could be a really cool future episode is the beginning. DAMIEN: Yeah. That's something I'd definitely like to hear about. ARTY: Well, thank you for ing us, Jen. It was really a pleasure talking with you. JEN: Thanks so much for having me! Special Guest: Jen Weber. Greater Than Code

TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence, Abuse, Interpersonal Safety 01:26 - Eva’s Superpower: ADHD and Hyperfocus Workplace Accommodation At-Will Employment 08:19 - Design for Safety Tech Used For Interpersonal Harm Might vs When Eva Penzey Moog | Deg Against Domestic Violence Weaponizing Technology 12:45 - What Engineers Need to Know Control/Shared s Surveillance Location Data 15:02 - Expanding Our Understanding of What “” Means “ as an abstraction.” 20:43 - Parallels with Security Personas / Archetypes Adding Layers of Friction Ongoing Arms Race 22:23 - Spreading Awareness Across Teams Focused on Feature Delivery Safety Designers as a Specialized Role? Generalists vs Specialists; Literacy vs Fluency This Book Is For Everyone: Engineers, Designers, Product Managers, etc. 31:38 - Thinking Beyond The Constituency Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need By Sasha Costanza-Chock 35:25 - Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy We Prioritize The Safety of Marginalized People Over the Comfort of Unmarginalized People How Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy (Workshop) Kim Crayton: Intention Without Strategy is Chaos Sitting with Discomfort 40:21 - Putting Ergonomics, Safety, and Security Behind Paywalls “Ergonomics is the marriage of design and ethics.” The History of Seatbelts Government Regulation Worker Organizing 45:58 - Tech Workers and Privilege Overpaid/Underpaid Reflections: Mandy: Inclusive and accessible technology includes people experiencing domestic abuse. Damien: If a product can be used for harm, it will be. Coraline: How systems are weaponized against marginalized and vulnerable folks. The internet is good for connecting people with shared experiences but we’re breaking into smaller and smaller groups. Are we propping up systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences? Eva: Who didn’t teach you about this? It’s our job to keep ourselves safe in tech. Tech companies need to take more responsibility for safety. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDY: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 252. My name is Mandy Moore and today, I'm here with Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Hi, and I am here with Coraline Ada Ehmke. CORALINE: Wow. I actually showed up for once. [laughs] I'm very happy to be with y'all today and I'm very excited about the guest that we have today. Her name is Eva PenzeyMoog and Eva is a principal designer at 8th Light and the author of Design for Safety. Before ing the tech field, she worked in the non-profit space and volunteered as a domestic violence educator and rape crisis counselor. At 8th Light, she specializes in experience design as well as education and consulting in the realm of digital safety design. Her work brings together her expertise in domestic violence and technology, helping technologists understand how their creations facilitate interpersonal harm and how to prevent it through intentionally prioritizing the most vulnerable s. Eva, I'm so happy to have you here today. Hi! EVA: Hi, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. CORALINE: So if I recall correctly and it has been a while so Mandy, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we open with the same question that we've been opening with for 251 other episodes and Eva, that is, what is your superpower and how did you discover, or develop it? EVA: Yeah, so my superpower is my ADHD, actually [chuckles] and specifically my ability to hyperfocus and I didn't really acquire and start to until the age of 25, which is when I was diagnosed. For people who don't know, hyperfocus is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's a state of very intense focus that people with ADHD will sometimes go into. It's not something you really have control over, it's not something you can just turn on, or off, and it isn't necessarily good, or bad. But for me, I'm really lucky because it often gets triggered when I start to code. So as I was starting to learn code and then I switched over to focusing on design and frontend like CSS and SAAS. But as I was learning that stuff, it gets triggered all the time. So I can sit down and code and oftentimes, hours have gone past and so long as I don't like miss any meetings or forget to eat, it's totally a superpower. CORALINE: That's amazing. I've talked about before, I live with bipolar disorder and I tend to stay in a low-grade manic state as my resting place and I experience very similar things with that hyper focus and just losing hours on a task and sometimes, it's very positive and I get a lot done and sometimes, I'm like, “What the hell did I do?” [chuckles] EVA: Right. CORALINE: But I think it's great that—I've been talking to some other folks with ADHD, with bipolar—the judo moves we can do takes something that really negatively affects us in a lot of ways and finding a way to turn it around, like you said, and use it as a superpower. Those are the strategies we develop when we live with things like this and I'm always happy when people have figured out how to get something good out of that. EVA: Yeah, totally and realizing that you have this thing that happens. Because I'm sure it's been happening my whole life, but I didn't recognize it, or understand it and then just being able to name it and see that it's happening is so powerful. And then to be like, “Oh, I can maybe do certain things to try to get into it,” or just being aware that it's a thing it's like very powerful. CORALINE: I'm kind of curious, Eva, if you don't mind us talking about ADHD for a little while? EVA: Sure. Yeah. CORALINE: Okay. I have a friend who is – actually, a couple of friends who were very recently diagnosed with ADHD and they had so much trouble in the traditional tech were workplace, especially working for companies that have productivity metrics like lines of code, or number of commits, or something like that. It was really difficult for both of these friends to operate in an environment where you're expected to have very consistent output day over day and not having accommodation, or not having the ability to design their work in such a way that maximizes the positives of how they work and minimizes the negatives of how they work. Is that something you've struggled with as well? EVA: Yeah, and that’s so unfortunate that your friends because like I said, I feel like it is a superpower and most workplaces, they should be trying to harness it and understand that, you can have really, really awesome employees with ADHD. If you set them up for success, they can be so successful. But it is something – so I've only ever worked at 8th Light actually, when I was interviewing, over 5 years ago now, and started doing, trying to find my first job in tech, after doing a bootcamp, I interviewed at a couple different places and none of them felt super great. But obviously, I was just really eager to get my first job. But then I went into 8th Light and 8th Light was one of the places where I really, really did want to work there and was really excited for the interview. But when I got to the office, it was very quiet and there was an open workspace, but people were working very quietly and there were like lots of rooms. I got into that and I was like, “Oh, thank God” like, this is exactly the space I need. I can't handle too much activity. I can't handle offices where they're actually playing music; that type of thing is my nightmare and I don't actually like wearing headphones all day like that. That's not just a easy fix for me and for a lot of people with ADHD. So I felt like right away, now I want to work here even more and I've been really lucky that it's been a really good setup for someone like me to work and I have gotten some accommodations which has been good. I feel like if you don't give accommodations, they're breaking the law, they need to do that. DAMIEN: This is really, really validating because I've had similar experiences of that. Even just this morning where I was in the code and I had no idea how much time was going by and I had no awareness of anything else. That's possible because of the environment I have that I work in. Whereas, previous jobs I've had with bullpens and just open office plans, I was in incredibly miserable there and I didn't understand how people could get any work done in those environments. So just this understanding of how people are different; in what environments some people thrive in and other environments other people thrive in. EVA: Yeah. So have you always worked from home, or has this been a pandemic thing? DAMIEN: This has been probably about 10 years. Yeah. [laughs] I went home and never left. [laughs] EVA: Nice. [chuckles] CORALINE: I've done something very similar. I started working from home, I think in 2015 and not for a great reason, but I found the exact same thing that you're talking about. Like I am very sensitive to my environment. I use music to control my mood and like you, Eva, I hate headphones. So I do wonder, you mentioned accommodations and the legal perspective on that. In Illinois where – Eva, you live in Illinois, too. Are you local for 8th Light? EVA: Yeah. I live in Chicago. CORALINE: We have that will employment and it's really easy to discriminate against folks on multiple axes rather than providing our accommodations. Without will employment, they can just let you go and you have no proof that it was because they're ableist, or racist or transphobic, or whatever. EVA: Oh, yeah. That's so rough. Pritzker's got to get on that. Our governor. [chuckles] CORALINE: So do you want to tell us a little bit about the book that you just wrote? I understand a lot of people are finding a lot of value in it and really opening their eyes to a lot of maybe issues they weren't aware of. EVA: Yeah. So my book, Design for Safety, came out in early August and it's been really great to see people's reactions to it. I got my first formal book review, which was really cool and it was overall very positive, which has been very exciting. I'm hopeful that it is helping people understand that this is a thing because it's different, I feel like than a lot of other problems. Someone else explained this to me recently and I had this light bulb moment that I'm not providing a solution to a problem that people know that they have this problem, like how their tech is used for interpersonal harm and now I have a solution like, here's this book that's going to tell you how to fix it. It's more that people don't even know that this is a problem. So I'm educating on that as well as trying to give some of the solutions on how to fix it. It has been a lot of people just saying like, “I had no idea about any of this. It's been so eye-opening and now I'm going to think about it more and do these different things.” So that's been really great to see that just people’s awareness is going up, basically. MANDY: I really like on the website, the sentence that there's a pullout quote, or I'm not sure if it's even a pullout quote, but it says, “If abuse is possible, it's only a matter of time until it happens. There's no might, so let's build better, safer digital products from the start.” I like that. EVA: Yeah, thanks. I was very intentional and well, this goes back to when I was doing a conference talk. Before I wrote the book, I did a conference talk called Deg Against Domestic Violence and I thought a lot about the type of language should I use; should I say might happen, or should I say will happen? I eventually settled on it's going to happen even if it hasn't happened yet, or oftentimes, I think we just don't know that it's happened. People who have gone through domestic violence, some of then we'll talk openly about it. But most people just don't, which makes sense. It's this really intense, personal thing to go through and there's so much judgment and survivors get blamed for all these things. So it makes sense that people don't want to talk that much about it. I ended up thinking we just need to say that it will happen. DAMIEN: That's amazing. So I really want to know everything about this book. [chuckles] but to start with, you said the book is deg for safety and you witnessed this a little bit with domestic violence, violence and abuse. Can you talk about safe from what sort of things you mean when you say safety there? EVA: Yeah, for sure because I know safety is a big word that can mean a lot of different things. But the way that I'm talking about it in my work is in of interpersonal safety. So it's like how is someone who has a relationship with you in an interpersonal way going to use technology, weaponized technology, in a way that was not meant to be used? We aren't deg tech with these use cases in mind, but how is it ultimately going to be weaponized for some type of abuse? Domestic violence is really the emphasis and my big focus and was mentioned in the intro, some background in domestic violence space. But there's also issues with child abuse and elder abuse, especially in of surveillance of those groups as well as surveillance of workers is another thing that came up a lot as I was researching that I didn't get as much into in the book. But it's basically anytime there's an interpersonal relationship and someone has access to you in this personal way where you're not just an anonymous stranger, how is tech going to be used to exert some form of control, or abuse over that person? DAMIEN: Wow, that is a very important subject. So I'm an engineer who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about interpersonal violence, domestic abuse, anything of that nature and I know you've written a whole book [laughs] and we only have an hour, or so here, but what are the first things that people, or engineers need to know about this? EVA: Yeah, so I think the first thing is to understand that this is a problem and that it's happening and to go through some different examples of how this happens, which is what the first couple chapters of the book are all about. It's different forms of this interpersonal abuse via technology in the form of shared s is a really big one and this question of who has control and nebulous issues of control. There's also surveillance is a really big one and then location data as well. So I guess, I don't want to say like, “Oh, just read the book,” but learning a little bit about the different – there's so many different examples of how this works. Just to start to build that mental model of how this happens like, someone taking advantage of certain affordances within a shared bank software, or someone using an internet of things device to gaslight someone, or torment them. There's so many different examples. Location data shows up in all sorts of really sneaky in of stalking. It's not purely putting a tracker on someone's car, or even like Google Map and sharing your location is a more straightforward thing. But there's also, it shows up in other ways like, a grocery store app that has a timestamp and location. You can learn someone's grocery shopping habits and maybe you're estranged from this person, or they've left you because you're abusive, but they don't know that their stuff is showing up in this app and their location data. So it shows up in all sorts of different ways. This is a very long way to answer your question, but I think the first thing is to start to understand how this stuff works so that you're just aware of it and then from there, I have a whole chapter about how to implement a practice of deg for safety at your company. It is a little more design focused, but I think engineers can absolutely be doing this work, too. Even if it's just like quick research on how are any product with any type of message feature is going to be used for abuse and there’s lots of literature out there. So just looking at some articles, thinking about ways that aren't covered already, that just having a brainstorm about what are some new ways this might be used for abuse and then thinking about how to prevent them. CORALINE: One of the things that I was thinking about after reading your book, Eva, is at a metal level, or zooming out a bit. I think a lot of the ways that we design software, we have this idealized and homogenous notion of a . I think that in a lot of cases, especially if you're working on a project that's like more, or less one of those scratch your own itch problems, you tend to think of yourself as the . It's great to have that empathy for the end , but what we don't have, I don't think as a field, is an understanding that is an abstraction and it is a useful abstraction. But sometimes you need to zoom down a little bit and understand the different ways that people want to use the software and will use the software and what makes them different from this average idealized . That was one of the things that really struck me, especially from the process you were describing, is expanding our understanding of what means and anticipating the different use cases with hostile s, with actively abusive s, and I think thinking of abstraction is super helpful, but I feel like sometimes we need to zoom down and think differently about really who the people are and what their circumstances might be. EVA: Yeah. Oh man, I just wrote down what you said, is an abstraction. That's such a good way to think about it that I haven't heard before, but you're absolutely right that it's encapsulating such a big group of people. Even if for a small product, something that's not like Twitter that's open to billions of people, even something that's a subscription, or something that's going to have a smaller base. There's going to be such a diverse, different group within there and to just think of the term as a catchall is definitely problematic. Sorry, I'm just processing that is an abstraction, that term because we use it so much as designers, definitely. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: And anyone in tech is always using this term, but problematizing that term in a new way is really interesting to me. And I think my other thought about this is that we talk a lot about needing to think about more than just happy path and I feel like even that, at least in my experience, has been other things that are also very important where it's like, let's think about someone who has a crappy Wi-Fi connection, or someone who's low vision. Like there are all these other very important things to think about in of accessibility and inclusivity. I think I see what I'm doing as just adding another group into the mix of let's think about people who are currently surviving domestic violence, which is maybe a little bit harder to bring up than those other two that I mentioned because it's just so dark and it's something that we just don't want to have to think about, or talk about during work. It's just such a bummer, but it is really important to have this new group added when we're thinking about inclusive and accessible tech. DAMIEN: There's a really great parallel here, I think with security minded design and research. Again, that's another who is not behaving in the happy path. That's not behaving the way your normal s are behaving and you have to design your system in such a way to be resilient to that. So I love this as an abstraction, then breaking it down into all these ways and then also, there's a huge value to diversity in your team with this sort of thing. CORALINE: Absolutely. DAMIEN: You can understand the very different types of s having people on the team who can understand blackhat s who are going to be trying to use your servers to mine Bitcoin, or [laughs] blind s, low vision s, or colorblind s, for goodness’ sake. And then in addition to that, people again, who are experiencing domestic violence, other to of other forms of interpersonal abuse and just being able to understand all those s and their experiences with the things you're building and deg. EVA: Yeah, definitely those are all really good points. Just going back to what you said about the parallels with security is something I've actually been thinking about that a lot, because I think there are lots of parallels to that, or useful things about how security professionals think about their work and operate. Especially the big one for me right now is thinking about a security professional. They're never going to be like, “Okay, we did it. Our system is secure. We're done. We have arrived.” That's not a thing and I feel like it's very similar with deg for safety, or even inclusion. There's just, you're never – I feel like we've had a mental model of “I can think about these things, I can check these boxes, and now, my product is inclusive, or my product is accessible.” I feel like we should be thinking more like security professionals where there's always going to be more things like, we always have to be vigilant about what's the next way that someone's going to misuse tech, or the group that’s going to be identified that we've totally left out and is being harmed in some way. So I think that's just a useful shift that I'm thinking a lot about. CORALINE: And Damien, I'm so glad you brought up the parallels with security. I was actually going there as well. One of the things that I've been thinking about from an ethical source perspective is insecurity that, I think two tools that would be super useful. First of all, personas and secondly—I guess, three things—understanding that safety can be a matter of adding layers of friction to disincentivize abusive behavior and like you said, recognizing this is an ongoing arms race. Every new feature that you design opens up some kind of attack, or abuse factor and if you're not planning for that from the outset, you're going to be caught later when harm has been done. EVA: Yeah, absolutely. Since you brought up personas, there is something in the process that I created that's a similar tool where I call them archetypes because they're a little different from personas. But it's identifying who is the ab in this scenario, who is the survivor, and what are their goals and that's basically it, we don't need to get into anything else. I don't think, but just articulating those things and then even having a little printout, kind of similar to the idea with personas like, oh, you can print them out for your sales team, or whoever it is to keep these people in mind. A similar idea of just having them printed out an on your wall so that it's something that you're thinking about like, “Oh, we have this new feature. We probably need to think about how is this ab person that we've identified who would want to use our product to find the location data of their former partner,” whatever it is. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Use this. CORALINE: From a mechanical perspective, Eva, one of the one of the challenges I had at GitHub when I was working on community and safety is that the other engineers and the other groups were creating so many new features. I felt like the knowledge about how feature can be abused, or like you said, will be abused wasn't spread very effectively throughout, especially a large software organization, and it fell on a small team of folks who frankly were not consulted. A feature would go out and we'd be like, “Holy crap, you can't do that because of this, this, and this.” So do you have any do you have any thoughts? I know you said print it out, or put it on the wall, but do you have any thoughts for how to spread that awareness and that mode of thinking across teams who frankly may be very, very focused just on feature delivery and will see any consideration like that as slowing them down, or having negative impact on “productivity”? EVA: Yes. I have many thoughts. [chuckles] So this is bringing up something for me that I've struggled with and thought about is should there be specialized teams in this area? I feel like yes, we want people with special knowledge and experts and that's really important, but also, I feel like the ideal scenario is that it's just everyone's job. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Those teams were already doing things and it wasn't seen as “Oh, Coraline’s team is going to come in and now we have to consult with those people,” or whatever because it's not our job, it's their job. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Which this isn't a very maybe satisfying answer to your question because I feel like it involves a huge shift in the way that we think about this stuff, but it is something I've thought about in of should I call myself a safety designer? Is that something I want to do? Do I want this to be like a specialized role? Maybe is that a goal where people start to see that? Because there are people who specialize in inclusive design, or accessible design. But then the downside of that is does that just give someone else even more leeway to be like, “Not my job, I don't have to worry about this. And then we have the problems, like what you just described. I don't know, I feel like it's such a big shift that needs to happen. CORALINE: Yeah. One of the models I've been thinking about and I was thinking of this in of generalists versus specialists is generalists, or to map that to domain that we're talking about now, the other engineers in your group, or in your company. I feel like there has to be a balance between specialization and general knowledge. The way I describe that is everyone should have literacy on a particular topic and the basic vocabulary for it and a general knowledge of the concepts augmented by a specialist who has fluency. So kind of a dynamic relationship between literacy and fluency. Do you have any thoughts on that? EVA: I love that. I'm literally writing that down. A generalist with literacy and a specialist with fluency is such a good way to think about it because I feel like I do say this. I don't want people who read my book, or see my talk to think like, “Oh, I have to be like her, I have to learn all this stuff. I have to really dig into domestic violence works and what it means and laws.” I don't want people to feel like they have to do that because it's just such a dark, heartbreaking thing to have to think and read about every day and I don't think that's a realistic goal. But I think being a generalist with literacy is realistic augmented by specialist with fluency; I'm just like basically repeating what you just said. [chuckles] But that's just a really brilliant way to think about it. DAMIEN: That pattern actually really matches something that I learned from another Greater Than Code guest. I'm sorry, I can't their name right now. I believe we were talking about inclusivity and what they said was like, “It's not the expert's job to make the product, or the company inclusive. [chuckles] It's the expert job to – it's everybody's job to make it inclusive. It's the expert's job to be an expert and to them.” We also use again, a metaphor from security. We don't have security experts whose job it is to make your app secure, we have security experts whose job it is to everybody in keeping your app secure. CORALINE: Yeah. DAMIEN: So I feel like that this matches really well. The job of the person with this expertise is to , to educate, to guide not because they can't do all the work together all themselves, like Coraline said. There's just too many features being added for [laughs] for some team somewhere to go, “Oh no, this is fine,” or “That's not fine.” EVA: Yeah, totally, and I feel like that just brought up something for me, Damien, about the speed at which we work, too many features being added, not enough time to actually do this work, and how—this is getting at just way bigger critique of tech in general. DAMIEN: Yeah. EVA: But it's okay to slow down once in a while. I feel like just the urgency thing causes so many problems outside of just what we're talking about. But this is another big one that I feel like it's okay to spend an afternoon thinking through what are the ways this is going to be not inclusive, or unsafe and that's totally fine. But I fall into it, too where I'm like, “I want to deliver things quickly for my client,” or if I'm doing so internal for a flight, I want to get done quickly. I don't want to hold people up. So it is a really hard thing to break out of. CORALINE: It seems to me, Eva, that this kind of knowledge, or this kind of literacy, or this kind of making it part of the process can fall solely on engineers. Because in a lot of places, we have of product managers who are setting deadlines for us. How do you communicate to them why this work is so important when they may only see it as like, “Well, you're getting in the way of us hitting a release date and we have a press release ready,” or “We want our debut this feature at a particular time, or place”? MANDY: And now we want to take a quick time out to recognize one of our sponsors: Kaspersky Labs: Rarely does a day where a ransomware attack, data breach, or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up, or know if you're protected. Don't worry, Kaspersky’s got you covered. Each week, their team discusses the latest news and trends that you may have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast mixing in humor, facts and experts from around the world. The Transatlantic Cable Podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts & Spotify, go check it out! EVA: Yeah, totally. So I think ideally, this comes from everyone. My book is called Design for Safety, but I really hope that people are reading it, who are also engineers and who are also project managers—basically anyone who has a say in how the product is actually going to function, I think should be doing this work. But specifically, if you have a project manager who is rushing everyone and saying, “We don't have time for this,” I do have a couple different strategies in my book about this, where it's like we can use statistics to talk about that this is a thing that is impacting a lot of our s. It's 1 in 3 women, 1 and 4 men in the US have experienced severe physical, domestic violence and that's just severe physical, domestic violence. There's so much domestic violence that doesn't have a physical component to it so that could be like a third of our base. So bringing stuff up like that to try to get some buy-in, but then also my process, I have little time estimate. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: So saying like, “We want to do research; it's going to be 6 hours.” “We want to do a brainstorm; it's going to be 2 hours.” Giving people very specific things that they can say yes to is always going to be better than just an open-ended, “We want to design for safety.” CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: And someone being like, “I don't know what that means, but we have a deadline.” Saying like, “We're going to do a brainstorm to identify ways that our product will be used for harm. We want to do it next week and we want to spend 4 hours on it” is going to be a lot better. DAMIEN: And I want to call out how important and useful the language you use there was you said because when you find something, when you do that brainstorm, or whatever analysis process, you go like, “Oh, here's the way our products will be used for harm.” Because if you say to a product manager, “Here's a way our product might be used for harm,” they go, “Well, okay.” [laughs] “Might not be.” [laughs] If you say, “Here's a way our product will be used for harm.” Well, now that leaves a lot less of wiggle room. EVA: Hmm, yeah. That's a really good point that I actually hadn't thought about. I think the other thing is there's tangible outcomes from something like that brainstorm, or these different activities that I have outlined. You can actually show the person, like, “Here's what we did. Here's what we came up with,” which isn't necessarily – I wish we didn't have to always do that; always have some type of very explicit outcome from everything we do. But I do think that's a reality that we have that this process kind of helps with. CORALINE: I want to go back to the thing. Again, one of the things that we're thinking about our ethical source is thinking beyond the and thinking about not just who is using the technology that we're creating, but the people that the technology we're creating is being used on. EVA: Yes. That's such a good point. I'm actually curious, have you come up with a term for that type of ? Like non? CORALINE: I have not yet, but that's a great call out. Language is so important so, yeah. EVA: Yeah. I don't know that it exists and I've seen non, but I don't know that that's agreed upon. DAMIEN: I've gotten as far, the best I've come up with is constituency. CORALINE: That is very interesting, Damien because one of the things we're developing is a governance tool. The W3C, when they were working on the HTML standard—this was a couple of years ago, I think—they mentioned something called a priority of constituent and this was very much from a standards body perspective, but it was one sentence and I think it is such a powerful sentence. Just for their example, they said, “In times of conflict, we prioritize end s over developers, over browser manufacturers, over spec writers, over technical purity.” [laughter] EVA: Wow. CORALINE: That’s one sentence, but writing that down, I think can really help cut through a lot of a lot of the noise and a lot of the gray area maybe that's the most encountered. It's so simple and you can do it in a single sentence. So absolutely, the notion of constituencies and being explicit about whose safety, convenience, or what have you you're optimizing for. EVA: Yeah. That's really important and I have two thoughts. One is that this comes up a lot in the surveillance space where it's like, what sort of rights, or priority should we be giving someone who is walking on the sidewalk in front of a house that has a Ring camera that's facing out to capture the porch, but is ultimately capturing the sidewalk in the street? What are the rights of that person, that non, who has not agreed to be filmed and isn't part of this product's ecosystem, but is still being impacted by it? It's something I think about a lot, especially there's so many in my neighborhood I see. Since I wrote the book, I see the Ring cameras everywhere, including in places where they're not really to be like on the outside of someone's gate, just facing the sidewalk. It's like, you're not even recording your own property at that point. It's just the gate, or it's just the sidewalk, I mean, which I feel is very problematic. You also said that it's important to explicitly call out who you're prioritizing and that's something – I read this book called Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock, which was very lifechanging and it's just such a good book. It's a little more theoretical. She explicitly says it's not a guide, but she talks about this, about how it's really important to, if you are going to choose not to be inclusive, or safe, or justice focused, whatever it is, you need to explicitly say, “We are choosing to prioritize the comfort of this group over the safety of this group. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Or whatever it is. Like, you need to actually just spell that out and be upfront about it. DAMIEN: Yeah. It reminds me of, I think I learned this from Marla Compton. Although, I don't know if she originated it. I guess, she probably didn't, but the phrase she taught me was, “We prioritize the safety of marginalized people over the comfort of non-marginalized people.” It's such a powerful statement. CORALINE: It really is. DAMIEN: Yeah, and just making that explicit like, “These are the tradeoffs and these are where we side on them.” CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's such a good one. I did this workshop recently, it's called How Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy, but they talked a lot about how feeling entitled to comfort is just such a white supremacist thing and I feel shows up in different forms of oppression as well like men's comfort, et cetera. But that's something I've been thinking about a lot is the feeling of a right to comfort and how that also includes a right to not have to have any type of conflict and a fear of conflict. How these things all play together and how it's all part of white supremacy and how it shows up in our culture, in our workplaces. It was a great workshop. I would highly recommend it because it's also been a lifechanging thing as I digest all of the different things from it. DAMIEN: It's so powerful to name that as comfort. CORALINE: Yeah. DAMIEN: Like, this is what we're protecting. We're protecting these people's comfort [chuckles] and this is what it will cost. CORALINE: I think about what Kim Crayton said for a year is, “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” EVA: Yeah, that's such a good one. I love her. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: I quoted her in my book about, oh, I forget what it is. It's something about not having strategy is chaos. CORALINE: Oh my God. EVA: Like, the need for strategy. CORALINE: I learned so much from her from that one statement. That was literally lifechanging for me. That was literally lifechanging for me because I always had a negative feeling about strategy, like strategy is coercive, or insincere. And then another friend of mine I was talking to about it said strategy is good when it's not a zero-sum game. EVA: Mm. CORALINE: I think we maybe we can think about personal safety and abuse factors in that way. EVA: Yeah, definitely. I think the full quote is “Intention without strategy is chaos.” CORALINE: Yeah, that. EVA: That has been very definitely influential for me and as I feel like a big part of the reason, that idea is why I wrote my book and did my conference talk is because I was feeling frustrated with – it's a lot easier to raise awareness about an issue than it is to have actual strategies for fixing it. I felt like I would always get really fired up reading something, or listening to a talk and be like, “Yeah, this is such a huge problem. We need to fix it,” and then didn't have a takeaway, or anything that I could really do at work other than just being told to think about this, or consider this, which I'm like, “When do I do that?” CORALINE: And what does that look like? EVA: Yeah, you can't think about all of the different things we need to think about from 9:00 to 5:00 while we're at work every day. We need a strategy to do that, which is why I like made these different activities that I have in my process. But going back to this white supremacy and design workshop that I did, I also learned in there about how some other ways that white supremacy shows up is having an action bias and a sense of urgency. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: And how a lot of that can come from people, especially white people, not being able to like sit with discomfort when we're faced with really uncomfortable topics and a desire to jump into action before we fully understand the problem and have internalized it. So now I'm feeling like I need to backtrack a little bit and be like, “Yes, provide action.” But also, it is good to do deep learning. I think we need both, but I feel like a lot of people, it's one, or the other. Let's do a ton of learning, or let's jump right into action. I have always been a jump right into action person and now I'm realizing it's okay to take a beat and do some deep learning and to sit with all the discomfort of the heavy topic. CORALINE: A friend of mine gave me a concept that I like a lot. He has a definition of ergonomics that is the marriage of design and ethics. When I use the term ergonomics in that sense, what I mean is how easy is it to do a particular action. One of the things that I see quite a bit—something, I think is a terrible consequence of the web, frankly—is putting ergonomics behind paywalls and asking people who use our software to yield some degree of agency, or digital autonomy, or security in exchange for features. EVA: Hmm. So interesting. CORALINE: So I'm curious maybe how you would frame deg for safety, some of the other axes of oppression that we discussed on the show today, from the perspective of the ethical aspect of our design decisions. What workflows are we optimizing for? What workflows are we putting behind a paywall, or in exchange for okay, you’re g up. The [inaudible] says you're buying into surveillance capitalism and you just simply have to do that if you want an email , if you want a Twitter , what have you. EVA: Yeah. I do feel like there is a bit of an issue with putting safety and security sometimes behind a paywall where you can literally pay more to not get d to, for example. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Which it's like, I get that products have to charge money and it’s like we shouldn't – the flipside of that is well, we can't just work for free. I see that a lot with journalism when people are criticizing paywalls and it's like well, but journalists have to get paid. They can't work for free just like everyone else. But I do feel that with things like being able to opt out of advertising and I feel like there are other things. Nothing's coming in right now, but different ways that you can ease some of the crappier parts of tech, if you have enough money, to buy into the paid versions of things is definitely problematic. Who are we keeping out when we do that and who are we saying doesn't deserve this privacy and the safety? What should just be standard? The seatbelt; I'm obsessed with the history of the seatbelts. CORALINE: [chuckles] I still have the [inaudible] that's been going around. EVA: Yeah. CORALINE: It’s amazing. EVA: I've talked about this in many different places, but the seatbelt used to be something that you had to pay extra for. In today's dollars, it would've been like 300 extra dollars when you bought a car to get seat belts and only 2% of the people, in 1956 when they were introduced, actually paid for them and probably even less were actually using them. And then there was a revolution in the auto industry led by activists and everyday people. It definitely not come from the auto industry; they had to be forced into these different things. But now seat belts, the government basically, they ed a law and they said, “You have to just include seat belts as a standard feature.” I think about that a lot in tech. The things now that we're making people pay for, should some of those just be standard features and how are we going to get there? Probably government regulation after a lot of activism and everyday people rallying against these different things with big tech. But I think we're going to get there with a lot of things and we're going to see a lot of seatbelts, so to speak, become just standard features and not something you have to pay for. CORALINE: And I wonder, you mentioned government regulation; I have literally zero faith in government doing anything effective in the online world at all because our government is powered by 65-year-old white men that are rich and there's no incentive for them to care about this even if they did have the basic literacy about how this stuff works. It seems to me one of the things that we've been seeing really emphasize is, especially during in post lockdown, is worker organizing and I wonder if there's a strategy here for empowering the engineers, who frankly, we are being treated rockstars right now. I hate that term rockstar, but we're overpaid, we're pampered—a lot of folks, obviously, not everyone. So can we leverage our power? Can we leverage the privilege of being in such an in-demand profession to affect change in organizations that have no financial incentive to think about stuff like this at all? EVA: Yeah. So many things I want to respond to. Definitely, I think worker power is like such a strong point in all of this and I feel like we are the ones leading out on this. A lot of it is coming from people who work in tech and understand the issues. Like, writing, speaking, and doing these different things to help everyday people who don't work in tech understand like, “Hey, actually, here's why Facebook is really terrible.” A lot of that is coming from people in tech, even former Facebook employees even. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Which is different, I think from the paradigm shift we had with the auto industry. I don't know, I would have to look, but I'm pretty sure is not coming from car designers and engineers weren't helping lead that charge the way that we are. But I also want to respond to something you said about tech workers being overpaid and pampered, which yes, I agree with you. But I also think there are privileges that everyone should have and that no one should of and I feel like everyone deserves to be well paid, to be comfortable and have all these perks, and whatnot. I had a career in nonprofit before this so I have so much internalized just baggage about and guilt around feeling with my pay, my benefits, and all these things. The work I do now, compared to the work I was doing in the nonprofit, which was helping kids who were basically on a road to dropping out before graduating high school, which was really important work and I made so much less money and worked so much harder. But I feel like everyone deserves to be as well paid as we are and it is possible. CORALINE: Yes. EVA: So I just wanted to kind of throw that out there as well that we – [chuckles] I feel like I'm trying to just absolve myself from being a well-paid tech worker. But I do think we deserve this and also, everyone else deserves similar treatment. CORALINE: Absolutely. DAMIEN: Yeah. I feel the same way, especially—to take an example within a tech company—as an engineer, I get paid a lot more than customer service people. CORALINE: Yeah. DAMIEN: And that doesn't mean I'm overpaid, [chuckles] it means they're underpaid. CORALINE: Yeah. DAMIEN: A lot. [laughs] CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Yeah, and I feel like this whole conversation, honestly, this is a freaking tactic. This is what the people at the top, this is how they want us to feel; pitting us against each other, feeling like it's not that – the sales people, that's normal and we're overpaid. It's like, no, actually we're paid a livable amount where we can live comfortably and they're exploited even more than we are. That's how I'm trying to think about things because I do feel like this other way of looking at it is just absolutely a tactic of, I don't know, the 1%, whatever you want to call them. The company leaders definitely don't want us to feel like we're – they would rather us feel that we're overpaid and pampered than just compensated for the labor we do in a fair way, MANDY: Have us feel the shame and guilt around it, too. Before I was in tech, I went from welfare to making a reasonable standard of living in a year and sometimes, I still feel guilty about it. It's a heck of a feeling. EVA: Yeah, and I feel like that didn't just come out of nowhere. We've been taught that we should feel guilty for just surviving. I don't know. Because I think even in tech, it's a lot of people there's still so many issues with burnout, with—I don't know about you all, my body sometimes just hurts from not moving enough during – like, there's still all these like different things that could be better. But the feeling that we should feel guilty for having some comfort and decent pay, I think that's definitely a strategy that has come from these different powerful groups. It didn't just come out of nowhere. CORALINE: I appreciate y'all pushing back on that. I guess, I'm speaking from an emotional place. Eva, you went from nonprofit and the tech. In April, I went from tech and the nonprofit and personally, I took a 30% pay cut and – [overtalk] EVA: Oh, wow. CORALINE: It just really made very visible and very personal seeing what we value as a society and what we don't value as a society. I'm still comfortable; I still have a living wage and everything. But look at what happened during the lockdown with “frontline workers.’ They're heroes, but we don't want to pay them more than minimum wage. So I definitely agree with what you're saying about other people being underpaid and I definitely hear what you're saying about that guilt, but guilt is a form of discomfort. What are you going to do with that? What are you going to do with the privileges and the power that we have as a result of the way we're treated in this industry? I feel like that's the more important thing and what do you do with it? Are you giving back? Are you giving back in a substantive way, or are you giving back to assuage your guilt? It's nuanced. As y'all are pointing out, it is nuanced. EVA: Yeah. It's very complicated, but I feel like agitating for those—sorry, Damien, I think you said people—getting paid more, that's something we can agitate for. I know someone, I'll call her an online friend of mine in the infertility space, which I'm very involved in as I go through my journey. I hate that word, but I've made all these online friends who are going through it and one of them is a paralegal and she is obviously hoping, although it's not going well, to get pregnant. But she was looking into the parental benefits and realized that the lawyers where she works had, I think it's 18 weeks fully paid off and then everyone else got this weird piecemeal of 6 weeks paid off, then there's FMLA, and then there's PTO, and all this stuff that amounted to a lot less, and you had to like use all of your PTO and all these different things. She actually was able to—with some of the lawyers help, I believe—get that policy change that it was just the same for everyone because it was like, “I didn't go to law school. So therefore, I don't need as much time with my newborn? How does that make sense?” CORALINE: [chuckles] Yeah. EVA: So I feel there is a lot of potential to have more equality in our companies, especially as the most powerful people often in the companies, to push for that change to happen. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: There needs to be a lot of solidarity, I think, between these different types of workers. CORALINE: Yeah, and that's a great example of that. MANDY: Well, this has been an absolutely fantastic conversation and I feel so privileged just to be sitting here kicking back and just taking in the back and forth between the rest of you. I wrote down a bunch of a things, but one of the biggest takeaways that I have had from this episode, and especially if you've been listening to the show the past couple episodes, we've been talking about a lot of accessibility things. Eva, you said something that was mind-blowing for me and it shouldn't be mind-blowing, but it was because I was like, didn't even ever think of that and what the hell is wrong with me for not even ever thinking about that? but inclusive and accessible includes people experiencing domestic abuse. It’s not something – I guess, because as what you said, people don't talk about it. So just keeping that in mind was pretty pertinent to me. I also liked what Coraline said about specialization and then the general knowledge and literacy versus fluency. That was really good as well. So it's been an awesome conversation. Thank you. Damien, what do you have? DAMIEN: Oh, well, this has been really awesome and I want to of first thank Eva for being our guest here and for the work you do and this book. The thing that's going to be sticking with me, I'll be reflecting on for a while, is this sentence both well, if the product can be used for harm, it will be, which is not only a really powerful thing to keep in mind when deg and building a thing, but also, a powerful sentence that is really useful in communicating these issues. So thank you very much for that. CORALINE: One of the things that and actually Eva, this was a reaction I had when I first read your book is, I think a lot of us, a growing number of us, have at least an awareness, if not a personal experience, with how systems are weaponized against marginalized, or vulnerable folks. So I think it's really important that in your book, you focus very specifically on a particular domain of abuse, abuse of power and loss of agency and loss of privacy, loss of physical safety. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is how the internet has been really good for connecting people with shared experiences and creating communities around the shared experiences. But I do worry that we're breaking into smaller and smaller and smaller groups and I see that. I don't know if it's intentional, but it certainly is a way, I think that we're propping up, that we're being coerced into propping up these systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences. I don't see that as a criticism. What I see it as is an opportunity to connect with other folks who experience that same kind of systemic damage in collaborating and trying to understand the different challenges that we all face. But recognizing that a lot of it is based frankly, white supremacy. We used to talk about patriarchy; I think the thinking broadly has evolved beyond that. But I would love to see your publisher start putting books together on different particular axes, but also, looking at ways that we can bridge the differences between these different experiences of intentional, or unintentional harm. So that's something that I think I'm going to think about. EVA: Nice. I can't give any spoilers, but I do think my publisher might have something in the works that it's getting at some of this stuff. Wonderful. EVA: Which is exciting. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Yeah, okay. Man, those are all so good. My reflection, I'm just thinking a lot about our conversation about the way that people in tech might feel like we're overpaid, or pampered and how that feels like an intentional thing that has come from somewhere and things like that don't just – it always comes from somewhere. I'm thinking Mandy, about what you said in your reflection. You said, “What's wrong with me for not thinking about this?” I always feel like when I hear people say things like that, it's like well, when were you – I think more who didn't teach you about this? Why wasn't this part of your education as you were learning to code and before you ed the industry? I feel like that's more where the blame lies than with individuals, but yeah. Something I was thinking about earlier today, before we started recording, is that this idea of safety, that it's like our job to keep ourselves safe on tech and there's so many resources out there, different articles, and different things. I've been thinking similarly about that, but that's a marketing campaign. That's something that the leaders of big tech done to intentionally shift responsibility from themselves and onto the end . We're expected to be legal experts, read these agreements, and understand every single thing about a product that no one uses every single feature, but we're expected to understand it. If we don't and something goes wrong, either interpersonal harm, what I do, or with like oh, someone guessed your or whatever it was, it's your fault instead of it being the tech company's responsibility. I feel like that's another thing that I'm thinking like that didn't come from nowhere, that came from somewhere. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: It feels like a very intentional strategy that big tech has used to blame us for when things go wrong. Not to say that we get to be absolved of everything, people have responsibilities and whatnot, but I feel like a lot of times it's like this comes from somewhere and I'm trying to think more about that kind of stuff. This conversation was really awesome for helping me process some of those and expand my thoughts a little bit more. So thank you all, this was just really awesome. DAMIEN: Thank you. Thank you for being here. MANDY: Thank you for coming. CORALINE: Yeah. So happy to talk to you, Eva. EVA: Yeah. You, too. MANDY: All right, everyone. Well, with that, we will wrap up and I will put a plug in for our Slack community. You can us and Eva will get an invitation as well to come visit us in Slack and keep these conversations going. Our website to do that is patreon.com/greaterthancode. Patreon is a subscription-based thing that if you want to you can pledge to the show. However, if you DM any one of us and you want to be let in and you cannot afford, or just simply don't want to, monetarily , we will let you in for free. So just reach out to one of the ists and we'll get you in there. So with that, I will say thank you again. Thank you, everybody and we'll see you next week! Special Guest: Eva PenzeyMoog. Sponsored By: Kaspersky Labs: Rarely does a day where a ransomware attack, data breach or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up or know if you're protected. Don't worry Kaspersky’s got you covered. Each week their team discusses the latest news and trends that you may have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast mixing in humour, facts and experts from around the world. The Transatlantic Cable Podcast can be found on apple podcasts & spotify, go check it out! Greater Than Code

01:09 - Todd’s Superpower: Advocacy For Accessibility Getting Started Deg With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman The A11Y Project W3C 06:18 - ing The W3C The W3C Community Page 07:44 - Getting People/Companies/Stakeholders to Care/Prioritize About Accessibility Making A Strong Case For Accessibility by Todd Libby Diplomatic Advocacy You Don’t Want To Get Sued! / $$$ “We are all temporarily abled.” 15:20 - The Domino's Pizza Story Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino’s over site accessibility 18:21 - Things That Typically Aren’t Accessible And Should Be The WebAIM Million Report WCAG Color Contrast Missing Alt Text on Images Form Input Labels What’s New in WCAG 2.1: Label in Name by Todd Libby Empty Links Not Using Document Language Triggering GIFS / Flashing Content Empty Buttons – Use a Button Element!! Tab Order Semantic HTML, Heading Structure 26:27 - Accessibility for Mobile Devices Target Size Looking at WCAG 2.5.5 for Better Target Sizes Dragging Movements 28:08 - Color Contrast Contrast Ratio 33:02 - Deg w/ Accessibility in Mind From the Very Beginning Accessibility Advocates on Every Team Accessibility Training 36:22 - Contrast (Cont’d) 38:11 - Automating Accessibility! axe-core-gems Reflections: Mae: Eyeballing for contrast. John: We are all only temporarily abled and getting the ball rolling on building accessibility in from the beginning of projects going forward and fixing older codebases. Mandy: Using alt-tags going forward on all social media posts. Todd: Accessibility work will never end. Accessibility is a right not a privilege. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 251. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mae Beale. MAE: Hi, there! And also, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hi, everyone! I'm Mandy Moore and I'm here today with our guest, Todd Libby. Todd Libby is a professional web developer, designer, and accessibility advocate for 22 years under many different technologies starting with HTML/CSS, Perl, and PHP. Todd has been an avid learner of web technologies for over 40 years starting with many flavors of BASIC all the way to React/Vue. Currently an Accessibility Analyst at Knowbility, Todd is also a member of the W3C. When not coding, you’ll usually find Todd tweeting about lobster rolls and accessibility. So before I ask you what your superpower is, I'm going to make a bet and my bet is that I'm 80% positive that your superpower has something to do with lobster rolls. Am I right? [laughter] Am I right? TODD: Well, 80% of the time, you'd be right. I just recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona. So I was actually going to say advocacy for accessibility, but yes, lobster rolls and the consumption of lobster rolls are a big part. MAE: I love it. That's fantastic. MANDY: Okay. Well, tell me about the advocacy. [chuckles] TODD: So it started with seeing family who are disabled, friends who are disabled, or have family themselves who are disabled, and the struggles they have with trying to access websites, or web apps on the web and the frustration, the look of like they're about ready to give up. That's when I knew that I would try to not only make my stuff that I made accessible, but to advocate for people in accessibility. MAE: Thank you so much for your work. It is critical. I have personally worked with a number of different populations and started at a camp for children with critical illnesses and currently work at an organization that offers financial services for people with disabilities – well, complex financial needs, which the three target populations that we work with are people with disabilities, people with dementia, and people in recovery. So really excited to talk with you today. Thanks. TODD: You’re welcome. JOHN: When you started that journey, did you already have familiarity with accessibility, or was it all just like, “Oh, I get to learn all this stuff so I can start making it better”? TODD: So I fell into it because if you're like me and you started with making table-based layouts way back in the day, because what we had—Mosaic browser, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer—we were making table-based layouts, which were completely inaccessible, but I didn't know that. As the web progressed, I progressed and then I bought a little orange book by Jeffrey Zeldman, Deg with Web Standards, and that pretty much started me on my journey—semantic HTML, progressive enhancement in web standards, and accessibility as well. I tend to stumble into a lot of stuff [laughs] so, and that's a habit of mine. [laughs] MAE: It sounds like it's a good habit and you're using it to help all the other people. So I hate to encourage you to keep stumbling, but by all means. [laughter] Love it. If you were to advise someone wanting to know more about accessibility, would you suggest they start with that same book too, or what would you suggest to someone stumbling around in the dark and not hitting anything yet? TODD: The book is a little outdated. I think the last edition of his book was, I want to say 2018, maybe even further back than that. I would suggest people go on websites like The A11Y project, the a11yproject.com. They have a comprehensive list of resources, links to learning there. Twitter is a good place to learn, to follow people in the accessibility space. The other thing that, if people really want to dive in, is to The W3C. That's a great place and there's a lot of different groups. You have the CSS Working Group, you have the accessibility side of things, which I'm a part of, the Silver Community Group, which is we're working on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 3.0, which is still a little ways down the road, but a lot of great people and a lot of different companies. Some of those companies we've heard of—Google, Apple, companies like that all the way down to individuals. Individuals can as individuals if your company isn't a member of the W3C. So those are the three things that I mainly point to people. If you don't really want to dive into the W3C side of things, there's a lot of resources on the a11yproject.com website that you can look up. MANDY: So what does being a member entail? What do you have to do? Do you have to pay dues? Do you have to do certain projects, maybe start as an individual level, because I'm sure we have mostly individuals listening to the show. Me as a newbie coder, what would I do to get started as a member of this initiative? TODD: Well, I started out as an individual myself, so I ed and I can get you the link to The W3C Community Page. Go to sign up as an individual and someone will approve the form process that you go through—it's nothing too big, it's nothing complicated—and then that will start you on your way. You can a sub group, you can a group, a working group, and it doesn't cost an individual. Companies do pay dues to the W3C and if your company is in the W3C, you get ahold of your company's liaison and there's a process they go through to add you to a certain group. Because with me, it was adding me to The Silver Community Group. But as an individual, you can in, you can hop right into a meeting from there, and then that's basically it. That's how you start. JOHN: What are the challenges you see in getting not only the goals of a W3C, but I'm assuming specifically around accessibility? TODD: Some of the things that I've seen is buy-in from stakeholders is probably the number one hurdle, or barrier. Companies, stakeholders, and board , they don't think of, or in some cases, they don't care about accessibility until a company is getting sued and that's a shame. That's one of the things that I wrote about; I have an article on Smashing Magazine. Making A Strong Case for Accessibility, it's called and that is one of few things that I've come across. Getting buy-in from stakeholders and getting buy-in from colleagues as well because you have people that they don’t think about accessibility, they think about a number of different things. Mostly what I've come across is they don't think about accessibility because there's no budget, or they don't have the time, or the company doesn't have the time. It's not approved by the company. The other thing that is right up there is it's a process—accessibility—making things accessible and most people think that it's a big this huge mountain to climb. If you incorporate accessibility from the beginning of your project, it's so much easier. You don't have to go back and you don't have to climb that mountain because you've waited until the very end. “Oh, we have time now so we'll do the accessibility stuff,” that makes it more hard. MAE: John, your question actually was similar to something I was thinking about with how you developed this superpower and I was going to ask and still will now. [chuckles] How did you afford all the time in the different places where you were overtime to be able to get this focus? And so, how did you make the case along the way and what things did you learn in that persuasion class of life [chuckles] that was able to allow you to have that be where you could focus and spend more time on and have the places where you work prioritize successful? TODD: It was a lot of, I call it diplomatic advocacy. So for instance, the best example I have is I had been hired to make a website, a public facing website, and a SAAS application accessible. The stakeholder I was directly reporting to, we were sitting down in a meeting one day and I said, “Well, I want to make sure that accessibility is the number one priority on these projects,” and he shot back with, “Well, we don't have the disabled s,” and that nearly knocked me back to my chair. [laughs] So that was a surprise. MAE: There's some groaning inside and I had to [chuckles] do it out loud for a moment. Ooh. TODD: Yeah, I did my internal groaning at the meeting so that just was – [chuckles] Yeah, and I that day very vividly and I probably will for the rest of my life that I looked at him and I had to stop and think, and I said, “Well, you never know, there's always a chance that you're able, now you could be disabled at any time.” I also pointed out that his eyeglasses that he wore are an assistive technology. So there was some light shed on that and that propelled me even further into advocacy and the accessibility side of things. That meeting really opened my eyes to not everyone is going to get it, not everyone is going to be on board, not everyone is going to think about disabled s; they really aren't. So from there I used that example. I also use what I call the Domino's Pizza card lately because “Oh, you don't want to get sued.’ That's my last resort as far as advocacy goes. Other than that, it's showing a videotape of people using their product that are disabled and they can't use it. That's a huge difference maker, when a stakeholder sees that somebody can’t use their product. There's numbers out there now that disabled s in this country alone, the United States, make up 25% of the population, I believe. They have a disposable income of $8 trillion. The visually disabled population alone is, I believe it was $1.6 billion, I think. I would have to check that number again, but it's a big number. So the money side of things really gets through to a stakeholder faster than “Well, your eyeglasses are a assistive technology.” So once they hear the financial side of things, their ears perk up real quick and then they maybe get on board. I've never had other than one stakeholder just saying, “No, we're just going to skip that,” and then that company ended up getting sued. So that says a lot, to me anyways. But that's how I really get into it. And then there was a time where I was working for another company. I was doing consulting for them and I was doing frontend mostly. So it was accessibility, but also at the same time, it was more the code side of things. That was in 2018. 2019, I went to a conference in Burlington, Vermont. I saw a friend of mine speaking and he was very ionate about it and that talk, and there was a couple others there as well, it lit that fire under me again, and I jumped right back in and ever since then, it's just then accessibility. MAE: You reminded me one of the arguments, or what did you say? Diplomatic advocacy statements that I have used is that we are all temporarily abled. [chuckles] Like, that's just how it is and seeing things that way we can really shift how you orient to the idea of as other and reduce the othering. But I was also wondering how long it would be before Pizza Hut came up in our combo. [laughter] MANDY: Yeah, I haven't heard of that. Can you tell us what that is? TODD: [chuckles] So it was Domino’s and they had a blind that tried to use their app. He couldn't use their app; their app wasn't accessible. He tried to use the website; the website wasn't accessible. I have a link that I can send over to the whole story because I'm probably getting bits and pieces wrong. But from what I can recall, basically, this sued Domino's and instead of Domino's spending, I believe it was $36,000 to fix their website and their app, they decided to drag it out for a number of years through court and of course, spent more money than just $36,000. In the end, they lost. I think they tried to appeal to the Supreme Court because they've gone up as high as federal court, but regardless, they lost. They had to – and I don't know if they still have an inaccessible site, or not, or the app for that matter because I don't go to Domino’s. But that's basically the story that they had; a who tried to access the app and the website, couldn’t use it, and they got taken to court. Now Domino's claimed, in the court case, that he could have used the telephone, but he had tried to use the telephone twice and was on hold for 45 minutes. So [laughs] that says a lot. JOHN: Looks like it actually did go to the Supreme Court. TODD: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think they did not want to hear it. They just said, “No, we're not going to hear the case.” Yeah, and just think about all these apps we use and all the people that can't access those apps, or the websites. I went to some company websites because I was doing some research, big companies, and a lot of them are inaccessible. A little number that I can throw out there: every year, there's been a little over 2,500 lawsuits in the US. This year, if the rate keeps on going that it has, we're on course for over 4,000 lawsuits in the US alone for inaccessible websites. You've had companies like Target, Bank of America, Winn-Dixie, those kinds of companies have been sued by people because of inaccessible sites. MAE: Okay, but may I say this one thing, which is, I just want to extend my apologies to Pizza Hut. [laughter] MANDY: What kinds of things do you see as not being accessible that should be or easily could be that companies just simply aren't doing? TODD: The big one, still and if you go to webaim.org/projects/million, it's The WebAIM Million report. It's an annual accessibility analysis of the top 1 million home pages on the internet. The number one thing again, this year is color contracts. There are guidelines in place. WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, that text should be a 4.5:1 ratio that reaches the minimum contrast for texts. It’s a lot of texts out there that doesn't even reach that. So it's color contrast. You'll find a lot of, if you look at—I’m looking at the chart right now—missing alt texts on images. If you have an image that is informative, or you have an image that is conveying something to a , it has to have alternative text describing what's in the picture. You don't have to go into a long story about what's in the picture and describe it thoroughly; you can just give a quick overview as to what the picture is trying to convey, what is in the picture. And then another one being another failure type a is form input labels; labels that are not labeled correctly. I wrote a article about that [chuckles] on CSS-Tricks and that is, there's programmatic and there’s accessible names for form labels that not only help the accessibility side of it, as far as making the site accessible, but also it helps screen reader s read forms and navigate through forms, keyboard s also. Then you have empty links and then a big one that I've seen lately is if you look up in the source code, you see the HTML tag, and the language attribute, a lot of sites now, because they use trademarks, they don't have a document language. I ran across a lot of sites that don't use a document language. They're using a framework. I won't name names because I'm not out to shame, but having that attribute helps screen reader s and I think that's a big thing. A lot of accessibility, people don't understand. People use screen readers, or other assistive technologies, for instance, Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice input. But at the same time, I’ve got to also add accessibility is more than just deaf, or blind. I suffer from migraines, migraine headaches so animation, or motion from say, parallax scrolling can trigger a migraine. Animations that are too fast, that also trigger migraine headache. You have flashing content that can potentially cause seizures and that's actually happened before where an animated GIF was intentionally sent to someone and it caused a seizure and almost killed the person. So there's those and then the last thing on this list that I'm looking at right now, and these are common failures, empty buttons. You have buttons that don't have labels. Buttons that have Click here. Buttons need to be descriptive. So you want to have – on my site to send me something on the form, it's Send this info to Todd, Click here, or something similar like that. MAE: Can you think of any, John that you know of, too? I've got a couple of mind. How about you, Mandy? MANDY: For me, because I'm just starting out, I don't know a whole lot about accessibility. That's why I'm here; I’m trying to learn. But I am really conscious and careful of some of the GIFs that I use, because I do know that some of the motion ones, especially really fast-moving ones, can cause problems, migraines, seizures for people. So when posting those, I'm really, really mindful about it. JOHN: Yeah, the Click here one is always bothers me too, because not only is it bad accessibility, it’s bad UX. Like HTML loves you to turn anything into a link so you can make all the words inside the button and it’s just fine. [laughs] There's so many other ways to do it that are just – even discounting the accessibility impact, which I don't want it. TODD: Yeah, and touching upon that, I'm glad you brought up the button because I was just going to let that go [chuckles] past me. I have to say and I think it was in the email where it said, “What's bothering you?” What bothers me is people that don't use the button. If you are using a div, or an anchor tag, or a span, stop it. [laughs] Just stop it. There’s a button element for that. I read somewhere that anchor tag takes you somewhere, a div is a container, but button is for a button. MAE: I love that. The only other ones I could think of is related to something you said, making sure to have tab order set up properly to allow people to navigate. Again, I liked your point about you don't have to be fully blind to benefit from these things and having keyboard accessibility can benefit a lot of people for all kinds of reasons. The other one is, and I would love to hear everybody's thoughts on this one, I have heard that we're supposed to be using h1, h2, h3 and having proper setup of our HTML and most of us fail just in that basic part. That's another way of ing people to be able to navigate around and figure out what's about to be on this page and how much should I dig into it? So more on non-visual navigation stuff. TODD: Yeah, heading structure is hugely important for keyboard s and screen reader s as well as tab order and that's where semantic HTML comes into play. If you're running semantic HTML, HTML by default, save for a few caveats, is accessible right out of the box. If your site and somebody can navigate through using let's say, the keyboard turns and they can navigate in a way that is structurally logical, for instance and it has a flow to it that makes sense, then they're going to be able to not only navigate that site, but if you're selling something on that site, you're going to have somebody buying something probably. So that's again, where tab order and heading structure comes into play and it's very important. JOHN: I would assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, or if you know this, that the same sort of accessibility enhancements are available in native mobile applications that aren't using each HTML, is that correct? TODD: Having not delved into the mobile side of things with apps myself, that I really can't answer. I can say, though, that the WCAG guidelines, that does pertain to mobile as well as desktop. There's no certain set of rules. 2.2 is where there are some new features that from mobile, for instance, target size and again, I wrote another article on CSS-Tricks about target size as well. So it's if you ever noticed those little ads that you just want to click off and get off your phone and they have those little tiny Xs and you're sitting there tapping all day? Those are the things target size and dragging movements as well. I did an audit for an app and there was a lot of buttons that were not named. A lot of the accessibility issues I ran into were the same as I would run into doing an audit on a website. I don't know anything about Swift, or Flutter, or anything like that, they pretty much fall into the same category with [inaudible] as far as accessible. JOHN: I also wanted to circle back on the first item that you listed as far as the WebAIM million thing was color contrast, which is one of those ones where a designer comes up with something that looks super cool and sleek, but it's dark gray on a light gray background. It looks great when you've got perfect eyesight, but anybody else, they’re just like, “Oh my God, what's that?” That's also one of the things that's probably easiest to change site-wide; it's like you go in and you tweak the CSS and you're done in a half hour and you've got the whole site updated. So it's a great bit of low-hanging fruit that you can attach if you want to start on this process. TODD: Yeah. Color contrast is of course, as the report says, this is the number one thing and let me look back here. It's slowly, the numbers are dropping, but 85.3%, that's still a very high number of failures and there's larger text. If you're using anything over 18 pixels, or the equivalent of 18—it's either 18 points, or 18 pixels—is a 3:1 ratio. With that color contrast is how our brains perceive color. It's not the actual contrast of that color and there are people far more qualified than me going to that, or that can go into that. So what I'll say is I've seen a lot of teams and companies, “Yeah, we'll do a little over 4.5:1 and we'll call it a day.” But I always say, if you can do 7:1, or even 10:1 on your ratios and you can find a way to make your brand, or whatever the same, then go for it. A lot of the time you hear, “Well, we don't want to change the colors of our brand.” Well, your colors of your brand aren’t accessible to somebody who that has, for instance, Tritanopia, which is, I think it's blues and greens are very hard to see, or they don't see it at all. Color deficiencies are a thing that design teams aren't going to check for. They’re just not. Like you said, all these colors look awesome so let’s just, we're going to go with that on our UI. That's one thing that I actually ran into on that SAAS product that I spoke about earlier was there was these colors and these colors were a dark blue, very muted dark blue with orange text. You would think the contrast would be oh yeah, they would be all right, but it was horrible. JOHN: You can get browser plugins, that'll show you what the page looks like. So you can check these things yourself. Like you can go in and say, “Oh, you're right. That's completely illegible.” TODD: Yeah. Firefox, like I have right here on my work machine. I have right here Firefox and it does this. There's a simulator for a visual color deficiencies. It also checks for contrast as well. Chrome has one, which it actually has a very cool eyedropper to check for color contrast. If you use the inspector also in Firefox, that brings up a little contrast thing. The WAVE extension has a contrast tool. There's also a lot of different apps. If you have a Mac, like I do, I have too many color contrast because I love checking out these color contrast apps. So I have about five different color contrast apps on my Mac, but there's also websites, too that you can use at the same time. Just do a search for polar contrast. Contrast Ratio, contrast-ratio.com, is from Lea Verou. I use that one a lot. A lot of people use that one. There's so many of them out there choose from, but they are very handy tool at designer's disposal and at developers’ disposal as well. JOHN: So I'm trying to think of, like I was saying earlier, the color contrast one is one of those things that's probably very straightforward; you can upgrade your whole site in a short amount of time. Color contrast is a little trickier because it gets into branding and marketing's going to want to care about it and all that kind of stuff. So you might have a bit more battle around that, but it could probably be done and you might be able to fix, at least the worst parts of the page that have problems around that. So I'm just trying to think of the ways that you could get the ball rolling on this kind of a work. Like if you can get those early easy wins, it’s going to get more people on board with the process and not saying like, “Oh, it's going to take us eight months and we have to go through every single page and change it every forum.” That sounds really daunting when you think about it and so, trying to imagine what those easy early wins are that can get people down that road. TODD: Yeah. Starting from the very outset of the project is probably the key one: incorporating accessibility from the start of the project. Like I said earlier, it's a lot easier when you do it from the start rather than waiting till the very end, or even after the product has been launched and you go back and go, “Oh, well, now we need to fix it.” You're not only putting stress on your teams, but it's eating up time and money because you're now paying everybody to go back and look at all these accessibility issues there. Having one person as a dedicated accessibility advocate on each team helps immensely. So you have one person on the development team, one person on the dev side, one person on the marketing team, starting from the top. If somebody goes there to a stakeholder and says, “Listen, we need to start incorporating accessibility from the very start, here's why,” Nine times out of ten, I can guarantee you, you're probably going to get that stakeholder onboard. That tenth time, you'll have to go as far as maybe I did and say, “Well, Domino's Pizza, or Bank of America, or Target.” Again, their ears are going to perk up and they're going to go, “Oh, well, I don't really, we don't want to get sued.” So that, and going back to having one person on each team: training. There are so many resources out there for accessibility training. There are companies out there that train, there are companies that you can bring in to the organization that will train, that'll help train. That's so easier than what are we going to do? A lot of people just sitting there in a room and go, “How are you going to do this?” Having that person in each department getting together with everybody else, that's that advocate for each department, meeting up and saying, “Okay, we're going to coordinate. You're going to put out a fantastic product that's going to be accessible and also, at the same time, the financial aspect is going to make the company money. But most of all, it's going to include a lot of people that are normally not included if you're putting out an accessible product.” Because if you go to a certain website, I can guarantee you it's going to be inaccessible—just about 99% of the web isn't accessible—and it's going to be exclusive as it's going to – somebody is going to get shut out of the site, or app. So this falls on the applications as well. Another thing too, I just wanted to throw in here for color contrast. There are different – you have color contrast text, but you also have non-text contrast, you have texts in images, that kind of contrast as well and it does get a little confusing. Let's face it, the guidelines right now, it's a very technically written – it's like a technical manual. A lot of people come up to me and said, “I can't read this. I can't make sense of this. Can you translate this?” So hopefully, and this is part of the work that I'm doing with a lot of other people in the W3C is where making the language of 3.0 in plain language, basically. It's going to be a lot easier to understand these guidelines instead of all that technical jargon. I look at something right now and I'm scratching my head when I'm doing an audit going, “Okay, what do they mean by this?” All these people come together and we agree on what to write. What is the language that's going to go into this? So when they got together 2.0, which was years and years ago, they said, “Okay, this is going to be how we're going to write this and we're going to publish this,” and then we had a lot of people just like me scratching their heads of not understanding it. So hopefully, and I'm pretty sure, 99.9% sure that it's going to be a lot easier for people to understand. MAE: That sounds awesome. And if you end up needing a bunch of play testers, I bet a lot of our listeners would be totally willing to put in some time. I know I would. Just want to put in one last plug for anybody out there who really loves automating things and is trying to avoid relying on any single developer, or designer, or QA person to to check for accessibility is to build it into your CI/CD pipeline. There are a lot of different options. Another approach to couple with that, or do independently is to use the axe core gems, and that link will be in the show notes, where it'll allow you to be able to sprinkle in your tests, accessibility checks on different pieces. So if we've decided we're going to handle color contrast, cool, then it'll check that. But if we're not ready to deal with another point of accessibility, then we can skip it. So it’s very similar to Robocop. Anyway, just wanted to offer in some other tips and tricks of the trade to be able to get going on accessibility and then once you get that train rolling, it can do a little better, but it is hard to start from scratch. JOHN: That’s a great tip, Mae. Thank you. TODD: Yeah, definitely. MANDY: Okay. Well, with that, I think it's about time we head into reflections; the point of the show, where we talk about something that we thought stood out, that we want to think about more, or a place that we can call for a call of action to our listeners, or even to ourselves. Who wants to go first? MAE: I can go first. I learned something awesome from you, Todd, which I have not thought of before, which is if I am eyeballing for “contrast,” especially color contrast, that's not necessarily what that means. I really appreciate learning that and we'll definitely be applying that in my daily life. [chuckles] So thanks for teaching me a whole bunch of things, including that. TODD: You’re welcome. JOHN: I think for me, it's just the continuing reminder to – I do like the thinking that, I think Mae have brought up and also Todd was talking about earlier at the beginning about how we're all of us temporarily not disabled and that I think it helps bring some of that empathy a little closer to us. So it makes it a little more accessible to us to realize that it's going to happen to us at some point, at some level, and to help then bring that empathy to the other people who are currently in that state and really that's, I think is a useful way of thinking about it. Also, the idea that I've been thinking through as we've been talking about this is how do we get the ball rolling on this? We have an existing application that's 10 years old that's going to take a lot to get it there, but how do we get the process started so we feel like we're making progress there rather than just saying, “Oh, we did HTML form 27 out of 163. All right, back at it tomorrow.” It's hard to think about, so feeling like there's progress is a good thing. TODD: Yeah, definitely and as we get older, our eyes, they're one of the first things to go. So I'm going to need assistive technology at some point so, yeah. And then what you touched upon, John. It may be daunting having to go back and do the whole, “Okay, what are we going to do for accessibility now that this project, it’s 10 years old, 15 years old?” The SAAS project that I was talking about, it was 15-year-old code, .net. I got people together; one from each department. We all got together and we ended up making that product accessible for them. So it can be done. [laughs] It can be done. JOHN: That’s actually a good point. Just hearing about successes in the wild with particularly hard projects is a great thing. Because again, I'm thinking about it at the start of our project and hearing that somebody made it all through and maybe even repeatedly is hard. TODD: Yeah. It's not something that once it's done, it's done. Accessibility, just like the web, is an ever-evolving media. MANDY: For me. I think my reflection is going to be, as a new coder, I do want to say, I'm glad that we talked about a lot of the things that you see that aren't currently accessible that can be accessible. One of those things is using alt tags and right now, I know when I put the social media posts out on Twitter, I don't use the alt tags and I should. So just putting an alt tag saying, “This is a picture of our guest, Todd” and the title of the show would probably be helpful for some of our listeners. So I'm going to start doing that. So thank you. TODD: You’re welcome. I'm just reminded of our talk and every talk that I have on a podcast, or with anybody just reminds me of the work that I have to do and the work that is being done by a lot of different people, other than myself as well, as far as advocacy goes in that I don't think it's ever going to be a job that will ever go away. There will always be a need for accessibility advocacy for the web and it's great just to be able to sit down and talk to people about accessibility and what we need to do to make the web better and more inclusive for everybody. Because I tweet out a lot, “Accessibility is a right, not a privilege,” and I really feel that to my core because the UN specifically says that the internet is a basic human and I went as far as to go say, “Well, so as an accessibility of that internet as well.” So that is my reflection. MAE: I'll add an alt tag for me right now is with a fist up and a big smile and a lot of enthusiasm in my heart. MANDY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Todd. It's been really great talking with you and I really appreciate you coming on the show to share with us your knowledge and your expertise on the subject of accessibility. So with that, I will close out the show and say we do have a Slack and Todd will be invited to it if he’d like to talk more to us and the rest of the Greater Than Code community. You can visit patreon.com/greaterthancode and pledge to us monthly and again, if you cannot afford that, or do not want to pledge to help run the show, you can DM anyone of us and we will get you in there for free because we want to make the Slack channel accessible for all. Have a great week and we'll see you next time. Goodbye! Special Guest: Todd Libby. Greater Than Code

01:19 - Adrian’s Superpower: Humor Making People Feel Comfortable Through Humor Self-Deprecating Humor & Authenticity 04:57 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): What are they? Employees Share Effective, Measurable, Impactful Insights Connecting New Hires with People Who Look Like Them Making Employee Experiences Better 09:20 - How ERGs Operate “Build with not for” Making Fellow Colleagues Heard 18:03 - Successfully Policy Implementations: Examples Transgender Healthcare 23:18 - ERGs and Management / Executive Sponsor Partnerships 30:41 - ERGs vs Unions Equity 34:19 - Inclusivity Training Reflections: Casey: “ERGs are only as strong as the management ing them.” Mandy: Live programming + fireside chats over slideshows for inclusivity training. Adrian: Pushing ERGs and DEI initiatives to the next level is crucial and keeping these efforts authentic. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Adrian Gillem. Greater Than Code

01:19 - Chad’s Superpower: Making People Laugh Using Comedy to Deal with Problems 03:46 - #TechIsHiring Bot: @TechIsHiring Amplifying Others Using Networks For Good Being a Bridge/Connector Actively Working to Benefit Others (Possibly Professionally?!?) Diversify Tech @DiversifyTechCo Veni Kunche Greater Than Code Episode #212: Diversify Tech with Veni Kunche 31:03 - eSports and Software Engineering Street Fighter Strategy & Online vs In-Person Events GGPO Rollback Networking SDK github.com/pond3r/ggpo Tony Cannon Chad on Twitch Netherrealm Studios Guilty Gear Strive Reflections: John: The simple act of connecting others with a hashtag. Mandy: Follow @GreaterThanCode for new content and RTs! Amplify others. Mando: Drawing comparisons and connections between playing fighting games and software development and engineering. Bringing experience from one realm to another. Chad: The possibility of being a connector in a professional sense and the validation of comparing fighting games and software development as a discipline worth talking about. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 249. I’m John Sawers and I'm here with Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, John. Hi, and I'm here with my friend, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hey! And I’m here with our guest, Chad Stewart. As a software engineer and esports athlete with many years of experience in both fields, Chad dives deep into issues that he comes across, drilling down to the core of a problem and finds solutions others may miss, letting the lessons of the journey guide future expeditions into the unknown. If you’re confused at comparing esports to software engineering, you’d be surprised at how similar they are. Welcome, Chad. CHAD: Thanks. Thanks for having me. I never imagined that writing that [chuckles] and it being literally the thing introduces me on a podcast. Wow, I’m sorry, I’m a little mesmerized. MANDY: I really do want to ask about how we compare esports to software engineering. But before we do that, we have to ask our standard question that we ask all of our guests, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? CHAD: So, funny enough, I listened to a few episodes before coming on and I wanted to tell a silly joke, but that segues into what my superpower is, is I make people laugh. That's just something I like doing, it’s a big thing for me and I guess, I acquired it by watching Cartoon Network way too early in my life [laughs] and just being, I don't know, I just enjoy making people laugh. I enjoy making myself laugh and I guess, it's just fun. To be honest, that's what I kind of do on Twitter all day, make people laugh. MANDY: That's awesome. That's a great coping mechanism. Especially these days, I find myself doing the same thing, trying to make light of situations so things don't seem as dark. [laughs] JOHN: Years ago, a friend of mine, it wasn’t exactly a criticism but he was like, “Man, you’ll laugh at any joke,” and I'm like, “Oh, that's the option. I can either laugh more, or I can laugh less and I choose more.” MANDY: Yeah, I always say I'd rather laugh than cry about it. CHAD: I completely agree. There's so much sadness in the world at the moment. We've been in this pandemic for an extended period of time now and there's been people who've lost family and friends, people who've lost livelihoods. Obviously, comedy is not necessarily going to fix all of that, but at the very least, it makes it easier to deal with those problems. We were all hoping that we were going to come out of that this year and it feels like that's not even going to happen. There is some level of normalcy, but long story short, definitely I'd much rather see people smiling and having a good time and if I can add more of that into the world, then great. Just trying to make people laugh and it's fun, it's good for you. It's physically good for you. MANDY: That's awesome. So I know that I reached out to you to come on the show because I wanted to talk to you specifically about, I think it's something you started around the beginning of the whole pandemic situation, The #TechIsHiring hashtag, do you want to talk about that a little bit? CHAD: Yeah. So #TechIsHiring is a hashtag that is specifically for job seekers and people who are looking for candidates for their jobs. What I noticed is people would post their jobs, or post that they're looking for a job on Twitter and depending on how strong their network is, it would get a lot of traction, or not so much traction at all. So I was thinking, there are people out there who are maybe looking for work and to be fair, it started mostly from that in the first place. More people are looking for an opportunity and posting about it on Twitter and if their network isn't very strong, or for whatever reason, the tweet doesn't get a lot of traction, then it may potentially become difficult for them. I started the hashtag so that if I saw a tweet like that, I could add it to the hashtag. If you have a job tweet that you're looking for somebody to fill this position, I’d just go out and ask if I could add it to the hashtag and if you say yes, I just tag it with #TechIsHiring and obviously, the same for if somebody is looking for an opportunity. It's been fairly successful like within the last couple of weeks, there've been a lot more usage of it. I don't necessarily have great ways of coming up with data on obviously how, if people are really benefiting from it outside of me maybe probing to see, but for the most part, I have the Twitter bot that I created for the hashtag. I have notification alerts for that and it's like my phone goes off all the time with notifications and I'm just like, “Hey, at least people are using it and people are retweeting it.” So I'm pretty happy about that. There's a few things I'd like to do to kind of expand it, but I'm definitely happy with where it is right now. JOHN: So you're saying that the need you saw was that people are posting about that they're looking for a job, but maybe their network isn't particularly good, or they're not getting a lot of reach out of that and so, they're not really getting the benefit of all of Twitter being available to them. So you wanted to create this way to amplify those tiny voices that are saying, “Hey, I need a job.” CHAD: Yes, yes, yes. To be fair, the #TechIsHiring, it's growing, but ultimately, what I wanted to be is pretty much the thing that people can rely on. You know what I mean? So in essence, I want to build the network for #TechIsHiring so I go and look for like jobs and for people who are looking for jobs, I will actively go and search for them on Twitter and initially, this was to add to the hashtag because obviously, the hashtag didn't have too much when I started it and it's just become a habit of mine. There are definitely some people who are looking who, by the time I get come across their tweet, which may be even a week after they've done it, they've maybe had two, or three, or so retweets and likes. I was like, “Hey, if I add this to the hashtag, maybe at the very least, people will see it.” My network is decent. It's not the best I'm not super Twitter famous, but I have a fair amount of people that follow me. So what I do when I'm asking is I always make sure to like and retweet whatever I find and ask so at the very least, other people on my network could see it and so, even if they don't reply—and to be fair, some people don't reply for whatever reason, maybe they never see it, or whatever. But even if they don't reply, at least some people are seeing it potentially and even a lot more now, I will retweet some people's job postings, or some people's looking for jobs tweets and people will retweet it themselves. I'm just trying to, I guess, be that bridge, or I guess, middleman. I don’t know, I can't come up with a better term, but I've just tried to be that person that helps because it's like, everybody's kind of been there. Like, you're looking for a job and you're doing your absolute best and you're stuck with whatever information you have. Information, or resources you have and it's like, if I can make this thing so that people can of latch onto it and use that, then maybe a lot more people can get in with somebody who can offer them an opportunity. But that's pretty much it. MANDY: That's awesome. I used to use the Greater Than Code to do a lot of that—amplify the voices of others—and I used to be on Mondays, I would go and fill a buffer queue of just content that I found on the internet that I could retweet others. Ever since my daughter got “laid off the school,” that's been a little more difficult, but I'm hoping that in the near future, I can start that up again and do the same thing with the #GreaterThanCode hashtag. But what you're doing, it's not easy work and it takes time to sit there, look, curate, put all that stuff together, and then amplify it out and get people to notice it, and engage with posts and it’s hard work. So thank you for trying to be that bridge and trying to use your network for good. I think that was awesome and part of the reason I wanted to get you on the show was because you've been doing it for a really long time and you keep up with it and it's amazing. CHAD: Yes. Thank you, thank you. There's a few things that I want to do like, I would like to reach out to more employers and it’s just always an awareness thing. I just definitely like to reach out to more employers and be like, “Hey, there are candidates here who are tweeting on Twitter and they're in this hashtag, you can look through that.” I kind of do it, but I do it like – so I was thinking about it the other day and to be honest, I actually did this way before I actually officially started the hashtag. When I first got on Twitter, or at least when I first got on tech Twitter, what I would do is I'd be doing the Twitter thing and just kind of oh, this person's interesting so I'd make a reply and have maybe a small conversation. And then I would see somebody who's like, “Hey, I'm looking for work,” and I was like, “Hey, I ed the thread that's talking about all of these jobs.” So I’d just link it to them and I was like, “Hey, hopefully, they'll get something out of it,” and I just did that. That was just something that just came to be naturally like sometimes I'll be on Reddit and they'll be like, “Oh there was some job posts here. I'll just link it to this person, they're looking for somebody,” and I guess, it makes sense that I ended up making a hashtag to do that in a more official capacity as opposed to one off. But what I definitely want to do is just to reach out to people, or to more people actually who have positions and I probably should reach out directly to the people who I'm retweeting who’s saying that they're looking for people and link people, especially people who I've already retweeted and be like, “Hey there's a candidate here,” and just stuff like that. That's something I want to do. There are a few organizations that talk about jobs on Twitter a lot and I want to reach out to them and just ask them if they could use the hashtag. I tend not to mess with them too much because they're out trying to make money and so on and so forth, and it feels kind of weird. I don't want to retweet their stuff. I don't know what their marketing plan is. But I just want to reach out to them and be like, “Hey I'm doing this thing” because I don't have any numbers on who benefits from the hashtag. It's all in hopes of type thing. So I just want it to be a little bit more direct with, “Hey employers, there's actually people here that you can look at.” So that's pretty much the direction that I'm hoping to go in while obviously, also, actually adding opportunities and people who are looking for options. But hopefully, people start doing it on their own, which is the ultimate goal is that I don't have to curate it myself because everybody understands that it exists. But for now, I don't mind doing that work. MANDY: So I love the fact that you're a connector in that sense. That's what I consider myself and what I would do before actually being a host/ist on the show. I feel like you should really hook up with this person and talk about this thing because do you know this person? And then I've had so many people come back from conversations with all the people that I've hooked up on podcasts and they're like, “So-and-so is like my new best internet friend now, thank you so much for introducing us.” [chuckles] I love being able to take people and being like, “You like this, you like this, do you two know each other?” and forging relationships like that. That's one of my greatest superpowers I feel so it seems like you're in the same boat, which is really cool. CHAD: Yeah. I would definitely say that I've been doing that for some time more in an unofficial capacity. It's more like, “Oh, this person needs something. I know somebody who can help with that.” So I go, “Hey, this person needs so-and-so,” and I just bring them together. I haven't been doing it too much of late. Well, I guess, I have because of the hashtag, but I haven't been doing it too much lately because I feel like the tables have turned; I'm the person that's in need more often than not. But it's definitely something I would definitely like to do more. Again, obviously I'm doing it with the hashtag, but it's definitely like, I've always been like that even as a kid. I've just always been the person who will just help just for helping’s sake. I'm not necessarily trying to like, “Oh, I'm going to help you so you can help me.” Like, no. “You need something. I think I can help you with that. What can we do?” I don't know, I like working to benefit people. I feel good doing that. You know what I mean? You hear people like, “Hey, things really worked out because of what you did,” and I'm just like, “Hey, I'm happy I could help.” I've always been like that since I was a kid and I intend on continuing to do that professionally. I guess, now that you bring it up, I'm like, “I really should think about it more actively” because I do it very ively. It's usually, I have a friend who’s looking for a specific job and I will just be minding my own business on Twitter and then I'll see a job that looks like something he wants and then I'll just send it to him. [laughs] He'll give me his reply and he'll be like, “Oh, thanks for thinking about me.” It's like, “Yeah, no problem. I just want to help.” I've always been that person. MANDO: I'm really glad you said that because I've been hearing you talk about how much you get out of this in addition to everything else that other folks get out sparked this question in my head, which was that have you thought about doing this professionally? Because there are a lot of people who get paid very well to do this kind of stuff very poorly and so, I wonder [laughs] if someone who knows someone who does it well and actually has a love for doing this kind of stuff, if you thought about making this an actual full-time job. I just went through a hiring process and we just hired an engineer over here. I would gladly engage with recruiters that I knew were doing the work that you're trying to do as opposed to folks that are just ing whatever they can off of Indeed, or other resume sites and tossing them in my face with little to no filtering. CHAD: I actually have never thought of it as something professional to do only because I don't know, because I always viewed each event that happened where I'm helping somebody as “Hey, I helped that person.” I never viewed it as a group of, “I can do this professionally.” I don't know, like it's never really crossed my mind literally until you mentioned it. I don't know, it would be interesting. I would love for my career to be – to be honest, I don't even know what my career should look like at this point. [laughter] I'm just all over the place. I just like being here. [laughs] I just literally enjoy being here. Like I said, I haven't really thought about it professionally. Actually, literally after this, I'll probably give it some thought, but I'm going to continue doing this regardless. Even if, say for instance, I don't think about it as doing it as a job where I get paid, but definitely just because I did something that just feels good to me and I get to help other people, I do get the benefit of feeling good that I helped somebody else, I'm going to continue to do it. But I never even thought of it as something that you make money off but. MANDO: A lot of people super do. [laughs] I cannot stress that enough. A lot of people super do and it is my experience that very, very few of them are worth what you end up paying them. CHAD: Yeah. [laughs] I understand. JOHN: You were talking about connecting with other organizations on Twitter around hiring that made me think about Diversify Tech. We had the founder, Veni Kunche, on the show last year, I think it was and she's been doing fantastic work over there. That was the first organization that came to mind when you were talking about reaching out, so they do good stuff. CHAD: Yes. I was definitely thinking about reaching out to them especially because they do a lot of work on Twitter specifically. So right now, the way I think about it, the hashtag obviously lives on Twitter, but it's mainly focused for the Twitter community only because at the time, I was just like, “Hey, people on Twitter are posting these things, I should make some space to put all of these things on Twitter.” Obviously, it doesn't necessarily have to be. Could end up being an entire organization, an entire company, or something like that. But specifically, because they do so much work on Twitter already, I definitely want to reach out to them. MANDY: That’s cool. So I want to go back to the thing we were talking about with reading your bio about comparing eSports to software engineering. Can you tell us more about that? CHAD: Yeah. So it's been something that I've been thinking about for a while. I say eSports athletes, I don't want to say professionally, but I compete playing fighting games. I've been doing that for about 11 years now. Pretty much the way I view it is when Street Fighter IV officially released on consoles, which was, I think February 9th. It was sometime in February 2009, that's when I kind of view my “eSports career” starting because I've been playing fighting games because of that. I played fighting games a lot longer before that, but when I started taking them seriously and competitively. During that time, I was in school for software engineering at Nova Southeastern University and what I have found, that I especially kind of feel this now, is my abilities as a software engineer and as a competitive fighting game player tend to complement each other. I haven’t had, I don't want to say official, but I haven't sat down and wrote this out, or have a thesis. But I find that there's a lot of comparison to fighting games and to making software so much so that I've been playing fighting games for a while and I would consider myself, if we're going to use the same terminology as software engineering, a senior fighting game here. MANDO: Love it. [laughter] CHAD: As funny as it is, when I have conversations with people and what they would consider a senior software engineer, it's like I do more, or less the same things in fighting games. For instance, a question of tooling—and you can definitely chime in because I'm not going to pretend that I'm the most knowledgeable in the industry, especially from actual experience standpoint. But from my understanding for a senior engineer, they understand various tools, they understand when to use them, what situations to use them in, when not to use them, how to tie things together, teaching other people how to do these things, they advocate for their project that's a little bit out of the fighting game. I guess, not really. But I guess the thing is that same thought process, the using the various tooling, is how I would—I'm looking literally back at my system just to think. [chuckles] But it's the how I play fighting games at this point like, I have tooling in my head. For instance, I'll be playing a match against a type of player and I'm like, “Okay, this type of player is so on and so forth. This generally works on this type of player. So let me apply this,” and so, “Okay, it's working,” or, “Oh, it's not working. Let me make some adjustments here.” I just feel like it's the same type of – I can't speak directly on that, but it feels so much like the same type of decisions except with software tools. When do you use MySQL? When do you use Mongo? Obviously, you don't have an opponent. You could make a construct of what an opponent is if you want to keep that same type of thought process. But you use tools for specific situations and then you make adjustments based on the way the situation changes, maybe based on your features that the wants, or based on what you've been finding has been successful, or you want to maybe add a feature, or so-and-so. I just feel like the thought process is similar. Even the way you use basic tools in programming variables, functions and so on and so forth and how you don't even necessarily think about them, but you obviously use them because you have to. You do the same thing with fighting games. In fighting games, our primitives is we call them normal where it’s you literally press the button and you do nothing else and an attack comes out. You know what I mean? So you can view them as primitives for, I guess, programming fighting games. I don't have a better term [laughs] to make the comparison, but I don't know. It's like for me, as a fighting game player and as a software engineer, I feel like there's a huge comparison. I'm still growing as a software engineer, but I'm actually getting to the point where I'm trying to look at my fighting game career, or my growth in fighting games and try to compare them to my growth in software engineering and see oh, where did I have issues here and how did I solve them? But that's just my thing like, I just feel like there's a comparison there that I definitely would like to explore a lot more, especially since obviously I'm in both industries, you know what I mean? But that's kind of why I make that comparison. JOHN: Yeah. I was thinking you could think of it okay, the opponent is a right heavy database load that needs to scale 10x and we're going to attack it with sharded Mongo and RabbitMQ. [laughs] CHAD: Right, and then how does that work? Because it's about the , right? JOHN: Yeah. CHAD: It's the same thing in fighting games; it's about the . I don't want to say it's more important than fighting games, but the thing is, a lot of people in fighting games, they have their strategy and they use it and it either works, or it doesn't work and they live and die by the strategy. But a lot of the times, it's you start with one thing because that's what you know and then you get from the opponent, you know what I mean? You're generally trying to make the favorable for you, but at the end of the day, it's just you leveraging the from the opponent. It's the same thing—in fact, it's extremely stressed in software engineering that you do get from your s, or get from wherever from either directly from your s, or say, for instance, there is some issue with your implementation, you have logs and so on and so forth. So it's like, what do you do with all of this information and like I said, I just feel like there is a comparison there that is really interesting. Again, I don't necessarily have this as a thesis, or anything. It’s—I’ve been saying this a lot—something I definitely want to explore, but it's just really interesting to me. I still play fighting games. It's been years. I played two different Street Fighters and I've used the same mindset and I still have the same comparisons. I feel like there's something there that's worth exploring. MANDO: Yeah, man. Just like what you were saying, Mike Tyson had a famous quote, “Everyone's got a plan till they get punched in the face,” and that's what you're talking about exactly with the fighting games and what John was talking about with the [laughs] heavy database load in an application. I come from the technical operations world where we absolutely view all kinds of things in adversarial everything from malicious s to external and internal systems to, on our very worst days, other developers and engineers. [laughs] It is through no fault, but you have to be careful to make sure that someone can't accidentally do something bad to a production database because no one's and everyone makes mistakes. Going back to what you were saying about drawing the connections between being a senior engineer and a senior fighting game expert, which I love that idea. In both cases, you build up this experience, this learned experience over time to where you learn. The reason that I don't want you to have production database access isn't because I want to keep things away from you, it's because nobody's perfect and I'm not perfect, which is why I don't have it either. It's too easy to make these kinds of mistakes, but you have to balance that with your ability to actually get your job done. Like, don't tell me I can't have database access when I need database access to get this stuff done. I imagine this the same way in fighting games. You want to win so you have to do stuff. You can't just sit there crouching in the back the whole time waiting, you know what I mean? CHAD: I'm literally trying to formulate a scenario, but trying to form it in a way where I can actually explain it without using terminology and just going over everybody's head. So a similar situation would be in fighting games is that you would play a specific range so that you can go in and out of the opponent's range, but they can't attack you. I don't know if this is actually a good scenario—the only other thing that they could do is jump and in essence – or jump at you and so, you're holding this range to force these two options. In your scenario, it's more like oh, this is to make sure that things don't happen. Bad things don't happen in a project. This is more okay, I know that if I'm too close, they can do more, or less anything they want to me so I'm going to hold this range so that they can and then I'm just going to leave them with these two options that I can control. This is not necessarily [inaudible], right? [laughs] MANDO: No, it's 100% perfect, man. It's the same exact idea of me giving you production database access, but I only give it to you with a read-only , or with certain U quotas, or something like that. So I'm making sure that what you can do is constrained in ways, like you said, that I can control and it's not only just to be defensive, it's to make sure that you get, I don't know, the most positive outcome of the situation. CHAD: Right. MANDO: Which, in a fighting game, is to win. CHAD: Right. Like – [overtalk] MANDO: And in my case, is to not get paged in the middle of the night. CHAD: Right, yes. In fighting games, the goal is to one, the whole thing is to generally avoid getting hit. But if you can get hit, you at least know where and you can deal with it. This is more from a defensive scenario; I can come up with offensive scenarios, too. I just lose it trying to keep it in line with the same thought process. MANDO: For sure. CHAD: But it's like, I personally have not been in that situation that you described in of a production database. But the fact that I could come up with a scenario that is similar to something you described and they're completely, I don't want to say, obviously it's not completely, but it's different realms. It's just something interesting to me and then again, obviously I'm still learning, but I'm not learning. I'm more of an expert in this thing. So I think that using my knowledge here to make the comparison to what I would say need to learn, or need to understand, or just how to approach a problem. I don't know. It's all jumbled in my head, but it's just fun. It’s just something fun that I want to explore more. I’ve been saying explore more a lot. JOHN: Yeah. It’d make a great series of blog posts. CHAD: Yes. I've been thinking of that, or making videos because then especially since fighting games is a very visual thing. I've been streaming recently, so it's just like, I can actually play the game and then maybe I can make a video on the game a little bit and then make some comparisons to basic ideas in software development. It's something that I really wanted to play with very recently, especially because I still play the game and I enjoy it, but sometimes, it's frustrating because the internet is internet, right? But it’s something I just want to explore, something that’s really fun for me. MANDO: So what are you playing right now, specifically? What are you competing in? CHAD: So I play Street Fighter V. I don't compete too much anymore mainly just because there aren't as many active communities. So I live in Jamaica and there aren’t that many communities, not necessarily for eSports in general, but specifically for Street Fighter. So I still watch a lot of events on Twitch and I watch a lot of match videos on YouTube, but I'll play the game here and there and then obviously, I'm still trying to grow as an engineer. I spend a lot of time doing that, but that, I would say a Street Fighter V. There are a few other fighting games that I'm interested in. Street Fighter V, it's being phased out. Eventually, a new version of that game will come out and for Street Fighter specifically, a lot of the times when they release a new game, it's fairly different from the previous one. So you take your fundamental tools and then you build on that with what the game gives you. But that's what I'm playing right now. When I say I'm a fighting game player, I mainly play Street Fighter. There's some people who play a variety of fighting games and it's extremely difficult because a lot of fighting games are very different. The intricate decisions that you make are very different like, just how you approach the opponent is very different. But that's mainly what I've been focusing on for right now. I'm hoping to get back into it once things settle down bit more—obviously, the pandemic put a damper on all manner of physical events. So once we are able to get back together when it's more safe, I'm really hoping to take part in that. MANDO: Yeah. That was going to be my next question was how many of these competitions happen online versus having to have to be in-person because of response times and refresh rates? I've known a couple of people throughout my life who do this competitive gaming and the idea of trying to do it over the internet would just make them gasp like, “Oh, never. Never.” [laughs] CHAD: Right. It's gotten significantly better than 10 years prior. 10 years prior, I won't say it was a nightmare, but it was pretty close. It's gotten better and I'm not going to pretend that, at the very least, the game that I play Street Fighter V is perfect. There are other fighting games where they've made significant strides in making the online experience better. Funny enough, there's a project that recently, what I mean by recently within the last 2 years, got open sourced called GGPO. It stands for Good Game Peace Out. It means absolutely nothing to nobody; it’s just everybody's just used GGPO. But the creator is somebody who used to run the largest fighting game event. He's more of an advisory person now, but he used to run the largest fighting game event in the world. He created, they call it Netcode. It's an unofficial term for just how the network works in of dealing with multiple players, but he created a system where generally, when you have two video games, I don't want to say generally, but for the most part, a lot of video games would try to keep the game as synced as possible. So if one of the two systems—within fighting, it's usually two systems. If one of the two systems went out of sync, then the other one would immediately stop what it's doing and try to sync up with the other system. So this person, I don't his name. He has a twin brother. We call them the Canon brothers. I don't which one did it. Either way, he created a system where the idea was instead of keeping both systems synced all the time, making that the main thing that the network does, is we'll have both video feeds play on their own. We still would do some syncing here and there. But what we will do is just ensure that – how do I describe it? Say for instance, you would have the one video feed being specifically on a specific frame. For people who don't know anything about video is that to get video, you just literally redraw images over a period of time and you get motion from that and we, in fighting games, use that specifically to understand how fast things are, what are our options, and so on and so forth. So in fighting games, it’s generally 60 frames per second that we use. Say for instance, the video feed for one device is on frame two and the video feed for another device is on frame three. Like, the devices are out of sync, but what they will do is for the device that's ahead, they will say, “Okay, this is what happened from the device behind,” and they call it rollback. They call it rollback Netcode and they will roll ahead device back to what the behind device was. The idea is to keep the video feeds as fluid as possible, because timing is a big deal for fighting games. So he did all of this work and it became a really, really popular option for net play, but he owned the rights to it at the time and he had owned the rights for 15, maybe not 15 years but for a long period of time and he recently opened sourced it. So it's something that I'm hoping that more game developers will be able to pick up on it and use it in their fighting games because otherwise, they would have to do one of two things. They'd obviously have to get the licensing from him and use it in their game and he would provide technical on how to implement it, or they would have to come up with their own thing and a lot of the times—in fact, funny enough, Street Fighter V is a famous example of this—is they won't get the implementation just quite right and then it just makes it a bad experience for the players. But again, I guess, going back to the conversation about online fighting games, it's been getting better. Like I said, that's one option. There's a company called NetherRealm Studios for people who, if you Mortal Combat, they're the company that works with that, makes Mortal Combat. They themselves have developed, I don't know too much about that personally, but their Netcode—I use air quotes—is “exceptional.” One of the big challenges is playing somebody from across the United States. So California to New York would be a good example. That's usually a horrible time for both people, but with both, GGPO and Mortal Combat, their Netcode is so good that that actually can happen. I'm sorry if I'm sounding super technical, but there's another game that got rereleased recently, Guilty Gear Strive, where the Netcode is so good that people are playing cross continents. Now it's reasonable for them. Whereas, if you left the state, or if you started playing as somebody from the East Coast to the Midwest, it wasn't even practical. It just didn't make sense. So there's been great strides in that. Especially because of the pandemic, a lot of events have been online. As a community, we've transitioned fairly well into doing a lot of online events. There's a lot of games that have been running online events and a lot of people who run very famous offline events have now transitioned to running good online events until the time that we can actually get back together. It's been an interesting and tough time, but I feel like everybody has stepped up to meet the challenge. MANDO: Yeah. No, it looks like it's Tony and I was just like reading through the Read Me for GGPO and I don't know a thing about this thing, but if what the Read Me says is true, it is super, super cool. CHAD: Yeah. MANDO: It uses input prediction and speculative execution to send inputs to the lagging side, or the non-lagging side to mimic what the lagging side would normally be sending over. CHAD: Right. MANDO: So the person who isn't lagging, to them it just feels like they're still playing and then it does the same thing to the other side. So [chuckles] even though you may not necessarily be playing each other, it still feels as though you're playing and not hanging and trying to do the sync like you were describing. CHAD: Right, and it does that until both sides get information about the specific frame and what happened and so – [overtalk] MANDO: What actually happened, right. CHAD: Yeah, or what actually happened and then it would like, “Okay, this is what actually most people were trying to do.” It's really interesting. Well, I think I still have the project on my machine. Funny enough, something that I actually really wanted to do. I'm not allowed to say that because I’m, to be quite honest, outside of the explanation. I'm lost from a technical point of what exactly is going on, but I'm hoping somebody is maintaining the project. I haven't seen anybody do anything with it, maybe even extending it. To be honest, I would love to go into it. But for the moment, it's way out of my wheelhouse. [chuckles] Because I think it's really important, you know what I mean and I would definitely love to see more game developers use it and if it kind of comes down to me doing something, you know. [laughter] CHAD: I just think it's a really important utility, at the very least, for fighting games because I've heard of other people trying to use it for other applications as well. It was obviously made specifically for fighting games. MANDO: Right. CHAD: But I just want to see the project continue and want to see more people using it. I don't know if it needs to be fleshed out because it was fleshed out during its development for an extended period of time, but I just definitely would like to see it leveraged more in fighting games. If nothing else, for my own sake, because I hate playing bad matches. [laughter] JOHN: So I think now is the time of the show where we do what we call reflections, which is basically each of us are going to talk about the things that we are going to take away from this conversation—maybe new ideas to think about, or just interesting points that have been made today. For me, it's definitely just the tiny little act that you started with this hashtag; just connecting a couple people and just making this little thing and now it's gotten bigger and bigger and you're putting the effort into it to make it bigger and all those things. But just people have gotten jobs based on what you've done, undoubtedly. It seems inevitable even if you don't have numbers on it. It's such a simple act of just noticing two people that should be connected and could be connected and making that simple. It's a retweet, or it's a little DM, or whatever it is, sometimes those small acts can have such big consequences. So it's wonderful to see that you noticed that that was a thing that could happen and that you could make happen and that you're continuing to put your effort into it just to make it bigger and bigger and be even more impactful. MANDY: For me, I also go back to the beginning of the conversation when I mentioned that we had the Greater Than Code Twitter handle and how I used to be super diligent about amplifying others, putting others content out there and then I stopped. I'm going to make that my back-to-school goal is to come back and get that done. So listeners, stay tuned. There's going to be some new content on Twitter. Follow us if you aren't already and also, make the effort to do the same thing. Do some simple retweets for others, amplify others. If you've got an audience, somebody else might not and just that simple act, as John said, can really help others. So be more cognizant and do that sometimes. MANDO: Yeah, it's great. Or the way that Chad, you took this thing that you love, you spent a lot of time, a fair amount of your life devoting to becoming an expert at fighting games and then taking that and being able to draw comparisons and make connections between that and the stuff that you do every day. When you were describing these kinds of connections, the idea that popped into my mind was there's someone, or someone's out there right now who grew up playing fighting game and they're super, super, super deep into it like, talking about all the stuff that you were talking about. Talking about NetCode, talking about hit boxes and refresh rate, all that stuff, normal. And then at the same time, they might be trying to break into the software engineering world and they're an expert over here and not over here. So hearing you talk about these connections and what if this in the fighting world could be reflected in the software engineering world? That might be just the kind of stuff that they need to hear so they can make those connections, those same types of connections in their minds and bring that experience from one realm into another, into the professional realm. It just got me thinking about all the different ways like you hear people often say things like, “Well, I don't have anything to blog about. I don't have anything to make a talk, or a presentation app,” and it's just not true. It's just like, there's so many people in the world who need this kind of content and how John was saying, this kind of content can make a material difference in someone's life and then that little bit starts a chain reaction. It's like a snowball going down a hill and you get someone who is able to start working now as a software engineer and by the end of their career, imagine all of the money and all of the stuff they've been able to do for themselves and their family and their friends and their loved ones, all because of something that you thought was some dumb blog post, or getting too technical in a podcast about stuff, you know what I mean? Like, it's important, it matters, and we need it and we need more of it. So thanks. I guess, this part was my way of saying thanks for coming in and talking about this stuff, but also, encouraging other folks, myself included, to not be afraid to talk about things, or just a connection in your mind because it's not just you, it's other people as well. CHAD: My reflection is one about making the whole connector person. I didn't even know it was something that could be done in a professional sense. Like I said, I do it because I'm helping people. That's the only thing that's in my mind about it. It's like, “Oh, this person needs something. I can potentially help them get it done,” and that's all that was in my head. So just having that as an option, as hey, you can actually make money doing this. There's that and to be honest, the validation that making the comparison to fighting games and all the technicalities of fighting games and software development as a discipline, there is that connection and it's something worth talking about and bringing it to other people and is potentially interesting. Obviously, I'm at least half decent at playing fighting games. [laughter] So I can talk about that and I'm still growing as a software engineer so it's almost like I have a foundation. It's like, I haven't made that journey yet, but I have a roap and I can potentially draw that same map and then give it to other people and they may be able to potentially leverage it for themselves, which again, I'm helping. You know what I mean? [laughs] MANDO: Yeah, man. That's how it works, brother. That's how it works. CHAD: Well, yeah, that's definitely – I don't know. I'm really happy about at least that kind of validation, if nothing else. So thank you very much. MANDY: Well, Chad, it's been wonderful talking to you. MANDO: Thanks for coming on, man. It's been great. MANDY: Yeah. Thank you for so much for coming on this show and thank you to our listeners. So we'll see you all next week. Special Guest: Chad Stewart. Greater Than Code

01:27 - Andrew’s Superpower: Stern Empathy 03:30 - Setting Work Boundaries Matrix Organizations 18F Acknowledging Difficult Situations (i.e. Burnout) Health Checks Project Success Time Tracking Heart Connection / Motivation Work Distribution Greater Than Code Episode 162: Glue Work with Denise Yu 18:54 - Providing During a Pandemic Stretching/Growth Work Comfortable/Safety Work Social Connection 23:37 - Keeping People Happy / Avoiding Team Burnout Project Aristotle by Google Collecting Honest Data Psychological Safety & Inclusion Earned Dogmatism “The Waffle House Solution” 36:26 - Developing Team Culture “Gravity People” Honing Communication Skills Staying Ahead of Big Problems The ACE Model of Leadership Appreciation Coaching Evaluation Learning Skills Managers: Coaching How To Coach Communities of Practice Hiring External Consultants Online Courses, Books, Podcasts 43:08 - Knowing When to Jump Ship and Understanding Your Skills TKI Assessment Competing Collaborating Compromising Avoiding Accommodating 46:51 - Developing & Enforcing Boundaries Summarization Normalization Asking For 59:05 - Making Mistakes Demonstrating Vulnerability Acknowledge, Internalize, and Learn Rebuilding Trust Acceptance: Start Over – There’s Other Opportunities Dubugging Your Brain by Casey Watts Reflections: Arty: The intersection between identifying and acknowledging creates the precedent for the norm. Jacob: Evolving culture to enable vulnerability more. Casey: Andrew’s river metaphor and Arty’s cardboard cutout metaphor. Andrew: Talking about and building psychological safety is foundational. Going first as leadership or being first to follow. How to start a movement | Derek Sivers (being the first follower TED Talk) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 248 of Greater Than Code. I'm Arty Starr and I'm here with my co-host, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Hello! Nice to be here, and I'm here with my other co-host, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here together with our guest today, Andrew Dunkman. Andrew, he/him, is an engineering leader and software developer with 17 years of experience. He’s worked on and launched tools for relationship management, predictive sales, radiology and healthcare, learning and management, business-to-business timekeeping, and most recently in government at 18F, a part of the US General Services istration that’s helping the federal government adopt -centered technology approaches. He loves those. He also likes building community in his free time. He helps moderate the DC Tech Slack, a 10,000-person community of tech workers in the DC area and he helps to run DC Code and Coffee, an informal hacking and community-building event every other weekend. Even though his cat, Toulouse, is glaring at him for talking too loud, he is excited to be here with us today. Hi, Andrew! ANDREW: Hey, y'all! So nice to be here. I'm honored to be a guest. CASEY: Let's start with our standard question to kick stuff off here. Andrew, what's your superpower and how did you acquire it? ANDREW: Thanks for asking. Yeah, this is whenever I answer the question of what my superpower is, it feels like bragging so I did what I normally do when I'm uncomfortable asking a question and I ask other people that question. I asked a few friends and they highlighted both, my ability to empathize with people and also, my sternness in that empathy. I think sometimes when you get caught up in empathizing with people, you can allow their emotions and their feelings to overwhelm you, or become a part of you in a way that you're not necessarily hoping for. So I like to draw a firm boundary there and then allow other people to see that boundary, I suppose. [laughs] I don’t know, it's hard for me to say that that's a superpower, but I'm just going to lean into what other people told me. ARTY: That's a pretty good superpower. I like it. How did you acquire it? ANDREW: I credit my mom a lot actually. My mother is a dual major in psychology and English and as growing up, she had the worst way of punishing me, which is anytime I’d do something wrong, she would say, “Can you describe to me what you did and tell me how it made the other person feel?” which is the absolute worst thing to do to a child to make them explain how they've hurt you. [laughs] So I credit that a lot for developing those skills. CASEY: That's so funny. You think it's the worst thing you can do? Could you imagine yourself doing it ever if you're around children like that? ANDREW: Oh, totally. [laughs] Absolutely, yes. I now do it to my friend's children. I have no children myself, but I do to my friend's children and it's appropriately uncomfortable. CASEY: I like that. Yeah. It can be the worst and it can be helpful and productive. I believe it. ANDREW: Yes. As one of my coworkers like to say, “Two things can be true.” JACOB: That boundary, I've been thinking about something along the lines of that recently, particularly in work settings where you can get really burnt out in everything is high stakes emotionally at work. I think that's a really good boundary to have. ANDREW: Absolutely and it's also super hard to know. [chuckles] Both know where that boundary is and what to do when you are coming up to it. I think some people and myself occasionally notice you've crossed that boundary in retrospect, but not necessarily in the moment and it's hard to start off just know your tells when you're getting close to that line and when to pull the e-brake and take a walk, or go out and find some way to disengage, or reengage in yourself as a human and your human needs. CASEY: I'd love to hear an example of a time when you pulled the e-brake recently, Andrew. It's so vivid you must have a lot of stuff under that sentence. ANDREW: So my current organization, 18F, is one that's a matrixed so we’ve got our chapters is what we call them which is our disciplines. Those are engineering and design, product acquisitions, they're groups of people that do the same kind of work, and then our other angle of the matrix is our projects. Those are business verticals like the kinds of people that we're helping and the organizations that we’re assisting around public benefits, or around national security, or around natural resources. So the result of a matrix organization is that you have two aspects to who's managing you—you have the manager of your work and you have the manager of your discipline—and the positive thing about that is that you can use both angles of the organization to you in different ways. Sometimes in your work, you need someone to speak up for you as a person, or as your skills development angle and sometimes you need someone to speak up for you in of the project work that you're doing, advocating for success in the specifics of your project, regardless of the way you're contributing to that project. The result, as you zoom out into upper layers of management, is that you have a conflict designed into the system and that conflict, when things are working well, benefits the health of the organization, both the health of people and the health of projects are advocated for and ed. But when things get out of balance, which happens all the time, in every organization I've ever been in you've got pendulum swing back and forth between different balances and when things out of balance, then suddenly you find yourself overextended, or advocating to an empty room. A recent example was a conversation around advocating for the benefits of – I'm on the chapter side of the house so I people within engineering and I had to pull an e-brake in a conversation where I was advocating for the health of people, but that I didn't have the right ears in the room to make a positive change. I found myself getting ahead of myself. One of the tells that I have is that I often feel tension in my jaw, which is usually a sign that I'm stressing too much about something. So I decided to take off a few hours and went to a gym [chuckles] and did a work out just to get the energy out of my system. ARTY: It seems like those conflicts can become pretty emotional depending on the circumstances where you've got folks that are overworked and stressed out, and wanting an advocate to help them in those challenging circumstances. You just think about product deadlines and things coming up and the company's trying to survive and it needs to survive so it can keep people employed. Those things are important too, but then we've got these challenges with trying to live and be human and enjoy our lives and things become too stressful that we lose our ability to the function and we need advocates on various sides. So when you engage with someone, let's say, there's someone on the team that's burnt out and really stressed out, how would you approach empathizing with where they're coming from to help work toward some good the solution to these things? ANDREW: Great question. I think in these kinds of situations, I always come in with the acknowledgement that no one in this conversation owns the truth. We're both working together to understand what the best thing to do is and what the reality of the situation is. From my perspective, in trying to someone seeing that they're burnt out, or overworked, that I think that's a misnomer. We can sometimes think of being burnt out overworked as an inherent state, or as something external. But I always try to encourage people to bring it internal because we all set boundaries and orders. The reality of an organization is that there will always be a resource constraint, whether that's people, or time, or money and it's up to the organization to effectively solve what they need to solve within the boundaries of those constraints. So when people are feeling overworked, or when they're feeling burnt out, oftentimes there's an imbalance there where the organization perhaps is trying to achieve too much, or perhaps there aren't enough resources supplied here. If you can both internalize it to yourself and say, “Okay, it's up to me to set responsible boundaries so that I'm not burnt out, so that I'm not overworked and how do I, as a manager, you in finding that boundary and helping push back when people try to violate your boundaries?” Also, how do we, as an organization, understand where that line is and understand what kind of slack do we have? Because I think a lot of times in organizations, it's hard to see are we at 20% capacity, 200% capacity? It's hard to see because the more work you throw at people, unless you're getting pushback, it seems as if you still have more slack, more line you can pull. Part of this is acknowledging that there is a systems level problem here where there's a lack of visibility into how overworked someone is and also, helping someone recognize hey, here's my boundary. We're over at. Now let's figure out a, how do we move that boundary back to where it needs to be so that I'm a positive contributor to this team and I can live my life [chuckles] in a happy way and also, how do we raise this in a way that the organization can see so that we can ultimately be more successful?” If an organization is burning people out and making them feel overworked all the time, the work is not going to be successful. You care for people first and great people who are cared for then care for your projects and deliver great work. JACOB: Yeah, and it’s like how can there'd be a health check for every person and what would that look like because I think if people are left to determine that for themselves, you can get really different conclusions from person. ANDREW: That is a great question I don't know the answer to. [laughs] I've been thinking about this a lot recently. My organization has a project health check where weekly, or bi-weekly, I can't , each project team talks about the different aspects of the work and whether, or not they're feeling well-ed, or if there are things external to the project that are getting in the way of project success. That gives you a data and interesting insights. We also track our time and there is a way that we track our time that's flagged as to the team. So that's where managers and people who are assisting in making big project decisions, those people track their time to that separate line. That's also interesting to look at because typically people ask for help after they already need it and the people that are close to the project can see that they need help. So if you're looking at the time tracking, usually a week, or two before something shows up on this project health tracker, you see a spike in hours in the kinds of that people are providing to the project. We have a lot of interesting data on the project health side of things, but it's really hard to collect data on the people part of this in a way that like makes people feel ed and it doesn't feel creepy. [chuckles] There's a whole aspect to this on whether, or not people feel comfortable reporting that they are feeling overworked and I haven't solved this problem. I'm curious if you all have ideas. [chuckles] I'd love to learn. ARTY: One of the things I'm thinking about with burnout in particular is I don't think it's directly correlated to the volume of work you're doing. There's other aspects and dimensions of things that go into burnout. So if I'm working on something that I'm really excited about, it can be difficult, it can be really challenging, it can be a huge amount of work, and yet as I work on it, as I get to the other side of that mountain I'm climbing, burnout isn't what I'm feeling like. It's a rush being able to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile as we don't necessarily burn out directly in correlation with working too many hours say, or something directly related to that. The things I find that happen when people get burned out is when they lose their heart connection with what they're doing. When you love what you do, when you're excited about what you're working on, when you're engaged and connected to a sense of purpose with what you're doing, then we usually stay in a pretty good, healthy state. We’ve got to maintain not still keeping in someone in balance, but we're doing pretty okay. Where I see developers usually burning out is there's some heart crushing aspect of things where people are disconnecting disengaging with what they're doing emotionally and they go into this mode of not caring anymore, not having those same compelling reasons to want to do those things and such that when that love connection dissipates, that work becomes too hard to maintain, to force yourself to do. So you start getting burnt out because you're forcing self yourself to do things that aren't an intrinsically motivated thing. I feel like the types of things that we need to do are activities that encourage this sense of heart connection with our team, with our project, with our customers. We do need visibility into those things, but maybe conversations, or even just knowing that those things are important, making time to scheduling time to invest in those sorts of things. I'm curious your thoughts on that. ANDREW: Yeah. Thank you for flagging that specifically. I think there's one thing that comes to mind for me is that is this work that you once loved that you no longer love? Like, is this something that you've connected with in the past and this really motivated you and now you're not motivated, I should say and if that's the case, what changed? I think brains are tricky and I think that we've all over the last pandemic, [chuckles] the current pandemic, I should say, the COVID pandemic is the one I'm referring to. I think that as people have coped with lots of trauma in their lives and significant shifts and changes, it's come out in interesting ways. I think, especially as people are learning themselves a little more with new constraints, the impacts are not always directly connected between say, the project work that you're doing, maybe something that you once loved, and now suddenly you no longer feel attached to that. What is that? Is that the work is somehow different? Is it that you really just your threshold for everything else in your life is just ticking higher and higher and higher so now it's really hard to engage in any of the things that you once loved? I personally have found myself, through the COVID pandemic, really finding meaning in repetition. So now I'm like a 560-day Duolingo streak and I've got podcasts I listen to every day of the week, and this repetition helps mark time in a way that makes me feel more like I have my life together. That gives me more capacity and reduces that stress threshold for me. So I think trying to narrow in on what specifically changed and how do we tackle that problem head on, and it might not be the work, or connection to the work. The other side of the question is, is this work your love? Maybe this is work that they've never really loved. Maybe this is grunt work—and one thing that I like to acknowledge is that every project has a grunt work associated with it and if you don't really have a framework for rotating that grunt work, a lot of times it falls to the person who has the least privilege on the team. So if as a positive team, you can work together and say, “Hey, these are the set of tasks that just needs to get done,” maybe that's notetaking in meetings, maybe that's sending out weekly status emails, or running a particular meeting. “Let's rotate that around so that we can find a balance between the grunt work and then the work that we're here to do this stuff that motivates us.” Because if the grunt work doesn't get done, the project won't be successful, but also, we all really want to work on the other thing, too. So let's make sure that no one here gets shafted with all that work [chuckles] and I think especially if teams haven't deliberately thought about that, patterns start to emerge in which people with less privilege get shafted. So I think that's something to be well acknowledge. JACOB: Quick shoutout. Episode 162 of this podcast, we talked with Denise Yu who really is framing exactly what you're talking about. She calls it glue work and it's that work that's maybe not directly recognized as a value add, but is the work that holds all of it together. So all of the work that might get done in JIRA, or around a Wiki, or organizing meetings, taking notes, all the above. The basic theory is like you said, how can that glue work be distributed equitably? Not to say that certain roles don't intrinsically need to do certain types of glue work because that's what their expertise is in. But it was a really good conversation. So if people are interested, go check that out, too. ANDREW: What are some ways that you're seeing that pandemic affect people in their work? ANDREW: I think the answer to that question is as varied as the number of people [laughs] that I . I think each person is affected in dramatically different ways, which I didn't quite expect, but taking a step back and thinking about it, of course, each person's individual and each person reacts differently. But I would say that for some people, especially people in care-taking roles, that kind of work has to shift to them. So if you're someone caretaking, you're often dealing with a lot of details in your out of work life and especially through the pandemic, now those lives are merging together. I'm currently at a remote organization and have been at a remote organization for the last 10 years, or so. The remote work thing is not necessarily new, but the complete merging of all of the things life and work is something that's still new and I think a lot of people who work remotely regularly often find ways to get out and get more exposure to people in their personal time, which is also something that has been limited. Especially if you're caretaking, you likely are doing that even less of your threshold for getting out is even lower. So if you're constantly dealing with details in your life, it might be good for you to take on more of that glue work, or more of the when you're thinking about the – I think I've worked in three categories. You've got the stretching work, or your growth work and that's work that is right on the cusp of your understanding. You're not really good at it yet, but by failing and by having moderate success, you grow as an individual. There's also your comfortable work, or your safety work and that's work that you're good at, you can knock it out of the park, do it really fast. I think for folks who are dealing with a lot in their personal life at the moment, leaning more towards the glue work, more towards the safety work is really important for making you feel successful and you're not really hungering that growth. I wished I the reference, but I heard someone referring to growth as being in a boat in a river before. Sometimes the river is wide and sometimes the river is narrow. When the river is wide, you really need to row. I found myself personally, in the last couple of years, not necessarily needing to grow as much and the river feels more narrow to me. So the current is faster and you're taken away with growth and you don't really need to do a lot to get there. Instead, you need to hold on [laughs] and try not to capsize. So that's one aspect, I would say I've seen people… CASEY: That's such a cool metaphor. I'm going to that. ANDREW: Yeah. I wish I ed where I heard it from so that I can reference it for you all. It's definitely not an original idea of mine. But another aspect of the way people have individually in coping and needing is around their social connection and that's an easy example. I think we've all felt differences in our social connection through COVID and sometimes that takes the form of having more structured meetings. Some people find more structure gives them the ability to communicate with each other in a way that makes you feel social and also isn't as draining and other people are the exact opposite where they want to get together in a room with less structure so that you can all just hang out and the structure gives people a sense of feeling stressed. The way that I've been looking across my organization is what kind of things are we providing and are they varied enough that we're capturing the majority of people in the that they need? CASEY: I thought about a lot in the dance communities I am in that there is a lot of introverts that love to go dancing, partner dancing, because it's structured and they'll say so. Like, I love that I can just show up and do the thing and it's social, but I haven't thought about the other side of that, which you just said, which is some people don't want the structure. I'm sure those people exist and I just probably know a lot of them, but I haven't heard people say that about themselves as much. The introverts in the dance communities know and they say it. The other side, I'm going to look out for it. That's cool. ANDREW: I used to play music for religious music ministry and one of the rules we had is that if you're always picking things you like, you're leaving people out. I think of that not necessarily attached to music ministry, but attached to all the other work that I do and that’s if your preferences are always represented, someone else's preferences are not. So trying to look around and say, “Who's not in the room right now, who could be benefiting from having their preferences heard once in a while?” CASEY: I want to jump back to how can we tell if people are about to be burnt out at work? How can we help people have a healthier environment? One of the lenses that I think about all the time is Project Aristotle by Google that came out, I don't know, maybe 5 years ago at this point and we're mentioning a lot of that aspects of it in our conversation already. Earlier, we were talking about on their list four and five are meaning of work like personal importance and impact of work, which is the company mission a little bit more. The other three that we touched on a little bit but not as much is psychological safety, which is number one on their list, dependability, like depending on each other, the coworkers, and structure and clarity, like goals, roles, and execution. I'm sure this is not a full list of what keeps individual employees happy. But I think a team environment that hits all of these five really well is going to have less burnout. More than individually, it's been studied. That's true. So when I did team health surveys before for the team, for the people, I like these five questions a lot. I bet it's a lot like the project surveys, Andrew, you were talking about. A lot of team health surveys are similar, but you got me thinking now what's missing from that list that's focused on the team that would show up in the individual one and I don't have a clear answer for that. ANDREW: And adding onto that, is there a way where you can collect honest data? I think one of the benefits of having one-on-one relationships with your immediate manager is that they can read between the lines and what you're saying after they get to know you well enough. I think for me, that usually happens about a year in with a new employee where you get to know someone well enough that you can understand. If they come to you and say, “Hey, I'm struggling with this right now in this project.” Is that a huge red flag, or is that normal? I think it takes a while to get to know someone and then you can read between the lines of what they're saying and say, “Okay, this is a big deal. It deserves my attention. I'm going to focus on this.” One of the things I struggle with capturing this information is that a, it's hard to capture that sort of interpretation part in these kinds of surveys and b, the data that you get is – when we were talking about burnout a lot, sometimes when people are burned out, they don't have the energy to submit these surveys. [chuckles] So the data is not particularly representative, but that's a hard thing to keep track of because how do you know? So it's a really tricky problem. I'm going to continue to try things [chuckles] to get this data, but I do like the idea of looking between the lines on if we're surveying team health, is there a way we can focus in on individuals? ARTY: There's also a lot of things that we don't talk about. Like Casey brought up psychological safety, for example and if you don't feel safe, you're not likely to necessarily bring up the reasons that you don't feel safe because you don't feel safe. [chuckles] I'm thinking about just some team dynamics of some teams I've worked on in the past where we had someone on the team that had a strong personality, and we would do code reviews and things, and some folks that were maybe more junior on the team felt sensitive and maybe attacked by certain things. But the response was to shut down and fall in line with things and not rock the boat and you ask him what's going on and everything's fine. So there's dynamics of not having psychological safety, but you might not necessarily get at those by talking to folks. Yet, if you're sitting in the room and you know the people and see the interactions taking place, you see how they respond to one another in context. Because I'm thinking about where those dynamics were visible and at the time, the case I'm thinking of was before the days where we were doing pull requests and stuff, where we did our code reviews in a room throwing code up on the screen and would talk through things that way. You'd see these dynamics occur when someone would make a comment and how another human would just respond to that person and you see people turn in words on themselves. These sorts of just dynamics of interaction where people’s confidence gets shut down, or someone else is super smart and so they won't challenge them because well, they're a super smart person so obviously, they know. Some people speak in a certain way that exudes confidence, even if they're not necessarily confident about their idea, they just present in a certain way and other people react to that. So you see these sorts of dynamics in teams that come up all the time that are the silent undercurrents of how we all manage to get along with one another and keep things flowing okay. How do we create an environment and encourage an environment where people feel safer to talk about these things? ANDREW: To me, psychological safety and inclusion are very closely tied and I believe that inclusion is everyone's responsibility on a team and in the situation you described there, who else was in that room and why didn't they stop it? I think that it's easy to say, “Oh, these two people are having a disagreement here,” but if we all truly believe that it's our responsibility to create a safe environment and include everyone and their ideas. As you mentioned, everyone in that room could see what was happening. [chuckles] So I think there's a cultural thing there that perhaps needs some work as an organization and I'm not saying that that is something that I don't experience in my teams as well. I think this is work that's constant and continual. Every time you notice something, it's to bring it up and invite someone back into the conversation. Some people like to think about calling out, or versus calling in and I really like that distinction. When someone oversteps a boundary, or makes a mistake, they've removed themselves from this safe community, and it's up to you as a safe community to invite them back in and let them know their expectations and I like the idea of that aspect of calling people in. Obviously, that requires some confidence and I encourage people, especially people that have institutional privilege, to especially looking out for this because you can really demonstrate to your team how much you're willing to them if you keep an eye out for these kinds of dynamics. One thing you mentioned really made me think about earned dogmatism. When people are around for a longer time, they become more closed-minded. That's the earned dogmatism effect and it's the idea that since you've been here for so long, or since you've been working in this industry so long, you're the expert and it causes you to become more and more closed-minded to new ideas, which obviously is not good. [laughs] So anytime I see that pattern popping up, I try to just let people know like, “Hey, do you know about this effect? Do you know that this happens with people in teams and is that how you would like to be? Would you like to become more close-minded, or would you like to continue learning?” I think just the awareness of the fact that that's something that you're going to inherently start doing helps people fight against that. JACOB: I'm trying to imagine just a typical, if you can call it that, team in a tech company and they're probably in a state where a lot of these things we're talking about might not come so easy because I think what we're saying is that a lot of this is dependent on everyone on the team being vulnerable about where they're at. I wonder if you have any ideas about how a team can get from there to the ideal state because it sounds like that's a really big barrier. I can't have better psychological safety and inclusion without somehow getting people's and I can get if they don't feel safe. So is there some iterative way to improve on that? ANDREW: Yeah. So one thing that I have direct experience with is in the federal government, there's a lot of funding models between the federal government and local governments where the federal government will pay for a majority of something as long as the local government follows a set of rules on implementing a program. So like Medicare and Medicaid are examples of this and other benefits programs as well. Even the federal highway system; the reason why our interstates are all the same is because the federal government pays for a majority of them if the local authorities building roads follows a set of rules and guidelines. I think that's one of the most dramatic examples of a power difference. If you're forming a t team to make changes to Medicare, or build a new highway, or improve rail service in your city and one person in the room controls 90% of the money. I think that's a pretty dramatic example of what could be a really psychologically unsafe environment and it requires a lot of effort to break down that boundary of, “Hey, I'm here to say yes to what you want.” But then the reality is the federal government representatives in those situations are often looking to collaborate and help solve problems because they're looking out to see how do I best spend this money to achieve the best effect. But the tendency is that other of the team coming from the 10% side of the house, they're responsible for the execution of the program and so, they tend to hide mistakes, or hide hiccups as much as possible so that they don't get their funding cut. That's just a very natural thing that happens and the experience that I have in this situation is what I like to think of as the Waffle House solution. I heard of a particular person in this situation taking the whole team to Waffle House. This obviously works better in-person. It's hard to take people to Waffle House remotely; that's definitely not something that you can't do. The idea behind that conversation is just the problem here is that you're not connecting with each other on a human level and you want to be safe to share your vulnerability with each other, but before you can be vulnerable with each other, you have to recognize each other's humanity and let everyone know that you respect each other. I think an easy way to do that is to share a meal, maybe it's to play a game together, maybe it's to schedule a meeting for 30 minutes in which you talk about note work. In the example that I gave it's up to the person in the position of power here to set that example, because if you're someone without that privilege, if you are someone who pays for 10% of a project instead of 90%, it's hard for you to go to your 90% funder and say, “Can I waste 30 minutes of your time? Can I waste half a day?” Because waste in this case is the idea from the business side of the house. You're wasting time. But in reality, if you slow down and connect with each other on a human level—slow is smooth and smooth is fast—so you can help the team develop that sense of humanity with each other, create an environment where hopefully you can be more vulnerable with each other and collaborate more humanly with each other. So I wouldn't necessarily say that this is a textbook plan like okay, you've got problems on your team, let's go to Waffle House and the problem solves. [chuckles] I'm not saying that but I am saying perhaps look for opportunities for you to recognize each other's humanity, and break down perhaps a structure that might be standing in the way of connecting with each other, and then just focusing on that can hopefully help you find that vulnerability better. JACOB: You can't take yourself seriously at a Waffle House. It's just not possible. ANDREW: [laughs] I'm pretty serious about Waffle House. I don’t know about you. [laughs] CASEY: I'm starting to get a craving here. Yeah, totally agree. I love that this is being talked about more and more, how do we build psychological safety on teams? It comes from trust, human connection, vulnerability, and how do we build that? By treating each other as humans. ARTY: The things I think about just contrasting some teams I've seen over time and how they ended up developing and the culture that emerged is the technical leadership on the team that organically evolves. Some people have strong personalities. They tend to naturally act in a leader-oriented way. Even if they don't officially have the title hat on their head, they're somebody that people respect and look up to. They value their opinion and thoughts and whoever those people are that have the natural gravity tend to have a lot of influence over the emergent culture. So when I've seen people in that position, be really ive of listening to the ideas of other folks on the team, creating space and treating people with respect, creating an environment where people are heard and listened to and it's about the ideas that the behavior of those people have an outsized impact on the culture that emerges by just how they interact and treat you respect others and other folks on the team tend to mimic and model that behavior of wherever that natural kind of gravity is going toward. If you've got folks on the team that are like that, that have a tendency to lift up other people around them, then what emerges is a much more psychologically safe environment. When you've got somebody in that gravity position that has an ego defensive response, they want to continue to feel like the confident expert ones, when people say counter things that are positioned as a challenge and you get a very different set of dynamics that emerge where people tend to be more walk on eggshells, try to say things very carefully to not upset things. I feel like it's just human instinct response depending on who's in the room, who you're talking to, how you anticipate they will react to something, that emergent interactions come from that and that whoever those gravity people are tend to have this outsize influence. So who you have in your organization of those folks? I'd say probably being really careful to hire people that have a tendency to and a desire to want to lift other people up and to maybe not have such a fragile competitive ego dynamic going on. ANDREW: Absolutely. Well, I have lots of feelings on hiring, [chuckles] but I do think that in the tech industry, we don't spend as much time focusing on communication and then I think that we should. I think a lot of times people who are in that ego situation are expressing vulnerability, but poorly and I think if they had more communication skills, they could potentially express that differently in a way that was more positive to culture. So zooming back to one of the things you said around leadership, evolution, evolutionary culture, and who steps into leadership roles, I think one of the things that is really important to me about good leadership is staying ahead of what your big problems are and that isn't necessarily saying working ahead of everyone else. That’s saying keeping your eye on the horizon. Like, are you looking out to where we're going and what kind of problems are we seeing here? If there's an acknowledgement of an issue with psychological safety on teams, letting leaders emerge naturally may not be the right approach. You can deliberately select someone who demonstrates the culture that you want to create on a team has that technical leader and give them – I like the ACE model, the appreciation, the coaching, and the evaluation of leadership, where you give them that appreciation on the particular things that they're doing really well and in front of the team so that the team can say, “Oh, that's what the norm is here. That's what we should be doing.” That also gives the person, who may have perhaps more of a natural leadership role, if that would have naturally emerged, but perhaps it's missing some of those communication skills, or other skills that makes them a more around teammate, gives them an opportunity to be out of the spotlight so that they can work on developing those skills and becoming a more active contributor to the team instead of holding it back in some ways. CASEY: I love that we keep saying the word “skill: because these are all learnable skills. You can learn how to communicate well. You can learn how to be a strong, effective leader. You can learn how to foster a psychologically safe and inclusive environment. You can learn all these things. I love to work at places where they want this, the culture that the leaders, the people who run the company, want it even if they don't know how yet because that growth is possible as long as there's the desire for that. I think we all have a base level of desire, but some people are aware of it and articulate it and say – I saw a tweet the other day. Someone was looking for a job and of their five criteria, top five they listed in the tweet, psychological safety was on the list. That person knows they want to work on a team like that. That's pretty cool. So someone wants their team to learn these skills. A natural way is managers coaching their employees to do that kind of thing like coaching how to coach. That can work pretty well. It's pretty powerful. Another one is communities of practice, where you have people come together and talk. It could even literally be about culture. Some companies have a culture, community of practice, where they talk about how to influence the culture. Some places don't have the skills yet and they hire external coaches. There's a whole bunch of companies including me. For myself, I'm a consultant for making happy teams. I do coaching and training, too. There's online courses, there's books, there's podcasts like Greater Than Code. It's pretty good. You should check it out. [chuckles] But acknowledging the problem, being aware of it is a huge key first step and I don't like to push for a psychological safety in a place that doesn't value it. That's just a recipe for burnout for me. It's happened to me a lot, but in an environment where it is already desired, getting people from wanting to, to being able to. That’s super satisfying work. I think that's true for anyone in tech who is talking about this kind of stuff, who cares about it. You want to make a difference where you can. ANDREW: Absolutely knowing when to jump ship at an organization because you are fighting upstream at a time when you are either being taken away in the current, or there aren't enough other people around you to swim upstream with you, it is super important. One of the things that helped me open a door in my life that I'd be happy to share with you all is an assessment I took a couple of years back called the TKI assessment, Thomas Kincaid Institute assessment, or something. I could've gotten that all wrong, but it's a tool that helps you understand what skills you already have around conflict resolution and what skills you can grow around conflict resolution. That unlocked a lot in my life specifically because it allowed me to understand how I naturally resolve conflict, to understand when I should push against my natural instincts to resolve conflict, and when I should feel that I have exhausted my abilities to resolve this conflict. That last step is a great indicator if you've tried everything you can to resolve the conflict, and maybe that conflict is around creating a psychologically safe workspace, you yourself cannot do this. So can you bring in other people that can help resolve this, or is it time to walk away and find a team that s you better? The five different modes that they reference in TKI are competing, collaborative, collaborating, I should say, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. When I first took the assessment, I scored a 0 in competing which means I had no recognizable skill in competing. When I look back into my history, my childhood, how I was raised, that totally makes sense. I was raised in a household where when people wronged you, you let it go. You moved on to find people who would you and believed that that person would eventually experience justice and that was not your responsibility to do that. Applying to my work-life today, that means people can walk over me. [laughs] So how do you pick up those skills? The assessment doesn't necessarily dive too much into how you pick up the skills, but I think just knowing where your blind spots are was really helpful for me, because then I could recognize a situation where a, I flagged that I'm experiencing conflict. B, my natural tendency is to accommodate this conflict, or avoid it. C, is that the right approach for this environment? Is that a right approach for this problem? And then d, either do that approach, or change it. It's really uncomfortable. Often, when I'm competing, it makes me feel selfish and I acknowledge that. So when I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to change my approach and I'm going to compete here. I'm going to argue.” It's like, “Okay, I'm readying myself,” like, “Okay, I'm going to feel selfish now, be ready to feel selfish, go for it.” [laughs] And that's just sort of how I counteract those natural tendencies. So I wouldn't say there's one particular magic bullet, or this is the assessment that you should do, or anything like that, but there are a number of tools out there to sort of help you understand yourself and what skills you have and what skills you might want to grow into. They can also provide a sense of completeness around a particular skill area, like conflict avoidance, or conflict resolution, and let you know when you've exhausted the available options in front of you. ARTY: That's interesting to me just thinking about where we started this discussion with boundaries and just people can react in a different way, and if you have someone who's kind of overstepping boundaries, how do you learn to stand up for yourself? If your instinct is to just run away from conflict, whenever it comes up, then we've got other sorts of problems and stuff that emerges. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to stand up for yourself and to be able to have the confidence to feel like you can. One of the things that that helps me with that is when someone else is upset and reacting and stuff is maybe they're attacking me, or something is to separate myself personally for that. So if I imagine them in their head and I'm a cardboard cutout character that I'm like, “Okay, they're kicking the cardboard character and that's not me.” They have a picture in their head of this little cardboard character that they've got an upset relationship with that that's separate from me. I can look at the dynamics that are of what's going on with them and why they're upset with this cardboard character, understand what's going on in their world with separating myself from that, and then I can respond in a way that is standing up for myself without necessarily reacting to the situation where I feel like I need to defend myself against an attack that something going on that really has nothing to do with me, but still, I need to be able to stand up for myself and not necessarily back away from the situation. So I find those kinds of skills really help with being able to not take other people's stuff so personally. You talked about the challenge with boundaries and over empathizing can put us in a situation where the things that other people say can end up hurting us a lot, or we internalize somebody else's feeling so much, or someone else's worldview so much that we can lose ourselves in someone else's emotions and feels. How do we separate enough so that we can have a solidity in our own self and our own sense of knowing such that we can have our own com that doesn't fall over, that we can feel bolstered in ourselves, independent of what everyone else is doing? That's where that empathy and boundaries and resilience and stuff come in. So a question for you, you did mention this boundary thing early on, what are some of the things that have helped you to develop boundaries, or some of the tools that you use to help in those challenging situations? ANDREW: I love the cardboard cutout analogy. I personally like to replay situations as if they're soap operas. I'll describe the characters, especially when things get heated emotionally, it's easy for me to recognize it as a soap opera, which helps me chuckle about the emotional component of it in a way that externalizes it from my feelings. It's a really tough situation. That's a tough ask. I think one thing that I do in the exact moments when I am feeling hurt, or valued, or some kind of emotional component is attached to something someone just told me is to again, pull that e-brake and say, “Okay, stop. I am not my work.” Similar to when you submit a pull request, you are not your code. I am not my work. I am not this conversation. I'm a whole self, I am valued as myself. I'm surprised by something that just happened and I'm reacting to it in a particular emotion, emotional reaction. So if you can create a pattern, when people get you into that emotional state, whether, or not they were intending on getting you there, of saying, “Hold on, I'm caught off guard by that. Can you tell me more?” Like, “I don't understand that comment.” It shifts the power dynamic from someone putting you on the spot, which they may, or may not have intended to do, to shift it back towards them to say, “Now the responsibility is on you as the person who has made me feel upset, or I'm caught off guard by that and the responsibility now is on you to describe more so that I can contextualize the emotion that I'm feeling, or just give me time to react to that.” You don't always have to immediately respond and oftentimes, I find myself reacting too quickly. All of the tools that I have in my toolbox are slowing down. That's one of the tools that I definitely use to help acknowledge that something is unusual. Another tool is I'm asking people to summarize so acknowledging that, “Hey, I'm surprised by that and I'm starting to get lost in the details of this meeting. Would it be all right if I asked you to summarize the main points here, or could you follow-up in Slack after this, or follow-up an email after this?” That's another one of those, like my natural tendency to avoid. It's like okay, I can take a step back here and avoid this immediate conflict, or this immediate emotion, and then take a breather. Often, in the before times, as I would go out and speak at conferences and I'm not a natural extrovert. I have this tendency after I speak at a place to go find a closet, or some dark room somewhere [chuckles] just to recharge a little bit, do nothing. I often will just sit there and sweat in a closet for 30 minutes, or something like that. That process allows me to reset my blood chemistry and say, “Okay, how do I fully acknowledge this situation?” Like, do I feel like I did a good job? Am I proud of the work that I'm doing? Am I proud of this? Is this where my boundaries should be? It allows me to give that moment to step away, to reset a little bit. So it’s something I think that I will spend the rest of my life learning, which is how to recognize my boundaries and set them appropriately, and I think that's right. I should be continuing to learn as I continue to change. ARTY: I really liked the summary thing. Just thinking about someone's really upset, it's a pretty safe question to ask and at the same time, it forces them to take a step back and really think about what it is that they're trying to say. Because usually when we're upset, we just spew lots of words of upsetness, but it forces you to shift into more of a thinking mode away from emotional mode, which I feel like would have a really good impact on level setting the conversation. Just take a deep breath. What is it you're trying to communicate here? What are the main points? I really liked that summarization idea. ANDREW: The one thing I always myself in those moments is, “Nothing is more important than my next breath,” and that helps me to unplug from the situation and focus on breathing and focus on relaxing and then be able to show back up and reengage. JACOB: Something that I think can be important is if I'm at work and I'm realizing that I need to be vulnerable in one way, or another because I need to draw a boundary, or for some other reasons, something that I feel like would be really important that I would really need to have is an example that would give me some idea of what will happen when I do that. How can team get examples of what happens when I'm vulnerable, because if they don't know what will happen, they're probably going to be left to their own personal experiences from maybe at another job, or something like that, that probably don't apply, that probably would be completely different. So it's like, how can managers, or leaders help people see, or experience examples of this is how we talk about difficult conversations to normalize it and just help people understand, like, this is what will happen and this is the way we go about it and yes, it will be safe. ANDREW: I don't think you can say that. [laughs] JACOB: I know. ANDREW: And that maybe is controversial, but I don't think you can say, “Yes, this will be safe.” I think you can strive for it and you can work for an environment that's safe, but in a professional setting, there's always a line and maybe it's not safe to share something that you think is appropriate to share and there are lots of reasons for that. Maybe it's the impact on other people. But the pattern I like to encourage and people just ask for permission, which is something that is maybe not always universally applicable advice, but oftentimes, I find myself talking to people when they're on teams where they want to say something controversial, or they want to say something difficult, or they want to share something that's personal and how they attach to this project, or this work, or something that happened in the team. I think there's a lot of power in asking people to you to coming in and saying, “I really want to share something with you all and I'm not sure how it's going to go. Can you me in this? What are you interested in hearing?” The way I often say it, when I'm trying to say something controversially is, “Can I be spicy for a moment?” [laughs] And that's an acknowledgement of saying like, “Hey, I'm going to say something comfortable.” It gives people a moment to set their expectations and it gives them a moment to recognize how they should respond before they hear what you say and then are caught up in the emotion of the response. I think that's a really kind thing you can do to your team to say like, “Hey, can I be vulnerable for a second here?” Like, “This is a project which involves researching prison populations and three of my family are in prison.” If you lead off with saying, “Three of my family are in prison,” people don't know how to understand that comment. But if you start by saying, “Can I be vulnerable for a second?” People will recognize that hey, you're showing something deep about you and your personality and it's something tied to your sense of identity, or something deep within you in a way that is not the responsibility of the team to validate, or say it's right, or wrong. But it is the responsibility to the team to hear you and to understand you and ask questions to say, “Hey, tell me more about that. Tell me more about how that connects to this work,” or “Do you want to interview some of your family for research on this project?” [chuckles] Or “Do you want them to stay out of this project?” Or “How do we you as a team member? Is this something that you want to acknowledge, but you'd prefer to put that in a box and keep it on the shelf, or is that a part of your identity that you'd like to bring to this conversation and bring to this work?” I think those conversations like can really benefit from that asking for permission step and you don't really need to wait for people's answers there, [chuckles] but it gives you an opportunity to set the tone for the conversation. JACOB: I feel like if I was working on your team and I saw Andrew use that phrase, “Can I have permission to be vulnerable? Can I be spicy?” I feel like later when I felt like I needed to be vulnerable, I would feel a lot more comfortable because now here's a map that's if I do this, it's probably not completely out of bounds and that now I have a way to know here’s how we go about that on this team, because there’s a leader who modeled it. ARTY: Yeah, bingo. I was just thinking about all the different ways I've screwed things up and stuff and learned, I guess, the hard way, what boundaries are the hard way of what unsafe things are is by making mistakes and screwing things up. I think about some of these experiences that I had and I feel like the saving grace for me, even when I messed something up, is that I genuinely cared and that people knew that and could see that and so, that when I apologize for something, it was authentic and that we could move forward and stuff because I cared. Underneath it all, I genuinely care. So even though I made some mistakes and stuck with things that was okay. And then after that, when I was thinking about being in more of a leadership position, one of the things I made a point of doing was putting mistakes and stuff I've made on center stage. Making it okay and safe for people to talk about when they screwed something up. Being in a leadership position, when I talked about all the things that “Well, I screwed up this thing, I screwed up this thing;” it makes it okay when our leaders demonstrate vulnerability, or create ways and pathways that show us how to do those things safely, too. ANDREW: That reminds me of a friend of mine had a conversation with me last weekend specifically around a mistake that they had made and that mistake was in an online community. They were discussing building a world in a video game and they suggested building something that was offensive. They immediately dove into how they didn't know it was offensive at the time and that the reaction that other people gave to them was inappropriate and that they felt like they didn't know how to apologize in a way that would help growth, or reengagement with the community, and that they felt like, “Maybe I'm just being canceled,” or maybe people are overreacting here. After the whole conversation, I just let them talk out and they ended with like, “How do I reengage here when people are now ignoring me?” and I just said, “Well, you don't deserve a second chance.” Not that anyone deserves to be canceled immediately, or cut out, but when someone says something offensive that you take offense in, it's up to that person how much tolerance they have for you. If someone has decided that this in this situation was so offensive, or that their tolerance for that offense is low, you don't get a second chance there. That's a mistake that becomes part of you and hopefully, you can allow that burden to not rest on your shoulders and hold you down, but you can internalize it and learn from it, and it becomes part of the foundation you stand on so that you don't make these kinds of mistakes next time. And also, [chuckles] demonstrating an aspect of my superpower, I disagree with you. I don't think you didn't know that that was offensive. [chuckles] I think you had that part of your brain turned off and hey, can we like talk about that? I think that this particular thing, you knew it was offensive, but you were thinking about this in a different context, or you thought this would be okay, and now you're rewriting this and placing yourself as a victim. That is a dangerous pattern so don't do that. [chuckles] I think that in a work setting, tying this back, when you are having these difficult, or vulnerable conversations, being able to acknowledge when you've made a mistake, maybe perhaps when you've shared something that is offensive, or perhaps you've made a comment about someone else's moment that's offensive, it's really important to acknowledge the mistake to provide the opportunity for others to give your and acknowledge that you've damaged trust here. It's your responsibility as the person who damaged that trust to then rebuild it and maybe rebuilding that trust means leaving the organization, or changing teams, or maybe that means really, truly deeply listening and empathizing with people moving into that position of hurt that you've caused and being uncomfortable with it, especially when you're personally wrong. When I'm personally wrong, I really feel that I want people to understand how much I'm hurt and if there isn't a great opportunity to share that pain with someone it's hard to accept their apology, because you don't feel like they understand. In those situations, it's up to the person who's done the controversial thing, or overstepped that boundary to step in and say, “Let's talk about this when you're ready.” ARTY: And also, the other thing I'm just thinking is that when things do happen, we need opportunities and stuff to start over, too. Sometimes the right thing to do is walk away from the whole thing, but learn from it and there&#3

02:01 - Sy’s Superpower: Making Complex Topics Digestible Sy on YouTube: "Computer Science Explained with my Cats" 06:28 - Approaching Learning to Code: Do Something That Motivates You Greater Than Code Episode 246: Digital Democracy and Indigenous Storytelling with Rudo Kemper Ruby For Good Terrastories 11:25 - Computers Can Hurt Our Bodies! Logitech M570 Max Dvorak Keyboard 13:57 - Motivation (Cont’d) Weekend Game Jams The I Do, We Do, You Do Pattern 22:15 - Sy’s Content (Cont’d) Sy on YouTube: "Computer Science Explained with my Cats" Content Creation and Choosing Topics 33:58 - Code As Art code:art / @codeart_journal trashheap / @trashheapzine Submission Guidelines Casey's Viral TikTok! 41:34 - #include ＜C++＞ Lessons learned creating an inclusive space in a decades old community (Sy's Talk) QueerJS Emscripten Graphiz it! Reflections: Mandy: Digging into Sy’s videos. Casey: Working within content creation constraints. Sy: Make a video on allocation. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Sy Brand. Greater Than Code

02:45 - Rudo’s Superpower: Being Pretty Good At Lots of Things! Learning How to Learn on the Fly Digital Democracy Earth Defenders Toolkit Ruby For Good Problem-Solving & Mastery: “Fake it until you make it!” 13:14 - Digital Democracy & Terrastories The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) Matawai People Capturing & Recording Oral History Ruby For Good Mapbox Indiginous-Requested, Indiginous-Led Taking Action When Invited Listen Before Action Co Creation Mapeo 27:39 - Defining an “Earth Defender” Earth Defenders Toolkit 30:40 - Community Collaboration/Development Best Practices Without Overstepping Boundaries Tech Literacy 35:52 - Getting Involved/ing This Work Digital Democracy & Earth Defenders Toolkit Stakeholders & Ownership 45:03 - Experiences Working w/ These Projects Anyone Can Contribute Meeting Fellow Dreamers 47:33 - Oral Traditions & Storytelling: Preserving History Reflections: Jacob: Getting involved and connecting virtually. Mandy: for Ruby For Good! Happening in-person this year from September 23-26 at the Shepherd's Spring Retreat, in Sharpsburg, Maryland! Mae: Being able to adapt and learn as a superskill. Be proud of the things you can do. Rudo: It’s inspiring to build community around software and the needs that it serves. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: Coming soon! Special Guest: Rudo Kemper. Sponsored By: Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote, employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/. Greater Than Code

03:03 - Rony’s Superpower: Being a Space Cadet: Free-Willing Imagination, Insight, and Intuition 06:54 - Becoming Interested in Technology Science + Art Star Wars Solar Power 10:30 - Unstructured Play and Maintaining a Sense of Wonder and Free-Spiritedness Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcenden 15:15 - Power Structures and Hierarchies Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Order vs. Disorder Greater Than Code Episode 125: Everything is Communication with Sam Aaron 35:04 - Using Technology to Decentralize Social Structures: Is it possible? Hacking Reality Enlightenment and Transcendence Somatics Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis by Stanislav Grof 01:05:19 - The Game of Capitalism What It Means To Win; Mimicking Desires Reorienting Around Joy, Creation, Learning, and Experiences Self-Actualization & Community 01:09:39 - Are We Technology? Survival of the Fittest Reflections: Tim: We as a global community, need to bring our drums to the drum circle. Chanté: How do we build decentralized guilds? Arty: 1) Breaking out of nets and creating opportunities to innovate, invent, rethink, and enable new things to happen. 2) How do we create more entrepreneurship and enable more entrepreneurial innovation to happen? Rony: Empathy, Comion, Imagination, Freedom, Courage. BONUS: The lost classic "Fire" (from one of Rony’s early bands) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: Coming soon! Special Guest: Rony Abovitz. Sponsored By: Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote, employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/. Greater Than Code

01:52 - Brianna’s Superpower: Intense Empathy and Feeling Deeply Octavia Butler: Parable of the Sower 06:28 - Practicing Acceptance vs Resignation Making Peace Without Giving Up Problems/Tasks vs People Providing Alternate Narratives Delicious Democracy: Making Things a Pleasurable Experience for All 12:04 - Delicious Democracy: A Creative Advocacy Lab Biomimicry Creative Ways to Form Grassroots Coalitions Online Town Door Knocking Reinforcement 17:14 - Community-Owned AI Merging Humans with Algorithms; Technology with Government Platform Co-Op Conference What is Ownership? Mastodon DisCO.coop 24:51 - Trust Trustless = Antihuman “Building Trust” by Robert C. Solomon & Fernando Flores The Industrialization of Trust Confidence Levels Working Families Party 40:41 - Outcomes > Outputs Measurements of Success Measurement Theory Proxy Measures: All Measures Are Proxy Measures 46:56 - Equitism -Centered Design Reflections: John: Unique approaches to door knocking: Changing the script. Casey: 1) All measures are proxy measures. 2) Thinking about how growth mindset and outcomes not outputs relate. Damien: Being able to work with nonbinary is the only way to deal with things like trust and confidence levels. Brianna: 1) All measures are proxy measures. 2) Meandering conversations! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Brianna McGowen. Sponsored By: Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote, employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/. Greater Than Code

02:51 - Jennifer’s Superpower: Kindness & Empathy Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) 07:37 - Equitable Design and Inclusive Design Section 508 Compliance Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) HmntyCentrd Creative Reaction Lab 15:43 - Biases and Prejudices Self-Awareness Daniel Kahneman's System 1 & System 2 Thinking Jennifer Strickland: “You’re Killing Your s!” 22:57 - So...What do we do? How do we get people to care? Caring About People Who Aren’t You Listening Using Web Standards and Prioritizing Web Accessibility Deg with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm Progressive Enhancement Casey’s Cheat Sheet Jennifer Strickland: “Ohana for Digital Service Design” Self-Care 33:22 - How Ego Plays Into These Things Actions Impact Others For, With, and By Indi Young 44:05 - Empathy and Accessibility Testability/Writing Tests Screen Readers TalkBack Microsoft Narrator NVDA Jaws Heydon Pickering Reflections: Casey: Animals can have cognitive disabilities too. Damien: Equitable design initiatives and destroying the tenants of white supremacy. Jennifer: Rest is key. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDO: Hello, friends! Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 243. My name is Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my wonderful friend, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Thank you, Mando, and I am here with our wonderful friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're all here today with Jennifer Strickland. With more than 25 years of experience across the product lifecycle, Jennifer aims to ensure no one is excluded from products and services. She first heard of Ohana in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, “Ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind, or forgotten.” People don’t know what they don’t know and are often unaware of the corners they cut that exclude people. Empathy, comion, and humility are vital to communication about these issues. That’s Jennifer focus in equitable design initiatives. Welcome, Jennifer! JENNIFER: Hi! DAMIEN: You’re welcome. MANDO: Hi, Jennifer. So glad you’re here. JENNIFER: I'm so intrigued. [laughs] And I'm like 243 and this is the first I'm hearing of it?! DAMIEN: Or you can go back and listen to them all. MANDO: Yeah. CASEY: That must be 5, almost 6 years? JENNIFER: Do you have transcripts of them all? CASEY: Yes. JENNIFER: Great! MANDO: Yeah. I think we do. I think they're all transcribed now. JENNIFER: I'm one of those people [chuckles] that prefers to read things than listen. DAMIEN: I can relate to that. CASEY: I really enjoy Coursera courses. They have this interface where you can listen, watch the video, and there's a transcript that moves and highlights sentence by sentence. I want that for everything. MANDO: Oh, yeah. That's fantastic. It's like closed captioning [laughs] for your audio as well. JENNIFER: You can also choose the speed, which I appreciate. I generally want to speed things up, which yes, now that I'm getting older, I have to realize life is worth slowing down for. But when you're in a life where survival is what you're focused on, because you have a bunch of things that are slowing your roll and survival is the first thing in your mind, you tend to take all the jobs, work all the jobs, do all of the things because it's how you get out of poverty, or whatever your thing is. So I've realized how much I've multitasked and worked and worked and worked and I'm realizing that there is a part of the equality is lost there, but we don't all have the privilege of slowing down. DAMIEN: I can relate to that, too. So I believe every one of our past 243 episodes, we asked our guests the same question. You should know this is coming. Jennifer, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JENNIFER: I don't know for sure. People have told me that I'm the kindest person they've ever met, people have said I'm the most empathetic person I've ever met, and I'm willing to bet that they're the same thing. To the people, they just see them differently. I acquired being empathetic and kind because of my dysfunction in my invisible disabilities. I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood trauma and then repeated life trauma, and the way it manifests itself is trying to anticipate other people's needs, emotions, moods, and all of that and not make people mad. So that's a negative with a golden edge. Life is full of shit; how you respond to it shows who you are and rather than molesting kids, or hurting people, I chose to do what I could to make sure that no one else goes through that and also, to try to minimize it coming at me anymore, too. [chuckles] But there’s positive ways of doing it. You don't have to be like the people who were crappy to you and the same goes like, you're in D.C.? Man, they're terrible drivers and it's like, [laughter] everybody's taking their bad day and putting it out on the people they encounter, whether it's in the store, or on the roads. I was like, “Don't do that.” Like, how did it feel when your boss treated you like you were garbage, why would you treat anyone else like garbage? Be the change, so to speak. But we're all where we are and like I said in my bio, “You don't know what you don't know.” I realized earlier this week that it actually comes from Donald Rumsfeld who said, “Unknown unknowns.” I’m like, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” MANDO: You can find good in lots of places, right? [laughs] JENNIFER: If you choose to. MANDO: Absolutely. Yeah. JENNIFER: Look at, what's come out of the horror last year. We talk about shit that we didn't use to talk about. Yeah, it's more exhausting when lots of people, but I think in the long run, it will help move us in the right direction. I hope. MANDO: Yeah. That's absolutely the hope, isn't it? JENNIFER: We don't know what we don't know at this time. My sister was volunteering at the zoo and she worked in the Ape House, which I was super jealous of. There's an orangutan there named Lucy who I love and Lucy loves bags, pouches, and lipstick. So I brought a backpack with a pouch and some old lipstick in it and I asked a volunteer if I could draw on the glass. They gave me permission so I made big motions as I opened the backpack and I opened the pouch and you see Lucy and her eyes are like, she's starting to side-eye me like something's going on. And then she runs over and hops up full-time with her toes on the window cell and she's like right up there. So I'm drawing on the glass with the lipstick and she's loving it, reaches her hand behind, poops into her hand, takes the poop and repeats this little actions on the glass. MANDO: [laughs] Which is amazing. It's hilarious so that's amazing. JENNIFER: It's fantastic. I just think she's the bomb. My sister would always send pictures and tell me about what Lucy got into and stuff. Lucy lived with people who would dress her in people clothing and so, she's the only one of the orangutans that didn't grow up only around orangutans so the other orangutans exclude her and treat her like she's a weirdo and she's also the one who likes to wear clothes. Like my sister gave her an FBI t-shirt so she wears the FBI t-shirt and things like that. She's special in my heart. Like I love the Lucy with all of it. DAMIEN: Well, that's a pretty good display of your super empathetic superpower there. [laughter] And it sounds like it might be really also related to the equitable design initiatives? JENNIFER: Yeah. So I'm really grateful. I currently work at a place that although one would think that it would be a big, scary place because of some of the work that we do. I've found more people who know what equity is and care about what equity is. The place I worked before, I talked about inclusive design because that's everywhere else I've worked, it's common that that's what you're doing these days. But they told me, “Don't say that word, it's activism,” and I was stunned. And then I'm like, “It's all in GSA documents here,” and they were like, “Oh,” and they were the ones that were really bad about like prioritizing accessibility and meeting section 508 compliance and just moving it off to put those issues in the backlog. The client's happy, no one's complained, they think we're doing great work. It's like, you're brushing it all under the rug and you're telling them what you've done and you're dealing with people who don't know what section 508 is either because who does? Very few people really know what it means to be section 508 compliant because it's this mystery container. What is in this? What is this? What is this thing? DAMIEN: So for our listeners who don't know, can you tell us a bit what section 508 is? JENNIFER: Sure. So section 508 means that anything paid for with federal funds must be section 508 compliant, which means it must meet WCAG 2.0 success criteria and WCAG is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If you're ever looking for some really complicated, dense, hard to understand reading, I recommend opening up the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I think the people that are on the working groups with me would probably agree and that's what we're all working towards trying to improve them. But I think that they make the job harder. So rather than just pointing at them and complaining like a lot of people do on Twitter, or deciding “I'm going to create a business and make money off of making this clear for people,” I decided instead to and try to make it better. So the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are based on Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust, POUR. Pour like this, not poor like me. [laughs] So there's just a bunch of accessibility criteria that you have to meet to make your work section 508 compliant. It's so hard to read and so hard to understand that I feel for everybody like of course, you don't know what section 508 compliance is. It's really, really hard to read. But if somebody who is an accessibility specialist tells you and writes up an issue ticket, you don't argue with them. You don't say, “This isn't a thing,” you say, “Okay, how soon do I need to fix it?” and you listen to them, but that's not what I experienced previously. Where I am now, it's amazing. In the place I worked before here, like just the contracting, they welcomed everything I said to them regarding accessibility. So I just clearly worked at a contractor that was doing a lot of lip service and not talking the talk, not walking the talk, sorry. [laughs] Super frustrating. Because accessibility is only a piece of it. I am older probably than anybody on this call and I'm a woman working in tech and I identify as non-binary. The arguments I've had about they/them all my life have been stupid, but I'm just like, “Why do I have to be female?” It's just, why do I have to be one, or the other? Anyway, everyone has always argued with me so I'm so grateful for the young ones now for pushing all that. I'm Black, Native, Mexican, and white all smushed together and my grandma wouldn't let me in the house because apparently my father was too dark so therefore, I'm too dark. Hello? Look at this! [laughter] Currently, some people are big on the one drop rule and I always say to people, “If you hate me, or want to exclude me so much because somewhere in me you know there is this and how do you feel about so-and-so? I’m done with you and you are bad people and we've got to fight this stupidity.” I have also invisible disabilities. So I'm full of all these intersectional things of exclusion. I personally experience a lot of it and then I have the empathy so I'm always feeling fuzzy people who are excluded. So what am I supposed to do with the fact that I'm smart, relatively able-bodied, and have privilege of being lighter skin so I can be a really good Trojan horse? I have to be an advocate like, what else am I supposed to do with my life? Be a privileged piece of poop that just wants to get rich and famous, like a lot of people in tech? Nope. And I don't want to be virtue signaling and savior complex either and that's where equitable design has been a wonderful thing to learn more about. HmntyCntrd.com and Creative Reaction Lab out in Missouri, those are two places where people can do a lot of learning about equity and truly inclusion, and challenging the tenants of white supremacy in our working ways. I'm still trying to find better ways of saying the tenants of white supremacy because if you say that in the workplace, that sounds real bad, especially a few months back before when someone else was in office. When you say the tenants of white supremacy in the workplace, people are going to get a little rankled because that's not stuff we talk about in the workplace. DAMIEN: Well, it's not just the workplace. JENNIFER: Ah, yes. DAMIEN: They don't like that at sports bars either. Ask me how I know. MANDO: No, they sure don't. [laughter] JENNIFER: We should go to sports bars together. [laughs] Except I’m too scared to go to them right now unless they're outdoors. But when we talk to people about the actual individual tenants about power hoarding, perfectionism, worship of the written word, and things like that, people can really relate and then you watch their faces and they go, “Yeah, I do feel put my place by these things and prevented from succeeding, progressing, all of these things.” These are things that we've all been ingrained to believe are the way we evaluate what's good and what's bad. But we don’t have to. We can talk about this stuff when we can reject those things and replace them with other things. But I'm going to be spending the rest of my life trying to dismantle my biases. I'm okay with my prejudices because even since I was a kid, I recognized that we were all prejudice and it's okay. It's our knee jerk first assumption, but you always have to keep an open mind, but that prejudice is there to protect you, but you always have to question it and go, “What is that prejudice? Is that bullshit? Is it right? Is it wrong?” And always looking at yourself, it's always doing that what you call self-awareness stuff, and always be expanding it, changing it, and moving it. But prejudice? Prejudice has a place to protect, speaking as someone who's had guns in her face, knives through her throat, and various other yucky things, I know that when I told myself, “Oh, you're being prejudiced, push yourself out into that vulnerable feeling,” things didn't go very well. So instead, recognize “Okay, what are you thinking in this moment about this situation? Okay, how can you proceed and keep an open mind while being self-protective?” DAMIEN: Yeah, it sounds like you're talking about Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 Thinking. We have these instinctive reactions to things and a lot of them are learned—I think they're all learned actually. But they're instinctive and they're not things we decide consciously. They're there to protect us because they're way faster, way more efficient than most of what we are as humans as thinking and enacting beings. But then we also have our rational mind where we can use to examine those things and so, it's important to utilize both. It's also important to know where your instinctive responses are harmful and how to modify them so that they're not harmful. And that is the word. JENNIFER: I've never heard of it. Thanks for putting that in there. Power accretion principles is that it? CASEY: Oh, that’s something else. JENNIFER: Oh. CASEY: Type 1 and type 2 thinking. JENNIFER: But I know with a lot of my therapy work as a trauma survivor, I have to evaluate a lot of what I think and how I react to things to change them to respond things. But there are parts of having TSD that I am not going to be able to do that, too. Like they're things where for example, in that old workplace where there was just this constant invalidation and dismissal of the work, which was very triggering as a rape survivor/incest survivor, that I feel really bad and it made me feel really unsafe all the time. So I felt very emotional in the moment and so, I'd have to breathe through my nose, breathe out to my mouth, feel my tummy, made sure I can feel myself breathing deeply, and try to calmly explain the dire consequences of some of these decisions. People tend to think that the design and development decisions we make when we're building for the web, it's no big deal if you screw it up. It's not like an architect making a mistake in a building and the building falls down. But when you make a mistake, that means a medical locator application doesn't load for an entire minute on a slow 3G connection—when your audience is people who are financially challenged and therefore, unlikely to have always high-speed, or new devices—you are making a design decision that is literally killing people. When you make a design decision, or development decision not to QA your work on mobile, tablet, and desktop, and somebody else has to find out that your Us options don't open on mobile so people in crisis can't reach your crisis line. People are dying. I'm not exaggerating. I have a talk I give called You're Killing Your s and it got rejected from this conference and one of the reviewers wrote, “The title is sensationalism. No one dies from our decision,” and I was just like, “Oh my God, oh my God.” MANDO: [laughs] Like, that’s the point. JENNIFER: What a privileged life you live. What a wonderfully privileged life! There's a difference between actions and thoughts and it's okay for me to think, “I really hope you fall a flight of stairs and wind up with a disability and leave the things that you're now trying to put kibosh on.” But that's not me saying, “I'm going to go push you down a flight of stairs,” or that I really do wish that on someone. It's emotional venting, like how could you possibly close yourself off to even listening to this stuff? That's the thing that like, how do we get to a point in tech where so many people in tech act like the bad stereotype of surgeons who have this God complex, that there are particular entities working in government tech right now that are told, “You're going to save government from itself. You've got the answers. You are the ones that are going to help government shift and make things better for the citizen, or the people that use it.” But the people that they hire don't know what they don't know and they keep doing really horrible things. Like, they don't follow the rules, they don't take the time to learn the rules and so, they put personal identifying information, personal health information on the public server without realizing it that's a no-no and then it has to be wiped, but it can never really fully be wiped. And then they make decisions like, “Oh, well now we're only worried about the stuff that's public facing. We're not worried about the stuff that's internally facing.” Even though, the internally facing people are all some of the vulnerable people that we're serving. I'm neutralizing a lot of what I'm talking about. [chuckles] MANDO: Of course. [laughter] DAMIEN: Well, convinced me of the problems. It was an easy sell for me. Now, what do we do? JENNIFER: The first thing we do is we all give a fuck about other people. That's the big thing, right? Like, how do I convince you that you should care about people who aren't you? MANDO: Yeah. CASEY: I always think about the spectrum of caring. I don't have a good word for it, but there are active and ive ers—and you can be vocal, or quiet—like loud, or quiet. I want more people to be going around the circle of it so if they're vocally opposed, just be quiet, quietly opposed, maybe be quietly in , and if you're quietly in , maybe speak up about it. I want to nudge people along around this, the four quadrants. A lot of people only focus on getting people who ively care to be more vocal about it. That's a big one. That's a big transition. But I also like to focus on the other two transitions; getting a lot of people to be quiet about a thing that as opposed. Anyway, everywhere along that process is useful. JENNIFER: I think it’s important to hear the people who were opposed because otherwise, how are we ever going to help understand and how are we going to understand if maybe where we’ve got a big blind spot? Like, we have to talk about this stuff in a way that's thoughtful. I come from a place in tech where in the late 90s, I was like, “I want to move from doing print to onscreen and printing environmental to that because it looks like a lot of stuff has gone to this web thing.” I picked up Jeffrey Zeldman's Deg with Web Standards and Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design and all of them talk ing web standards and web standards means that you prioritize accessibility from the beginning. So the first thing you build is just HTML tagging your content and everyone can use it. It's not going to be fancy, but it's going to be completely usable. And then you layer things on through progressive enhancement to improve the experience for people with fancy phones, or whatever. I don't know why, but that's not how everybody's coming into doing digital work. They’re coming in through React out of the box, thinking that React out of the box is – and it's like nope, you have to build in the framework because nobody put the framework in React. React is just a bunch of hinges and loops, but you have to put the quality wood in and the quality glass panes and the handles that everybody can use. I'm not sure if that analogy is even going to work. But one of the things I realized talking with colleagues today is I tend to jump to three steps in when I really need to go back, start at the beginning, and say, “Here are the . This is what section 508 is. This is what accessibility is. This is what A11Y is. This is WCAG, this is how it's pronounced, this is what it means, and this is the history of it.” I think understanding history of section 508 and what WCAG is also vital in the first version of WCAG section 508, it adopted part of what was WCAG 1.0, but it wasn't like a one to one for 1.0, it was just some of it and then it updated in 2017, or 2018, I forget. Without my cheat sheet, I can't this stuff. Like I got other things to keep in my brain. CASEY: I just pulled up my favorite cheat sheet and I put it in the chat sidebar here. JENNIFER: Oh, thank you. It's in my slides for Ohana for Digital Service Design that I gave at WX Summit and I think I also gave it recently in another thing. Oh, UXPA DC. But the thing is, the changes only recently happened where it went to WCAG 2.0 was 2018, I think it got updated. So all those people that were resisting me in 2018, 2019, 2020 likely never realized that there was a refresh that they need to pay attention to and I kept trying to like say, “No, you don't understand, section 508 means more now.” Technically, the access board that defines what section 508 is talking about moving it to 2.1, or 2.2 and those include these things. So we should get ahead of the ball, ahead of the curve, or whatever you want to call it and we should be doing 2.1 and 2.2 and even beyond thinking about compliance and that sort of stuff. The reason we want to do human beings is that 2.1 and 2.2 are for people who are cognitively fatigued and I don't think there's anyone who's been through the pandemic who is not cognitively fatigued. If you are, you are just a robot. I don't know. I don't know who could not be not cognitive fatigue. And then the other people that also helps are mobile s. So if you look at any site, look at their usage stats, everything moving up and up and up in mobile devices. There's some people who don't have computers that they only have phones. So it just seems silly not to be ing those folks. But we need, I don't know. I need to think more about how to get there, how to be more effective in helping people care, how to be more effective in teaching people. One of the big pieces I've learned in the last six months is the first step is self-care—sleep, exercise, eat, or maybe those two need to be back and forth. I haven't decided yet because I'm still trying to get the sleep workout. Before I moved to D.C., I was a runner, hiker, I had a sit spot at the local pond where I would hang out with the fishes and the turtles and the frogs and the birds and here, I overlook the Pentagon and there's swarms of helicopters. I grow lots of green things to put between me and it, but it's hard. The running is stuck because I don't feel safe and things like that. I live in an antiseptic neighborhood intentionally because I knew every time I went into D.C. and I saw what I see, I lose hope because I can't not care. It kills me that I have to walk by people who clearly need – this is a messed up world. We talk about the developing world as the place where people are dying on the side of the road. Do you have blinders on like, it's happening here? I don't know what to do. I care too much. So what do we do? What do you think? DAMIEN: Well, I think you have a hint. You've worked at places that are really resistant to accessibility and accessibility to improvements, and you've worked at some that are very welcoming and eager to implement them. So what were the differences? What do you think was the source of that dichotomy? JENNIFER: I think at the place I worked after I left the hellhole; the product owner was an Asian woman and the other designer was from India. Whereas, before the other place was a white woman and a white man and another white man who was in charge. And then the place I work now, it's a lot of people who are very neurodiverse. I work at MITRE, which is an FFRDC, which is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center. It's full of lots of smart people who are very bookish. It's funny when I was a little kid, I was in the gifted and talented kids and so, they would put us into these class sessions where we were to brainstorm and I love brainstorming. I love imagining things. I thinking, “I want to work in a think tank and just all I do all the time is brainstorm and we'd figure out a way to use some of those things!” And I feel a little bit like I'm there now, which is cool and they treat one another really well at MITRE, which is nice. Not to say it's perfect there. Nowhere is perfect. But compared to a lot of places, it's better. I think it’s the people are taking the time to listen, taking the time to ask questions. The people I work with don't have a lot of ego, generally. At least not the ones I'm working with. I hear that they do exist there, but I haven't run into many of them. Whereas, the other place, there was a lot of virtue signaling and a lot of savior complex. Actually, very little savior conflicts. They didn't really care about saving anyone, sorry. Snark! [laughs] DAMIEN: Can you tell us a little more about ego and how ego plays into these things? JENNIFER: How do you think ego plays into these things? DAMIEN: Well, I think it causes people to one up and turn questions around it on me, that's one way. Ego means a lot of things to a lot of different people, which is why I asked the question. I think it was introduced to English by Freud and I don't want to use a Freudian theory for anything ever. [laughter] And then when I talk to people about death of the ego and [inaudible] and all of these things, it seems really unpleasant. People like their self-identity, people like being themselves, and they don't want to stop being themselves. So I'm not sure how that's related to what you were saying. CASEY: The way I'm hearing you use ego here sounds like self-centered, thinking about your own perspective, not taking the time and effort and energy to think about other people's perspectives. And if you don't have a diverse set of experiences to lean on your own, you're missing out on a lot. JENNIFER: Yeah. I tend to think about, I guess, it's my dysfunction. Once again, it's like, how do my actions impact others? Why are other people thinking about how their actions impact others? When you're out in public and you’ve got to cut the cheese, are you going to do it when there are a lot of people around? Are you going to take a stinky deuce in a public bathroom that you know other people in there? If you think about the community around you, you would go find a private one if you cared at all. But most people don't care and they think, “I do what I got to do.” I just think we need to think a little bit more about the consequences of our actions and I tweeted yesterday, or this morning about how – oh, it was yesterday. I was watching TV and a new, one of those food delivery commercials came on. This one, they send you a stove, you get a little oven, and you cook all of their meals in this little throwaway dishes. So you have no dishes, nothing. How much are we going to just keep creating crap? When you think about all of this takeout and delivery, there's just so much trash we generate. We should be taxing the bleep out of companies that make these sorts of things like, Amazon should have the bleep taxed out of it because of all the cardboard and I'm just as guilty because I ordered the thing and the box of staples arrives in a box. It has a plastic bubble wrap all around it. Like it's just a box at $2.50 staples, but I couldn't be bothered to go – I don't know if they have them at Walgreens. Like for real, I don't know. We need to do better. We need to think about the consequences of these decisions and not just do it like, that's the thing that tech has been doing is let's make an MVP and see if it has wheels. Let's make a prototype, but do the thing. Okay, let's do the thing. Oh, it's got wheels. Oh, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing. Who cares about the consequences of all of it? Who cares? Your kids, your grandkids someday maybe will when the world is gone. We talk about climate change. We talk about 120-degree temperatures in Seattle and Portland, the ocean on fire, the beaches are eroding, like the ice cap—most of the Arctic is having a 100 and some odd degree temperature day. Like we are screwing it up and our legislation isn't keeping pace with the advances in technology that are just drawing things. Where are the people who care in the cycle and how are they interrupting the VCs who just want to like be the next big tech? Everybody wants to be the next Zuckerberg, or Jack, or Bezos, or Gates, or whatever, and nobody has to deal with the consequences of their actions and their consequences of those design and development decisions. That's where I think it's ego, it’s self-centeredness, it's wanting to be famous, it’s wanting to be rich instead of really, truly wanting to make the world a better place. I know my definition of better. We've got four different visions of what better is going to be and that's hard work. Maybe it is easier to just focus on getting famous and getting rich than it is on doing the hard work of taking four different visions of what good is and trying to find the way forward. DAMIEN: Making the world a better place. The world will be a better place when I'm rich and famous. But that also means – and that's the truth. [laughter] But what else you said was being empathetic and having a diverse – well, marginalized people in charge where you can see that that's why the impact that things are having on other people. It's not just about me being rich and famous, but it's also about things being better for other people, too. JENNIFER: Yeah. I don't necessarily mean marginalized people have to be in charge. DAMIEN: Right. I took that jump based on your description of the places you worked for. I should have specified that. I wasn’t clear enough. JENNIFER: I do have to say that in general, when I've worked for people who aren't the status quo, more often than not, they bring a comionate, empathetic approach. Not always. There have been some that are just clearly driven and power hungry, and I can't fault them either because it's got to take a lot to come up from wherever and fight through the dog-eat-dog world. But in the project work, there's the for, with and by. The general ways that we redesign and build things for people, then the next piece is we design and build things with the people that we're serving, but the newer way of doing things is that we don't design and build the things, the people that we're serving design the things and tell us what they want to design, and then we figure out how to make sure that it's built the way they tell us to. That goes against the Steve Jobs approach where Steve Jobs said people don't know what they want sort of thing. Wasn't that was he said? DAMIEN: Yeah. Well, there was Henry Ford who said, “If you ask people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses.” JENNIFER: Right. D And Steve Jobs kind of did the same thing. JENNIFER: Right. And we, as designers, have to be able to work with that and pull that out and suss it out and make sure that we translate it into something useful and then iterate with to make sure that we get it. Like when I do research, listening sessions with folks, I have to use my experience doing this work to know what are the – like, Indi Young’s inner thinking, reactions, and guiding principles. Those are the things that will help guide you on what people are really wanting and needing and what their purpose is. So you make sure that whatever your understanding is closer to what they're really saying, because they don't know what can be built. They don't know what goes on, but they do know what their purpose is and what they need. Maybe they don't even know what they need, but they do know what their purpose is, or you keep validating things. CASEY: I want to amplify, you said Indi Young. I read a lot of her work and she just says so many things that I wish someone would say, and she's been saying them for a while. I just didn't know about her. Indi Young. JENNIFER: It’s I-N-D-I and Y-O-U-N-G. I am so grateful that I got to take her courses. I paid for them all myself, except for one class—I let that other place pay for one through my continuing ed, but I wanted to do it so badly that I paid for all myself. The same thing with all the Creative Reaction Lab and HmntyCntrd stuff; I paid for those out of my own money that probably could have gone to a vacation, [chuckles] or buying a car, or something. But contributing to our society in a responsible and productive way, figuring out how to get my language framework better. Like you said earlier, Damien, I'm really good at pointing out what the problems are. I worry about figuring out how we solve them, because I don't really have the ego to think that I know what the answer is, but I'm very interested in working with others to figure out how we solve them. I have some ideas, but how do you tell a React developer that you really have to learn HTML, you have to learn schematic HTML. That's like learning the alphabet. I don't understand. CASEY: Well, I have some ideas around that. Amber is my go-to framework and they have accessibility baked into the introduction tutorial series. They have like 13 condoned add-ons that do accessibility related things. At the conference, there's always a whole bunch of accessibility tracks. Amber is like happy path accessibility right front and center. React probably has things like that. We could have React’s onboarding docs grow in that direction, that would be great, and have more React add-ons to do that that are condoned and ed by the community could have the same path. And it could probably even use a lot of the same core code even. The same principles apply. JENNIFER: If you want to work together and come up with some stuff to go to React conferences, or work with the React team, or whatever. 
CASEY: Sounds fun. DAMIEN: Well, one of the things you talked about the way you described it and made it sound like empathy was so much of the core of it. In order to care about accessibility, you have to empathize with people who need that functionality. You have to empathize with people who are on 3G flip phones. That's not a thing, is it? [laughs] But nonetheless, empathizing. JENNIFER: A flat screen phone, a smartphone looking thing and it's still – if anyone's on a slow 3G, it’s still going to be a miserable experience. DAMIEN: Yeah, 3G with a 5-year-old Android OS. JENNIFER: But I don't think it's necessarily that people have to empathize. In an ideal world would, but maybe they could be motivated by other things like fast. Like, do you want to fast cumulative layout shift? Do you want like a great core vitals Google score? Do you want a great Google Lighthouse score? Do you want the clear Axe DevTools scan? Like when I get a 100% little person zooming in a wheelchair screen instead of issues found. Especially if I do it the first time and like, I hadn't been scanning all along and I just go to check it for the first time and it's clean, I'm like, “Yes!” [laughs] CASEY: Automation helps a lot. JENNIFER: Yeah. CASEY: When I worked at USCIS, I don't know what this meant, but they said we cannot automate these tests. I think we can and they didn't do it yet, but I've always been of baffled. I think half of it, you can automate tests around and we had none at the time. JENNIFER: Yeah, you catch 30 to 50% of the accessibility issues via the Axe rule set and JSX Alley and all that. You can catch 30 to 50. CASEY: Sounds great. JENNIFER: That's still better than catching none of them. Still not great, but it's still better than nothing. They're not here to tell us why they can't, but adding things into your end-to-end test shouldn't be that hard if you know how to write tests. I don't personally know how to write tests. I want to. I don't know. Like, I have to choose which thing am I going to work on? I'm working on an acquisition project, defining the requirements and the scope and the red tape of what a contract will be and it's such foreign territory for me. There's a lot of pieces there that I never ever thought I would be dealing with and my head hurts all the time. I feel stupid all the time, but that's okay. If you're not doing something you haven't done before, maybe you're not learning, it's growing. I'm growing. I'm definitely growing, but in different ways and I miss the code thing of I have a to-do list where I really want to get good at Docker, now I want to learn few, things like that and I want to get back to learning Python because Python, I think is super cool. CASEY: There's one thing I wanted to mention earlier that I just ed. One thing that was eye-opening to me for accessibility concerns is when I heard that screen reader has existed, which was several years into my programming career. I didn't know they were a thing at all. I think it's more common now that people know about them today than 10, 15 years ago. But I still haven't seen someone use a screen reader and that would be really important for me as a developer. I'm not developing software lately either so I'm not really coding that. But if anyone hasn't, you should use a screen reader on your computer if you're developing software that might have to be used by one. JENNIFER: So everyone on a Mac has voiceover. Everyone on an iPhone has voiceover. It's really hard on the iPhone, I feel like I can't, oh, it's really hard. I've heard great things about Talkback on Android. And then on Windows, newer versions have Microsoft Narrator, which is a built-in screen reader. You can also NVDA for free and install it. It depends on how much money you want to spend. There a bunch of different ways to get Jaws, do Jaws, too. Chrome has Chromebox so you can get another screen reader that way. CASEY: So many options. It's kind of overwhelming. If I had to recommend one for a Windows and one for a Mac , would you recommend the built-in ones just to start with, to play with something? JENNIFER: So everywhere I've tested, whether it was at the financial institution, or the insurance place, or the government place, we always had to test with Jaws, NVDA, and voiceover. I test with voiceover because it's what I have on my machine, because I'm usually working on a Mac. But the way I look at the screen reader is the number of people who are using screen readers is significantly fewer than the number of people with cognitive considerations. So I try to use good semantic markup, basic web standards so that things will work; things have always been pretty great in screen readers because of that. I try to keep my code from being too complicated, or my UI is from being complicated, which might do some visual designers seem somewhat boring to some of them. [chuckles] CASEY: Do you ever turn off CSS for the test? JENNIFER: Yes, and if it makes sense that way, then I know I'm doing it right and is it still usable without JavaScript. Better yet, Heydon Pickering's way of like, it's not usable unless you turn off the JavaScript, that was fabulous. I pissed off so many people. But to me, I try to focus on other things like how clear is, how clean is it? Can I tab through the whole UI? Can I operate it with just a keyboard? Your keyboard is your best assistive tech tester. You don’t skip. If you can tap through anything without getting stuck, excellent. If you don't skip over nav items. CASEY: My biggest pet peeve is when websites don't work when you zoom in, because all of my devices I zoom in not because my vision is bad, but because for my posture. I want to be able to see my screen from a far distance and not lean in and craning my neck over laptop and my phone, both and a lot of websites break. JENNIFER: Yeah. CASEY: You zoom in the text at all, you can't read anything. JENNIFER: Yeah. At the one place I worked before, we required two steps of zoom in and two steps of zoom out, and it still had to be functional. I don't see that in most places; they don't bother to say things like that. CASEY: Yeah. JENNIFER: At the government, too – CASEY: I wonder how common it is if people do that. I do it so I think it's very common, but I don't know the right. [laughter] JENNIFER: But that's how the world is, right? I can tell you that once you hit this old age and your eyes start to turn against you and things are too small, or too light, you suddenly understand the importance of all of these things so much more. So for all of those designers doing your thin gray text on white backgrounds, or thin gray text on gray backgrounds, or your tiny little 12 and under pixels for your legaleas, karma is out to get you. [chuckles] We've all done it. Like there was a time I thought nobody cared about the legaleas. That's not true. Even your footer on your website should be big enough for people to read. Otherwise, they think I'm g away my soul to zoom because I can't read it. If you can zoom it in, that's great. But some apps disable the zoom. DAMIEN: So we usually end on a series of reflections. How do you feel about moving to that? JENNIFER Sure! DAMIEN: We let our guests go last. Casey, do you have a reflection you want to share with us? CASEY: I'm thinking back to Mando's dog and I thought it was interesting, Jennifer, that you linked your experiences with the dog’s experiences. Like, some of the symptoms you have might be similar if a dog has TSD, too and I think that's really insightful. I think a lot of animals have that kind of set up, but we don't treat them like we treat humans with those issues even if they're similar. DAMIEN: It was in your bio, equitable design initiatives, I really want it to dig into that because that fascinates me and I guess, if draws that bridge between things that I think are very important, or very important for me, both accessibility, that sort of work, especially in software design, because that's where I'm at. And then destroying the tenants of white supremacy and being able to connect those as things that work together and seeing how they work together. Yeah, that's what I'm going to be reflecting on. JENNIFER: Yeah. Whenever we're doing our work, looking for opportunities to surface and put it out for everyone to look at who has power, if this changes who has power, if this doesn't change who has power, what is motivating the players, are people motivated by making sure that no one's excluded, or are people motivated by making sure that their career moves forward, or they don't get in trouble rather than truly serving? I still am in the mindset of serving the people with a purpose that we're aiming to meet the needs of kind of thing. I still have that mindset. A lot of the prep work, we're still talking about the people we aim to serve and it's still about getting them into the cycle. That is a very big position of power that a designer has and acknowledging that that's power and that I wield that power in a way that I consider responsible, which is to make sure that we are including people who are historically underrepresented, especially in those discussions. I'm really proud of a remote design challenge where all of our research participants were either people of color, or people with disabilities. Man, the findings insights were so juicy. There was so much that we could do with what we got. It was really awesome. So by equitable design initiatives, it's really just thinking about acknowledging the power that we have and trying to make sure we do what we can to share it, transfer it, being really respectful of other perspectives. I've always thought of it as infinite curiosity about others and some people have accused me being nosy and they didn't realize it's not about getting up in their private business. It’s just, I want to be gracious and respect others. What I will reflect on was how I really need to rest. I will continue to reflect on how I rest is key. I'm making a conscious decision for the next couple of months to not volunteer because I tend to do too much, as Casey may, or may not know. [chuckles] Yeah, I want to wake up in the morning and feel energized and ready to take full advantage of, which is not the right way to phrase it, but show up as my best self and well-prepared for the work. Especially since I now have found myself a new incredibly comionate, smart place that genuinely aims to improve equity and social justice, and do things for the environment and how grateful I am. I totally thought this place was just about let’s them all and it’s so not. [laughs] So there’s so many wonderful people. I highly recommend everybody come work with me if you care about things. DAMIEN: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer for being our guest today. It’s been a pleasure. The author's affiliation with The MITRE Corporation is provided for identification purposes only, and is not intended to convey or imply MITRE's concurrence with, or for, thepositions, opinions, or viewpoints expressed by the author. ©2021 The MITRE Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Special Guest: Jennifer Strickland. Greater Than Code

01:20 - The Superpower of Sociotechnical System (STS) Design: Considering the Social AND the Technical. The social side matters. Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity by Michael C. Jackson Open Systems Mechanical Animate Social Ecological On Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events 09:14 - The Origins of Sociotechnical Systems Taylorism Trond Hjorteland: Sociotechnical Systems Design for the “Digital Coal Mines”* Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program 18:42 - Design From Above vs Self-Organization Participative Design Idealized Design Solving Problems is not Systems Thinking 29:39 - Systemic Change and Open Systems Organizationally Closed but Structurally Open Getting Out of the Machine Age and Into Systems Thinking (The Information Age) The Basis for the Viable System Model / Stafford Beer // Javier Livas What is Cybernetics? Conference by Stafford Beer Jean Yang: Developer Experience: Stuck Between Abstraction and a Hard Place? The Embodiment and Hermeneutic Relations 37:47 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution 4 Historical Stages in the Development of Work Mechanization Automation Centralization Computerization Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge Ten challenges for making automation a "team player" in t human-agent activity Jessica Kerr - Principles of Collaborative Automation Reflections: Jessica: “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn’t know you see.” – Trond Trond: You should take the person out of the system but you should close the system as much as possible. Rein: What we call human error is actually a human’s inability to cope with complexity. We need to get better at managing complexity; not controlling it. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guest: Trond Hjorteland. Greater Than Code

01:25 - Teaching, Learning, and Education 06:16 - Becoming a Data Scientist Opportunities to Create New Knowledge Data Science Science 19:36 - Solving Bias in Data Science Weapons of Math Destruction 23:36 - Recommendations for Aspiring Data Scientists Hire a Career Coach Creating and Maintaining a Portfolio * Make a Rosetta Stone Make a Cheat Sheet Write an Article on a Piece of Software You Dislike A Few Times, I’ve Broken Pandas Kyle Kingsbury Posts Contribute to Another Project Post On Project Contribution Spend $$$/Invest on Transition Bet On Yourself 45:36 - Impostor Syndrome Immunity Boosts Community Know Your Baseline Clance Impostor Phenomenon Test Dr. Pauline Rose Clance The Imposter Phenomenon: An Internal Barrier To Empowerment and Achievement by Pauline Rose Clance and Maureen Ann O'Toole Disseminate Knowledge Confidence Leads to Confidence Dunning-Kruger Effect Johari Window Reflections: Mae: Checking out the metrics resources on Impostor Syndrome listed above. Casey: Writing about software in a positive, constructive tone. Mando: Investing in yourself. from:sheaserrano bet on yourself Adam: Talking about career, data science, and programming in a non-technical way. Also, Twitter searches for book names! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDO: Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode number 241. I'm Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my friend, Mae Beale. MANDO: Hi, there! And I am also here with Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I am Casey! And we're all here with Adam Ross Nelson, our guest today. Welcome, Adam. ADAM: Hi, everyone! Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here. CASEY: Since 2020, Adam is a consultant who provides research, data science, machine learning, and data governance services. Previously, he was the inaugural data scientist at The Common Application which provides undergraduate college application platforms for institutions around the world. He holds a PhD from The University of Wisconsin: Madison in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis. Adam is also formerly an attorney with a history of working in higher education, teaching all ages, and educational istration. He is ionate about connecting with other data professionals in-person and online. For more information and background look for his insights by connecting with Adam on LinkedIn, Medium, and other online platforms. We are lucky we have him here today. So Adam, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ADAM: I spent so much time thinking about this question, I really wasn't sure what to say. I hadn't thought about my superpower in a serious way in a very long time and I was tempted to go whimsy with this, but I got input from my crowd and my tribe and where I landed was teaching, learning, and education. You might look at my background with a PhD in education, leadership, and policy analysis, all of my work in education istration, higher education istration, and teaching and just conclude that was how I acquired the superpower. But I think that superpower goes back much further and much deeper. So when I was a kid, I was badly dyslexic. Imagine going through life and you can't even tell the difference between a lowercase B and a lowercase D. Indistinguishable to me. Also, I had trouble with left and right. I didn't know if someone told me turn left here, I'd be lucky to go – I had a 50/50 chance of going in the right direction, basically. Lowercase P and Q were difficult. For this podcast, the greater than sign, I died in the math unit, or I could have died in the math unit when we were learning greater than, or less than. Well, and then another one was capital E and the number 3, couldn't tell a difference. Capital E and number 3. I slowly developed mnemonics in order to learn these things. So for me, the greater than, less than pneumonic is, I don't know if you ever think about it, but think of the greater than, or less than sign as an alligator and it's hungry. So it's always going to eat the bigger number. [laughs] It’s always going to eat the bigger quantity. So once I figured that mnemonic out and a bunch of other mnemonics, I started doing a little bit better. My high school principal told my parents that I would be lucky to graduate high school and there's all kinds. We can unpack that for days, but. MANDO: Yeah. ADAM: Right? Like what kind of high school principal says that to anybody, which resonates with me now in hindsight, because everything we know about student learning, the two most influential factors on a student's ability to learn are two things. One, teacher effectiveness and number two, principal leadership. Scholarship always bears out. MAE: Whoa. ADAM: Yeah. So the principal told my family that and also, my household growing up, I was an only child. We were a very poor household; low income was an understatement. So my disadvantages aside, learning and teaching myself was basically all I had. I was the kid who grew up in this neighborhood, I had some friends in the neighborhood, and I was always exploring adjacent areas of the neighborhoods. I was in a semi-rural area. So there were wooded areas, there were some streams, some rivers, some lakes and I was always the kid that found something new. I found a new trail, a new street, a new whatever and I would run back to my neighborhood and I'd be like, “Hey everybody, I just found something. Look what I found, follow me and I will show you also. I will show you the way and I'll show you how cool that is.” MAE: Aw. ADAM: I love this thinking. [laughs] MAE: I love that! CASEY: Sharing. ADAM: I'm glad because when I'm in the classroom, when I'm teaching – I do a lot of corporate training now, too. When I'm either teaching in a traditional university classroom, or in corporate setting, that is me reliving my childhood playtime. It's like, “Hey everybody, look at this cool thing that I have to show you and now I'm going to show it to you, also.” So teaching, learning, and education is my superpower and in one way, that's manifested. When I finished school, I finished my PhD at 37. I wasn't 40 years old yet, if you count kindergarten had been in school for 23 years. Over half of my life, not half of my adult life, half of my entire life I was in school [chuckles] and now that I'm rounding 41—that was last week, I turned 41. Now that I'm rounding 41 – MAE: Happy birthday! ADAM: Thank you so much. Now that I'm rounding 41, I'm finally a little more than half of my life not in school. MANDO: Congrats, man. That's an accomplishment. [laughs] So I'm curious to know how you transitioned from that academic world into being a data scientist proper, like what got you to that point? What sets you down that path? Just that whole story. I think that'd be super interesting to talk about and dig into. ADAM: Sure. I think context really matters; what was going on in the data science field at the time I finished the PhD. I finished that PhD in 2017. So in 2017, that was that the apex of – well, I don't know if it was, or maybe we're now at the apex. I don't know exactly where the apex was, or is, or will be, but there was a lot of excitement around data science as a field and as a career in about 3, or 4 years ago. MANDO: For sure. ADAM: So when I was finishing the PhD, I had the opportunity to tech up in my PhD program and gain a lot of the skills that others might have gained via other paths through more traditional computer science degrees, economics degrees, or bootcamps, or both. And then I was also in a position where I was probably—and this is common for folks with a PhD—probably one of the handful of people in the world who were a subject matter expert in a particular topic, but also, I had the technical skills to be a data scientist. So there was an organization, The Common Application from the introduction, that was looking for a data scientist who needed domain knowledge in the area that I had my PhD and that's what a PhD does for you is it gives you this really intense level of knowledge in a really small area [chuckles] and then the technical skills. That's how I transitioned into being a data scientist. I think in general, that is the template for many folks who have become a data scientist. Especially if you go back 3, or 4, or 5, or 6 years ago, before formal data science training programs started popping up and even before, and then I think some of the earliest bootcamps for data science were about 10 years ago. At least the most widely popular ones were about 10 years ago to be clear. And then there's another view that that's just when we started calling it data science because the skills for – all of the technologies and analytical techniques we're using, not all of them, many of them have been around for decades. So that's important to keep in mind. So I think to answer your question, I was in the right place at the right time, there was a little bit of luck involved, and I always try and hold myself from fully giving all the credit away to luck because that's something. Well, maybe we'll talk about it later when it comes to imposter syndrome, that's one of the symptoms, so to speak, of imposter syndrome is giving credit for your success away to luck while you credit the success of others to skill, or ability. But let me talk about that template. So the template is many data scientists become a data scientists with this three-step process. One, you establish yourself as an expert in your current role and by establishing yourself as an expert, you're the top expert, or one of very, very few people who are very, very skilled in that area. Then you start tackling business problems with statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. You might not be called a data scientist yet, but by this point, you're already operating as a data scientist and then eventually, you be the data scientist, you become the data scientist. If it is a career path for you, you'll potentially change roles into a role that's formerly called, specifically called data science. But one of the articles I wrote recently on Medium talks about the seven paths to data scientist and one of the paths talks about a fellow who really doesn't consider himself a data scientist, but he is a data scientist, been a data scientist for years, but he's really happy with this organization and his role as it’s titled as an engineer and he's great. He's good to go. So maybe we'll talk about it a little bit later, too. I think as we were chatting and planning, someone asked about pedigree a little bit and one of the points I like to make is there's no right, or wrong way to do it. There's no right, or wrong way to get there just once you get there, have fun with it. MAE: I love what you said, Adam, about the steps and they're very similar to what I would advise to any traditional coder and have advised is take all of your prior work experience before you become a programmer. It is absolutely relevant and some of the best ways to have a meaningful impact and mitigate one's own imposter syndrome is to get a job where you are programming and you already have some of that domain knowledge and expertise to be able to lend. So you don't have to have been one of the rarefied few, but just having any familiarity with the discipline, or domain of the business you end up getting hired at, or applying to certainly is a way to get in the door a little easier and feel more comfortable once you're there, that you can contribute in lots of ways. ADAM: And it gives you the ability to provide value that other folks who are on a different path, who are going into data science earlier—this is a great path, too don't let me discount that path—but those folks don't have the deep domain knowledge that someone who transitions into data science later in their career provides. MAE: Exactly. Yeah, and the amazing teams have people with all the different versions, right? ADAM: Right. MAE: Like we don't want a team with only one. Yeah. ADAM: That's another thing I like to say about data science is it's a team sport. It has to be a teams – it has to be done in tandem with others. CASEY: I just had a realization that everyone I know in data science, they tend to come from science backgrounds, or maybe a data science bootcamp. But I don't know anyone who moved from web development into data science and that's just so surprising to me. I wonder why. MAE: I crossed the border a little bit, I would say, I worked in the Center for Data Science at RTI in North Carolina and I did do some of the data science there as well as just web programming, but my undergrad is biochem. So I don't break your role. [laughs] MANDO: [chuckles] Yeah. I'm trying to think. I don't think I know any either. At the very least, they all come from a hard science, or mathematics background, which is interesting to me because that's definitely not my experience with web application developers, or just developers in general. There's plenty that come from comp side background, or an MIS background, or something like that, but there's also plenty who come from non-traditional backgrounds as well. Not just bootcamps, but just like, they were a history major and then picked up programming, or whatever and it doesn't seem to be as common, I think in data science. Not to say that you couldn't, but just for my own, or maybe our own experience, it's not quite as common. ADAM: If there's anybody listening with the background that we're talking about, the other backgrounds, I would say, reach out probably to any of us and we'd love to workshop that with you. MAE: Yes! Thank you for saying that. Absolutely. MANDO: Yeah, the more stories we can amplify the better. We know y'all are out there; [chuckles] we just don't know you and we should. MAE: Adam, can you tell us some descriptor that is a hobnobbing thing that we would be able to say to a data scientist? Maybe you can tell us what P values are, or just some little talking point. Do you have any favorite go-tos? ADAM: Well, I suppose if you're looking for dinner party casual conversation and you're looking for some back pocket question, you could ask a data scientist and you're not a data scientist. I would maybe ask a question like this, or a question that I could respond to easily as a data scientist might be something like, “Well, what types of predictions are you looking to make?” and then the data scientists could respond with, “Oh, it's such an interesting question. I don't know if anybody's ever asked me that before!” But the response might be something like, “Well, I'm trying to predict a classification. I'm trying to predict categories,” or “I'm trying to predict income,” or “I'm trying to predict whatever it is that –” I think that would be an interesting way to go. What's another one? CASEY: Oh, I've got one for anyone you know in neuroscience. ADAM: Oh, yeah. MAE: Yay! CASEY: I was just reading a paper and there's this statistics approach I'm sure I did in undergrad stats, but I forgot it. Two-way ANOVA, analysis of variance, and actually, I don't think I know anyone in my lab that could explain it offhand real quickly really well because we just learn it enough to understand what it is and why we use it and then we have the computer do it. But it's an interesting word saying it and having someone say, “Yes, I know what that means enough. It’s a science, or neuroscience.” ADAM: I would be interested in how neuroscience is used two-way ANOVA because I'm not a neuroscientist and two-way ANOVA is so useful in so many other contexts. CASEY: I'm afraid I can't help today. Maybe 10 years ago, I could have done that. [laughter] CASEY: It's just something that you don't work with and talk about a lot. It's definitely fallen out of my headspace. I looked up the other day, I couldn't another word from my neuroscience background. Cannula is when you have a permanent needle into a part of the brain, or maybe someone's vein, same thing. I used to do surgeries on rats and put cannulas and I was like, “What's that thing? What was that thing I did?” I have no idea! It's just like time es and it fades away. I don't do that anymore. [chuckles] ADAM: So sometimes folks will ask me why I'm a data scientist and I love that question by the way, because I'm a major proponent of knowing what your why is in general, or just having a why and knowing a why, knowing what your why is. Why do you do what you do? What makes you excited about your career, about your work, about your clients, about your coworkers? One of the main reasons I am a data scientist is because it's an opportunity to create new knowledge and that's the scientific process, really. That's the main output of science is new knowledge and if you think about that, that's really powerful. This is now at the end of this scientific process, if you implement it correctly, we now know something about how the world works, about how people in the world work, or something about the world in general that we didn't know before. I get goosebumps. We're on podcast so you can't see the goosebumps that I'm getting. But when I talk about this, I actually get goosebumps. So for me, being a data scientist and then there's also the debate is data science, science and I say, absolutely yes, especially when you are implementing your work with this spirit’ the spirit of creating new knowledge. One of the reasons I am very adamant about keeping this why in the forefront of my mind and proposing it as a why for others who maybe haven't found their why yet is because it's also a really powerful guardrail that prevents us from working on problems that we already have answers to, that have been analyzed and solved, or questions asked and asked and answered. I'm a major proponent of avoiding that type of work, unless you have a really good reason to replicate, or test replication, or you're looking for replication. That would be an exception, but in general, questions—analytical questions, research questions, and data science problems—that lead to new knowledge are the ones that excite me the most. And then this goes back to what I was talking about a moment ago, my superpower teaching and learning. One of the reasons I really enjoy teaching data science in the classroom, or statistics in the classroom, or at corporate training is because then I can empower others to create new knowledge. That feels really good to me when I can help others create new knowledge, or give others the skills and abilities to do that as well. MAE: I love that. Yeah. I do have one angle on that, but I hope this doesn't feel like putting you on the spot, but especially in the not revisiting a established—I'm going to do air quotes—facts and from undergrad, the scientific definition of fact has not yet been proven false. But anyways, there is a growing awareness of bias inherent in data and we so often think of data as the epitome of objectivity. Because it's a bunch of numbers then therefore, we are not replicating, or imposing our thoughts, but there is the Schrodinger's cat, or whatever in place all the time about how those “facts” were established in the first place, where that data was called from? Like, the Portlandia episode where they ask where the chicken is from and they end up back at the farm. [laughter] The data itself, there's just a lot in there. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that accordion. ADAM: There’s a lot. That's a big question. I will say one of the things that keeps me up at night is this problem, especially when it comes to the potential for our work in data science, to perpetuate, exacerbate social inequity, social inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality, economic inequality. This keeps me up at night and I am, like most, or like everyone – well, no, I don't know if everybody is interested in solving that problem. I think a lot of data scientists are, I think a lot of researchers are; I think many are interested in solving that particular problem and I count myself among those. But I would be ahead of myself if I purported to say that I had a solution. I think in this format and in this context, one of the best things to do is to point folks towards others who have spent even more time really focusing on this and I think the go-to is Weapons of Math Destruction. Weapons of Math Destruction is a book. If you're on a bad connection, that's M-A-T-H. Weapons of Math Destruction and especially if you're just getting started on this concern, that's a good place to get started. MAE: Thank you. Thanks for speaking to that, Adam. CASEY: There's a piece of the question you asked me that I always think about is the data true and I like to believe most data is true in what it measured, but it's not measuring truth with a T-H. ADAM: That’s true. MAE: Whoa. ADAM: I think you could spend a lot of time thinking this through and noodling through this, but I would caution you on something you said it's true as to what you measured. Well, you have measurement error. We have entire – actually, I happen to have social statistics handbook handy. In any statistics handbook, or statistics textbook is going to have either an entire chapter, or a major portion of one of the introductory chapters on error, the types of error, and measurement error is one of them, perception error, all of the – and I'm on the spot to name all the errors. I wish I could rattle those off a little bit better. [chuckles] ADAM: But if you're interested, this is an interesting topic, just Google data errors, or error types, or statistical errors and you will get a rabbit hole that will keep you occupied for a while. MAE: Love it. I will be in that rabbit hole later. [laughs] ADAM: Yeah. I'm going to go back down that one, too myself. MANDO: So Adam, we have people who are listening right now who are interested in following one of your paths, or one of the paths to becoming a data scientist and maybe they have domain expertise in a particular area, maybe they don't. Maybe they're just starting out. Maybe they're coming from a bootcamp, or maybe they're from a non-traditional background and they're trying to switch careers. If you were sitting there talking to them one-on-one, what are some things that you would tell them, or what are some starting points for them? Like, where do you begin? ADAM: Well, one, ittedly self-serving item I would mention is consider the option of hiring a career coach and that's one of the things that I do in my line of consulting work is I help folks who are towards the middle, or latter part of their career, and they're looking to enter into, or level up in data science. So a career coach can – and I've hired career coaches over the years. Back to, Mando, one of the questions you asked me earlier is how did you end up in data science? Well, part of that story, which I didn't talk to then is, well, I went into data science route when the faculty route didn't open up for me and I'm a huge fan. I had two career coaches helping me out with both, faculty and non-faculty work for a while. So having been the recipient and the beneficiary of some great career coaching, I have also recently become a career coach as well. Probably something more practical, though. Let me give some practical advice. A portfolio, a professional portfolio for a data scientist is probably one of the most essential and beneficial things you can do for yourself in of making that transition successfully and then also, maintaining a career. If you're interested in advancing your career in this way, maintaining a career trajectory that keeps you going so having and maintaining a portfolio. I'll go through four tips on portfolio that I give folks and these tips are specifically tips that can help you generate content for your portfolio, because I know one of the hardest things to do with the portfolio is, well, let me just do some fictional hypothetical project for my portfolio, so hard to do and also, can end up being sort of dry, stale, and it might not really connect with folks. These are four ways you can add to, or enhance your portfolio. I wouldn't call them entire projects; maybe they're mini projects and they're great additions to your portfolio. The first one is: make a Rosetta Stone. This one is for folks who have learned one computer programming language, and now it's time for them to learn another computer programming language, or maybe they already know two computer programming languages. In fact, the Rosetta Stone idea for your portfolio doubles as a way to build on and expand your skills. So here's what a Rosetta Stone is. You have a project; you've done it from start to finish. Let's say, you've done a project from start to finish in Python. Now port that entire project over to R and then in a portfolio platform—I usually recommend GitHub—commit that work as git commits as a Rosetta Stone side-by-side examples of Python and R code that produce the same results and the same output. I love this piece of advice because in doing this, you will learn so much about the language that you originally wrote the program in and you will learn a lot about the target language. You're going to learn about both languages and you're going to have a tangible artifact for your portfolio and you might even learn more about that project. You might encounter some new output in the new language, which is more accessible for that language, that you didn't encounter in the old language and now you're going to have a new insight about whatever your research project was. The next piece of advice I have is make a cheat sheet and there's tongue in cheek opinion about cheat sheets. I think sometimes folks don't like to call them cheat sheets because the word cheat has negative connotations, but whatever you're going to call it, if it's a quick reference, or if it's a cheat sheet, a well-designed cheat sheet on any tool, platform, tool platform, language that you can think of is going to be a really nice addition to your portfolio. I recommend folks, what you do is you just find the things that you do the most frequently and you're constantly referencing at whatever website, make a cheat sheet for yourself, use it for a while, and then polish it up into a really nice presentable format. So for example, I have a cheat sheet on interpreting regression. I also have a cheat sheet that is a crosswalk from Stata, which is a statistical programming language, to Python. So actually there, I've put the two of them together. I've made this cheat sheet, which is also a Rosetta Stone. If you're looking for those, you can find those on my GitHub, or my LinkedIn, I have cheat sheets on my LinkedIn profile as well and you can see examples. I do have on YouTube, a step-by-step instructional video on how to make a cheat sheet and they're actually really easy to do. So if you even if you consider yourself not graphically inclined, if you pick the right tools—and the tools that you would pick might not be your first choice just because they're not marketed that way—you can put together a really nice cheat sheet relatively easily. The third tip is to write an article… about a piece of software that you dislike. So write an article about a piece of software that you dislike and this has to be done with, especially in the open source community, do this one carefully, possibly even the creators, and also, be sure not to blame anybody, or judgment. Just talk about how and why this particular project doesn't quite live up to your full aspiration, or your full expectation. I've done this a couple of times in a variety of ways. I didn't in the title specifically say, “I don't like this,” or “I don't like that,” but in at least one case, one of the articles I wrote, I was able to later submit as a cross-reference, or an additional reference on an issue in GitHub and this was specifically for Pandas. So there was a feature in Pandas that wasn't working the way I wanted it to work. [chuckles] MAE: Pandas. ADAM: Yeah, Pandas is great, right? So there's a feature in Pandas that wasn't working in quite the way that I wanted it to. I wrote an article about it. Actually, I framed the article, the article title is, “How I broke Pandas.” Actually, several versions of Pandas back, the issue was it was relatively easy to generate a Pandas data frame with duplicate column names. Having duplicate column names in a Pandas data frame obviously can cause problems in your code later because you basically have multiple keys for different columns. Now, there's a setting in Pandas that will guard against this and it's an optional setting—you have to toggle it on and off. This article, I like to say, helped improve Pandas. So write an article about software you dislike and also, like I said, be diplomatic and in this case, I was diplomatic by framing the article title by saying, “A few times, I managed to break Pandas,” and then – MANDO: This reminds me a lot of Kyle Kingsbury and his Jepsen tests that he used to do. He was aphyr on Twitter. He's not there anymore, but he would run all these tests against distributed databases and distributed locking systems and stuff like that and then write up these large-scale technical explanations of what broke and what didn't. They're super fascinating to read and the way that he approached them, Adam, it's a lot like you're saying, he pushed it with a lot of grace and what I think is super important, especially when you're talking about open source stuff, because this is what people, they're pouring their heart and soul and lives into. You don't have to be ugly about it. ADAM: Oh, absolutely. MANDO: [chuckles] And then he ended up like, this is what he does now. He wrote this framework to do analysis of distributed systems and now companies hire him and that's his job now. I'm a big fan of the guy and I miss him being on Twitter and interacting with him and his technical expertise and also, just his own personality. Sorry, your topic, or your little cheat there reminded me of that. We'll put some links—thanks, Casey—and in the show notes about his posts so if people haven't come across this stuff yet, it's a fascinating read. It's super helpful even to this day. ADAM: I'm thankful for the connection because now I have another example, when I talk to people about this, and it's incredible that you say built an entire career out of this. I had no idea that particular tip was so powerful. MAE: So cool. MANDO: [chuckles] So I think you said you have one more, Adam? ADAM: The fourth one is: contribute to another project. One of the best examples of this is I wrote an article on how to enhance your portfolio and someone really took this fourth one to a whole new level. I'm sure others have as well, but one person—we’ll get links in, I can get some links in the show notes—what he did was he found a package in R that brings data for basically sample datasets for our programmers and citizens working and data scientists working with R. But he was a Python person. So he suggested, “Hey, what about making this?” I he ed me and he said, “I read your article about adding to my portfolio. I really think it might make sense to port this project over to Python,” and so, he was combining two of them. He was making a Rosetta Stone and he was contributing someone else's project. Now this data is available both in R and in Python and the author of this project has posted about it. He posted about it in May, early May, and it's constantly still a month and a half later getting comments, likes, and links. So he's really gotten some mileage out of this particular piece, this addition to his portfolio and the original author of the original software also has acknowledged it and it's really a success. It's really a success. So contribute to another project is my fourth tip. Oh, one more idea on contributing to another project. Oh, I have an article on that lists several projects that are accepting contributions from intermediate and beginners. The point there is identify specific projects that are accepting beginner and immediate submissions on contributions, mostly via GitHub. But if you go to GitHub and if you're newer to GitHub, you can actually go to a project that you like, go to its Issues tab, and then most projects have tags associated with their issues that are identified as beginner friendly. That is an excellent place to go in order to get started on contributing to another project, which makes the world a better place because you're contributing to open source and you have an addition to your portfolio. MANDO: Oh, these are fantastic tips. Thank you, Adam. ADAM: I'm glad you like them. Can I give another one? Another big tip? This one's less portfolio, more – MANDO: Yeah, lay it on us. MAE: Do! By all means. ADAM: And I'd be interested, Mae, since you also made a similar career transition to me. I made an investment. I think I know what you might say on this one, but I spent money. I spent money on the transition. I hired consultants on Fiverr and Upwork to help me upgrade my social media presence. I hired the career coaches that I mentioned. Oh, actually the PhD program, that was not free. So I spent money on my transition and I would point that out to folks who are interested in making this transition, it's not a transition that is effortless and it's also not a transition that you can do, I think it's not one that you can do without also investing money. MAE: Yeah. [chuckles] Okay, I'm going to tell you my real answer on this. ADAM: Okay. MAE: Or corollary. I had a pretty good gig at a state institution with a retirement, all of these things, and I up and left and went to code school. I had recently paid off a lot of debt, so I didn't have a lot of savings. I had no savings, let's just say that and the code school had offered this like loan program that fell through. So I'm in code school and they no longer are offering the ability to have this special code school loan. I put code school on my credit card and then while in code school, my 10-year-old car died and I had to get a new car. ADAM: Ah. MAE: In that moment, I was struggling to get some fundamental object-oriented programming concepts that I'm like, “Holy cow, I've got a mortgage. I no longer have a car.” Now I'm in a real bind here, but I be leaving myself. I know I made these choices after a lot of considered thought and consultation. I, too had hired a career coach and I was like, “I've already made this call. I'm going to make the best of it. I'm just going to do what I can and see what happens.” I really have a test of faith on that original call to make those investments. I would not recommend doing it the way I did to anyone! [laughter] MAE: And I went from a pretty well-established career and salary into – a lot of people when they go into tech, it's a huge jump and I had the opposite experience. That investment continued to be required of me for several years. Even still, I choose to do things related to nonprofits and all kinds of things, but it takes a lot of faith and commitment and money often, in some form, can be helpful. There are a lot of, on the programming side, code schools that offer for you to pay a percentage once you get a salary, or other offsetting arrangements. So if somebody is listening, who is considering programming, I have not seen those analogs in data science, but on the programming side, especially if you're from a group underrepresented in tech, there's a number of different things that are possible to pursue still. ADAM: Here we are talking about some of the lesser acknowledged aspects of this transition. MAE: Yeah. ADAM: Some of the harder to acknowledge. MAE: Yeah. MANDO: Yeah, I really liked what you said, Mae about the need to believe in yourself and Adam, I think what you're saying is you have to be willing to bet on yourself. ADAM: Yes. MAE: Yeah. MANDO: You have to be willing to bet on yourself and sometimes, in some forms, that's going to mean writing a check, or [chuckles] in Mae’s example, putting it on your credit card, but. [laughter] Sometimes that's what it means and that's super scary. I'm not a 100% convinced that I have enough faith in my ability to run the dishwasher some days, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that today, or not. This is going to be really silly and stupid, but one of my favorite cartoons is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. MAE: Yes! MANDO: It's a series on Cartoon Network, I think. No, Nickelodeon, I watched it with my kids when they were super little and it's still a thing that we rewatch right now, now that they're older. There's this one episode where this grandfatherly wizened uncle is confronted [chuckles] by someone who's trying to mug him [chuckles] and the uncle is this super hardcore general guy. He critics his mugging abilities and he corrects him and says, “If you stand up straight and you change this about the way that you approach it, you'll be much more intimidating and probably a more successful mugger,” and he's like, “But it doesn't seem that your heart is into the mugging.” [chuckles] So he makes this guy a cup of tea and they talk about it and the guy's like, “I don't know what I'm doing. I'm lost. I'm all over the place. All I want to do is become a masseuse, but I just can't get my stuff together.” Something that the uncle said that really, really struck with me was he said, “While it's important and best for us to believe in ourselves, sometimes it can be a big blessing when someone else believes in you.” MAE: So beautiful. MANDO: “And sometimes, you need that and so, I get it. You can't always bet on yourself, or maybe you can bet on yourself, but sometimes you don't have that backup to actually follow through with it.” That's why community is so important. That's why having a group of people. Even if it's one person. Someone who can be like that backstop to be, “You don't believe in yourself today. Don't worry about it. I believe in you. It's okay. You can do it. You're going to do it.” ADAM: Community is just massive. Absolutely massive. MANDO: Yeah. ADAM: Having a good, strong community is so important. Also, I think I could add to what you're saying is about betting on yourself. I don't know if I love the analogy because it's not a casino bet. MANDO: Right. ADAM: The odds are not in favor of the house here. If you have done the right consultation, spoken with friends and family, leveraged your community, and done an honest, objective, accurate assessment of your skills, abilities, and your ambition and your abilities, et cetera. It's a bet. It's a wager, but it's a calculated risk. MAE: Yes! That is how I have described it also. Yes, totally. I loved that story from Airbender and it ties in a few of our topics. One is one of the things Adam said originally, which is being deeply in touch with your why really helps. It also ties in the whole teaching thing and often, that is one of the primary roles is to offer faith and commitment to your pursuits. If I had had different code school teachers, the stress of my entire livelihood being dependent on my understanding these concepts in week two of bootcamp that I was struggling with, and I had made a calculated bet and I thought I was going to be awesome, but I was not. It was like the classic Peanuts teacher is talking, “Wah wah woh wah wah.” I had to lean into my teachers, my school, my peers, believe in me. I believed in me before, even if I don't in this moment and I just have to let that stress move to the side so that I can reengage. That was really the only way I was able to do it was having a similar – well, I didn't try to mug anybody, [laughs] but I had some backup that really helped me make that through. MANDO: Yeah, and those credit card folks call like, it’s tricky. MAE: Yeah, and then I had to buy a car and those people were calling me and they just did an employment verification. They said, “You don't have a job!” I was like, “Oh my god. Well, you [inaudible] get my car back, but I have really good credit. How about you talk to your boss and call me back?” So anyway, these things all tie into, if we have time to talk about something, I was hoping we would cover is this thing about imposter syndrome and believing in oneself, but also not believing in oneself simultaneously and how to navigate that. I don't know, Adam, if you have particular advice, or thoughts on that. ADAM: I do have some advice and thoughts on that. Actually, just yesterday, I hosted a live webinar on this particular topic with another career coach named Sammy and she and I are very ionate about helping folks. When we work with clients, we work with folks intentionally to evaluate whether imposter syndrome might be part of the equation. Actually, in this webinar, we talked about three immunity boosts, or three ways to boost your immunity against imposter syndrome and in one way, or another, I think we've touched on all three with the exception of maybe one of them. So if you're interested in that topic reached out to me as well. I have a replay available of that particular webinar and I could make the replay available on a one-on-one basis to folks as well, who really want to see that material, and the section – MANDO: [inaudible] that. ADAM: Yeah, please reach out and LinkedIn. Easiest way to reach me is LinkedIn, or Twitter. Twitter actually works really well, too these days. MANDO: We’ll put both of those in the show notes for folks. ADAM: Okay. Yeah, thank you so much. I look forward to potentially sharing that with folks who reach out. The community was the second immunity boost that we shared and actually, Mando and Mae, both just got done talking extensively about community. And then the first immunity boost we shared was know your baseline. We called it “know your baseline” and I know from our planning that we would put in this program notes, a link to an online assessment that's named after the original scientist, or one of the two original scientists who really began documenting imposter syndrome back in the 70s and then they called it imposter phenomenon. Oh, the history of this topic is just fascinating. Women scientists, North Carolina, first documented this and one of the two scientists is named Pauline Clance. So the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale, that'll be in the show notes. You can take the Imposter Phenomenon Scale and then objectively evaluate based on this is imposter syndrome a part of your experience, if it is what is the extent of that, and just knowing your baseline can be a really good way, I think to protect you from the effects of the experience. It's also, I think important to point out that imposter syndrome isn't regarded as a medical, or a clinical diagnosis. This is usually defined as a collection of thoughts and actions associated with career, or other academic pursuits. And then the third immunity boost is disseminate knowledge and I love the disseminate knowledge as an immune booster because what it does is it flips the script. A lot of times folks with imposter syndrome, we say to ourselves, “Gee, if I could get one more degree, I could probably then do this,” or “If I got one more certification,” or “I can apply for this job next year, I could apply for that permission next year because I will have completed whatever certification program,” or “If I read one more –” MANDO: One more year of experience, right? ADAM: Yeah. One more year of experience, or one more book, or one more class on Udemy. Especially for mid and late career professionals and we talked about this earlier, Mae the bank of experience and domain knowledge that mid and late career professionals bring, I promise nobody else has had your experience. Everybody has a unique experience and everybody has something to offer that is new and unique, and that is valuable to others. So I say, instead of g up for the seminar, host the seminar, teach the seminar. [laughter] ADAM: Right? Again, there's nothing wrong with certifications. There's nothing wrong with Udemy classes, I have Udemy classes that you could should go take. There's nothing wrong with those, but in measure, in measure and then also, never, never, never, never forget that you already have skills and abilities that is probably worth sharing with the rest of the world. So I recommend doing that as a boost, as an immunity boost, against imposter syndrome. MANDO: Yes, yes, and yes! [chuckles] CASEY: Now, I took the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale test myself and I scored really well. It was super, super low for me. I'm an overconfident person at this point, but when I was a kid, I wasn’t. [laughter] I was super shy. I would not talk to people. I'd read a book in a corner. I was so introverted and it changed over time, I think by thinking about how confidence leads to confidence. MANDO: Yes. CASEY: The more confident you are, the more confident you act, you can be at the world and the more reason you have to be competent over time and that snowballed for me, thank goodness. It could happen for other people, too gradually, slowly over time the more you do confidence, the more you'll feel it and be it naturally. MAE: Yes! MANDO: I think it works the other direction, too and you have to be real careful about that. Like Adam, you were talking about flipping the script. If you have a negative talk script of just one more, just this one thing, I'm not good enough yet and I'm not you know. That can reinforce itself as well and you just never end up getting where you should be, or deserve to be, you know what I mean? It's something that I struggle with. I've been doing this for a really, really long time and I still struggle with this stuff, it’s not easy. It's not easy to get past sometimes and some days are better than others and Casey, like you said, it has gotten better over time, but sometimes, you need those daily affirmations in the morning in the mirror [laughs] to get going, whatever works for you. But that idea, I love that idea, Casey of confidence bringing more confidence and reinforcing itself. MAE: And being mindful of Dunning-Kruger and careful of the inaccuracy of self-assessment. I like a lot of these ways in which making sure you're doing both, I think all the time as much as possible. Seeing the ways in which you are discounting yourself and seeing the ways in which you might be over crediting. ADAM: Right. Like with a lot of good science, you want to take as many measurements as possible. MAE: Yeah. ADAM: And then the majority vote of those measurements points to some sort of consensus. So the IP scale is one tool you can use and I think to your point, Mae it'd be a mistake to rely on it exclusively. You mentioned Dunning-Kruger, but there's also the Johari window. MAE: Oh, I don’t know. What’s that? ADAM: Oh, the Johari window is great. So there's four quadrants and the upper left quadrant of the Johari window are things that you know about yourself and things that other people know about yourself. And then you also have a quadrant where things that you know about yourself, but nobody else knows. And then there's a quadrant where other people know things about you that you don't know. And then there's the complete blind spot where there are things about you that you don't know that other people don't know. And then of course, you have this interesting conversation with yourself. So that quadrant that I don't know about it and nobody else knows about it, does it really exist? Does the tree falling in the woods make a sound when nobody's there to hear it? You can have a lot of fun with Johari window as well and I think it also definitely connects with what you were just saying a moment ago about accuracy of self-assessments, then it gets back to the measurement that we were talking about earlier, the measurement errors. So there's perceptual error, measurement error—shucks, I had it, here it is—sampling error, randomization, error, all kinds of error. I managed to pull that book out and then get some of those in front of me. [laughter] CASEY: There are some nice nicknames for a couple of the windows, Johari windows. The blind spot is one of those four quadrants and façade, I like to think about is another one. It's when you put on the front; people don't know something about you because you are façading it. MAE: Hmm. MANDO: So now we'll go ahead and transition into our reflection section. This is the part where our esteemed ists and dear friends reflect on the episode and what they learned, what stuck with them, and we also get reflection from our guest, Adam as well, but Adam, you get to go last. ADAM: Sounds good. MANDO: You can gauge from the rest of us. Who would like to go first? MAE: I can! I did not know that there was an evaluative measure about imposter phenomenon, or any of that history shared and I'm definitely going to check that out. I talk with and have talked and will talk with a lot of people about that topic, but just having some sort of metric available for some self-assessment, I think is amazing. So that is a really fun, new thing that I am taking away among many, many other fun things. How about you, Casey? CASEY: I like writing about software you dislike in a positive, constructive tone. That's something I look for when I'm interviewing people, too. I want to know when they get, get , when they give , will it be thoughtful, unkind, and deep and respectful of past decisions and all that. If you've already done that in an article in your portfolio somewhere, that's awesome. That's pretty powerful. MANDO: Oh, how fantastic is that? Yeah, I love that! CASEY: I don't think I've ever written an article like that. Maybe on a GitHub issue, or a pull request that's longer than it feels like it should be. [laughter] Maybe an article would be nice, next time I hit that. MANDO: Oh, I love that. That's great. I guess I’ll go next. The thing that really resonated with me, Adam was when you were talking about investing in yourself and being willing to write that check, if that's what it means, or swipe that credit card, Mae, or whatever. I'm sorry, I keep picking on you about that. MAE: It’s fine. [laughs] It’s pretty wild! MANDO: I love it. I love it, and it reminded me, I think I've talked about it before, but one of my favorite writers, definitely my favorite sports writer, is this guy named Shea Serrano. He used to write for Grantland and he writes for The Ringer and he's a novelist, too and his catchphrase—this is why I said it earlier in the episode—is “bet on yourself.” Sometimes when I'm feeling maybe a little imposter syndrome-y, or a little like, “I don't know what I'm going to do,” I click on the Twitter search and I type “from:sheaserrano bet on yourself” and hit enter and I just see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tweets of this guy that's just like, “Bet on yourself today.” “Bet on yourself” “Bet on yourself today, no one else is going to do it.” “No one's coming to save you, bet on yourself,” stuff like that and thank you, Adam for that reminder today. I needed that. ADAM: You're welcome. I'm so happy that you've got that takeaway. Thank you so much for sharing the takeaway. I have, I think two reflections. One, what a breath of fresh air, the opportunity to talk about life, career, but career in data science, and programming in a non-technical way. I think the majority of our conversation was non-technical. [laughter] We briefly went into some technicalities when we talked about how you can sometimes have duplicate heading names in a Pandas data frame. That was a little bit technical. Otherwise, we really just spoke about the humanistic aspects of this world. So thank you so much for that and I got a research tip! Mando, what a brilliant idea. If you're ever looking for more background on a book, do a Twitter search for the book name and then anybody who's been speaking about that book – MANDO: Oh, yes! ADAM: Yeah, right? You could extend that to a research tip. [overtalk] MANDO: That’s fantastic! Absolutely. Yeah. ADAM: So today, I learned a new way to get additional background on any book. I'm just going to go to Twitter, Google, or not Google that, search the book title name, and I'm going to see what other people are saying about that book. And then I can check out their bios. I can see what else they're sharing. They might have insights that I might not have had and now I can benefit from that. Thank you. Thank you so much for the research tip. MANDO: Yeah, and I think it dovetails really well into what you were talking about earlier, Adam, about publishing data. Like building out this portfolio, writing your articles, getting it out there because someone's going to go to Google, or Twitter and type into the search bar a Pandas data frame, column, same name, you know what I mean and now they're going to hit “A few times, I managed to break Pandas,” your article. But it could be about anything. It could be about that stupid Docker thing that you fought with yesterday, or about the 8 hours I spent on Monday trying to make an HTTP post with no body and it just hung forever and I couldn't. 8 hours, it took me to figure out why it wasn't working and it's because I didn't have one line in and I didn't call request that set body. I just didn't do it. I've done this probably more than a million times in my career and I didn't do it and it cost me 8 hours of my life that I'm never getting back, but it happens. That's part of the job is that – [overtalk] MAE: Yeah, sure. MANDO: And you cry about it and you eat some gummy worms and then you pick yourself back up and you're good to go. ADAM: Yeah, another common one that people are constantly writing about is reordering the columns in a Pandas data frame. There's like a hundred ways to do it and none of them are efficient. MANDO: [laughs] Mm hm. ADAM: So I love [inaudible], of course. MANDO: Yeah, you hit the one that works for you, write a little something about it. It’s all right. ADAM: Exactly, yeah. MANDO: All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on, loved having you on. Special Guest: Adam Ross Nelson. Greater Than Code

02:11 - Wampum.Codes MIT Co-Creation Studio Mozilla Fellowships Check out some episodes! Super-Group - Indigenous Tech, Indigenous Knowledge: Wampum.codes as a model for decolonization [Episode] Weirdness with MorningStar [Episode] Comedy in the age of Quarantine: A conversation with comedy writer and performer Joey Clift [Episode] Rock Hands with "Roo": a conversation with DeLesslin "Roo" George-Warren [Episode] 08:13 - Amelia’s Superpower: Being invited to cool parties! no-funding.com 11:26 - Storytelling & Performance The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture 20:16 - “Indigenous Antecedent Technology” Decentralized Economies 24:16 - “Ethical Dependencies” Indigenous wisdom as a model for software design and development Articulating Values Community ability Policing vs ability 35:48 - Handling Disagreements and Giving Permission to Fail 40:55 - Robert’s Rules of Order 44:23 - “No Striving, No Hustling” 47:33 - Facilitating Communication with Peers Storytelling Cont’d Studio Ghibli Storytelling "Ma" – Negative Space This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 240 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke. I'm very happy to be with you here today, and I'm also really happy to be here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton. JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm glad to be on the show with you, too, and I'm also here with my great friend, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Aw, hello, and I'm going to introduce our guest. Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist and technologist who creates playful work with XR, VR, AI, AR, AV, and other esoteric systems of story and code. Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the stupidhackathon.com. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist for Contentful and host of the Contentful + Algolia Developer Podcast DreamStacks. She is working on ethics-based dependencies for software development as a Mozilla Fellow embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio. Welcome to the podcast. AMELIA: Thank you so much! I'm so excited to be here. You all are some of my favorite people, so [laughs] excited to chat on record. CORALINE: And today's going to be very technical; we’re going to ask you some very technical questions about XR, VR, AI, AR, AV and… JAMEY: That's a lot of letters. CORALINE: SP, everything. AMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, we were at a function. Coding. Yeah, let's crack it. [laughs] CORALINE: Amelia, just on a personal level, I'm so happy to have you here. You and I have talked before, we're both involved in ethical source, and I’m such an irer of your work. I'm so happy to have this conversation in public with you today. AMELIA: Oh, back at you, Coraline. I love ethical source and I've been so excited to your team of rebels, exciting thinkers, and dreamers. So I'm really excited to be here with you and in community with you. CORALINE: So Amelia, I first became aware of your work through your wampum.codes project that you did. Well, it's an ongoing project, but I guess, you started it with the Mozilla Fellowship. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think it's really fascinating. AMELIA: Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. When I started my Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, it was actually pre-pandemic. So it was right, but not very much so it was only a couple of months. We got to go to London and meet each other and I got to hang out a little bit at MIT with the Co-Creation fellows. I'm the first full-time fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, which is a really cool studio, imagined and led by Kat Cizek, who's an incredible transmedia storyteller and inspiring human that I get to be in collaboration with there. So for wampum.codes as an ethical framework for software development, we had imagined a lot of things and then the pandemic hit and I wasn't able to be as close to them as I was. I also moved from New York to San Francisco. Before I thought I was going to from New York to Boston pretty regularly on the train and then moved to California and that's when I decided to have the Co-Creation portion of wampum.codes exist as a podcast. So rather than flying to different spaces and meeting with friends and technologists on reservations, who are indigenous across North America, I was like, “Okay, well, let's do this via Zoom call as a podcast” as many people moved to different online formats during the pandemic and that's how the wampum.codes podcast was born. As I want to do research because if you're going to create an ethical framework for software development, based on indigenous values of Co-Creation, you need to do it in co-creation with those people. [chuckles] I had initially planned to fly all of them to MIT and have this big conference and everything. But instead, I got to have weekly conversations with indigenous people, who are using technology in creative ways to make positive impact in their communities. And then we still did a big conference at MIT, but virtually and actually, a lot more people were able to participate in it that way. Big surprise, right? All of us who are internet natives are unsurprised that you have a lot of accessibility there. So then that became the supergroup episode of wampum.codes where we had everyone who was going to be there physically at MIT and then I was able to distribute. Rather than using those funds to fly everyone to MIT, distribute those to all the different people who were on the podcast and just have weekly conversations with each of these people. I guess, the technology projects range and I welcome anyone to go to wampum is W-A-M-P-U-M, .codes, C-O-D-E-S. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can go on Buzzsprout, but it's able to be found on Spotify, or Apple, anywhere you find a podcast. We have RSS feeds there. If you go through the episodes, it varies where each of the indigenous people are coming from. Like, there's an incredible actress on there, MorningStar Angeline, and she is an incredible advocate and activist for the Albuquerque drag scene, also does really incredible art installations and happenings, and works in VR. But she's also the voice of the local area population in Red Dead Redemption, one of my favorite games. [laughs] So it's really interesting that she crosses all of these different media. Then we have another person, Joey Clift, who's a comedian, who's an indigenous comedian and the first indigenous person to be on the—and I'm going to probably say this wrong, but the house comedy team of UCB in LA, I think they call it the house comedy team. The interesting way that he uses technology is he created the largest Facebook group of comedians ever and it's the comedians with cats, basically. [laughs] I just love that he has this and then he creates all this comedy through that Facebook group. So that's an interesting way that comedy becomes its own scene through the social media network all based around cats. I think that's pretty amazing, that an indigenous person is grounded everybody in our deep love of animals. He does a lot of really great activist work. He's also a writer of a couple of different television shows right now and one of them is the first all-indigenous writers room Everett Hollywood. So he's doing really incredible things, but I love his use of technology in his cats group on Facebook. [laughs] And then you have Roo DeLesslin George-Warren, who's creating an app with children. He's part of Catawba nation and the app is around language preservation and language education of Catawba language. But it's the fun thing that we talk about on the episode is, there's some words that don't exist in Catawba language and it's because they're last truly immersed indigenous speaker of Catawba language ed away in the 80s. So anything that wasn't created up until the 80 didn't have an official name, but that doesn't mean that the language is dead. It's alive and it's an alive on the tongue of every child that's learning and every person that's living. But what it does mean is those children get to name some of these things, they get to name what a cell phone is, they get to name all these fun things, and one of the children said, “We should name cell phones rock hands,” and he's like, “Oh really? That's great. Why is that the word for rock and the word for hands in Catawba? And he said, “Well, because it's made of rocks and minerals and we hold it in our hands,” and I thought that was really beautiful. So those are the examples of how each of these different awesome technologists, indigenous leaders are using technology in creative ways. So from that, all those conversations really contribute to the framework that I helped to organize and turn into a workshop and writings around an ethical framework for software development. Those conversations are really key and important to it, because I need to learn how are people making change with technology, because that really will contribute to the guidelines that we hope people can bring out in the process of creating an ethical framework for software development and value-based dependencies. JAMEY: So we have one question for you that you may be expecting already, because we warn our guests about it, and that question is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? AMELIA: Oh, that's an excellent question and I'm cheating because I once was asked this question at Stephanie Dinkins’ AI dinner in New York and I just said the first thing that came to my head because I wasn't expecting it and the first time I said it, I said, “Wow, that's really stupid, Amelia. Why did you say that?” Well, it's because the first thing that came to my head, but then the longer I sit with it, the more I'm like, “I think it's true so I'm just going to say it,” again as if it's the first time which is, I think my superpower is being invited to cool parties. [laughter] JAMEY: That's a great superpower. AMELIA: Yeah. how did I acquire it? I think you just have to have cool friends and then those friends invite you to cool parties. It's worked out for me so far because sometimes their parties are in Dharamsala hanging out with the Dalai Lama, sometimes their parties are doing some weird art show in New York, and sometimes their parties are awesome powwows that have been going on for hundreds of years. So I think that's the best way I want to live my life [laughs] so that's my superpower. CORALINE: I love that. JAMEY: I just wanted to say that I don't think that's a stupid superpower at all. I think it's a beautiful superpower. CORALINE: I'm kind of jealous of that superpower, honestly. I think the last party I had, the big important, exciting thing was red velvet cupcakes. AMELIA: Ooh, that’s awesome. CORALINE: Oh no, you have red velvet cupcakes on the one hand, the Dalai Lama on the other hand, that's a tough choice to make really. AMELIA: Yeah. Obviously, during quarantine I feel like I've definitely not had my superpower active in a while, so maybe I'm in like my cave of solitude. [laughs] Definitely. It's been a tough year for those of us who that's our only superpower, but I definitely been invited to a lot of Zoom parties, let me tell you. I've led a lot of Among Us things and I've been the one to organize a lot of Zoom [inaudible] outlook. We all are Zoom fatigued, but I've been organizing what I hope could be something interesting. I started this thing called No-Funding.com as a virtual party where we could talk about, I don't know, it's supposed to be an artist group where we talk about ways that we can each other outside of gatekeeping and traditional funding avenues. But honestly, it's like, if you didn't need any funding and you didn't want any funding and you just wanted to be punk rock and talk about our art and how we can help each other, that's a space. We do it and we ended up getting into some esoteric conversations. We talk a lot about ethics and the worlds that we want to build that have a community focus. But we also just kind of, we'll talk about creative ideas to feed our soul like, “Hey, why don't we write poems today?” and somebody in the group knows how to teach us how to write poem. Someone might know something about an artist and teaches us something. So it's definitely more an artist group, but with the motto of not – our motto is no striving, no hustling. [laughs] So that's No-Funding.com, us every week. [laughs] CORALINE: Well, one of the things that really interested me, or interests me about your work, Amelia, almost everything you've said in of the things you're doing have a very strong community focus. As someone who came up in a very white Western technology environment where most of what happens is developer tooling and most of it is going to the companies in San Francisco, I think it's really interesting that people who are outside of that bubble seem to have stronger, especially people in different parts of their world, or indigenous cultures that are often ignored, or excluded, but you're doing community work. I see a lot of those non-white Western—what I’m trying to say—that's kind of unique in a way, or it's different from how technology is usually thought of in the US especially. I don't know where to go with that. I am so sorry. I just think that's so fascinating and so different and that's something I'm going to learn about. AMELIA: Yeah, and I think it's absolutely everything you said about technology is true and it also is true for the art world, too, which I came actually from a background of performance. My mom, growing up, was a traditional storyteller for our tribe, Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan and being a storyteller is something like being a politician, a historian, a performance artist, an actor, a writer, an educator. It's this combination because you need to be given the stories from elders. They have to trust you so you have to be a politician, or a leader and you're really required to make sure that the stories that you tell are relevant and significant for your current generation. You're taking information from previous generations, you're preserving it, and sharing it with your current generation so that it will have positive impact on the generations to come, but it has to be relevant. So you cannot tell it the same way that an elder gave it to you. It's the core requirements like, I'm giving you the story for you to make it new and relevant for your generation and each audience you meet with it has to be relevant. Our storytelling is embedded in multimedia. It's obviously, spoken word stories. It has music, it has patterns, it has art, it has pottery, it has bead work; all of these things reinforce the stories. When my mom would travel around, her superpower is being that leader, historian, educator. She has that voice that as soon as she says, “Hello, I would like to tell you a story today,” every person in the whole room sits down. You know what I mean? I don't know, that's her superpower is she can just, not even with a mic and she has a quiet voice. She can just be like, “Hello,” and everyone just sits down. She's like, “I'm going to tell you a story.” [chuckles] It's that incredible storyteller voice and then I would perform the songs and the music with her since she's not a musician, or a musical person at all, but she knows the songs and knows this is the story that has the song that goes live. So I would be the musical one and then I became an opera singer. At 15, I went to the Eastman Conservatory of Music at a young age and became a professional opera singer at a young age. So I came from a performance background and then once my work became so weird in the sense of, I had so much coding involved, projections and video. I'm a nerd and I've been a self-taught coder since I was very young and since my work became more integrated with multimedia, people were like, “You're not really an opera person anymore, or a director of new opera. You're kind of a multimedia artist.” That title was somewhat thrust upon me and I was like, “Oh, this is great. I'm going to go get my Master's degree, my MFA in art.” Once I went to school, they showed me my studio and then they lock you in there. They close the door and then you're supposed to live in your studio. I would pop my head out and like, “Hey everybody, what are we doing?” They're like, “Go away, like go back into your studio.” We're all in our studios heads down and then I said, “Oh, well, let's collaborate.” No one wants to collaborate with me. The only people in the entire, like above me, or below me, or my same year that want to collaborate with me were indigenous people. Interesting! [laughs] So we all wanted to collaborate and start making things together and our professors were like, “We're not even going to consider that for your grades, or for your thesis, or for – that doesn't count, that doesn't even exist. If you made it with another person, it doesn't even exist,” and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” The whole entire world doesn't work when it comes to the way that most media we consume isn't created that way. The only exception really is more the solitary artist, which also doesn't always work that way either. When you go and see things in a museum and it has one person's name under it, there's a thousand names that are not mentioned. When we see a film, we see the director, but we see the thousands of names come over us with the credits. When we go to a play, we open that cast book and we see all of those names that are behind that object. So it's really, the art world and the technology world overlap in that myth of the solitary genius, total myth that they perpetuate it. I definitely had a crisis, what I went into the art world and then again, as I've continued my journey throughout tech, where I'm like, “It's not true that one person has made these things,” [laughs] but we believe that. We believe that that's how things work and that was always a big shock to me and something that I've maybe found ways of integrating a more collective mindset into each of those spaces. I recently was meeting with this incredible group. The US Department of Art and Culture, I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're not a real government agency, but they perform really incredible service to our collective dreaming, which is they build things, like the People's State of the Union, or they've created the honoring native land initiative, which is an incredible toolkit for people to do land acknowledgements. They've recently hired me to bring on a new page of this honoring native land initiative to think about how do you bring something from land acknowledgement to action so it's not just making a verbal statement, but you're making a commitment that can come with action. When I was meeting with them initially, they were like, “Well, you do categorize yourself as an artist, but this role is a lot about community building. So can you talk a little bit about that?” And I thought, “Oh, that's so interesting because my whole life, I have felt like more of a community builder than an artist.” That's interesting that they assume that an artist isn't a community builder because it isn’t because there’s usually that separation. So I was very happy to find this role. One of the fun things that you do at the beginning of working with this group is to work with them to define a title and I don't have one yet. I'm going to share with you some of my ideas, [laughs] let me know what you think of me. JAMEY: So let's workshop them right here on the show. AMELIA: Right. I’m looking for your opinions because the other people have these incredible titles, like one is the Chief Ray of Sunshine. That's one of her names, she's the Chief Ray of Sunshine. One person is the Director of People and Possibilities. Another one is Director of Decolonization and Honoring Native Land. I thought, I think that's the title. And then I've been throwing around a lot of different ones. So one, I think was good as something around a land acknowledgement lab, because I want to make it a place where I can collaborate with lots of different people around how they can imagine, and give a framework and tools for people to imagine how you can change land acknowledgement thinking of this something that you say, something that you do, and something that has action. So that was what I've been thinking about. I don't know. What are some of the coolest titles you guys have heard? [laughs] CORALINE: Well, not exactly the same thing, but a friend of mine, Astrid Countee, who's also one of the ists on our podcast. She is trained as an anthropologist and she got into tech. So she and I have been workshopping [chuckles] a title for her and we're coming up with sociologist engineer, anthropology engineer, things like that because the thing I like about that and the thing I like about what you're saying is that the impact that we have is a lot broader than the work that we do. We don't acknowledge the connections either and we tend to lionize the pure technical – I'm speaking as like the industry. We lionize that is the lone genius, like you were talking about, and I'd like to see us bring more of ourselves into how we describe the work we do, as opposed to just the, “Oh, I write code.” So Amelia, one of the things that you and I talked about in our conversation of couple of months ago, you introduced me to an incredible term that I'd like you to share with us and talk about and that is antecedent technology. AMELIA: Yeah. I like to think a lot about the continuous line that we have for technology and the way that oftentimes, when we're learning about a new technology, people will use metaphors that are connected to the technologies in history, but frequently, it's from a Western perspective rather than seeing a continuous line from technologies that were invented in indigenous communities. One of the reasons that I say it's important to look at indigenous antecedent technology is we don't want to colonize our future. We don't want take something and project it to the future with a limited understanding of how the world works. An example of that is that we've had, for thousands of years, decentralized economies that use decentralized ledgers and had large data systems that were able to be incorporated into consensus building contracts that led to peaceful communities. Like for instance, Wampum with the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois Confederacy, or even Quipu, we had in South America, which was a Turing-complete data system 500 years before Alan Turing was born. I think the reason why it's important is not because of primacy, or saying that's because something happened first it's better. But if you are thinking of making giant leaps in the future with some of these new emerging technologies, you could say, “Well, we don't have any data in the past, so we're just going to have to wing it.” Or you could look at it as a line and a string that connects to our ancestral histories and say, “Well, actually we did have successful distributed economy, decentralized economies, right in the location where I'm standing now. We could study how they worked in collaboration with the environment in this environment and learn from there.” Or we could just throw that out and say, “Wow, this is the first time California is ever going to use a decentralized economy. Let's just wing it.” Or you could say, “Actually, there’s precedent here we can learn from that, from this very location, from this very land.” Something that a lot of indigenous activists are talking about is understanding the connection and giving back agency to indigenous groups is not just racial justice, but it's also climate justice. So I think people who deeply want to make positive impact for our environment, or are looking at some of these possibilities for different types of economies in a less extractive format for your state, or for your nation, or for your continent, or your region, it is important to include indigenous knowledge in those discussions. So that's what I mean when I talk about antecedent technology is like, are these innovations that you're building? Do they have deep roots, and do you have a mechanism of looking at them in historical context? Can that give you more data to make more successful models for how you might make innovation in the future? CORALINE: But Amelia, how can people do that and also solve every problem from first principles? AMELIA: I know, right? [laughs] And that's the funny thing is we see this is an issue in Silicon Valley already. Already, people are like, “Oh my gosh, they're reinventing buses,” or they're reinventing these things that already existed not a 100, or 200, or 300 years, or a 1,000 years ago, but people are reinventing something that happened a month ago, or a year ago. That is what we do. We pile slight innovations on top of each other in an extractive format to create competition and I think that it's a slowing down of that. It's like, what if it's not about reinvention, or just rebranding, or remarketing, but if our goals have of real long vision of lasting for seven generations, can we think then about innovation in a different way? JACOB: I've never heard the phase ethical dependencies. Could you educate me, if you care to? AMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, sure. I think about it like I love to use technological terminology to describe ethical, or creative practices and I love to use creative and ethical terminology to describe technological practices. I like to be a bridge between these two worlds because it's somewhere I sit in the middle of. So when people aren't technical and they're like, “What is an ethical dependency?” Then I'll start talking to them about how certain computer programs can't run unless they have all of their check-dependencies and I explain that to them. And then when it's a technical group, I'll talk about when you go through your package.json and you're trying to communicate to someone who might be using your GitHub repo, you might have a bunch of different choices of things that you can connect them with in your package.json. Maybe it's just basic, “Hey, this is the version I'm using and make sure you use this node version.” As you go through it, the only ethical choice I've had, at least as a web developer, is this MIT open source, or is this CANoe, or what is the licensing for this is, or is it just closed source so it's for the company that I'm working for. The reason why I wanted to make an ethical dependency for software is I wanted there to be more options and more choices there that you could say, not only do I have license, which really is just adjudicated through the legal process of international law of copyright. If someone violates the MIT license and close sources my open source project, maybe I can sue them. But if I'm a small developer, I probably don't have the resources to some people. But what if I don't even believe in that process? I'm somebody who truly believes in a horizontal organization that is a mutual aid network and we don't want to spend our funds on lawyers suing people. But we do want to have a way in which our community is held responsible to each other and maybe we have our own process of guidelines that this group adheres to and we want a resource where people can say, “Okay, what are the values behind your code that you imagine people should uphold?” And then my article that I wrote for the Mozilla blog, I mentioned an example, which is a cat shelter. Like, what if I made a really great website for my friend's cat shelter and then they reach out to me and say, “Hey, my other friend would really love to use your code. Is that totally fine?” “Yeah. It's open source. No problem.” “Okay, great, great, great,” and then I say, “Well, actually, I did a lot of work on this. I'm totally fine anyone using it for free, but I don't kill shelters.” If it's a no-kill shelter, then totally cool with them using my code, but if there are not a no-kill shelter, I don't know if I wanted to spend all hours that I did making this and the time ing it and everything else that I do. That's my values. Like, you can use my code for free, but not if you're using it to do something that I don't want to see in the world. I think we see that a lot in open source projects for research where researchers have done incredible systems for looking at the stars and star mapping, and then those same systems are used for military guided missiles and they're like, “Wait a minute. I use all those graduate students and we spent years and years and years building this incredible thing to look at stars and have this be an educational tool and now it's being used in a way that is absolutely not how we anticipated, or what we thought would exist in the world.” And there's not a mechanism because they didn't necessarily close source it; they're just using it as a guidance system. [chuckles] o it's like, how could you hold people able? I think the first step is to make explicit the values to begin with and a lot of times people will say to me, “Well, if you can't enforce this, then what is the point of doing this?” I think that's an interesting thing in our culture that we immediately go to policing before we can even think of the imagination of what is our value? Oh, you're not even allowed to think of what your values are, because if you can't police them, they don't matter. Well, that's actually a very strange skewed worldview to imagine that you can't hold values unless you can police them. Because in a world of post-policing, we have to have ways that we hold values, right? [laughs] We can't just throw out values. So the first step is articulating and agreeing upon the values and creating an ethical dependency, and then through the process in wampum.codes, I talk about how ability can work within a community and what you want ability to look like. It shouldn't be the default that the only way you can hold someone able is to sue them, or is to police them through a court system, or international court system. There should be a way in which you can hold people able that is more aligned with the values of your group. Maybe you can say, if you have found someone that has not followed these ethical guidelines, invite them to this town hall where we'd like to talk about it, or meet us every week at the Zoom link. There's lots of different ways you can put an ability link in your package.json, which is, this is how I expect my community can hold me able. This is how I want my community to hold me able. This is how I want my community to hold each other able. So we talk through that process. I don't think it should just be a default outsource thing to a government that you have no influence on the copyrighting law that exists. It’s like well, it's either open, or close. So that’s a bad – now I've lost my place, but feel free to ask me questions. [laughs] These guys have stopped running. JAMEY: I really like the distinction that you make between policing and ability, which I think are words that have similar meanings, but very different vibes. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how those two concepts like work different in practice. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you can imagine that it's – I always start from a point of imagining that it's the community, that we are all part of a community and that we care about the values and we care about each other. Like, you're starting from a point of imagining. Everyone's a good actor before you start imagining how someone is a bad actor. It's like saying, “I need to explain to you why this game is fun and what the rules are before I start.” If I start off being like, “Okay, everyone who's going to cheat at this game, this is what's going to happen to them.” Then people are like, “Well, wait, what game is this and what even are the rules?” So just start from a point of like, “This is why the game is fun. This is why we want to participate in it. These are the rules of the game and the rules are part of how we have fun.” The rules are a part of how we engage with each other. The rules are part of the point of why we're even playing. It makes it fun, constraints are fun, and then you can start thinking about like, “Hey, and if you cheat at this game, these are the fun ways you can cheat at this game and these are the ways that are actually not fun and everyone in the group would rather you just not do that and if you do do that, then maybe we talk about what we do.” I think that's a more of a process of thinking about the ideas, the end, and the means exist within the community and are part of the community. I think a lot of activists organizations have been very involved in rethinking community ability without policing and oftentimes, they're communities that either indigenous communities on reservations don't have policing in the same way that other spaces do and/or their places where policing does not benefit those communities. They're not actually defending the rights, or the needs of those communities. So they've had to start thinking about like, “Well, we still have to think about what we do when we have something in our community that we don't want to have.” Like, if we have domestic violence, what do we do in a way that still protects and maintains our community, that we can still make sure we have help and needs? That's an issue that I think a lot of reservations have looked at because it's like we don't have police, or police don't help us when they come and so, how do we figure out ways that we can our communities and make sure that we can minimize domestic violence and they have lots of different initiatives all over Indian country that are really amazing. So I think that's a good example. JAMEY: I find it really refreshing, the attitude about the game, like these are the rules of the game before we talk about cheating, because I find myself feeling a way that's jaded that my brain does go to. But I know there's bad actors and I've dealt with bad actors and I stress about that. I think it's a stressful thing that it’s reasonable to stress about, but putting that value lower than the value of well, what's the ideal and how do we start with that, I think it really feels good. AMELIA: Yeah. I know as a young developer and probably all of you have had a very similar experience, but as a very young developer, you'll enter into a space and be like, “Oh, I have a question about this,” and then you just get a hammer on your head like, “This isn't the space where you ask questions! That's the space where you ask questions and you don't ask this question on Tuesday. You only ask them on a Wednesday!” and you're like, “Ah!” We've all had that experience, too, which isn't a very accessible way of someone wants to your party and you're like, “Oh, you really aren’t to on Wednesdays and not with that question.” and it’s like – So I think it's important to make things accessible to someone who's a new, or an outsider and give them a way of being a good actor because otherwise, if they don't, then everyone new will be a bad actor without any option of otherwise and of course, there are bad actors. We've all grown up on the internet, [laughs] so I think we know. Another thing that is interesting is I've been doing these workshops with development teams, at companies, startups, blockchain companies, or financial companies, or nonprofits, or academic departments, or groups of artists. It is always interesting that people are like, “Oh yeah, who should be here that can articulate our values for this exercise?” My answer is, “You,” and they're like, “Oh, well, no one gave me permission to do that.” “On behalf of who?” “I don’t know on behalf of who,” and I'm like, “Well, you get to do it on behalf of everyone.” You get to articulate it and then someone else gets articulated and then we get to talk about that. I'm always surprised that this is sometimes the first space that anyone's given them that permission, it's like, “Well, what do you think are the values?” They go, “Well, I think our values are X, Y, and Z,” and someone else can say, “Well, I think it's this other thing,” and they can say, “Oh, interesting.” And then the founders, or the directors can be there and be like, “Wow, I had no idea all these different opinions,” and then we'll say to them, “Well, what did you think it was?” They’re like, “I actually now, I realize I don't know. Now I'm liking these ideas,” or “I'm thinking about this differently.” So it's square one is that articulation and everyone thinks that that's a given. They're like, “Oh, well, that'll be easy. That part will take 5 minutes.” But that is almost the entire time. [chuckles] Usually, it’s that beginning of like, “Okay, we are articulating our values.” Then once you articulate them, it's actually quite easy to just embed those into your source code and then think about ability and all that. But getting on that same page, it's often the first time that – and coders will say things like, “Well, I think the UX person was supposed to decide this.” The UX person said, “No, no, no, I don't think it was me. I think it was somebody else who was supposed to decide this!” I'm like, “Well, if actually no one on your development team thinks they're allowed to express this, then that's probably a problem because how are they supposed to design code that meets your values of your team if no one thinks they're allowed to articulate that?” JAMEY: Something I find striking about the story that you just told is that, I think we often feel disagreements are a really bad thing to have and you just told the story where having disagreements was a very good thing to be experiencing because it's like more ideas and more discussion. I wonder what your thoughts are on like, well, how can we get past that feeling of like, “Oh, well, if someone disagrees with me, that's a bad thing.” AMELIA: I think it's different for different people. I think all of us have probably worked on international teams. I work on an international team with a lot of German coworkers and they're not in any way afraid of disagree [chuckles] in the beginning of a meeting, but they are very hesitant to disagree later on. They have this great way of clashing in the beginning with lots of ideas. Like, “No, I don't think that!” They're really, really clashing in the beginning, but then once we've all agreed to move forward with something, then they would be more hesitant later on to be like, “Hey, I don't think this is working out” because they're like, “No, we made a commitment, we're going to do this. We'll just keep doing what we decided.” It's harder for them later on to like flag a problem and say, “I think we should go in a different direction,” because it's less part of their culture to do that. It's like, “Well, we all agreed. So if we all agreed and we're all together, then we all agree and we're all together. You don't later go on and decide something else on your own.” Whereas, I feel like in American culture, it's not as big of a deal for someone to raise the hand and be like, “I think we're going to go into a brick wall if we keep going this direction so we’ve got to veer to the left.” Everyone would be like, “Thank goodness.” But if you showed up at the brick wall, they'd be like, “Why didn't anyone –?” “Oh, we knew we were going to run a brick wall. Why didn't you say anything?” “Oh, we didn't want to disagree.” That wouldn't be appropriate in American culture, but they make jokes all the time in that that's what happens sometimes because people agree and then they'll just keep going. [chuckles] So it's very interesting clash of culture. I think different cultures have different points at which they feel comfortable. That's just one example. You can imagine how all of us have so many different cultures when it feels okay to have disagreements and sometimes explaining that in the beginning could be helpful, too. Because in some of these groups, you'll have people that are international that are speaking more in the beginning and I'll call that out, too and say, “I hear a lot of Europeans are disagreeing in the beginning. Oftentimes, Americans don't feel comfortable doing that, but this is a helpful way of making sure we have alignment and it's not seen as that you think someone's idea is not good, but it's a way of contributing, or adding.” Sometimes I throw that out because I know even based on different parts of the US that you're in, you might have different ways when you feel more comfortable sharing a descending of opinion. [chuckles] CORALINE: Amelia, how does that intersect with permission to be wrong? AMELIA: Oh, I like that permission to be wrong. Tell me a little bit more about that. What do you –? CORALINE: I think it's tied to what we talk about a lot about psychological safety and safety to fail. Things don't always fail just for environmental reasons. AMELIA: Oh, yeah. CORALINE: Sometimes someone had an idea and it ends up that idea isn't workable, but we have such attachment to the idea that I think we oftentimes are likely to run into that wall because we don't want to it that we didn't think of something, or we didn't see something coming, or we didn't think it through correctly and that’s a lot of pressure. AMELIA: Oh, totally. Absolutely, it is. I feel like I find that a lot when I was a professor and I still am a trainer. I work at Contenful as a technical trainer and I think as a teacher, you see that a lot with people. It's like that first moment where students have learned something and they want to apply it and sometimes, our first idea is great, but usually our first 20 ideas are terrible. [chuckles] So it's like when you're first learning something, you don't always have the best ideas and what I usually have tried to do in my classrooms is give people just an enormous space to create a lot of bad ideas quickly. If it's in an art class, I might say, “Okay, I've taught you how to do this animation. I need you to make a 100 in the next hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Well, then make them really bad and really crude and just find out how to do volume,” and when you find out how to do volume, you get over a lot of the preciousness of the first bad idea that is usually really bad, but you're really precious about it because it's your first and that can push past that. Similarly, in technical training classes, it might be the same where it's like, “Okay, all 50 of you have to do this impossible task in an hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Great. So let's start with, where should we start?” Often, where should we start is a bad idea. People are like, “We should start with writing down everything that we need to do!” It's like, “Well, if you only have an hour, that's probably going to be the hour of just writing it down, or you could start somewhere.” There's lots of different options. So I think permission to fail, or permission for bad ideas sometimes can be overcome by that brute force of just being like, “Well, do the first 100 bad ideas, get it out of your system.” [laughs] JACOB: I was just thinking about how I've worked in an organization in the past that really wanted to have that very collaborative beyond the same page about values. There was one issue that came up a lot, which was that we had this culture where if anyone wanted to blow up the entire thing and make us all talk about it from ground zero, they could. I think that, whether on purpose, or not, was abused and what ended up happening was not really able to go anywhere. Effectively, what happened was the person who wanted to just keep bringing up their thing got their way because you know. AMELIA: Yeah. JACOB: When you were talking about that earlier, I was thinking about what's a way for one of the values of a group to be like, “We want to be able to have everyone's input, but we also want to move forward,” and I was just thinking about how we would do that. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think this is why so many mutual aid networks, or activist groups, or anarchist groups will use different formats like even Robert's Rules of Order, or they make their own versions of that where they say – and then I've seen in some artist groups, they'll have the 10 not commandments, but things on the wall where if a certain thing in a conversation is going there, they might point to it and say like, “Hey, is this number eight derailment? Are you derailing our consensus through number seven only being concerned with your own idea?” And then they will be like, “Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's what you're doing here. Number seven and number eight and right now, so we're going to move past that.” Or with Robert's Rules, you might say like, “Yeah, your emotions on the table doesn't have a second. So we're tabling that.” I think that's why it's important to have some of those ground rules when you're in an activist organization and maybe we should take some of those activist language into the product space at companies as well to say, we can have formalized ways. It doesn't mean we're not listening to people. There's a balance between “You're never allowed to question our values,” or “Yeah, you can bring up your own pet project at any time and derail everyone else's process and project and progress.” So I think there's definitely a balance there and people can always make addendums to that. People can say, “Hey, we're going to pause Robert’s Rules right now because it looks like we're getting kicked out of the space in 5 minutes so we're going to move to this section. Does everyone agree with that?” “Yes, we agree with tabling those rules that we already agreed to make a supplemental rule for this section.” I don't know how many of you have worked in an activist organization. Sounds like all of you see what I’m talking about. [laughs] Sometimes it's a lot of saying that and saying it really fast, but you get used to it. You get used to being like, “Oh my gosh, we only have 5 minutes. Okay, should we table this? Yes, or no? Do we have a second? Okay, we do. Great.” It takes more verbiage, but it is a way that we can agree on the rules of play and that people feel safe being like, “No one seconded that idea. You have brought it up for the third time, you’re bringing it up again, no one's going to second it again. So it's okay, we get it. You still want that idea. That's okay. We're writing it down in the minutes, but how it goes. [chuckles] You're also welcome to start your own group and have that be a focus and that's always possible, too.” So not everything has to be done by, for, with, and with approval of the group and I think that's what's great, too. JAMEY: So Amelia, you were talking earlier in the show about your No Funding group. That's what it was called, right? AMELIA: Yeah. JAMEY: And the phrase that you said, I wrote it down was, “No striving, no hustling.” AMELIA: Yeah. JAMEY: I liked that so much that [chuckles] I wrote it down and I was hoping we could talk about that because I think that that's something that people really struggle with, too. Anxiety about productivity and monetizing hobbies is something I see a lot. I'm also in the tech space and the art space, and you see that a lot in comics like, how can I make this thing that I want to do into my career? Which like, there's something beautiful about that, but it's also really tough when you're doing that with everything in your life that should bring you joy. So this isn't really a question, but I was hoping you could talk about no striving, no hustling. AMELIA: Oh yeah, thank you so much, Jamey. So I'll read you the little statement that we made, just because it's funny, but we say, “No Funding: Be the crypto-anarchist digital artist collective you want to see in the world. The mutual aid network that aims to help creatives radically rethink our relationships to funding, grants, and gatekeepers. In an arts and media culture increasingly focused on securing patronage from institutions, corporations, and wealthy individuals, No Funding asks what creative life would look like if artists were fully liberated from money and the self-censorship imposed by its pursuit? Rather than experience the soul crushing lifestyle of striving, rejection, and constant jockeying for position, could we instead find new ways to one another and what would we make?” As part of the official announcement, I wrote a short story called Child's Play, where I imagine a world in which children seize control of the global economy with nothing more than a Minecraft server and their grandparents’ goodwill. [laughs] “No Funding is a public group. You can visit no-funding.com to get in on the fun and participate in weekly online conversations where present on topics near and dear to them. No Funding is primarily a BIPOC creative technologist group, but it's open to anyone who's ever needed a day job to make something cool that they believe in. Our motto is no-striving, no-hustling; No-Funding.com a creative collective.” So that's our little statement. [laughs] JAMEY: I love it. I love everything about it. AMELIA: Yeah. I've had a lot of fun because I don't know how you felt during the pandemic, but I feel adrift in a sea of information where I don't know where land is. I don't see a lighthouse. I can't tell if I'm 5 minutes from shore, or a 5 miles and having a check-in with people with this format that it's like, no striving, no hustling, you're not pitching your project for a group of adjudicators. This is a group of people for people by people and I've been able to get more of a temperature on how people are feeling, what people are thinking. For me, it's helping that lighthouse of how far I am adrift. When I have my own notions of, I think this is going on and then I go to a No Funding meeting and I'm like, “Okay, I'm totally wrong. I can adjust myself to the shore.” So for me, it's been really helpful in that way. JAMEY: I think that there's two pieces of what you just described that have a similar result, but are different, which is trying to get funding because we live in capitalism and you need money to survive and to do things, which sucks and it's hard. And then on the other side, I think you have just this feeling about whether, or not you're being productive in that way. Even if an artist doesn't need to make money off of something to pay their bills, I think there's a feeling of like, but if I'm not making money, then it’s not valuable, or it's not real, or it's not as valuable as something else that someone else is working on. Actually, that is also capitalism that made that happen, but I think that's a little bit more solvable maybe. It's hard for us to just decide that we're going to have a community without that kind of global economy. But I think we could decide that we're not going to hold ourselves to that in the way that we do, but that's a tough step to take, I think and it sounds like you have a whole group of people that have all taken that step. [chuckles] AMELIA: Yeah. It's pretty incredible. I think we're all very diverse and don't agree on a lot of things, but the one thing that we do agree on is that the definition of having a full and creative life is only available to someone who does never need to work. Even if there are people in our group that might be true for, we all agree that that's not true, that you can have a full creative life and do many different jobs at many different times in your life for many different reasons. That is the one thing that we've committed to is like having a day job doesn't kick you out of the club of being a activist, a creative, a dreamer, a thinker, and a world that that exists is a world that is actually quite creatively stifling. It's very stifling and we see that it ends up just reproducing a lot of commonality and there's only a small demographic of people then who gets to participate in it and they have a very small narrow grasp on the world. I think we see that in a lot of our media that in order to participate in media, you have to be independently wealthy enough that you don't need to make any money from it and then those people tend to be a very small narrow demographic. And then you say, “Well, why don't we have all of our stories are told from this one perspective?” It's like, “Well, those are the only people that are allowed to do that work because it requires a full-time job where you don't make money.” Then of course, you 're going to get the same group of people [chuckles] that are going to tell the stories then. So that's why we think about it of like, well, what could we make if we assume we have day jobs, if we assume we don't need money, what kind of projects can we make together, or how can we each other and each other's projects all coming from a notion of there's not someone coming to save us and we're not looking to grab the attention of someone high up there. Rather, we're looking to our right and to our left of us and the people that are standing beside us and saying, “How do we move forward?” JAMEY: I find that incredibly inspiring and empowering and it's something similar that I think about in comics a lot where people who are new to comics are often trying to get in with people that are already names in comics and really talented people that of course, you want to work with those people, but those people are doing something different than you if you're just a beginner. I heard the advice when I was new, that's like, “Hey, don't reach out to me, reach out to people that are your peers, because me and my peers used to be like that and we all became successful together and what you need to do is make a group like that and then you become successful together.” I thought about that a ton since I heard it and I think I'm getting a similar vibe from what you're talking about that and I think it's beautiful. AMELIA: Well, thank you so much, Jamey. You literally described the exact impetus for me forming this is I get a lot of talks weekly at universities and I had so many students after my talks be like, “Can we grab coffee? I'd love to pick your brain.” I look at my schedule and unfortunately, just because I have a full-time startup job and I do lots of advocacy and activism on the side, I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to be able to meet with you in like three months and that's not good.” I want to be able to give more time to these people who have really valid questions, but I also don't think that I hold anything that they need. Like, I don't think that I'm the person standing in the path for their progression and I need to give them a hand up. In fact, I think what I do need to do is to give them a space where they can communicate with their peers, like you said, and I say that to them. I say, “Look, I'm not brushing you off because you're not important. I'm taking myself out of this equation because I'm not important and you don't need me to tell you how to move forward, but you do need your peers and luckily, I've collected all of you from all of my talks into a group that meets weekly and you can all talk to each other, which is a much more valuable thing and I facilitate this. I've created this as a way of giving you a Zoom link that everyone can connect to each week, but you're going to connect with each other and you're going to meet hundreds of people around the world that are your peers, that will be your network, that will be the person to your left and to your right.” I always say to people, “If you look to your left and your right and you don't see anyone, that's because there's somebody behind you, you need to pull up that you need to give a hand to.” CORALINE: Oh, yeah. I've been doing a lot of that, thinking and talking about storytelling, and the value I place in storytelling and I'm also thinking about how can I give agency to other people to tell their stories? But one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about storytelling is for example, look at superheroes. Almost every white superhero is a lone actor. They don't have a community connection. They don’t have a family; they all died in a terrible accident. AMELIA: Origin story, yeah. CORALINE: Yeah, and that's the kind of stories we tell and it’s what we’re telling people. You have to be the hero. You have to be the most famous. You have to be the most rich. I learned there's actually a name for different kinds of stories, there's a German word for it called bildungsroman, and I'm probably pronouncing that all wrong, but this is more what our stories used to be like. The entire story would be about the development of the hero and it's not the hero's journey like a Joseph Campbell thing, it's literally how they learn how to be who they are. We don't tell the stories, or the origin story that's highly dramatic and left behind as opposed to acknowledging that we're all flawed and that hopefully, we're all growing and that hopefully, we'll just be better people and that's enough. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. My son, when he was a baby, he used to hate Disney movies because he would say [chuckles] they always have like the mom, or the dad always dies, something bad always happens to them in the beginning, and then the rest of the story is running from a trauma to find a perfect ending and this is like a 4-year-old telling me this. I'm like, “Yeah, that is the problem with the Western myth of the origin story,” and he was like, “But I want to just watch friends having fun together, telling each other jokes, going on a journey. I want it to look like my life. I want to see stories that look like my life,” and I'm like, “Yeah, well, you probably will find your stories in other spaces,” and he did. He finds Minecraft, which is much more of a similar thing to his experience is we're collectively building our story through participating in a world on a server that we've negotiated the of and that's his fictional world and he still is that way. His generation is still that way. The Zoomers, I think tell stories in a more interactive and collective format and they're not as interested in media that comes from a single voice, which I think is cool, so. [chuckles] JAMEY: I read some discourse recently about Studio Ghibli movies and people were talking about Studio Ghibli movies don't really have conflict and I thought that was confusing because obviously, there's lots of conflict in many of them. There's lots of problems and they solve the problems. I think that the thing that people mean when they say that isn't that there's actually no conflict, it's that there's room in those stories for quiet moments of reflection and that makes people feel like it's not conflict because you're having that space to sit with it and think about it and then continue. I think that's what is so relaxing about them. People will feel like, “I'm relaxed and so, it's not stressful and it's not conflict,” but it's giving yourself space to, I don't know, I already said it what I was going to say, so. [laughs] AMELIA: That's really beautiful. I met this screenwriter once when I was in LA and I was really surprised by his point of view because he said a lot of people think that drama is violence, aggression, death, hardship, and he says the best drama that most people want to watch is a good person has to make a tough decision. I just loved that statement because it's true. That kind of drama, it doesn't have to just be this doom and gloom, or I'm taking in trauma and trauma there. As soon as he just said that phrase to me, I was like, “Tell me more. What is the story?” I was like, “Tell me, I want to know the end of your story,” he's like, “No, no, no, that's every story I tell on TV. That is my story is like &#821

01:35 - Eli’s Superpower: Germinating Seeds & Gardening 03:03 - Accessibility in Tech Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) Remote Work 09:16 - Having Conversations with Leadership/Management Trust & Honesty Communication Shame & Guilt; Managing Expectations 18:26 - Team Culture and Setting Good Examples Reducing Stigma Removing Onus 20:09 - Human Performance & Safety People are the source of your success Pretending Out of Fear and Rejection Context-Switching 29:09 - Being Who You Are – Sexuality in the Workplace Battling Thoughts of Deception “I am allowed to change at any time.” I Am Me by Virginia Satir Discarding Things That No Longer Fit The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō 37:33 - Sobriety & Drinking Culture Reflections: John: Your marginalizations are not problems to be managed. They’re just who you are. Mandy: “I own me and therefore I can engineer me.” – Virginia Satir Rein: “I own everything about me, My body including everything it does; My mind including all its thoughts and ideas; My eyes including the images of all they behold; My feelings whatever they may be… anger, joy, frustration, love, disappointment, excitement My Mouth and all the words that come out of it polite, sweet or rough, correct or incorrect; My Voice loud or soft. And all my actions, whether they be to others or to myself.” – Virginia Satir Eli: How complicated and complex but beautiful it is to be a person. Make space. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 239. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, John! And I’m here with my friend and a very special co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Thanks, Rein. Hi, everyone! Today, we’re here with Eli Holderness. Eli has been in tech for 5 years since graduating in 2016 and has become disabled with CFS a few months into their career, which has really affected how they view the industry and what jobs they've been able to take. They're also genderqueer, bi, ADHD, and Jewish, and they're excited to talk about finally having a job where they can bring their whole self to work. They're quite an extrovert and have been blessed with a strong queer network since university, and are keen to break down the barriers into tech that shut out other marginalized folk who aren't so lucky as Eli has been. Welcome to the show, Eli. ELI: Hi! Yeah, I'm super excited to be here and really honored to be here for Mandy’s first in on the . I don't really have a thesis statement for what I want to talk about today, other than I guess, general topics around accessibility and tech, and an interesting aspect of that is things that have changed over the last year with the recent horribleness. MANDY: That sounds great. But first, we have to ask you the question we always ask everyone and that is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ELI: So my superpower is, if you give me a seed, like a plant seed, I can probably germinate it and it's a double-edged sword. Recently, I saw my parents. I was lucky enough to see my parents early in the year and my mom was making a tie out with Seville oranges and she said, “I've got all these Seville orange seeds. Do you want them?” And long story short, now I have a whole crop of orange seedlings on my windowsill because I just cannot stop myself. I'm not really sure how I acquired it. I think I might have inherited it from my grandmother who grows tomatoes and is a really keen gardener, but my bedroom is slowly being taken over by plants. It's kind of a problem. MANDY: I know the feeling. Ever since the pandemic, I ended up buying 2 plants and now I think I have 15 plants? Yeah, they just keep multiplying, but I'm enjoying having them around. So that's a great superpower to have because I’m either a hit, or miss when it comes to either plants thriving, or plants die. ELI: I've had really bad luck with succulents actually, which is supposed to be the typical you couldn't kill it if you tried, but apparently, maybe I've just got reversed superpowers when it comes to part like it's opposite day every day with me. But no, some of my oranges are doing quite well, so maybe you're manage to keep them alive. That’ll be nice. So one of the things I wanted to talk about is just experiences of accessibility and tech. I work 4-day weeks and I have done for a couple of years now. That's about what I can handle with my CFS, which is chronic fatigue syndrome. It basically means my body just sucks. My body is an extended practical joke that God is playing on me. And how various things I hope will change after the pandemic, or we will hopefully see some of the changes in our working patterns maybe persist in ways that they've been helpful to people for accessibility, like being able to work from home obviously is a huge one. But I think there's also been maybe a change in attitudes to meetings, how we schedule our time, and deliberately blocking off time just to work in your calendar so that you're not interruptible and various like, how those things actually can be super necessary for some people, even though we're only now coming around to them as norms in the industry. I don't know if you folks have experiences of how your work has changed and if that's made your work easier, or more difficult. JOHN: My work actually didn't change much as far as the pandemic. My team has been remote for the last decade. ELI: Oh, wow. JOHN: So it didn't change things for that. Although, the rest of the company outside of technology all went remote. So we've been using that opportunity to try and help the rest of the company get up to speed on things you can do to keep the team together while they're working remotely, because we've been building that expertise for a while. That was nice to be able to help other people, get up to speed on what that was when it all happened on such short notice for everyone. And I think I've heard so many people talk, much like you, about hoping that the remote work situation continues afterwards because we've all just had this huge example of work can get done just fine without an office so why are you insisting on an office? Yeah, I think a lot of people are really hoping that sticks. MANDY: Yeah. For me, I feel the same. I've always worked from home. It's funny, my daughter's going to be 12 so I always base the number of years I've worked from home on her age because it was literally when she was born. So it's been 12 years that I've done this. But I will say that over the pandemic, a lot of other people are now coming around to knowing that working from home, while it is a privilege, it's not exactly easy. I've had to put a lot of boundaries in place with my clients and take a lot more self-care because I feel like the pandemic has been a very unique situation. For me, at least, it's not the same as it used to be working from home. Working from home, I had more schedule and regimen and stuff, but now, as I said, my daughter, she's doing remote schooling this year. So there's that, I also, for my mental health, need to work out every day and I just do that when I feel like right now is a good time where I should take a break. I need to get up and do that kind of thing. Back before I used to be like, “Okay, 3 o'clock is the time where I go and work out.” Now it's like, whenever I need a minute, or I'm feeling overwhelmed, or I need a brief break, I go and do it. So I've kind of had to put more boundaries in place and a lot of people are now a lot better about that. I'm not getting excessive pings on my phone, or text messages, “Where are you? Where are you?” I stress to my clients asynchronous like, “I'll be back. I promise, I promise you I will be back, but please don't call me saying, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ [laughs] because I need some time away from the screen.” I find myself much more productive when I sit down and do an hour, or two and then go do something, like the dishes, or the laundry, and then come back for an hour, or two, and then go prepare dinner, or do a doctor's appointment, and then come back for an hour, or two and break up my day in that way. So I think that the pandemic has allowed us to be a lot more accessible in that way and a lot of companies are being much more like you don't have to have butts in chairs from 9:00 to 5:00, or 8:00 to 4:00, or whatever hours those are. ELI: It's interesting for me because one of the things that I lost when we went to work from home because I've always been in an office until this past year, but I, with my ADHD, really benefit from externally imposed structure. I actually gave a talk at a conference back in March, Python web conference, about working from home with ADHD. Having to be work from home and not have the structure of an office has really made me confront a lot of the ways that I was coasting based on that external structure and not really addressing maladaptive behaviors I had. So when we started working from home, I found myself just really procrastinating until I was able to put in place things like, “Okay, don't me at this time because I'm going to be head down on a piece of code,” and if I get distracted by something, somebody coming in with a ticket that needs to be done, I will be thrown off kilter for the entire rest of the day and broke my flow, like break my hyper-focus. So that was something where actually my chronic fatigue was less of a factor in my ability to work over this past year than my ADHD had been, which it flown under the radar for almost my entire life. But one of the things that's been really nice as well as that, the place that I'm at now at the moment, I can just say, “Oh, my brain is full of BS today. I'm not going to be very productive.” A huge part of being able to work as well as I do at the moment is having people who are willing to work with me in the ways that I need, which is really nice and letting me have a 4-day week, which is surprisingly uncommon. I have been turned down from a lot of job interviews and whatnot for needing a 4-day week and that's something I hope we see less off going forward as our industry accepts that a more flexible working pattern can still be useful, productive, and valuable. MANDY: Yeah, I agree. So how do you bring up conversations with people you work with, or your bosses, or management team? What do you say? How do you tell them what your individual needs are and what are their reactions? ELI: So the place I'm working at the moment, Anvil, it's a really small team. There's 8 of us and it's pretty flat structure as well. While I have the two co-founders, Meredydd and Ian, they run things as it were, but it's not a traditional, I guess, management. I don't feel beholden to them in the same way that I would to like, they're not my boss exactly, but they do pay my salary, but they're not my bosses in that sense. So if I say to them, “Look, I'm not going to be able to get this thing done because I just can't focus today,” or multiple times I said, “Oh, my brain is full of BS. My brain is too full of sludge today. I'm going to take a nap.” I did that today. The trust is there for them to say, “Okay, go do that and you'll get your work done when you get your work done.” So when I bring things up, like we have regular check-ins, or whatever, I might say, “Oh, I've been in a rut lately and I think I really need to change what I'm working on,” or how I'm working on it. This thing isn't working, that thing isn't working and whether, or not it's because of one of the weird ways that my brain, or my body is, they just handle it as if it were a need. There's no fuss just because it's a rising from a way that I am outside the norm, which I think is the ideal way to handle it because obviously, every person is unique and what we define as norms, or any vague clusterings of behaviors and traits that we see in people. It's just the most common way for a person to be, but everybody is going to differ from it in some way. I have had experiences in the past when the trust hasn't been there and I've said “Something's not working,” or “I'm struggling,” and a manager has just not, I guess, believed that I was being genuine, thought I was skiving, and that has been some of the worst experiences. I think that's where some of the dark side of inaccessibility and it's not just in tech. That could be in any workplace is when there isn't trust between you and the person that you serve, the person you're working for, the person who's representing your employer to you. When I say my views on accessibility have really shaped the way that I view the industry and what jobs I've taken, that's one of the key things that has to be there is my managers have to trust that I'm being honest about my abilities and my needs. And that's true for anyone, but I think it becomes particularly weighty when you're talking about things that arise from marginalizations. JOHN: And do you find that that's trust that you have to build up in relationship with those managers, or it has to be there from the beginning, because from the beginning, you're going to need some way to work with them and build some flexibility into your working relationship? ELI: So the relationships I'm thinking of where that trust has been present, and they've been really fruitful and positive relationships, it has been there just from the start, or given on faith, as it were. As I say, I became disabled fairly early on, it was three months out of university—fantastic, right—and I had just had a new manager. There has just been a shakeup in the management chain and the manager who I was then placed with had never known me not being ill and I was dealing with suddenly being ill, not knowing what was happening to me, and so on. I think it would have been a very different experience had he trusted me that I was being honest and not just trying to skive and get away with being in a cushy software job without doing any work, which is very much how that situation did play out. I think if the trust isn't there from the start, it's going to be very hard to earn and I think that part of hiring somebody and expecting them to work with you, if you don't trust them to be able to do that and manage their needs, expectations, and abilities, you have no business hiring them, in my opinion. JOHN: It struck me like, as you were saying that, that if the person is coming to that situation as, “Oh, you've got to always keep an eye on people because they're always trying to get one over on you and find ways to not work very hard,” or whatever. That person is never going to have a fantastic relationship with their rapports and then once you add in the other marginalizations on top of that, it just goes down and he'll leave him faster. ELI: And that's something that I think we've seen over the last year with reluctance, or resistance to moving to work from home, where if somebody who is managing has been very used to being able to walk around and see what's on everyone's screens and have this sense that they are keeping an eye on. They’re making sure nobody is secretly playing Minecraft for 8 hours a day, or whatever. But moving to work from home requires that trust and it reminds me of there's some advice I've had about having a long-distance romantic relationship where you've got to be really, really good at trust and communication. Those are two things that you should have in any serious relationship whether romantic, or not. I think that maybe working from home over the last year has exposed, in some relationships, but I think about work relationships where those things haven't been present. But it's not that working from home created them as that it exposed them and the companies, I think that are doing the best now at maintaining and building those relationships between co-workers in their management structure are ones that probably already had that and probably has set themselves up for success by just having a healthy environment to begin with. MANDY: So I have a tendency when I start with a new client—I'm an independent contractor; I work for several companies—my tendency is to always under promise and over deliver and then I do that and I'm really good at doing that. But then things inevitably come up, I get sick, and then I feel like I'm letting them down because it's like well, they expect the bar to be here and now it's down here. And then I'm disappointing them and they're like, “Well, where's the Mandy that we hired?” and it's like, well, you did hire that Mandy, but that Mandy is not here today. Do you have those feelings, first of all, and if you do, how do you deal with them? ELI: Yeah, the guilt. Whenever I have to take a day off sick, my goodness and it has definitely been compounded by the experiences that I've had of not being trusted. If I say that I need to take a day off sick and people go, “Oh, well, couldn’t you come in anyway?” I've been very fortunate in the last couple of jobs that I've had where I've had really, really ive relationships with managers that were full of trust. So I'm slowly starting to creep back from that a little bit. One of the ways that I think I got to that point, though, or one of the things that really helped me was upfront managing expectations. So I take days off now when I get sick, as opposed to having overdone it with fatigue and it’s got to a point in my fatigue where I need to take days off just to rest by cutting back to 4 days a week. That's one of the things where I say actually, I'm going to factor in that Eli isn't here today, that Eli won't be here one day a week. So don't hire me on that day and that was a choice I made because I wanted to stay in work, essentially. That was the only way I could consistently, in good faith, promise to be able to deliver a consistent amount of at the time being in the office. That's the big thing that I've done. I think there's a lot of shame that comes with having a chronic illness, not being at your best 100% as well. I think that in the tech industry, in particular, there’s this mentality of you’ve got to hustle. The rockstar developer and itting that you can't be that. I even said the word itting as if it was a failure, but stating that that's not possible for you can be seen as and can certainly feel like it being a failure and that's not fun, but at the same time for me, it's certainly true. I'm never going to be a rockstar developer putting in 70-hour weeks and cranking out loads of code. That's just not me. So tackling that head on and just itting it and saying, “If this is a problem, then it's not going to work out.” I have had a lot of places that I have been pinged by recruiters and then I say, “I can do a 4-day week. These are the that I can work on,” and they don't want it and that's their call to make. I hope that that will change. I hope that will change soon as a result of the recognition that flexible working [chuckles] is good actually for parents, for people with disabilities, for all kinds of people. But that's one of the big ways that I've managed those feelings and cut down on the situations where there's feelings of rise, but it's definitely it's something I massively relate to. I still do struggle to take time off and I'm really lucky at the moment to have. I had my checkup with Ian this week and one of the first things he said was, “When you're going to take some time off soon?” because I've been working a lot recently and that was really lovely. So having ive coworkers and they lead by example as well, they take time off just whatever, and it's great and it doesn't make us less productive, or I think it makes us healthier as a team and it certainly helps me navigate all the issues that I have surrounding it, which are myriad. JOHN: You touched on an interesting point right there at the end there about how not only is it useful for you to have obviously management buy-in with working and the flexibility that you need, but having the team culture of everybody around you, also them taking the time that they need and working on the flexes that they need to flex is an incredibly important part of ing you in feeling like it's okay for you to do those things. ELI: Yeah. It reminds me of, I guess, the push to put pronouns in your bio, or your screenname regardless of whether, or not you are somebody who people get your pronouns wrong. Because there's this phenomenon where strictly speaking, something is allowed, but if it's outside the norm, you still feel odd. You might feel ashamed of doing it. So even if you are allowed to take mental health days at your place of work, if nobody else does, you're still not allowed. Socially, you're not allowed almost. So setting healthy norms opens doors for everybody, including those who need the doors open for them, as it were. Like me. [laughs] I don't always have the energy to advocate for myself because of the reasons that I need to advocate for myself. Leading by example on the part of the people that I work with and the people who have the clout organizationally, even though we have quite a flat structure at Anvil. That's one of the things my manager at my last place as well, was really, really fantastic about was setting good examples. Definitely reducing the stigma around taking care of yourself, removing the onus from the person who will have the hardest time advocating for themselves. REIN: Well, I think there's a pretty general statement here, which is that managers that don't trust their employees are bad managers. ELI: I think it's very hard to be a good manager if you don't trust your employees. I'm thinking of, it's not in tech, but I did work a retail job and I think across that industry, that's just it. That’s not a thing; you're not trusted by your manager if you work in retail just as a default. The places where you are a unicorn land rare. I think I would agree with that general statement. I hesitate to make sweeping statements just in general because humans are so fast, complex, and complicated that there will almost always be a counterexample to whatever sweeping statement. But I think trust has to be the basis of any healthy relationship. If you're working together towards some shared goal as a relationship is whether, or not that's to have fun hanging out, or to get some work done, you have to trust that you're both committed to that, I suppose and lacking that trust for why you hired that person, why they're working for you, I suppose. REIN: In human factors on safety science, there's an old view of human performance, which is that people are a problem to be managed. People make mistakes; they have to be trained, they have to be watched, they have to be supervised. They can't be trusted to make decisions. People are a problem to be managed. The way you get a safer workplace is by dealing with problem employees and making sure that they don't screw up. The new view of human performance and safety is that people are the source of your success. ELI: Thinking about humans as problems and eventually, by eliminating any aspect of humanity that causes problems, you're just going to end up with nothing. It reminds me of that bot that was trained to debug code basis and it just deleted the code base. It was like, “There's no bugs because there's no code!” And there'll be no problems with us no humans, but there’ll be no success either. REIN: So I think that managers who look at people like they’re a problem to be managed are the source of a lot of these issues. ELI: Yeah, that definitely resonates with me in the sense that that's how I felt in my negative experiences, especially when it comes to managing my ability to work and viewing my marginalizations as problems to be managed instead of just ways that I am. REIN: Yeah. ELI: Which is a difficult one to navigate with chronic fatigue. I didn't always have this disability and it has limited my life, but it's also, I think made me think very deeply about things that I wouldn't have otherwise. So in my case, I think there's been a silver lining and now it is a part of the way that I am and you can take it, or leave it, but it's a package deal with me working for you, or me being friends with you, or me being part of your D&D group and it has to be accepted and can't be managed away. I think that's been the case as well with my other marginalizations Mandy rattled rattling off the whole litany of various things that I am and I have definitely had instances. So for example, with my Jewishness, where I have been expected not to bring it to work almost. Of course, in the UK, we don't actually have separation of church and state, we are actually a Christian country. Everyone does Christmas and you've got all the loads of the bank holidays and what not, Easter. Whenever I would make a remark that I did not fall into this norm, and actually I would be celebrating over instead of Easter and it was a slightly different time, it was viewed as like I was causing problems for being different almost even though it was just an aspect of the way that I am. So I think that's an attitude that definitely pervades and it's definitely harmful on more axes than just disability and ability to work. MANDY: I actually think that that’s an attitude that that needs to go. I've worked for people where I've totally been afraid to be my best self because I'm afraid they'll fire me. Like, I pretended to be a conservative for a very long time with a client and boy, was that stressful! [laughs] For me, a lot of it is fear and being rejected and then all of a sudden, I don't have a job and then all of a sudden, I can’t pay my bills and then it just spirals from there. So it leads to a lot of almost pretending to be someone that I'm not for fear of looking good, or looking a certain way, or being perceived as a certain person and it becomes really, really stressful. ELI: The way that I handled being genderqueer is I just based on vibes whether, or not I'm going to come out and at what stage. So at my current place, on my first day, I was like, “By the way, I use they/them pronouns. I’m genderqueer,” and absolutely plain sailing. It was totally fine. A couple of jobs ago, I decided not to and let everyone just assume that I was a woman, which is how I present essentially, or that's what most people assume by looking at me. Part of the reason for that was that the CTO was a Trump er who, it was one of the people who had jokes for everybody in the office. He had little funny jabs that he would make. “Funny jabs” and his funny jab for me was that I drank instant coffee and it was not real coffee. I just thought if he is going to make fun of me every morning for not drinking real coffee, what kind of fun is he going to make of me for not having a real gender and I thought, you know what, safer probably just to not bring it up. It is stressful and I felt dishonest and I'm not sure if I were in the same situation now, I'd be looking for another job, but I'm not. [chuckles] But being able to bring your whole self to work, I definitely tried before and been rebuffed and this is the first time that I think it's sticking with my current place, which is such a joy, honestly. I cannot overstate it and part of it is an intentional effort on the people creating and it's enshrining the culture to allow that. I think there's probably some truth to the idea that with norms the way that they are and with norms that don't allow you to be your whole self and that will punish you for being certain ways, it does require an active effort on people creating culture to go against that, which is a shame because if you're trying to get a business up and running, that might not be your highest priority, but as soon as you let it slip even a little bit, it's just going to spiral. JOHN: Yeah. You're right that it takes intentional effort that a culture like that does not happen by accident, or just falls into that. [laughs] One of the things I'm curious about is were are you able to suss out that aspect of the culture before you started this job, or did you get there and then realize that you'd locked into it? ELI: One of the things that was funny about what I was interviewing for this job was that I'd actually met one of the founders. We met at a social event in Cambridge briefly and I think not caught his name, not followed up, but we met, talked briefly, really vibed. And then when I went to this interview for oh, it’s a developer advocate job, that sounds great. The company looks nice. The product is cool. And I went into the interview and I was like, “Oh, it's you!” Somebody that I’d met briefly, really got along with. One of the things that Anvil did and that Meredydd and Ian did was, very deliberately, make sure that they were trying to be gender inclusive in their hiring from a very early stage. So even when I interviewed, there were four people and one of the core platform developers was a woman. I say was as if she's not with the company anymore; she is. [chuckles] Very early on in me working at Anvil, one of the things that one of them said to me was we were very conscious that if we got to a stage where it was 10 men and we're trying to hire our first woman, that woman being interviewed is not going to be inclined to take the job and be the only woman in the room with 10 guys. I guess, I got lucky in the sense that they found the woman candidate, Bridget, who was incredible and that they didn't happen to end up finding that the best candidate every single time was a guy. But they’re certainly intentional and it's something that we send her when we're trying to find new people as well because it's done us well so far! It's something that I have looked for in the past as well is when I’ve said, thinking about which jobs I'm able to take, trust with the managers and the ability to be myself, because it's so exhausting when you have to create and impersonate a whole other person. MANDY: There is a lot of context switching. ELI: Oh, yes. I’m trying to who's out where. My fiancé is genderqueer as well and there was a time when we were each out at each other's jobs, but we weren't out at our own jobs. So we were each being read as a cisgender at our own jobs, but with a genderqueer partner and it was just so confusing. I barely got enough brain to handle my day job, [laughs] let alone being two, or three different people in different places. MANDY: Now, I'm curious about that, if I can ask. So I'm actually going through that right now. I’m bisexual and not a lot of people know that and it's like, “Do I need to make a grand announcement?” ELI: I just like to pepper into conversation that I think Lucy Lou is really hot, or something. I don't know. It's a hard one. That's how I came out to my parents is that I was just loudly interested in women in front of them and never really said anything, but it's too much to my memory. I got very lucky with my parents as well because my younger brother is transgender as well. He actually came out before me and paved the way and so, when it came time to come out to them as genderqueer, I just gave him a phone call. I said, “By the way, I'm genderqueer. My friends are using they pronouns for me. You can, if you want,” and just left it. No, that is a difficult thing. Coming out, it's hard at any stage because that I've always felt is that I fear I've deceived people, but actually it's not me. It's the norms and assumptions that are being made completely in good faith by people that's not necessarily the people are being malicious when they assume me to be a woman, or assume me to be straight, but that I have to inform them that they're wrong and that's scary. I don't like conflict and oh, there's a potential for conflict here because I have to tell them that they're wrong and nobody likes to be wrong. Nobody likes to have made an incorrect assumption. It's difficult every time and I think the way that I get through it these days is just by being obnoxiously confident of people. Just saying, “Oh, if you were taking it back. I'm sorry, get over it.” [laughs] MANDY: Yeah, I’ve just been slowly peppering it into the people I trust and it’s like I do feel that level of deceit. I’m like these people have known me as a straight woman for—I'm not going to disclose my age—this many years and now all of a sudden, she's not? Like, is this a phase, is this a – you have those people and then to me, people who have been queer, or bi, am I gay enough? Am I – you know? [laughs] So it’s like there’s this whole spectrum of I don’t know where I am, somebody please help me! [laughs] ELI: Oh, that am I gay enough? I still have that. So I'm genderqueer and I've had top surgery. I wanted to have a flat chest and I was able to do that and sometimes, I still go, “But I'm not trans enough to have done that.” [laughs] The level to which you can absorb that kind of rhetoric, it's really quite impressive actually. Am I gay enough? Gay enough of what? Yeah, and the thing about is it a phase, “Everything's a phase, mum, show me the permanent state of the self, there's no such thing.” MANDY: One of my favorite affirmations is I am allowed to change at any time. I like to look at myself in the mirror and if I decide I'm with a woman and then all of a sudden, it doesn't work out and I want to go back to being with a man and I'm stringing. Again, I am allowed to change any time. I don't owe anybody that and I'm working on that. It's taken a lot of therapy for me to get to that stage, [chuckles] but all I owe is to myself. ELI: I have a friend who had been going through a crisis of identity and basically to me, it seemed very clear that they were much, much happier in one label than the other and so, to me, that's what automated the decision. But obviously, it's not so clear when you're in the middle of it and one thing I said to them that I helped was, “Even if you turned around tomorrow and said, ‘Oh no, I'm actually this other thing.’ If you lose any friends for that and somebody says, ‘Oh, you are fraud. You were lying to me all this time.’ That wasn't your friend to start with. It will be okay.” You are allowed to change. You are allowed to decide where and how and what label makes you comfortable and which behaviors in yourself you want to celebrate, or accentuate. MANDY: Yeah. I feel like that's very important to hear. As I've been navigating this, this past few years, I’ve realized I'm not alone. So I think some of the listeners out there, if you are going through new identity crisis, or I’m not going to call it an identity crisis, but if you're struggling with who you are, I think everybody is to one extent, or another. Even as a person, not just a gay person, or not just as a straight person, or not just as a political person, I think everyone out there is just struggling; who am I and right now, especially. ELI: Yeah, that’s something that with this friend I was discussing is the idea of an objective truth about yourself and whether, or not that exists. Would I be a ciswoman if this thing of my past was different, or I'd had a different balance of hormones while I was in the womb, or any of those ways that people try to find causes, or pathologize, or rationalize the ways in which humans are complex, different, and unique. I think I found comfort and peace in the idea that there isn't necessarily an objective truth buried at the heart of me underneath layers of experience, or whatever. I am who I am at this moment; that is broadly continuous one moment to the next, but it might change. At some point, I will have found that I've crossed a boundary over time maybe. I used to identify as a woman and then I don't think anything about myself abruptly changed, but one day, I was like, “No, actually I'm not. Yeah, women are great, but I'm not one. I'm not one of them.” That's not dishonest and it's not disingenuous to change over time, or to find that your surroundings have changed around you and that you relate to them differently. So for example, going back to the oh, what if the objective truth about myself, if I had grown up in a culture where being a woman looks different than it does now, or than it has in my life, I might have thought differently about my gender over time. But that doesn't mean that the way that I am is not real. REIN: This gives me the opportunity I've been looking for to name drop Virginia Satir. [chuckles] ELI: Ooh. REIN: She wrote a poem that I really love called I Am Me and I'll just read a little bit of it. It says, “However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turned out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest and invent something new for that which I discarded.” And later it says, “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.” ELI: As someone with a customized body, I love that. [laughs] MANDY: I love that. ELI: I love that as a way to approach therapy as well. I'm somewhere for whom, I'm very lucky in the what is recommended as the basic bitch first line therapy here in the UK, cognitive behavioral therapy, works well for me. And that is very much, I am objective looking at my thoughts and trying to encourage the ones that I agree with and discourage the ones I don't; engineering debug my brain. REIN: It might not surprise you that she was a family therapist. ELI: I like that. More therapists should be poets, [chuckles] in my opinion. I've had therapists that have said some incredibly profound things. I like the idea of as well, the imagery of discarding things which no longer fit you whether that's labels, or behaviors, or friendship groups, or political alignments, or whatever in the same way that you would with clothes. This is something where I've recently read Marie Kondo's incredible book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, and really loved the idea of everything you own which sparks joy and that you can look at something which no longer fits you and say, “Thank you for the role you've played in my life. It's over now,” and put it away and donate to charity, or whatever. I think applying that same method to non-physical aspects of our lives that we've outgrown that need to be put away, I think it certainly helped me to avoid the sense of shame, or guilt, or feeling disingenuous that comes with growing and changing as a person. MANDY: I feel the same applies to sobriety, which is also a thing that I struggle with. Like, drinking alcohol? It was fun while it lasted. We had some good times. We had some not so good times, but it no longer serves me so we're not going to do that anymore. [chuckles] ELI: Yeah. That's another axis on which I want to circle back to accessibility and tech because here in the UK, we have a really strong drinking culture and from my understanding, it varies across the States and but here in the UK, it is very much we are getting drunk at house parties from our early teens. The first place I worked had a very strong drinking culture. All of your work relationships were to be strengthened down the pub over a pint. Every work party was drink-y. I have a friend who is teetotal not due to, as far as I know, any religious, just a completely personal choice and actually that was one of the factors in them leaving that role at that company was because they were not allowed to be their whole self at work because being at work meant drinking to a certain extent, if you want it to be successful, popular, get the good projects and obviously, that locks so many people out. People who are sober for whatever reason. People who might not be drinking because they might be pregnant. People who just don't like to drink. [overtalk] MANDY: [inaudible] drinking. ELI: Yeah. People for religious reasons, or health reasons. It's one that I think again, sing the praises of my current place, when we hang out COVID safe ways we dislike lunchtime picnics and stuff and we've got new parents at our company who we want to be able to include in social gatherings and make sure that it's not predicated on drinking and being out late to be able to socialize with your coworkers, if you choose that that's something that you want. I think it's probably another thing where you have to take an active stance on it. So it's not to just absorb paradigms from the greatest society that you're embedded in. MANDY: I'm not going to say I'm not nervous for running conferences on Zoom because conferences do have a very big drinking culture and that’s a socializing thing and I’m very nervous about how I'm going to navigate that. It just seems like it's everywhere, but I’ve come to the place where I’m just going to say no and I have some fancy mocktails I like so that's what I'll be doing. [chuckles] ELI: Yeah. Something I really liked recently was—I do drink and I do like to drink—but I was at Python web conference and after the day it was done of talks and things, there was fun social event afterwards and it was all virtual because it's March and it was somebody making cocktails in their kitchen and showing us all of his fancy cocktail gear and the virgin ones, the non-alcoholic ones were given equal parity, like time and attention were paid to them. It was just presented as completely not noteworthy at all that somebody might not drink alcohol and I think that was a really nice way of framing it. It was just, here is the alcoholic question and here is non-alcoholic version and there's no value judgment being made about the two. I think that was also an active choice on behalf of the person doing that presentation and the people organizing the conference. But so many different ways that not paying attention to these things can lock people out of the industry and contribute to that good old leaky pipeline that we all know and love. JOHN: When we come to the end of every show, we like to do what we call reflections, which is to talk about the things that struck us about the conversations, or the ideas that we're going to be thinking about later. For me, something you said Eli, just recently was that your marginalizations are not problems to be managed rather they're just the way you are, they're just who you are is such a powerful statement about identity and how it should be thought about and treated that I really didn't like the phrasing of it is something that can be just repeated to drill it into everybody's head. MANDY: For me, I really liked the Virginia Satir poem that Rein shared, especially the last bit of “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.” I think that is so relevant and such a good way for everyone to keep in mind. I really believe that people shouldn’t be afraid of change. No, let me say that again because I think you can be afraid of change, but it's going to be okay and you are allowed to be afraid of change and it can be overwhelming and it can be scary, but you can get through it and I’m going to get through it. Thank you for allowing me to tell a little bit of my truth for the first time and in the tech world and on this podcast! JOHN: It's really great to have you on the show, finally. Your show. REIN: Yeah, you know in Lincoln, the welcome to your house scene? This is like the welcome to your podcast scene. MANDY: It’s not just my podcast. It’s all of ours. ELI: Bugs Bunny meme. Oh, podcast. REIN: I thought I might close this out by reading another part of that poem. She says, “I own everything about me. My body including everything it does. My mind including all its thoughts and ideas. My eyes including the images of all they behold. My feelings, whatever they may be—anger, joy, frustration, disappointment, excitement. My mouth and all of the words that come out of it—rude, or polite, sweet, or rough, correct, or incorrect. My voice loud, or soft. And all of my actions, whether they be to others, or to myself.” MANDY: I love that. Thank you. Eli, how about you? ELI: I guess I'm just thinking about all the different ways that people can be and how complicated, complex, beautiful, different, and diverse it is to be a person, the same person over time even. If space isn't made for that, including, or not including things that we understand to be marginalizations in our current model, it harms people and the places that put effort into making space for people to be people in all the messy, complex, weird ways that they are. I've got to do better! That's well deserved. REIN: Yeah, it turns out that that's good business, but it's also the right thing to do. ELI: Fully agreed, yeah. MANDY: Well, again, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eli. It has been absolutely wonderful having you and I’m so glad it’s been you here to be on my first episode as a ist of Greater Than Code and for listeners out there, I hope you like what you’ve heard and maybe you’ll see a little bit of me in the future. But if you would also like to talk to the rest of the , we do have a Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. You can it for as little as a dollar and if you cannot it, or you don’t want to it, just get in with me and I will let you in anyway. Thank you for much for listening and hopefully, I will talk to you very soon. Special Guest: Eli Holderness. Greater Than Code

01:00 - Mae’s Superpower: Being Able to Relate to Other People and Finding Ways to Them 03:42 - Contributing to Humanity (Specifically American Culture) Title Track Michigan Climate Change Clean, Accessible Water Hate & Divisiveness; Understanding Racial Justice 07:01 - Somatics and The Effects of Yoga, Meditation, and Self-Awareness Flow Kripalu PubMed Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Debugging Your Brain by Casey Watts 12:20 - Mutual Aid: Solidarity, Not Charity WeCamp Ruby For Good Harm Reduction Encampments “We keep us safe.” Rainbow Gatherings Burning Man Big Big Table Community Cafe 33:17 - Giving vs Accepting Help; Extending and Accepting Love, Empathy, and Forgiveness Collective Liberation The Parable of Polygons Listening: What could be of use? 99 Bottles of OOP – Sandi Metz 48:25 - The Mental Health Challenges of Being a Programmer Celebrating Small Wins; “Microjoys!” Reflections: Casey: The word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Also: help and be helped! Jamey: Valuing yourself and the way that helps the communities you are a part of. Mae: Engaging with s using the things your building is a reward and a way to give yourself “microjoy!” This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your and to our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 238 of Greater Than Code. I am your host, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here today with our guest, Mae Beale. Mae spent 20 years in and out of nonprofit-land, with jaunts into biochemistry and women's studies degreeing, full-time pool playing, high school chemistry and physics teaching, higher ed senior istrating, and more. She went to code school in 2014 (at 37 years old) to gain the technical skills needed to build the tools she wished she'd had in all the years prior. So glad to have you, Mae. MAE: Thanks, Casey. Thanks, Jamey. Same for me. JAMEY: So you may be ready for the first question that we're going to ask you, which is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MAE: Yeah, thank you. I think that my superpower is being able to relate to other people and find ways to them. How did I get good at that? Well, I've dealt with a lot of pretty complicated people in my life that you have to do extra thinking to figure out. So I think I got my start with that and I've done lots of different things in life and met lots of different people and felt lots of different feelings and thought lots of different thoughts. So I think that's mostly it: living. JAMEY: I was going to say that I know from knowing you that you've done lots of things, but even our listeners who don't know you probably already know that just after listening to your bio, so. [laughter] MAE: Yeah, and there's plenty more that didn't make it in there. That's something that is fun and a joke is no matter how long people know me, there's always still something that they didn't know and so, that's fun for me. I like to surprise other people and I love being surprised by people. So it's like a little game I have with all my fun facts. JAMEY: I love that. CASEY: I've got a question: what's on your mind lately. MAE: What is on my mind lately? So many things, I don't even know where to start. One is where and how can I contribute to the future of humanity [chuckles] and American culture in particular and in the circles that I'm in, drawing it down even more. So I think about that a lot. I think about my house a lot. I just bought a house and I'm going to do each room with a color theme so it'll end up being, you walked through the rainbow. Pretty excited for that, lots of things there. And I think a lot about how to empower others and be a more and more effective communicator. I think about that a lot. Probably those are the top ones and maybe Dominion. I play that every day. So I think about that a little bit. CASEY: [chuckles] Love that game. JAMEY: Me too. CASEY: This is great. All three are really interesting. I want to start on your first one. What opportunities do you see lately, or what have you done recently, or what do you hope to do to help the world help American culture help make an impact? What are you working on? MAE: From where I sit, it seems like the most important things that any of us can attune to about even a portion of is the environment and whatever's going on with our ability as humans to respond to climate change and water, like clean, accessible water for people, and hate and divisiveness. Those three things I think are our biggest challenges. So I try to do things that end up in those spheres, if not in things that ideally have some mix of those rather than having them be silos. One of my jobs is working with Title Track Michigan, and they are a relatively new nonprofit that brings creative practice to complex problems and is specifically focused on water protection, racial equity, and youth empowerment. Once all the uprising started in 2020, we created an Understanding Racial Justice course for white people in Northern Michigan and so, I've been helping to facilitate those courses and taking as many opportunities to rethink my orientation to all those topics as well. CASEY: That's so cool. You found a group that does all of those things in one. MAE: Amazing, right? CASEY: Wow. Title Track Michigan, huh? MAE: Yeah. I found them because my life radically changed a few years ago. A lot of things changed at once like, not just a lot, all of the things. So I went on this walkabout just trying to find ways to be of service in the world without expectation, watch who I met, and where I ended up. I ended up in Michigan and getting introduced to these people who then were creating a new nonprofit Title Track. Another thing I do is I have a consultancy that I have a flagship enterprise product for nonprofit, small business istration. That is a little bit of a Trojan horse for change management and organizational development and sustainable longevity planning for organizations. So the fact that I ended up there with them at that time and way more cool synchronicities happened. That's how I met them. So it just feels right and great to have landed in that space and then to have 2020 be what it became, we were already formed and positioned to try to be of help. JAMEY: This is an abstract question. MAE: Okay. JAMEY: But what does it feel like to feel like you're doing the right thing in that way like, the right place to be? I got the sense from you telling this story that things just came together in the right way at the right time and that's a beautiful thing when it happens and you said it feels right. What does that feel like? MAE: Mm thanks, Jamey. Well, my first thought is another thing that Title Track does in that Understanding Racial Justice course and a lot of circles I've ended up in have a focus on somatic and so, body centered awareness and engagement. So I used to always think my answer was going to be emotional when people ask me, “How do I feel?” and now I hear and think of my body first so that's cool. I'll answer a couple of ways, if that's okay. When for me synchronicities happen and I feel most alive, or of use, which is important to me, my heart literally feels bigger and almost breathing like I can feel air. I don't know how to explain that. I definitely will be smiling more, my back is straighter, and I usually have a lot more to say. All of a sudden, I'll have a lot to say. Other times, I have nothing to say! For how I might've answered that question previously would be closer to having a lot of things to say, like I'm a lot more creative, making connections, getting excited, and wanting to create new things together with other people. How about you two? CASEY: Just hearing you describe that, I have thought back on times I felt really proud and engaged and I noticed my posture improved, too. That's so interesting. I've had a nerve injury for 2 years. My hands go tingly sometimes. So I'm working on my back and noticing posture all the time. Interesting how my mood like that could affect the posture. I believe it, too. JAMEY: I'm not sure that I would have called out posture specifically in that way, but now that I'm thinking about it, I think what I would say is I feel lighter. MAE: Yeah! JAMEY: So to feel less bogged down, I can see in what way that's related to posture. [chuckles] MAE: Totally. Yeah. CASEY: We all have a lot to say on this, I love it. [chuckles] This reminds me of the Flow State. So when your skills match a need and it's challenging the appropriate amount, you're in a great concentration state, but if your skills aren't enough, or if the need isn't important enough—either one—feels a little way less good, not good. JAMEY: Totally. MAE: I lived at a yoga retreat center for a little while in Massachusetts called Kripalu—it's the largest yoga retreat center in North America. I had never done yoga and I was like, “Oh, cool. I'll just go live there [laughs] and see.” Anyway, I was there for three months and they have a part of their organization dedicated to optimal human performance. They have a partnership with Tanglewood and some other places around there to see if yoga and meditation can induce more Flow State, more of the time for top performing musicians, and just to be able to have more “scientific evidence” about how physiologically we can do things to get ourselves closer to those states more often. Pretty cool work. JAMEY: Yeah. That's really interesting. CASEY: I was just doing some research on the effects of different types of yoga and meditation on anxiety. I was trying to read some of the primary sources. I like to go to PubMed first—that's my go-to. Some people do Google Scholar. It's interesting, the framing sounded in a couple of papers like, “Well, it's not as good as CBT,” and my takeaway was, “Well, it helps an amount, huh? Great, good.” [laughter] So people who can't get access to CBT should consider that and that's true anyway. Science has shown this thing we knew was helpful anyway, is helpful in an empirical sense and that’s great. MAE: Totally. Casey, for anybody who might not know what CBT is, would you be willing to…? CASEY: Thank you. CBT here is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is one of the most common and effective forms of talk therapy you would do with a therapist. It focuses on what some maladaptive, unhelpful thought patterns are and helps you change them. MAE: And that's coming from a psych major, right, Casey? CASEY: That's right. I talk all about that in my book, Debugging Your Brain. It's funny, but you're flipping the script here. Usually we do this to our guests. MAE: [laughter] Great! CASEY: Love it. JAMEY: There's another project, Mae that I know that you've worked on that. I'm a little bit surprised that you haven't brought up yet, but I'm going to bring it up, which is your Mutual Aid program. MAE: Thank you. JAMEY: I think that when you are talking about doing something to make an impact on the world, like that was the first thing I thought of since I know you're involved with that and I would love to hear you talk about it. MAE: Yes. Thank you. Thanks for bringing that up and I did want to talk about that and I was looking forward to hearing what you have to say about that topic as well. So when the pandemic started, you may have seen these, or become involved, but there was a whole bunch of spreadsheets starting like Google Sheets of people who had some needs and people who wanted to offer some things. Google spreadsheets are really easy first for people with low tech skills and no budget to just come together. But I started being invited to all these different spreadsheets from around the country that include people's name, address, phone number, CashApp name, their exact vulnerabilities and identities, and current struggles in a spreadsheet that's able. It really freaked me out and I started coding that day about how can we start to do something to make these people not have to have their identity so exposed and through like WeCamp networks, Ruby for Good networks, and different Slacks I'm in of varying programmers, I started saying, “Does anybody else want to get involved?” and several people did. So we have built a platform to mutual aid groups and what we did immediately was find some groups to figure out what their needs were instead of just what we might imagine. They were doing a lot of, we call it dispatch moderated setups where people fill out a form and then volunteers read the forms and then match people and do all the communication manually, but not having peer-to-peer things go on. The system was originally designed to that dispatch moderated set up and once people started to go back to work in the fall and there weren't as many people able to devote as much time to volunteer, and as varying groups, especially ones that hadn't been around as long, realized they would probably need a lot more training in social work, ask things just to be more effective and figure out how to route people correctly within their community to services that might be able to help them a little more. Since the fall, we've to coding peer-to-peer solution. We have several different mutual aid groups around the country and right now, most closely working with groups in Michigan and New York state, just because that's where our networks are. Getting to launch some peer-to-peer stuff, but mutual aid itself has become a buzzword and like, what is that anyway? [chuckles] So that topic I love talking about. There's like a mutual aid saying, “Solidarity, not charity.” The whole thing is we're all in it together and we're not going to rely on different structures, or institutions that were set up most often in ways that institutionalized various forms of oppression. Just empowering people to connect with each other, have stronger networks, and build more resiliency is what's up with it, but mutual aid has been around for over a 100 years, at least as a term and a thing, but it generally, almost always springs from communities that have been disenfranchised. So when the pandemic started and a lot of new groups formed, not everybody had already checked what's already happening and a lot of different people, especially in communities of color, were surprised by like, they didn't hear that term, that's just what they do. There's been a big—along with everything else—learning of how those structures already were in place and how we can continue to grow them, and each other as we navigate this world we're in. Jamey, I was going to ask you about your involvement with mutual aid, too and if you had anything to add to that definition. JAMEY: I was going to say that I really liked what you said about finding new ways around things that have been institutionalized. Because I think one of the things that's so beautiful about mutual aid is the way that people can help each other realize what kind of help is available and what kind of help they even might need. A story that I really like to tell that and I think about a lot is I have a friend who's involved in mutual aid in Buffalo, where I'm from and he does repair work and just is very handy in that way. So he does a lot of mutual aid repair for people and he told me that the way that this started for him is that there was a request in our mutual aid Facebook group where someone was saying, “I really need $200, or something like this because my window is broken and I need to buy a space heater because it's been getting really cold. So I need this money to buy a heater and all of this stuff.” My friend came in and was like, “Okay, but what if I just fixed your window?” It had not occurred to this person that she could ask for that. MAE: Oh, boy. JAMEY: She was coming up with all these solutions around it. So this idea of like coming together as a community and saying, ‘Yeah, I can help you, but can we help a little bit closer to the source than what you even just asked for?” I think is really powerful. MAE: Yes. I love that, Jamey. Yeah, it's the closer we can be in community with each other, the easier those asks are. Something that you said about figuring out your own needs, there is a thing and it's related a little bit to some of the other topics we've talked about where there's like the white savior thing. People want to do something for people who they think are less – they have less than them. There's a power dynamic there and mutual aid—mutual, that's the main part. So you really aren't doing mutual aid if you're not accepting help. All of us have things that we could be ive with and things to offer. I love also having that not – there's a lot of mutual aid that is about just giving money and/or like reparation stuff. But I love when money isn't part of the equation and quantification of value isn't part of the equation. It's just like, “I have something to give and I could use something and this is how we're going to stay in community and in network and lower those barriers to have offers and asks be even easier in the future.” JAMEY: For sure. I think it's about meeting people where they are, too, because I agree about some programs are focused on money, and some people have money and can put that into the community and that's great. But maybe they don't have time to show up and do these things and other people might think like, “Well, how can I help because I don't have money,” but they have time, or they have skills. I think that everyone bringing in and saying, “This is what I have to offer with what's going on in my life right now,” and maybe it's money, or maybe it's time, or maybe it's something else that I didn't even think of that they're going to offer. [chuckles] MAE: Totally. When you were saying that, I just got a chill thinking if really every single person just that question you just said, “How can I help?” If we all did one thing, this is how to effect broad change. CASEY: How can people find the mutual aid groups near them? If they just search mutual aid, that probably gets a bunch, but they don't all say it, right? MAE: Yeah. It's a really great point. There have been some different efforts to link together mutual aid networks and there's a map, but not every network is on it because not every network even knows about it. [chuckles] So because mutual aid is so grassroots, it's not – CASEY: Right. MAE: A number of them have form 501(c)(3) is just to not be doing illegal financial transaction stuff that is problematic by having all this money go through their personal Venmo, or something. But that is what a lot of people have done. So mostly there's the Google option and the term mutual aid is getting used more and more, but there are some other phrases. I'm forgetting it right now. What's the name when they hand out medical supplies? Harm reduction, there's a bunch of harm reduction efforts. Also, in cities where there are a lot of homeless shelters, there's things around encampments and like becoming community with those folks to advocate. Another piece, major piece of mutual aid that I forgot to name is it inherently has a political engagement component in it. So one of the reasons why it is this solidarity thing is you're seeing all the humans as inherently equally valuable and that you're identifying the structural things that led to people having a different experience, or a different privilege, or a different outcome to what's going down for them. So then by identifying those together, you try to change the system to not create the problem. Whereas, to go back to that phrase charity, a lot of charities—which are awesome, I'm not trying to knock those—but a lot of them have more of a it's your fault, or shortcoming, or need that has put you where you are. Mutual aid is the way in which this is all rigged and on purpose, or not on purpose, or just the impact of the structures is how you ended up where you are so let's rejigger. JAMEY: A phrase that comes up a lot, in the protest community specifically, is, “We keep us safe and we say that at protests about security, medics and things, and wearing masks—I've seen people start to use that phrase. But I think that that's a phrase that really speaks to like what mutual aid is about, too. It's about we are doing something together for ourselves as a community, and we're not looking for something from the outside that comes in a hierarchical structure. We're just making this decision as a group of people to take care of ourselves and our neighbors and I think that's what I really love about it. [chuckles] MAE: Totally. Yeah, absolutely. And back to what you were saying, Casey, the how can people find those things? There's also just, “Hey, I've got some extra seeds,” or put a cabinet in your yard with some food in it and say free food. You don't have to associate with a “mutual aid group” to do mutual aid. It's like, that's just a blanket term, basically that offers a little bit of a cue about what those people might be up to. But it's really, in whatever way you are sharing and developing relationships with your fellow community . This is mutual aid. JAMEY: I thought of another example of that. MAE: Yay! JAMEY: We have this in Buffalo, but I think it's a thing that we're seeing other places, too. Separate from our mutual aid network, we have a Facebook Buy Nothing group. MAE: yes. JAMEY: And people will post like, “Oh, I have this, I'm going to get rid of it. Someone come pick it up.” “Oh, I was going to donate these spoons from my kitchen. Someone can have them.” When you said seeds, that's the kind of thing you'll see on Buy Nothing and I think that's been a revolution in anything even separately from it, because I do think that money plays a part in a lot of mutual aid stuff, because folks need money for things. But in Buy Nothing, it's pointedly without money and I think that that's a very fun and cool dynamic, too. MAE: Totally. Yes. I have a couple of things I would love to say them. One is that the bringing up Facebook has started to mutual aid. But also, I don't know if y'all have seen The Social Dilemma and just become aware of all of this tracking that's going down. There's something that is another motivator for us on the mutual aid repo is this is open source code that anybody who wants to use it can stand up their own instance and if you partner with us, connect with us, we will help you if you need us to. But it's intentionally not a multitenant app so that people have small datasets that they own and there isn't like this aggregate thing going on about local data. It’s basically a small tech for the win, which is also pretty mutual aid-y. Our group, like the programmers who are most involved, meet a couple times a week and know about what's going on in each other's lives. We are mutual aid for each other, too. The energy of what, how, who we are, and what we're doing is getting put into the thing that we're building that hopefully has that same effect. So there's this nice spiral thing going on in there that I'm proud of. I think there's a lot about what we referenced earlier, institutionalization of oppression, that has to be like, there are ways to create other options and they take cultivation of and building new structures. Stuff like this as an example of that and an experiment in it. Another one that it reminded me of is when I was younger, I used to go to rainbow gatherings. I don't know if y'all know about these. It's a super hippie thing and there's regional gatherings, but there's a national gathering at a national forest every year. All these people just show up and then they build earthen stoves. There's a bunch of people who do not participate in main society; they just go to these different gatherings and travel around as a… There's plenty more to talk about rainbow tribe and even the usage of that word tribe and what goes down. I'm not going to try to touch into that, but something I love about it is there's a whole exchange row where people just sit out with things and there's no money. You're not allowed to use money. I think I was 18 when I went to my first one and I was just like, “What? This is amazing.” Like, just to imagine my life not through a currency, or that evaluated exchange, it was so inspiring to me. It still is and so, some of what you said, Jamey, reminded me of that. JAMEY: I relate a lot to that, too. Burning Man events are also no money allowed. MAE: Ah. JAMEY: When I first entered that space, that was one of the things that really spoke to me about it too. In fact, it's also no barter allowed in Burning Man. It's a purely gifting economy where if you give someone something, a lot of times they become inspired to gift you something back right there and there's an exchange that happens. But culturally, the point of it is that there's not supposed to be any expectation of exchange when you gift something to somebody. MAE: Do you know about that restaurant in San Francisco that is free, but you pay for the person behind you if you want? JAMEY: I don't know about one in San Francisco specifically, but we have a program like that similar in Buffalo. It's called Big – I'm going to look it up so I can link it up. MAE: How about you, Casey? I’m getting excited so I keep saying things. CASEY: I’m reflecting on the award mutual aid a lot through all this. I like this idea that mutual aid as it is in action and that mutual aid groups do mutual aid, but individuals can, too. MAE: Yeah. CASEY: That's a pretty powerful theme. It makes the term more approachable, especially since it's a jargon word lately. It's just grassroots-y helping each other out, however that looks. MAE: Totally. CASEY: I'm thinking a lot about what communities I'm a part of, too, that naturally have that phenomenon. It's like, I'm queer, I’m in a lot of queer groups. I’m in interest groups like musician groups and they help each other do stuff. They carpool to the practice or anything like that that’s this. There's also a formal ones like D.C. Ward 6 has mutual aid groups that are named that. That's its own thing. And then even my Facebook friends, I just post like, “I have a crackpot, who wants it?” MAE: Totally! CASEY: But before today, I might not have used the word mutual aid to describe any of that because I'm not part of a formal approved mutual aid group, which is not the point of that term. MAE: [laughs] Yeah. CASEY: Just people helping people. MAE: When I was thinking about getting into tech, I, as a pretty outspoken woman who will address injustice directly if I see it, when I see it in myself and others, I wasn't sure if that was going to be a place for me. I had had some not awesome experiences with tech people before I was in tech. So I reached out to a bunch of people who were already in the biz and they spent hours talking to me about their experiences, answering all of my questions, and offering to help me. As I took the leap and went to code school and participated in a meetups and just, everywhere is mutual aid in programming, everybody is helping each other. “I have a question,” “I'm wondering about this.” This podcast is mutual aid, in my opinion. It's been really inspiring for me to be a programmer because I feel a part of a worldwide network of people who try to, especially with mixing in the open source piece, build things and offer what they can. It's awesome. CASEY: I have a challenge for people listening to this podcast. This week, I'd like you to help someone and accept help from someone, both in the spirit of mutual aid. MAE: Yes! CASEY: I'm not surprised; accepting help might be the harder half for a lot of people. MAE: Yes. JAMEY: I think that's true. [chuckles] MAE: One way I've said it before is that that is your gift to the giver. The giver doesn't get to be a giver [chuckles] unless you accept the gift from them and that people can, including myself at times, tend to over-give and that is its own challenge. So if you need to stay in the giving frame, [chuckles] you can be like, “All right, well, I'm providing this opportunity to the other person.” [chuckles] CASEY: Sometimes I've playfully pushed on an idea to people. I'm trying to help them and they say, “No, no, no. I can't accept your help because I would be indebted,” and I'm like, “You would deprive me of this good feeling I would get from helping you? Really?” [laughter] MAE: Yeah. CASEY: Thinking of it a little bit, I'm not like – [overtalk] JAMEY: [inaudible]. CASEY: Right. I'm just thinking that way a little bit, flipping it, helps some people accept the help then. MAE: Yeah. JAMEY: I think that people have so much harder of a time of extending love and empathy, and forgiveness, and all of these nice things that we might really value extending to other people, but not to ourselves. MAE: Yo, that's for real, Jamey and still on this theme, the seeing each other as equals as in community. My Mom used to say this great phrase, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” She was raised Catholic so it's got that in there, but I love that of this could definitely be me. There's a cool Buddhist practice that I learned from Pema Chödrön about you extend release of suffering to others and then you widen the circle to include yourself in it, but you don't start there. So similar to how you're saying, Jamey, that that is a challenge for a lot of people, it's just built into that practice where when you can't give yourself a break, [chuckles] imagining others in that situation and then trying to include yourself is an angle on it. JAMEY: I like that. I think also related to Casey's example of his joke. It's thinking about how what you do affects other people, I think sometimes we're better at that and if you're treating yourself bad, especially if you're in one of these tight mutual communities. If you're treating yourself bad, that's affecting the people around you, too. They don't want to see you being treated bad and they don't want to see you being miserable and they want the best for you. When you're preventing yourself from having the best, that's affecting the whole community, too. MAE: Yo! JAMEY: I hadn’t really thought about it like that until right now. So thank you, Casey, for your joke. CASEY: Powerful thought. Yeah. Like the group, your people, your team, they need you to be your best. So if you want to help your team, sometimes the best way is to help yourself. It's not selfish. It's the opposite of selfish. MAE: Exactly. Another thing I've heard a bunch of the different activist groups, some phrasing that people have started to use is collective liberation and no one's free till we're all free and if we are suffering, the other people are suffering and vice versa. So figuring out how to not be so cut off from ourselves, or others, or that suffering and seeing them as intertwined, I think is one of the ways to unlock the lack of empathy that a lot of people experience. CASEY: There's a really cool visualization I like that that reminds me of. It's called the Parable of the Polygons and you can drag around triangles and squares. You can see how segregation ends up happening, if you have certain criteria set up in the heuristics of how they move. Or if some people want to be around diverse people, it ends up not happening, or it ends up recovering and getting more integrated and mixed. It's so powerful because you can manipulate the diagrams. There's a whole series of diagrams. Look it up, it's the Parable of the Polygons. MAE: Cool! That is awesome. CASEY: So I want to be around people who aren't like me and that helps. It helps with this phenomenon and the more people do that, the better. MAE: Yeah, and having grown up in a small city, that's pretty homogenous on multiple levels. When I went to college and learned that people thought differently, my world was this very rigidly defined, this is how things are. [chuckles] My biker dad, that's still his way, his lens. When you start to experience people who are not like yourself, you let that challenge your assumptions, then you end up transformed by that. I was a double major in college—biochemistry and women's studies—and I being in an organic chemistry class and the professor said, “Well, if that's too hard for you, you can go take a sociology class.” I raised my hand and was like, “My sociology classes challenge me on every single thing I think about the world. Your class requires me to provide rote memorization, which I'm awesome at luckily and that's how I ended up in your class.” But that is not harder. That's that story. CASEY: The last episode that I recorded was with Andrea Goulet. One of the things that kept coming up was the old-timey programming interview questions were all about math. MAE: Yes. CASEY: Which isn't necessarily what programming is about. That reminds me here of rote memorization in that class versus complex systems thinking in sociology. MAE: Totally!
 CASEY: With these two choices, I might choose a sociology person to do architecture work in my software than the rote memorization person. MAE: Totally, definitely, every time. Yeah, and that's a different lens that I have coming in to the industry from having been an for so many years is our perception as programmers about what's going to be helpful is very different than someone whose day job is to do repetitive work like very, very, very simple apps. When I was in code school, I really wanted us to figure out how to make even our homework assignments be available for nonprofits and that's how my whole system in business ended up getting spun up. Oh, it was before that. My job before that, when I interviewed, I said, “Well, how long do you need someone here for? How long would you need me to commit?” and he said, “A year,” and I said, “All right, well, I'm not sure I'm the best candidate for you because I'm going to go to grad school and get a degree and be a consultant as businesses and nonprofits.” And then I was at that job for 8 and a half years before I went to code school. [laughs] But the thing about what could be of use just requires so much humility from programmers to defer to the actual employees and the workers about their experience and what could help them. Because so often, we think that we're the ones with the awesome idea and we can just change their lives and disrupt the thing. A lot of the best ideas come from the people themselves. I went to a project management training in Puerto Rico and it was a very rarefied environment of people who could pay for people to get PMP training, or whatever. The people that were in my cohort were factory project planners and not a single one of them knew anyone who worked in the factory. Like, they didn't get to know them as part of that project and they didn't have anyone in their sphere and my parents were paper mill workers. So when I'm sitting there and listening to these people talk about the worker and their lack of wherewithal, I guess, there'll be a gracious way to say it right now, I was just appalled. I try to take that into any time we are building software in a way that honors all people. CASEY: Yeah. My favorite leaders are the ones that listen to their employees and the s. I am happy with my roles in leadership positions, but the thing that makes me happy with myself is listening and if I ever lose that, I don't trust myself to be a good leader, or manager. MAE: Totally. CASEY: I could. I know it's easy when you get promoted to stop listing as much. It's the incentive structure of the system. I wouldn't blame myself if I lost it, but knowing I value it and don't want to lose it helps me hold on to my propensity to listen. MAE: Yes, Casey! Totally that. CASEY: Sometimes people have asked me, “What makes you think you'd be good at leading this?” That is literally my answer is like, “Well, I won't forget to listen.” MAE: Yeah. JAMEY: I think that it's weird the way that people create this hierarchy of good ideas and better ideas and which idea is better and put that kind of value judgment on it. When really, when you're dealing with software and trying to create something that works for the people that are using it. It's not about whether your idea is good or bad, it's about whether it's the right one for that group of people. My background, my first tech industry job was in agriculture and so, all of our customers were farmers and people that worked at farms, To it I don't know what it's like to work on a farm in that way, it's not a value judgment about whether you're smart, or good at programming, which people act like it is. It's just a true fact about whether, or not you've ever had that experience. [laughter] CASEY: Sometimes I run workshops where we think about all the pros and cons to different ideas and when we need it, we pull out a matrix. We get a spreadsheet that has columns and rows, and rows are the ideas. A lot of decisions are made with one column, naturally like, “What's the best?” You just say like, “1 to 10, this one's the best.” But when we break it out, we have lots of columns, lots of variables like, oh, this one's easier to build, this one's higher impact. And when we break it out even further, we can weight those columns then do the matrix math and people like that, actually. Even people who are math averse. They can fill in the numbers in each of the cells and then they trust the spreadsheet to do the thing. That gets us on the same page. It depends on the context, which columns matter, which factors are important and that can completely change the situation. Even if you all agree on this one's harder than that one, the outcome could be completely different. The columns, or the context in my matrix model. JAMEY: We’re reading at work 99 Bottles of Object-Oriented Programming, which Mae knows because we work together, which we haven't said yet on the show. But we're doing a book club. Your description of the matrix columns and what is relevant reminded me of the thesis of that book because it's like, there are tradeoffs. It's not that one tradeoff is necessarily more valuable than another tradeoff, it's just like what makes sense for this context that you're using and building it in, then you have to think about it in a nuanced way if you want to come up with a nuanced answer. MAE: I am so grateful to and inspired by Sandi Metz. Her ability to distill these concepts into common sense is so genius and moving, welcoming, accessible. So grateful, so really glad you brought that up, Jamey. One of the things that really stuck out from various talks of hers that I've been to is even if you aren't changing that code, that code does not need to change. That's bad code, but it works. That's great code, [chuckles] like working code, and splitting some of the bikeshedding that we do on code quality with business impact is a teeter-totter that I really appreciate. JAMEY: I like the way it puts value on everyone and what they're working on. Because my big takeaway from starting to read this book has been that I tend to write fairly simple code because that's what I find easy to do. [chuckles] I always felt well, other people write more complicated code than me because they know more about X, Y, and Z than me and I don't know enough about it to write something that elegant, or that complex, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I had placed this value judgment on other people's code over mine and to read about code that's dissecting the value judgments we put on it and determining hey, just because maybe it's not always the best thing to overengineer something Maybe it doesn't have to be because you don't feel smart enough to overengineer it. Maybe it can just be because that's not the right choice. [chuckles] MAE: Cool. JAMEY: I thought that was really valuable to think about. MAE: Love that, Jamey. JAMEY: Boost people's confidence, I hope because I think a lot of people need their confidence boosted. [chuckles] MAE: Yo, I had no idea what I was getting into as far as the mental health challenge of being a programmer. To maintain one's self-respect, especially as an adult who was successful in her career prior to then be like, there is a whole thing about the adult learner. But to have your entire day be dealing with things that are either broken, or don't exist yet, that's your whole day. Nothing works ever basically and the moment it does, you move on to the things that aren't, or don't exist. So it's so critical to try to and/or learn how to celebrate those small wins that then somehow feel like insulting that you're celebrating this is just some simple things. [laughs] And then it's like, why are we making a big fanfare? But those microjoys—I've never heard that phrase as opposed to microaggression, or something. Microjoys, if we could give each other those, it could go a long because the validation is a very different experience than I have seen, or heard about, or experienced in any other industry. It's a real challenge. JAMEY: Not only is everything broken, or doesn't exist. But once it's working, you never hear about it again until it's broken again. [chuckles] MAE: Yeah. [laughs] CASEY: That’s so true and it's such an anti-pattern. At USCIS, you would have every developer, who was interested, see an interview—we’re working on an interview app—watch the use the app every month at least, if not more and they loved those. They saw the context, they saw the thing they just built be used. That's positive that everyone deserves, in my opinion and it's just a cultural idea that engineers don't get to see s, but they should. They do at some companies and yours can, too. MAE: Yes, Casey! We are working on that at True Link financial as well. Figuring out how to work that more in so that we all feel part of the same team more and we're not like the IT crowd and in the basement and all we have to say is, “Hello, have you tried turning it on and off again?” [laughs] JAMEY: Casey, I love that because even as you were telling that story, I was like, “Yeah, it's useful to see how people use it because that'll help you make better decisions,” and blah, blah, blah, which I feel strongly about. And then what you actually said at the end was, “and you get satisfaction out of being able to see people using your thing.” I hadn't even thought of that dynamic of it. CASEY: Yeah. It’s both, happier and more effective. That's the thing I say a lot. These interviews make you happier doing your job and make you more effective at doing them both. How can you not? MAE: Yeah. JAMEY: What’s not to like? [laughter] It's true, though about knowing that people use your app. I started in consulting and a lot of the things I worked on felt a little soul crushing and not because I thought that they were bad, or unethical in any way, but just like, who is this for? Like, who cares about this? One of my most joyful experiences was one of the other products that wasn't quite like that, that I worked on when I was in consulting was an app called Scorebuilders and it was for physical therapy students have a specific standardized test they have to take and so, it's study prep for this specific test. There's like two, or three and we had different programs for them. And then I, a few years after that was, in physical therapy myself, because I have back problems and they have interns from college helping them in the physical therapy office that I went to and they were talking about studying for their test, or whatever. I was like, “Oh, that's funny. I haven't thought about that in a while. Do you use Scorebuilders to study in?” They were like, “Oh yeah. We all use it. That's what you use if you're in this program,” and I was like, “Oh, I built that,” and they were like, “What?!” They were calling all of the other people from the next room to be like, “Guess what?” and I'm like, “This is literally the best thing that's ever happened.” [laughs] MAE: Yay! CASEY: Yeah! That's such a good story in the end, but it's such a bad story. You never got to meet anyone like that earlier, really? JAMEY: Yeah. CASEY: That's common, that’s everywhere, but that's a shame. You can change that. [overtalk] JAMEY: I just realized since it was consulting and not like, I didn't work for Scorebuilders. CASEY: Oh, I’m sure. It's even more hard. JAMEY: Yeah. CASEY: I'm so glad you got that. JAMEY: Thank you. It happened like 5 years ago and I still think about it all the time. [laughs] Well, we've been having a great discussion, but we've pretty much reached the point in the show where it's time to do reflections and that's when everyone will say something that really stood out to them about our conversation, maybe a call-to-action, something that they want to think more about. So, Casey, do you want to start? CASEY: Yeah. I said this earlier, but this is my big takeaway is the word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Especially since it is, by definition, grassroots-y. There is no formal stamp of approval on a mutual aid group that formalizes it. That's pretty powerful. I'll be thinking about what communities I'm part of that do that through that lens this week and I challenge listeners to help and be helped sometime this week, both. JAMEY: I think one thing that I'm going to really try and keep in mind is what we were talking about, valuing yourself and the way that that helps the community. I really liked Mae’s story about including yourself after other people and using that way to frame it in your mind. Because I think that that will make it easier and thinking about like, this is something I struggle with all the time. I think a lot of us do. So I think that I really want to take that one into my life. Next time I realize I'm treating myself unfairly, I want to think, “Well, how is this affecting the other people around me who probably don't want to see me to do that?” [chuckles] MAE: Thanks, Jamey. Yeah. I have so many answers of reflections! The one I know I'm going to use immediately is this most recent one of engaging with s using the things you're building as a reward and a way to be able to get microjoy. I'm definitely going to use that word now more, microjoys, but I agree with both of what you said, too. JAMEY: Well, Mae thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us. This was really great and I think people will really appreciate it. MAE: Yay. I loved it! Thank you both so much. What a treat! CASEY: I feel like we could keep talking for hours. JAMEY: I know. [laughter] This is how I feel after a lot of my episodes. [laughter] Which is always good, I guess, but. Special Guest: Mae Beale. Greater Than Code