Podcasts about Coraline Ada Ehmke

The past week has been awash with new devices, routing options, key driven sounds and things that generally go bleep bloop, there so much and its come so quickly that we're picking our favourites, as well as those from the community, and seeing what Superbooth 25 will be known for. Check out 'First Land Encounter' here: https://fieldsoffew.bandcamp.com/album/first-land-encounterHelp Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen Setzepfandt, Lars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

Soundtoys dropped a delightful sound design tool in 'Spaceblender' and better yet it's free until 22nd May. We're checking it out as a community and seeing what's going on with the fantastic scapes it creates. Later in the show, as its coming up to Superbooth, we're looking at what we're most excited by and what we want to see developments in.Check out 'First Land Encounter' here: https://fieldsoffew.bandcamp.com/album/first-land-encounterHelp Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen Setzepfandt, Lars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

Last month Fields of Few became the latest Audionautic Record label mate as we released his latest LP 'First Land Encounter' .With the full release on all streaming platforms incoming , we're sitting down with the man himself to discuss his release with conversational threads from his experience with FL studios, crafting narrative within musical storytelling and his success with sync libraries. Check out 'First Land Encounter' here: https://fieldsoffew.bandcamp.com/album/first-land-encounterHelp Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen Setzepfandt, Lars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

It's been one whole year since Spotify moved towards its new threshold royalty payment scheme and there has been evidence of the movement being replicated across other platforms. At the time, it seemed like a bad move for the Independent musician but now the data has come out. So for this week, we're running through it. Help Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen Setzepfandt, Lars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

Following on from the SP-404 MK2 update, Teenage Engineering have come out with theirs for the EP-133 Sampler. The update looks pretty hefty and there are many outlets looking at those updates. We're interested however in where this puts the EP-133. Are we suddenly looking at an equal playing field in the sampling game? Audionautic Records' latest release, Fields of Few - First Land Encounterhttps://fieldsoffew.bandcamp.com/album/first-land-encounterGrab tickets for Eonlake's London Show here:https://skiddle.com/e/40699373Help Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen Setzepfandt, Lars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

Since we last met, Roland Unveiled their big 404 Day update 5.0. There is a lot going on and the community is divided in what the update brings for the people. We break it down. In the Round Robin, we're ripping off the Radio and Talking 'Desert Island Devices'. If we were washed up on an isolated island with only one piece of gear, what would it be and why? Let us know in the comments what your Desert Island Device would be. Audionautic Records' latest release, Fields of Few - First Land Encounterhttps://fieldsoffew.bandcamp.com/album/first-land-encounterGrab tickets for Eonlake's London Show here:https://skiddle.com/e/40699373Help Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen Setzepfandt, Lars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

Our friends over at Bleass were kind enough to alert us to their new delay plugin 'Tides'. With every plugin company from here to Buenos Aires providing a delay VST we're asking 'why this one?'So we're putting it through its paces to see what its about and whether or not its worth your hard earned cash.Audionautic Records' latest release, Fields of Few - First Land Encounterhttps://fieldsoffew.bandcamp.com/album/first-land-encounterGrab tickets for Eonlake's London Show here:https://skiddle.com/e/40699373Help Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Matt Donatelli, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen Setzepfandt, Lars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

We're awashed with updates are releases! Leading the charge is Elektron with their Updates to the Digitakt II and Digitone II. Trying something this week with the audience vote. There's news in both the Dreadbox AND Behringer camp. We'll be talking about whichever those tuning into the live show think is most interesting. Audionautic Records' latest release, Fields of Few - First Land Encounterhttps://fieldsoffew.bandcamp.com/album/first-land-encounterGrab tickets for Eonlake's London Show here:https://skiddle.com/e/40699373Help Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Matt Donatelli, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen Setzepfandt, Lars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

In this age of consumerism, sometimes the coolest things come from the crowfunders and the will of the people! Artium Instruments have completed their kickstarter for 'Doppler' a desktop FM synth that looks to lean into unbridled exploration where you find a unique sound at every knob turn. We're checking out the press release to see what's up. In the Round Robin, we're looking to the release of Serum 2 and asking ourselves what is it in our studios that unequivocally requires that financial investment and why. Join us for an hour of synth nerding.Audionautic Records' latest release, Fields of Few - First Land Encounterhttps://fieldsoffew.bandcamp.com/album/first-land-encounterGrab tickets for Eonlake's London Show here:https://skiddle.com/e/40699373Help Support the Channel:Patreon: www.patreon.com/audionauticThanks to our Patrons who support what we do:Audionauts: Abby, Bendu, David Svrjcek, Josh Wittman, Paul Ledbrook, Matt Donatelli, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Jaycee Lewis and Stephen SetzepfandtLars Haur - Audionaut ProducerJonathan Goode - Audionaut ProducerJoin the conversation:

Guest Dawn Wages Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, Richard is very excited to have as his guest, Dawn Wages, who's the Python Community Advocate at Microsoft, Core Team Member for Wagtail, DjangoCon Organizer, and Director and Treasurer for the Python Software Foundation. We'll hear Dawn's journey into how she got involved with the PSF and as a Python Community Advocate at Microsoft, she explains how to become a PSF member, as well as the benefits, since they've made some changes recently. She explains where she falls on the ethical source divide and dives into the AntiRacist Ethical Source License, which is her niche. Also, she shares advice on how communities can be more sustainable at navigating conflict in their communities and reveals that we should lead with empathy. If you're looking at going to a conference this year, there's some great DjangoCon's and a PyCon going on that are worth checking out. Hit download now to hear more! [00:03:31] We hear how Dawn got involved with the PSF and how she became the Python Community Advocate at Microsoft. [00:05:23] Dawn shares why foundations in the open source space seem to continually have this community voting way of entering into the board, if she thinks it's healthy, and if she thought about it when she was working on Django's new process. [00:08:27] Both dollars and time are things which are often barriers to entry for DEI, so how does that help diversity, equity, and inclusion versus how it hurts it? Also, we hear about Wagtail and Torchbox and what they do. [00:11:40] Dawn mentioned that the PSF lowered the dollar amount and Open Collective, so now we hear the benefits it gives to an individual to become a member of the PSF, if that's something people should think about if they're working in Python, and if it's possible to join on behalf of the project and not their company. [00:13:30] We hear about a tool called, Fiscal Sponsoree, with the PSF. [00:14:50] Dawn fills us in on DjangoCon 2023, the financing structure for keeping Django going, how they think about sustainability in their community, and DjangoCon Africa 2023. [00:16:51] What does a sponsored chair do? [00:19:04] Richard wonders how Dawn thinks about the return on investment for her ultimate strategy, why these conferences, and what's the ultimate narrative arc for her seventh season open source Bajor story. Also, she explains why she's the treasurer. [00:22:56] Richard explains what the Ethical Source Movement is and wonders how Dawn holds the tension and where she falls on the ethical source divide. [00:24:37] We hear Richard's opinion on one of the problems with open source requiring a huge layout of upfront investment in hours and time and no guarantee that it will pay off, and the work being detrimental to mental health of people working on it. Dawn talks about the Anti-Racist License and explains the “PIES” check-in. [00:28:12] Dawn shares advice on how to help communities be more sustainable at navigating trauma and conflict in their communities without it becoming a drain on resources. [00:31:00] Listen here for a list of conferences you should go to that are Python and Django and where you can follow Dawn on the web. Quotes [00:08:58] “Open source is not accessible for everyone, and it's not a great method for everyone. It is people who have support elsewhere somehow.” [00:26:34] “I think there are tools we can use to be able to acknowledge the humanity of the individuals contributing, and being flexible and thoughtful about the goals we are trying to meet as a collective, and the goals the individual is trying to contribute or try to receive.” Spotlight [00:33:21] Richard's spotlight is his friend, Danielle Garber, who's a personal coach and makes amazing hand woven things. [00:34:08] Dawn's spotlight is Jeff Triplett, Director of PSF, and Coraline Ada Ehmke, lead organizer for the Organization for Ethical Source. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Dawn Wages Twitter (https://twitter.com/BajoranEngineer) Dawn Wages Website (https://dawnwages.info/) Dawn Wages Mastodon (https://mastodon.online/@fly00gemini8712) Python Software Foundation (https://www.python.org/psf-landing/) At The Root (https://attheroot.dev/) DjangoCon 2023 (Durham, North Carolina) (https://2023.djangocon.us/) DjangoCon 2023 (Edinburgh, Scotland) (https://2023.djangocon.eu/) DjangoCon Africa 2023 ( Zanzibar, Tanzania) (https://2023.djangocon.africa/) PyCon 2023 (Salt Lake City, Utah) (https://us.pycon.org/2023/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 75: Deb Nicholson on the OSI, the future of open source, and SeaGL (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/75) Wagtail (https://wagtail.org/) Torchbox (https://torchbox.com/) Fiscal Sponsorees (https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) AntiRacist Ethical Source License (https://github.com/AtTheRoot/ATR-License) Every Thread Handwoven (Danielle Garber) (https://www.everythreadhandwoven.com/) Jeff Triplett Website (https://jefftriplett.com/about/) Coraline Ada Ehmke Website (https://where.coraline.codes/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Dawn Wages.

02:28 - Kerri's Superpower: Having an Iron Butt * The Iron Butt Association (https://www.ironbutt.org/) 06:39 - On The Road Entertainment * FM Radio * Country Music * Community/Local Radio * Roadside Attractions * The World Largest Ball of Twine (http://www.kansastravel.org/balloftwine.htm) * Mystery Spot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Spot) * Mystery Spot Polka (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYHiGQiAPhI) 15:11 - Souvenir Collection & Photography * Fireweed Ice Cream (https://www.wildscoops.com/post/2018/08/28/botany-of-ice-cream-fireweed-chamerion-angustifolium) * Clubvan (https://www.google.com/search?q=clubvan&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwjCk7zdiJn2AhXIFFkFHfvjC-kQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=clubvan&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIHCCMQ7wMQJzIHCCMQ7wMQJzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgYIABAFEB4yBggAEAoQGDIECAAQGDIGCAAQChAYMgYIABAKEBgyBggAEAoQGFCMB1iMB2CUDGgAcAB4AIABS4gBjQGSAQEymAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWfAAQE&sclient=img&ei=rNsXYsKNB8ip5NoP-8evyA4&bih=748&biw=906) * Lighthouses * National Parks 25:42 - Working On The Road 27:37 - Rallies, Competitive Scavenger Hunts * Traveling Salesman Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem) 30:40 - Tracking, Tooling, Databases * Penny Machine Locations (http://209.221.138.252/AreaList.aspx) * Penny Costs 1.76 Cents to Make in 2020 (https://www.coinnews.net/2021/02/23/penny-costs-1-76-cents-to-make-in-2020-nickel-costs-7-42-cents-us-mint-realizes-549-9m-in-seigniorage/#:~:text=Penny%20Costs%201.76%20Cents%20to%20Make%20in%202020%2C%20Nickel%20Costs,Realizes%20%24549.9M%20in%20Seigniorage&text=The%20cost%20for%20manufacturing%20U.S.,in%20its%202020%20Annual%20Report) 35:36 - Community Interaction; Sampling Local Specialties * Cinnamon Rolls * Salem Sue, World's Largest Holstein (https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2716) 38:40 - Recording Adventures * Kerri's Blog: Motozor (http://motozor.com/) * Stationary & Sassy (https://anchor.fm/stationary-and-sassy) (Jamey's Podcast) 41:46 - Focus / Music * Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com/) * Steely Dan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steely_Dan) * Neil Peart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Peart) (Rush) 42:22 - Directed Riding vs Wandering/Drifting Reflections: Mandy: Taking time to enjoy yourself is SO important. Jamey: Get started! Create a map, now. Coraline: Permission to go down rabbit holes: wander aimlessly, and explore. Aaron: If I'm not having fun, why am I doing this? Resetting expectations to your purpose. Chelsea: Making “it didn't always look like this!” stories accessible to folks. Kerri: It's a marathon. You can't do a lot of things in a single step. We have traveled far from where we began. Greater Than Code Episode 072: Story Time with Kerri Miller (https://www.greaterthancode.com/story-time) 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. Transcript: CORALINE: Hey, everybody and welcome to Episode 273 of Greater Than Code. You may remember me, my name is Coraline and I'm very, very happy to be with y'all today and to be with my friend, Jamey Hampton. JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm also excited to introduce my good friend, Aaron Aldrich, and it's our first time co-hosting together so I'm excited about that, too. AARON: Oh, Hey, it's me, Aaron Aldrich. I'm also excited. I'm so excited to host with all these people and I will introduce you to Chelsea. CHELSEA: Him folks. I'm Chelsea Troy and I am pleased to introduce Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hey, everybody. It's Mandy. And today, I am here with one of my favorite people! It's Kerri Miller, and you may know Kerri as an engineer, a glass artist, a public speaker, a motorcyclist, and a lackwit gadabout based in the Pacific Northwest. Generally, she's on an epic adventure on her motorcycle somewhere in North America. Will she meet Sasquatch? That's what I want to know and that's why she's here today because we're not going to talk about tech, or code today. We're going to catch up with Kerri. If you're not following Kerri on these epic adventures, you need to be because I live vicariously through her all the time and you need to, too. Kerri is a prime example of living your best life. So without further ado, Kerri, how are you?! KERRI: Oh my gosh. With an intro like that, how can I be anything but amazing today? Can I just hire you, Mandy just to call me every morning and tell me how exciting I am? MANDY: Absolutely. [laughter] KERRI: No. I'm doing really, really well. The sun actually came out today in the Pacific Northwest. I've been telling people lately that if you want to know what living in Seattle is like, first go stand in the shower for about 4 months [laughs] and then get back to me. So to have the sun bright and it's 53 outside, it's amazing. AARON: 53 does sound amazing. It's been like so far below freezing for so long here that I've lost track. Every once in a while, I go outside and it's like 30 and I'm like, “Oh, this is nice!” [laughter] JAMEY: Are we going to ask Kerri the superpower question? Because I feel like she's come on and answered it a bunch of times already. [laughs] We could ask her about Sasquatch instead. MANDY: I mean, I thought her superpowers were having epicly awesome adventures, but maybe she has a different answer. KERRI: Well, in the context of this conversation, I think that my superpower is being able to sit on a motorcycle for ridiculously long amounts of time. CORALINE: Kerri, would you say you have an iron butt? Is that what you call that? KERRI: Yes. I mean, of course, the joke being that I belong to a group called the Iron Butt Association, which is dedicated to promoting the safe and sane practice of long-distance endurance motorcycle riding. So the only requirement to join, besides having the defective gene that makes you want to sit on a motorcycle for hours and hours on end, is to be able to ride a 1,000 miles on a motorcycle in 24 hours, which once you do it once, you very quickly decide if you ever want to do it again and if you do decide you want to do it again, you are one of the ingroup. AARON: What's a reference point for a 1,000 miles? That's a number that I only know conceptually. KERRI: Let's see. It is a 1,000 miles almost exactly from Seattle to Anaheim to the front door of Disneyland. It's a 1,100 miles from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida. CORALINE: Oh, wow. KERRI: It's 2,000 miles from my house in Seattle to Chicago. JAMEY: What made you feel like you wanted to sit on a motorcycle for that long? KERRI: I don't really have a short answer for that, but I'll give you an honest answer. I mean the short answer is the jokey one to say, “Oh, I've got a defective gene. Ha, ha, ha.” But when I was in – I grew up in the country and had a lot of a lot of struggles as a teenager and the way that I escaped from that was to go get in my car and drive around the back roads of New England. Dirt roads, finding old farmsteads and farm fields and abandoned logging roads and that gave me this real sort of sense of freedom. When I moved out to Pacific Northwest—no real friends, no family out here—I spent a lot of time in my car exploring Pacific Northwest. I had a lot of those same vibes of being by myself and listening to my good music and just driving around late nights. When I got into to motorcycling, I rediscovered that joy of being by myself, exploring things, seeing new things, and if I wasn't seeing something new, I was seeing how had changed this week, or since last month, or since last few years since I've been through a particular region. And my motorcycling is basically an extension of that, it's this sort of urge to travel. A desire to be by myself under my own control, my own power, and to learn and discover new stories that I'm not learning just by sitting in my apartment all day. I work from home. I've worked remotely for 8, or 9 years now, so anytime I get to leave the apartment is a joy and adventure, but doing so for longest ended periods of time just lets me see more of the world, expand my own story, and learn the story of others as I travel. Being a single solo lady on a motorcycle, I'm instantly the object of interest wherever I stop and it doesn't help that I have rainbow stickers and all sorts of stuff all over my bikes. My motorcycle helmets are crazy pink, rainbow reflective, got unicorn horns, and things all over my bike, so people see me as being super approachable. Every time I stop for gas, or to get a burger, or a soda, or something, people come up to me and they want to tell me their stories. It's usually about the motorcycle, they're really interested about. It's usually middle aged and old men come up to me to say, “Oh, I had a motorcycle when I was in college and then I got married and had a kid.” You can kind of see them deflate a little bit. Or I've had lots of kids come up because it's covered with stickers and a lot of the stickers, they're all kind of at a kid eye level. They see them and they get really excited, they want to come over and talk to me. With rainbow bandanas and everything, I think I look safe as a biker. I'm not dressed in black and skulls and so, people see me as approachable and they want to come up and talk. So there's a lot of those great interactions that I get to have with people along the way. CORALINE: And you said at the beginning, when you were driving around the Pacific Northwest, you were listening to your good music. Do you also listen to music on the motorcycle and some of those have fancy speakers in the helmet and all that sort of stuff where you just go quiet and just listen to the road? KERRI: Honestly, over the course of the day, because I will ride 18, 20 hours a day if you just let me go and if I'm trying to make distance, I'll do that. It's kind of a mix, but for the most part, I actually do listen to something. The last few years, I've really embraced and tried to understand and integrate into my personal identity, having ADHD and how does that manifest for me and I found that if I'm riding my motorcycle and I'm not listening to something, my mind wanders. But weirdly, if I'm listening to something, then I'm paying attention and focused, patrolling the motorcycle and being safe and then whatnot, which seems paradoxical. But that's just how my brain works. So I pretty much always have something going. Until recently, I had a Spotify playlist with about 1,800 songs on it that was rotating through. I tried to do audiobooks and podcasts, but that's a little tricky with all the wind noise and whatnot. I'm trying to protect my hearing. Other than that, I also listen to a lot of FM radio, which is great. So I have opinions on country music now, which I never thought I was going to have opinions on that at before. Yes, country music is great. It's all over. Even in Seattle, we have country music, bars, and whatnot, but you don't just walk down the street in Seattle and hear country music. You've got to kind of seek it out and so, I haven't been exposed to it. So listen to a lot of FM country as I cross the vast planes of America and I've also used that to discover a lot of this rebirth that's happened in the last decade of community radio. A lot of small communities have their own low power, super local FM radio you can only pick up for 20 miles at a stretch. So if I'm passing through a town and I see a sign for K, B, C, or whatever it is for some small town, I immediately tune to it. it's always somebody who's just like, they're not a trained professional. They never went to broadcasting school. They don't have that trained radio voice. They're just talking about sheep that got out, or here's a problem with the town water supply, or whatever it is, what local road is closed. That's just an amazing way of even as I'm passing through a place, if I'm not stopping, I kind of get a little bit of a flavor for that. AARON: Well, just thinking that FM radios generally got to give you more of a flavor for the local area that you're at. I always thought of that as the frustration of FM radio when traveling, like, “All my radio stations keep changing. I don't know where to tune!” But at the same time, that's pretty cool. I love that as a positive of what do they listen to over here? What do they listen to over this part of the country? I would imagine even just where different musical genres are on the dial would probably shift around. Or maybe not. Maybe that's just my…coming up with things, but. KERRI: Yeah. You do learn that there are some patterns, like all of the NPR stations, they're all down in the 800s and also, a lot of the religious radio and the top end of the dial seems to be a lot of rock. The big rock stations seem like 107, whatever the end, or something. The best ones, though are the ones that have local commercials because you get a lot of the same like, law firms and drugs that I don't know if I have even the condition, but I should really talk to my doctor, see if it's right for me. But then you'll get local car places, or I got one when I was down south, somewhere in Louisiana and it was for a combination, an airboat rental and barbecue joint? It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing and the guy had this amazing regional accent, which I never hear up here in the Northwest. We have our own accent, but I got a little taste of this real Southern accent and it was the owner. It was clearly the owner just reading a little script that he wrote, “Come on down and rent a jet boat, bring your dog and your dog can go on it and then we'll have barbecue waiting for you when we get off the dock,” and I'm like, “I'm sold.” Like, “I'm going to turn around, go see this guy right now. This is amazing,” and I actually have that business. I keep a map of every interesting place I hear about as I travel and I put a pin there I'm like, “Someday, I'm going to be coming back by this place and I'm going to be hungry for lunch and I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop here.” So advertising works, I guess, is what I'm saying. JAMEY: Will you share that map with us? [laughter] KERRI: I really should. I really should. It's a lot of fun actually because you read these websites, or roadside attractions, or you hear about some abandoned theme park, or something and it's like, that's kind of a cool thing. You read the article and you move on your day, but I add it to my maps and those maps are my GPS unit. As I'm writing, I've got this old screen in front of me and if I see a little pin appearing on the map in front of me, I can say, “Oh, there's this old waterpark over here,” or “Oh, there's that resort over there that I always wanted to see,” or a particular weird statue, or the birthplace of James Kirk, or whatever it is. So I don't have to remember if the computer could do it for me. JAMEY: I was going to ask if you go to things like the world's largest ball of twine and like –? KERRI: Every time. JAMEY: Okay, cool. KERRI: Every time. JAMEY: I'm glad that I understand you enough to know that you would do that. [laughter] CORALINE: Kerri, have you been in the Mystery Spot? KERRI: I have been in Mystery Spot. MANDY: What is Mystery Spot?! CORALINE: I remember Mystery Spot is some kind of a place where they say gravity is out of whack and everything feels sideways and you're super disoriented. They have this whole mythology around it. I've never been myself, but I did pretend that I'd been there by putting a bumper sticker on my car 15 years ago. [laughter] There's this amazing song called Mystery Spot Polka. Can't remember where I read that, but I think that's how I learned about it. MANDY: I will put that in the show notes. CORALINE: I will find Mystery Spot Polka. It is incredible. MANDY: So Kerri, what are some of the coolest places you have visited? Can you give us a top three rundown? CORALINE: And I really hope that cracker barrel is in that top three, Kerri. JAMEY: But which cracker barrel? CORALINE: Oh, cracker barrels are the same everywhere you go. I really believe there's only actually one cracker barrel, the canonical cracker barrel, and it's multidimensional, so. JAMEY: Yeah. You teleport into it? CORALINE: Yeah. [laughter] KERRI: Well, interestingly enough, I won't call this a danger, but one of the side effects of traveling as much I have in the last 4, or 5 years is strange, random flashbacks to stretches of road and you can't remember where they are. So you were just asking about this and I'm thinking about, “Okay, two places I could talk about,” and then I suddenly, unbidden, had this memory of a stretch of road. I can't remember where that is. I don't even know what state that's in. It was an amazing piece of pavement that I really enjoyed riding and, in that moment, I had this amazing moment. If I skip way ahead to the end of the conversation where I sum everything up and tell you why I ride, or what I get out of doing this is that it's cemented for me, this concept of the impermanence of everything because if I'm having a great day on the bike, it's beautiful afternoon, the temperature's perfect. It's not going to last. The sun is going to go down, the pavement is going to be bad, traffic is going to pick up, it's going to start raining. So I need to enjoy this moment, this curve, this hour, this half hour, this 5 minutes, whatever it is. Something, conversely, if it's bad, if it's raining, or it's dark, or heck, if it's snowing, it's like, this is not going to last. I'll go through this and everything will be great. But once every six weeks, or so, I make a really bad decision on the motorcycle, for instance, like that rain's probably going to clear up, that's not going to be a rainstorm. Nah, this wind is going to die down, it'll be fine. I'll be riding through something and it makes me just completely miserable. 110 degrees, or sideways rain, or whatever, and I think, “Yes, this is it. This is the moment. This is the thing that I'm going to be remembered for. This is the dumb thing that I did,” but it never lasts. I always survive and I walk away with this just amazing memory and this amazing about that time I rode through a rainstorm, or illegally parked my motorcycle in front of the Alamo to just get a photo, [laughs] things like that if it happened. CHELSEA: Kerri, do you collect souvenirs of any kind from some of these travels, or is it specifically photos? Do you post about them specifically anywhere? Maybe you do a whole bunch of things. I've certainly seen a number of your posts, but I guess I'm wondering, I'm imagining myself in these situations collecting stickers, or something like that. Do you have things like that that you look for in these places? KERRI: One of the neat things that I enjoy about traveling my motorcycle is that I just simply can't, I can't buy anything. It's not any space for it. My gear is all pretty well packed tightly. Souvenirs are kind of out unless I'm willing to pay extra ship from home. So it's kind of rare. Although, I have occasionally gotten, if I know that I'm going to be visiting a friend in a day, or two, I'll stop and pick something up and usually, it's a food item that I haven't seen before. In fact, if you follow me on Twitter, you'll see I'm always posting about weird foods, or energy drinks. 90% of the time it's weird stuff I found in a weird gas station on the side of the road, especially when it comes to energy drinks. And it's much more about having that experience of a place at the end of the day. I don't take as many photos as I'd like, or I think that I should. Although, certainly, I do take more than I used to. I've been working on landscape photography with my iPhone because again, I choose not to travel with a full camera rig. Well, I've got my iPhone, how can I take photos with that? That turns out to be much more about composition and seeing a moment and grabbing it than having the right lens, or light conditions being just right, or whatever. CHELSEA: Ooh. So I'd be very interested to hear some of your tips for phone photography, because this is a thing. We all have our phones on us and I imagine if I just a little more about how to frame my photos sometimes, I could get something a lot better. KERRI: Some of the basic tips are just photography one-on-one, like how do you compose a shot in terms of the rule of three where you break it up, and you'll see in phones, a lot of times you have the option turn on a grid. So you're looking at a grid and then help you understand how much space something is going to take up in the final shot. You want to line up your horizon, for example, if I'm taking a picture of say, like a harbor. I've taken a lot of photos of lighthouses for reasons I can get into later. So I'm trying to take really nice photos of lighthouses, the sea kind of wants to be right around and take up the lower third of the shot and then two-thirds is the sky. It's about how much of the frame gets filled with different elements will psychologically suggest the viewer, what their importance is, or how they relate to the person who's taken the photograph. So just some basic rules around that. I try to do things where, especially when doing landscape photography, because the iPhone lens is just horrible for this. It's really meant to take photos of your friends at parties, or your car in the driveway. It's not meant to take landscaping vistas, but you can do some tricks. Actually, I found that zooming in a little bit, not a lot, but just a little tiny bit just brings it a little bit closer and the final result just feels a little different. And then if also, you continue to follow those rules of composition, you can get some good landscape. Putting something in the foreground is really great. So my motorcycle is in a lot of my shots because of that, because it gives some depth to the photo. It helps to not just be like, especially if you're doing a wide-open plane like you do, it's like, oh yes, here's some bars of color. It's like, oh, now here's something to give me perspective and humanize the scale of a landscape. It's just little things like that and that's all stuff that I've learn just because I'm just a naturally curious person. So I'm like, “Well, how do I take better photos of that?” So I went off and did 4 hours of research and audited a class online somewhere. CORALINE: Have all, or most of your travels been continental US, or have you ever gone on a motorcycle trip on another continent, or? KERRI: It depends. Is New Zealand a continent? JAMEY: Well, it's not in the continental US. [laughs] KERRI: Yes. Starting closer to home, though. North America, I've done. So I've done US, Mexico, and Canada. Right when COVID hit, I was actually in Baja, California down at the Southern tip at the Tropic of Cancer on my motorcycle. I rode there all the way from Long Beach, California and I've been up to Alaska through Canada twice now. JAMEY: I'm sorry. I was going to tell a Jerri Alaska story actually, because I was in Alaska – [overtalk] KERRI: Oh, please. JAMEY: Not too long ago and I posted a landscape photo from our rental car on Twitter and I did not label where I was and Kerri was like, “Where are you in Alaska?!” And then we were talking about this and she recommended that I eat fireweed ice cream, which I did and it was wonderful. KERRI: Oh, was it great? JAMEY: [laughs] It was great. So I was going to suggest that your superpower could be recommendations. KERRI: Oh, thank you. That's super flattering, actually. I sometimes think when I finally get tired of tech, I just want to be a tour guide, or something, or write a travel novel, or something. JAMEY: Oh yeah. You'd be great at that. KERRI: Yeah. I love being a hostess and I love – whenever somebody's like, “Oh, I'm traveling,” or “I'm going here,” or I see somebody post photos from someplace I've been, I'm like, “Wait, here's this restaurant, you should go here and make sure you talk to this person and do this.” A year after I got my first bike, no, not even a year. Oh my gosh, it was 5 months after I got my first motorcycle, I went to New Zealand for a conference and said, “Well, hassle in traveling to New Zealand is actually traveling to New Zealand. So I might as well take some time.” I took two weeks and rented a motorcycle and just did a couple thousand kilometers all over the South Island in New Zealand. So those are the four countries I've ridden in. I was going to rent one – I'd been to Berlin a few times and I thought, “Oh, I'll rent a BMW when I'm in Germany, that'd be cool and ride around.” But unfortunately, I got sick while I was in Germany, the one time I was going to do that. So I stayed my hotel and felt bad. JAMEY: How different is motorcycle on the other side of the road in New Zealand? [chuckles] KERRI: I only rode on the wrong side of the road twice. [laughter] Yeah, the shop I rented from actually, they rent to a lot of Americans, I guess. So they put arrows on the windscreen to say, “Drive pass” to help remind us. But it's funny because every single rental car down there, the left side of the car is the one that's completely trashed because when you're riding, we start driving on the wrong side of the road. The side you're not used to. Now, it's like your entire concept as a driver of the opposite side of the car is now completely inverted and so, it's like trying to do something with your left hand when you're right-handed. It's just like, how do left-handed people survive?! Like, what are you doing? [laughs] CORALINE: I was in South Africa a number of years ago and we drove out to this wildlife preserve and the only car I was able a rental, that was not a stick shift because I don't know how to drive stick shift, [chuckles] was this giant club van. So not only I had driven the wrong side of the road, but I was in the largest vehicle I had ever driven. [laughs] Had no idea where the other side of the car might be was, just terrified of exactly that the whole time. KERRI: See, you called it a Clubvan, but all I can imagine, the image that popped in my brain was a party bus. [laughter] So imagine you driving around South Africa in a party bus. [laughter] CORALINE: That would have been amazing. Yeah. KERRI: Very different trip. AARON: I just want to bring it back to lighthouse pictures because as a native New Englander, I need to know why you're taking pictures of all these lighthouses. KERRI: Well, as another native New Englander, hi. AARON: Hi. KERRI: How are you? [laughter] No. So why am I taking photos of lighthouses? One of the things about the Iron Butt Association, which again, is this group dedicated to promoting this, is not just the pure endurance of can you ride a 1,000 miles in 24 hours? Can you ride 1,500 miles in 24 hours? What are the limits of safe endurance events? We also do a number of collection style things. We call them tours. I'm doing a lighthouse tour. So you go to lighthouses and I've got this little passport, my lighthouse passport I got from the United States Lighthouse Society. When they're open, you can get a little rubberstamp in your book to prove that you were there. When they're not open, I take a photo of my motorcycle next to the lighthouse and that's the proof that I've been there. The challenge is I have to visit 60 in 12 months. AARON: Okay. KERRI: And that's the bare minimum. So there's advancing levels of difficulty and they're merit badges for adults, really. [laughter] 60 in 12 months I'm at 25, or 30 now and I scoured the West Coast. I'm going to also hit the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic next month when I'm down there in Florida. There are other challenges like go to 120, or 180 again, over the course of different time periods. You have different difficulty levels. I've also done one which is visiting national parks because national parks have a similar passports stamp program where you can go get these timestamped little cancellations to say I was in the Redwood National Forest, or I was at Wounded Knee, or not Wounded Knee, Little Bighorn, or Devils Tower, or whatever. The challenge there is to visit say, 50 of them, but now you have to do 25 different states. Of course, I've upped the ante and we have the silver level, which is you also have to combine that visiting one park in Washington, California, Florida, and Maine, in addition to those 50 and 25 states. So I did two of those last year and then year before that, I added Alaska just for fun, which is the gold, or insanity level. So it's just these little different ways of encouraging people to go out and travel and see more in the country on their motorcycle. CORALINE: You work from the road, right? KERRI: Yeah, I do actually. CORALINE: I would love hear about how that works with such an aggressive travel schedule. KERRI: That takes a lot of discipline and balance, which I am surprised I managed to pull off [chuckles] given how much I can normally do it without adding to traveling. Usually, what I do is I have days where I am in one place and days when I'm traveling. So for example, on February 28th, I'm going to be heading out for 2 months on the road and my first stops going to be San Diego. I will take that weekend and ride down to San Diego, which again, only 1,300 miles so that's a day and I've rented a little place down in Ocean Beach, a block from the shore and they have Wi-Fi in this little tiny one-bedroom studio. I'll work there and I'll kind of explore San Diego. I'll work all day and, in the evenings, I'll go over ride on the hills, or go up to Legoland, or whatever I want to do in that part of the world. And then Friday night, Saturday, I'll hit the road again for a couple days. This is actually how I initially started traveling these long, long distances was trying to say like, “Okay, I really want to go to Austin, Texas, but it's going to take me four riding days, or whatever to get to Austin, Texas. How do I manage do that and still work from the road?” So well, 2 days away is Denver, Colorado. So why don't I go to Denver? I'll work there for a few days and then next weekend, then I'll skip on. So it's like setting up a series of base camps as if I was attacking Everest so I can break up these big trips. But as I wanted to travel further and further distances overall, I had to actually physically travel, or do longer distances in the same amount of time. Speeding isn't going to do that safely and it actually really doesn't get you there that much faster in the end. So the only way to do that was to figure out how to ride longer more hours in the day, figure that out. JAMEY: Can you talk about these motorcycle scavenger hunt things that you do? KERRI: Yeah. Thanks for asking. I assume you noticed the trophies on the wall behind me. So these are competitive scavenger hunt style rallies. We call them rallies. A lot of people, when you say motorcycle rally, they think about Bike Week in Daytona, or Sturgis out in South Dakota. That's none of this. It is a scavenger hunt and there's a timer on it say, 36, or 60 hours where the night before you get a list of here's all the different places that you could possibly go, you call them bonus locations and at 4:00 in the morning, everyone's released and you're like, “Okay, go, be back in a day and a half.” You go and you take photos of these different places to prove that you went there and every place gets you a certain number of points. The harder it is to get there, or the further away it is, the more points that you would get for going there. You can do combinations for visiting certain places, visit three clown theme places and get the clown bonus, or whatnot. Like a pinball machine, if you will, where you score the right combination, you get more points. So it's a timed competitive thing to who can the most amount of points because you can't visit all of the – they'll give you 80, or a 100 places you could possibly go. You can't go to all of them in the time allotted. So can you construct an efficient route that is also one that you have that you the physical capability to travel in the allotted time and earn enough points to place well? They typically last, 36 hours is one level. We have a few that do 60. I'm doing one this summer that is 9 days long. So we'll be leaving Cheyenne, Wyoming and four days later, we have to be in State College, Pennsylvania where we'll all stop for 10 hours and then we'll turn around and head back to Cheyenne. I actually just put in my application for the Olympics of the Iron Butt Association is called the Iron Butt Rally, which is an 11-day version of the countrywide scavenger hunt – [overtalk] CORALINE: Oh, wow. KERRI: With locations all over North America and Canada. We call it, it's sort of the Olympics. It happens every 2 years. You actually have to apply to be accepted to enter because otherwise, you'd have a lot of folks that say, “Oh, I could do that,” and they don't really know what they're getting into and it's a little bit unsafe if you haven't done it before and you don't really understand what it takes to do. That's what's coming up my horizon for those and they're very competitive events, although at the end of the day, it's made-up internet points. There are no sponsorships, there's no recognition besides outside of this group of 300, or 400 similarly weirdo people who like riding their motorcycles longways. But no, I've had quite a bit of success competitively in that and that just scratch all the right itches because it's riding a motorcycle. Plus, it's basically a traveling salesman problem. It's a directed graph problem and you work with GitHub all day long and like, “Oh, I understand how to traverse a graph, this is easy.” CORALINE: Speaking of that, Kerri as a long-time software engineer, do you do anything, do you have any software, any kind of tools that you develop for keeping track of all this? KERRI: Yeah, I do a lot with spreadsheets, believe it, or not. The tooling, it's tricky because at the end of the day, you still have to ride the motorcycle and you can't really automate that. So a lot of the stuff I'm able to do with software is really around using software for planning and analysis. For example, there's a number of different databases around you asked about the collection of the lighthouses and one of the things that I'm around the country collecting this year is pressed pennies. Now a pressed penny machine, actually I think they're fascinating because a pressed penny machine is the only machine still in active production that interacts with the penny in any way, shape, or form. There's no vending machines. There's nothing who deals with the penny besides coin counting machine. Besides the penny smasher, you put a penny, 2 quarters and it smashes a little design in. Again, I've got to go collect a 100 of these from 20 states and 5 of them have to be on the other side of the Mississippi, all these weird rules, but how do you find them? There's one at every cracker barrel. There's eight at Disney, one at SeaWorld. There's some obvious things like that, but it turns out, there's almost 4,000 of these machines in the United States and there's a database for these on this weird creaky, old website written in ASP. It's actually an IP address. It doesn't have a domain name. JAMEY: That's legit. CORALINE: Dark web got pennies. That's amazing. [laughter] KERRI: If only there was crypto involved here, it'd be perfect. So I got to break out some scripting the other day and actually write a little script that went into kind of scrape these old web pages and then parse CHTML and kind of strip out, look, here's the address for the place and store them because you want the name of the place and the address so you can find it. You've got to take that and ship it over to Google API, actually get an actual latitude, longitude, and then reform it into the XML format that my GPS device – it's this whole chain of Rube Goldberg machine of how to get this data into a place that I can actually use it. CORALINE: I think the story of the entire internet is made. [laughs] KERRI: Right. CORALINE: Yeah. KERRI: So fast forward to the end of that and now I happen to be the maintainer for a website that maps pressed penny machines across the United States, based on this data that I'm scraping from somebody else's website. AARON: All because you have a DNS name. KERRI: Exactly, exactly. But this actually turned to be really, really crucial because a whole bunch of people in my riding community said, “I really wanted to do that penny collecting hunt and you have 12 months to do it and I'm going to go out to the West Coast.” So I was like, I thought, “I have plenty of places to stop, but I could never find the machines.” It's just like, “Oh, okay. So my putting this information into a format that other people could actually easily digest, that's the value that I'm adding here.” It's inspired at least a dozen people to go out and start collecting smashed pennies. So I've got to be responsible for some uptick in sales on these vending machines. JAMEY: They should sponsor you. AARON: I love the weirdness of these machines that interact with a coin that's so bad at being currency, we just sort of toss them out to the extent that I was at Disney World not too long ago and the machines have their own supply of pennies because people just don't have pennies. So [chuckles] this machine just has a stock of pennies and you can swipe a credit card and be like, “Give me the smashed pennies,” and it charges you a dollar in 1 cent and then goes through and does it. KERRI: God, it's fabulous. A lot of people have heard the story that pennies are actually – it costs more to make a penny than a penny is actually worth in terms of currency. It's wild. But every time I start thinking, “We should get rid of the penny,” I'm like, “That sounds like the craziest, insane conspiracy theory position to ever take.” AARON: But also, the penny is real bad at being currency. [laughs] KERRI: Yeah. Yeah. MID-ROLL: And now a quick word from our sponsor. I hear people say the VPNs have a reputation for slowing down your internet speed, but not with NordVPN, because it's the fastest VPN in the world. I don't have to sacrifice internet speed for better security. With NordVPN, my internet traffic is routed through a secure encrypted tunnel, which protects my data and privacy. I can also have it on up to six devices like my laptop, phone, TV, iPad—all my devices are protected. Grab your exclusive NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/gtc, or use the code GTC to get a huge discount on your NordVPN plan plus one additional month for free. Plus, a bonus gift! It's completely risk-free with Nord's 30-day money back guarantee. KERRI: Way back at the beginning of this conversation, somebody asked me and sorry, I forgot who asked me about some of the best places I've been and the strangest things I've seen. I kind of got derailed on some poet nonsense, but I realize that I really am a sucker for world's largest ball twine kinds of things. I had this great opportunity. So collecting pennies, lighthouses, and national parks, I'm always just getting off the main roads and things. I see a lot of stuff. I found out that I'm a sucker basically for weird local foods like the fireweed ice cream. Anytime I see something advertised on a menu that I've never heard of before, that's the thing I'm going to order. Cinnamon rolls because when you travel up the Alaskan highway from Dawson Creek, BC up to Alaska, every 60 miles, or so, there's a gas station and a little bakery. So you can get your gas, you can get coffee, and you can get a cinnamon roll and they all claim to have the best cinnamon roll on the Alaskan highway. I stop every 60 miles and get a cinnamon rolls. After about 5 hours, I really just want to fall over and vomit because I'm sick of cinnamon rolls. But now when I travel, if I see some place advertising cinnamon rolls, I'm like, “Well, I've got to stop because that's my thing because I like cinnamon rolls because that's reminds me of Alaska.” So I get to go to a lot of these really great small towns and just seeing a lot of how, especially in the central part of the country, so many towns are struggling with just having jobs for people and keeping local economies going that a lot of them will do these sorts of things. They'll have interesting, strange festivals, or hold the film festival about corn, or soy, or they'll paint their water tower, or something. Last year, as I was traveling across North Dakota one time, I saw off on the horizon on a hill—first of all, yes, a hill in North Dakota so that was notable—a giant cow. A giant Holstein cow. This a 100-foot-tall fiberglass cow and so, I said to my riding partner, I'm like, “We're going the cow, right?” And she's like, “Yeah, we're going the cow.” So get off the highway and we rode this little windy dirt road at the top of this hill. It was just this huge giant fiberglass cow that they put on top of the hill 20, 30 years ago and now it's like the 4-H Club with the FFA kids take care of it and repaint it every few years. They collect like, they ask for donations. $5 each and the little two because we're passing through and that's part of our job. That's how I'm interacting with the community and plus man, I got a ton of pictures of this giant cow. It was right at sunset, we were on this hill, and it was actually really beautiful, the prairie, it was spread out for us and it was about an hour east of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. So it's right where the planes start to break up into the what's called Missouri Breaks where the rivers have really broken up the land quite a bit. So it was just gorgeous. It was just absolutely beautiful and I never would've seen that if I didn't stop because there was a giant cow. That's my giant cow story. CORALINE: Kerri, have you ever considered writing down your stories and the stories of the people that you meet along the way and the amazing places you've been? I hate to say the B word, but it would make a pretty interesting book. KERRI: Well, I'll throw back another B word at you, which is blog. I keep a travel blog at motozor.com. Lately, I've been writing more about, because I haven't been doing as much non-directed travel, so a lot of my travel lately has been around these sort of competitive rallies that I've been riding in, which are interesting in themselves because they're like, “Go take your photo with the giant cow,” or “Go to the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada, or whatnot, take a photo there.” I've been writing quite a bit about those sorts of travels, but I also have a huge backlog of articles that I've written for that over the years of all the different trips I've taken to New Zealand, Alaska down into Baja, and the multiple times I've been across the country. The one that I'm working on, that I haven't finished yet because I'm trying a new thing, which is incorporating a series of interview video interviews with my riding partner, is trying to tell the story in written form of the trip that she and I did last summer, where we rode to all 48 states in 10 days starting in New England ending in Washington. JAMEY: Kerri, I have an important question to ask you, but I'm contractually obligated to ask you. How many miles at a time would you say that you live your life? [laughs] KERRI: Well, I guess, I supposed to say one quarter of a mile at a time. [chuckles] JAMEY: Well, Kerri was also a guest on my Greater Than Code spinoff, fast and furious show, Stationary & Sassy, so. KERRI: Which I love. JAMEY: I had to pull it back. [laughs] KERRI: I'll answer that in an obliviously serious way. [laughter] I can go an entire take of gas without putting my foot down. That's kind of fun. One of my current challenges right now is can I ride through the entire state of Oregon, north to south, without getting gas? Because it's 304 miles from the Washington-Oregon border to the California-Oregon border and Oregon doesn't let you pump your own gas and it irritates me. They usually, if they see you're on a motorcycle, they're like, “You got it?” I'm like, “Yeah, I got it. I'm not from here. I pump gas.” So the challenge right now is can I cross Oregon without having to stop for gas and then actually weirdly, mentally breaks up my day. It's kind of weird motorcycle Pomodoro of like, “Okay, I can go 3 hours before I need to stop.” So my day gets broken up into these chunks of where are the stops that I have to make versus the ones I want to make, or excuse me, the ones I want to make versus the ones I have to make. JAMEY: You heard it here, folks. Kerri lives her life 304 miles at a time. [laughter] KERRI: I live my life a quarter tank at a time. [laughter] CHELSEA: Kerri, you mentioned earlier that you listen to music while you're riding because you find that it helps you focus on riding. I find a similar thing with work, whether it's fulltime job work, or side work, I have a much easier time focusing—for the audience, I'm a programmer as well—if I've got something on. I like to listen to Boston Nova, or I also go on turntable.fm, I'm in a heavy metal room there that's kind of fun. I'm curious as to whether you find that music helps you focus anywhere off the motorcycle as well. KERRI: Yes. I am very susceptible to the emotional resonance of music, if that makes any sense whatsoever. There are kinds of music that I just can't listen to before I go to bed, like heavy metal gets me going, jam music. I'm a really huge Phish fan, which surprise, from Vermont, and I wear a lot of tie dye. Of course, I'm in the Phish. But that's the music I like to listen to when I'm riding and when I'm working. But I do a lot of chill hop stuff now. I've gotten into that and I'm finding my way back to a lot of again, country music. But there's this entire alt Nashville scene that's happened in the last 10 years. I completely missed that. I'm kind of getting caught up on these days. My Bandcamp catalog, I think I'm keeping at least three of their engineers paid for; I buy so much stuff on Bandcamp these days. CORALINE: I definitely get what you said about sensitivity to the emotional music definitely resonates with me as a musician. It's kind of weird to admit, but when I'm doing writing, I listen to Steely Dan [laughs] and I actually learned from a friend of mine that William Gibson listened to Steely Dan while he was writing all the seminal cyberpunk novels and thought that's kind of interesting, maybe good company, right? KERRI: Hey, Fagen and Becker, great albums. It's the stereotypical thing that Rush is this big band in programming circles and fun fact, the drummer for Rush was a huge motorcycle guy to the point that they actually had a trailer on their tour bus that he would carry two bikes on the trailer. So he would ride between concert stops. The band do their show and they'd leave on the bus and he got on his motorcycle and like, “See you in Chicago, guys,” “See you in Milwaukee,” “See you in Madison.” The band went along. He had some personal and his wife passed away and his daughter fairly tragically and he wrote an entire book about it, where he didn't really quit the band. Although, they basically shut Rush down for a period of time so the band could work through that. But he took that time and went on the road just writing his motorcycle around. He wrote several books about dealing with grief through riding his motorcycle. I found that to be a really fascinating book and it's one of those touchstones, the Canada motorcycle riders. What little we read, that's definitely a book that everyone recommends to me at some point like, “Oh, have you read this book?” I'm like, “Yes, I've read that book.” AARON: It's Neil Peart for anyone who needs to look that up. I relate to the music as a distraction preventative [laughs] as someone who also deals with ADHD. It just makes sense to me. It's like, “Oh yeah, without it, there's so many places for my brain to go,” but if you have music on the back and it's like, “Oh, great. All right. That's where my brain is going to go when it gets distracted, it's just going to listen to this, then I'll go back to riding the bike.” [chuckles] KERRI: Exactly. Exactly. CORALINE: Kerri, you said a word earlier when you were contrasting the way you were riding when you started out and being kind of exploratory versus, I think the word you used is directive there, or a sweet spot for you between directed activity, directed riding versus wandering, maybe even drifting—not a car movie reference. But is there a balance that rejuvenates you, or that energizes you? KERRI: Yes. I've talked to other motorcycle riders about this, where you say, “My gosh, there's so many great things that we see along the way,” and we say, “I would love to stop here.” So for example, when we're doing these rallies where we're collecting things, for example, you stop to take a picture, or something, and then you've got to go. You only really stop for 5 minutes because you have this timetable and a schedule that you're trying to execute, or if you're trying to ride 1,500 miles in 24 hours, you can't stop. Your gas stops, you're timed down to like oh, 5 minutes. So you'll see things. You're like, “Man, I wish I could stop,” or “I wish I had come back here and take this in and give something,” the respect that you want to give it, or really, really dive deep and taste a place, if you will. It's a really common thing in the long-distance thing. Other motorcycles will sometimes say like, “Well, you don't see anything that way.” It's like, “Well, actually, I see a lot. I see way lot more in my days than you see,” but you don't get to stop so you have to kind of try and balance that. That's one thing that I really like about these collection things that I do is, collection challenges, I carry satellite tracker, of course so I can plot out everywhere that I've been. I've been looking at the one for my lighthouse trip so far up and down the West Coast. It's just amazing, I'm going out to every little inlet, point, and little peninsula sticks out into the ocean because that's where the lighthouses are and the things that I've gotten to see through doing that. So one of the reasons that I've gotten into those sort of challenges rather than the pure and endurance is just because it does reward that exploration. While, at the same time, being fairly directed because the directed part of it is researching and planning at home, like finding where are the lighthouses, where are the national parks I need to go visit? What are the hours are things open? Making that plan versus executing on the plan and the execution plan, getting to explore things, I think it's really a lot about the framing of the trip for me. In February, I'm going down to San Diego and then I'm going to, what's called a 50cc, which is coast to coast in 50 hours. So I'll be leading San Diego and within 50 hours, I'm going to be in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Aha. Somehow, I'll do that. I'm not going to be able to stop and see anything along the way, but because I know that's the kind ride I'm embarking on, it becomes okay. It's this weird personal permission structure to give a pass to things that I would really like to see along the way versus say, if I'm doing a lighthouse trip – I did one several months ago down to Disneyland, but I went down the California coast and I found myself like, “Oh, I'm not making any miles. This is so slow. Why is this taking me 3 days to get down to Los Angeles when it normally takes me 1 and a half at most?” So I had to stop and I ended up stopping in this little tiny town. I can't even remember the name of the place, but it's somewhere in Northern coast, California, and there's a little tiny coffee shop there. It's like Two Girls Coffee, or something like that. I just stopped, I got a coffee, and I sat outside. They had a table, it was a nice day, and I was just like, “I'm just going to sit here for 30 minutes and I'm just going to recenter myself and really think about what am I doing here? What do I want to be accomplishing and what set of skills do I need to bring to this moment to maximize how much fun I'm going to have? If I'm not having fun, then why am I doing it?” So just being able to sit there in sunshine for a little bit and just say, “The point of what I'm doing here is to explore and it's to have this experience. It's not get someplace fast. It's not to get someplace far away. It's to explore and see things.” I was so much happier after that and I had a great conversation with a hippie in the parking lot so that was pretty great. MANDY: Bonus. [laughs] Well, we usually end this conversation with reflections. I know, for me, I just want to say that everything you described just makes me feel so happy. I've been on a really big journey to improve my life and just what you said in the last few minutes about just taking time to enjoy, not being in a hurry, slowing down, and recentering yourself. That is all just so important to remember the whole cliché of stopping and smelling the roses. Like just enjoying your life even if it's a quarter tank at a time. JAMEY: I keep thinking about this map that Kerri says that she has, which I actually legitimately would really like to see. But a lot of what Kerri was talking about was resonating with me. I also like to explore and I think about keeping track of places, but I don't have a map and I've been thinking about it for a while. I think it's one of these sunk cost things where I'm like, “Well, if I wanted to do a map, I should have been like doing it already,” but that's not how that works in real life. So if I want to have a map, I should start it now and I think that's my call-to-action. [chuckles] KERRI: When people ask my advice like, “Oh, what motorcycle should I get,” or “What's the best motorcycle to do this, or that?” I always say like, “Oh, well the best motorcycle to do the ride you want to do is the one you have.” I think that's really true of so many things in life is that the trick is just to get started and it's not about the fancy equipment. It's not about the gear. You could just do it. If you just give yourself permission to go do a thing, you can just go do it. CORALINE: I was thinking about how that kind of philosophy relates to how my life circumstances, job situation has changed so much for the past year since I retired from software engineering and the relief of not having to be productive, not having to hit goal, not having to have constraints that I'm not in control of, governing things, and permission to go down rabbit holes. So when you were talking about the giant cow, I was liking that to well, if you were in a hurry to get somewhere, you wouldn't have stopped there. But because you weren't, you had a richer experience. You saw something you hadn't seen before. You hadn't experienced before. I really think that's a lesson we can take all over the place and give ourselves permission, like you said, to wander aimlessly and to explore. That's something that I definitely intend to do in my life and your story of doing that is very inspirational so thank you, Kerri. AARON: I was just latching onto two bits that I really liked. First off, if I'm not having fun, then why am I doing this is probably life lessons to live by. [chuckles] But I also appreciated the moment of resetting your expectations to your purpose. Like, why am I doing this thing? Let me remember, because I had a reason I'm doing it and if I'm not enjoying it right now, where's the mismatch? I like that. Because so often, it's easy, for me anyway, to stumble into doing something and finding yourself like, “Why am I doing this?” and then stepping back and be like, “Okay. All right. I chose to do this because of this and if this is my purpose, then I can let go of this other pressure that I'm putting on myself to go further every day when that's not the reason I'm here.” It doesn't make sense to put that pressure on myself then. KERRI: I feel like that chain, that returning to the beginning point is also a good career skill. You have to get serious about it, or bring this into work realm. But as a senior engineer, staff engineer, and principal, blah, blah, blah, so often, it's not how efficient can I make this loop. It's also going back, is this doing the right thing to do? Like, “Why are we doing this? Is there a better way to solve this sort of problem?” So it's that lesson of what I learned on the road coming back into work, but it's also because work is life as well and if work isn't fun and whatever, then why am I doing it? But that skill comes back into my personal life so there's this free flow of influence going back and forth. AARON: Yeah. That purpose revisit thing is something that I've just been thinking about from events standpoint from doing conferences over the past couple years, like so much had to go back to first principles because it was like, okay, well what was the reason for us doing this? Just recreating the same motion in a different environment isn't necessarily going to get us the same results. What is the reason we're doing this? Let's revisit that and make sure we're still in alignment with it all. I think we can do that more often in our lives, too. Like, “What is the reason I'm doing this thing?” [chuckles] “Okay, it's not accomplishing that anymore. Let's get rid of this practice and try something else,” or not. Maybe the answer is to keep it. CHELSEA: Yeah. One of the things that I think about apropos of what a couple of other folks were mentioning about how easy it is to get caught up in the details when trying to start something as opposed to just picking early anything and getting started. Occasionally, folks will ask me questions like that about blogging and one of the things that I like to do is keep some URLs on hand of some of my earlier pieces, just because it makes it really clear that it didn't always look like this. I just started and it wasn't what people see. I think folks sometimes see someone who's several years down the road of having started something and feeling like they can't start because it won't look like that immediately and it won't. [laughs] But I imagine that having those kinds of stories on hand, what I'm thinking about is how to make those sorts of stories more accessible to folks. Because a lot of what we see understandably about how to do something is from the folks who have mastered it to some degree and it's not as clear where to look to find folks who also are just starting and what to expect your journey to look like right at the beginning. MANDY: Kerri, do you want to leave a us with any parting thoughts? KERRI: A lot of people, when I tell them I rode a 1,000 miles in a day, they're like, “You can't do that.” It's like, “I've done it 12 times.” It's like, “What are you talking about?” But to kind of carry on to Aaron and to what Chelsea just said, it's a marathon. You can't do a lot of big things in a single step. You have to make that first step and then the second step and then the third step and then you're walking and you're doing the thing. I don't really talk about motorcycling with people who don't motorcycle and everybody who I motorcycle would talk about this. We all do it and so, it's not remarkable. Sometimes I think it's important to realize that what we do accomplish in our lives is fairly remarkable and magic to a lot of people. As software engineers, what we do is frankly, astounding some days and it's important to remember that we have traveled far from where we began when we first started doing this sort of stuff and we may return to that when we change careers, or jobs, or languages, or technologies. Return to that place of not knowing and that can be uncomfortable, but there is so much joy and discovery you can have if you just take that time, and stop and understand and pay attention to your story of where you started, where you're going, and how far along you've actually come. You can't look up the mountain and be intimidated by that. You should turn around and look back down the mountain to see how far you've come. MANDY: That was lovely. Thank you so much and thank you so much for coming back on the show and telling us yet another few stories. The first time you were on the show, I distinctly remember the title being Story Time with Kerri Miller and you never disappoint. I'm so glad that you took time to join us and talk about your motorcycling adventures with us [chuckles] non-motorcycling people. It is super fascinating and it's definitely an awesome topic outside of – that we can relate a lot of the concepts to the tech field, software engineering, development, and all that. So dear listener, if you have a cool hobby like Kerri that you want to come on the show and talk about, we'd love to talk to you because this has frankly been amazing and I really enjoyed this episode. So thank you again and we'll see you all next week. Special Guest: Kerri Miller.

On this week's episode of Fanboys, Ty and Edgar talk goth symphonies and industrial orgies. Grab the full episode on The Hard Times' Patreon! (https://patreon.com/thehardtimes) ALSO: are you in a shitty band? Want to hear the Fanboys try to say something nice about it? Submit your music to Edgar's Twitter (https://twitter.com/EdgarTowner)! Be sure to check out this week's featured artists: Vindicating Twilight (https://vindicatingtwilight.bandcamp.com/album/my-ephemeral-mind?fbclid=IwAR3zOiOun9GbdfDb2b4cPQbgPitXC98speVsDahkwfZ60BKSjLf83MZCKsY), Doors in the Labyrinth (https://doorsinthelabyrinth.bandcamp.com/?fbclid=IwAR05evUoLZo6DDZvJn38QuHexBPoc0IKghszEuPNWDjessMHwbn0W_ZnzqU), Another Dead Weirdo (https://deadweirdo.bandcamp.com/album/choke-a-love-letter?fbclid=IwAR1gJMta9h33MPSIYrTDTzmVnQrLEB3ipIl6MfR8nE0IodR9kRNj1jhr7dg), Coraline Ada Ehmke (https://soundcloud.com/coralineada/the-punk-session-2-6-11-21?in=coralineada%2Fsets%2Fthe-punk-wip&fbclid=IwAR2KwkUjqi3Z4u_bMxI7sHJTLm0wLf77L6Z-jZZajmbIPcMoJ6ElB66yEks), SPKGoose (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLzRFtLQfZg), and Tulpa (https://tulpaproject.bandcamp.com/album/fm-transmitter?fbclid=IwAR0Siesk0nJsUhfZbb3RY2x-XdVH4khEowDelO2BamAB7YKwLpNMKWbDu0k)

TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence, Abuse, Interpersonal Safety 01:26 - Eva's Superpower: ADHD and Hyperfocus * Workplace Accommodation * At-Will Employment (https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/at-will-employment-overview.aspx) 08:19 - Design for Safety (https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-safety) * Tech Used For Interpersonal Harm * Might vs When * Eva Penzey Moog | Designing Against Domestic Violence (https://vimeo.com/373462514) * Weaponizing Technology 12:45 - What Engineers Need to Know * Control/Shared Accounts * Surveillance * Location Data 15:02 - Expanding Our Understanding of What “User” Means * “User as an abstraction.” 20:43 - Parallels with Security * Personas / Archetypes * Adding Layers of Friction * Ongoing Arms Race 22:23 - Spreading Awareness Across Teams Focused on Feature Delivery * Safety Designers as a Specialized Role? * Generalists vs Specialists; Literacy vs Fluency * This Book Is For Everyone: Engineers, Designers, Product Managers, etc. 31:38 - Thinking Beyond The User * Constituency * Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need By Sasha Costanza-Chock (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/design-justice) 35:25 - Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy * We Prioritize The Safety of Marginalized People Over the Comfort of Unmarginalized People * How Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-design-thinking-protects-white-supremacy-tickets-168123071633) (Workshop) * Kim Crayton (https://www.kimcrayton.com/): Intention Without Strategy is Chaos * Sitting with Discomfort 40:21 - Putting Ergonomics, Safety, and Security Behind Paywalls * “Ergonomics is the marriage of design and ethics.” * The History of Seatbelts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEQ6AojkEeo) * Government Regulation * Worker Organizing 45:58 - Tech Workers and Privilege * Overpaid/Underpaid Reflections: Mandy: Inclusive and accessible technology includes people experiencing domestic abuse. Damien: If a product can be used for harm, it will be. Coraline: How systems are weaponized against marginalized and vulnerable folks. The internet is good for connecting people with shared experiences but we're breaking into smaller and smaller groups. Are we propping up systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences? Eva: Who didn't teach you about this? It's our job to keep ourselves safe in tech. Tech companies need to take more responsibility for user safety. 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. Transcript: MANDY: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode number 252. My name is Mandy Moore and today, I'm here with Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Hi, and I am here with Coraline Ada Ehmke. CORALINE: Wow. I actually showed up for once. [laughs] I'm very happy to be with y'all today and I'm very excited about the guest that we have today. Her name is Eva PenzeyMoog and Eva is a principal designer at 8th Light and the author of Design for Safety. Before joining the tech field, she worked in the non-profit space and volunteered as a domestic violence educator and rape crisis counselor. At 8th Light, she specializes in user experience design as well as education and consulting in the realm of digital safety design. Her work brings together her expertise in domestic violence and technology, helping technologists understand how their creations facilitate interpersonal harm and how to prevent it through intentionally prioritizing the most vulnerable users. Eva, I'm so happy to have you here today. Hi! EVA: Hi, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. CORALINE: So if I recall correctly and it has been a while so Mandy, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we open with the same question that we've been opening with for 251 other episodes and Eva, that is, what is your superpower and how did you discover, or develop it? EVA: Yeah, so my superpower is my ADHD, actually [chuckles] and specifically my ability to hyperfocus and I didn't really acquire and start to until the age of 25, which is when I was diagnosed. For people who don't know, hyperfocus is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's a state of very intense focus that people with ADHD will sometimes go into. It's not something you really have control over, it's not something you can just turn on, or off, and it isn't necessarily good, or bad. But for me, I'm really lucky because it often gets triggered when I start to code. So as I was starting to learn code and then I switched over to focusing on design and frontend like CSS and SAAS. But as I was learning that stuff, it gets triggered all the time. So I can sit down and code and oftentimes, hours have gone past and so long as I don't like miss any meetings or forget to eat, it's totally a superpower. CORALINE: That's amazing. I've talked about before, I live with bipolar disorder and I tend to stay in a low-grade manic state as my resting place and I experience very similar things with that hyper focus and just losing hours on a task and sometimes, it's very positive and I get a lot done and sometimes, I'm like, “What the hell did I do?” [chuckles] EVA: Right. CORALINE: But I think it's great that—I've been talking to some other folks with ADHD, with bipolar—the judo moves we can do takes something that really negatively affects us in a lot of ways and finding a way to turn it around, like you said, and use it as a superpower. Those are the strategies we develop when we live with things like this and I'm always happy when people have figured out how to get something good out of that. EVA: Yeah, totally and realizing that you have this thing that happens. Because I'm sure it's been happening my whole life, but I didn't recognize it, or understand it and then just being able to name it and see that it's happening is so powerful. And then to be like, “Oh, I can maybe do certain things to try to get into it,” or just being aware that it's a thing it's like very powerful. CORALINE: I'm kind of curious, Eva, if you don't mind us talking about ADHD for a little while? EVA: Sure. Yeah. CORALINE: Okay. I have a friend who is – actually, a couple of friends who were very recently diagnosed with ADHD and they had so much trouble in the traditional tech were workplace, especially working for companies that have productivity metrics like lines of code, or number of commits, or something like that. It was really difficult for both of these friends to operate in an environment where you're expected to have very consistent output day over day and not having accommodation, or not having the ability to design their work in such a way that maximizes the positives of how they work and minimizes the negatives of how they work. Is that something you've struggled with as well? EVA: Yeah, and that's so unfortunate that your friends because like I said, I feel like it is a superpower and most workplaces, they should be trying to harness it and understand that, you can have really, really awesome employees with ADHD. If you set them up for success, they can be so successful. But it is something – so I've only ever worked at 8th Light actually, when I was interviewing, over 5 years ago now, and started doing, trying to find my first job in tech, after doing a bootcamp, I interviewed at a couple different places and none of them felt super great. But obviously, I was just really eager to get my first job. But then I went into 8th Light and 8th Light was one of the places where I really, really did want to work there and was really excited for the interview. But when I got to the office, it was very quiet and there was an open workspace, but people were working very quietly and there were like lots of rooms. I got into that and I was like, “Oh, thank God” like, this is exactly the space I need. I can't handle too much activity. I can't handle offices where they're actually playing music; that type of thing is my nightmare and I don't actually like wearing headphones all day like that. That's not just a easy fix for me and for a lot of people with ADHD. So I felt like right away, now I want to work here even more and I've been really lucky that it's been a really good setup for someone like me to work and I have gotten some accommodations which has been good. I feel like if you don't give accommodations, they're breaking the law, they need to do that. DAMIEN: This is really, really validating because I've had similar experiences of that. Even just this morning where I was in the code and I had no idea how much time was going by and I had no awareness of anything else. That's possible because of the environment I have that I work in. Whereas, previous jobs I've had with bullpens and just open office plans, I was in incredibly miserable there and I didn't understand how people could get any work done in those environments. So just this understanding of how people are different; in what environments some people thrive in and other environments other people thrive in. EVA: Yeah. So have you always worked from home, or has this been a pandemic thing? DAMIEN: This has been probably about 10 years. Yeah. [laughs] I went home and never left. [laughs] EVA: Nice. [chuckles] CORALINE: I've done something very similar. I started working from home, I think in 2015 and not for a great reason, but I found the exact same thing that you're talking about. Like I am very sensitive to my environment. I use music to control my mood and like you, Eva, I hate headphones. So I do wonder, you mentioned accommodations and the legal perspective on that. In Illinois where – Eva, you live in Illinois, too. Are you local for 8th Light? EVA: Yeah. I live in Chicago. CORALINE: We have that will employment and it's really easy to discriminate against folks on multiple axes rather than providing our accommodations. Without will employment, they can just let you go and you have no proof that it was because they're ableist, or racist or transphobic, or whatever. EVA: Oh, yeah. That's so rough. Pritzker's got to get on that. Our governor. [chuckles] CORALINE: So do you want to tell us a little bit about the book that you just wrote? I understand a lot of people are finding a lot of value in it and really opening their eyes to a lot of maybe issues they weren't aware of. EVA: Yeah. So my book, Design for Safety, came out in early August and it's been really great to see people's reactions to it. I got my first formal book review, which was really cool and it was overall very positive, which has been very exciting. I'm hopeful that it is helping people understand that this is a thing because it's different, I feel like than a lot of other problems. Someone else explained this to me recently and I had this light bulb moment that I'm not providing a solution to a problem that people know that they have this problem, like how their tech is used for interpersonal harm and now I have a solution like, here's this book that's going to tell you how to fix it. It's more that people don't even know that this is a problem. So I'm educating on that as well as trying to give some of the solutions on how to fix it. It has been a lot of people just saying like, “I had no idea about any of this. It's been so eye-opening and now I'm going to think about it more and do these different things.” So that's been really great to see that just people's awareness is going up, basically. MANDY: I really like on the website, the sentence that there's a pullout quote, or I'm not sure if it's even a pullout quote, but it says, “If abuse is possible, it's only a matter of time until it happens. There's no might, so let's build better, safer digital products from the start.” I like that. EVA: Yeah, thanks. I was very intentional and well, this goes back to when I was doing a conference talk. Before I wrote the book, I did a conference talk called Designing Against Domestic Violence and I thought a lot about the type of language should I use; should I say might happen, or should I say will happen? I eventually settled on it's going to happen even if it hasn't happened yet, or oftentimes, I think we just don't know that it's happened. People who have gone through domestic violence, some of then we'll talk openly about it. But most people just don't, which makes sense. It's this really intense, personal thing to go through and there's so much judgment and survivors get blamed for all these things. So it makes sense that people don't want to talk that much about it. I ended up thinking we just need to say that it will happen. DAMIEN: That's amazing. So I really want to know everything about this book. [chuckles] but to start with, you said the book is designing for safety and you witnessed this a little bit with domestic violence, violence and abuse. Can you talk about safe from what sort of things you mean when you say safety there? EVA: Yeah, for sure because I know safety is a big word that can mean a lot of different things. But the way that I'm talking about it in my work is in terms of interpersonal safety. So it's like how is someone who has a relationship with you in an interpersonal way going to use technology, weaponized technology, in a way that was not meant to be used? We aren't designing tech with these use cases in mind, but how is it ultimately going to be weaponized for some type of abuse? Domestic violence is really the emphasis and my big focus and was mentioned in the intro, some background in domestic violence space. But there's also issues with child abuse and elder abuse, especially in terms of surveillance of those groups as well as surveillance of workers is another thing that came up a lot as I was researching that I didn't get as much into in the book. But it's basically anytime there's an interpersonal relationship and someone has access to you in this personal way where you're not just an anonymous stranger, how is tech going to be used to exert some form of control, or abuse over that person? DAMIEN: Wow, that is a very important subject. So I'm an engineer who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about interpersonal violence, domestic abuse, anything of that nature and I know you've written a whole book [laughs] and we only have an hour, or so here, but what are the first things that people, or engineers need to know about this? EVA: Yeah, so I think the first thing is to understand that this is a problem and that it's happening and to go through some different examples of how this happens, which is what the first couple chapters of the book are all about. It's different forms of this interpersonal abuse via technology in the form of shared accounts is a really big one and this question of who has control and nebulous issues of control. There's also surveillance is a really big one and then location data as well. So I guess, I don't want to say like, “Oh, just read the book,” but learning a little bit about the different – there's so many different examples of how this works. Just to start to build that mental model of how this happens like, someone taking advantage of certain affordances within a shared bank account software, or someone using an internet of things device to gaslight someone, or torment them. There's so many different examples. Location data shows up in all sorts of really sneaky in terms of stalking. It's not purely putting a tracker on someone's car, or even like Google Map and sharing your location is a more straightforward thing. But there's also, it shows up in other ways like, a grocery store app that has a timestamp and location. You can learn someone's grocery shopping habits and maybe you're estranged from this person, or they've left you because you're abusive, but they don't know that their stuff is showing up in this app and their location data. So it shows up in all sorts of different ways. This is a very long way to answer your question, but I think the first thing is to start to understand how this stuff works so that you're just aware of it and then from there, I have a whole chapter about how to implement a practice of designing for safety at your company. It is a little more design focused, but I think engineers can absolutely be doing this work, too. Even if it's just like quick research on how are any product with any type of message feature is going to be used for abuse and there's lots of literature out there. So just looking at some articles, thinking about ways that aren't covered already, that just having a brainstorm about what are some new ways this might be used for abuse and then thinking about how to prevent them. CORALINE: One of the things that I was thinking about after reading your book, Eva, is at a metal level, or zooming out a bit. I think a lot of the ways that we design software, we have this idealized and homogenous notion of a user. I think that in a lot of cases, especially if you're working on a project that's like more, or less one of those scratch your own itch problems, you tend to think of yourself as the user. It's great to have that empathy for the end user, but what we don't have, I don't think as a field, is an understanding that user is an abstraction and it is a useful abstraction. But sometimes you need to zoom down a little bit and understand the different ways that people want to use the software and will use the software and what makes them different from this average idealized user. That was one of the things that really struck me, especially from the process you were describing, is expanding our understanding of what user means and anticipating the different use cases with hostile users, with actively abusive users, and I think thinking of abstraction is super helpful, but I feel like sometimes we need to zoom down and think differently about really who the people are and what their circumstances might be. EVA: Yeah. Oh man, I just wrote down what you said, user is an abstraction. That's such a good way to think about it that I haven't heard before, but you're absolutely right that it's encapsulating such a big group of people. Even if for a small product, something that's not like Twitter that's open to billions of people, even something that's a subscription, or something that's going to have a smaller user base. There's going to be such a diverse, different group within there and to just think of the term user as a catchall is definitely problematic. Sorry, I'm just processing that user is an abstraction, that term because we use it so much as designers, definitely. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: And anyone in tech is always using this term, but problematizing that term in a new way is really interesting to me. And I think my other thought about this is that we talk a lot about needing to think about more than just happy path and I feel like even that, at least in my experience, has been other things that are also very important where it's like, let's think about someone who has a crappy Wi-Fi connection, or someone who's low vision. Like there are all these other very important things to think about in terms of accessibility and inclusivity. I think I see what I'm doing as just adding another group into the mix of let's think about people who are currently surviving domestic violence, which is maybe a little bit harder to bring up than those other two that I mentioned because it's just so dark and it's something that we just don't want to have to think about, or talk about during work. It's just such a bummer, but it is really important to have this new group added when we're thinking about inclusive and accessible tech. DAMIEN: There's a really great parallel here, I think with security minded design and research. Again, that's another user who is not behaving in the happy path. That's not behaving the way your normal users are behaving and you have to design your system in such a way to be resilient to that. So I love this user as an abstraction, then breaking it down into all these ways and then also, there's a huge value to diversity in your team with this sort of thing. CORALINE: Absolutely. DAMIEN: You can understand the very different types of users having people on the team who can understand blackhat users who are going to be trying to use your servers to mine Bitcoin, or [laughs] blind users, low vision users, or colorblind users, for goodness' sake. And then in addition to that, people again, who are experiencing domestic violence, other to terms of other forms of interpersonal abuse and just being able to understand all those users and their experiences with the things you're building and designing. EVA: Yeah, definitely those are all really good points. Just going back to what you said about the parallels with security is something I've actually been thinking about that a lot, because I think there are lots of parallels to that, or useful things about how security professionals think about their work and operate. Especially the big one for me right now is thinking about a security professional. They're never going to be like, “Okay, we did it. Our system is secure. We're done. We have arrived.” That's not a thing and I feel like it's very similar with designing for safety, or even inclusion. There's just, you're never – I feel like we've had a mental model of “I can think about these things, I can check these boxes, and now, my product is inclusive, or my product is accessible.” I feel like we should be thinking more like security professionals where there's always going to be more things like, we always have to be vigilant about what's the next way that someone's going to misuse tech, or the group that's going to be identified that we've totally left out and is being harmed in some way. So I think that's just a useful shift that I'm thinking a lot about. CORALINE: And Damien, I'm so glad you brought up the parallels with security. I was actually going there as well. One of the things that I've been thinking about from an ethical source perspective is insecurity that, I think two tools that would be super useful. First of all, personas and secondly—I guess, three things—understanding that safety can be a matter of adding layers of friction to disincentivize abusive behavior and like you said, recognizing this is an ongoing arms race. Every new feature that you design opens up some kind of attack, or abuse factor and if you're not planning for that from the outset, you're going to be caught later when harm has been done. EVA: Yeah, absolutely. Since you brought up personas, there is something in the process that I created that's a similar tool where I call them archetypes because they're a little different from personas. But it's identifying who is the abuser in this scenario, who is the survivor, and what are their goals and that's basically it, we don't need to get into anything else. I don't think, but just articulating those things and then even having a little printout, kind of similar to the idea with personas like, oh, you can print them out for your sales team, or whoever it is to keep these people in mind. A similar idea of just having them printed out an on your wall so that it's something that you're thinking about like, “Oh, we have this new feature. We probably need to think about how is this abuser person that we've identified who would want to use our product to find the location data of their former partner,” whatever it is. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Use this. CORALINE: From a mechanical perspective, Eva, one of the one of the challenges I had at GitHub when I was working on community and safety is that the other engineers and the other groups were creating so many new features. I felt like the knowledge about how feature can be abused, or like you said, will be abused wasn't spread very effectively throughout, especially a large software organization, and it fell on a small team of folks who frankly were not consulted. A feature would go out and we'd be like, “Holy crap, you can't do that because of this, this, and this.” So do you have any do you have any thoughts? I know you said print it out, or put it on the wall, but do you have any thoughts for how to spread that awareness and that mode of thinking across teams who frankly may be very, very focused just on feature delivery and will see any consideration like that as slowing them down, or having negative impact on “productivity”? EVA: Yes. I have many thoughts. [chuckles] So this is bringing up something for me that I've struggled with and thought about is should there be specialized teams in this area? I feel like yes, we want people with special knowledge and experts and that's really important, but also, I feel like the ideal scenario is that it's just everyone's job. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Those teams were already doing things and it wasn't seen as “Oh, Coraline's team is going to come in and now we have to consult with those people,” or whatever because it's not our job, it's their job. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Which this isn't a very maybe satisfying answer to your question because I feel like it involves a huge shift in the way that we think about this stuff, but it is something I've thought about in terms of should I call myself a safety designer? Is that something I want to do? Do I want this to be like a specialized role? Maybe is that a goal where people start to see that? Because there are people who specialize in inclusive design, or accessible design. But then the downside of that is does that just give someone else even more leeway to be like, “Not my job, I don't have to worry about this. And then we have the problems, like what you just described. I don't know, I feel like it's such a big shift that needs to happen. CORALINE: Yeah. One of the models I've been thinking about and I was thinking of this in terms of generalists versus specialists is generalists, or to map that to domain that we're talking about now, the other engineers in your group, or in your company. I feel like there has to be a balance between specialization and general knowledge. The way I describe that is everyone should have literacy on a particular topic and the basic vocabulary for it and a general knowledge of the concepts augmented by a specialist who has fluency. So kind of a dynamic relationship between literacy and fluency. Do you have any thoughts on that? EVA: I love that. I'm literally writing that down. A generalist with literacy and a specialist with fluency is such a good way to think about it because I feel like I do say this. I don't want people who read my book, or see my talk to think like, “Oh, I have to be like her, I have to learn all this stuff. I have to really dig into domestic violence works and what it means and laws.” I don't want people to feel like they have to do that because it's just such a dark, heartbreaking thing to have to think and read about every day and I don't think that's a realistic goal. But I think being a generalist with literacy is realistic augmented by specialist with fluency; I'm just like basically repeating what you just said. [chuckles] But that's just a really brilliant way to think about it. DAMIEN: That pattern actually really matches something that I learned from another Greater Than Code guest. I'm sorry, I can't remember their name right now. I believe we were talking about inclusivity and what they said was like, “It's not the expert's job to make the product, or the company inclusive. [chuckles] It's the expert job to support – it's everybody's job to make it inclusive. It's the expert's job to be an expert and to support them.” We also use again, a metaphor from security. We don't have security experts whose job it is to make your app secure, we have security experts whose job it is to support everybody in keeping your app secure. CORALINE: Yeah. DAMIEN: So I feel like that this matches really well. The job of the person with this expertise is to support, to educate, to guide not because they can't do all the work together all themselves, like Coraline said. There's just too many features being added for [laughs] for some team somewhere to go, “Oh no, this is fine,” or “That's not fine.” EVA: Yeah, totally, and I feel like that just brought up something for me, Damien, about the speed at which we work, too many features being added, not enough time to actually do this work, and how—this is getting at just way bigger critique of tech in general. DAMIEN: Yeah. EVA: But it's okay to slow down once in a while. I feel like just the urgency thing causes so many problems outside of just what we're talking about. But this is another big one that I feel like it's okay to spend an afternoon thinking through what are the ways this is going to be not inclusive, or unsafe and that's totally fine. But I fall into it, too where I'm like, “I want to deliver things quickly for my client,” or if I'm doing so internal for a flight, I want to get done quickly. I don't want to hold people up. So it is a really hard thing to break out of. CORALINE: It seems to me, Eva, that this kind of knowledge, or this kind of literacy, or this kind of making it part of the process can fall solely on engineers. Because in a lot of places, we have of product managers who are setting deadlines for us. How do you communicate to them why this work is so important when they may only see it as like, “Well, you're getting in the way of us hitting a release date and we have a press release ready,” or “We want our debut this feature at a particular time, or place”? MANDY: And now we want to take a quick time out to recognize one of our sponsors: Kaspersky Labs: Rarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach, or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up, or know if you're protected. Don't worry, Kaspersky's got you covered. Each week, their team discusses the latest news and trends that you may have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast mixing in humor, facts and experts from around the world. The Transatlantic Cable Podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts & Spotify, go check it out! EVA: Yeah, totally. So I think ideally, this comes from everyone. My book is called Design for Safety, but I really hope that people are reading it, who are also engineers and who are also project managers—basically anyone who has a say in how the product is actually going to function, I think should be doing this work. But specifically, if you have a project manager who is rushing everyone and saying, “We don't have time for this,” I do have a couple different strategies in my book about this, where it's like we can use statistics to talk about that this is a thing that is impacting a lot of our users. It's 1 in 3 women, 1 and 4 men in the US have experienced severe physical, domestic violence and that's just severe physical, domestic violence. There's so much domestic violence that doesn't have a physical component to it so that could be like a third of our user base. So bringing stuff up like that to try to get some buy-in, but then also my process, I have little time estimate. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: So saying like, “We want to do research; it's going to be 6 hours.” “We want to do a brainstorm; it's going to be 2 hours.” Giving people very specific things that they can say yes to is always going to be better than just an open-ended, “We want to design for safety.” CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: And someone being like, “I don't know what that means, but we have a deadline.” Saying like, “We're going to do a brainstorm to identify ways that our product will be used for harm. We want to do it next week and we want to spend 4 hours on it” is going to be a lot better. DAMIEN: And I want to call out how important and useful the language you use there was you said because when you find something, when you do that brainstorm, or whatever analysis process, you go like, “Oh, here's the way our products will be used for harm.” Because if you say to a product manager, “Here's a way our product might be used for harm,” they go, “Well, okay.” [laughs] “Might not be.” [laughs] If you say, “Here's a way our product will be used for harm.” Well, now that leaves a lot less of wiggle room. EVA: Hmm, yeah. That's a really good point that I actually hadn't thought about. I think the other thing is there's tangible outcomes from something like that brainstorm, or these different activities that I have outlined. You can actually show the person, like, “Here's what we did. Here's what we came up with,” which isn't necessarily – I wish we didn't have to always do that; always have some type of very explicit outcome from everything we do. But I do think that's a reality that we have that this process kind of helps with. CORALINE: I want to go back to the user thing. Again, one of the things that we're thinking about our ethical source is thinking beyond the user and thinking about not just who is using the technology that we're creating, but the people that the technology we're creating is being used on. EVA: Yes. That's such a good point. I'm actually curious, have you come up with a term for that type of user? Like nonuser? CORALINE: I have not yet, but that's a great call out. Language is so important so, yeah. EVA: Yeah. I don't know that it exists and I've seen nonuser, but I don't know that that's agreed upon. DAMIEN: I've gotten as far, the best I've come up with is constituency. CORALINE: That is very interesting, Damien because one of the things we're developing is a governance tool. The W3C, when they were working on the HTML standard—this was a couple of years ago, I think—they mentioned something called a priority of constituent and this was very much from a standards body perspective, but it was one sentence and I think it is such a powerful sentence. Just for their example, they said, “In times of conflict, we prioritize end users over developers, over browser manufacturers, over spec writers, over technical purity.” [laughter] EVA: Wow. CORALINE: That's one sentence, but writing that down, I think can really help cut through a lot of a lot of the noise and a lot of the gray area maybe that's the most encountered. It's so simple and you can do it in a single sentence. So absolutely, the notion of constituencies and being explicit about whose safety, convenience, or what have you you're optimizing for. EVA: Yeah. That's really important and I have two thoughts. One is that this comes up a lot in the surveillance space where it's like, what sort of rights, or priority should we be giving someone who is walking on the sidewalk in front of a house that has a Ring camera that's facing out to capture the porch, but is ultimately capturing the sidewalk in the street? What are the rights of that person, that nonuser, who has not agreed to be filmed and isn't part of this product's ecosystem, but is still being impacted by it? It's something I think about a lot, especially there's so many in my neighborhood I see. Since I wrote the book, I see the Ring cameras everywhere, including in places where they're not really to be like on the outside of someone's gate, just facing the sidewalk. It's like, you're not even recording your own property at that point. It's just the gate, or it's just the sidewalk, I mean, which I feel is very problematic. You also said that it's important to explicitly call out who you're prioritizing and that's something – I read this book called Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock, which was very lifechanging and it's just such a good book. It's a little more theoretical. She explicitly says it's not a guide, but she talks about this, about how it's really important to, if you are going to choose not to be inclusive, or safe, or justice focused, whatever it is, you need to explicitly say, “We are choosing to prioritize the comfort of this group over the safety of this group. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Or whatever it is. Like, you need to actually just spell that out and be upfront about it. DAMIEN: Yeah. It reminds me of, I think I learned this from Marla Compton. Although, I don't know if she originated it. I guess, she probably didn't, but the phrase she taught me was, “We prioritize the safety of marginalized people over the comfort of non-marginalized people.” It's such a powerful statement. CORALINE: It really is. DAMIEN: Yeah, and just making that explicit like, “These are the tradeoffs and these are where we side on them.” CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's such a good one. I did this workshop recently, it's called How Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy, but they talked a lot about how feeling entitled to comfort is just such a white supremacist thing and I feel shows up in different forms of oppression as well like men's comfort, et cetera. But that's something I've been thinking about a lot is the feeling of a right to comfort and how that also includes a right to not have to have any type of conflict and a fear of conflict. How these things all play together and how it's all part of white supremacy and how it shows up in our culture, in our workplaces. It was a great workshop. I would highly recommend it because it's also been a lifechanging thing as I digest all of the different things from it. DAMIEN: It's so powerful to name that as comfort. CORALINE: Yeah. DAMIEN: Like, this is what we're protecting. We're protecting these people's comfort [chuckles] and this is what it will cost. CORALINE: I think about what Kim Crayton said for a year is, “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” EVA: Yeah, that's such a good one. I love her. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: I quoted her in my book about, oh, I forget what it is. It's something about not having strategy is chaos. CORALINE: Oh my God. EVA: Like, the need for strategy. CORALINE: I learned so much from her from that one statement. That was literally lifechanging for me. That was literally lifechanging for me because I always had a negative feeling about strategy, like strategy is coercive, or insincere. And then another friend of mine I was talking to about it said strategy is good when it's not a zero-sum game. EVA: Mm. CORALINE: I think we maybe we can think about personal safety and abuse factors in that way. EVA: Yeah, definitely. I think the full quote is “Intention without strategy is chaos.” CORALINE: Yeah, that. EVA: That has been very definitely influential for me and as I feel like a big part of the reason, that idea is why I wrote my book and did my conference talk is because I was feeling frustrated with – it's a lot easier to raise awareness about an issue than it is to have actual strategies for fixing it. I felt like I would always get really fired up reading something, or listening to a talk and be like, “Yeah, this is such a huge problem. We need to fix it,” and then didn't have a takeaway, or anything that I could really do at work other than just being told to think about this, or consider this, which I'm like, “When do I do that?” CORALINE: And what does that look like? EVA: Yeah, you can't think about all of the different things we need to think about from 9:00 to 5:00 while we're at work every day. We need a strategy to do that, which is why I like made these different activities that I have in my process. But going back to this white supremacy and design workshop that I did, I also learned in there about how some other ways that white supremacy shows up is having an action bias and a sense of urgency. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: And how a lot of that can come from people, especially white people, not being able to like sit with discomfort when we're faced with really uncomfortable topics and a desire to jump into action before we fully understand the problem and have internalized it. So now I'm feeling like I need to backtrack a little bit and be like, “Yes, provide action.” But also, it is good to do deep learning. I think we need both, but I feel like a lot of people, it's one, or the other. Let's do a ton of learning, or let's jump right into action. I have always been a jump right into action person and now I'm realizing it's okay to take a beat and do some deep learning and to sit with all the discomfort of the heavy topic. CORALINE: A friend of mine gave me a concept that I like a lot. He has a definition of ergonomics that is the marriage of design and ethics. When I use the term ergonomics in that sense, what I mean is how easy is it to do a particular action. One of the things that I see quite a bit—something, I think is a terrible consequence of the web, frankly—is putting ergonomics behind paywalls and asking people who use our software to yield some degree of agency, or digital autonomy, or security in exchange for features. EVA: Hmm. So interesting. CORALINE: So I'm curious maybe how you would frame designing for safety, some of the other axes of oppression that we discussed on the show today, from the perspective of the ethical aspect of our design decisions. What workflows are we optimizing for? What workflows are we putting behind a paywall, or in exchange for okay, you're signing up. The [inaudible] says you're buying into surveillance capitalism and you just simply have to do that if you want an email account, if you want a Twitter account, what have you. EVA: Yeah. I do feel like there is a bit of an issue with putting safety and security sometimes behind a paywall where you can literally pay more to not get advertised to, for example. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Which it's like, I get that products have to charge money and it's like we shouldn't – the flipside of that is well, we can't just work for free. I see that a lot with journalism when people are criticizing paywalls and it's like well, but journalists have to get paid. They can't work for free just like everyone else. But I do feel that with things like being able to opt out of advertising and I feel like there are other things. Nothing's coming in right now, but different ways that you can ease some of the crappier parts of tech, if you have enough money, to buy into the paid versions of things is definitely problematic. Who are we keeping out when we do that and who are we saying doesn't deserve this privacy and the safety? What should just be standard? The seatbelt; I'm obsessed with the history of the seatbelts. CORALINE: [chuckles] I still have the [inaudible] that's been going around. EVA: Yeah. CORALINE: It's amazing. EVA: I've talked about this in many different places, but the seatbelt used to be something that you had to pay extra for. In today's dollars, it would've been like 300 extra dollars when you bought a car to get seat belts and only 2% of the people, in 1956 when they were introduced, actually paid for them and probably even less were actually using them. And then there was a revolution in the auto industry led by activists and everyday people. It definitely not come from the auto industry; they had to be forced into these different things. But now seat belts, the government basically, they passed a law and they said, “You have to just include seat belts as a standard feature.” I think about that a lot in tech. The things now that we're making people pay for, should some of those just be standard features and how are we going to get there? Probably government regulation after a lot of activism and everyday people rallying against these different things with big tech. But I think we're going to get there with a lot of things and we're going to see a lot of seatbelts, so to speak, become just standard features and not something you have to pay for. CORALINE: And I wonder, you mentioned government regulation; I have literally zero faith in government doing anything effective in the online world at all because our government is powered by 65-year-old white men that are rich and there's no incentive for them to care about this even if they did have the basic literacy about how this stuff works. It seems to me one of the things that we've been seeing really emphasize is, especially during in post lockdown, is worker organizing and I wonder if there's a strategy here for empowering the engineers, who frankly, we are being treated rockstars right now. I hate that term rockstar, but we're overpaid, we're pampered—a lot of folks, obviously, not everyone. So can we leverage our power? Can we leverage the privilege of being in such an in-demand profession to affect change in organizations that have no financial incentive to think about stuff like this at all? EVA: Yeah. So many things I want to respond to. Definitely, I think worker power is like such a strong point in all of this and I feel like we are the ones leading out on this. A lot of it is coming from people who work in tech and understand the issues. Like, writing, speaking, and doing these different things to help everyday people who don't work in tech understand like, “Hey, actually, here's why Facebook is really terrible.” A lot of that is coming from people in tech, even former Facebook employees even. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Which is different, I think from the paradigm shift we had with the auto industry. I don't know, I would have to look, but I'm pretty sure is not coming from car designers and engineers weren't helping lead that charge the way that we are. But I also want to respond to something you said about tech workers being overpaid and pampered, which yes, I agree with you. But I also think there are privileges that everyone should have and that no one should of and I feel like everyone deserves to be well paid, to be comfortable and have all these perks, and whatnot. I had a career in nonprofit before this so I have so much internalized just baggage about and guilt around feeling with my pay, my benefits, and all these things. The work I do now, compared to the work I was doing in the nonprofit, which was helping kids who were basically on a road to dropping out before graduating high school, which was really important work and I made so much less money and worked so much harder. But I feel like everyone deserves to be as well paid as we are and it is possible. CORALINE: Yes. EVA: So I just wanted to kind of throw that out there as well that we – [chuckles] I feel like I'm trying to just absolve myself from being a well-paid tech worker. But I do think we deserve this and also, everyone else deserves similar treatment. CORALINE: Absolutely. DAMIEN: Yeah. I feel the same way, especially—to take an example within a tech company—as an engineer, I get paid a lot more than customer service people. CORALINE: Yeah. DAMIEN: And that doesn't mean I'm overpaid, [chuckles] it means they're underpaid. CORALINE: Yeah. DAMIEN: A lot. [laughs] CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Yeah, and I feel like this whole conversation, honestly, this is a freaking tactic. This is what the people at the top, this is how they want us to feel; pitting us against each other, feeling like it's not that – the sales people, that's normal and we're overpaid. It's like, no, actually we're paid a livable amount where we can live comfortably and they're exploited even more than we are. That's how I'm trying to think about things because I do feel like this other way of looking at it is just absolutely a tactic of, I don't know, the 1%, whatever you want to call them. The company leaders definitely don't want us to feel like we're – they would rather us feel that we're overpaid and pampered than just compensated for the labor we do in a fair way, MANDY: Have us feel the shame and guilt around it, too. Before I was in tech, I went from welfare to making a reasonable standard of living in a year and sometimes, I still feel guilty about it. It's a heck of a feeling. EVA: Yeah, and I feel like that didn't just come out of nowhere. We've been taught that we should feel guilty for just surviving. I don't know. Because I think even in tech, it's a lot of people there's still so many issues with burnout, with—I don't know about you all, my body sometimes just hurts from not moving enough during – like, there's still all these like different things that could be better. But the feeling that we should feel guilty for having some comfort and decent pay, I think that's definitely a strategy that has come from these different powerful groups. It didn't just come out of nowhere. CORALINE: I appreciate y'all pushing back on that. I guess, I'm speaking from an emotional place. Eva, you went from nonprofit and the tech. In April, I went from tech and the nonprofit and personally, I took a 30% pay cut and – [overtalk] EVA: Oh, wow. CORALINE: It just really made very visible and very personal seeing what we value as a society and what we don't value as a society. I'm still comfortable; I still have a living wage and everything. But look at what happened during the lockdown with “frontline workers.' They're heroes, but we don't want to pay them more than minimum wage. So I definitely agree with what you're saying about other people being underpaid and I definitely hear what you're saying about that guilt, but guilt is a form of discomfort. What are you going to do with that? What are you going to do with the privileges and the power that we have as a result of the way we're treated in this industry? I feel like that's the more important thing and what do you do with it? Are you giving back? Are you giving back in a substantive way, or are you giving back to assuage your guilt? It's nuanced. As y'all are pointing out, it is nuanced. EVA: Yeah. It's very complicated, but I feel like agitating for those—sorry, Damien, I think you said support people—getting paid more, that's something we can agitate for. I know someone, I'll call her an online friend of mine in the infertility space, which I'm very involved in as I go through my journey. I hate that word, but I've made all these online friends who are going through it and one of them is a paralegal and she is obviously hoping, although it's not going well, to get pregnant. But she was looking into the parental benefits and realized that the lawyers where she works had, I think it's 18 weeks fully paid off and then everyone else got this weird piecemeal of 6 weeks paid off, then there's FMLA, and then there's PTO, and all this stuff that amounted to a lot less, and you had to like use all of your PTO and all these different things. She actually was able to—with some of the lawyers help, I believe—get that policy change that it was just the same for everyone because it was like, “I didn't go to law school. So therefore, I don't need as much time with my newborn? How does that make sense?” CORALINE: [chuckles] Yeah. EVA: So I feel there is a lot of potential to have more equality in our companies, especially as the most powerful people often in the companies, to push for that change to happen. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: There needs to be a lot of solidarity, I think, between these different types of workers. CORALINE: Yeah, and that's a great example of that. MANDY: Well, this has been an absolutely fantastic conversation and I feel so privileged just to be sitting here kicking back and just taking in the back and forth between the rest of you. I wrote down a bunch of a things, but one of the biggest takeaways that I have had from this episode, and especially if you've been listening to the show the past couple episodes, we've been talking about a lot of accessibility things. Eva, you said something that was mind-blowing for me and it shouldn't be mind-blowing, but it was because I was like, didn't even ever think of that and what the hell is wrong with me for not even ever thinking about that? but inclusive and accessible includes people experiencing domestic abuse. It's not something – I guess, because as what you said, people don't talk about it. So just keeping that in mind was pretty pertinent to me. I also liked what Coraline said about specialization and then the general knowledge and literacy versus fluency. That was really good as well. So it's been an awesome conversation. Thank you. Damien, what do you have? DAMIEN: Oh, well, this has been really awesome and I want to of first thank Eva for being our guest here and for the work you do and this book. The thing that's going to be sticking with me, I'll be reflecting on for a while, is this sentence both well, if the product can be used for harm, it will be, which is not only a really powerful thing to keep in mind when designing and building a thing, but also, a powerful sentence that is really useful in communicating these issues. So thank you very much for that. CORALINE: One of the things that and actually Eva, this was a reaction I had when I first read your book is, I think a lot of us, a growing number of us, have at least an awareness, if not a personal experience, with how systems are weaponized against marginalized, or vulnerable folks. So I think it's really important that in your book, you focus very specifically on a particular domain of abuse, abuse of power and loss of agency and loss of privacy, loss of physical safety. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is how the internet has been really good for connecting people with shared experiences and creating communities around the shared experiences. But I do worry that we're breaking into smaller and smaller and smaller groups and I see that. I don't know if it's intentional, but it certainly is a way, I think that we're propping up, that we're being coerced into propping up these systems by taking a narrow view based on our own experiences. I don't see that as a criticism. What I see it as is an opportunity to connect with other folks who experience that same kind of systemic damage in collaborating and trying to understand the different challenges that we all face. But recognizing that a lot of it is based frankly, white supremacy. We used to talk about patriarchy; I think the thinking broadly has evolved beyond that. But I would love to see your publisher start putting books together on different particular axes, but also, looking at ways that we can bridge the differences between these different experiences of intentional, or unintentional harm. So that's something that I think I'm going to think about. EVA: Nice. I can't give any spoilers, but I do think my publisher might have something in the works that it's getting at some of this stuff. Wonderful. EVA: Which is exciting. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: Yeah, okay. Man, those are all so good. My reflection, I'm just thinking a lot about our conversation about the way that people in tech might feel like we're overpaid, or pampered and how that feels like an intentional thing that has come from somewhere and things like that don't just – it always comes from somewhere. I'm thinking Mandy, about what you said in your reflection. You said, “What's wrong with me for not thinking about this?” I always feel like when I hear people say things like that, it's like well, when were you – I think more who didn't teach you about this? Why wasn't this part of your education as you were learning to code and before you joined the industry? I feel like that's more where the blame lies than with individuals, but yeah. Something I was thinking about earlier today, before we started recording, is that this idea of user safety, that it's like our job to keep ourselves safe on tech and there's so many resources out there, different articles, and different things. I've been thinking similarly about that, but that's a marketing campaign. That's something that the leaders of big tech done to intentionally shift responsibility from themselves and onto the end user. We're expected to be legal experts, read these agreements, and understand every single thing about a product that no one uses every single feature, but we're expected to understand it. If we don't and something goes wrong, either interpersonal harm, what I do, or with like oh, someone guessed your password or whatever it was, it's your fault instead of it being the tech company's responsibility. I feel like that's another thing that I'm thinking like that didn't come from nowhere, that came from somewhere. CORALINE: Yeah. EVA: It feels like a very intentional strategy that big tech has used to blame us for when things go wrong. Not to say that we get to be absolved of everything, people have responsibilities and whatnot, but I feel like a lot of times it's like this comes from somewhere and I'm trying to think more about that kind of stuff. This conversation was really awesome for helping me process some of those and expand my thoughts a little bit more. So thank you all, this was just really awesome. DAMIEN: Thank you. Thank you for being here. MANDY: Thank you for coming. CORALINE: Yeah. So happy to talk to you, Eva. EVA: Yeah. You, too. MANDY: All right, everyone. Well, with that, we will wrap up and I will put a plug in for our Slack community. You can join us and Eva will get an invitation as well to come visit us in Slack and keep these conversations going. Our website to do that is patreon.com/greaterthancode. Patreon is a subscription-based thing that if you want to you can pledge to support the show. However, if you DM any one of us and you want to be let in and you cannot afford, or just simply don't want to, monetarily support, we will let you in for free. So just reach out to one of the panelists and we'll get you in there. So with that, I will say thank you again. Thank you, everybody and we'll see you next week! Special Guest: Eva PenzeyMoog.

02:11 - Wampum.Codes (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995) * MIT Co-Creation Studio (https://cocreationstudio.mit.edu/co-cr-new-mozilla-fellow/) * Mozilla Fellowships (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/) * Check out some episodes! * Super-Group - Indigenous Tech, Indigenous Knowledge: Wampum.codes as a model for decolonization (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995/3586117-super-group-indigenous-tech-indigenous-knowledge-wampum-codes-as-a-model-for-decolonization) [Episode] * Weirdness with MorningStar (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995/3101911-weirdness-with-morningstar) [Episode] * Comedy in the age of Quarantine: A conversation with comedy writer and performer Joey Clift (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995/3071704-comedy-in-the-age-of-quarantine-a-conversation-with-comedy-writer-and-performer-joey-clift) [Episode] * Rock Hands with "Roo": a conversation with DeLesslin "Roo" George-Warren (https://www.buzzsprout.com/893995/3004156-rock-hands-with-roo-a-conversation-with-delesslin-roo-george-warren) [Episode] 08:13 - Amelia's Superpower: Being invited to cool parties! * no-funding.com (https://ameliawb.github.io/no-funding/) 11:26 - Storytelling & Performance * The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (https://usdac.us/) 20:16 - “Indigenous Antecedent Technology” * Decentralized Economies 24:16 - “Ethical Dependencies” * Indigenous wisdom as a model for software design and development (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/indigenous-wisdom-model-software-design-and-development/) * Articulating Values * Community Accountability * Policing vs Accountability 35:48 - Handling Disagreements and Giving Permission to Fail 40:55 - Robert's Rules of Order (https://robertsrules.com/) 44:23 - “No Striving, No Hustling” 47:33 - Facilitating Communication with Peers * Storytelling Cont'd * Studio Ghibli Storytelling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli) * "Ma" – Negative Space 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. Transcript: CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 240 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke. I'm very happy to be with you here today, and I'm also really happy to be here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton. JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm glad to be on the show with you, too, and I'm also here with my great friend, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Aw, hello, and I'm going to introduce our guest. Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist and technologist who creates playful work with XR, VR, AI, AR, AV, and other esoteric systems of story and code. Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the stupidhackathon.com. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist for Contentful and host of the Contentful + Algolia Developer Podcast DreamStacks. She is working on ethics-based dependencies for software development as a Mozilla Fellow embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio. Welcome to the podcast. AMELIA: Thank you so much! I'm so excited to be here. You all are some of my favorite people, so [laughs] excited to chat on record. CORALINE: And today's going to be very technical; we're going to ask you some very technical questions about XR, VR, AI, AR, AV and… JAMEY: That's a lot of letters. CORALINE: SP, everything. AMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, we were at a function. Coding. Yeah, let's crack it. [laughs] CORALINE: Amelia, just on a personal level, I'm so happy to have you here. You and I have talked before, we're both involved in ethical source, and I'm such an admirer of your work. I'm so happy to have this conversation in public with you today. AMELIA: Oh, back at you, Coraline. I love ethical source and I've been so excited to join your team of rebels, exciting thinkers, and dreamers. So I'm really excited to be here with you and in community with you. CORALINE: So Amelia, I first became aware of your work through your wampum.codes project that you did. Well, it's an ongoing project, but I guess, you started it with the Mozilla Fellowship. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think it's really fascinating. AMELIA: Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity. When I started my Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, it was actually pre-pandemic. So it was right, but not very much so it was only a couple of months. We got to go to London and meet each other and I got to hang out a little bit at MIT with the Co-Creation fellows. I'm the first full-time fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio, which is a really cool studio, imagined and led by Kat Cizek, who's an incredible transmedia storyteller and inspiring human that I get to be in collaboration with there. So for wampum.codes as an ethical framework for software development, we had imagined a lot of things and then the pandemic hit and I wasn't able to be as close to them as I was. I also moved from New York to San Francisco. Before I thought I was going to from New York to Boston pretty regularly on the train and then moved to California and that's when I decided to have the Co-Creation portion of wampum.codes exist as a podcast. So rather than flying to different spaces and meeting with friends and technologists on reservations, who are indigenous across North America, I was like, “Okay, well, let's do this via Zoom call as a podcast” as many people moved to different online formats during the pandemic and that's how the wampum.codes podcast was born. As I want to do research because if you're going to create an ethical framework for software development, based on indigenous values of Co-Creation, you need to do it in co-creation with those people. [chuckles] I had initially planned to fly all of them to MIT and have this big conference and everything. But instead, I got to have weekly conversations with indigenous people, who are using technology in creative ways to make positive impact in their communities. And then we still did a big conference at MIT, but virtually and actually, a lot more people were able to participate in it that way. Big surprise, right? All of us who are internet natives are unsurprised that you have a lot of accessibility there. So then that became the supergroup episode of wampum.codes where we had everyone who was going to be there physically at MIT and then I was able to distribute. Rather than using those funds to fly everyone to MIT, distribute those to all the different people who were on the podcast and just have weekly conversations with each of these people. I guess, the technology projects range and I welcome anyone to go to wampum is W-A-M-P-U-M, .codes, C-O-D-E-S. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can go on Buzzsprout, but it's able to be found on Spotify, or Apple, anywhere you find a podcast. We have RSS feeds there. If you go through the episodes, it varies where each of the indigenous people are coming from. Like, there's an incredible actress on there, MorningStar Angeline, and she is an incredible advocate and activist for the Albuquerque drag scene, also does really incredible art installations and happenings, and works in VR. But she's also the voice of the local area population in Red Dead Redemption, one of my favorite games. [laughs] So it's really interesting that she crosses all of these different media. Then we have another person, Joey Clift, who's a comedian, who's an indigenous comedian and the first indigenous person to be on the—and I'm going to probably say this wrong, but the house comedy team of UCB in LA, I think they call it the house comedy team. The interesting way that he uses technology is he created the largest Facebook group of comedians ever and it's the comedians with cats, basically. [laughs] I just love that he has this and then he creates all this comedy through that Facebook group. So that's an interesting way that comedy becomes its own scene through the social media network all based around cats. I think that's pretty amazing, that an indigenous person is grounded everybody in our deep love of animals. He does a lot of really great activist work. He's also a writer of a couple of different television shows right now and one of them is the first all-indigenous writers room Everett Hollywood. So he's doing really incredible things, but I love his use of technology in his cats group on Facebook. [laughs] And then you have Roo DeLesslin George-Warren, who's creating an app with children. He's part of Catawba nation and the app is around language preservation and language education of Catawba language. But it's the fun thing that we talk about on the episode is, there's some words that don't exist in Catawba language and it's because they're last truly immersed indigenous speaker of Catawba language passed away in the 80s. So anything that wasn't created up until the 80 didn't have an official name, but that doesn't mean that the language is dead. It's alive and it's an alive on the tongue of every child that's learning and every person that's living. But what it does mean is those children get to name some of these things, they get to name what a cell phone is, they get to name all these fun things, and one of the children said, “We should name cell phones rock hands,” and he's like, “Oh really? That's great. Why is that the word for rock and the word for hands in Catawba? And he said, “Well, because it's made of rocks and minerals and we hold it in our hands,” and I thought that was really beautiful. So those are the examples of how each of these different awesome technologists, indigenous leaders are using technology in creative ways. So from that, all those conversations really contribute to the framework that I helped to organize and turn into a workshop and writings around an ethical framework for software development. Those conversations are really key and important to it, because I need to learn how are people making change with technology, because that really will contribute to the guidelines that we hope people can bring out in the process of creating an ethical framework for software development and value-based dependencies. JAMEY: So we have one question for you that you may be expecting already, because we warn our guests about it, and that question is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? AMELIA: Oh, that's an excellent question and I'm cheating because I once was asked this question at Stephanie Dinkins' AI dinner in New York and I just said the first thing that came to my head because I wasn't expecting it and the first time I said it, I said, “Wow, that's really stupid, Amelia. Why did you say that?” Well, it's because the first thing that came to my head, but then the longer I sit with it, the more I'm like, “I think it's true so I'm just going to say it,” again as if it's the first time which is, I think my superpower is being invited to cool parties. [laughter] JAMEY: That's a great superpower. AMELIA: Yeah. how did I acquire it? I think you just have to have cool friends and then those friends invite you to cool parties. It's worked out for me so far because sometimes their parties are in Dharamsala hanging out with the Dalai Lama, sometimes their parties are doing some weird art show in New York, and sometimes their parties are awesome powwows that have been going on for hundreds of years. So I think that's the best way I want to live my life [laughs] so that's my superpower. CORALINE: I love that. JAMEY: I just wanted to say that I don't think that's a stupid superpower at all. I think it's a beautiful superpower. CORALINE: I'm kind of jealous of that superpower, honestly. I think the last party I had, the big important, exciting thing was red velvet cupcakes. AMELIA: Ooh, that's awesome. CORALINE: Oh no, you have red velvet cupcakes on the one hand, the Dalai Lama on the other hand, that's a tough choice to make really. AMELIA: Yeah. Obviously, during quarantine I feel like I've definitely not had my superpower active in a while, so maybe I'm in like my cave of solitude. [laughs] Definitely. It's been a tough year for those of us who that's our only superpower, but I definitely been invited to a lot of Zoom parties, let me tell you. I've led a lot of Among Us things and I've been the one to organize a lot of Zoom [inaudible] outlook. We all are Zoom fatigued, but I've been organizing what I hope could be something interesting. I started this thing called No-Funding.com as a virtual party where we could talk about, I don't know, it's supposed to be an artist support group where we talk about ways that we can support each other outside of gatekeeping and traditional funding avenues. But honestly, it's like, if you didn't need any funding and you didn't want any funding and you just wanted to be punk rock and talk about our art and how we can help each other, that's a space. We do it and we ended up getting into some esoteric conversations. We talk a lot about ethics and the worlds that we want to build that have a community focus. But we also just kind of, we'll talk about creative ideas to feed our soul like, “Hey, why don't we write poems today?” and somebody in the group knows how to teach us how to write poem. Someone might know something about an artist and teaches us something. So it's definitely more an artist support group, but with the motto of not – our motto is no striving, no hustling. [laughs] So that's No-Funding.com, join us every week. [laughs] CORALINE: Well, one of the things that really interested me, or interests me about your work, Amelia, almost everything you've said in terms of the things you're doing have a very strong community focus. As someone who came up in a very white Western technology environment where most of what happens is developer tooling and most of it is going to the companies in San Francisco, I think it's really interesting that people who are outside of that bubble seem to have stronger, especially people in different parts of their world, or indigenous cultures that are often ignored, or excluded, but you're doing community work. I see a lot of those non-white Western—what I'm trying to say—that's kind of unique in a way, or it's different from how technology is usually thought of in the US especially. I don't know where to go with that. I am so sorry. I just think that's so fascinating and so different and that's something I'm going to learn about. AMELIA: Yeah, and I think it's absolutely everything you said about technology is true and it also is true for the art world, too, which I came actually from a background of performance. My mom, growing up, was a traditional storyteller for our tribe, Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan and being a storyteller is something like being a politician, a historian, a performance artist, an actor, a writer, an educator. It's this combination because you need to be given the stories from elders. They have to trust you so you have to be a politician, or a leader and you're really required to make sure that the stories that you tell are relevant and significant for your current generation. You're taking information from previous generations, you're preserving it, and sharing it with your current generation so that it will have positive impact on the generations to come, but it has to be relevant. So you cannot tell it the same way that an elder gave it to you. It's the core requirements like, I'm giving you the story for you to make it new and relevant for your generation and each audience you meet with it has to be relevant. Our storytelling is embedded in multimedia. It's obviously, spoken word stories. It has music, it has patterns, it has art, it has pottery, it has bead work; all of these things reinforce the stories. When my mom would travel around, her superpower is being that leader, historian, educator. She has that voice that as soon as she says, “Hello, I would like to tell you a story today,” every person in the whole room sits down. You know what I mean? I don't know, that's her superpower is she can just, not even with a mic and she has a quiet voice. She can just be like, “Hello,” and everyone just sits down. She's like, “I'm going to tell you a story.” [chuckles] It's that incredible storyteller voice and then I would perform the songs and the music with her since she's not a musician, or a musical person at all, but she knows the songs and knows this is the story that has the song that goes live. So I would be the musical one and then I became an opera singer. At 15, I went to the Eastman Conservatory of Music at a young age and became a professional opera singer at a young age. So I came from a performance background and then once my work became so weird in the sense of, I had so much coding involved, projections and video. I'm a nerd and I've been a self-taught coder since I was very young and since my work became more integrated with multimedia, people were like, “You're not really an opera person anymore, or a director of new opera. You're kind of a multimedia artist.” That title was somewhat thrust upon me and I was like, “Oh, this is great. I'm going to go get my Master's degree, my MFA in art.” Once I went to school, they showed me my studio and then they lock you in there. They close the door and then you're supposed to live in your studio. I would pop my head out and like, “Hey everybody, what are we doing?” They're like, “Go away, like go back into your studio.” We're all in our studios heads down and then I said, “Oh, well, let's collaborate.” No one wants to collaborate with me. The only people in the entire, like above me, or below me, or my same year that want to collaborate with me were indigenous people. Interesting! [laughs] So we all wanted to collaborate and start making things together and our professors were like, “We're not even going to consider that for your grades, or for your thesis, or for – that doesn't count, that doesn't even exist. If you made it with another person, it doesn't even exist,” and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” The whole entire world doesn't work when it comes to the way that most media we consume isn't created that way. The only exception really is more the solitary artist, which also doesn't always work that way either. When you go and see things in a museum and it has one person's name under it, there's a thousand names that are not mentioned. When we see a film, we see the director, but we see the thousands of names come over us with the credits. When we go to a play, we open that cast book and we see all of those names that are behind that object. So it's really, the art world and the technology world overlap in that myth of the solitary genius, total myth that they perpetuate it. I definitely had a crisis, what I went into the art world and then again, as I've continued my journey throughout tech, where I'm like, “It's not true that one person has made these things,” [laughs] but we believe that. We believe that that's how things work and that was always a big shock to me and something that I've maybe found ways of integrating a more collective mindset into each of those spaces. I recently was meeting with this incredible group. The US Department of Art and Culture, I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're not a real government agency, but they perform really incredible service to our collective dreaming, which is they build things, like the People's State of the Union, or they've created the honoring native land initiative, which is an incredible toolkit for people to do land acknowledgements. They've recently hired me to bring on a new page of this honoring native land initiative to think about how do you bring something from land acknowledgement to action so it's not just making a verbal statement, but you're making a commitment that can come with action. When I was meeting with them initially, they were like, “Well, you do categorize yourself as an artist, but this role is a lot about community building. So can you talk a little bit about that?” And I thought, “Oh, that's so interesting because my whole life, I have felt like more of a community builder than an artist.” That's interesting that they assume that an artist isn't a community builder because it isn't because there's usually that separation. So I was very happy to find this role. One of the fun things that you do at the beginning of working with this group is to work with them to define a title and I don't have one yet. I'm going to share with you some of my ideas, [laughs] let me know what you think of me. JAMEY: So let's workshop them right here on the show. AMELIA: Right. I'm looking for your opinions because the other people have these incredible titles, like one is the Chief Ray of Sunshine. That's one of her names, she's the Chief Ray of Sunshine. One person is the Director of People and Possibilities. Another one is Director of Decolonization and Honoring Native Land. I thought, I think that's the title. And then I've been throwing around a lot of different ones. So one, I think was good as something around a land acknowledgement lab, because I want to make it a place where I can collaborate with lots of different people around how they can imagine, and give a framework and tools for people to imagine how you can change land acknowledgement thinking of this something that you say, something that you do, and something that has action. So that was what I've been thinking about. I don't know. What are some of the coolest titles you guys have heard? [laughs] CORALINE: Well, not exactly the same thing, but a friend of mine, Astrid Countee, who's also one of the panelists on our podcast. She is trained as an anthropologist and she got into tech. So she and I have been workshopping [chuckles] a title for her and we're coming up with sociologist engineer, anthropology engineer, things like that because the thing I like about that and the thing I like about what you're saying is that the impact that we have is a lot broader than the work that we do. We don't acknowledge the connections either and we tend to lionize the pure technical – I'm speaking as like the industry. We lionize that is the lone genius, like you were talking about, and I'd like to see us bring more of ourselves into how we describe the work we do, as opposed to just the, “Oh, I write code.” So Amelia, one of the things that you and I talked about in our conversation of couple of months ago, you introduced me to an incredible term that I'd like you to share with us and talk about and that is antecedent technology. AMELIA: Yeah. I like to think a lot about the continuous line that we have for technology and the way that oftentimes, when we're learning about a new technology, people will use metaphors that are connected to the technologies in history, but frequently, it's from a Western perspective rather than seeing a continuous line from technologies that were invented in indigenous communities. One of the reasons that I say it's important to look at indigenous antecedent technology is we don't want to colonize our future. We don't want take something and project it to the future with a limited understanding of how the world works. An example of that is that we've had, for thousands of years, decentralized economies that use decentralized ledgers and had large data systems that were able to be incorporated into consensus building contracts that led to peaceful communities. Like for instance, Wampum with the Haudenosaunee, Iroquois Confederacy, or even Quipu, we had in South America, which was a Turing-complete data system 500 years before Alan Turing was born. I think the reason why it's important is not because of primacy, or saying that's because something happened first it's better. But if you are thinking of making giant leaps in the future with some of these new emerging technologies, you could say, “Well, we don't have any data in the past, so we're just going to have to wing it.” Or you could look at it as a line and a string that connects to our ancestral histories and say, “Well, actually we did have successful distributed economy, decentralized economies, right in the location where I'm standing now. We could study how they worked in collaboration with the environment in this environment and learn from there.” Or we could just throw that out and say, “Wow, this is the first time California is ever going to use a decentralized economy. Let's just wing it.” Or you could say, “Actually, there's precedent here we can learn from that, from this very location, from this very land.” Something that a lot of indigenous activists are talking about is understanding the connection and giving back agency to indigenous groups is not just racial justice, but it's also climate justice. So I think people who deeply want to make positive impact for our environment, or are looking at some of these possibilities for different types of economies in a less extractive format for your state, or for your nation, or for your continent, or your region, it is important to include indigenous knowledge in those discussions. So that's what I mean when I talk about antecedent technology is like, are these innovations that you're building? Do they have deep roots, and do you have a mechanism of looking at them in historical context? Can that give you more data to make more successful models for how you might make innovation in the future? CORALINE: But Amelia, how can people do that and also solve every problem from first principles? AMELIA: I know, right? [laughs] And that's the funny thing is we see this is an issue in Silicon Valley already. Already, people are like, “Oh my gosh, they're reinventing buses,” or they're reinventing these things that already existed not a 100, or 200, or 300 years, or a 1,000 years ago, but people are reinventing something that happened a month ago, or a year ago. That is what we do. We pile slight innovations on top of each other in an extractive format to create competition and I think that it's a slowing down of that. It's like, what if it's not about reinvention, or just rebranding, or remarketing, but if our goals have of real long vision of lasting for seven generations, can we think then about innovation in a different way? JACOB: I've never heard the phase ethical dependencies. Could you educate me, if you care to? AMELIA: [laughs] Yeah, sure. I think about it like I love to use technological terminology to describe ethical, or creative practices and I love to use creative and ethical terminology to describe technological practices. I like to be a bridge between these two worlds because it's somewhere I sit in the middle of. So when people aren't technical and they're like, “What is an ethical dependency?” Then I'll start talking to them about how certain computer programs can't run unless they have all of their check-dependencies and I explain that to them. And then when it's a technical group, I'll talk about when you go through your package.json and you're trying to communicate to someone who might be using your GitHub repo, you might have a bunch of different choices of things that you can connect them with in your package.json. Maybe it's just basic, “Hey, this is the version I'm using and make sure you use this node version.” As you go through it, the only ethical choice I've had, at least as a web developer, is this MIT open source, or is this CANoe, or what is the licensing for this is, or is it just closed source so it's for the company that I'm working for. The reason why I wanted to make an ethical dependency for software is I wanted there to be more options and more choices there that you could say, not only do I have license, which really is just adjudicated through the legal process of international law of copyright. If someone violates the MIT license and close sources my open source project, maybe I can sue them. But if I'm a small developer, I probably don't have the resources to some people. But what if I don't even believe in that process? I'm somebody who truly believes in a horizontal organization that is a mutual aid network and we don't want to spend our funds on lawyers suing people. But we do want to have a way in which our community is held responsible to each other and maybe we have our own process of guidelines that this group adheres to and we want a resource where people can say, “Okay, what are the values behind your code that you imagine people should uphold?” And then my article that I wrote for the Mozilla blog, I mentioned an example, which is a cat shelter. Like, what if I made a really great website for my friend's cat shelter and then they reach out to me and say, “Hey, my other friend would really love to use your code. Is that totally fine?” “Yeah. It's open source. No problem.” “Okay, great, great, great,” and then I say, “Well, actually, I did a lot of work on this. I'm totally fine anyone using it for free, but I don't support kill shelters.” If it's a no-kill shelter, then totally cool with them using my code, but if there are not a no-kill shelter, I don't know if I wanted to spend all hours that I did making this and the time supporting it and everything else that I do. That's my values. Like, you can use my code for free, but not if you're using it to do something that I don't want to see in the world. I think we see that a lot in open source projects for research where researchers have done incredible systems for looking at the stars and star mapping, and then those same systems are used for military guided missiles and they're like, “Wait a minute. I use all those graduate students and we spent years and years and years building this incredible thing to look at stars and have this be an educational tool and now it's being used in a way that is absolutely not how we anticipated, or what we thought would exist in the world.” And there's not a mechanism because they didn't necessarily close source it; they're just using it as a guidance system. [chuckles] o it's like, how could you hold people accountable? I think the first step is to make explicit the values to begin with and a lot of times people will say to me, “Well, if you can't enforce this, then what is the point of doing this?” I think that's an interesting thing in our culture that we immediately go to policing before we can even think of the imagination of what is our value? Oh, you're not even allowed to think of what your values are, because if you can't police them, they don't matter. Well, that's actually a very strange skewed worldview to imagine that you can't hold values unless you can police them. Because in a world of post-policing, we have to have ways that we hold values, right? [laughs] We can't just throw out values. So the first step is articulating and agreeing upon the values and creating an ethical dependency, and then through the process in wampum.codes, I talk about how accountability can work within a community and what you want accountability to look like. It shouldn't be the default that the only way you can hold someone accountable is to sue them, or is to police them through a court system, or international court system. There should be a way in which you can hold people accountable that is more aligned with the values of your group. Maybe you can say, if you have found someone that has not followed these ethical guidelines, invite them to this town hall where we'd like to talk about it, or meet us every week at the Zoom link. There's lots of different ways you can put an accountability link in your package.json, which is, this is how I expect my community can hold me accountable. This is how I want my community to hold me accountable. This is how I want my community to hold each other accountable. So we talk through that process. I don't think it should just be a default outsource thing to a government that you have no influence on the copyrighting law that exists. It's like well, it's either open, or close. So that's a bad – now I've lost my place, but feel free to ask me questions. [laughs] These guys have stopped running. JAMEY: I really like the distinction that you make between policing and accountability, which I think are words that have similar meanings, but very different vibes. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how those two concepts like work different in practice. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you can imagine that it's – I always start from a point of imagining that it's the community, that we are all part of a community and that we care about the values and we care about each other. Like, you're starting from a point of imagining. Everyone's a good actor before you start imagining how someone is a bad actor. It's like saying, “I need to explain to you why this game is fun and what the rules are before I start.” If I start off being like, “Okay, everyone who's going to cheat at this game, this is what's going to happen to them.” Then people are like, “Well, wait, what game is this and what even are the rules?” So just start from a point of like, “This is why the game is fun. This is why we want to participate in it. These are the rules of the game and the rules are part of how we have fun.” The rules are a part of how we engage with each other. The rules are part of the point of why we're even playing. It makes it fun, constraints are fun, and then you can start thinking about like, “Hey, and if you cheat at this game, these are the fun ways you can cheat at this game and these are the ways that are actually not fun and everyone in the group would rather you just not do that and if you do do that, then maybe we talk about what we do.” I think that's a more of a process of thinking about the ideas, the end, and the means exist within the community and are part of the community. I think a lot of activists organizations have been very involved in rethinking community accountability without policing and oftentimes, they're communities that either indigenous communities on reservations don't have policing in the same way that other spaces do and/or their places where policing does not benefit those communities. They're not actually defending the rights, or the needs of those communities. So they've had to start thinking about like, “Well, we still have to think about what we do when we have something in our community that we don't want to have.” Like, if we have domestic violence, what do we do in a way that still protects and maintains our community, that we can still make sure we have help and needs? That's an issue that I think a lot of reservations have looked at because it's like we don't have police, or police don't help us when they come and so, how do we figure out ways that we can support our communities and make sure that we can minimize domestic violence and they have lots of different initiatives all over Indian country that are really amazing. So I think that's a good example. JAMEY: I find it really refreshing, the attitude about the game, like these are the rules of the game before we talk about cheating, because I find myself feeling a way that's jaded that my brain does go to. But I know there's bad actors and I've dealt with bad actors and I stress about that. I think it's a stressful thing that it's reasonable to stress about, but putting that value lower than the value of well, what's the ideal and how do we start with that, I think it really feels good. AMELIA: Yeah. I know as a young developer and probably all of you have had a very similar experience, but as a very young developer, you'll enter into a space and be like, “Oh, I have a question about this,” and then you just get a hammer on your head like, “This isn't the space where you ask questions! That's the space where you ask questions and you don't ask this question on Tuesday. You only ask them on a Wednesday!” and you're like, “Ah!” We've all had that experience, too, which isn't a very accessible way of someone wants to join your party and you're like, “Oh, you really aren't to join on Wednesdays and not with that question.” and it's like – So I think it's important to make things accessible to someone who's a new, or an outsider and give them a way of being a good actor because otherwise, if they don't, then everyone new will be a bad actor without any option of otherwise and of course, there are bad actors. We've all grown up on the internet, [laughs] so I think we know. Another thing that is interesting is I've been doing these workshops with development teams, at companies, startups, blockchain companies, or financial companies, or nonprofits, or academic departments, or groups of artists. It is always interesting that people are like, “Oh yeah, who should be here that can articulate our values for this exercise?” My answer is, “You,” and they're like, “Oh, well, no one gave me permission to do that.” “On behalf of who?” “I don't know on behalf of who,” and I'm like, “Well, you get to do it on behalf of everyone.” You get to articulate it and then someone else gets articulated and then we get to talk about that. I'm always surprised that this is sometimes the first space that anyone's given them that permission, it's like, “Well, what do you think are the values?” They go, “Well, I think our values are X, Y, and Z,” and someone else can say, “Well, I think it's this other thing,” and they can say, “Oh, interesting.” And then the founders, or the directors can be there and be like, “Wow, I had no idea all these different opinions,” and then we'll say to them, “Well, what did you think it was?” They're like, “I actually now, I realize I don't know. Now I'm liking these ideas,” or “I'm thinking about this differently.” So it's square one is that articulation and everyone thinks that that's a given. They're like, “Oh, well, that'll be easy. That part will take 5 minutes.” But that is almost the entire time. [chuckles] Usually, it's that beginning of like, “Okay, we are articulating our values.” Then once you articulate them, it's actually quite easy to just embed those into your source code and then think about accountability and all that. But getting on that same page, it's often the first time that – and coders will say things like, “Well, I think the UX person was supposed to decide this.” The UX person said, “No, no, no, I don't think it was me. I think it was somebody else who was supposed to decide this!” I'm like, “Well, if actually no one on your development team thinks they're allowed to express this, then that's probably a problem because how are they supposed to design code that meets your values of your team if no one thinks they're allowed to articulate that?” JAMEY: Something I find striking about the story that you just told is that, I think we often feel disagreements are a really bad thing to have and you just told the story where having disagreements was a very good thing to be experiencing because it's like more ideas and more discussion. I wonder what your thoughts are on like, well, how can we get past that feeling of like, “Oh, well, if someone disagrees with me, that's a bad thing.” AMELIA: I think it's different for different people. I think all of us have probably worked on international teams. I work on an international team with a lot of German coworkers and they're not in any way afraid of disagree [chuckles] in the beginning of a meeting, but they are very hesitant to disagree later on. They have this great way of clashing in the beginning with lots of ideas. Like, “No, I don't think that!” They're really, really clashing in the beginning, but then once we've all agreed to move forward with something, then they would be more hesitant later on to be like, “Hey, I don't think this is working out” because they're like, “No, we made a commitment, we're going to do this. We'll just keep doing what we decided.” It's harder for them later on to like flag a problem and say, “I think we should go in a different direction,” because it's less part of their culture to do that. It's like, “Well, we all agreed. So if we all agreed and we're all together, then we all agree and we're all together. You don't later go on and decide something else on your own.” Whereas, I feel like in American culture, it's not as big of a deal for someone to raise the hand and be like, “I think we're going to go into a brick wall if we keep going this direction so we've got to veer to the left.” Everyone would be like, “Thank goodness.” But if you showed up at the brick wall, they'd be like, “Why didn't anyone –?” “Oh, we knew we were going to run a brick wall. Why didn't you say anything?” “Oh, we didn't want to disagree.” That wouldn't be appropriate in American culture, but they make jokes all the time in Germany that that's what happens sometimes because people agree and then they'll just keep going. [chuckles] So it's very interesting clash of culture. I think different cultures have different points at which they feel comfortable. That's just one example. You can imagine how all of us have so many different cultures when it feels okay to have disagreements and sometimes explaining that in the beginning could be helpful, too. Because in some of these groups, you'll have people that are international that are speaking more in the beginning and I'll call that out, too and say, “I hear a lot of Europeans are disagreeing in the beginning. Oftentimes, Americans don't feel comfortable doing that, but this is a helpful way of making sure we have alignment and it's not seen as that you think someone's idea is not good, but it's a way of contributing, or adding.” Sometimes I throw that out because I know even based on different parts of the US that you're in, you might have different ways when you feel more comfortable sharing a descending of opinion. [chuckles] CORALINE: Amelia, how does that intersect with permission to be wrong? AMELIA: Oh, I like that permission to be wrong. Tell me a little bit more about that. What do you –? CORALINE: I think it's tied to what we talk about a lot about psychological safety and safety to fail. Things don't always fail just for environmental reasons. AMELIA: Oh, yeah. CORALINE: Sometimes someone had an idea and it ends up that idea isn't workable, but we have such attachment to the idea that I think we oftentimes are likely to run into that wall because we don't want to admit that we didn't think of something, or we didn't see something coming, or we didn't think it through correctly and that's a lot of pressure. AMELIA: Oh, totally. Absolutely, it is. I feel like I find that a lot when I was a professor and I still am a trainer. I work at Contenful as a technical trainer and I think as a teacher, you see that a lot with people. It's like that first moment where students have learned something and they want to apply it and sometimes, our first idea is great, but usually our first 20 ideas are terrible. [chuckles] So it's like when you're first learning something, you don't always have the best ideas and what I usually have tried to do in my classrooms is give people just an enormous space to create a lot of bad ideas quickly. If it's in an art class, I might say, “Okay, I've taught you how to do this animation. I need you to make a 100 in the next hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Well, then make them really bad and really crude and just find out how to do volume,” and when you find out how to do volume, you get over a lot of the preciousness of the first bad idea that is usually really bad, but you're really precious about it because it's your first and that can push past that. Similarly, in technical training classes, it might be the same where it's like, “Okay, all 50 of you have to do this impossible task in an hour,” and they're like, “That's impossible.” I'm like, “Great. So let's start with, where should we start?” Often, where should we start is a bad idea. People are like, “We should start with writing down everything that we need to do!” It's like, “Well, if you only have an hour, that's probably going to be the hour of just writing it down, or you could start somewhere.” There's lots of different options. So I think permission to fail, or permission for bad ideas sometimes can be overcome by that brute force of just being like, “Well, do the first 100 bad ideas, get it out of your system.” [laughs] JACOB: I was just thinking about how I've worked in an organization in the past that really wanted to have that very collaborative beyond the same page about values. There was one issue that came up a lot, which was that we had this culture where if anyone wanted to blow up the entire thing and make us all talk about it from ground zero, they could. I think that, whether on purpose, or not, was abused and what ended up happening was not really able to go anywhere. Effectively, what happened was the person who wanted to just keep bringing up their thing got their way because you know. AMELIA: Yeah. JACOB: When you were talking about that earlier, I was thinking about what's a way for one of the values of a group to be like, “We want to be able to have everyone's input, but we also want to move forward,” and I was just thinking about how we would do that. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think this is why so many mutual aid networks, or activist groups, or anarchist groups will use different formats like even Robert's Rules of Order, or they make their own versions of that where they say – and then I've seen in some artist groups, they'll have the 10 not commandments, but things on the wall where if a certain thing in a conversation is going there, they might point to it and say like, “Hey, is this number eight derailment? Are you derailing our consensus through number seven only being concerned with your own idea?” And then they will be like, “Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's what you're doing here. Number seven and number eight and right now, so we're going to move past that.” Or with Robert's Rules, you might say like, “Yeah, your emotions on the table doesn't have a second. So we're tabling that.” I think that's why it's important to have some of those ground rules when you're in an activist organization and maybe we should take some of those activist language into the product space at companies as well to say, we can have formalized ways. It doesn't mean we're not listening to people. There's a balance between “You're never allowed to question our values,” or “Yeah, you can bring up your own pet project at any time and derail everyone else's process and project and progress.” So I think there's definitely a balance there and people can always make addendums to that. People can say, “Hey, we're going to pause Robert's Rules right now because it looks like we're getting kicked out of the space in 5 minutes so we're going to move to this section. Does everyone agree with that?” “Yes, we agree with tabling those rules that we already agreed to make a supplemental rule for this section.” I don't know how many of you have worked in an activist organization. Sounds like all of you see what I'm talking about. [laughs] Sometimes it's a lot of saying that and saying it really fast, but you get used to it. You get used to being like, “Oh my gosh, we only have 5 minutes. Okay, should we table this? Yes, or no? Do we have a second? Okay, we do. Great.” It takes more verbiage, but it is a way that we can agree on the rules of play and that people feel safe being like, “No one seconded that idea. You have brought it up for the third time, you're bringing it up again, no one's going to second it again. So it's okay, we get it. You still want that idea. That's okay. We're writing it down in the minutes, but how it goes. [chuckles] You're also welcome to start your own group and have that be a focus and that's always possible, too.” So not everything has to be done by, for, with, and with approval of the group and I think that's what's great, too. JAMEY: So Amelia, you were talking earlier in the show about your No Funding group. That's what it was called, right? AMELIA: Yeah. JAMEY: And the phrase that you said, I wrote it down was, “No striving, no hustling.” AMELIA: Yeah. JAMEY: I liked that so much that [chuckles] I wrote it down and I was hoping we could talk about that because I think that that's something that people really struggle with, too. Anxiety about productivity and monetizing hobbies is something I see a lot. I'm also in the tech space and the art space, and you see that a lot in comics like, how can I make this thing that I want to do into my career? Which like, there's something beautiful about that, but it's also really tough when you're doing that with everything in your life that should bring you joy. So this isn't really a question, but I was hoping you could talk about no striving, no hustling. AMELIA: Oh yeah, thank you so much, Jamey. So I'll read you the little statement that we made, just because it's funny, but we say, “No Funding: Be the crypto-anarchist digital artist collective you want to see in the world. The mutual aid network that aims to help creatives radically rethink our relationships to funding, grants, and gatekeepers. In an arts and media culture increasingly focused on securing patronage from institutions, corporations, and wealthy individuals, No Funding asks what creative life would look like if artists were fully liberated from money and the self-censorship imposed by its pursuit? Rather than experience the soul crushing lifestyle of striving, rejection, and constant jockeying for position, could we instead find new ways to support one another and what would we make?” As part of the official announcement, I wrote a short story called Child's Play, where I imagine a world in which children seize control of the global economy with nothing more than a Minecraft server and their grandparents' goodwill. [laughs] “No Funding is a public group. You can visit no-funding.com to get in on the fun and participate in weekly online conversations where members present on topics near and dear to them. No Funding is primarily a BIPOC creative technologist group, but it's open to anyone who's ever needed a day job to make something cool that they believe in. Our motto is no-striving, no-hustling; No-Funding.com a creative collective.” So that's our little statement. [laughs] JAMEY: I love it. I love everything about it. AMELIA: Yeah. I've had a lot of fun because I don't know how you felt during the pandemic, but I feel adrift in a sea of information where I don't know where land is. I don't see a lighthouse. I can't tell if I'm 5 minutes from shore, or a 5 miles and having a check-in with people with this format that it's like, no striving, no hustling, you're not pitching your project for a group of adjudicators. This is a group of people for people by people and I've been able to get more of a temperature on how people are feeling, what people are thinking. For me, it's helping that lighthouse of how far I am adrift. When I have my own notions of, I think this is going on and then I go to a No Funding meeting and I'm like, “Okay, I'm totally wrong. I can adjust myself to the shore.” So for me, it's been really helpful in that way. JAMEY: I think that there's two pieces of what you just described that have a similar result, but are different, which is trying to get funding because we live in capitalism and you need money to survive and to do things, which sucks and it's hard. And then on the other side, I think you have just this feeling about whether, or not you're being productive in that way. Even if an artist doesn't need to make money off of something to pay their bills, I think there's a feeling of like, but if I'm not making money, then it's not valuable, or it's not real, or it's not as valuable as something else that someone else is working on. Actually, that is also capitalism that made that happen, but I think that's a little bit more solvable maybe. It's hard for us to just decide that we're going to have a community without that kind of global economy. But I think we could decide that we're not going to hold ourselves to that in the way that we do, but that's a tough step to take, I think and it sounds like you have a whole group of people that have all taken that step. [chuckles] AMELIA: Yeah. It's pretty incredible. I think we're all very diverse and don't agree on a lot of things, but the one thing that we do agree on is that the definition of having a full and creative life is only available to someone who does never need to work. Even if there are people in our group that might be true for, we all agree that that's not true, that you can have a full creative life and do many different jobs at many different times in your life for many different reasons. That is the one thing that we've committed to is like having a day job doesn't kick you out of the club of being a activist, a creative, a dreamer, a thinker, and a world that that exists is a world that is actually quite creatively stifling. It's very stifling and we see that it ends up just reproducing a lot of commonality and there's only a small demographic of people then who gets to participate in it and they have a very small narrow grasp on the world. I think we see that in a lot of our media that in order to participate in media, you have to be independently wealthy enough that you don't need to make any money from it and then those people tend to be a very small narrow demographic. And then you say, “Well, why don't we have all of our stories are told from this one perspective?” It's like, “Well, those are the only people that are allowed to do that work because it requires a full-time job where you don't make money.” Then of course, you 're going to get the same group of people [chuckles] that are going to tell the stories then. So that's why we think about it of like, well, what could we make if we assume we have day jobs, if we assume we don't need money, what kind of projects can we make together, or how can we support each other and each other's projects all coming from a notion of there's not someone coming to save us and we're not looking to grab the attention of someone high up there. Rather, we're looking to our right and to our left of us and the people that are standing beside us and saying, “How do we move forward?” JAMEY: I find that incredibly inspiring and empowering and it's something similar that I think about in comics a lot where people who are new to comics are often trying to get in with people that are already names in comics and really talented people that of course, you want to work with those people, but those people are doing something different than you if you're just a beginner. I heard the advice when I was new, that's like, “Hey, don't reach out to me, reach out to people that are your peers, because me and my peers used to be like that and we all became successful together and what you need to do is make a group like that and then you become successful together.” I thought about that a ton since I heard it and I think I'm getting a similar vibe from what you're talking about that and I think it's beautiful. AMELIA: Well, thank you so much, Jamey. You literally described the exact impetus for me forming this is I get a lot of talks weekly at universities and I had so many students after my talks be like, “Can we grab coffee? I'd love to pick your brain.” I look at my schedule and unfortunately, just because I have a full-time startup job and I do lots of advocacy and activism on the side, I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to be able to meet with you in like three months and that's not good.” I want to be able to give more time to these people who have really valid questions, but I also don't think that I hold anything that they need. Like, I don't think that I'm the person standing in the path for their progression and I need to give them a hand up. In fact, I think what I do need to do is to give them a space where they can communicate with their peers, like you said, and I say that to them. I say, “Look, I'm not brushing you off because you're not important. I'm taking myself out of this equation because I'm not important and you don't need me to tell you how to move forward, but you do need your peers and luckily, I've collected all of you from all of my talks into a group that meets weekly and you can all talk to each other, which is a much more valuable thing and I facilitate this. I've created this as a way of giving you a Zoom link that everyone can connect to each week, but you're going to connect with each other and you're going to meet hundreds of people around the world that are your peers, that will be your network, that will be the person to your left and to your right.” I always say to people, “If you look to your left and your right and you don't see anyone, that's because there's somebody behind you, you need to pull up that you need to give a hand to.” CORALINE: Oh, yeah. I've been doing a lot of that, thinking and talking about storytelling, and the value I place in storytelling and I'm also thinking about how can I give agency to other people to tell their stories? But one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about storytelling is for example, look at superheroes. Almost every white superhero is a lone actor. They don't have a community connection. They don't have a family; they all died in a terrible accident. AMELIA: Origin story, yeah. CORALINE: Yeah, and that's the kind of stories we tell and it's what we're telling people. You have to be the hero. You have to be the most famous. You have to be the most rich. I learned there's actually a name for different kinds of stories, there's a German word for it called bildungsroman, and I'm probably pronouncing that all wrong, but this is more what our stories used to be like. The entire story would be about the development of the hero and it's not the hero's journey like a Joseph Campbell thing, it's literally how they learn how to be who they are. We don't tell the stories, or the origin story that's highly dramatic and left behind as opposed to acknowledging that we're all flawed and that hopefully, we're all growing and that hopefully, we'll just be better people and that's enough. AMELIA: Yeah, absolutely. My son, when he was a baby, he used to hate Disney movies because he would say [chuckles] they always have like the mom, or the dad always dies, something bad always happens to them in the beginning, and then the rest of the story is running from a trauma to find a perfect ending and this is like a 4-year-old telling me this. I'm like, “Yeah, that is the problem with the Western myth of the origin story,” and he was like, “But I want to just watch friends having fun together, telling each other jokes, going on a journey. I want it to look like my life. I want to see stories that look like my life,” and I'm like, “Yeah, well, you probably will find your stories in other spaces,” and he did. He finds Minecraft, which is much more of a similar thing to his experience is we're collectively building our story through participating in a world on a server that we've negotiated the terms of and that's his fictional world and he still is that way. His generation is still that way. The Zoomers, I think tell stories in a more interactive and collective format and they're not as interested in media that comes from a single voice, which I think is cool, so. [chuckles] JAMEY: I read some discourse recently about Studio Ghibli movies and people were talking about Studio Ghibli movies don't really have conflict and I thought that was confusing because obviously, there's lots of conflict in many of them. There's lots of problems and they solve the problems. I think that the thing that people mean when they say that isn't that there's actually no conflict, it's that there's room in those stories for quiet moments of reflection and that makes people feel like it's not conflict because you're having that space to sit with it and think about it and then continue. I think that's what is so relaxing about them. People will feel like, “I'm relaxed and so, it's not stressful and it's not conflict,” but it's giving yourself space to, I don't know, I already said it what I was going to say, so. [laughs] AMELIA: That's really beautiful. I met this screenwriter once when I was in LA and I was really surprised by his point of view because he said a lot of people think that drama is violence, aggression, death, hardship, and he says the best drama that most people want to watch is a good person has to make a tough decision. I just loved that statement because it's true. That kind of drama, it doesn't have to just be this doom and gloom, or I'm taking in trauma and trauma there. As soon as he just said that phrase to me, I was like, “Tell me more. What is the story?” I was like, “Tell me, I want to know the end of your story,” he's like, “No, no, no, that's every story I tell on TV. That is my story is like –” He's like, “This is why we love hospital dramas because it's like these doctors, they need to make a tough decision and it does have life, or death consequences, but they're saving lives, or the core concept is not about death and destruction and violence. The core concept is about them trying to save a life and make a tough decision and people love that.” So the concept that people only like entertainment that has a lot of violence, or trauma and is like, okay, that's true and [laughs] actually people love to see a good person making a tough decision. So I always remember that when I think about storytelling. CORALINE: Amelia, I really appreciate your sharing with us your story today and I think it's very inspiring and I think it's also really wonderful that it seems to connect to other things. It's not just your story, it's a collective story, but you are a force for bringing those stories to life and I really appreciate that. Giving people the space to tell their stories and [inaudible] their stories. AMELIA: Oh, awesome. So thank you so much, Coraline and I see that Jamey thought of the name. JAMEY: The term I was looking for is Ma. I don't actually know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, even though it's only two letters, M-A, but it's a Japanese word for negative space. Negative space is so important in design, white space is important in code, and the idea of negative space being important in a story, I think is really valuable. AMELIA: That's really beautiful and I think as a collective, we always move slower and we move at the speed of the community and it changes the speed, or the way in which we tell stories, but it changes the value, I think in a positive way. Those of us who want to connect to our community can then see stories that reflect our own reality. So I think that's really beautiful. Maybe the Ma, or the space within community storytelling will be defined and have some terms someday. That'd be cool. JAMEY: Maybe the kids from your story at the very beginning who made up the rock hand word will come up with a word for it for us. [chuckles] AMELIA: Totally. Absolutely. CORALINE: Amelia, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. AMELIA: Thank you so much for having me. What a beautiful conversation and a beautiful afternoon conversation for me. So thank you for making sunshine happen for the rest of my day. JAMEY: Thank you so much. This was really great. Special Guest: Amelia Winger-Bearskin.

01:04 - Austin’s Superpower: Pain Tolerance 02:06 - Deserted Island DevOps (https://desertedisland.club/) (Running an Online/Virtual Conference in Animal Crossing (https://animal-crossing.com/) or Other Mediums) * Deserted Island DevOps 2020 on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVUQjiv8GtwL-B9AJJ-rNdiDtcU2wo7Gy) * Software Circus (https://www.youtube.com/c/SoftwareCircus) * The Great Cloud Native Bakeoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koT08purWDc) * Making Real-Time Audience/Human Connection * Streaming * Watch Parties * Austin Parker: Virtual Events Suck. (https://aparker.io/posts/virtual-events-suck/) 24:09 - Failure; Making it Safe to Fail * Technical Failure * Psychological Failure * Underpromise, Overdeliver 32:51 - Safety and Setting Expectations (The Problem with More is Better) * OKRs * Open Source Principles (https://opensource.com/principles) Reflections: John: The creativity of new ways to experience a conference. Coraline: The importance of moderation. Austin: How to communicate feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to people you’re working with. Jacob: Find a conference that has been thoughtful about interaction when not in person and go. 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. Transcript: CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 231 of Greater Than Code podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke and I’m joined by my friend, John Sawers. JOHN: Thanks, Coraline. And I’m here with Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Thanks. John! It’s my pleasure to introduce our guest this week, Austin Parker. Austin makes problems with computers and sometimes solves them. He’s an open-source maintainer, observability nerd, DevOps junkie, and poster. You can find him ignoring Hacker News threads and making dumb jokes on Twitter. He wrote a book about distributed tracing, taught some college courses, streams on Twitch, and also ran a DevOps conference in Animal Crossing. Such a nice pleasure to have you on the show. AUSTIN: It's fantastic to be here. JACOB: We can start the show like we always do by asking you a question. What's your superpower and how did you develop it? AUSTIN: Right now, my superpower is I'm 50% through a COVID-19 vaccine and I developed it by staying indoors for the past year, but more hilariously I guess, I developed a strong resistance to burns by working as a gas station cook for quite a while, back in my younger days. So I ran the fryer and you get really good at ignoring hot oil spattering on you. So I'd like to think that that level of pain tolerance is what helped me get through a lot of DevOps stuff and getting used to computers. [laughter] CORALINE: Yeah. I hate Kubernetes and it's hot oil splashing. They should do something about that. It's open source. I guess, I could open my PR, but . AUSTIN: Yeah. Well, they say PR is welcome, but that's the open-source maintainers. Bless your heart, right? CORALINE: Yeah, exactly. So Austin, I want to know more about this DevOps conference that you ran in Animal Crossing. AUSTIN: So let's start at the beginning, let's take everyone back to just about a year ago now where we were all kind of settling in for our wonderful pandemic that has been extremely not wonderful for most people, but I think everyone was coming to grips with how long it would take at first. My day job, I work as in developer relations. I'm a marketer, effectively. But I remember a lot of people were talking, the marketing team and certainly, the entire events space like, “Oh, what's this going to do about the summer events, what's this going to do about the fall events?” and I'm sitting here like, “Hey, I think this is going to last a little longer than till June.” So the conversation kind of pivots as everything gets progressively worse and people are starting to come to grips like, “Well, can we do a virtual event?” I don't think anyone at the time really had a good idea of what a virtual event would be. We all know video conferencing certainly is something that we've come to rely on in our day-to-day lives over the past year. Even if you weren't already in tech, or weren't already working remotely, Zoom is – it’s been Q-tip. It's been Kleenex. It's a no matter what you're using, you're Zooming someone. So they have that going for them, I guess. People, I think there was a lot of possibility and not a lot of real, strong ideas about what does this actually mean? So I wanted to try something different. I was joking around on Twitter and I had just gotten a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and I was staging with screenshots with like, “Oh look, this is funny. It's like a conference booth.” It's like ha, ha, we're all giving out t-shirts and laughing. And the code people picked up on and they were like, “Oh, that's funny. I bet you could actually do a conference in Animal Crossing and stream it out” because you can actually have people like join you, come over to your island and stand around. I was like, “Well, actually, you could just composite that video from the output of the game over some slides and what's the difference?” Someone's talking, someone's clicking through slides, and it spiraled from a joke. I put up a page, a landing page on April 1st, which is the best time to announce anything thing. Because if people don't go for it, you can always be like, “Ha, ha, April fools. Got you!” [laughter] But I put up a landing page and we had a 100 people register for more information that first day, I messaged them on Slack, and I'm like, “Well, I’ve got to do it now; a 100 people one day. That's great.” CORALINE: Yeah. AUSTIN: So long story short, over the next 30 days, we basically put together, myself and then my co-organizer, Katie @thekatertot on Twitter, or Katie Farmer, a virtual conference inside of Animal Crossing. It's called Deserted Island DevOps. You can go watch it on YouTube, the one from last year. We're doing another one this year on April 30th. It's just a one-day live stream. If you're watching it, you're just watching it on Twitch. We have a Discord that you can talk and do the hallway track stuff and ask questions and network. But the gimmick is basically, everyone's presenting has a Switch and they are in Animal Crossing. They're on this island, they're dressing up their little Animal Crossing character and we overlay their slides with the video coming out of the Switch so they can emote and react and it's cute experience to watch. But I think it's also interesting because what I saw, last year at least, is that it solves a lot of the problems, I think most virtual conferences don't quite nail, which is, I think a good event is something that takes you out of your day-to-day. It takes you out of where you are and put you somewhere else. Now, if you go into KubeCon, or re:Invent, or even devopdays, if you're doing this physically like, you're not at your office, you're not at home, you're somewhere else talking to people, literally, you have changed the physical location you're in. But most virtual events, it still boils down to, “Hey, I'm watching a Zoom effectively and I'm talking to people in Slack.” If I wanted to do that, I could just do my actual job. So I think one of the things that people appreciated about Deserted Island and continue to is the idea that this is produced differently. There's a couple other people that are doing stuff like this. I think Software Circus out of the UK, they've done a lot of themed events, themed virtual events like this, where the presenters are wearing costumes. Or there was The Great Kubernetes Bake-Off, I want to say where it’s a cloud kitchen theme so everyone has their chefs’ hats. I think having that concept also gives presenters a lot of mileage in terms of hey, you can theme what you're talking about. Here is an analogy in a box, here is a world that you can put your talk in and you have an idea that everyone can use those shared experiences, that shared language to develop your talk and give people an anchor for it, which I think is one of the good ways you help people learn. If you give them something they know about and then you tie your concept into that concept, then they're going to get more out of it. The other thing is that it's a great way to be expressive. In Animal Crossing, you are who you are, you are whoever your avatar is. So you don't get any of the – I hate being on camera a lot. It gets exhausting because you feel like you're performing for the camera. It’s not the same, but in this, nobody's seeing your actual face; they're hearing your voice and then you can dress your Animal Crossing your avatar whatever. So you can be creative. You can be who you are without having that weird performance pressure of a bunch of people that you can't see staring at your face JOHN: This is an important topic these days because there's still everything's online and will be for a while and I think so many people are still learning how to do online events and those skills are going to need to keep happening over the next coming years. I think because you can do now online events, which are more accessible to more people all over the world, you don't have to be the sort of person who can fly places in order to attend certain events. Having them online is a great accessibility option. So finding new modalities for making that interesting and not just sitting on Zoom all day, I think is a worthy endeavor. AUSTIN: Yeah, and it's super challenging. I don't want to sound like I'm like dragging people's work because I know CNCF has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. I know of the entire devopsdays community has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. This is super hard to do. It's not easy. It requires a lot of intentionality; a lot of planning and I think we will all get better at it over time. The future is not necessarily going to be like the past, I don't know if there's ever going to be a day where we just kind of flip a switch and it's all like, “Oh, we're back to how we were before March of 2020,” I think. So there's still going to be a desire for virtual events and there's still going to be a desire for figuring out ways to be more inclusive and to bring people in, especially because of climate change and everything like that. At some point, we have to come to a reckoning about the actual cost of a global travel-based society but that's maybe a slightly different topic. I don't know. CORALINE: I actually think a good side effect of all this is a focus on accessibility and like you said, a lot of people aren't people to travel. It's expensive. I know conferences, typically in-person conferences, used to spend quite a bit of money with programs to bring in marginalized folks who maybe couldn't afford the travel. But one thing I do miss is getting that audience reaction. Especially as a storyteller, I tend to tell a lot of stories in my talk and I like to be able to see, is the audience with me, is the audience getting what I'm saying? I can tune my presentation in real-time based on audience reactions and I really miss that. I really missed that aspect of it, that feedback aspect of it, because at the end of people are like, “Oh, great talk.” I'm like, “Yeah, but did it get to you?” AUSTIN: Yeah, did you connect with it? CORALINE: Yeah, and that's so hard. AUSTIN: It's challenging, especially because so many of – on the production side, there's a bias, I think in virtual events to prerecord, due to a lot of factors and this is not a diss on prerecording. I personally hate it. I basically have stopped doing any event that's like, “Oh, we want you to prerecord.” I'm just like, “Eh, I'd rather not” because that’s the style, that's the way I talk. I agree with this idea of storytelling like, you're not just reading slides. If I just want someone to read slides, I could just hand them a book. But what's weird to me is one of the things that I think that we did, that I haven't seen anyone else really do, is there's already a way that people do this. If you watch Twitch, if you watch twitch.tv, or live streams like the kids do these days, there is a real-time chat and people are reacting in real-time. It's a little bit delayed. It's a couple seconds delayed, but I don't know why you haven't seen other virtual event platforms take that idea and really try to have even just a button like a clap button, or a sparkle fingers button, or something to kind of let people know that there's people out there watching you and that they're reacting positively and maybe not negatively, but they're reacting. That they are cognizant of what you're saying. It's really surprising to me that we haven't seen more like that and I would love if some of these event platforms thought about that. How do you make that actual, immediate real-time, or near real-time audience connection with the speaker? CORALINE: The Twitch thing is really interesting. Back in October, I started streaming in addition to everything else I do in my life—I'm a musician—and I started streaming, recording, and music production and I have a weekly show. You're right, the audience interaction is great and I incorporate that into my show. I'll stop what I'm doing after I finish laying down one track and I'll ask the people in chat, “What instrument should I pick up next?” Or, “What sound would you like to hear there?” Things like that. It does make that more interactive and it brings some of that human connection back and I think you're right. That's what's missing from a lot of these online conferences is that connection. CORALINE: Yeah, and I actually think you've hit on it right there with streaming. There's been a big question – I don't know how much you follow the CNCF, KubeCon EU talk acceptance drama that kind of popped off a week, or so ago. But the short version is obviously, KubeCon is a very prominent conference in the Cloud Native world and it gets a lot of submissions and because it gets a lot of submissions, a lot of talks get dropped, a lot of things get cut. That's every event; there's always more submissions than there are slots for people to speak, but it turned into a bit of a blow up on Twitter and they actually wrote a blog post that's very explicitly described again hey, this is how we pick these talks. There's a lot of factors that go into it. The thing that occurred to me and I've seen some people talk about, especially people that have been in the industry for a while is, what really is the benefit of a conference at all? When you have things like Twitch and you can build an audience for yourself and it's easier than it's ever been to get a platform. Some people in the world have used that for good ends and some people in the world have used that for ill ends, but regardless, I could go out and just say, “I'm not doing talks and I'm not doing conferences anymore. I'm just going to stream. I'm going to produce things and put them on YouTube.” The only reason you would be at a conference at that point is as like okay, this is a quality filter. These are some people saying, or suggesting that these talks, or these individuals have a higher value to the community because we got a bunch of people, smart people to look at it and say like, “Yeah, we think this one's better than that one.” But I really wonder if all of this with COVID, with the pandemic, with the change in events is going to inspire a different model going forward, where there's less of a centralization factor of you haven’t made it until you've done a KubeCon keynote, or you haven't made it until you've done the devopsdays circuit, or you haven't made it until you've written a book, or whatever. If you’ve got something to say, go say it and I think maybe that's a better way because that also is more accessible. You don't have to necessarily – there's less gatekeepers and a lot of times, gatekeepers and experts are useful because they help cut through all the chaff. But on the flip side, it can be harmful, too because everyone has biases and even the best process is never going to weed out bias and most of the time, you don't want it to weed out bias. You want it to be biased for good things, not bad things. I don't know. I feel like there's a conversation that needs to happen about this that hasn't quite gotten off the ground yet. I'm interested to see where it goes. JACOB: One thing that sounds interesting about this Animal Crossing conferences, you talked about it was a different modality altogether and I'm just curious if did this conference include, or at least was it like there was a side-effect of conference goers just playing the game with each other? AUSTIN: Yeah, actually that was one of my really interesting learnings from it was that when you have a community started, just the best thing to do is just let them go do stuff. We had a bunch of people form impromptu watch parties where they would open up their island and invite people are watching to come and be in the same game space as them as viewers and run around together while watching the stream. So they would tweet out pictures like you would do at an actual conference, where it's like, “Oh, hanging out with the besties,” and then tweet out a picture, a screenshot of their island with people sitting. Some people went really into this; they built little watch party rooms where everyone had chairs and a little movie projector set up. Some people had coffee machines and a little snack plates, or whatever in the game. It was really interesting to me how, when you kind of let people be creative about it and you let people try to build what they want inside this modality, this world, this bigger world, I guess, of being at a virtual conference, that they'll do stuff with it because it's fun and because it gets you engaged. Again, it's not just watching another Zoom. It's not just chatting on Slack. It's, you're doing something and the really good thing about that is if you are doing something, if you do make it a unique experience, people will actually take the time for it. One thing that I think gets lost in a lot of these virtual events right now is that it's not something you're blocking off time for. You're saying like, “Okay, I've got maybe two, or three talks I really want to watch. So I'm going to block off 45 minutes in my calendar here and there and I'm going to watch this different screen for a minute.” But with this, what we saw was people had blocked the entire day off. It was a 6-hour, maybe 5 hours total and people were there the entire time. We had 8,000, 9,000 people watching basically consistently from the beginning to the end and about 15,000 people total watched it over the course of the day. So nearly 50% of that were people that were there the whole time roughly. I think by giving people that space to make time for themselves and to say like, “I'm going to treat this like an actual thing and not just something I'm going to pop back into.” That meant they could do the networking. They could do the chatting. They could react in Twitch and they could do the little clap emojis and the sparkle emojis. They could have those hallway track conversations and network and bond and get that social jazz you get by talking to people that have this similar problems, or have overcome challenges and are like, “Oh, this is how I solved X and Y problem in Kubernetes,” or even, “Oh yeah, this is a strategy I learned for dealing with managers that don't understand me, or making sure that we – how do I communicate this technical concept to the business?” It wasn't just, “I want to talk about really cool IP tables configs.” It really was like, “Hey, we're all people trying to solve these problems,” and that was, I think, wonderful to see and something that I'm really hoping that we can nail again this year. JACOB: I think the wonderful thing about conferences is that, as someone who has a good deal of social anxiety, or shyness, is the in-person experience is an excuse to sort of – well, it was like it prevented me from having the excuse of like, “Oh, I could just watch it on – is this something I can just watch it on YouTube?” I was able to like, convince myself, like, “No, you actually have to go there and you have to sit next to someone you don't know and introduce yourself.” I feel like conferences that I could get the exact same experience just watching the video anyway, I lose that side effect, which is, I think the more valuable thing is that there's an experience that I would miss out on if I wasn't there. So it made me think about what Caroline is saying about that immediacy of being a speaker and I guess, what I’m wondering is maybe the secret is if you can't reproduce the immediacy of people being in the same room together, and I'm not certain that's true, or not whatever it is, maybe the trick is how do you use technology to your advantage rather than thinking about it as a barrier to get around? AUSTIN: Yeah. I'm not going to say I have all the answers, certainly. The thing that I really hope, because I wrote a big thing about it on my blog and I feel like there's a progression of events, virtual events that have happened where people are experimenting and trying new things. I would like to think they're trying to get to that point. How do you use the technology we have to enhance connections rather than viewing it as just like, “Oh, this is a thing we’ve got to do until we can get everyone back on a plane”? CORALINE: And really, that's the best thing about technology is when you find an unexpected use for it. When you find something outside the use case that it's designed for and you get that feeling of delight, I think that's when tech is at its best. AUSTIN: Yeah. I think that was one of the things. The two big things about Deserted Island is the idea that this is a deliberately delightful and cute and comfortable place. It is the softest game you can imagine. There are no harsh edges. There is no failure state. I don't think there's a 90-degree angle in that entire game, but it also gives you enormous constraints because it's a very crafted world and so, working around and through those constraints, but also having sort of the delight of overcoming them and figuring out like, “Oh, this is this really soft round space that I can do stuff in, but I have these walls. I have these barriers set up that I have to work around.” I mean, that's why I'm in technology; it’s because it's endless source of challenges and it's an endless source of like, “Oh, here's a hill I can overcome.” I was never super popular, or fast, or anything. I sucked at sports. I still suck at sports. The one time I went skiing, I tore my ACL in 15 minutes. I'm just not a coordinated guy, but in technology, there's always a new hill to summit. There's always something new to learn. There's always a new challenge that presents itself. That, to me, is that's why I stick with it. I could do other things, but here's something that's always going to challenge me and it's always going to give me something new to do. That, I think is worth celebrating in itself and if we can find a way to blend all these things together, blend all the different ideas about events and the delight and constraints and challenges of technology and dah, dah, dah, dah, and throw that together in a Twitch stream. Cool, rad, let's do that. I think that was a lot of the inspiration. It was just like, “Hey, this might blow up in my face. This might fail terribly, but it's better to try it and see what happens.” Every day when I'm sitting here thinking, “Oh my God, it's never going to be as big of a success. Everyone's going to hate me,” whatever, I come back to that like, “Well, better to try and just like fall on my face than it is to wonder what might've been if I hadn't tried.” CORALINE: That reminds me of safety and something that we talk about at least in workplaces is making more places safe to fail and I think at the event level, the fear of failure has got to be a lot more on a different level. So were you prepared to fail and how did you prepare to fail? AUSTIN: It’s a great question. To be super honest, I'm not sure I was prepared to fail by the time it actually – so there's two types of failure. There was the technical failure and that was something that I did have plans for. There's a lot of technical failure that can happen during a live event production; my computer could have crashed, my internet could have gone down, a presenter's internet could have died. In preparation for that, there was a playbook effectively of okay, if this goes wrong, then do this. If this goes wrong, do that. Now, in doing so, I actually discovered a lot of other things that I didn't think could go wrong that did go wrong. One example was, we had very strong moderation in the chat because it's the internet, it's a public thing. There's no registration. Anyone could come into the Twitch chat and say whatever. So I was pretty biased towards okay, now let's crank up the moderation filters and make sure that people aren't going to just come in and say some mean things. One thing I didn't think to ask any of the presenters is like, “Hey, do you have something that's interactive outside of this?” One of them did, they had an interactive presentation where people went to Slido, or something and could that had its own chat input, text input. Any large enough Twitch stream, you had some trolls that had come in and started typing some slurs and other non-code of conduct things. So it's like, “Oh, crud,” and switch that scene off really quick and try to make sure, coordinate in chat like, “Hey, are you aware of what's going on with the speaker?” In real-time while they were continuing to present. We managed to deal with that and then cut out the offensive language in the video on demand version. So it's not there and it didn't disrupt things. there was a blip of like, “Ah,” and then we dealt. I think beyond that, though, the actual psychological failure because my expectations were pretty low in terms of like, “Oh, what is a success?” Because we didn't spend a lot of money on it. I didn't have any sponsors. I think I had an email list with 1,500 people on it and I was like, “Well, 50 roughly, you have some sort of webinar, or whatever, you get 50% of the sign-ups and that's a good one.” A 100 people sign up and 50 people show up. Great, you're doing fantastic. So my expectations were like, “Oh, here's my bar, 1,500.” If we hit that, if we hit anything close to that, we're doing great and then we hit 8,000. So the problem coming back to this a year later is oh, now the expectations are so much higher and we've taken sponsorship. We have sponsors now; we have a sponsor money in order to fund things like scholarships. One of the problems last year was you had to have a Switch to participate. This year we've come, I've gone around and said, “Hey, if you want to sponsor this and pay for someone that doesn't have access to a Switch, or Animal Crossing, or whatever, you can sponsor us by buying that person the equipment thingy to join this because not everyone can afford that.” Obviously, it's some level of exclusionary, like not everyone has internet, but within the group of people, the class people are giving talks to this, I figured that's about what we can do. Especially since you don't need a good camera, you just need a microphone. But because they're sponsors now, because there were so many people last year. It's like, “How do I set myself up for the chance that this is a failure psychologically?” And that, I don't have a great answer to. Therapy, I guess, is the answer to that. I talked to my therapist about this stuff. But it is. I think the psychological effects are actually much harder to plan around and much like in a workplace, psychological safety is significantly harder than technical safety. So my advice is to be very open and honest and transparent with the people that you're organizing with and to talk about it. I think this is the problem with most things is we don't talk about failure enough and we don't talk about how does it feel to fail? How do you get back up after you failed? By keeping all that inside, that leads to a lot of negative stress outcomes and stuff and you just feel like crud. So normalize talking about failure. JOHN: Were there any specific structures, or just communications that you set up with your organizing team around that to get everyone on the same page about thinking through failure and how it feels and how you're going to react to it, anything like that? AUSTIN: So that's also a really great question. It's an area that I could do better at. The organizing team is very small and informal for this like, it's mostly just me and Katie, and I've wound up doing quite a bit of it just for a variety of reasons that are really important. But we've had a lot of conversations about, I think that level of nervousness and that level of stress that you can have. A lot of it is both of us talking ourselves down right and being nobody – and some of it also just being very straightforward with people, with external people. When I did this last year, literally the expectations were very, very low and when people applied to speak, it's like, “Well, you know what you're getting into.” I didn't pretend this was anything other than what it is. This year as well, when I'm going and I'm talking about it, or I'm putting together sponsorship perspectives, or whatever, I'm saying, “Look, here's what happened last year. I can't guarantee you the same level of thing, but I'm also not asking a ton from you.” So I think one lesson from this is preemptive de-escalation. It's better, or maybe a better way to say this is under promise/overdeliver. The perspectives is very clear. It's like, “Look, this is historically what we had. Here's what I'm asking from you and here's what you're getting for it.” I've seen what a lot of conferences charge for sponsorships, I'm asking you for much less and maybe compared to those, you're not getting as much. You're getting a 30-second ad a couple of times over the day, you're getting your logo, you're getting some shoutouts and that's it. You're not getting leads. You're not getting an attendee list because there is none. That's one nice thing, I think about doing stuff like this is you don't have to be super aggro about stuff because it's like well, this doesn't exist. There's no registration so I can't tell you who's attending. But by lowering the stakes a little bit, people are still willing to throw you a couple grand, or whatever on a community conference, because one, that's a rounding error in most places’ event budgets. Two, even if you only get a 1,000 people and you expected 8,000, the video's going to be there. It's a long-term asset. Those videos are going to be on YouTube forever and they're going to be something that people go back and watch so, under promise. And the third thing really is and this actually makes it worse, not better, but this is probably the longest I've talked about this to anyone, this podcast right here. Most of the promotion for this has come from people that attended last year and spoke last year that are going around and talking it up and being like, “Oh no, this was the best thing I did in 2020. You should definitely put this on your calendar.” That actually makes it worse because that's all of your internet friends are like, “Oh my God, this was so great,” and you're just sitting here like, “Wow, I hope I don't let all these people down,” but that's life. I'm not going to tell people, “Hey, don't talk good about this because I'm worried that it's going to fail.” Let those external expectations try to lift you up a little. If everyone knew what it was last year and if you can deliver that again at least, then you're probably going to be doing all right. JOHN: There's two threads I wanted to pull on with that. First of all, you talked about having multiple different people, different constituencies like there's you as the organizing team, there's you and the speakers, there's you and the attendees, there's you in the sponsors. There's all these different groups and there's different levels of safety with each of them that. A different type of relationship with each of those and they each have a different level of communication and setting expectations. And then I think the other thing that really jumped out was the setting of expectations. I think that's such a key to managing an emotional reaction to something because so often those negative reactions come from missed expectations and that proactive communication about where things can land and what's possible and what's likely is a great way of keeping everyone on the same page. AUSTIN: Absolutely. So I want to actually start on that second one about expectations because I think this is something that catches me a lot and probably catches a lot of other people that are – wherever you are in your career, really, but there's both a tyranny of low expectations and a tyranny of high expectations. We tend to focus on one, or the other, but the hardest thing in the world is actually figuring out what that band is in the middle between your expectations are too low and your expectations are too high. I think the tech industry is absolute hot garbage just stem to stern. There's a ton of practices we have in the industry that I think because we're so afraid because the way capitalism works, the way funding works, the way everything works, every incentive is tuned towards preventing you from ever setting expectations too low. So if you look at OKRs, the concept of OKRs, the idea is the objective and key result and you should always set those as something you'll never hit; you should never set your key result too low. I think the Google-y way to think about this as if you achieve 70% of OKR, then that's good. That's what you should expect. To me, that's terrible. I hate that with every fiber of my being because you're giving me an objective that I'm always going to fail. That's how I perceive it and I get why we do this because it's always bad to be too low and I think a lot of this is cultural. It's the success win whatever business culture that's infested technology, where we would much rather set a very high bar for ourselves and then not meet it rather than set a low bar and clear it because if you set a low bar and you clear it, then that means you weren't pushing yourself. Because of the way that all of the money works an d how monetized we make all of our labor, if you aren't doing enough, you might as well not have done anything at all. So the thinking is better to have that high bar and then miss it. But that's extremely, I think just dismantles people that aren't super neurotypical. It certainly dismantles me and I'm whoever, I'm Austin, I'm one person in the distance. But I think it's prevalent throughout everything in tech and I would love to see that interrogated more. You're starting to see a lot of the golden geese of the tech industry being interrogated because of the pandemic. Things like the value of people working in person with each other, or the value of having companies in San Francisco, or the value of hiding your pay, of pay inequity. I think this idea of what should our expectations of ourselves be, of our teams, of the performance of our software even, I made a joke the other day that’s like, I want to see smaller applications written by fewer people that are paid more, that don't work as well and I'm not kidding. Because I think that the idea of oh no, we want the Googles, we want the big companies of the world to encompass everything. We want this one-stop shop. It's not great. It's harmful, it's actively harmful, and I know that there's a lot of voices and people are like, “Well, you can't just dismantle, you can't just cut Google into two pieces, or five pieces, or Amazon into five pieces and have it all worked out.” I agree, you need to be intentional about this. But I remember when I was growing up in the 80s and I remember what technology was like a little more than and the idea that someone could go into business for themselves maintaining a library and just selling a license for people to use that library. Maybe they figured out a really fast way to do a bubble sword and it's like, “Okay, I'm going to sell you a library, a Pascal library that you can link to and it does this work really fast and if you have a problem with it, then you get support from me and you email me, or whatever and I fix this bug for you.” We've taken all those things that people used to be able to do and build and craft and just said, “Hey, we're going to socialize all that expensive maintenance and put it on the open source community and have them do that for free and then we're going to build businesses around extracting value from all that labor.” CORALINE: That's one of the seven criteria of the ethical source principles is that we have a right to be paid. We have a right to have the value of our work respected and if you're making billions off of an open source library, you would better be giving back. AUSTIN: Yeah, and I think but it feeds back from – this all goes back to the capitalism.exe; It's all from the same source and a lot of ways. But I think that idea of expectations setting and never setting the bar low; that is a product of this and it's all intersectional. It's all interrelated. There is no one evil other than really big sociological complex sociotechnical human systems, or whatever and we can make it better, but we can't fix it without equally big changes. JOHN: Yeah. I think that the capitalism more is always better rule is what's poisoning this because you could make a small app and it can be successful and it could be two people on the team and those people could be very happy. But everything in society is saying, “Well, make it bigger, add a bigger team, do more things, blah, blah, blah.” I remember reading a story about, at one point a couple of years ago, the Uber like iPhone app was growing by 1 megabyte of compiled code per week because they were adding all this stuff to it and that just boggled my mind. It's like, it's Uber. They do really just one thing and they were having to do all these things and they kept bumping up against iOS store limits of the size of the binary. Just that mentality of let's do all the things because we can and let's stress ourselves out and work ourselves raw just because more is better. AUSTIN: Yeah, and I think it's a team problem. It's an organizational problem. Because how does that happen without you having so many people working in the same small space that are duplicating effort, that are duplicating features even, or other things behind the scenes? You just keep hiring and hiring, you keep growing and growing because that's all you can do, because that's the only way you can exist in society as a corporation, or as people building a product, or whatever is to constantly consume and grow and grow. This goes into Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs, that have taken, at least my corner of the internet, by storm and the idea that oh, this is a way that you can introduce scarcity into digital art and it's like, “Oh my God, it's such a bad idea.” Every blockchain thing is so, so awful. But the amount of energy it takes to actually encode these things under the blockchain, even on Ethereum blockchain, because of how proof of work algorithms function, the only purpose of these things is to consume more energy for a completely pointless purpose. If you're consuming energy for the sake of consuming energy, to prove that you're doing some work in order to “prove that you own something.” You can't own a tweet; Twitter technically owns that tweet. There are people who are selling cryptographic signatures like, “Oh, it's like a signed tweet. You own the signed tweet.” It's like you own a link and that I'm not even sure that you can own that from any sort of legal, or moral, or ethical standard. That's not how ownership works, especially intellectual property ownership. Oh my God, this industry. Every day, it makes me want to move to the woods and raise alpaca. CORALINE: Well, maybe there'll be an alpaca feature added to Animal Crossing soon. [laughter] AUSTIN: Maybe, yeah. Just live out my alpaca farming dreams in Animal Crossing. It’s a shame that we need money to live. JOHN: So we've come to the time on the show and we go into our reflections, which is a where each of us talks about the things that we're going to take away from this conversation. Maybe the things we're going to keep thinking about, or any new ideas that we were exposed to and just what's going to stick with us. So for me, I think I heard about Deserted Island DevOps last year when it happened, I think some of my friends presented there, but hearing you talk about it more in-depth in behind the scenes, should we a bit more about the creativity, both on your side and in the audience as they put together new ways to experience the conference. I am really excited by that because it's not a place where I've seen a ton of creativity being expressed and finding new ways to have a conference-like experience like different mediations, different ways of participating, I think are really valuable because right now, we're copying online what we used to do in-person, but kind of and it's not always working out great. So if you just sort of throw away all the stuff and start over from, this is our platform and these are our constraints, I think that that leads to creativity and so, it's nice to see that. CORALINE: And I'm thinking about what you said about moderation and the importance of moderation. I was involved in the famous tech feminist wars of the 2010s and I was one of the voices calling for codes of conduct at in-person conferences. I think that becomes even more important with virtual conferences and the need for moderation. I don't think we do a good job, as an industry, of thinking about what moderation means, thinking about how to manage random people on the internet coming to a virtual space and I'm hoping that virtual events continue to invest some more technology. I think Twitch does a great job of giving us tools and I'm hoping that that idea of really investing in moderation takes off because I think that will have ripple effects in a lot of different domains. AUSTIN: I'm going to reflect, I think when you were talking about with failure and psychological safety and how to communicate failure, or those feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to not only peers, but also to people I'm organizing events with, or two people I'm working with. Because I think that one thing that this conversation really led me to realize is that I don't actually communicate it as well as I thought I had, or there's things I don't think about. Sometimes, you need someone to mention it to really piggy back up. I'm wondering if there's ways that we can develop toolkits, or playbooks, or even just point by point, like, “Hey, here's a guide to have these conversations,” because they're hard conversations and they're conversations that maybe you think you're ready to have, or that you think you've communicated. But it's like, “Well, did you think about this?” So that's something I'm definitely going to take away from this. I will put it out in the moderation thing. I used your code of conduct for the Deserted Island one. So yes, I appreciate the work that went into that because it was invaluable to me to make a good one for this. CORALINE: I'm glad to hear that. Thank you, Austin. JACOB: I haven’t been to any conference since the pandemic started and I think part of it is that being stuck at home like pretty much everyone else, hopefully, is that I think I was always telling myself, “Do I really need to take time off when I would probably be bored and restless and would wish I could just watch the video later anyway?” I think I was kind of missing the point because I think maybe what I really need to do is find a conference like this one that has been thoughtful about how participants can interact when not in-person and make the leap and force myself to take the day off, or days off. That’s the only thing I’m doing and force myself to be engaged with it because I’ve got nothing else to do just like any in-person conference. I’m going to give it a shot. CORALINE: Well, Austin, it’s been great talking to you today. Thank you for your openness, your honesty, your vulnerability, and you great ideas. I think we all have a lot to take away from this conversation so, it was really great talking to you today. Thank you so much. AUSTIN: Thanks! It was wonderful to be here. Special Guest: Austin Parker.

Coraline Ada Ehmke works at the intersection of open source software and social justice. She's the creator of Contributor Covenant, a code of conduct used by more than 100,000 open source projects and communities. She created the Hippocratic License, which prohibits software from being used in projects that violate human rights. She's also behind the Organization for Ethical Source, an initiative that aims to ensure that the work of open source developers is being used for social good. Organization for Ethical Source: https://ethicalsource.dev/ Coraline Ada Ehmke on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CoralineAda Creative Commons on Twitter: https://twitter.com/creativecommons Donate to support the work of Creative Commons: https://www.classy.org/give/313412/#!/donation/checkout Theme music: "Day Bird" by Broke for Free (http://brokeforfree.com/). Available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) license, at the Free Music Archive (http://freemusicarchive.org). Open Minds … from Creative Commons is licensed to the public under CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Coraline Ada Ehmke has released the Hippocratic License, at link to firstdonoharm.dev This is an entirely well-meaning effort and I applaud her sentim... https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic-license-cant-work/ https://firstdonoharm.dev/Open Source Definition,

Coraline first told us about how she nearly didn't work into tech. We then discussed her values, ethic in our industry and how she deliberately stands in the front-lines to make the world a better place!Here are the links of the show:Coraline on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/CoralineAdaContributor Covenant: https://www.contributor-covenant.orgHippocratic License: https://firstdonoharm.devEthical Source: https://ethicalsource.devPost-Meritocracy Manifesto: https://postmeritocracy.orgPersonal site: https://where.coraline.codesCreditsMusic Aye by Yung Kartz is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.Your hostSoftware Developer‘s Journey is hosted and produced by Timothée (Tim) Bourguignon, a crazy frenchman living in Germany, who dedicated his life to helping others learn & grow. More about him at timbourguignon.fr.Gift the podcast a ratingPlease do me and your fellow listeners a favor by spreading the word about this podcast. And please leave a rating on the podcasting platforms. This is the best way to increase the visibility of the podcast. Find all the links here: https://devjourney.info/subscribe.htmlPatreonFinally, if you want to help produce the podcast, support us on Patreon. Every cent you pledge will help pay the hosting bills.Support the show (http://bit.ly/2yBfySB)

With all that is going on in the world this month—the uncertainty, the fear—we still want to take a moment to celebrate Women’s History Month this March. Because it is worth taking a moment to listen to inspiring stories. It’s important to sow uplifting, interesting, and even funny moments in times like these. This episode features some of our favorite clips from 9 of our women and non-binary guests, following two themes. We focus in on these two ideas: first, the vast differences in experience between those coming into this field in different times in history, and second, the bias that some women have encountered (but not all) and their suggestions for fighting that bias. These women, and indeed the women around all of us right now, are worth celebrating and hearing from. Enjoy this celebration of Women’s History Month. HERE ARE SOME OF OUR FAVORITE MOMENTS with Jacqueline Harper, Ellen Petry Leanse, Sherry Wei, April Wensel, Laura Yecies, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Linda Popky, Mar Hicks, and Paula Buchanan.

Events have a code of conduct. Projects often have rules of behavior for those who participate. There are expected rules we follow when creating content, from adhering to MLA style to ensuring ideas are delivered in a succinct way with value to the consumer. But when it comes to DevRel, there is no specific rule set or guidelines for practitioners. Beyond the external rules we need to follow as generally good humans, there is nothing to show how to be an ethical DevRel practitioner. So where does that leave us?  Coraline Ada Ehmke and Don Goodman-Wilson join us to discuss this difficult topic.

Events have a code of conduct. Projects often have rules of behavior for those who participate. There are expected rules we follow when creating content, from adhering to MLA style to ensuring ideas are delivered in a succinct way with value to the consumer. But when it comes to DevRel, there is no specific rule set or guidelines for practitioners. Beyond the external rules we need to follow as generally good humans, there is nothing to show how to be an ethical DevRel practitioner. So where does that leave us?  Coraline Ada Ehmke and Don Goodman-Wilson join us to discuss this difficult topic.

The idea of a “lone genius” unleashing software marvels on the world is mostly a myth. Almost all good software is a product of the exchange of ideas, continuous discussions, and collaborations. Today we talk with Coraline Ada Ehmke - the creator of the Contributor Covenant and the laureate of the Ruby Hero Award - about the importance of kindness and empathy in coding. From creating safe spaces for discussions and exchange of ideas, through introducing empathy into understanding user needs and collaborators’ concerns, to creating a kinder programming language and the code itself - Coraline shares her thoughts with us on the whys and hows of kindness in software industry. When you are done with the episode, make sure to visit Coraline’s web-site.

Robby speaks with Coraline Ada Ehmke, Principal Engineer at Stitch Fix and author of The Compassionate Coder. Coraline speaks about the social side of coding and empathy in open source and legacy projects. Robby and Coraline also walk through some possible scenarios on development teams and how to handle them with empathy. Helpful links: Follow Coraline on Twitter Coraline's website The Compassionate Coder by Coraline Ada Ehmke and Naomi Freeman Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton & André Arko Subscribe to Maintainable on: Apple Podcasts Overcast Or search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts. Brought to you by the team at Planet Argon.

All the things we love on the internet — from websites that give us information to services that connect us — are made stronger when their creators come with different points of view. With this in mind, we asked ourselves and our guests: "What would the internet look like if it was built by mostly women?" Witchsy founders Kate Dwyer and Penelope Gazin start us off with a story about the stunt they had to pull to get their site launched — and counter the sexist attitudes they fought against along the way. Brenda Darden Wilkerson recalls her life in tech in the 80s and 90s and shares her experience leading AnitaB.org, an organization striving to get more women hired in tech. Coraline Ada Ehmke created the Contributor Covenant, a voluntary code of conduct being increasingly adopted by the open source community. She explains why she felt it necessary, and how it's been received; and Mighty Networks CEO Gina Bianchini rolls her eyes at being called a "lady CEO," and tells us why diversifying the boardroom is great for business and innovation. IRL is an original podcast from Mozilla, maker of Firefox and always fighting for you. For more on the series go to irlpodcast.org Help us dream up the next season of IRL. What topics should we cover? Who should we talk to? Let us know by filling out this survey. Coraline Ada Ehmke has been an open source programmer for over 20 years and created the Contributor Covenant. You can also learn about Mozilla's own community participation guidelines. Meritocracy as an open source practice is briefly mentioned in this episode. Mozilla has taken steps to discontinue using the word “Meritocracy” as a way to describe our governance and leadership structures. Here's why. Mozilla is dedicated to fostering both an inclusive web and also inclusive working places. Learn more. Firefox is open source and driven by a community of volunteers and contributors. However, in the past decade, representation of women in open source has inched up merely 1.5 percentage points to a shockingly low 3%. Read about the importance of — and efforts to realize — open source gender inclusion. Like society, the Internet grows stronger with every new voice. What's healthy and unhealthy on the web when it comes to inclusion? Mozilla Foundation's Internet Health Report has some of the answers. And, check out this article from Common Sense Media, on kids and technology use.

Courtney Eckhardt on Greater Than Code, Teresa Torres on Product Love, Johanna Rothman on Developer On Fire, Jeff Patton on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Jeff Gothelf on Scrum Master Toolbox. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two weeks period starting January 7, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. COURTNEY ECKHARDT ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Courtney Eckhardt with hosts John K Sawers, Sam Livingston-Gray, Jamey Hampton and Coraline Ada Ehmke. It was great to hear another conversation that built upon the human factors conversations with Steven Shorrock and John Allspaw in previous episodes. I like how Courtney highlighted the importance of good communication in incident response by helping us picture what the lack of good communication looks like from the customer’s point of view. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/110-human-incident-response-with-courtney-eckhardt/id1163023878?i=1000426093173&mt=2 Website link: http://www.greaterthancode.com/2018/12/19/110-human-incident-response-with-courtney-eckhardt/ TERESA TORRES ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Teresa Torres with host Eric Boduch. I felt that, while A/B testing is a powerful and useful technique, Teresa makes a great point that it is not appropriate in all circumstances and she lists several other techniques that teams should consider when doing product discovery. I also liked the bloodletting metaphor. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/teresa-torres-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000425622664&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-teresa-torres-product-discovery-coach-and-writer-of-product-talk/ JOHANNA ROTHMAN ON DEVELOPER ON FIRE The Developer On Fire podcast featured Johanna Rothman with host Dave Rael. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone make a distinction between management and leadership. I always felt that it let managers off the hook. I feel that a manager needs to be a good leader to do his or her job well and vice versa. Johanna captured that sentiment. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-402-johanna-rothman-learning-and-delivering/id1006105326?i=1000426413335&mt=2 Website link: https://developeronfire.com/podcast/episode-402-johanna-rothman-learning-and-delivering JEFF PATTON ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Patton with host Vasco Duarte. Jeff talked about how, when he got into software development, he quickly learned that building software was about making as many people as happy as you could while still making money. When he found himself on XP and Agile teams in the first decade of the 2000s, he felt something was missing. When he later fell in with product people, he realized that the missing piece was product thinking. They discussed how Jeff came up with user story mapping and Jeff cited three books that emphasize product thinking: Inspired, Escaping The Build Trap, and Inspired. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/product-owner-role-what-scrum-masters-can-do-to-help/id963592988?i=1000426507266&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2018/12/podcast/jeff-patton-shares-his-view-on-the-product-owner-role-and-what-scrum-masters-can-do-to-help/ JEFF GOTHELF ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco asked Jeff about the key ingredients in Agile transformations that get organizations to continuously think about how the product they’re creating relates to the business and the market. Jeff gave a great answer that finished with an example of how even a change in the name of the team changes the way that the team thinks of themselves and their mission. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-redefine-measure-success-for-software-development/id963592988?i=1000426560415&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2018/12/podcast/jeff-gothelf-on-how-to-redefine-the-measure-of-success-for-software-development/ Feedback Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website: https://www.thekguy.com/ Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus

In this episode we’re talking with Coraline Ada Ehmke, a well-known speaker, writer, open source advocate and technologist. She is also a founding panelist of Greater Than Code, a popular program that focuses on the human elements of software development.

Coraline Ada Ehmke has been writing software professionally since 1994. For the past decade, she's been active in the Ruby programming language community and has created numerous open source tools to help fellow Ruby programmers. But these days she's best known for a different type of code altogether.

Podcast Description “You can’t tell someone who is constantly under political attack that they can’t lash out at political opponents. When that’s your life, you cannot censor someone from seeking justice.”  Coraline Ada Ehmke is an international speaker, writer, and developer with over 20 years of experience in software engineering. She was recognized for her work on diversity in open source with a Ruby Hero award in 2016. Coraline is the creator of the Contributor Covenant, the most popular open source code of conduct in the world with over 40,000 adoptions. She is a founding panelist on the Greater than Code podcast. Coraline is co-authoring a book on practicing empathy in software development, and writes and records music in her home studio. Additional Resources Personal WebsiteContributor Covenant Twitter Coraline Ada Ehmke Become a #causeascene Podcast sponsor because disruption and innovation are products of individuals who take bold steps in order to shift the collective and challenge the status quo.Learn more >All music for the #causeascene podcast is composed and produced by Chaos, Chao Pack, and Listen on SoundCloud. Listen to more great #causeascene podcasts full podcast list >

Some of the most persistent problems in tech are human issues. Coraline Ada Ehmke and Naomi Freeman took a break from writing their upcoming book The Compassionate Coder to speak to us about empathy in technology.

We used to be able to log on and take on any identity we wanted. Now, we expose our entire lives to the world. Is that a good thing? What are the tradeoffs? And in that environment, how have anonymous trolls and bots somehow pushed us all back towards anonymity? And what does eBay’s reputation system have to do with all this? Coraline Ada Ehmke has a very personal story about her experience of identity on the internet, and we discovered that she and I shared similar experiences, from different angles. She’s a developer, I’m a marketer, but we both began our life on the internet in anonymity and watched it disappear. In this episode we’ll talk about the evolution of identity on the internet, and what today’s tech companies can learn from the past to better serve their customers today. Coraline Ada Ehmke is an open-source advocate and developer with over 20 years of experience. She was recognized for her work on diversity in open source with a Ruby Hero award in 2016. Coraline is the creator of the Contributor Covenant, the most popular open source code of conduct in the world with over 40,000 adoptions. She is a founding panelist on the Greater than Code podcast. In her free time, Coraline pursues her interests in artificial intelligence and writes and records music in her home studio.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: The Proteus Effect (Wikipedia): describes the phenomenon of people changing their behaviors online and in virtual worlds based on the characteristics of their avatar. Online Identity: Who, Me? (InternetSociety.org): A resource for everyone that dives into internet identity and helps everyone protect and secure their identity online. Identity and the Internet: From Pixels To Personas (Financial Times): A 2011 article that covers Facebook's insistence on real names and some of the impact noted at the time.  Building Web Reputation Systems, Randy Farmer (Amazon). A 2010 book that served as summary of what we knew then about reputation systems. Trust Building Systems (University of Washington): Excellent collection of identity and trust systems The Online Identity Crisis (Wired, 2014): Outlines concerns Coraline raises about Federated Identities   MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY: "Who Are You Really?" by The Who   ABOUT THIS PODCAST Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco. We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

02:40 – Coraline’s Superpower: Boundless Energy 06:16 – Practicing Self-Care and Outsourcing 12:20 – Being a “Code Witch” and Perceiving the Construct of Reality 17:25 – Evocation (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/evocation) and Invocation (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/invocation) 20:52 – Being Deliberate: Refactoring Your Code and Refactoring Your Life 32:13 – Documentation and Naming Things 38:48 – Writing Magic and Writing Code; Thoughtforms Drood by Dan Simmons (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031600703X/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=031600703X&linkId=d0f51d85194e87b83637277f5c6dccbb) 43:20 – Impressions and Personas; Sympathy and Empathy Brené Brown on Empathy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw) 51:58 – Acquiring Boundless Energy and Badassery 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!

00:16 – Welcome to “Missives from the Future of Tech: Ladies’ Night Edition” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!” 01:20 – Where the Lines Cross; Social Responsibility of Engineers Tragedy of the Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) 06:53 – Why We Do What We Do 09:03 – Surviving and Functioning For All Humans: Basic Social Support 16:20 – Preventing Infrastructure Decay and Advancing the Whole 19:54 – “The Cycle of Safety” The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553380966/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0553380966&linkId=057eda599b58fdadf1e06c52a9256018) 25:21 – Scarcity 30:15 – Where are we focusing? 33:25 – Reframing The Tragedy of the Commons; Gatekeeping The Broken Promise of Open Source by Coraline Ada Ehmke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKpbejoneFs) 37:56 – Organizations as Business AND Schools The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385517254/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0385517254&linkId=7e9c7008b6f4237ac17119214b877a51) 40:25 – Abundance and Barter Systems Reflections: Coraline: Access to technology as a human right. Janelle: Where is all the knowledge in the world? Where does the knowledge flows? What are the gates that get in the way of knowledge flows? Astrid: What would you do if money wasn’t a factor? Jessica: Software has to hold the keys. It’s the closest thing to magic that we’ve ever had. The Open Mastery Community (http://www.openmastery.org/join-us/) 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!

Open-Source Community Management and Safety With Coraline Ada Ehmke and Yana Carstens Follow us on Twitter! @techdoneright or leave us a review on iTunes! Guests Coraline Ada Ehmke (https://twitter.com/CoralineAda): Open Source Advocate, Creator of The Contributor Covenant (http://contributor-covenant.org/), Founding Panelist of Greater Than Code (https://www.greaterthancode.com/), Senior Engineer on the Community and Safety Team at GitHub (https://github.com/) Yana Carstens (https://twitter.com/YanaCarstens): Senior User Experience Designer at Table XI (http://www.tablexi.com/) Summary How can you manage a social media site to maximize community and make all contributors feel safe? Coraline Ada Ehmke (@CoralineAda (https://twitter.com/CoralineAda)), from GitHub's Community and Safety Team, and Yana Carstens (@YanaCarstens (https://twitter.com/YanaCarstens)), a Senior UX designer with Table XI, join Noel on this episode of Tech Done Right. We discuss tools for allowing users more control over their social media environment and community, and how to use personas in design as a way to understand user's goals and guide them toward positive community actions. Notes 02:59 - GitHub’s Community Management and Anti-Harassment Tools Team and the Problems that They Are Trying to Solve 06:47 - Exposing Anti-Harassment Features and Making Them Prominent, Improving User Experience, and Identifying Harassers 15:10 - Throwing Friction to “Jerkfaces”; Block Functionality 19:13 - Sentiment Analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis) - Eudora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)) 26:38 - Working Together with Other Social Platforms - Chatham House Rules (https://www.chathamhouse.org/about/chatham-house-rule) 30:38 - What does success look like? “Social Coding” 33:05 - Visibility and Flagging of Comments Resources: Coraline: GitHub Community Guidelines (https://help.github.com/articles/github-community-guidelines/) Yana: Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience by Jeff Gothelf (http://www.jeffgothelf.com/lean-ux-book/) UX Booth (http://www.uxbooth.com/) UX Mastery (http://uxmastery.com/) Usability.gov (https://www.usability.gov/) Special Guests: Coraline Ada Ehmke and Yana Carstens.

In the 28th episode of NEOHUMAN, Agah and Mandi are chatting with Coraline Ada Ehmke. Coraline is an open-source advocate, speaker, and web developer. She was recognized for her work on diversity in open-source with... The post 28: Coraline Ada Ehmke appeared first on LIVE IN LIMBO.

Coraline Ada Ehmke is a speaker, writer, teacher, open source advocate and technologist with 20 years of experience in developing apps for the web. She works diligently to promote diversity and inclusivity in open source and the tech industry. She is the creator of the Contributor Covenant, the most popular open source code of conduct in the world (with over 15,000 adoptions including JRuby, Swift, F# and Rails.) Coraline works for GitHub as a senior engineer on a team devoted to creating community management and anti-harassment tools. Show notes at http://hellotechpros.com/coraline-ehmke-people/ What You Will Learn In This Episode Why a lack of diversity limits creativity and problem solving. What a Code of Conduct can help you achieve in your organization. The impact your words and behaviors have on those around you, regardless of your intention. How to approach and communicate with someone who is violating the code of conduct. Technical terminology that needs to be refactored by everyone. The root cause behind most software problems. The anti-harassment and community support tools GitHub is building to foster excellent conduct. The emotion we all need to show at work to make life and work better for everyone involved.

In this Halloween-ish episode of Community Pulse, PJ and Mary talk to Coraline Ada Ehmke and Ed Finkler. We explore the the two sides of the same coin that are the life of technical advocates.

In this Halloween-ish episode of Community Pulse, PJ and Mary talk to Coraline Ada Ehmke and Ed Finkler. We explore the the two sides of the same coin that are the life of technical advocates.

Coraline wears the Social Justice Warrior title proudly. She fights the battles, working tirelessly to create safer spaces for more people in tech. But noble as her cause may be, it is not without controversy. We talk to Coraline about what it means to be a social justice warrior, how she’s dealt with the trolling and harassment that comes with it, and how she stays above it and continues to fight. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Codeland Conf Codeland 2019

In this interview with Coraline Ada Ehmke, Lead Software Engineer at Instructure, we discuss data-driven refactoring and developer happiness teams. Coraline gives some great advice on the kinds of tests we should write for refactoring, tools to use and metrics to monitor, to make sure our refactoring is effective. We also learn about the role of refactoring in the Developer Happiness team at Instructure.

Katrina Owen comes back on the show to talk education with Coraline Ada Ehmke and the rest of the Rogues.

Katrina Owen comes back on the show to talk education with Coraline Ada Ehmke and the rest of the Rogues.

Katrina Owen comes back on the show to talk education with Coraline Ada Ehmke and the rest of the Rogues.