Podcasts about ada developers academy

In this episode, we redefine what successful, productive engineering looks like with Tammarrian Rogers. As the former Inclusive Engineering Director @ Snap, Tammarrian shares her perspective on global relational healing and what pulled her away from her traditional eng leadership role to explore this topic further. We cover the importance of incorporating relational healing practices into eng leadership & product development, the importance of the “healing profit,” how technology can help manifest healing opportunities for users, and how to align eng teams on embracing relational healing as a practice. We also cover how individual eng leaders can build awareness around internal self-talk – critical & positive – and explore self-love / reflection practices daily.ABOUT TAMMARRIAN ROGERSTammarrian (@tammarrian) has enjoyed acquiring over 30 years of engineering leadership experience in both hardware and software at General Motors, Apple, Microsoft and Snap.  She has had the opportunity to lead cross-functional teams with a focus on inclusive product engineering, quality assurance, release management and product localization and globalization.  She has also served on community non-profit and for-profit organizations including Ada Developers Academy, NordVPN, Northwest Tech Equity Initiative (NWTEI) and OPTYVA, a social purpose organization with a business sustainability focus.In November 2021, Tammarrian left her position as Snap's first Inclusive Engineering Director to redirect her energy to developing methodologies that promote and facilitate global relational healing; healing that will lead to a sustainable, healthy planet and future for us humans.  Ultimately, her goal is to systematically embed these successful methodologies into emerging and evolving technologies.As a solo nomad today, Tammarrian is enjoying meeting and connecting with people and land around our world. You'll likely find her on an urban or nature hike, in some body of water or giving much love to a stranger's dog."We really have to be aware of what is the impact of the product that we're building on our communities beyond the typical metrics that we use to say that we're being successful. So for example, we talk a lot about success being financial, right? It's a profit. How are we profiting? And that also hinges upon everything from our engagement metrics, the visits, the retention, the click-through rate. Whatever your product is, what is it that you're measuring to say that you're building and retaining a community of people and you're growing your business? We're all familiar with that, and I think what I'm inviting us to do as engineering leaders across our industry is to shift the currency of success and to bring in an entirely different currency.”- Tammarrian Rogers   Join us at ELC Annual 2023!ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You'll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San FranciscoFor tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023SHOW NOTES:Tammarrian's transition from eng leadership @ Snap (2:45)Redefining what a productive day means & focusing on global relational healing (5:09)How Tammarrian felt pulled to move away from traditional eng leadership (6:31)Exploring what global relationship healing means (10:03)Strategies for building awareness around critical internal talk (12:16)Frameworks for practicing self-love (13:47)Tammarrian's strategies for diverting outward distractions & focusing inward (15:32)Using your physical space to impact your perspective & vice versa (18:15)Encouraging eng leaders to consider the “healing profit” (20:19)Technology / products that manifest healing opportunities (23:12)An example of how Snap's technology helped users feel seen (25:19)Make sure your team is aligned on if healing is a value (28:06)Tammarrian's approach to dissonance between perceived & actual lived-out values (31:25)Active ways someone can transition from surviving mode to thriving mode (35:32)The No. 1 practice to embody the thriving mindset (38:20)Rapid fire questions (39:49)LINKS AND RESOURCESProfit Without Oppression - Profit Without Oppression unapologetically identifies the systems, institutions, and policies that privilege the few while excluding and harming the many. This book charts an inclusionary strategic path forward that seeks to develop an economic ethos and series of business models that are supremacy, coercion, discrimination, and exploitation free.The Silent Patient - A shocking psychological thriller of a woman's act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive.Humankind: A Hopeful History - International bestseller Rutger Bregman provides new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another.This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Justin Beals - CEO & Co-Founder at Strike Graph Go to www.thejasoncavnessexperience.com for the full episode and other episodes of The Jason Cavness Experience on your favorite platforms. Sponsor CavnessHR delivers HR companies with 49 or fewer people with our HR platform and by providing you access to your own HRBP. www.CavnessHR.com Justin's Bio Justin Beals is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in AI, cybersecurity, and governance who is passionate about making arcane cybersecurity standards plain and simple to achieve. He cofounded Strike Graph in 2020 to eliminate confusion surrounding cybersecurity audit and certification processes by offering an innovative, right-sized solution at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional methods. Now, as Strike Graph CEO, Justin drives strategic innovation within the company. Based in Seattle, he previously served as the CTO of NextStep and Koru, which won the 2018 Most Impactful Startup award from Wharton People Analytics. Justin is a board member for the Ada Developers Academy, VALID8 Financial, and Edify Software Consulting. He is the creator of the patented Training, Tracking & Placement System and the author of “Aligning curriculum and evidencing learning effectiveness using semantic mapping of learning assets,” which was published in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJet). Justin earned a BA from Fort Lewis College.  We talk about the following among a few other subjects Security Compliance Why It's A Business Accelerator  What makes a great CTO How to balance CTO/CEO roles  The Seven Social Sins Remote work and unlimited vacation Justin's Social Media Justin's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jubeals/ Justin's Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@jhavoc Company Website: https://www.strikegraph.com/

We sat down with our dear friend and ex-colleague Jennie Buechner to reflect on how her career took a sharp turn after a bootcamp at Ada Developers Academy. Full show notes with links: https://metacastpodcast.com/p/017-from-teacher-to-software-engineer-amazon We're always happy to hear back from our listeners, so don't hesitate to drop us a note! Email: hello@metacastpodcast.com Ilya's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyabezdelev/ Arnab's Twitter: https://twitter.com/or9ob Subscribe to our newsletter where we announce new episodes, publish key takeaways, and ramble about interesting stuff at https://newsletter.metacastpodcast.com.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help Enterprise B2B SaaS vendors shorten their sales cycles by 50-75%. My guest is Justin Beals, Co-founder and CEO of Strike Graph.  Justin Beals is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in AI, cybersecurity, and governance. He organizes strategic innovations at the crossroads of cybersecurity and compliance and focuses on helping customers get outsized value. In every startup he started, he focused on setting a foundational culture of employee growth. Based in Seattle, he previously served as the CTO of NextStep and Koru, which won the 2018 Most Impactful Startup award from Wharton People Analytics. Justin is a board member for the Ada Developers Academy, VALID8 Financial, and Edify Software Consulting. He's also an author and the creator of the Training, Tracking & Placement System US Patent. He's passionate about making arcane cyber security standards plain and simple to achieve. That drove him to co-found Strike Graph in February 2020 - which he leads as their CEO.  Strike Graph is on a mission to enable its customers to earn revenue faster by completing security audits successfully and quickly. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Justin to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the security audit services market. Justin shares his lessons learned how he found a sizeable market that Strike Graph can dominate by developing a product that creates a shift in value by aiming to be different, not just better.  His story about articulating what business he's really in and how he measures progress is a textbook example of how to create a company that's resilient no matter what crisis it'll find on its path.  Here's one of his quotes "Every company is concerned with their revenue. We didn't want to be a security company. We wanted to be a revenue company. Our goal was to say close deals faster, with more confidence. And if we can shorten your time to close by 50 to 75%, you can imagine the amount of efficiency that an organization gets, you know, in revenue acquisition quarter over quarter, there are startups that I've worked at that that simple change would have saved us, we would have been a market leader." During this interview, you will learn four things: That you create instant differentiation is you ensure the design of your solution amplifies the uniqueness of your ideal customer Why your mission should be about 2 things: Immediate and apparent value for your customers That a good exercise to repeat regularly is to start to look at what scales exponentially and what scales linearly Why crystalizing what business you are really in can mean the difference between failing and becoming the market leader For more information about the guest from this week: Justin Beals Website Strike Graph Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Stressed by the thought of 'not enough' traction? Eager to know how to remove the roadblocks that slow down your entire SaaS business? Then Subscribe here It's a short daily reflection on how to shape a B2B SaaS business your customers would miss if it were gone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Founded in 2013, Ada Developers Academy is the top program for empowering women and gender expansive adults to become software developers for companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, and other household tech names. CEO Lauren Sato is expanding into Atlanta and discusses Ada's amazing placement statistics, why Atlanta is the perfect city for Ada's model, and how funding from Melinda French Gates will take the program to new heights in our city.

Lauren Sato is the CEO of Ada Developers Academy, an organization which prepares women and gender expansive adults for careers in software development in addition to helping place them in internships setting them up for long-term career success. Lauren has deep experience in leadership and leading programs that empower women in sustainable ways. She has a BA in Adolescent and Young Adult Social Studies Education.Episode NotesLauren's passion for the work she does at Ada Developers Academy is so evident in our conversation. Providing sustainable life change for women and gender expansive adults particularly Black, Latine, Indigenous Americans, Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander, LGBTQIA+, and low-income people is the core of Ada's mission. Lauren is working to accelerate Ada's growth which has been challenging and also unexpectedly strong because of COVID.In addition to sharing information about Ada's program, her own story and journey of coming to Ada, Lauren shares stories of some of the women that have gone through the Ada program and how life changing it has been for them. We have some extensive discussions about diversity, the importance of language, and providing communities that people feel at home in. Music used in the podcast: Higher Up, Silverman Sound StudioAcronyms, Definitions, and Fact CheckAda Developer's Academy - https://adadevelopersacademy.orgAda Lovelace - Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. (wikipedia)Gender Expansive - People who did not identify with traditional gender roles but are otherwise not confined to one gender narrative or experience. (www.hrc.org)Seventeen percent of LGBTQ people polled lost their jobs because of COVID-19, compared to 13 percent of the general population, a survey found. (nbc news)From February 2020 to January 2022, male workers regained all jobs they had lost due to the public health crisis, according to an analysis by the National Women's Law Center of the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report. However, 1.1 million women left the labor force during that span, accounting for 63 percent of all jobs lost. While women gained 188,000 jobs in January 2022, they are still short by more than 1.8 million jobs lost since February 2020. It would take women nearly 10 months of growth at January's level to regain the jobs they lost, the NWLC report indicated. "While men have recouped lost jobs, women are still in a big hole, and that shows how the pandemic impacts genders in different ways," said Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at NWLC. "Part of the reason for this is because women still hold the lion's share of caregiver responsibilities." (https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/global-and-cultural-effectiveness/pages/over-1-million-fewer-women-in-labor-force.aspx)

After two years virtual, SXSW EDU 2022 was back in person in Austin earlier this month! It was an amazing four days of amazing conversations. By far, one of the most inspiring ones for me was the one I had on the Cognizant Foundation podcast stage with three women whose career paths have been changed by tech training programs that opened the doors for them in an industry that hasn't always been the most welcoming to women. Simply put: These women are amazing. These programs are amazing. In this episode – which we recorded live in front of an enthusiastic audience – you'll meet: Kate Nichols – a 32-year-old former teacher who packed up her bags in Austin and moved to Seattle to learn software programming at Ada Developers Academy. She got a paid internship at Zulily as part of the training. She loves education still and has been able to combine that love with her new career at Hello World.Sage Lee – a 26-year-old former retail food worker who went from stocking shelves to an intensive seven-month intensive software programming class in Denver's Turing School. Today, after a paid apprenticeship at Handshake, she's an associate junior programmer at the company. By the way, she went from barely making $40,000 to making more than $90,000 a year – that's a big jump from her salary at the grocery store.Maria Contreras – an Austin high school senior who started learning to code at 15 in a free Code2College afterschool program that landed her a paid internship at Indeed. We learned on stage that the now-18-year-old is headed to Rice University with a full scholarship to major in computer programming. What these young women have in common is their desire to move into an in-demand career, and that they were able to find free, or almost free, training programs geared toward young people who don't have the financial resources to do it on their own. We talk about how they did it, and how you can do it too! You can listen here – and I encourage you to listen all the way to the end – or you can download and listen from wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Kristen Titus, Hannah Lee, and Kyle Gunnels and all the Cognizant Foundation team for inviting us to record the podcast on their stage! WorkingNation was a media partner with SXSW EDU for the fourth year in a row. Check out our interviews for our WorkingNation Overheard series for a flavor of the other conversations we had in Austin this year. Episode 224: Expanding Opportunities in Tech at SXSW EDUHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlExecutive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa PanzerTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0Download the transcript for this podcast here.You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

Alexandra Holien is the Vice President of Revenue and Strategy and Deputy Director of Ada Developers Academy. She talks with Chad about working for a nonprofit that prioritizes teaching Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and low-income folks software development for free. Ada Developers Academy (https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) Follow Alexandra on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AlexandraHolien) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandraholien/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Alexandra Holien, Vice President of Revenue and Strategy and Deputy Director of Ada Developers Academy. Alexandra, thank you for joining me. ALEXANDRA: Thank you for having me. I'm excited. CHAD: Let's start right off the bat with giving folks a brief overview of what Ada actually is. ALEXANDRA: Yeah, I'd love to. Ada Developers Academy we are a super unique non-profit, and I think, well-functioning business. We're a tuition-free 11-month software developing bootcamp academy for women and gender-expansive people. That may sound like some of the other bootcamps you've seen out there, but we're completely different. We have this really cool intersection of education, social justice, equity, bringing money to the people that need money sort of drive about us. We prioritize serving Black, Latine, Indigenous, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander folks, and low-income folks. And we prioritize them because they've been left out of this capitalistic system the most. And we think if we can really put money in the hands of these gorgeous, resilient communities through the career of software development and one of the hugest wealth engines of our time, then we're going to change the world. We're crazy because it's like we're free for our students. CHAD: [chuckles] ALEXANDRA: There are wraparound services, ridiculous, not even ridiculous, just like, natural. And it seems unique, and it seems crazy. But these things that we're doing to support our students are actually just human and basic needs, providing comprehensive support for our students financially, childcare, mental health care, free laptops, just making sure that they're set up for success, unlike I think other more traditional education systems. So they can go and be really amazing software developers. And it's proven time and time again if you just set people up, open the door, give them the opportunity, make sure that you're creating equity, then 92% of those folks what we're seeing is our numbers are going to go out there and get full-time software development jobs. So that's Ada in the smallest nutshell and believe me, I'm going to tell you way more. CHAD: Well, we're going to dig into each of those things and more. I interview a lot of people who graduate from bootcamps. We have a pretty wide-reaching apprentice program. And I'm pretty familiar with what it looks like when people are graduating from those programs. And you can graduate from a three-month program and be successful, and I don't mean to imply that you can't be. But I do see folks who go to slightly longer programs, up to 11 months, a year like at Ada, and those people are often much more well-rounded developers not only with the technical skills but with all of the other skills that are important to development. How intentional was the length of the curriculum? And was there pressure early on to get people into the market faster? ALEXANDRA: Yeah, great question. I think that so many...let me answer your first question, which is how intentional was it? It had to be at the forefront of what we wanted to do. And the reason why it had to be is that we were taking a group of people that had already been left out of the system. And we already knew that there were going to be steps that they had to take to get into...like, once they got into the tech industry, getting in and staying in was going to be harder than their counterparts, harder than the white dude who took apart a computer or a Nintendo when they were in the 80s and growing up because their dads were software engineers. And then went on to college and knew they were going to be software engineers. So our founders, Scott Case and Elise Worthy, were so intentional in making sure that the technical bar and the technical merit of our students going into the industry was not what they were going to have to worry about. That was not going to be the thing that kept them up at night thinking like, oh, man, I don't know if I can do this because I don't understand it. That was not going to be it because we knew there were going to be other things. We knew there were going to be people mistaking you for the secretary. And these are examples that are all true. It's mistaking you for the secretary or the person that's the assistant or the executive assistant when they walk into the room or that person that constantly misgenders you. We knew there were going to be other really big obstacles that they're going to have to overcome when walking into a very homogenous industry like the software development industry of the United States. We knew that that was going to be the big thing. So being intentional about the programming that we were going to offer our students that five and a half months of nine-to-five intense programming that also concentrates on what I don't think a lot of bootcamps really concentrate on, that CS fundamentals part of it, showing people that that is a part of the world. It's not the part of the world of the most entry-level software engineers, but it is there, so showing them that that's there. And then giving them that internship, giving them that on-the-job training that Ada does that no other bootcamp does like we do. That sort of on-the-job training where you go in, and you see what does that practice of what you learned in code look like in real-time when you put it next to one of our sponsoring companies' tech stack? So it had to be really intentional. I don't know if it was like, yes, this has to be perfectly like this. I think we definitely iterated and made it better over the years. But making sure that the technical bar of our students was at the technical bar of everyone else was something that we really wanted to make sure that we hit on. So they didn't have to worry about...so retention was not that they couldn't quote, "hack it" like everyone else like the people say, or they didn't have the aptitude. The retention was all about is the company creating a good enough environment for these folks to want to stay at that point? CHAD: What is the tech stack that you're teaching now? ALEXANDRA: Yeah, we just switched. We talked about this for a little bit. We just switched from our beloved Ruby on Rails. We were Ruby on Rails for a very long time. But we just switched to Python, React, JavaScript. HTML and CSS is part of our curriculum. And yeah, that's it, Python, React, JavaScript. CHAD: I don't take the switch away from Rails personally. [laughs] ALEXANDRA: People did. We had companies being like, "What are you doing? We love Ruby." And we were like, "Yes, we do too, but we had to move forward and on." [laughs] Ada started at the same time Ruby was in the spotlight, too, eight years ago. CHAD: So is that what you're seeing in the industry now, is Python, React are in more development, in more demand? ALEXANDRA: Yeah, we're seeing that definitely come up. We put together a steering committee for our curriculum when we made this switch. We basically just brought in our partners to help us like, okay, what is the thing because, you know, our partners range...every cohort, we have a company that sponsors the education of one of our students, and then they take that student on as an intern. So we can't please everyone. We knew we couldn't please everyone here. But we wanted to find a good middle, and Python seemed like a really good middle. Python, React was a good middle for us to go towards for just the future. Eight years from now, again, we'll probably be in the same place we are right now. But we say it's like teaching Spanish. We're not teaching you building out a bunch of Python engineers. We're building out people that know how to be agile, know how to learn different curriculums, know how to be flexible and all that, and know that the industry is changing, and you have to be a lifelong learner, right? CHAD: Yeah. ALEXANDRA: You know this to be a part of this industry. CHAD: Well, beyond the tech, what are some of the other things that students in Ada learn or focus on over the course of the program? ALEXANDRA: I would say our curriculum is broken out into three distinctive pieces that are all a part of our everyday classroom. So that first part being that technical part that our students really are just getting the chops of what it means to be a software engineer, understanding a full tech stack, understanding the frontend, backend, the APIs that all connect the stuff, just making someone that sort of bare bones of what I think is a good software engineer. The next step is that social justice piece, which is held up by our equity and policy team. They're really teaching students once you get in the door, it's not just about getting in the door; it's about staying in the room. And it's about not just diversity; it's about inclusion. And we're seeing that we cannot just expect just because someone's decided to sponsor an Ada student, we can't expect someone knowing how to support someone that is outside of what they've supported in the past, and we know what that looks like. So we have to really create students who know what allyship looks like, know what advocacy for themselves looks like. So they can really manage up in this process, bring people in. We do not want to say someone did something or said something to me, so we're just going to push these people away because we found that when you push those people away, especially in the tech software engineering space, you're really just left out of it. You're just out of the system. So we have to figure out how to change the system from within. So really teaching students how they can talk about gender expression, how they can talk about racial expression, how they can advocate for themselves while they're on the job. And the goal of all of this is actually to keep people on tech. We don't want our students having to talk about these things all the time. We want them to be talking about the tech that they're doing just like they want. And so we want to just keep things as much on tech as possible. The third part is our professional development part. How do you manager up, take yourself in that first block to that SE2 SE3? And that's just helping folks with career development. CHAD: When it comes to the inclusion piece, I imagine it's a little bit of a fine line to walk because you don't necessarily want to put all of the work of creating an inclusive environment on the people who have been historically marginalized. But at the same time, you want to set those people up for success coming out of your program. How directly do you provide training to the companies that are sponsoring? ALEXANDRA: Completely directly. [laughter] We know that if we can get a whole...I would say I sign people at the CTO level and the senior manager level. They have the budget. They're the ones pulling the purse strings. But once we figure out, once you sign on as a company, your manager and mentor are going through our corporate accountability training. While our students are learning the technical part of it, our managers and mentors are going through a monthly training with our team to make sure they are ready to receive these interns. So when that intern comes on-site, they're speaking the same language. We're not only teaching the students how to be allies and advocates. We're teaching the managers how to be. So many times, they're like, "Someone on my team keeps misgendering someone, and I don't know what to do." We had enough of those calls, so we decided to teach them what to do. And not only do we teach them, but we also put them in peer learning groups together so they can teach each other what to do because that's where they really start listening to each other. When two folks coming from the same background are having a conversation on how to be a better manager, we love that. CHAD: Yeah, that's great. And I think that's really likely a very important component to overall success. Well, let's talk economics a little bit because I've gotten up on my soapbox before around how companies have traditionally been way too comfortable saying, "Well, we have this position open, and we're using recruiters." And the position has been vacant for months. And in the meantime, they're willing to pay recruiters tens of thousands of dollars trying to fill the position. And I've always made the case like, tech and the way the economics work it would be better to invest that money that you're willing to give a recruiter into training people. When I learned about Ada, it really resonated with me. So what is the complete picture of how students afford to attend Ada, where the funding comes from, and how that all works out for them? ALEXANDRA: Oh, you're speaking to the choir. [laughs] When I talk about this with companies, I am oftentimes like, "How much did you spend on recruiting last year?" And then they tell me the number, and I'm like, wow, okay. We work with companies we call them our company partners because they are partnering with us to complete this mission of Ada that we have, which is to educate more women and gender-expansive people to be software engineers. Our business model is simple, but it works. We wanted to remove all barriers for entry for people that wanted to become software engineers within that group. So we wanted the program to be free. We knew that was always the case. We knew that there was this hole with bootcamps that was out there. This was seven, eight years ago where it was like people were going through these bootcamps and then not getting full-time jobs. And so we knew we didn't want to fall victim to that. So what we did was put an internship on the backend and really got companies to not just put their money where their mouth is but put their time and resources where their mouth is. That's more money. So they pay $55,000, and that $55,000 educates the student while they're in class with us, keeps the program completely free for our students. And then the other part of their buy into this whole shebang is you have to now make this person a hireable junior engineer because they're going to do an internship with you. And then everyone's always like, okay, the return on investment. To me, the return on investment is you did good, company. CHAD: [laughs] ALEXANDRA: But also, the return on investment for a lot of our company partners, I call it the icing on the cake because it is not a part of our model. It is 70% of them convert their students to full-time jobs, full-time FTE offers from these internships. We had a company give...they sponsored six interns, gave six offers, and then went on to do a hiring loop with our graduating cohort and gave another 23 offers. CHAD: Wow. ALEXANDRA: And this happens every six months. So these companies that are out there saying it's a pipeline problem or I'm just going to spend money on this recruiter to go find talent, I'm like, are you kidding me? We're either in your backyard, or we're a phone call, phone call, excuse me, an email away. CHAD: [laughs] A fax away. ALEXANDRA: I age myself. I said Rolodex to our students, and people didn't know what it was, and I was so embarrassed. I was like, wow, I guess a LinkedIn I'm sorry. CHAD: [laughs] ALEXANDRA: But we're like, you know, the resource is there, the talent is there. We have 120 students in our cohorts, and that's only growing. We're expanding to Atlanta. We're expanding to the DC area. It's there. So when companies are like, "I don't know." I've seen us move the needle at mid-sized companies. There are companies like Amazon, and there are over 100 graduated Adies there. We've moved the needle. So it's like, you just got to call or email at this point. There are other ways to do it. And if you keep going to the same well, you keep going to the colleges; you keep going to that recruit, yeah, you're going to fill up the same thing over and over again. And we know 70% of jobs are received by...you're networking with your friends, and you're networking with your peers. And if something like 75% of the industry is white dudes or just dudes in general, then we're just going to keep bringing in the same person. And it's not just diversity is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do, but it's also like you build a better product, period. That's just a better product. CHAD: Yeah, the different perspectives that people have, the different blind spots that people have. When you get rid of those, you build a better product. ALEXANDRA: And we're talking about building the future here. We have to include the other 50% of the population. So it's imperative. It's not necessary; it is imperative we get up to that. You're at 40% in your company. We got to get up to 50%. We got to get a little bit more. And we got to make sure that 50% is diverse on all intersections of what diversity can mean. Mid-roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: So you mentioned the companies pay to sponsor individual students. You also have mentioned earlier in the conversation that you provide things like child care. So are the pooled resources of all of those sponsorships also going to pay for those additional benefits while in the program, or do you have another source of funds? ALEXANDRA: We are still very much so a non-profit. [laughs] We have a good amount of philanthropic dollars coming our way, and it's individual donors. I would say one of our biggest clumps of donors, our biggest group of people that donate to Ada, are our alumni. They come out with 160% salary change, and they are the first people to see the value in giving back to Ada. We also have some major donors out there. We just got a pretty large expansion grant from the Pivotal folks, which is Melinda French Gates, MacKenzie Bezos, and the Schusterman Foundation. They invested $10 million in helping us expand. That expansion has served more students. Wraparound services mostly come from philanthropic dollars. So donating to what we do, donating to keep our program equitable, is always very much needed because about 10% of our budget is all philanthropic dollars, and that's covering those wraparound services barriers to entry. CHAD: Is healthcare one of the wraparound services that you provide? ALEXANDRA: No. I wish. I mean, geez. CHAD: I know. ALEXANDRA: If the U.S. government gets it right, after they get it right, we'll follow soon. [laughter] But we're trying. We are trying to do it differently. We're trying to meet people where they are and see the reality of people's situations. And the reality is that if you're a woman or gender-expansive person and you want to take this chance, we offer a zero-interest either loan or a zero-interest grant that comes directly from Ada, or from our partner, Community Credit lab. And that's a zero-interest loan. We don't even check your credit. If you're in it with us, then we're going to get it in it with you. And that zero-interest loan just gets recycled back to serve more people. So that zero-interest loan is while you're in class for that five and a half months, you're going to need still some money coming in. So we make sure you still have money coming in. The stipend hits when you get to internships, so from that 55,000, about 17 goes directly to the student for their stipend while they're interning. Also, we give a childcare stipend. We're looking for a childcare partner out there because we really want to be able to make this more of a national program. But we're looking for that out there. But we give that stipend out to folks so they can pay for daycare or whatever they may need so they can actually come to the program. We have a laptop program. You need a Mac to come to Ada. Everyone can't afford a Mac. We take donated Macs from companies that...companies sometimes give them a two-year life cycle for their Macs. So we can use it for another couple of years. So we take donations for Macs. And we also have a fund that we fund every year so people can buy a Mac. And my favorite and I think one of the most needed things is we partner with BetterHelp and offer our students free therapy while they're in the classroom and while they're in their internship and a little bit after that as well. The free therapy was just...we're in a pandemic, and it's hit women hard. It's hit gender-expansive folks, parents, Brown folks, it's hit people hard. And so we're like, hey, why don't we, while you're in a pandemic, send you through the most rigorous part of your life? [laughs] And so, making sure we were supporting people all around was really important to us. And it did nothing but create success for us. This did not make a deficit in our bottom line. This actually created more success for us. We saw when we did this; we got more people graduating. We get more people donating back. We get more people paying back their loans faster. So it just does nothing for the community but make it better and stronger. So we're going to continue to do it. It's going to continue to always be a part of who we are at Ada. But the wraparound services are key to the success. CHAD: That's fantastic. So you mentioned you're expanding. Where is the original location? ALEXANDRA: Seattle. We are a Seattle-based school. CHAD: And you're expanding to Atlanta and DC you mentioned. ALEXANDRA: Yeah. We first went digital because you know -- CHAD: That is what I was going to ask. ALEXANDRA: [laughs] CHAD: How have you dealt with the pandemic with a primarily in-person model previously? And then how has that affected your expansion plans? ALEXANDRA: The pandemic was shitty and just horrible in so many ways. And out of a lot of shitty and horrible times, it creates a lot of innovation, and that's what it did. Our leadership team is a group of Brown parents. And they went to work immediately. We switched from being an in-person classroom where there's a lunch club, and a push-up club, and there are hugs everywhere and to being 100% online program in three days with systems. And companies were coming to us saying, "How are you creating community in this time?" So we did it very quickly. It taught us that we can educate people digitally. So the first thing we decided to do is like we've got our digital cohort up and running. So still, I would say in quotes, "our Seattle cohort and digital cohort," but digital cohort basically means you're partnering with a company that is fully digital, and they are not attached to anything geographically. And that helped us expand to Atlanta because it helped us jump over the hurdle of like, oh, we have to go get a brick and mortar. We have to set up this brick and mortar. Instead, we just decided to educate people still digitally. If you're in the Atlanta cohort, you're still having your education 100% online, and your internship is going to be in person with an Atlanta-based tech company. So you might be but and see [inaudible 24:11] in Atlanta later on, but we can educate you digitally. So we didn't have to slow this down. We saw the need just like the amount of women that lost their jobs in the pandemic. We were completely energized by the fact that we can do this. We have people that believe in us. They're giving us money. They're funding this. We can do it. So we went for it. And Atlanta is the first campus. We already have staff there. We already have a campus director on point there. And then, the next expansion will be to the DC area. And we're excited to do the same thing. It's educate them digitally because that's what we've been doing for the last few years, and we're good at it. And find but and see partnerships in DC because that's how we can really make sure we have good programming that we know they can do and then give them to the sponsoring companies to complete their programming with the internship. CHAD: So where are the current limits of growth for you then? ALEXANDRA: Current limits for growth, I mean, we've been such a Seattle-based place, and COVID pushed us into that national arena, so not a lot of people outside of our geography know who we are. Pacific Northwest was our sweet spot because people used to have to move to Seattle to be a part of Ada. So we got a lot of Californians. We got a lot of Oregons, Montana, Idaho, some Floridians because Florida knows about...we have a very huge population of Floridians. I don't know how they know, but they know. CHAD: [laughs] ALEXANDRA: Our thing is, how do we get the Ada Developers Academy name and model out to the rest of the country? So they know that we are here, and we're an option for them if they want to become a software engineer. CHAD: And right now, it sounds like you have your sights just set on the United States, not internationally. ALEXANDRA: Not Internationally. I always joke about Ada at sea, but we'll see. CHAD: [laughs] ALEXANDRA: Give me 10, 20 years to get that spun up. But I would just love to...[laughs] but yeah, over the next five years, there'll be five markets in Ada. By 2025, we're hoping to educate 10,000 women and gender-expansive people. We just graduated a class of 72 last Thursday. And we just admitted another class of 120 that starts in March. So we're chugging. But right now, it's Seattle, digital, Atlanta, DC. I imagine there'll be a Southern region, and then probably a Midwest region coming after that. CHAD: So, and then you have the purely digital cohort too? ALEXANDRA: Yep. And that's that sort of the sixth market, purely digital, which means there are so many companies that went fully remote and have no plan on coming back. And so that's just a market that we want to make sure that we're...we want people to opt into that. That's for some people who want to be fully remote forever. Some people are seeing that they need some sort of community while doing this work. And so they want to have a but and see internship. And there's every which way in between. So we'll figure it out as we move through this pandemic like the rest of the folks. CHAD: You've shared some numbers there. And I think sometimes it's good to put that in context because people don't realize that 10,000, on one hand, sounds like a small number in the grand scheme of the United States. But actually, it's a very large number. ALEXANDRA: It's huge. CHAD: The U.S. only graduates around 65,000 CS graduates a year in the whole United States, so just to put that in context for people. ALEXANDRA: Yeah, it's huge. I looked at the numbers for...I'm in Seattle, and I'll just say there's a college here, a large college here in Seattle, and they graduated 300 CS folks last year, and 20% of them were women. And we graduated in six months, 72 women and gender-expansive, and our focus is Brown folks, low socioeconomic folks. So you could just imagine underneath that umbrella of women, even under that, the diversity that you see. We're getting up there with some of our colleges, and we're doing this every six months. And so it's a powerful model. It's the reason why I've been here for six years. It's the reason why I get really excited talking about this program. [laughs] I don't know if you can tell, but I get really excited talking about it. Because once people get in, they love being a part of our program, and they love being a partner with us. And it's a cool place to be. It just feels like a transformative place right now. And I think that we can really make a difference. CHAD: Yeah, your excitement, and I'm a big believer in the opportunity. Your excitement is clear [laughs] when you're talking about it. How did you get into this work? ALEXANDRA: I was in recruiting before. I did technical recruiting, contractor for a few different places. And I just saw the amount...and I came from a working-class. My family is from the Deep South in Louisiana. And the average income from the town I'm from is $26,000, and that was my reality. And then, when I started technical recruiting, it was insane. The amount of wealth that was a part of this churn, the going to these colleges, early recruiting, paying people $6,000 a month, paying them a living stipend, making sure they had a plane ticket home, hot air balloons, tours of people's, you know, these millionaires houses. I was like, holy crap, this has to be more readily available. And again, having two working-class black parents, they didn't even know what software development was. We didn't even know that was a possibility. My dad was like, "We're getting a computer," because he wanted to be on the forefront. And we got to that clear Mac that was like a purple color. We had that purple one. CHAD: [laughs] ALEXANDRA: And my dad was like, "We've one." But still, there were kids in my school and in my college that had been around computers their whole lives; their schools had programming and things. So they just had that extra step. My opportunity to see in was recruiting. And after that, I was like, okay, where do I find the intersection of this and what I want to do, which is making sure that black folks have money? To be crude about it. [laughs] If we're going to work and live in a capitalist society, then I want us to have some coins to play, and that is where I found Ada. And I love having this place. I just get to be a part of this place where I just get to open doors or show people a door. They can open it themselves and go through, and just that's the amazing part of me, a part of this is watching people change their lives, buy their grandparents' homes, pay off their student debt, get a divorce, anything they want to do. [laughs] But to have the agency to do it in this world we live in, in the society we live in, and that's all I care about is that agency. CHAD: Yeah, I was very privileged to be exposed to computers really early on and get to experience that spark of I love this. This is what I want to do. And I talk to so many people who just never had that opportunity to discover that that was even a thing that they could do, let alone love. It's just incredible when I meet someone who's like a plumber, and then they somehow get that exposure to computers or technology, and you see that spark go off for them. And it's amazing. ALEXANDRA: It's so cool. It's one of my favorite...like; our admissions process is pretty rigorous. I think the average is like 15% or 20%, depending on the cohort admissions process. And to hear how obsessed these airline stewardesses or hairdressers or mothers are obsessed with coding, I'm like, yes, yes. Or these folks who are like...Oh, we had this woman who she was an immigrant from...she fled Israel, and she came to the U.S. And she's like, the only thing she knew about coding before she started was she had one time saw someone with two screens in a movie. CHAD: [laughs] ALEXANDRA: And she saw them on the computer, and she saw two screens. And then she started going through finding free stuff online. She found Ada. And this person's sitting in front of me talking about how geek they are about arrays and loops, and I'm like, yes, this is amazing. And to watch that person graduate less than a year later with just the salary that she got from Microsoft, and just the feeling that she felt when she got to call home and say, "Hey, I'm a software engineer now," I was like, all day, all day. That's like the gravy for this. CHAD: It has nothing to do with aptitude. It has everything to do with opportunity. ALEXANDRA: Oh my gosh. Yeah, opportunities. Yeah, it's everything here. CHAD: Well, that's great. And Ada is providing folks with that opportunity. And I am so excited to hear about it and share it with our audience. Hopefully, students are listening and want to sign up but also those sponsoring companies too, right? ALEXANDRA: Yeah, for sure. Sponsoring companies too. We love you too. You keep the wheels on this bus. So definitely give us a call. CHAD: So if folks want to get in touch, where's the best place for them to do that? ALEXANDRA: Our website that's the best place to start, adadevelopersacademy.org. And there there is stuff on corporate partnership. If you sign up on the partners' email list, it leads you right to my email. And then, for students, we have full admissions. Our admissions opens in March for the next Atlanta cohort. There are going to be 48 seats in Atlanta, 60 seats digitally, and 60 seats in Seattle. I would say get ready for that via our website. CHAD: Awesome. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm along with all those links that Alexandra just mentioned and a transcript of the entire episode. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Alexandra Holien.

Ada Developers Academy seeks to change a lack of diversity in tech by creating a learning platform that trains women and gender-expansive people to enter the industry and reach their goals. Students can come to hold jobs with tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft after just one year, most of them witnessing life changing salary increases.    In this episode Jodi Petrie, March EVP, and Lauren Sato, CEO of Ada, discussed the reality of the tech world today and how Ada is playing a role in propelling the careers of minorities in the tech world and changing the tech landscape to be a level playing field for all.

Shamira Marshall is an attorney who learned to code in 2019 and today is a software engineer at GoDaddy. Her interest in tech started in law school and then attended Ada Developers Academy to make the career switch. Which is where she and I met! Resources: Ada Developers AcademyShamira on Dev.to/MiraMarshallShamira on Twitter  @MiraMarshalll We Belong Here Podcast:Follow Lauren on Twitter @LoLoCodingWeBelongPodcast.comSubscribe on AppleSubscribe on SpotifyWe Belong Here Discord CommunityJoin us on Discord Server today! bit.ly/webelongdiscord 

Trying to figure out how to break into the tech industry can be daunting. Traditional four-year institutions can be expensive places to learn computer science and lack of exposure to the skills needed in the industry as a whole can derail a career before it gets started. In this Expanding Opportunities in Tech podcast series produced in partnership with Cognizant Foundation, we examine alternative, free training programs, each offering a foot in the door to teens and young adults from historically underrepresented groups in the tech industry, including women, BIPOC, and people from low-income backgrounds. Five years ago, Miriam Cortés, then 33, found herself juggling massive college debt and unable to pay her bills despite working full-time as a substitute teacher and holding several other part-time jobs. "I had one of those—when you're in your 30s—'What am I even doing?' panic attacks. I have no money right now. I can't afford rent," she recalls. Out of high school, Cortés earned a B.A. and then a Master's degree but says the timing was wrong and she was unable to find work in her chosen field—industrial engineering. That's when she started piecing together a number of jobs to earn a living. Cortés was thinking of moving back to her hometown of Miami from Seattle when a friend told her about Ada Developers Academy, an 11-month free program with the goal of "preparing women and gender-expansive adults to be software developers." At first, she was skeptical about a free school that made such big promises in such a male-dominated field. "There's no way that there's a free program that helps you find a job, or an internship, and then if that doesn't work out with the internship company, it helps you find a job further on and you don't owe them anything. That's not real." she remembers thinking. But it was real—and still is—and Cortés was soon on a pathway that has changed her life. She started out learning software languages such as Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and JavaScript, but she says those weren't the most important skills she learned. "It's really hard at the beginning...but you're getting into an industry where that's going to be your reality for however long. I have since learned Python and Java, and some other stuff, but essentially your most used skill is the learning how to learn on your own, or learning how to figure out the right questions to ask." Part of the Ada program is a paid internship. Cortés did hers at Zillow, the online real estate hub, which hired her as a full-time software development engineer. Now 38, she's gone from working multiple jobs and barely making ends meet to having a $118,000-a-year career that she loves. Cortés says Zillow also is providing her with opportunities to move up at the company and gain new skills at her own pace. "I've really appreciated that at Zillow, There's been micro ways of figuring out what I want that next step to be for me. I feel very lucky now." She also has embraced the Ada mission and now sits on its Board of Directors. Opening the Door for More Women in the Tech Industry Lauren Sato, CEO, Ada Developers Academy (Photo: Ada Developers Academy) Cortés is exactly the type of woman Ada Developers Academy can help—smart and motivated, but stuck in a job or career that, for whatever reason, isn't right for them, says CEO Lauren Sato. "We have over 500 alums now at Ada—and another 5.3 million women who left the workforce over the last year—who can attest to their career not being a good fit, whether it's because they just ended up not liking it, or it wasn't a good fit for their families and their family decisions," Sato tells me. "We've had accountants come to Ada and they realize that they want more flexibility, they want better benefits, they want to be paid what they're worth. They end up at Ada and build these incredible careers that really work with their lives." Ada doesn't admit students with a traditional tech background.

It took no time at all. In the beginning, we looked at computers and the internet with wide eyes and open arms. It was a technology of liberating potential for us all. Now, it is arguably a dystopia: a dark monolith of algorithms, surveillance, criminality, and job-displacing robots. Three Stanford professors with long careers in the tech industry, know of the shadows of these tangled webs—they shined a light on them, and offered some hope with System Error. It doesn't have to be this way. Big tech's focus on optimization leaves out one key facet: human optimism. Big tech is driving towards deeper riffs of discrimination, further erosions of privacy, and more losses for the working class. What do we hope for in the future? What is it that we value? Should big tech tell us what we value? Or should it be the other way around? Reich, Sahami, and Weinstein offered thoughts, suggestions, and tools to give us some power against that dark monolith. Rob Reich is a philosopher who directs Stanford University's Center for Ethics in Society and is the associate director of its new Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Mehran Sahami was recruited to Google in its start-up days and was one of the inventors of email spam-filtering technology. He's been a computer science professor at Stanford University since 2007. Jeremy Weinstein was a White House staffer for Barack Obama, launching Obama's Open Government Partnership. Since 2015, he's been a professor of political science at Stanford University, where he now leads Stanford Impact Labs. Lauren Sato is the Chief Executive Officer of Ada Developers Academy, a nonprofit, cost-free coding school for women and gender-expansive adults. Creating greater economic power and agency for BIPOC women and gender expansive folks means a better world for everybody. Buy the Book: System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation online click here. 

Roxanne Agerone went from working in chemistry to working in software over the course of the year. After being accepted into a prestigious coding program Seattle, Roxanne sold everything she owned, bought a school bus, packed it full of everything that was left, and drove across the country. It has been four years of software development, and she loves it. (No, Roxanne doesn't still live in a bus, but it was a great adventure and so worth it.) Watch the YouTube HERE: https://youtu.be/u9RspXeuZj4 ABOUT OUR GUEST   Roxanne Agerone is a software engineer with a passion for solving problems and creating new software. Previously, she worked as a laboratory technician for Sanesco International before moving to Seattle to participate in the Ada Developers Academy coding program. Roxanne landed a job with Tableau and now works for Salesforce.     Don't forget to subscribe to Educative Sessions on YouTube! ►► https://www.youtube.com/c/EducativeSessions   ABOUT EDUCATIVE   Educative (educative.io) provides interactive and adaptive courses for software developers. Whether it's beginning to learn to code, grokking the next interview, or brushing up on frontend coding, data science, or cybersecurity, Educative is changing how developers continue their education. Stay relevant through our pre-configured learning environments that adapt to match a developer's skill level. Educative provides the best author platform for instructors to create interactive and adaptive content in only a few clicks.   More Videos from Educative Sessions: https://www.youtube.com/c/EducativeSessions/   Episode 71: "I Bought a School Bus to Learn Code" with Roxanne Agerone of Salesforce | Educative Sessions

Trae talks with Mariya Burrows about how the Ada Coding Academy is bringing high tech education to underserved communities.

The RailsConf Scholarship Program (https://railsconf.org/scholarships) 03:12 - Tram’s Superpower: Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Per Night! 04:08 - Leah’s Superpower: Being a Companion to Long-Distance Runners 04:55 - Stefanni’s Superpower: Doing Things She’s Terrified of Doing 05:34 - Being Afraid and Grappling with Self-Doubt * Asking Questions and Being Vulnerable * Call-Out Bad Behavior 12:34 - Team Psychological Safety 17:20 - Education & Learning Environments; Tech Journeys * Ada Developers Academy (https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) * The Turing School (https://turing.edu/) 27:52 - Making & Noticing Progress; Comparing Yourself to Others * The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know (https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Code-Science-Self-Assurance-What-Should/dp/006223062X) Reflections: John: Finding new ways to be of service to other people. Leah: What can we proactively do to make our space safer and more conducive to diverse thought? Mando: It’s okay to make mistakes and not be perfect. Steffani: How common it is to openly talk about these things in the Rails Community ❤️ Tram: Representation matters! Humanization and inclusivity. Calling people out. Lending Privilege -- Anjuan Simmons (https://anjuansimmons.com/talks/lending-privilege/) Transcript: JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 235. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, John. And I'm here with three RailsConf scholars who are going to be joining us today, which I'll like to take turns introducing yourself, maybe starting with Leah? LEAH: My name is Leah Miller and I’m a Platform Engineer at Highwing, which is an insurtech startup based out of Denver. Before making over the switch to tech, I spent almost a decade in the insurance industry primarily working as a production underwriter. In my spare time, I enjoy running and craft beer and frequently, the careful combination of the two. I’m also a new dog mom to a rescue pup named Orla. MANDO: Great. Tram, you want to go next, please? TRAM: Yeah. So hi, everyone. I'm Tram Bui. I’m currently attending Ada Developers Academy, which is a tuition-free coding program for women and gender-diverse folks in Seattle. The program includes an internship match with a Seattle tech company. So currently, for my internship, I work as a Developer Relations engineer and what this means is that I try to make it easier for Rails developers to deploy their apps to the cloud. Outside of coding, I try to maintain it and improve my high school tennis skills. I also like to read books and also, thinking about my next great public transportation adventure and volunteering for local nonprofits. And then Stephanie, I can pass it on to you. STEPHANIE: Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm Stephanie and I've been working with Rails for the past 4 years, but now I'm trying to transition from dev full-time to having my own projects. And besides software, I also like to talk about plant-based diet, financial independence, and mental health. Also, if you have noticed my accent, I'm from Brazil, but I live in Vancouver, BC and yeah, I'm really happy to be here. JOHN: Awesome. Welcome to the show, everyone. So this is just a little setup here. Not every year at RailsConf, but most years at RailsConf, we do have a special episode where sometimes, we've got many of the panelists are together and so, we can record in the same room, which is obviously very novel for us. This year of course, it's all online. One of the things we’ve also done is bringing in some of the people who are part of the RailsConf Scholar Program, which is the program to expand access to tech conferences to people that are underrepresented and to give them some guidance on how to make the most of their experience at the conference. We always think it's great to get the opinions of people that are brand new to this industry and see what their perspective is on everything. So we're going to start off with our usual question which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? We can go really in any order. Who would like to go first? TRAM: I can go first. So my superpower would be the ability to get 8 hours of sleep a night [chuckles] and I think I acquired this power – I think I was very just like, I loved nap time as a kid and I grew up knowing the importance of a good night's rest. I think for me to be my best self, that’s one of the big things that I need to have. I think growing up and going to college, it was very like, “Oh, sleep is not important,” but I always had noticed the importance of sleep and I think it does hustle economy, too. People are very fast to just cast aside and was like, “You can sleep when you're dead,” but I'm like, “No, if you don't sleep, you will die faster.” So I'm going to take every opportunity that I can do at least get a full night's rest. LEAH: I am so jealous of that superpower. [laughs] I think mine feeds into a little bit of the opposite of that, but my superpower is the ability to keep people company when they're running through the night during a 100-mile races, or ultra-marathons. So people running it 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, getting really down, needing someone to lift them up, I can run alongside them and sing, or just be a companion to keep them motivated. I think I acquired this skill from being a middle child. I spent a lot of time just entertaining myself and being pretty independent and if you can entertain yourself, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that to others, keep people going, so. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: I would say that my superpower currently is a work in progress actually, but it's doing things even if I'm terrified of the way I always struggled a little bit with self-confidence. How I acquired that, I actually had to go to therapy first to build the foundation, but now I think I've been getting pretty good at it and the feeling of doing the things that you're scared at the end is a really good feeling. You feel like a superwoman. [chuckles] JOHN: Oh, those are all such great answers. I want to dive into each of them, I think oh, my thoughts are jumbling up because I want to ask questions to all of you. Well, I think I'll start with Stephanie. That's an amazing superpower and it's definitely going to serve you well. It's something that I've had to learn as I develop my speaking career at the same time. Even just thinking that it was possible for me to get up on stage and do that, that took a while to get there and then actually doing it also took a lot of practice. So certainly, that's going to be awesome. MANDO: Yeah. It's so easy to just keep doing the things that you're good at and try to ignore, or maybe push off the things that you're not so good at, or you don't have that confidence in, Stephanie, like you were saying. It's funny, I keep relearning this lesson over and over again, there's this project at work that I've been putting off and pushing the JIRA ticket over just because I kept telling myself that it wasn't important and that I could do – other things were higher priority. It's just because I was kind of scared, but I wasn't going to be able to do it as well as I could do the other things. I just had to sit down and do it and then I pushed up the PR and it got ripped to shreds by the other wonderful, [laughs] amazing engineers that I work with. But it's good. I didn't die. [laughs] So it’s funny how we have to keep learning these lessons over and over again sometimes, I think. JOHN: Yeah, that reminds me that there's a related skill in there also, which is realizing when you were afraid of something. Sometimes you think, “Oh, it's just not important that happened right now.” MANDO: Yeah. JOHN: As an excuse, but once you realize, “Oh, I'm actually afraid of how this is going to go.” It allows you to approach it differently. You can be like, “Oh, okay, well that's what this is. All right, then now I know how to like face it, head on rather than pretending it's some other reasons.” So I think that that's really important as well. MANDO: Absolutely. Yeah, and it took me a couple of days to [laughs] realize that that's what I was doing and it wasn't until that was the last thing I had to work on for the sprint after I had reshuffled and moved everything over and then looked at my other teammates, JIRA boards to see if they had any stuff that I could help out with [laughs] that finally I was like, “Well, okay, I guess I'll just do this one.” TRAM: Yeah. I think sometimes for me, the anticipation, or the thought of it is even scarier than actually doing the task itself. I've had this happen to me so many different times. For instance, with the podcast, I'm like, “Yeah, this is something that I want to do because I like listening to podcasts,” but I was like, the nervousness and the scariness of putting myself out there and just thinking about it leading up to this moment, it's so much scarier than actually being in the moment and talking with y'all. So yeah. LEAH: I think part of it, too is recognizing that your feelings are not existing in a vacuum. There's other people that experience the same insecurities, or just going through what you're going through. We were interviewing someone a couple weeks ago at my company and just talking about the stressors of being from a bootcamp and being hired into an engineering organization as either a junior developer, or a mid-level developer, or whatever level, but just knowing that your background isn't a CS degree, or it's just a little bit different than what other people have. And then having that insecurity of I'm pushing up a PR and then are 20 people going to make comments on this and then that gets pushed to Slack and everyone sees all 20 comments. Am I going to be laughed at, or looked at as less than? So it's just nice to express that to someone else and have them regurgitate the same feelings, or just reflect back to you that you're not the only one who's having self-doubt in that way. MANDO: Yeah, and it's tough for me at least to remember sometimes that I come from a very different place privilege wise than other folks on the team. So it can be a lot easier for me to do stuff like, just push this PR up and ask for comments because my experience may be very different than someone who doesn't have my same background, or the amount of experience that I have, or the kinds of relationships that I may have with other folks on the team. I strive to help create spaces whether at work, or wherever where people can feel comfortable asking questions and not worrying about people coming in and being overly critical, or negative, or whatever. But my lived experience is very different than others. That's something that I need to keep in mind that you can't always just assume good faith that everyone's going to treat you the way that you would maybe treat them and I have to actively work and actively communicate to people that this is that kind of place. JOHN: Do you find that there are specific things that you do to communicate that, or at least to make that ambiently knowledgeable to the other people in the team? MANDO: That's a good question. I think the easiest thing you can do is make sure that you're modeling both sides of that behavior like, asking a lot of questions, putting yourself in vulnerable situations, and then also, making sure that you always jump in and respond positively when others do that so that you can help set a baseline. I think of what the behavior should be and what behavior is expected, and then the second thing is always making sure to call out behavior that doesn't hit the bar. I can't remember where I first heard this, but my buddy, Jerry, he's the one who always drops the phrase to remind me, he says, “It's as simple as saying, ‘We don't do that here.’” It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be a huge problem, or anything. Just when there's behavior that you don't do here, you say, “We don't do that – [laughs] we don't do that here.” It's as simple as that. LEAH: I love that. MANDO: Yeah, Jerry's awesome. JOHN: I think this is a really interesting topic because I'm always looking for examples of ways to make that easily communicated in a team environment. So have any of you had experiences where maybe someone else on the team was able to communicate some thoughts of psychological safety, or things that made you more comfortable being who you were on the team? LEAH: So I can speak to the team where I work. We're a startup. We have about 15, I think maybe officially 16 people now and we have, I think just hired our fifth female to join the team, or a fifth non-male to join the team. We have created just a private channel for all non-males on the team in Slack where we can communicate with each other and we've set up a happy hour once a month where we can meet. You don't have to drink alcohol. You can just sit and chat and we just have an hour set aside where no conversation topic is off limits. It's just really helpful to just set aside that time where there's no outside influence and it's just the five, or six of us, or however many there are right now [chuckles] who can join and just chat through what's a win for the week, or what's a struggle for the week. I think part of it is giving each other the space to express what's going well and also, express what's going wrong, and then see if others of us on the team can be a champion for the other person and just offer support where possible, or step in when something's happening that we need to maybe put a stop to. Our private channel is lovingly called The Thundercats, [laughs] which I'm pretty fond of. MANDO: [laughs] That's fantastic. You make it almost sound like a union kind of [laughs] where y'all can have this place where you have this ability to do collective action, if necessary. I think that's just fantastic. That's amazing. LEAH: And I should say that the men on our team are fantastic. So this is not like a – [laughs] [overtalk] MANDO: Of course, yeah. LEAH: Escape hatch like, we're all upset about stuff, but it's just nice. Regardless of how wonderful the men on the team are, it's nice to have a space for not men. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think that for me, from my experience, the one that I was more comfortable with was at my first Rails job. It was still in Brazil and the team was totally remote and they did lots of peer programming. They did a great job in onboarding people, but peer programming was way more than onboarding. It was a common practice and I was just like, “Wow, this is so cool.” You could learn so much more beyond just a code and besides that, I felt really comfortable in seeing that no one was scared of doing anything wrong like, there was a really good communication. So I think that the main thing that needs to be worked at, when you're working in a team, is to make sure that everyone feels safe to do their stuff and they don't feel like, “Oh, I'm going to be judged,” or “I don't want to try this because I don't want to have to handle with anything from management,” or whatever. So maybe having that feeling, “Oh, we make mistakes here. We are humans, but we try to make the best to learn from them.” That's a good way to improve this team behavior, I guess. [chuckles] JOHN: So you were able to see the other people on the team, that you were paired with, making mistakes and being okay with it and just that became obvious to you that that was the thing that happened all the time and it was fine. Right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, and especially because I was also self-taught. I actually went for computer science for one year, but I dropped out. I always had this idea that people with more experience, they know everything. [laughs] That was like a mindset that I changed and it made me feel way more human, more than anything at first, and that's when I started seeing how much it's important to think of your team and how much that affects everyone and in your company as well. MANDO: First of all, shout out to comp sci dropouts. I made it just a little bit farther than you, but I know exactly where you're coming from. I had that same thing in my head for a very long time that these folks with their degrees obviously must know so much more than me and I have no idea what I'm doing. That's one of the things that I've always loved about the programs, like the RailsConf Scholars, is that for me, one of the things that helps combat that imposter syndrome thinking is working with folks directly who are earlier in their careers, or have less experience. So not only do you get to help them, guide them, and show them things and stuff, but it really does help serve as a reminder of all the stuff that you do know. There's nothing better than talking about something with someone, being able to explain it to them and help them, and then you walk away and you're like, “Oh yeah, I do know some things, that's kind of nice.” TRAM: I think in talking about dropping out of a major, or switching majors, my experience and my journey into tech. In college, I was quite afraid. I had a requirement to take a CS class, but hearing all these horror stories from other people made me delay taking it. I actually took my first CS class, my junior year of college and while it was really challenging, I definitely enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. But since I took it too late in my college career, I couldn't switch my major, or couldn’t minor, or major in it and that really stuck with me because, I think going and finding the ADA Developers Academy, which is a coding program, it’s like it was my second chance at doing something that I wanted to do, but didn’t have the time, or didn't have the confidence to do in college. One thing that is nice, that I keep thinking about, is that even if I did do a CS major in college, that environment instilled with the competition of it and instilled with, I guess, people who may think that they know more than you may have not been conducive for my education. But what I really enjoy about the current coding program that I'm in is that it's all women, or gender diverse folks and we all come from all different walks of life. But one thing that we have in common is being really empathetic to each other and that environment, I think made all the difference in my ability to learn and to see that there is a community that would champion me and that would also try to uplift other people. JOHN: Yeah. I think that highlights the importance of that initial learning environment. If your first exposure to tech is a weed-out course when you’re trying taking CS in college, you're probably never coming back to it. But having an environment that's specifically designed to actually be supportive and actually get you through learning things can make all the difference, really. MANDO: Yeah. My oldest son is going through a computer science course, or computer science curriculum at UT Dallas here in Texas and his experience is a little bit different, I think because of the pandemic and he doesn't have that in-person structure. Everything's different. He's not having in-person classes. So it's forcing it to be a little more collaborative in nature and a little less kind of what you were saying, John, like waking up at 8 o'clock in the morning to go to some 300-person weed-out class. I think it has served him a little bit better having things be a little weird in that regard, but it is funny to see how little the curriculum and set up around getting a computer science college degree has changed in the 20 years since I took it. That's a shame and I think that that's why the places like ADA Developers Academy and other folks who are showing people and especially employers, that there's different ways for people to get these skills and get this knowledge as opposed to a strictly regimented 4-year, whatever you want to call it, degree program. Leah, you came into technology, you were saying, through a different path other than your traditional computer science degree? LEAH: Yeah. So I majored in math in college and wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with that and when I graduated, it was 2009, to age myself. [chuckles] It was 2009 and the economy was not doing very well and a lot of my peers were really struggling to find jobs. I went for a leadership program at an insurance company and ended up staying there and moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, which I had no desire ever to go there, [laughs] but it worked out fine. I ended up in this insurance company for almost 10 years. Met some really wonderful people and I got to do a lot of really great things, but just kept having that question in my mind of if it hadn't been a poor economy and if it hadn't been whatever factors, could there have been another path for me? I just kept thinking about what I enjoy doing at my job had nothing to do with the insurance side of things. I found that I got really into writing Excel formulas, [chuckles] those were the days that I was having the most fun and I was working remotely, living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time. After chatting with a few friends, I found the Turing School of Software & Design out in Denver. So I quit my job and moved out to Denver and two days after I moved there, I started the bootcamp program. After an entire week of school, I still hadn't unpacked my bag of socks and several other things from my car. So it was just kind of a whirlwind, but I picked Turing because they had an emphasis on social justice and that was really important to me and I think it served me very well as far as being able to meet a lot of people who are like-minded—who also picked Turing for similar reasons—just wanting to better the community and be a force for good with technology. So yeah, that was my rambling answer. [laughs] MANDO: I know that I struggle a lot with knowing the “good programs” and the not-so-great bootcamp style programs. Like anything else, when stuff becomes something that's popular, it attracts folks who are speculators and usurious, I guess, for lack of a better word. [chuckles] So you hear these horror stories about people who go through and spend all this money on bootcamp programs and then can't find a job, don't really feel like they learned the things that they were supposed to learn, or were told they were going to learn. It's nice to hear good stories around those and some good shoutouts to solid programs. LEAH: It was definitely stressful and we had a hallway that we deemed “the crying hallway.” [laughs] But I think it did serve me well and has served many people well in the several iterations that Turing has had over the years. MANDO: Yeah. Just because it's a solid program, or a positive program doesn't mean that it's easy by any stretch. LEAH: Totally. MANDO: I remember one time I was talking with an old coworker and she was telling me about her experience going through the CS program at Carnegie Mellon. This woman, Andrea, she's easily one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life and she's fantastic at everything that I've ever seen her do. So to hear her talk about going through this program and finding stairwells to cry in and stuff as she was a student really shook me and made me realize that the stuff's not easy and it's hard for everybody. Just because you see them years later being really, really fantastic at what they do doesn't mean that they spent years trying to build those skills through blood, sweat, and tears. LEAH: Yeah, I think one of the things that was hard, too is you have no idea what playing field everyone is starting from. It's easy to really get down on yourself when you're like, “This other person is getting this so much faster than I am,” and come to find out they've had internships, or have been working on random online courses teaching themselves for years, and then finally made the decision to go to a school versus other people who haven't had that same amount of experience. It's another lesson and [chuckles] just level setting yourself and running your own race and not worrying about what other people are doing. TRAM: I totally agree with that, Leah. I feel like sometimes I compare my starting point to someone's finish line and I'm like, “Oh, how did they finish already? I'm just starting.” It can be really hard to think about that comparison and not get down on yourself. But I think it's also really good to keep in mind that we only know our journey and our race and it's so hard to have all of the other information on other people, how they got there. So it's just like, I try to remind myself that and it's like, I think the only one that I'm trying to compare myself with is me a month ago, or me a year ago instead of someone else's journey. LEAH: Totally. JOHN: Yeah, that's actually something I'm trying to build into a conference talk because it's so hard to see your own progress unless someone points it out to you. Especially as you're grinding through a curriculum like that, where it's like you're always faced with something new and you're always looking ahead to all the things you don't know. Like, when am I going to learn that, when am I going to get to that, when am I getting to know all these things like everybody else? It takes extra work to stop and turn around and look at, like you said, where you were a month ago, where you were three months ago and be like, “Oh my God, I used to struggle with this every day and now it just flows out of my fingers when I need to do a git commit,” or whatever it is. Being able to notice that progress is so important to feeling like you're not completely swamped and struggling the whole time; that you're always looking to the things you don't yet know and never looking at the things you do know, because you don't have to struggle with those anymore. They don't take up any space in your mind. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I can relate to that as well. Something that I've been doing that it's working a lot is okay, I look to others, but I try to see what they did that I can try to look forward. Like, “Oh okay, so they did this and this looks like something that I want to do,” but I only compare myself to my past self because it can be really – I don't think it does a lot of good to anyone, in fact, when you compare yourself to others, just for the sake of comparing. But if you do see that as an inspiration, “Oh, look, this person is showing me that what I want to do is possible and that's great because I have now more proof that I'm going the right path.” It definitely takes some time to change this little key in your head, but once you do, it gets so much easier and so much lighter. You see even people in a different way because you start asking, “I wonder if this person is struggling with this as well because it's not easy.” [laughs] So this is something that it's helping me. MANDO: Yeah, that's something that I'm struggling with right now with my daughter. She plays high school softball. She's fantastic, she's an amazing athlete, and she's really, really good, but she's a freshman on the varsity team at the highest-level high school team. So she continually compares herself against these other girls who are like 2, 3, 4 years older than her and have a lot more playing time and playing experience and they're bigger and they're stronger. I keep trying to look for a way to help her understand that, like you said, Stephanie, she can compare herself to herself yesterday and she can look to these other players as inspiration as to what's possible. But what she can't do is get down on herself for not being there yet. That's just not fair at all and she may never get there. There are a lot of other factors, outside of how hard she works and what she does, that will contribute to how she's going to finally be. That's another thing that I have to [laughs] work on just me personally is that we all have our own built-in limitations and we all make choices that set us down only so far down a path. I choose to not keep my house completely spotless because there's only so many hours in a day and I would rather go watch my daughter's softball game than deep clean a bathroom. I'll eventually clean the bathroom, but today, [laughs] it's not going to be cleaned because that's the choice. But yet for some reason, I still get down on myself when I come home after the game and I'm like, “Ugh, why is this house so dirty?” STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think now that you mentioned that you have a daughter, I remember this chapter from this book called The Confidence Code. It’s a really, really good book and it talks about all the reasons women are the ones that more self-confidence and how we can put ourselves to compete. There is a chapter for parents and how you can help your daughters to not go through the normal route because it will happen. Not that much anymore, but we are still, in terms of society, expected to behave differently and the book brings you really good tips for parents. I think you would be nice for you. It looks like you want to learn more about that? MANDO: Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Stephanie so much. I'll take a look at that and we'll include a link in the show notes for that and some of the other stuff. Any and all help [chuckles] is very much appreciated. JOHN: We've come to the time on the show where we go into what we call reflections, which are just the takeaways, or the new thoughts, or the things we're going to be thinking about that we've talked about on this episode that really struck us. So for me, it's a couple of different things. First Leah, you were talking about being a companion to long distance runners, which is something I had never thought about being a thing, but of course, the moment you say it, I'm like, “Oh yeah, if you're running a 100 miles, it'd be nice to have someone keep you a company.” That sounds great and it's something you need to be suited to. You need to be able to run and talk and so, finding new ways to be of service to other people, I think is really interesting part of that. I think the other thing that struck me is we're discussing different ways of increasing psychological safety on the team and the ways that you can communicate that to the people that are there. Those are the things I'm always keeping an eye out for because I always want to be able to provide those to my team and so, hearing your examples is just always good for me just to have even more different ways of doing it in the back of my head. LEAH: Well, thanks, John. Yeah, I think the big takeaway for me is just what can we proactively do to make our space safer, or just more conducive to diverse thought? I think, Mando, maybe you asked the question of what we were explicitly doing at our companies, or if anyone had ever done something explicit to make us feel safer, or invite us to participate fully in the community of developers? I think there is a lot more that can be done to help people feel as though they're a part, or that their opinion matters, or their belief matters and their contribution will only make the team better and stronger. MANDO: Yeah. I think that was John who asked that and then I rambled on for about 20 minutes afterward, so. [laughter] LEAH: Sorry. MANDO: But that reminds me, or that that leads into my reflection. Stephanie was talking about the one of the things that helps reinforce that psychological safety for her was seeing people make mistakes and having it be okay, and having that general attitude that we're going to make mistakes and bad things are going to happen and that’s okay. It's something that Leah, like you, I work at a really, really small startup. There's five people at the company total. So the pressure to make sure that everything is done right the first time is pretty high, the pressure that I put on myself, and it can easily spiral out of control when I start thinking about how long I've been doing this and then the should start to come out. “You should know this,” “You should be able to do this,” You should get this stuff done quickly, or faster,” or “It should be perfect.” I need to keep reminding myself that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to not have it be perfect the first time, it's okay to not be perfect. So thank you for that reminder, Stephanie. STEPHANIE: You're welcome. I have to remind myself every day as well. [chuckles] It is a daily practice, but I can guarantee you that it's so much better, things like life in general is so much better, so it is worth it. I think that my takeaway here, not only from this talk with everyone, but also from the RailsConf in general and the Rails community is how common it is to talk about these things at our community. Like, yesterday at the keynote, I saw the diversity numbers and I was like, “Whoa, wait a second. I think this is the first time that I go to a conference and someone is talking about this openly.” I think that's one of the reasons why the Rails community is so important to me and I want to continue the legacy. I think that talking about these names is what makes our community unique and I'm really grateful to be part of the community. TRAM: Yeah, I think my main takeaway is what I've been reflecting on the past few days and this conversation is one thing following the psychological safety theme of how can we have more inclusive and safe environments and like Leah said about representation matters. The people you see around you and the environments that you are in can help you to feel a certain way and when there's such a monolith of people in a certain company, that can make me feel very scared and open up to what I think, or my thoughts are. So I think the diversification of type is very, very important, but also just humanizing people and that's one thing that we can do today is highlight, be open about our mistakes, but also have an environment that is inclusive enough where people can speak up about their mistake and that inclusivity begets inclusivity. You're not going to just say that you're inclusive and don't have actions to back it up. Also, I think what Mando said about calling someone out. Sometimes being a newcomer to a company, I don't feel like I have the power to do that and sometimes, it's uncomfortable for me to do that. So having someone who is in upper management, or someone who has a little bit more power showcase that that's something that they have the power to do, but something that I can do also is really helpful. So that's something that I would try to reflect more on and act upon because it's been a really wholesome conversation and I'm glad to be a part of it. JOHN: Wonderful. Yeah, and to your point, Tram, there's a talk that was actually at RailsConf a couple of years ago by Anjuan Simmons called Lending Privilege. One of his points is that those of us who have the higher levels of privilege, we can wield it for good and we can do things like putting ourselves out there to say, “No, that's not okay on this team,” or to lift someone else up and say, “Hey, you just talked over, what's her name.” Like, “Please Stephanie, say what it was you were going to say,” or like, “Stephanie mentioned that idea tenured 10 minutes ago and we ignored it.” So using that privilege, or the position on the team. I've been at my company for 10 years so I have a lot of social capital; I can use that for a lot of good. I'll post a link to that talk as well in the show notes because I think it's really important concept. All right. Well, we've come to the end of our show. Thank you so much to all of our scholars who were able to join today, Leah, Stephanie, and Tram and thank you, Mando for being here. This was a wonderful conversation. MANDO: Yeah, thanks everyone. LEAH: Thank you. MANDO: It was fantastic. STEPHANIE: Thank you! TRAM: Thanks, ya’ll. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guests: Leah Miller, Stefanni Brasil, and Tram Bui.

Ada Developers Academy is on a mission to increase access to high paying jobs in technology. Each year, Ada admits a cohort of 90+ students from underrepresented groups for a year-long coding bootcamp that will prepare them for developer jobs at leading tech firms. On average, Ada graduates have realized a 100% increase in wages over their previous jobs, financial capital that is then invested in the underrepresented communities that Ada students traditionally come from. In this episode, Ada's Director of Strategic Partnerships and Development Alexandra Holien joins Revolve to discuss Ada's mission and impact, how to promote equitable and inclusive growth, and the value of humility. Notes: Ada Developers Academy: https://adadevelopersacademy.org

Ada Developers Academy is on a mission to increase access to high paying jobs in technology. Each year, Ada admits a cohort of 90+ students from underrepresented groups for a year-long coding bootcamp that will prepare them for developer jobs at leading tech firms. On average, Ada graduates have realized a 100% increase in wages over their previous jobs, financial capital that is then invested in the underrepresented communities that Ada students traditionally come from. In this episode, Ada’s Director of Strategic Partnerships and Development Alexandra Holien joins Revolve to discuss Ada’s mission and impact, how to promote equitable and inclusive growth, and the value of humility. Notes: Ada Developers Academy: https://adadevelopersacademy.org

Lauren Granger began their career working with adults experiencing homelessness in Seattle.Lauren’s path to social work began on the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration when during his speech, he encouraged every person to get involved and volunteer. And that they did; Lauren dedicated the next decade of their life to giving back to their community. They managed low-income houses and did incredible work for individuals facing homelessness in Seattle's community. Pivoting from work in social service work, Lauren then attended Ada Developers Academy to learn to code and is a Software Development Engineer today at Amazon. They work on the Freetime team, which works to offer peace of mind for parents of young children. Lauren and I dive deep into the power of volunteerism and giving back to our communities. We discuss the importance of finding your people, active allyship, and how to use the professional skills we bring with us to the table from prior life/work experiences to succeed in our careers in tech. Resources: - Downtown Emergency Service Center - Ada Developers Academy - Find Lauren Granger on Twitter & LinkedIn

Nora is nonprofit fundraising professional turned coder. Today, she & I chat about her journey to tech after dedicating her career and education to mission-driven companies and how she used to perceive corporate Americas as the “dark-side.” She shares that it was in fact her therapist, who told her about Ada Developers Academy and encouraged her to pursue software development. She’s so thankful for that advice, as she has now discovered a way to blend her passion for tech with her love for helping people and does so today as a Software Development Engineer on a Kindle team at Amazon. We chat about the parallels between the fundraising and technical marketing industries and how many of the skills are transferrable from one to the other. This episode is not one to miss and Nora wants you to know that you have the right AND the ability to learn anything! Resources:Ada Developers AcademyYou are a Badass @NTPetesNora's LinkedIn

Jamie & Lauren talk today about her path to attending a coding bootcamp after feeling frustrated with the traditional 4-year college path that so many are encouraged to take. She calls for a rethinking of the way we push that route onto young adults as the expected route and encourages us all to consider exploring our interests and passions to help discover what we will be good at but more importantly, what will bring us joy. In 2014, Jamie attended a program called Dev Bootcamp and went on to be an educator and instructor at many different bootcamp and coding programs such as the Flatiron School, the Latin High School in Chicago, General Assembly, Kode with Klossy, and even was Lauren’s instructor at Ada Developers Academy here in Seattle!Because this podcast is dedicated to interviewing those who for example, have graduated from programs such as these, we thought it would be fun to chat with someone from the perspective of the person teaching these programs and understand her own unique path to tech. This episode with Jamie is not one to miss! Links: Coding newbie: https://www.codenewbie.org/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiepilgrim/Twitter: https://twitter.com/pilgrimmemoirs Github: http://github.com/pilgrimmemoirsJamie's Website http://www.illbringthedonuts.com/

Kate recently graduated from Ada Developers Academy and is a Developer Apprentice at Alaska Airlines. She has an infectious laugh and such a zest for life that it’s hard not to smile while listening to her talk about her journey today. Although she eventually transitioned to tech, she studied to become a park ranger from a very early age and has her Masters in Environmental Education. Today she shares with me her obsession with nature and her love for storytelling, all Meetups, and geocaching. She’s passionate about promoting diversity in tech and helps organize for the Tech Ladies chapter in Seattle and lives life by the mantra: Every day is a school day.Kate and I have an honest conversation about how grueling the tech industry can be and she open ups about her personal relationship with depression. We discuss the power of therapy and she acknowledges that although it may be difficult, it’s so important to seek help if you think you might also be struggling with depression yourself. This episode interviewing Kate Pond (@OhKPond) is not an episode to miss! Links:A resource she loved when first learning to code: Code.org To find a local Meetup near you: Meetup.com The nonprofit she’s passionate about: Tech Ladies To find a therapist: Psychology Today An Instagram and Twitter recommendation: TheLatestKateBook reference: Creative Trespassing by Tania KatanFind Kate Pond on all things social: @OhKPond

Severin and I talk today about all things ballet dancing, law school, and her passion for logic problems and patterns! We discuss our shared experience as students at Ada Developers Academy, our mutual feelings of imposter syndrome, celebrate the fact that we’ve both cried in front of our managers, and unfortunately discover that neither one of us were ever encouraged to explore a career in tech when we were young. Severin dives deep on the importance of internships, asking questions, and the value in balancing your soft skills with your technical ones as a career changer. She’s a firm advocate of pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and finding a great manager and team that you feel safe enough to fail in front of. She believes that writing code is an emotional process and lives for the excitement and thrills that is the roller coaster of being a developer. Her passion and enthusiasm alike are contagious -- this is not an episode to miss! Links: MightyAI: https://mighty.ai/ BaseCS Podcast: https://www.codenewbie.org/basecsExercism problems: https://exercism.io/ 99 Bottles of OOP: https://www.sandimetz.com/99bottles Ada Developers Academy: https://www.adadevelopersacademy.org/ Severing Wiggenhorn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/severinwiggenhorn/

GUEST BIO: Lauren Lee is a Technical Product Manager at Go Daddy where she gets to evangelize a platform team that optimizes the engineering process for developers.  Lauren helps teams to adopt a framework that makes prioritizing Machine Learning, experimentation, personalization and mobile-first development simple. EPISODE DESCRIPTION:         Phil’s guest on today’s show is Lauren Lee. Lauren started her IT career later than most. After spending 7 years working as a teacher she secured a place at the Ada Developers Academy. From there she has gone on to work for Amazon as a software development engineer and secure her current role at GoDaddy as a technical product manager. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (00.59) – So, Lauren, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Lauren explains that for 7 years she was a teacher. But, she quit her job and attended a coding program at Ada Developers Academy. It was an intensive tuition-free course that takes 11 months to complete. Students spend 6 months in the classroom, followed by a 5-month paid industry internship. The academy specializes in helping women and gender diverse people to start a successful career in the tech industry. From there, she became a software engineer at Amazon and has recently transitioned to a technical product management role with GoDaddy. Lauren describes her main function as being to act as a bridge between the engineer, designers, marketers and the end users. (1.52) - Phil asks Lauren how she ended up working for GoDaddy. Lauren explained that they are a sponsor company for the developer’s academy. Everyone Lauren knew that worked for them said that they were excellent employers that offered a truly inclusive culture. So, when she needed a job she chose to interview with them. Right now, Lauren is working on the website building side of things, helping small business owners to succeed. (2.58) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Lauren says it is important to understand the power of communication and be an empathetic educator. Her work as a teacher demonstrated to her that people communicate in different ways. Lauren has found that bearing this in mind has also helped her to be more effective in her IT career. As a teacher, she learned to be an empathetic educator who adapted the way she taught to the needs of her students. Today, it is not hard for her to adapt her way of communicating to suit the audience she is speaking to. Getting into the mindset of the people you are talking to is a good habit. It helps you to think about things from different perspectives. (5.12) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. For Lauren that was when, during a whiteboarding interview, a tear ran down her face. It was a humbling moment, despite the fact that she did in fact land the job. So, Lauren is pleased to see companies trying to move away from relying on whiteboarding interviews. They are beginning to realize that not everyone does well when asked to explain things using a whiteboard. Some freeze up, others get flustered and virtually everyone feels nervous when put in that situation. As a result, it is very easy to dismiss someone who actually does have the talent and skills that your organization needs. Phil finds this point particularly interesting because very few people talk about the interview part of landing an IT job. He has noticed that when it comes to interviews most of us create a lot of extra stress for ourselves. We turn the interview into the be all and end all. When, in fact, it is just a one-off event. (8.05) – Phil asks Lauren what her best career moment was. For Lauren, that was getting into the Ada Developer Academy. She was particularly proud to make it through the tough selection process. The moment she pushed her first feature into production is another highlight that springs to mind. However, for her speaking at conferences has become her real passion. She started out small, but has now graduated to the larger events. Lauren particularly enjoys being involved in these collaborative learning experiences. She loves finding new ways to engage with and help these larger technical communities through her work as a presenter. (9.56) – How did you get into conference speaking? As a student, Lauren attended a Ruby conference. It was a great experience, so very quickly she decided to put herself out there and start speaking and contributing. (10.29) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? Lauren is excited by the fact that there are now so many opportunities for women within this industry. The industry is definitely becoming more inclusive and moving towards a point where everyone is represented and can be successful working in IT. But, it is important that each of us plays our part in pushing this process along. We all need to become mentors, advocates and allies. There are some great organizations out there that are doing exactly that. Ada is just one example. There is also Chick Tech and Girls Who Code. Importantly, other underrepresented groups are now also getting help. For example, organizations like Unloop are helping ex-prisoners to get involved in the IT industry. (13.09) – What first attracted you to a career in IT? Lauren was partly drawn to the industry because she wanted to play a part in bridging the gender gap that exists in IT. She also wanted her students to see her taking a risk and succeeding at changing her life drastically. The fact that you have to be a continuous learner to keep pace with the rate of change is also something that drew her to the IT industry. She enjoys being continually pushed her to continually improve. (14.20) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? Know when to walk away from the bug in your code. If you are blocked you will just get frustrated and in all likelihood not solve the problem either. Stepping away for a bit enables you to approach the problem from a different angle. It is important not to let the imposter syndrome creep in. Self-doubt can end up paralyzing you completely. The truth is that, in time, you will learn to solve your problem. You will get there. Problems are learning experiences. (15.54) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Lauren says she probably would not do anything differently. She does not regret the fact that she spent 7 years teaching before starting her IT career. It has enabled her to bring something a little different to the table. (17.10) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Right now, Lauren is focusing on creation over consumption. She has stopped scrolling through Twitter and other platforms berating herself about all the stuff she does not know. Instead, she is being selective and purposeful about what she consumes and how she spends her time. (18.04) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Having a growth mindset has really helped Lauren to move her career forward. Not knowing everything does not intimidate her. It inspires her to dive in and learn. She also sees these situations as opportunities to reach out to others, learn from and connect with them Phil agrees that mindset is a healthy one for IT professionals to have. After all, everyone has been in a position where they do not know something, at some point in their careers. (19.07) – Phil asks Lauren to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. Lauren’s advice is to those who are new to the industry is to attend meetups. Lean into the things you do not understand, get a mentor, study hard and continue to do so until it makes sense. For those who have been working in the industry for a long time, her advice is to tap into the power of volunteering. She finishes her response by urging everyone to be advocates for those that are underrepresented in the IT industry. BEST MOMENTS: (3.56) LAUREN – “People learn and communicate in a myriad of different ways.” (4.03) LAUREN – “There's so much value in thinking about problems from creative and new perspectives" (7.34) PHIL – "Often, for interviews, you create the stress yourself by putting too much expectation on yourself" (9.11) LAUREN – "Conferences offer that opportunity to bring individuals together to participate in collaborative learning and foster a greater sense of community" (14.28) LAUREN – "Sometimes you've got to walk away from the bug in your code, or whatever problem you have, especially if you are blocked." (18.16) LAUREN – “I’m not intimidated by not knowing everything.” CONTACT LAUREN: Twitter: https://twitter.com/LoLoCoding @LoLoCoding LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-lee-ande/

Dr Cheryl Ingram is the CEO and founder of Diverse City LLC and Inclusology and has specialized in diversity, equity and inclusion work for 17 years. Working with such clients as Netflix, University of Washington, Uber, Ada Developers Academy, and the Greater Seattle Business Association. Her expertise helps companies increase transparency and awareness. Ending the discriminatory practices and biases to create more positive, productive work environments. Cheryl has been awarded New Business of The Year in 2017 and is a finalist for the Advocate Award in the Champion Awards hosted by the Female Founders Alliance of Seattle. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Recorded at Seattle’s Women in Tech Regatta, Colleen and Sonia connect with the event creator, Melody Biringer to learn more about her motivation to curate a week of educational events, workshops, and conversations. Then, Colleen interviews Fethya Ibrahim, the secretary of the local professional chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. Sonia interviews Cynthia Tee, the former Executive Director of Ada Developers Academy and an Advisory Board Member for the WiT Regatta. Our hosts wrap it up with some reflections on their favorite panel of the week, #WhatWouldChadDo. Please subscribe, rate, and share the episode. Find us online at www.wibt.com. Send any and all feedback to wibt@microsoft.com or tweet @MicrosoftWomen

01:53 – Kerri’s Superpower: Looking ahead to the future. 08:33 – Community Gatekeeping and Contempt Culture Liz Baillie: The Illustrated Adventure Survival Guide for New Rustaceans @ RustConf 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce6ppwgF4SA) Slides ^^ (https://www.slideshare.net/LizBaillie/rustconf-2016-illustrated-adventure-guide-65894363) Sam Livingston-Gray: Cognitive Shortcuts: Models, Visualizations, Metaphors, and Other Lies @ RailsConf2014 (http://confreaks.tv/videos/railsconf2014-cognitive-shortcuts-models-visualizations-metaphors-and-other-lies) Slides ^^ (https://www.slideshare.net/geeksam/cognitive-shortcuts-models-visualizations-metaphors-and-other-lies) 16:03 – The Contextual Framing of Storytelling Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262510871/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0262510871&linkId=9568bc985aaaabdcf2e7be1e9d99bd85) Ada Developers Academy (https://www.adadevelopersacademy.org/) Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1512212938/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1512212938&linkId=a64e456d870048a8cbec54caf4a2d794) 31:50 – Retaining Information and Explaining Things to Others 44:05 – Technical Jargon: Tactical and Strategic 47:39 – Storytelling is Everywhere Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250061539/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1250061539&linkId=c44d2647a340ce0a4ca596ae7056cd7e) 52:50 – Telling Stories Over and Over and Over and Over and Over … 55:53 – Crafting the Elements of a Story Avdi Grimm: Confident Code at Cascadia Ruby 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfXEwvmCWvc) 01:01:39 – What the heck is a Lackwit Gadabout? Reflections: Sam: The distinction between behavior and identity. Christina: Storytelling is super important. Jamey: It’s helpful to care about something before you learn it. Kerri: Next time you do a Git commit, don’t do -m. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Kerri Miller.

Cynthia Tee is Executive director at Ada Developers Academy. For 20 years, Cynthia worked at Microsoft leading diverse products and during this time she also served as a mentor for many women. We talked about the ways in which she has helped other women grow in their careers and her work at the Ada Developers Academy. The Ada Developers Academy is a tuition-free program in Seattle where women can become Software Developers and get work experience. We also talked about her perspective on staying at a company for 20 years and how she would approach her career if she was starting it in 2016.