Podcasts about Fortran

I read from FORTRAN to forty.     FORTRAN (Fortran) is now Fortran 2023 (based on the year) and "...has ranked among the top ten languages in the TIOBE index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages" since April 2024. Wow! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran     The word of the episode is "fortune cookie". https://joshmadison.com/2008/04/20/fortune-cookie-fortunes/     Use my special link https://zen.ai/thedictionary to save 30% off your first month of any Zencastr paid plan.    Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr     Theme music from Jonah Kraut https://jonahkraut.bandcamp.com/     Merchandising! https://www.teepublic.com/user/spejampar     "The Dictionary - Letter A" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter B" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter C" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter D" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter E" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter F" on YouTube     Featured in a Top 10 Dictionary Podcasts list! https://blog.feedspot.com/dictionary_podcasts/     Backwards Talking on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmIujMwEDbgZUexyR90jaTEEVmAYcCzuq     https://linktr.ee/spejampar dictionarypod@gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/thedictionarypod/ https://www.threads.net/@dictionarypod https://twitter.com/dictionarypod https://www.instagram.com/dictionarypod/ https://www.patreon.com/spejampar https://www.tiktok.com/@spejampar 917-727-5757

In this episode of the Earley AI Podcast, host Seth Earley sits down with Yang Li, a leading figure in AI and software innovation. Yang is the Chief Operating Officer of Cosine, an advanced AI development firm, with deep experience driving startups, scaling organizations, and pioneering advancements in engineering and software development. Yang's work focuses on leveraging AI to empower the next generation of developers, especially in navigating the increasingly complex landscape of modern and legacy codebases.Yang and Seth dive into how AI is reshaping the role of software engineers, the evolving challenges of handling massive backlogs and legacy systems, and what creativity and efficiency really look like in an age of AI-powered software development.Key Takeaways:AI's Impact on Software Engineering: AI is shifting the developer's role from hands-on coding to more creative, iterative, and strategic work.Tackling Legacy Code: Cosine is pioneering new ways for AI to handle outdated and complex codebases (like COBOL and Fortran) that most engineers—and AI models—struggle with.Augmenting, Not Replacing, Engineers: AI tools like Cosine's Genie reduce ramp-up time for engineers, help address daunting backlogs, and act as creative partners rather than outright replacements.The Challenge of Benchmarks: Yang explains why public coding benchmarks can be misleading when bringing products to real-world enterprise environments, especially with diverse codebases.The Emergence of ‘Vibe Coding': Idea-to-prototype time is shrinking, allowing non-technical team members to quickly bring their ideas to life using AI assistants.Risks & Limits: Over-reliance on AI, standardization versus differentiation, and the need for new evaluation criteria in engineering organizations.Future Skills: The importance of risk-taking, adaptability, and prompt engineering as software development evolves, plus insights into how organizations are rethinking career ladders and promotions in an AI-powered world.Insightful Quote from Yang Li:"Previously you had to use words and language to describe your idea, you can now show people your idea... The time between you having thought of an idea to actually be able to show people that idea has now reduced almost to zero because of vibe coding."Tune in to discover what's next for software engineering in the age of AI, and how to stay ahead in this rapidly changing landscape.Thanks to our sponsors: VKTR Earley Information Science AI Powered Enterprise Book

In this episode of Project Synapse, join our group of AI-obsessed IT professionals as they discuss the intriguing concept of AI-generated code, specifically focusing on 'vibe coding.' Marcel Gagne, a former system administrator turned author, dives deep into the history and potential of writing code through AI. The episode covers the evolution from early programming languages like COBOL and Fortran to modern AI coding tools like Cursor and Firebase. Discover how AI tools aid in prototyping, personal productivity, and the future possibilities in enterprise-level applications. The team also explores security implications, testing methodologies, and the importance of responsible AI use in development. Tune in to learn about the present and future impact of AI on programming and systems development. 00:00 Introduction to Project Synapse 00:36 Meet the Hosts 02:53 The Evolution of Programming Languages 08:27 The Rise of Vibe Coding 14:00 Practical Applications and Experiences 19:54 Advanced Tools and IDEs 22:39 Challenges and Solutions in AI Coding 29:56 Starting Fresh: The Importance of Context 33:04 Introduction to Programming by Kenny Rogers 33:28 Legendary Programmer John Carmack 33:38 AI in Game Development 34:19 Nostalgia for Classic Games 35:59 The Evolution of Game Engines 38:04 AI's Role in Modern Coding 38:36 Proof of Concept and Rapid Prototyping 44:20 Security Concerns with AI-Generated Code 50:06 The Future of AI in Enterprise Systems 01:00:27 The Importance of Testing and Security 01:03:44 Final Thoughts and Recommendations

In this episode of the IC-DISC Show, I sit down with Brian Schwam to discuss how Interest Charge Domestic International Sales Corporations (IC-DISCs) can help businesses save on taxes. With over 35 years of experience, Brian shares how IC-DISC has evolved since 1972 and why it remains a valuable tool for U.S. exporters. He explains how businesses, particularly in the aerospace industry's Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) sector, can take advantage of this incentive to improve their financial position. We walk through a hypothetical example to illustrate how an exporting business could benefit from IC-DISC. Brian explains how companies involved in manufacturing, repairing, or trading parts can qualify and why many eligible businesses overlook this opportunity. We also discuss the annual MRO conference in Atlanta, where industry professionals gather to share insights and best practices. This event highlights the ongoing impact of IC-DISC within the aerospace sector and beyond. Despite the clear benefits, many businesses hesitate to implement IC-DISC due to a lack of awareness or expertise. Brian talks about how our firm partners with CPA firms to integrate IC-DISCs into existing tax processes, making it easier for businesses to take advantage of these savings. He also highlights the underutilization of IC-DISC and why more companies should consider it as part of their tax strategy. We wrap up by discussing the upcoming MRO America's Conference in Atlanta, where exporting aviation maintenance companies can connect and learn more about IC-DISC applications. Whether you're new to IC-DISC or looking to refine your approach, this conversation provides useful insights for businesses considering this tax-saving opportunity.     SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In this episode, I discuss the intricacies and benefits of Interest Charge Domestic International Sales Corporations (IC-DISC) with tax attorney Brian Schwam, who has over 35 years of experience in the field. We explore the historical context of IC-DISC, including its origins in 1972 and the significant changes it underwent following international scrutiny and U.S. tax reforms, such as the 2003 Bush tax cuts and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Brian provides insights into how IC-DISC can serve as a valuable tax incentive for U.S. exporters, particularly those in the aerospace industry's Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) sector. Through a detailed hypothetical example, we illustrate how companies can leverage IC-DISC to maximize export profits, highlighting specific benefits for pass-through entities and closely held C corporations. We address common apprehensions businesses face regarding IC-DISC implementation and discuss how collaboration with CPA firms can facilitate a seamless integration into existing tax processes. Despite the clear benefits, IC-DISC remains underutilized, and we emphasize the potential missed opportunities for businesses not taking advantage of this tax-saving strategy. The episode also covers upcoming industry events, such as the annual MRO conference in Atlanta and the ICDISC Alliance Conference, which offer valuable networking and professional growth opportunities.   Contact Details LinkedIn - Brian Schwam (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-schwam-b6026a3/) LINKSShow Notes Be a Guest About IC-DISC Alliance About WTP Advisors GUEST Brian SchwamAbout Brian TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dave: Hey, brian, welcome to the podcast. Brian: Thanks, dave, good to be here. Dave: So where on planet Earth are you calling in from today? It's hard to tell by looking at your background. Brian: Outer space. I am in the sunny South Florida. Dave: Okay. Brian: Breezy, south Florida, okay. Dave: Now are you a native of Florida. Brian: I am not a native of Florida. I spent 50 years of my life in the upper Midwest in Wisconsin. Okay, I had to move to Sunbelt. Dave: Okay, Now were you educated in the Midwest then too. Brian: I was. I'm a proud alum of the University of Wisconsin, both for an undergraduate degree in accounting and also my JD from the law school Okay. Dave: So you've and I take it and I've known you a while, so I think that's been several decades ago that your career was started. Is that about right? Brian: Several would be a good good approximation. Yes, I've been at this for 38 years. I know it doesn't look like it, right, okay? Dave: And so, and how long have you been involved in ICDISC? Then Most of that time 38 years, oh, 38 years in ICDISC. Then most of that time, 38 years, oh, 38 years in the disc, wow, yeah. So how does that do you know? Do you have any way to quantify that? Like how many you know ICDISC returns you've, you know, signed or reviewed or prepared, or Boy, it's a big number, dave. Brian: It's probably five figures. Okay, probably, so you know, somewhere north of 10,000 for sure. Okay, over that time period. Dave: Well, and that is why I'm glad that you are one of the founding members of the IC Disc Alliance with me that when I had a chance to partner up with you and some of your team when we created the IC Disc Alliance, I was really excited because in my book I pretty much knew all the players in the IC Disc space and once the famous Neil Block retired after 50 years to me you were without peer in the IC Disc space. Brian: So I really enjoyed collaborating with you through the years here in the ICDISC space, so I really enjoyed collaborating with you through the years. Dave: Thank, you for that, Dave. I hope to be able to follow Neil into that 50-year stratosphere. Yeah, that's big shoes to follow. So let's just talk a bit about the ICDISC. What the heck is it? Why does everyone use that silly acronym? Brian: Because what it really stands for is a mouthful. Dave: Okay. Brian: Discharged Domestic International Sales Corporation and that is what the ICDISC stands for, short right ICDISC. And I don't know if we'll get into. I'll get into what the IC stands for and everything. But basically this is an export incentive that's been in the Internal Revenue Code since 1972. Okay, in various forms. Initially it was an export incentive that just about any company could use, that was exporting goods that were manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US. It came under some fire from our trading partners and in 1984, it was transformed into the ICDISC. It started out just as the DISC in 1972 for the Boston International Sales Corporation and it, like I said, came under scrutiny. Our trading partners said hey, you're a, you can't have an exemption from income because you're not. You know you tax things differently in your country. This flies in the face of the other incentives you give your taxpayers. So they changed it into the ICDIS, which made it into, instead of a permanent tax savings, at least on its face, into a temporary savings where, to the extent a taxpayer saved tax and deferred income from tax, they were required to pay an interest charge to the IRS on that deferred tax. Hence the IC. Dave: Okay, okay. Brian: That rate changes every year. It's based on the one-year average TBLO rate as of September 30th annually. And at the same time they instituted something called the Foreign Sales Corporation, which was widely used by thousands of companies, and that came under attack and eventually became the extraterritorial income exclusion which was immediately attacked and eventually, a couple of years later, it just went away. In the meantime, the disk floundered for quite a number of years. In fact, in the year 2000 there were only 787 disks in existence. Dave: Wow, it seems like a shockingly small number. Brian: Well, the tax laws weren't real conducive to benefiting from the disk at that time. Then, in 2003, the Bush tax cuts brought in the concept of qualified dividend income and it took the disk off of life support and really put it on robust territory for pass-through entities, because they could now, to the extent that they could qualify and we'll get into that, to the extent they could qualify and to the extent that they could benefit it provided a 20% rate benefit between ordinary income and qualified dividend income, so it was a significant savings. Now that's been whittled away over time, where it's been reduced here and there. Various tax law changes and probably the largest or the next biggest reduction came in in 2017 with the Trump tax bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the rate on qualified income on non-qualified income. So it reduced the rate on S-corp income partnership income in an individual's tax return to a 29.6% level, and so now the spread between the qualified dividend rate and the ordinary rate just isn't as great as it used to be. It's approaching 6%. So where it used to be 20, then it went to 15, and now it's 6. But it's still a permanent savings for these past three entities and it's not something that they should ignore, because it can save significant taxes, depending upon the level of export activity. Dave: Okay, and now to be clear, depending on a company-specific fact pattern, that spread could be greater. Right For a pass-through. It could be as high as what like? Brian: 13% or so For a pass-through it could be as high as what like, 13% or so For a pass-through business. Dave: It could be as high as 13.2%, okay, but in general we see that it and it could even be somewhere between that, depending on. Brian: Anywhere in between 5.8 and 13.2. Dave: And our experience has been that most companies tend to gravitate more toward the lower end of the savings than the higher end. Brian: Yes. Dave: Yes, okay. Now what about for a C-Corp? Brian: C-Corp is a different animal. Okay, a C-Corp can't use an disc to pay deductible dividends to its owners if it's a closely held C corp. This is not something that a public company can benefit from. But if a closely held business C corp is paying dividends to its shareholders and would like to be able to deduct those payments, rather than not being able to deduct those payments, using an ICDIS can transform the dividend into a deductible dividend. Now, it doesn't save the shareholders any tax, because they're paying tax on the dividend regardless of where it comes from, but it would eliminate the corporate level tax on the C corporation, so that benefit could be as high as 21%. Dave: Okay. Brian: Okay, another manner in which certain C corporations use the disc is to fund bonuses for shareholders and key employees, and then that saves the shareholders 17% tax the difference between a tax on a wage and a tax on a dividend, qualified dividend. So that's a 17% savings for the shareholder. In that case the C-Corp doesn't save any tax. They're getting a deduction either way wages or commission to the disk. And now that I've mentioned the word commission, that's probably a good segue into how does a disk earn income? Yeah, and what is its income? So most discs are what we call commission discs. They earn a commission when a operating business that's related to that disc makes an export sale of qualified export property. So let's dig down into that first. What's qualified export property? Well, that's property that has been manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US. So if I'm manufacturing in Mexico or Canada or China and I'm simply selling what I've made in those other countries, you know the disc is not something that's going to benefit that type of a business. Dave: Okay. Brian: It is there to spur US manufacturing, create US jobs, right in line with the America First proposition that's headlining Washington in 2025. Dave: Okay. Brian: So it should be on safe ground, everything that's going on there. So if a company has property that's been manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US and they sell it for export outside the United States and not to a US possession, then that sale can potentially generate an ICDIS commission that would be paid to the ICDIS. And keep in mind this ICDISC is not an entity that the outside world sees or understands or knows about. It's simply an entity that does business, if you will, internally with the operating company, so customers don't know about it. It's really transparent to the world. It's just there to help US exporters save tax. Dave: Okay, it's just there to help US exporters save tax. Okay, and the logistics of it. Like say a company has just for simple math, let's say they have $10 million of export, of qualified export revenue, and the ICDIS commission that's calculated to say 10% of that. Brian: Okay. Dave: So 10% of that would be a million dollars, and so walk me through kind of the that's correct and it accrues the deduction, assuming it's not a cash basis taxpayer. Brian: It accrues that deduction at the end of the year, the DISC accrues the income at the end of the year and then by statute the DISC does not pay income tax. So now we've gotten a deduction on one side, we have non-taxable income on the other side and then when the disc pays a dividend to its owners, that becomes a qualified dividend and is taxed at a lower rate. Dave: Okay, so then, effectively, that million dollars gets reclassified from being taxed at ordinary dividend rates to qualified dividend rates. Brian: From ordinary income rates to qualified dividend rates. Dave: yes, Yep, thank you for that. And where that shows up for a pass-through is going to be on the individual shareholders, k-1, right. That box up near the top that shows ordinary taxable income would basically go down. Let's say there was one shareholder, that number goes down by a million dollars. And then there's a box further down on the K-1 for qualified dividend income and that's where the number's being shifted to right. Brian: Right. Assuming the disc is owned by the operating company, which most of the time it is in the pass-through business context, then the ordinary income gets reduced on the K-1 and the dividend income will increase on the K-1, not necessarily in the same year, but that will be the result over time. Dave: And then that tax savings then will show up on the individual shareholders. 1040, right, because their ordinary income line is a million dollars less. The qualified dividend income line is a million dollars more, and that's where that arbitrage. Brian: They pay less tax if they're getting a distribution from the company to cover their taxes, which is often the case, the company doesn't have to distribute as much cash, therefore increasing the working capital of the business. Dave: Okay, well, thank you. Thank you for that. Now, what I want to drill down into a little more today is looking at the aerospace industry, specifically what's called the MRO space in aerospace. Do you know what MRO stands for? Brian: I believe, I do, I believe maintenance, repair and overhaul. Dave: That's my understanding as well. Brian: That's a significant area in the aviation space. Dave: yes, Okay, and I believe that there's a big conference in Atlanta in April with like something like 17,000 expected attendees. Brian: Yeah, just a small gathering. Dave: A small gathering. Brian: For sure. Yes, that's my understanding as well. In fact, I'll be there. Dave: Yeah, I believe we'll both be there, yeah we'll both be there A few of our colleagues. Brian: Yeah, so it's a one a year significant gathering of companies that operate in this MRO space, supporting airlines and other aviation companies, and basically MRO is important because it keeps planes able to fly. Yeah, and we actually have a booth there. Dave: Yeah, and we actually have a booth there. 1818 BC and it makes it sound like it's a date from a long time ago. But yeah, we'll be there and this will be our first year in attendance or exhibiting. And this has come from, in recent years, I'd say, a big ramp up in the number of MRO companies who we are helping with their IC disk. Is that right? Brian: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the sponsors of the conference was a company I was doing some work with and I asked them if he thought it would be a good idea for us to attend, and it was a resounding absolutely that he thought that we could meet a lot of companies that could benefit from this ICDISC similar to his company. Dave: Okay. What are the elements in the MRO space or the characteristics of the companies that make them a good fit for the ICDISC, because my understanding is it's probably only one out of a hundred of like all the registered corporations in the US are really a fit for the disc. Brian: Yeah, so it takes a specific fact pattern to really benefit. So the companies in the service side of the business so let's say they're carpet cleaners or something to that nature they're not going to be able to benefit from the disk. But let's say it's a repair center and airlines will ship in parts to the repair center because they've worn out and they need it. They need a replacement part so that they can fly this plane. So what happens is maybe the repair center takes their part and repairs it, but they previously repaired another part that's identical and then to the customer and that plane gets back in the air right away. So in that scenario, even though it's a different part that's going back out versus what was coming in, that type of activity qualifies as long as what they're doing qualifies as manufacturing and that repair is occurring in the US. Dave: Okay. Brian: Then that type of a company could definitely benefit Other companies. I don't want to use this term, but it's kind of like horse trading. Sometimes companies will buy a surplus of parts, knowing that eventually they're going to be used by somebody and they hang on to these parts, or they find them from somebody who says I don't want these parts anymore, I haven't been able to sell them. So they take a flyer, they take a risk and they buy these parts and they hang on to them and maybe they sell them at a significant profit and maybe they don't. But there's that space as well that can benefit from the disc, and there's some misconception out there that some of the companies that are similar to what I just described can't benefit from a disc, and so, for example, if parts are obtained outside the US, they stay outside the US. They stay outside the US and they're repaired, recertified and resold. Those aren't going to qualify for the ICBITS. But sometimes parts are acquired outside the US and they're brought into the US, they're repaired, put it back into inventory in the US and then sold for export, and that activity does qualify for the ICs, and so it's very important to know where this refurbishment or remanufacturing is taking place. Dave: Okay and yeah, and there's a US content piece to it, right, like if they buy a part from China and all they do is they just put a little lubricant on it and throw it in a box. Brian: that may not qualify and then they export it. The test is what's the customer's value when that part comes into the US. So if it's a burned out hot engine part, for example, yeah there's no value or very little value and it comes into the US, its customers value is close to zero. It gets repaired, it's going to easily meet the content test and it's easily going to be considered manufactured in the US. It's rare, I think, that we'll find that somebody will buy a new part from outside the US just to inventory it here for export. Dave: Okay, yeah, because there's that it's a 50% US content test, right which? Is also, I think confusing on the surface if you don't really dive down into the rules, right, I mean, the layperson may find it. Brian: How do you know what's 50% US content? Well, the cost of good, I mean. Think of it the other way. The foreign content can't be more than 50%. And the foreign content is the cost, the customs value when it was imported. So if I'm selling something for $100, I imported it for as much as $49.99. That's going to qualify as long as I did something, you know, remanufactured it once it got to the US and once it got to the plus, more often than not, I think the value of those things coming in because they're used and worn and damaged parts, they're going to have a low customs valuation where there'll be no problem meeting that content. Dave: Okay, I can see that. Well, I find and my listeners tell me they really like kind of case studies, little mini of case studies, little mini, you know, client case studies On an anonymous basis. Do you have an example or two of some of the types of companies we've worked with, just to give people a flavor of them and, again, you know, being anonymous to you know? What company it is, but just a sense of like the sense of the size of the company, what the benefit might have been. Brian: The size is sort of across the board, right. So some of them are someone on the smaller side. They might have export sales between $5 and $10 million, and then some of them might have export sales of $100 million. It all depends on the size of their business and the benefits are kind of all over the map. Because we don't just do a simple calculation of the benefits. And the reason we don't is because in this industry what we find is there's a lot of margin variability in the companies that are exporting, and then a transaction-by-transaction analysis of the disk commission is what makes the most sense. That allows us to benefit from the margin variability, allows them to benefit from a higher disk commission and obviously then they're going to save more tax. And in some cases the commission grows by 10x by using the T by T. Sometimes it's two or three x, sometimes it's. You know, I've seen you know where it would have been zero because there was an overall loss in the company, but we were able to get a significant discommission with a T by T approach. So it's hard to pinpoint an exact number, but generally speaking it's 15 to 20, you know the commission ends up being 15 to 20% of sales. And if you look at the statutes, one of the statutes says oh, the commission can be 4% of sales, and another implies that it could be anywhere from 4% to 10%, but we generally see in this industry at least 15% on average. It's significantly higher. Dave: Yeah, and I'd like to drill down into that because I tell, and based on my understanding, we may manage more IC disks than any other organization of the country. I mean we I think our number is somewhere north of 500 companies now that we're helping out, and when I'm having these conversations, you know. So I'm, as you know, I'm more focused on the sales side. You know, and you and your team are more focused kind of on the technical aspect of producing these returns, and what I tell people is that our real value isn't being able to produce an IC disk return. Our value is the incremental benefit that the transaction by transaction calculation yields. That the transaction by transaction calculation yields. Because you know just about any any cpa firm you know most of them their software includes the ic disk return. You know, if they just go do a four percent calculation, it's a, you know, reasonably straightforward calculation. But we find that you know they're capturing only a fraction of the total benefit. Brian: That's true, and while I've seen a good number of interesting looking disc returns, I tend to agree that if you follow the directions, anybody can probably prepare a disc return. We do that as well. That's not where we add the most value. Where we add the most value, adding the value comes in unlocking the highest commission possible so that the tax savings are as great as possible. Yeah, and a lot of businesses that are high margin I'm sorry, low margin high volume businesses. When you look at the disc, on its face it looks like oh, there's not much benefit here, we're only making 2% or 3% of sales on our bottom line. So our disc commission would be 2% or 3% of sales. But, like I said, with the transactional approach, if the commission approach is 15%, well now we've taken the company into a tax loss which could potentially save additional taxes for the owners over and above that 5.8%, because now we're offsetting that loss against other income wages, interest, et cetera and being taxed just on the qualified dividend income of the disc. And so you can't just look at the overall margin or overall profitability of the company and project what that, what it's going to look like, Because they vary all over the place. Dave: Based on this transactional approach, yeah, and I would like to talk a bit about. Oftentimes, when I'm talking to a company that's considering a disk, oftentimes they've never even heard of it. Their CPA firm may not have even mentioned the idea. And they'll say, and they'll ask me hey, does this mean my CPA, you know, screwed up by not telling me about it. In my response, you know I try to be generous and I explain it that, look, you know, in our experience only about one out of 100 companies are a candidate. And so let's just say you have a large local CPA firm and they have 100, you know midsize corporate clients. Statistically we find that only one of them, you know, would be a fit for the disk. And your experience may be a little different, you know, feel free to correct me. And so when you think about it from the CPA's perspective, if there's a special part of the tax code and they only have one client that benefits, it's a difficult economic dynamic for the CPA firm to invest in a whole team and expertise to serve one client, right? Isn't that like part of the challenge that the and I know you've worked at a number of large CPA firms Is my understanding correct? That's part of the problem is just their clientele. There aren't enough of them. That makes it worth doing yeah. Brian: Yeah, I think that's a fair characterization. I might phrase it a little bit differently. I mean, there are thousands of CPA firms and they're all excellent generalists. This is not an area where you can be a generalist. Cpa firms often outsource R&D, tax credit work, cost segregation work. This, to me, falls right in that same category. You don't want to dabble in this, and if you're not sure what you're doing, you can get you and your client in trouble. Have good intentions, but if you don't execute it properly, it can be more of a headache than it's worth. And so, like most people, I think people gravitate towards what they know and understand, and things that they don't know and understand can look and sound scary. Dave: Yeah. Brian: So it's like, oh my God, an IC disc. I've never heard of that. I'm not sure I can bring that to my client because I don't really know what I'm doing. Well, I wish I knew somebody I could call to him. He's not a competitor right who could help me through this and help my client through this, and so that's really one of the reasons why we exist, because, as you stated, you don't want it to be a competitor that you call, and so, because we are so hyper focused on what we do and we don't do the things that I'll call the cpa's generalists, that the generalists do, we're an excellent partner because we're not looking to take away anybody's tax return or any of the other type of work that the CPA might be doing for that client. We just want to play in our space. Dave: Yeah, sometimes I'm sorry. Sometimes you know clients or potential clients will say, yeah, but you know our CPA firm does. You know all of our work. It's a one-stop shop thing and I'm afraid having you do the disc return and then doing the corporate return yeah, but our CPA firm does all of our work, it's a one-stop shop thing and I'm afraid having you do the disc return and then doing the corporate return it's just going to be a nightmare for you all to coordinate your efforts. It just sounds like too much trouble. What would your response be to that? Brian: My response is I work with over 500 companies. Generally we do the disk work for those companies. The regular mainstream CPA does everything else. We coordinate our work with that CPA and it's never a problem. We say, look, we're going to need X number of days to turn this around, so please have a draft of the operating company return by a particular date, and then they work towards that date. They give us the return, we get data from the company and we turn the number around so they can finish their tax return and then we go ahead and finish the disc return and I would say 99.9% of the time it works like we're all part of the same thing. Dave: Yeah, because really the CPA they prepare that final draft corporate return. They then pull two numbers from the disk return that goes into the corporate return and then they're done, basically right. Brian: And they're done and they can go ahead and finish up their disk return, I mean their operating company return and their state returns and everything. And then we just have to get the disc return done. And sometimes you know they file their tax return in april and you know the disc returns aren't due till september. So one might say, oh, you could just sit on them until september. But you know, we try to get them done at the same time. Sure sure Everybody can rest easy. But I mean we think of ourselves as a bolt-on resource to that CPA firm while we're working with that and we work with probably 50 to 75 CPA firms around the country in that role- yeah. It works well. I mean, you can talk to any one of them about what it's like to work with us, and I'm sure you'd get a glowing recommendation for how we work with them and for their clients. Dave: Yeah, no, I'm with you. So, as we're nearing the end here, the other thing that people find interesting you'd mentioned in 2003, there were 700 IC disks under 1,000. Yeah, 787. And then, according, if my recollection is correct, the most recent IRS stats that updated that were published, I think, in 2010. And I believe in 2010, there were like 2000 disks. Brian: Yeah, something like 1926. Okay, To be exact, and that number I'm sure has grown dramatically since then. I would guess there's somewhere between eight and 10,000 disks out there now. Okay, yeah. Dave: Yeah, now what's interesting? This is what people find interesting. I believe there's about 50 million business organization, you know business entities in the country, and so let's just assume that's the number, 50 million. Brian: I mean it's tens of millions. Dave: I'm certain of that. For some reason, I think it's 50 million. Does that sound reasonable? Brian: It does so let's think it's 50 million, does that? Dave: sound reasonable. It does. So let's say it's 50 million and on your average, you know we find around one out of a hundred. You know, maybe one out of 200 companies are fit for the disc. So if we run through the math, you know one percent of 50 million, I believe, is 500, 000. You know approximate companies that we think would benefit from a disc. Yet most recent stats, there's only 2000, you know, and maybe it's 4,000, 6,000, you know. Even, let's say it's 10,000 that exists now. So if you divide 10,000 by 500,000, what is that? Like 2%, I think, of the projected eligible company actually have a disc yeah, and people can't. They always are surprised by that and I usually tell them it might. And tell me if your numbers are consistent. I say about 100. One out of 100 benefit or could benefit. The ones who could benefit 90 percent of them have never heard of the disc, maybe 95%, and the 5% of the 1% who have heard of it, even once they hear about it, they usually haven't implemented it. Brian: Right. Then there's a percent that have implemented it. They're not getting out of it what they can. Dave: Right right. Brian: So it's so. There's a lot of missed opportunities by taxpayers and everyone's always trying to save some taxes. It helps fun, you know. It might help hire another employee might help, you know, if the savings are moderate and it's 50, 6070, 1000 of tax savings that still could pay for an employee to come work at the company. Why do? Dave: you think that utilization is so low? I mean because it'd be shocking if only 2% of the companies who did research and development took advantage of the RMD tax credit. Brian: I think it's just not well known. I mean it's very esoteric, it's been in the tax code for ages and ages and it just doesn't you. You know, there were so many years where it just wasn't relevant when you think that it's not something people think about. And then if you know, if you're a small exporter and you're exporting a half a million dollars a year a million dollars a year unfortunately it probably doesn't benefit you to have a disc and so maybe someone will look at it whether that size and they're like, oh yeah, it doesn't benefit you to have a disk and so maybe someone will look at it whether that size and they're like, oh yeah, it doesn't work. And then they grow and they forget that it might work once they've grown. So once a company hits about three million of export sales really should look at it again, because that's where it starts to have economic relevance that's where it starts to have economic relevance. Dave: Do you think some of it could be that? I mean, in general, public companies don't use disks, right? Brian: They just simply don't. Dave: Okay, and so I've found that oftentimes small to mid-sized privately held companies receive a lot of their sophisticated business knowledge from their Fortune 500 suppliers or clients. You know they'll hear from them about something and you know, like the payroll protection program during COVID, you know I suspect some of those might have heard about that from you know some of their large customers. Maybe that's not a good example, but you know that could be another reason. Right, there's just a dearth of knowledge that the CPAs aren't focused on it because the economics don't make sense. The large sophisticated public suppliers and clients don't use it, so they don't hear about it from them. Right, it's not really in the news, it's just. It just kind of flies below the radar screen, doesn't it? Brian: It definitely does, and that's certainly a reason why it's not as utilized as it probably could be. Dave: Yeah, and it seems like you know most of our, you know virtually all of our clients come as a referral from either an existing client or an advisor who we've worked with other clients you know, like a CPA or attorney or banker. So yeah, it's just a yeah, even though you know the podcast is called the Icy Disc Show. I don't get the sense that I'm ever going to. You know, reach Joe Rogan's audience size. It just seems to kind of fly below the radar screen. Brian: Yeah, and the potential audience is probably a little smaller than Joe's. Dave: Probably Well. So the last thing, the other thing people tell me they're surprised about the first year of the disk return. When they set up a disk is to get everything done. And we tell them the disk return's ready and they say, super good, and e-file it for me, like the CPA does the corporate and personal returns. And what is our response when they tell us to go e-file it for them? Brian: The response is unfortunately, the IRS doesn't provide for e-filing of disk returns and we'll need to send you a paper return. You're going to need to sign it and file it with the IRS and the unfortunate thing there is gosh, I don't know what percent of the time, but it's a growing percentage of the time the IRS loses the return Right and then sends a notice saying, hey, we never filed or whatever. And some of these disk returns are quite large. The fact that they because when you do the transaction by transaction analysis, there's a lot of paper that gets produced and filed and it's shocking to me that the IRS would lose those what they do. Dave: So it's interesting what they do. So it's interesting. I like to say that not only does the ICDISC fly under the radar screen of most everything, it even, in some ways, it's almost like it flies under the radar screen of the IRS itself. Brian: Yeah, and they put some things in place with regard to the ICDISC in 1984 and have never changed it. For example, if you're in the situation where you have to pay interest on deferred tax, which often occurs. First of all, a lot of times taxpayers don't realize it and they don't do it. Secondly, if they do it. It's so antiquated that the instructions to the form where you calculate the interest it says please staple a check to this form and mail it in. I mean, who does that in 2020, right? Nobody. People, businesses prefer to do things electronically to avoid checks being stolen, fraudulent activity, so on and so forth. But here the IRS is saying staple a check to this form and mail it to Kansas City, missouri. Dave: Yeah, and I guess it kind of makes sense that you know if there's only a few thousand of these disks in existence. In the same way, you can't expect the CPA firms to make it a heavy focus, I suppose even the IRS. You know there's a hundred other tax incentives or a thousand other tax incentives that are more highly utilized that you know they maybe are spending their time on. Brian: Yeah, as I like to say, the people at the IRS that understood the disc were working there in the 70s and 80s, OK, and they're long retired. Yeah, and they're long retired. There's really not a lot of bodies at the IRS that understand the DISC and certainly when you're doing a transaction by transaction study and calculating the commission on each individual transaction, there's nobody there that understands that. Dave: Nobody Well, and it's kind of the same thing outside the IRS, right? Nobody Well, and it's kind of the same thing outside the IRS, right? I mean I have this joke that nobody makes partner at a big four firm being the IC disk expert. Oh, that's true, so it even especially nowadays. Yeah, and so it seems like like the average age of IC disks experts is about the same as the average age of the average Fortran computer language programmer. It just seems like you know new people are not coming into the disk and there's just a dearth of knowledge all around. Brian: Right, right. And I myself learned COBOL, which is a choice between Fortran and COBOL, when I was in business school, both equally non-usable. Dave: Is it part of that? Because since the disk came on in 1972, it seems like since 1973, people have been talking about the IC disk going away. So is that maybe part of it? People think, well, why should I learn something if it's going away? Brian: Maybe part of it. People think, well, why should I learn something if it's going away? There's always been a fear that it's either going to go away or that there's a technical correction coming that the disk dividend is not a qualified dividend. But the bottom line is politically, I just don't see that happening. Dave: It stands for too many things that are positive for the US Job creation export sales for too many things that are positive for the US Job creation, export sales, us companies being more competitive in the global market. Brian: So it doesn't really lend itself to be repealed. What can be repealed are some of the tax rates. Some of the tax rates can change and that can change the benefits of the disc. The concept of the disc itself and what it stands for really is very consistent with our country. Dave: Yeah, wow, I can't believe how the time has flown by, brian. Is there anything else that you want to mention about the IC disc or the MRO industry? Brian: No, I can't think of anything specifically other than I'm looking forward to being there and meeting many of the attendees and other exhibitors that are there and spending some time with you and our colleagues in Atlanta. Dave: Yeah, it will be fun. So it's the ICDISC Alliance. If you want to look us up on the website for the conference or stop by 1818BC. We also have a LinkedIn page for the ICDISC Alliance, and so I'd love to meet with any of you who are going to be at the conference. Awesome, well, thank you very much for your time, Brian. This has been really useful. Brian: You're welcome. You're very welcome. Special Guest: Brian Schwam.

RobChrisRob returned after to long apart to discuss North Korea's ban on Hot Dogs, Dungeons & Dragons Stamps, using LLMs as a DM, NotebookLM getting annoyed at humans, the fakeness of LinkedIn job listings, the Fortran used to render landscapes in Alien, a typo that caused a living maryland woman to be declared dead, the death of film legend David Lynch, as well as Anora, Skeleton Crew & Heavenly Creatures. Join our discord to talk along or the Subreddit where you will find all the links https://discord.gg/YZMTgpyhB https://www.reddit.com/r/TacoZone/

Frohes neues Jahr euch allen! In dieser Episode tauchen wir tief in die Geschichte der Programmiersprachen ein und reisen mit FORTRAN zurück in die 1950er-Jahre! Wie schafft es eine Programmiersprache, die so alt ist wie unsere Großeltern, immer noch in der Hightech-Welt mitzuspielen? Wir erzählen euch von wissenschaftlichen Revolutionen, den Höhen und Tiefen der „GOTO“-Ära und warum selbst die NASA nicht ohne FORTRAN kann. Nebenbei berechnen wir die Marsreise einer Katzen-Oma und überlegen, wie viele Katzen in fünf Jahren wohl eure Wohnung übernehmen werden.Und natürlich plaudern wir über unsere Neujahrsvorsätze und Vorhaben und von der Mantelschrift zum Yogastudio ist alles dabei!

ABOUT TREVOR BULLEN:LINKEDIN PROFILE:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-bullen-6b55b615/DUNWOODY COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY: https://www.linkedin.com/school/dunwoody-college-of-technology/TREVOR'S BIO:Trevor is the Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology. He is an award-winning architect with over 25 years of professional experience. He has significant international experience; working on a wide range of architecture, landscape architecture and planning projects in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. In addition to his role as Dean, Trevor has taught architectural design at the Boston Architectural College, the City College of New York as well as the University of Minnesota and is a frequent guest critic at schools of architecture nationwide.Prior to joining Dunwoody, he was a Senior Associate and Director of Operations at Snow Kreilich Architects, the recipient of the 2018 AIA Architecture Firm Award. From 2000 to 2016, he co-founded and led an architecture and planning studio on the island of Grenada, completing more than 30 built projects. The work of his firm has been published extensively in journals and books as well as being exhibited at the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice. SHOW INTRO:Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.EPISODE 74… and my conversation with Trevor Bullen. On the podacast our dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human's influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.orgTrevor is the Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology. He is an award-winning architect with over 25 years of professional experience who believes that design and teaching architecture is synonymous with discernment.We'll get to all of that in a moment but first though, a few thoughts…                 *                                  *                                  *When I think back to my architecture education, it seems like another universe to today's practice. And then again, in some ways it is much the same.Architecture school was 4 long years of hard work and all-nighters that, at the time, we wore as a badge of honor. It seemed that there was never enough time to do what we were being asked to accomplish. Or maybe I was trying to do more than was necessary to fulfill the learning objectives. I certainly felt I had a lot to prove since it had taken me a couple of years to finally get accepted into the program after not doing particularly well at calculus and linear algebra in junior college. I also took extra math in fifth grade. Yeah… math wasn't my thing.Or at least it wasn't my thing until I had a good tutor in second year who helped me understand that I was visual spatial learner and if I could draw or make models of the problems they would all make sense. Seeing algorithms… my eyes would roll back in my head.Anyway…I stuck with it, took every drawing class I could, loved design studio and managed the engineering. I was proud to graduate from the McGill School of Architecture school, go on to study for my licensing exams - another series of all-nighters – pass and be able to enter the profession of reserved title and call myself an “Architect.”I was proud to wear the traditional pinky-finger white gold ring with 7 notches in it representing the 7 Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin. Ruskin was an English polymath – a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era. The Seven Lamps were seven principles which Ruskin viewed should be reflected in a building: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience. The white gold ring was a tradition of McGill 4th year architecture graduates, as symbols of having legitimately put the time in, done the work on the design thesis and survived it. In those days we drew our projects by hand and built models in the workshop. We got our hands dirty. There were 4 years of design studio projects that, in the real world, would take months or more, and we were trying to get them done in weeks. Back in those days, the mid 80's, Computer Aided Design was emerging as a new tool. I remember that we had to take a class in computer programming – I think it was Fortran or something – and we had dinosaur computers that some students were playing around with to create drawings.In the mid-80's email didn't exist, or not to students in any case,Cell phones had just arrived with the Morotrola DynaTec 8000 which was the size of a brick and weighed almost the same, We used this thing called a fax machine that magically sent images across the telephone wires and could print it out on the other end on thermal paper (which you didn't want to leave on the window sill, because it would fade away),The blue print shop was an ammonia fumigated workplace where diazo prints, as they were technically called,  were actually blue hence the term “blue prints.”We used pencils or ink pens on paper or mylar, and if you screwed up you actually used an eraser to rub the error out and you drew it again.I remember one of my first summer jobs in an architecture office, I was quickly assigned renderings due to my love of drawing. I had made some mistakes when plotting out a perspective using the Plan Projection Method, and I was erasing what I had drawn. One of the principals came by my desk, stopped, watched and then remarked “hey… we hired you to draw not erase…” and then walked away.Nice…Our go to reference books were by Francis D.K Ching – ah… the drawings and hand lettering in “Architecture Construction Illustrated”, or “Form Space and Order”And… the social media, google, Ai and computer generated 3D modeling didn't exist.It wasn't until around 2005 or so that Facebook became popular and the iPhone came out in 2007.Then the world seemed to shift on it axis and life as we know it was on the path towards Artificial General Intelligence and all of the miraculous - and scary - things we are now so familiar with shaped our everyday lives. The world sped up and the way I learned in university was both a thing of the past and then again it wasn't.Many of the ways architecture is taught are similar to my experience. Courses are taught as individual, disaggregated subjects, that graduates have to piece together in actual life experience. A wholistic approach to learning the discipline of architecture is not generally the norm. Which when you consider all of the components of a building it is a challenge since everything is connected to everything and the amount of ‘everything' in a building can indeed be overwhelming if you try to consider it all at the same time.The number of professional and skilled labor disciplines is enormous. And most of us simply see buildings as ‘fait a complis' – completed works - with no idea what actually had to be wrangled to go from concept to completed construction.Going back to social media and the internet for a moment, students now have never known a time without ubiquitous access to the world's information through the internet. The tools for designing buildings have changed.One could say it is easier to some degree now. Computer programs manage all of the interrelationships between engineering, architecture, building systems, interior design elements, as well as the cost estimating, construction management and more.It is also easier to rely on tools to think for you and disconnect you from discernment – one of the key features of the architects' role in puting a building together.And this is where my guest on this episode comes into the frame. Trevor Bullen is the Dean of the School of Design at Dunwoody College of Technology. Trevor is an award-winning architect with over 25 years of professional experience. He has significant international experience, working on a wide range of architecture, landscape architecture and planning projects in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States.In addition to his role as Dean, Trevor has taught architectural design at the Boston Architectural College, the City College of New York as well as the University of Minnesota and is a frequent guest critic at schools of architecture nationwide.He believes in introducing real world problems into the architecture curriculum so that students begin to understand the relationships between theory and practice as well as that good projects are built on good relationships between architects and their clients.He suggests to students that new tools should not supplant their discernment – That key to their success as a professional will be their ability to consider the multitude of factors in building design, determine what matters and to not let the remarkable tools that are afforded us through the development of computer aided design relace their voice.Trevor pushes the idea that great advances in visualization with Ai should not be and end in itself but a means to that end. The tools should be a part of the process not the end point in the evolution of a concept and that their personal voice, point of view, vision should not be lost in the use of the app.And in Trevor's experience, oh what a voice students of today have. Projects are influenced by subjects of racial equity, restorative justice, indigeneity, political orientations, sustainability and climate change and more.And this, it seems to me, is what architecture has always been partly about – the 3-dimensional representation of cultural ideologies. Architecture and ideas are inseparable. Buildings stand as testaments to what we believe, want to influence and aspire to. They are much more than the materials that bring them into being or the space planning at accommodate human interactions. They are epicenters of human relationships imbued with stories and meaning. That said, it brings to mind the famous quote by Marshal McLuhan - "The medium is the message." McLuhan suggested that the way information or an idea is communicated, like in a television broadcast, newspaper, social media post or I dare say architecture, has as much impact on the message itself as the content of the message.I think that this suggests that the form of communication, even if the form of architecture, significantly influences how the message is perceived by the audience.In architecture parlance – I think Mies van der Rohe phrased it as “Form Follows Function.” If beyond utility, architecture is made to convey ideas, then its Form, Space and Order are brought together as a 3-dimension embodiment of them.Thinking back to my architecture education, the tools of today's professional practice have drastically changed and some of my classmates when on to other careers other than being architects, but the education we got then gave us a understating of the interconnectedness of things and the ability to solve multilayered challenges while wielding stone, steel, glass, light all forged into a unified whole by learned discernment. Teaching discernment is not just in the service of good building design and construction, it is a life skill as emerging students navigate the volatile, unpredictable, complex and often ambiguous world that face them beyond their architecture degree.             *                         *                         *ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582bWebsites:  https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)Email: david.kepron@NXTLVLexperiencedesign.comTwitter: DavidKepronPersonal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/Bio:David Kepron is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why', ‘what's now' and ‘what's next'. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott's “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine's Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation's Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.He has held teaching positions at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. David also writes a popular blog called “Brain Food” which is published monthly on vmsd.com.  The next level experience design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production by Kano Sound. The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.

Our guest this time is Dale Young. Other than ten years in Australia, Dale has spent his entire life in Texas. Mostly he worked in the IT world starting right out of college. Even in college in 1972 he was attracted to computers. He worked in the computer world for more than 30 years. As Dale will describe, he experienced a life-changing event that occurred to him in 1992 that changed the entire direction of his world. However, it was many years before he recognized this life-changing event. Dale will tell us all about this. Dale has an interesting and very positive coaching program he will describe. I think you will see that what he offers is relevant to consider. About the Guest: Dale inspires Christian Entrepreneurs to Step Into Their Calling. He helps them clarify their Calling and turn their business into a purpose-driven mission using proven Biblical principles and the latest research on brain science. Identity answers “Who are you at your deep core level?” Dale uses CliftonStrengths, Spiritual Gifts, and Values assessments along with other reflection tools to help you answer this question. Community answers “Who are you with, who supports you?” Calling answers “Why are you here, in this place at this time?” Dale is certified with several assessments and has multiple coaching qualifications, including WeAlign Executive Coach and the International Coach Federation (ICF) Professional Certified Coach (PCC). Dale volunteers with several Christian non-profits including Follower Of One and the Faith Driven Entrepreneurs. Dale is a native Texan and currently lives west of Fort Worth. Dale is a member of Solid Rock Church. Dale is a two-time #1 bestselling author. Next Level Your Life was released January 24th, 2023 and hit #1 in 31 categories, including international. The Transformational Journey was released October 10th, 2023 and hit #1 in 60 categories including several international. Ways to connect with Dale: Email: Dale@CoachDale.com Website: www.CoachDale.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachdale/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoachDaleYoung About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Well, howdy, everyone, this is your host, Mike Hinkson, and you are listening to unstoppable mindset. We're really glad that you're here. Thanks for being here, wherever you happen to be today, we get to talk today with Dale Young who as as he would tell you, he inspires Christian entrepreneurs, which I think is great, and he's a coach. He does a number of things relating to all that. And I'm really going to be very interested to hear how he got to doing what he does and exactly what he does. He's also written two books that have been very successful. Both have been published within the last few months, and they're both doing very well, so I think that's kind of cool as well. So Dale, want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset, and thanks very much for being here. Well, thank   Dale Young ** 02:10 you, Michael. I'm honored to be here. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 02:14 why don't we start, as I love to do, by hearing kind of, maybe, about the early Dale, growing up and some of that sort of stuff.   Dale Young ** 02:21 Early Dale, well, let's see. I was born raised in I was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas. So I'm a native Texan. I've lived in Texas all my life, except for 10 years in Australia, which I'm sure we'll get to at some point. But first 18 years was in Amarillo Texas, sort   Michael Hingson ** 02:38 of, sort of, born on Route 66   Dale Young ** 02:42 huh? Yep. Was, was basically had a pretty normal childhood. I was a geek or a nerd before geeks and nerds were popular, so I was in the math and science club and I was in the chess club in high school. So there you go. That gives you a little bit of background for   Michael Hingson ** 03:05 me. Yeah, I, I never did end up in the chess club, but I was in the Math Club and the science club, and I was on the mathletes, which was our math competition thing. And I actually got a letter for being on the mathletes, which was I never expected to get that but during our senior awards assembly, I got a letter. So I thought that was pretty cool. That's pretty cool. So I guess that made me eligible for the Letterman club, except I graduated. So what do you do? Story of my life?   Dale Young ** 03:35 Anyway, High School. The best teacher I had in high school was Mrs. Billy love, and she taught physics, and so I went off to college to be in physics. Aha, yeah. And I know that's very close to your background there,   Michael Hingson ** 03:53 right? My, my master's is in physics, yeah.   Dale Young ** 03:57 So anyway, I got into physics at UT, Austin, and I found that it was a little bit tough. And I was probably, it was probably tough because I was falling in love with computers at the time. Yeah. What year was this? This was 1972   Michael Hingson ** 04:17 okay, yep, yeah.   Dale Young ** 04:18 I i was actually, I was actually going there started out as a physics major, but because I had not had calculus in high school, because I was in one of the more slower high schools in the Amarillo area, they said, Well, you can't take a real physics course because you haven't had calculus, even though I'd had two semesters of physics, and I really knew all the calculus. I just didn't know that I knew all the calculus. And so they put me in this this course that they called physical simulation via computer. And so we worked all these calculus like problems during using the computer programming. And I found that I loved it. And so I went on as kind of doing a lot in physics and a lot in computer science for about a year, year and a half, something like that. And game count came down to a time when I made a B in physics and an A in computer science. And I looked at the employment prospects for things, and I said, Hmm, maybe I should change majors here. So so I went over into computer science and loved it, made, made tremendous progress in that actually had the privilege of actually working as a computer programmer on campus while I was still an undergraduate, and that was a really big deal, because I got to drive my car on campus and all kinds of good stuff like that.   Michael Hingson ** 05:49 What computers were you using back then?   Dale Young ** 05:51 They were basically, I started with Data General, Nova computers, many computers, many computers, right? The computer science profession was, you know, the computer. Most of the computer science people were doing card punches and submitting it to a mainframe with it was a control data computer, CDC computer, yeah. And so it was one of the big, big dogs. And so when I switched to computer science and I took my first computer science class, they actually said, Well, you got you got to do it via punch cards. And I did my first assignment to be a punch cards. And I said, this is not cool. I don't like doing this because I'd already had the stuff with doing the mini computer. So I talked to some buddies and found out I could do the assignment on the minicomputer and submitted to the big computer, get the results back, and then everything, you know, debug it multiple times, and then actually just submit it for once and get the printout. And I was done. And so I didn't actually have to use the computer the punch card decks. And so that was, that was my back door around it, and that was one of the reasons I made straight A's in computer science, is because I could do things about 10 times faster than most of the other computer science people there.   Michael Hingson ** 07:10 Yeah, I remember going to UC Irvine in 1968 and most everything at that time was done on the mainframe, which we had was an IBM 360 and then for the more advanced computer users, they had a PDP 10, the deck PDP 10, which I got to eventually play with a little bit. But for me, the big problem was that there wasn't an interface that was accessible. I kind of figured out a few workarounds to do some stuff on the computer, but it was not really available. A friend who I met because he started this project learning from the computer science people that I wasn't able to access the computer, he did some research, and he figured out a way to develop a computer terminal. And the computer terminal used, let's see, I want to make sure I do it right. It was a PDP 8e mini computer that would take the information from the computer and translate it into code that would drive a printer that was specially modified the shop on campus modified it according to specs to be able to produce some Braille, but it required the computer to translate it. So all of my work, whenever I wanted to use a computer, once we figured that out was I had to go in, activate the PDPA and turn on, of course, the printer, well, it was a terminal, not a printer, and so it would emboss Braille on regular paper, so it wasn't even Braille, so it wasn't anything that I would keep, and it worked, but it was still just kind of a real challenge. So for me, computers, although I love them and did as much as I could and learned as much as I could with them, weren't as usable back in those days. Yeah.   Dale Young ** 09:20 Well anyway, after changing majors, I still graduated in three years and two summer schools, and that was basically because I had to take a foreign language and so I had to concentrate on the summer schools to get the foreign language stuff in. What did you take? And German of all things. Yeah, I thought it was going to be useful in the computer science world, but it really wasn't. So haven't ever really used it or followed up on that. Yeah, yeah. And so anyway, went back to Amarillo and got a job on for the city of Amarillo on an IBM 360 mainframe. Mm hmm, doing IBM assembly language. Did a little bit of COBOL, just enough to know that I didn't like cobalt. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 10:08 I hear you probably,   Dale Young ** 10:09 I probably learned probably three dozen computer languages by the time I graduated college. I did better with Fortran, yeah. Well, my first language was basic, and my second one was Pascal, and my third one was Fortran, so   Michael Hingson ** 10:23 yeah, and I learned basic as well. Yeah, they were all good.   Dale Young ** 10:28 But anyway, was in back in Amarillo for about eight months, got an offer to go back to Austin and work for a actually worked for the boss that I had worked for as a programmer on campus, he had started his own startup company, and he had bought one of these data general Nova computers, and was doing business systems on it. And so I went back and worked for him for a couple of years, then moved over to another local firm there in Austin called radian. They did a lot of atmospheric type of scientific stuff using many computers. So I did that. And after that, I got an offer to move to Dallas, to eventually move to Australia, and that was all because of my data general expertise and background. So came to Dallas for about a year and a half, got my security clearance as part of that, and then went down to Australia in January of 1982 was there for three years, came back to the states for two years and then went back to Australia for seven years after that. So, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 11:47 So what did you do in Australia? What was the reason for going down there?   Dale Young ** 11:51 So the company I was working for was e systems. It's a defense contractor right now, part of Raytheon, right? And so it was all government work at that point.   Michael Hingson ** 12:02 Yeah, wow. So, so was it just you? Did you have a family by then?   Dale Young ** 12:09 I actually got married in 1983 halfway through that first three years. But I got married to a lady from Dallas. So you know, it was another person that I'd known before, so got married there, and, yeah, we actually never had any kids, so it was just the two of us for quite a while that eventually ended up in divorce in 2016 I'm a parent a little bit later. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, but yeah, had a great time in Australia, both the the first time and the second time. Actually made the Northern Territory volleyball team during the first tour, and that was great. And, you know, made a lot of friends in Australia, had a lot of travel around Australia, did quite a few things in terms of work. But during that time, the thing I was most proud of was I took a I took a system. They actually sent me down there in January 82 to support a system that had not been developed by you systems. It was developed by another government contractor. And they sent a, you know, they installed it in January 82 got it mostly signed off in, think, March of 82 and then they were, they had somebody stay over for another month or so, but after that, it was me. I was the sole support for that new system, and I was also the trainer for that new system. I was teaching all the old people that had not known this system at all. I was teaching them how to use it and support it and such like that and so. So it was lot of responsibility, but one of the big things I did was one program in particular that just was not working at all, and when you printed it out, because this is the day in the days of the green bar computer print out 132 column readouts and such like that. That thing was probably about six inches thick when you printed it out that program, yeah, and I worked through it, and I looked at it, and I it was basically a mess. I ended up just basically throwing away and rewriting it. And it ended up about an inch and a half and print out when it was done. And about half of that was the comments that had been all the changes that were recorded at the front of the program. So I really simplified that program a lot, and it all worked. And it. Work the way the users wanted it to work. So it was, it was a really significant win, and I don't think they ever had any more problems with that problem with that program. So that was one of the things I was most proud of about my Australia, Australia time was being able to make a significant contribution and to change like that. So   Michael Hingson ** 15:19 kind of probably the thing that you remember the most, are you the most proud of when you were in the IT world?   Dale Young ** 15:25 No, not in the whole IT world, but that was definitely in the Australia time. So yeah. So after Australia came back and got a different job as CEO CI CIO of a little company. It had like a four people to IT team. So CIO was just a title, and in title, not in fact, type of thing. Worked there for a couple of years, and then got into computer consulting for a couple of years, then worked for another company for a year, and then started with, with the people I've been with, we actually started a startup company in 2000 in the technology industry. And you say, dot bomb type of thing. That was not a really good time, but our company actually did really well. It was a combination of selling computer hardware. We were a sun microsystem dealer, so we sold computer hardware, and by that time, I was a database expert. So I was installing Oracle databases on the Sun Microsystems and installing the sun OS as well spark stations and so on. Yeah, so operating systems and databases, and I was VP of that startup company. And we went from, I don't know, just a few $1,000 of startup funds to, I don't know, I think it was several million dollars of actual revenue. And we hit number 10 on the entrepreneur, fastest growing companies in the US for the year 2000 so that was applied Solutions Incorporated. And then in 2002 we opened a Houston office, and we hit number 23 on that entrepreneur fastest 100 list. And so then in 2003 we had some internal struggles, some leadership struggles, and some other things. And in 2004 we actually ended up having to shut the company down. So yeah, so it was a real roller coaster ride from 2000 to 2004   Michael Hingson ** 17:34 I remember working with sun spark stations. I worked for a company that actually developed a pizza box that looked just like a spark station, except it had hot plug removable disk drives in it. Oh, wow. Okay, and and so for Wall Street, for example, they could either have our system stacked right on top of or right below the spark station so it didn't take up any more room on a desk, but people could pull out disks and put in different disks, so everybody had their own assigned disk, for example. And we also did that with other organizations, some government contractors or some government agencies that we can't really talk about, but they used it too, which, again, was the advantage was it was essentially a zero footprint, except for going up two or three inches. Yeah, which was cool. Yeah,   Dale Young ** 18:29 that was pretty cool. So then 2004 we shut that company down. I went to, went to Stonebridge technologies, and started building, started doing kind of the same things, hardware, databases, operating systems. And one thing I didn't mention, the guy that actually hired me in 1996 he was kind of my friend and mentor. His name's Gary Todd. He was president of applied solutions. I was vice president. And then when we switched over to Stonebridge, he was, he was a vice president and a division lead, division president, and I was working for him, we built up that division, and then 2006 sold a managed services, a database managed services contract, to a client in Houston. This was, you know, we were based in the DFW area, Dallas, Fort Worth area, and sold it to this client in Houston. So I was on the I was down in Houston four days a week for quite a while on, you know, getting that thing spun up and supported in the team built and all that sort of stuff. That contract went annual in 2007 right? Yeah, 2007 went annual for over a million dollars a year. And considering Stonebridge. Was a $12 million annual revenue company in 2006 we got quite a bit of attention in our division because of that so but ended up that after finally left stone bridge in 2021 and we still had a managed database managed services contract with that client in Houston. And, you know, for a managed services contract to last more than five years is a pretty big deal, and this one lasted at least 14 so I was, I was proud of the team that I built, that we built through that time. Wow, that's the thing I would say was the most impressive about my whole IT career,   Michael Hingson ** 20:45 yeah, you you had it, and it lasted for quite a while, which is really pretty cool. What caused you to leave?   Dale Young ** 20:51 Well, so really 2004 because of the changes with applied solutions and some other stuff. I went through some experiential based training, which really opened me up to the whole personal development side. I'd already been kind of in that mode, okay? I've been learning a lot more about teamwork and following John Maxwell and such like that. This, this training I went through in 2004 really opened me up to being more on the personal side, personal connections, all of that. And then in 2007 I started, well, 2006 2007 I started volunteering for that organization and really learning more about the emotional side of human beings and how to really build relationships and things like that. 2007 I end of 2007 I actually take a course with a guy from that organization about life coaching. I'd never heard of life coaching before that never knew that it was such a thing and but I kind of fell in love with it, and I started doing some research on it. Found out that I what I could find at the time in 2007 on the internet was not, I couldn't find anything that really brought in a spiritual aspect. And we'll go back and talk about the spiritual journey in just a second, probably, but the whole spiritual aspect was not there that I could find. And so I said, Well, this is not for me, and I put it on the shelf. I did get certified in a personality assessment called core map, which was similar to disc and in some ways similar to Myers Briggs, and I'd always had lots of disc tests assigned to me, you know, and I'd always came out one particular way, and I was always interested in, well, why does this work so well for me, you know? I know for some people, it doesn't work so well. So what's the difference? And so I got certified in this core map assessment and started doing some of those things on the side. And then in 2009 I'm walking through Half Price Books, and this book falls off the shelf and locks me on the head, figuratively, anyway. And the book is actually titled Christian coaching, and it's like, okay, this is what I've been looking for. And this Christian coaching book led me to follow a guy named Christopher McCluskey, and he invited me to take a coaching course in January, 2011 and I took that course, and I just fell in love with coaching, so I'm working full time in it until 2016 but I'm doing coaching from 2011 to 2016 in a part time mode. And then in 2016 I've been asking Stonebridge to go to part time, if that could work out. They came to me with about two weeks notice and said, We think you ought to start the first of April, going to part time. And I said, Okay, let's do it. And so from 2016 to 2021 I'm doing part time with Stonebridge and building my coaching practice full time. And so that's really how I got out of the whole IT side of things.   Michael Hingson ** 24:16 So by 2021 How did the pandemic affect all of that for you?   Dale Young ** 24:21 Since most of what I was doing on the IT side was already remote, I really didn't have any changes or problems on the IT side at that point anyway, and on the coaching side, I'd always been doing a lot of coaching remotely anyway, because that saved me on travel time and everything else. I had a paid Zoom account since 2015 so I've been on zoom from the fairly early days of zoom. And so a lot of the stuff that I did when the pandemic came out actually just reemphasized some of the stuff that I was doing in the coaching. And why I was being drawn to what I'm drawn to now, which I'll say is just the calling. I feel like calling is bigger than career or passion or mission or even purpose. Calling is just a spiritual pull that draws you forward. So I was I was in the beginning stages of pull up, putting some of that ideas and some of that framework together, working on some of the stuff that I work on now around identity and community, was always a big piece of what I was doing. But the calling piece really, really gelled and really came together, really in 2021, 2022, for me. And so that piece has been that's fairly recent piece for me.   Michael Hingson ** 25:50 Well, you talk about the fact that there is a life changing event that you experienced, but you didn't recognize it for a long time.   Dale Young ** 25:59 Yeah, that was back in 1992 and that was actually before I was Christian. So I was actually raised in a non Christian household. We didn't go to church or anything. I had prayed the prayer back in 79 but I really had no life change. Really had nothing to to inform me or anything like that. But in 1992 kind of towards the end of my time in Australia, and we're we're making some crazy money. I mean, it's like 54% on base salary and lots of benefits and lots of travel and all this sort of stuff. And the government says that they're going to start taxing some of the benefits. And there's a bunch of us that are around this table at lunchtime, and we're all complaining about this tax, you know, now, the taxes, you know, like two or 3% on the bonuses that we're actually getting here, you know. So it's a fairly minor amount, but none of us are acknowledging that fact, and out of my mouth as we're as we're complaining as I'm in there complaining, out of my mouth comes this phrase, and the phrase is, well, maybe we really shouldn't complain, after all, this is just a job, not a career. And it was in that moment that my heart finally got through to my head that I was made for something bigger and something more. And was at that point that it was like, Okay, I need to, I need to pay attention to this. It was almost like a coaching moment, but it was self coaching. You know, I recognized this phrase as something that was important for me to know and pay attention to. And so I took that phrase, and within year and a half or two years, I'm back in the States. I'm not making crazy money. I've switched to careers and all that sort of stuff. And you've heard about the career side of things, so at that point, so we're back in the States. You know my wife that we never had kids together. We're having a few struggles. And in 1997 we start going to church. Because I'd prayed this prayer back in 79 but had never been to church. So, you know, just was getting back into or getting into the total church community, learning a little bit about the Bible and the church and such like that. And in 1998 I'm at a funeral, and there was a church member who signed at OD, and I'm at the funeral, and it was something about the funeral and the way the gospel was presented at that point that made me really set up and take notice. And it was like, Okay, I need to really turn my life over to Christ at this point. And so I did, and I started getting discipled, getting mentored. I still think back on the days when I was being mentored once a week by Greg Boyd. He was a great guy. And, you know, he just poured, poured into me. And that was part of what led me towards the whole personal development and the whole growth and all the other stuff that was going on at that point, you know, in the 2000s and 2004 and 2007 so, you know, it was the but that phrase back in 1992 you know, this is just a job. Yeah, it was like, okay, that's, that's a key thing. I'm listening to my heart for the first time in my life, maybe. And that was something that was really a significant turning point that I didn't even think of as a turning point until, I don't know, probably, probably 2025, years later. So you know, but it led me on that journey that led me now, eventually, to the calling.   Michael Hingson ** 29:54 So now, though you coach full time, do you coach full time? Do you. Coach people from all over. Or, how does that work?   Dale Young ** 30:02 I have coached people in Germany, yeah, via zoom, so, yeah, I coach people all over. You know, a lot of what I do is relational. A lot of what I do is based on identity. And I use the, I use several assessments, but I use the Clifton Strengths, or what's known as the old strength finder assessment, to help people really understand how God created them and how God wired them, because that assessment's got 34 talents for somebody to have the same top five talents in the same order as somebody else in the world. Chances are one in 33 million. So it's pretty unique, you know, I think of the I think in the top 10, it's one in 421 trillion, or something like that. You know, there's only 8 billion people on the planet, right? So, you know, you're going to be unique in in the way that you're that God has wired you and put these talents together in you, and so with that process, you know, helping people, walking people through that system, and helping them understand, this is how God puts you together. This is God, how God wired you. He gave you these talents. He gave you spiritual gifts, if you're a Christian, and those are unique as well. How they show up in your life is unique. And so I, you know, I really think that your your identity, is your superpower, and that's what it that's what you really have to focus on, is being the best you you can be. And that's one, that's one, a third of the system that I put together. That's the identity piece.   Michael Hingson ** 31:46 Well, tell me more about sort of the whole system and and what you coach, and how you coach, and then clearly, you bring a a Christian element into it. How is that received? Well,   Dale Young ** 31:58 it's received pretty well by Christians, and not so well by the general public sometimes. But you know, that's okay, God is God has called me to coach these people, and so that's what I'm focusing on doing.   Michael Hingson ** 32:14 You can only do what you can do. Yeah, that's right,   Dale Young ** 32:17 the second third. The first third is the identity piece, which I've talked about. The second third is the community piece. The fact is, we were all built to be in community, just like God is a trendy and is exist in community. You know, eternally, we're, we're designed to be in community. You know, you've probably heard the the statistics about kids that are raised, you know, babies and infants that are raised in a environment where they're given all the food and their diapers are changed and all that sort of stuff, but they're not given any physical touch, or they're not given any talking to or any love or anything like that, they end up warped, right? They end up as not developed well. And that's just, is an expression of how important community is to to us. And so bringing in a community of people, like minded community, like minded people that are all moving in the same direction. That's what I love to build, and that's what I am in the process of building now is, is a community of people like that. And then the third component is what I call the calling piece. And the calling piece, I've got a framework which is basically four four circles. You can think of as a Venn diagram of four circles calling is the intersection of all four of them, and that Venn diagram, the first one is, what provides income. Okay, so what provides income? You know, what puts the paycheck in the back, what provides for your physical needs, those types of things that is important, but that's also the piece that is often most disconnected from the other three for a lot of people.   Michael Hingson ** 34:11 Why is that?   Dale Young ** 34:13 I think people get into jobs and they're too scared to change the job, even though they know it's not right for them, they they have a sense of safety or security in that job, or it's what they were told that they should be doing all along. Are, you know, several other reasons, but you know, it basically gets down lots of times to they haven't looked at trying to bring that more into their calling. Now, the second key is what I call abilities that others affirm. I use the cliftonstrengths Because a lot of times you'll see that over, over the lifetime you've been affirmed for certain things. But. You maybe dismiss them, or you maybe discounted them. One of the things that it revealed to me, for example, was connectedness. I am a very connected person. I like to make new people, meet new people. I like to go deep with new people. I like to see how people are connected. You know, like Michael, I think I've already introduced a couple of people to you for your podcast, because it's such a great fit. So that's the connectedness showing up. For the longest time I did not recognize that, even though people told me I was doing okay, but seeing it in black and white and being coached through it, it was something that it was like, oh, okay, I guess I really have done this, and people have told me that. So that abilities that others affirm, it also keeps you the people, you know, it's, it's the American Idol syndrome. You know, where people who can't sing on American Idol, and they find out they can't sing type of thing, right? You know, if people tell you that you can do something, it's much more likely you actually are pretty good at it. Yeah, yeah. And then the third key is, what makes your heart cry? This would be something that oftentimes has happened because of something in your past, and I'll use you as an example here, Michael, what makes your heart cry? And I see, I see this in your life is dealing with disabilities. I mean, you're doing a podcast here about disabilities and inclusion, and, you know, unexpectedness, all that sort of stuff, that that is something that's very near and dear to your heart, because it's affected you directly. Okay, what makes my heart cry is entrepreneurs that have failing businesses. I want to help those entrepreneurs succeed in their business, because that that first time with applied solutions, when we had to go out of business after having, you know, three, four successful years. That was a heartbreak for me. Yeah, you know now another piece that makes my heart cry, but not as much, is my divorce, which we never got to but we'll talk about that later. That's another, another piece that makes my heart cry.   Michael Hingson ** 37:20 You're You're welcome to talk about that well.   Dale Young ** 37:23 So after we went to church in 1997 and I got baptized in 98 and then we went through this experiential learning in 2004 I thought we had the best years of our marriage. I really did, but somewhere out of nowhere, in 2011 or 2012 my wife starts asking for a divorce, and it's like, I don't I still don't know exactly where she was coming from, other than she was. I don't even know if I can speculate, but I think she was afraid of me living leaving the IT career, because she saw how happy I was in the coaching side. I think that's my speculation. I don't know if that's true or not, but anyway, we tried to, I tried very hard to save the marriage, and, you know, we went through little bit counseling, and we went through some stuff, but there was several times where she said, Nope, this is done. I'm moving moving away. And she moved off to Tennessee, where her family had grown up. And then, you know, a few months later, should move back, and then a few months later, should move back to Tennessee. Anyway. This went on for several times, and finally, knew that it was over on September 11 of 2015 we had gone to see would. Should been back in town with gone on a date, and we went to see the movie War Room, which is all about, you know, praying your way back to a healthy marriage is really the way I described that, that that movie in a nutshell. And I was thinking there, wow, this is exactly what we need. We need to pray our way back to a healthy marriage. And just after that movie, she said she's leaving for Tennessee the next day, and really broke my heart. And so six months later, the divorce was final. Divorce was final on March 7, and my boss comes to me, my boss at Stonebridge comes to me a week or two later and says, We think April 1 is a good time for you to go to part time in your IT career. And I'm going, well financially, it's not a really good time. But, you know, I'm not going to turn down this chance, you know, because I felt like God was opening the door, and so I went ahead and stepped through it, and I don't regret it, but I did have some hard financial. Years after that. So, yeah, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 40:03 things happen. And yeah, it's it's interesting, not knowing your wife at all, and you know, just listening to your story. The thing that strikes me in general about a lot of the things that that you've said, not specifically about you or anyone in particular, is we so choose not to or are afraid to take time every day to analyze ourselves, look at what went well, what didn't go well, and how we can deal with what didn't go well, or even what did go well, and how can we do it better. I'm a firm believer in the whole concept of introspection, and it's something that we should do. And again, this isn't a comment about you, but it's just something that crossed my mind to say that so many people don't, and we never really get deep into what's going on in our lives. And clearly, you did, you have, you have, you've taken some major steps, and you've thought about it a lot over the years, and it was a major step to go out in faith, to change careers, but I gathered that you would say you're really Happy and doing well now,   Dale Young ** 41:20 yep, I am and, you know, as of, as of June 2021, I am married to my new bride, and we are extremely happy, and I've inherited four kids and the three, sorry, three kids and four grandkids through that new marriage. And so that's that's been wonderful to, you know, be able to have some other people to pour into now. So,   Michael Hingson ** 41:46 so do you subscribe to the theory that the purpose of being a grandfather is to spoil grandkids?   Dale Young ** 41:52 I believe that with all my heart, yes, I do good thing.   Michael Hingson ** 41:59 If somebody ever told me, No, I think I'd not really understand why, but yeah, we we never had kids, just lot of things from a physical standpoint for her, she was concerned about it being in a wheelchair her whole life. She just felt it wouldn't be good for her body. But what we also did was we spoiled nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews and so on. So we we live vicariously that way. But you know the advantages, of course, just like with being a grandparent, at the end of the day, you can throw them out and send them home.   Dale Young ** 42:36 That's right, hype them up on sugar and send them home for somebody else to deal with them, right?   Michael Hingson ** 42:40 That's right. So it works, works really well, yeah.   Dale Young ** 42:46 So anyway, so, yeah, it's, you know, it's been a wild ride. I will say that I felt like in 2004 when I went through that experiential based training. Before that, I would have said that I was probably a an emotional infant and an emotional, a relational infant. I really didn't understand relationships or emotions the way I do now. Now I don't think it was quite true. I think I actually started learning even going back to 92 I think that was part of what I was part of. What led to that statement of, this is just a job, not a career. I think I was glimmering and and growing a little bit. But that time in 2004 2005 and the volunteering I did after that, it really just supercharged it, and that, that's one of the reasons why I say, I say the community is one of the big three components of my coaching now, is that you gotta bring in the relational aspect.   Michael Hingson ** 43:57 But it's pretty insightful that you, you said, and, and I can understand why it took a while to really understand the full significance of it, but it's just a job, not a career, that is a pretty profound statement, and I think all too often, so many of us are just doing a job and we don't find maybe what our career really ought to be, or what our career really is, or maybe we view it as a job, and it really is our career. Again, it gets back to really taking the time to think about it and analyze it, and it's something that we all ought to do a lot more of but it is, I think, really important to have that thing that you really love to do. And I agree with the people who say that it's not a job when you're just having fun and you just really enjoy doing it, and the time passes by so quickly. Yeah.   Dale Young ** 45:00 Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that really gets to the fourth key of my four key system for the calling, which is the desires of your heart. I think it's Psalm 37 if I remember right, that says something about you know, God will follow the Lord, and he'll give you the desires of your heart. That's a paraphrase. But you know, in my way of thinking, God wired you and created you, not only with your talents and your spiritual gifts and things like that, your hair color, your eye color, you know, all these types of things, but he also put in the desires of your heart, and those are the things that are wired in you, deep within you. Proverbs, 20, verse five says a the passions and a person's heart are like deep water, but the but a person of understanding will draw them out. And that's actually a pretty nice coaching verse. You know, I think coaches can come alongside of you and help you recognize when you say those statements, like, it's just a job, not a career. They can help you when you are just rattling on and you say, Oh yeah, I love to do this. And you go, Wait a minute. Why? What did you just say? Oh, yeah, I love to do this. What does that say about your desires of your heart? You know? What does it say about your passion and about your mission? You know, those types of things. So that's, that's the kind of the calling framework. It's got those four keys and custom intersections and things like that. But you put those four keys together that provides the basis for my coaching program through the calling piece, which is the third piece of my whole coaching system.   Michael Hingson ** 46:52 Well, and I asked you before, if you you know how people receive your coaching, it seems to me, although you know you, I'm sure you bring God into it and Jesus into it, and so on, but you're teaching basic concepts that should be acceptable to anyone. But of course, as soon as you talk about God or Jesus, they're going to be people who just tune it out. Oh, that's Christian. I don't believe in that. The concepts, though, are still the same.   Dale Young ** 47:24 Well, the concepts of the Bible are still the same. You know, almost everybody steals something from the Bible, whether they realize it or not. So, so from that point of view, yeah, I totally agree. I just want people, and I'm open to working with non Christians. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, they, they have to. They have to be able to be respectful to me the way that I'm respectful to them. And they have to know that I am a Christian. And if you put me, I'm probably Christian, you know. And so I'm going to use Bible verses, because I do. I do believe in it. I don't always have to put the reference on them, you know, I don't have to be in your face with about it. But it is something that, if I'm speaking to Christians, they get it a little bit more if I do,   Michael Hingson ** 48:15 if they, if they know the Bible, right? Yeah. Well,   Dale Young ** 48:19 these are, these are these are principles. These are things that are common to everybody, because they're common to humans, sure,   Michael Hingson ** 48:29 and in reality, of course, a lot of the well, most all of the principles are common, even among all religions, if we would, but recognize that. But we get bound up in too many things and get into too many arguments that that really don't make any sense at all, but nevertheless, we do it.   Dale Young ** 48:53 Yeah, that's that's part of what makes us human as well.   Michael Hingson ** 48:57 Yeah, so I've heard. So what are you most passionate about today?   Dale Young ** 49:04 What I'm most passionate about today is helping people understand this framework, whether they coach with me or not, and getting them out of their comfort zone. It's because it's not really a comfort zone. It's an uncomfortable zone that they're used to and living inside a zone where they're not improving, where they're not growing, that where they're not developing, that just is a waste of talent. It's a waste of life. You know, it's basically you're just dead, but not in the grave yet. And so I really want people to get energized. I want them to live their life, and I want them to do what they're designed, to do, what they were put on this planet, to do whatever that might be. And I just like to help them. I like to come alongside and help people. Figure out what that is. That's where I get the most joy. That's where I feel like God smiles at me. Is if I've done that in a day, he I can go to sleep at night saying, oh, god smiling at me because I did my job today.   Michael Hingson ** 50:15 Well, I have, in in the past, done some some significant studying about coaching and so on. And one of the things that I've always remembered that I read was that the whole idea of a coach is not to have the answers, but to help guide you to figure out what the answers are. And I think that's so important, and makes it so powerful, because when you help people discover what their calling is, what they're meant to do, and what makes them passionate. There's nothing better than that.   Dale Young ** 50:49 That's right, that's right. I mean, it's if I'm doing on Zoom, I can see the light bulb go off in their head, you know, because their whole countenance changes. It's just so amazing. And that's part of what I like about the strength finder, the strength finder assessment, and the way that I coach through that. It just really does they start making these connections that they've never made before, and they start realizing, okay, this is actually who I am. And I'll give an example, one of the ladies I coached through the strength finder back in 2019 she had self published 16 books at the time that I met her, she was owner, publisher of a neighborhood magazine, but she was burned out. She was just overworked. She just felt like this wasn't what God wanted her to do, and so I took her through this process, and she basically shut that company down. She started a new company doing virtual administration, and she was fully booked in 30 days with no advertising or anything else, and she was looking for people to help her do the work. And now, five years later, she is got a company that's got, I don't know, 1718, 20 people part time working for her, helping her do all the work. 35 clients, 40 clients nationwide. And she's going, she's, she's at the point where she's trying to get herself out of the day to day work in that business, and it's just been so successful for her because she is doing what she was designed to do and what she was meant to do. And the way she says is, when you stop swimming upstream, that's when the magic happens.   Michael Hingson ** 52:41 How did you help her figure out what the solution was or what she was supposed to do? Well, it was actually   Dale Young ** 52:48 sitting there in her talents, you know, communication, even though she'd self published 16 books, communication was November 14 for her, it wasn't one of her natural talents. She knew how to do it, but it was actually also draining for her. Okay? And so turned out that of those 16 books, I think 12 or 13 of them, were journals. So she wasn't actually creating writing a bunch of stuff. She was creating space for other people to write. So it was kind of an interesting thing that she saw once she had been through this process, okay, but you know, her, her talents are actually, we've got four of the same top five, not in the same order, but, you know, we're very similar in some of those. And so, you know, her idea, her, her superpower is being able to get a group of people to work on a particular issue or problem or set of problems for other people. And she does it so well. She's a she's a community builder, and she does it really well.   Michael Hingson ** 53:55 That's cool, yeah. Well, we talked a little bit about them. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your two books. My two books. So   Dale Young ** 54:03 my books are, let's see, I don't even have one hair candy for me. I was gonna hold it up, leave the pictures through the camera. So two books are, first one was published in January of 2023, and it's called next level your life. And it's a compilation book with about 40 authors in it. It's got Tom Ziegler in it, Simon Bailey, Ross, Robert Helms, I think he's got something like three quarters of a billion dollars in real estate, and it's put together by Kyle Wilson. Kyle Wilson was the marketing person behind Jim Rohn. You know Jim Rohn was the big speaker, right? Kyle Wilson took him from like $400 for a one hour speaking engagement up to $10,000 a day. A type of thing. And, you know, booked out his calendar with 300 events a year, or something like that. So, so next level your life. And I wrote a chapter in there, and it talks about the worst decade of my life, which was from 2012 2011 2012 when started asking for a divorce. Through that bottom were in the three or four weeks I divorce was final, and then I went to part time in the IT career and all that sort of stuff. The second book is called The transformational journey. It came out in October 2023 and it's got Dennis Whateley, Brian Tracy, Chris Gronkowski, from football fame and Latino from music frame, lot of good people in there, similar type thing, but 40 different authors in that one. So next level your life. Hit Amazon. Bestseller in 31 categories, and transformational journey at Amazon bestseller in 60 categories, and they're available on Amazon about 13 bucks a piece on on Amazon. So yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 56:17 what's your your next book project? Well, my   Dale Young ** 56:21 next book project is another compilation book that's going to be coming out probably later this year, maybe 24 and it's actually going to have more like 80 people in it, and something like 20 celebrity authors, again, put together by Kyle Wilson, and it's called Lessons from thought leaders.   Michael Hingson ** 56:47 Okay, cool. Well, we'll have to keep an eye out for that. I think that it'll be interesting to see how all that goes.   Dale Young ** 56:58 Yeah, it's been interesting being a two time number one, best selling author here, and you know, I'm looking for speaking engagements and podcasts like this, and just trying to get my message out, because I feel like this is giving me a platform to talk about the the calling, and helping people to just find their calling, step into their calling, and then follow their calling. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 57:23 if people want to reach out to you and explore the coaching process, explore learning about the calling and working with you, how do they do that?   Dale Young ** 57:35 I'm on all the social media. LinkedIn is Coach Dale Facebook is Coach Dale young. You can send me emails to dale@coachdale.com you can hit my website@coachdale.com and there's you can find all my information in those stories and those two books as well. So yeah, and I'm sure we'll get all of that into the links as well. Yes,   Michael Hingson ** 58:04 it'll all be there. You provided us with a lot of that, so that's cool. Well, I want to thank you for being here and giving us your insights and offering a lot of things for all of us to think about. I hope people will reach out to you. I think it's important that people really analyze themselves and and if they're not successful at it themselves, then they've got people like you who can help with that. But I think it's important that people really analyze themselves and and take the time to understand what they really want to do and what they're passionate about. We all have a whole lot more fun when we deal with our passions and follow through on them. Of course, it's I'm it's probably a little nebulous to say they got to be realistic. But what is realistic that the bottom line is that we really need to decide what we're to do, what we're meant to do, and do it and and you help with that. So that's great. So I want to thank you. I want to thank you for being here, but I also want to thank all of you for listening. We really appreciate it. Hope that you'll reach out to coach Dale. And Dale is D, A, L, E, so please reach out, and he's there and ready to help. I want to thank you for being here, and I really hope that you will give us a five star rating wherever you're listening to unstoppable mindset or watching it. Also, if you'd like to reach out to me, love to hear from you. You can reach me at Michael H, i@accessibe.com that's m, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, I, B, e.com, or go to our podcast page, which is w, w, w, dot Michael hingson.com/podcast, and Michael Hinkson is spelled M, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I N, G, s, O, N, again.com/podcast, and as Dale said, I also am a speaker. I've been speaking ever since September. 11th, 2001 so if you need a speaker, or know anyone who does love to hear from you, you can also reach out to me at speaker at michaelhingson com. But however you do it, I hope that you'll reach out, and I hope that you'll reach out to Dale as well and work with him and use some of those insights. So again, Dale, I want to just thank you for being here and giving us all your time and your thoughts today.   Dale Young ** 1:00:28 Well, thank you, Michael. I've certainly enjoyed it, and I'm honored to be   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:37 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Interview with Steve Leininger, Designer of the TRS-80- Model I Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays Sponsors: 8-Bit Classics  Arcade Shopper   0                                 Floppy Days Tune 1 min 13 sec              Vintage Computer Ads 1 min 42 sec              Intro 9 min 03 sec             bumper - Peter Bartlett  9 min 11 sec              New Acquisitions 17 min 11 sec             bumper - Ian Mavric  17 min 19 sec            Upcoming Computer Shows 21 min 53 sec            bumper - Myles Wakeham 21 min 58 sec            Meet the Listeners 28 min 37 sec            Interview with Steve Leininger 1 hr 20 min 29 sec    Closing This particular episode has a special meaning for me, personally.  You see, as I've mentioned on earlier episodes, the TRS-80 Model I from Tandy/Radio Shack was my first home computer (even though my first programmable device was a TI58C calculator).  I recall the joy and wonder of playing with the machine (it wasn't called the Model I at that time; just the TRS-80; as it was the first of the line) in the local Radio Shack store in 1977 and 1978 and the incredible rush of owning one in 1979; after my wife purchased a Level I BASIC machine for me as a gift for college graduation.  That machine only had 4K of RAM and 4K of ROM (Tiny BASIC), as it was the entry-level machine, but it was a thing of beauty.  I felt like I could do anything with that machine, even though my justification to the wife was that we could track our checkbook and recipes on it.  I think she knew better, but went along with it anyway.  The computer came with everything you needed, including a tape drive and black-and-white monitor, which was good for a poor recent college graduate.  I quickly, as finances allowed with my new engineering job, upgraded the computer to 16K of RAM and Level II BASIC (a powerful Microsoft 12K ROM BASIC) and enjoyed the machine immensely, even using it in my job supporting the build-out of a new nuclear power plant back in those days. I eventually sold off the Model I, in favor of a computer that had color graphics and sound (the Atari 800), but have always continued to have a huge soft spot for that first computer. When I started the Floppy Days Podcast, one of the people that has always been on my bucket list to interview has been Steve Leininger, who, along with Don French while at Radio Shack designed the TRS-80 Model I, among other things.  A few years back, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Steve for the Trash Talk Podcast, when I was co-hosting that show, but an ill-timed trip to the hospital for my son meant that I was not able to participate.  While my son's health is of paramount importance, of course, I always wanted to get another chance to talk with Steve.  Not only was Steve the designer of one of my favorite home computers of all time, but he also was a fellow Purdue University Boilermaker, who graduated just a year before I started there.  The thought that I could have met Steve on campus if I'd been there just a year earlier was very intriguing to me, and fueled my desire to talk with Steve even more. In the last episode (#141 with Paul Terrell) I talked about VCF Southeast in Atlanta in July of 2024.  After I had made plans to attend that show, I was flabbergasted to find out that Earl Baugh, one of the show organizers, had somehow managed to contact Steve and get him to come to the show!  I have to thank Earl for the work he did to make that happen.  Here was my opportunity to certainly meet Steve, and perhaps even talk with him!  I prepped some questions, just in case I was able to get an interview. While at the show, I met Steve and asked him if he would be willing to do a short interview for Floppy Days while at the show.  Amazingly, he was very kind and agreed to do that.  We found a quiet room and I was able to talk with Steve for almost an hour.  This show contains that interview. Another note on this: as you'll hear in the interview, the connection to Steve is even stronger than I realized!  He not only went to my alma mater, but also grew up in some of the same towns that myself and my wife did.  We personally peripherally know some of his relatives.  Things like this really do make you think the world is small! One other, final, note: This interview even ties into the recent and continuing interviews I've been publishing with Paul Terrell.  As you'll hear in upcoming episodes with Paul, and in this interview with Steve, Steve actually worked at the Byte Shop before getting the first job with Tandy, and in fact his work at the Byte Shop directly led to him getting hired by Tandy to design the Model I. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed getting it.  I am overjoyed I finally got the chance to talk to one of my vintage computer heroes, Steve Leininger! New Acquisitions C64 Sketch and Design by Tony Lavioe - sponsored link https://amzn.to/4dZGtt2  Compute's Mapping the IBM PC and PC Junior by Russ Davies - sponsored link https://amzn.to/3yQmrlP  The Best of SoftSide - Atari Edition - https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-best-of-softside-atari-edition  ZX81+38 - https://github.com/mahjongg2/ZX81plus38  magnifying glasses - sponsored link https://amzn.to/4cBQYla  Japanese power adapter - sponsored link https://amzn.to/3XjeUW5  Upcoming Shows VCF Midwest - September 7-8 - Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, IL - http://vcfmw.org/  VCF Europe - September 7-8 - Munich, Germany - https://vcfe.org/E/  World of Retrocomputing 2024 Expo - September 14-15 - Kitchener, ON, Canada - https://www.facebook.com/events/s/world-of-retro-computing-2024-/1493036588265072/  Teletext 50 - Sep 21-22 - Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, UK - https://www.teletext50.com/  Portland Retro Gaming Expo - September 27-29 - Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR - https://retrogamingexpo.com/  Tandy Assembly - September 27-29 - Courtyard by Marriott Springfield - Springfield, OH - http://www.tandyassembly.com/  AmiWest - October 25-27 - Sacramento, CA - https://amiwest.net/  Chicago TI International World Faire - October 26 - Evanston Public Library (Falcon Room, 303), Evanston, IL - http://chicagotiug.sdf.org/faire/   Retro Computer Festival 2024 - November 9-10 - Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, England - https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/  Silly Venture WE (Winter Edition) - Dec. 5-8 - Gdansk, Poland - https://www.demoparty.net/silly-venture/silly-venture-2024-we   Schedule Published on Floppy Days Website - https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSeLsg4hf5KZKtpxwUQgacCIsqeIdQeZniq3yE881wOCCYskpLVs5OO1PZLqRRF2t5fUUiaKByqQrgA/pub  Interview Steve's Workbench at radioshack.com (archived) - https://web.archive.org/web/19980528232503/http://www.radioshack.com/sw/swb/   Transcript of Interview-Only Randy Kindig: All right. I really appreciate your time today, Steve.  Steve Leininger: Thank you for having me, Randy.  Randy Kindig: So let's start out maybe just by talking about where You live today, and what you do? Steve Leininger: I live in Woodland Park, Colorado, which is 8, 500 feet, right out in front of we got Pike's Peak out our front window. Randy Kindig: Oh. Oh, that's nice.  Steve Leininger: Yeah we get snow up through about June, and then it starts again about September. But it's not as much snow as you would imagine.  Randy Kindig: I've got property in Montana, and I lived out there for a couple of years,  Steve Leininger: so there you go.  Randy Kindig: We probably got more snow up there.  Steve Leininger: Hey, you asked what I did.  I'm involved with Boy Scouts, a maker space with a church based ministry firewood ministry, actually. Some people call it a fire bank. So we provide firewood to people who can't afford that.  Randy Kindig: Oh.  Steve Leininger: So it's like a food bank, but with fire, firewood.  Randy Kindig: I've never heard of that. Steve Leininger: We source the firewood. We cut it down and we split it. Lots of volunteers involved; pretty big project.  Randy Kindig: Yeah. Okay, cool. I also wanted to mention, I'm a fellow Boilermaker.  Steve Leininger: There you go.  Randy Kindig: I know you went to Purdue, right?  Steve Leininger: I did go to Purdue.  Randy Kindig: Did you ever get back there?  Steve Leininger: Yeah, and in fact they've got a couple learning spaces named after us. Randy Kindig: Oh, okay.  Steve Leininger: We've been donating to our respective alma maters. My wife went to IU.  Randy Kindig: Oh, is that right? Oh my.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, oh my and me. Yeah, the fact that the family who's all IU, their family tolerated me was, quite a remarkable thing.  Randy Kindig: Okay.  I find it interesting because I think you graduated in 76, is that right? Steve Leininger: 74.  Randy Kindig: Oh, 74.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. Yeah. I was there from … Randy Kindig: Oh yeah, you actually were gone before I started.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. So I was there from 70 to 73. 70 to 70 four. When I graduated in four years, I got both my bachelor's and master's degree by going through the summer. I managed to pass out of the first year classes because of some of the high school stuff yeah.  Randy Kindig: Okay. I started in 75, so I guess we just missed each other.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. Yeah. You're the new kids coming in.  Randy Kindig: Yeah. . So I, I found that interesting and I wanted to say that. Do you keep up with their sports program or anything like that? Steve Leininger: Yeah, they play a pretty good game of basketball in fact, I ribbed my wife about it because she was from the earlier days, the Bobby Knight days at IU that were phenomenal.  Randy Kindig: Yeah, exactly. For those of you listening, I'm talking with Steve Leininger, who was the primary developer, if not the developer, of the TRS 80 Model I.. Steve Leininger: I did all the hardware and software for it. I'll give Don French credit for sticking to it and getting a project started. And for refining, refining our product definition a little bit to where it was better than it would have been if I would have stopped early.  Randy Kindig: Okay. And I have talked with Don before. I've interviewed him on the podcast, and I met him at Tandy Assembly. But I'm just curious, when you were hired into Tandy and you were told what you were going to do; exactly what were you told?  Steve Leininger: They had a 16 bit microprocessor board that another consultant had developed. And they were trying to make a personal computer out of this. It was the Pace microprocessor, which was not a spectacular success for National, but it was one of the first 16 bit processors. But they had basically an initial prototype, might have been even the second level of the thing. No real documentation, no software, ran on three different voltages and didn't have input or output. Other than that, it was fine. I was brought in because I was one of the product one of the engineers for the development boards, the development board series for the SCAMP, the S C M P, the National Semiconductor had a very low cost microprocessor that at one point in time, I benchmarked against the 8080 with positive benchmarks and ours was faster on the benchmarks I put together, but as I was later told there's lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. But so they said take a look at using that, their low cost microprocessor that you were working with. And it really wasn't the right answer for the job. Let's see, the Altair was already out. Okay. That was the first real personal computer. The Apple, the Apple 1 was out. Okay. But it was not a consumer computer. Okay. They, it was just, it was like a cookie sheet of parts, which was very similar to what was used in the Atari games at the commercial games. Okay. pong and that kind of stuff at that time. And I had been working, after Purdue, I went to National Semiconductor. There's a long story behind all that. But in the process, some of us engineers would go up to the Homebrew Computer Club that met monthly up at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. We're talking Wilbur and Orville Wright kinds of things going on. Yeah. Everyone who was in the pioneering version of computing had at one time been to that meeting. Randy Kindig: It's very famous. Yeah.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. And Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were basically a couple guys working out of their garage at the time. I was still working at National Semiconductor, but I also had a Moonlight job at Byte Shop number 2. The second computer store in all of California. Randy Kindig: And So you worked with Paul Terrell. Steve Leininger: I actually worked with one of, yeah, Paul, I actually worked for Paul's I don't know if it was a partner, Todd, I don't even remember the guy's name. But I just, it was.  Randy Kindig: I was curious because I'm talking to Paul right now and getting interviews. Steve Leininger: Yeah. I, I'm sure we met, but it wasn't anything horribly formal. Since it was the number two shop, it still wasn't the number one shop, which Paul worked out of. And so we had an Apple 1 there. I actually got the job because I when I When I went in there, they were trying to troubleshoot something with what looked like an oscilloscope that they pulled out of a tank, and so it had, audio level kind of bandwidth, but could not do a digital circuit. And I said what you really need is a, I told him, a good tectonic scope or something like that. He said do you want a job here? I ended up moonlighting there, which was, as fortune would have it, was a good deal when the folks from Radio Shack came down to visit. Because when they came down to visit the sales guy wasn't there. We'll let the engineer talk to them, they almost never let the engineers talk to them.  Randy Kindig: So you had to talk with them.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. It was John Roach, Don French, and it was probably Jack Sellers, okay and Don was probably the; he was the most on top of stuff electronically because he was a hobbyist of sorts. The other two guys: Mr. Sellers ran the engineering group. John Roach was the VP of manufacturing. And they were basically on a parts visit. They do it once a year, once, twice a year. And they also did it with Motorola and a couple other places. But I told him about this microprocessor and that I was writing a tiny BASIC for it. Okay. Tiny BASIC was a interpreted basic that a guy named Li-Chen Wang actually had the first thing in Dr. Dobbs, Dr. Dobbs magazine. We're talking about, we're talking about things that you don't realize are the shoulders of giants that turned out to be the shoulders of giants. And in fact, we reached out to Mr. Wang as we were working on it. We thought we had the software already taken care of because I'm jumping ahead in the story, but we were going to have Bob Uterich, and you'd have to chase that back. We had him signed up to write a BASIC interpreter for us, but because he'd already done one for the 6800, and it was included in Interface Age magazine. on a plastic record. You remember the old plastic records you could put in a magazine?  Randy Kindig: Yeah, I did see that.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, so this was called a floppy ROM when they did it. Yeah. So if you had the right software and everything you could download the software off of the floppy ROM and run it on 6800. I think he used the Southwest Technical Products thing. And so we'd signed him up to do the BASIC. This was independent of the hardware design I was doing. And he went into radio silence on us; couldn't find him. And so we get to, in parallel, I was using the Li-Chen Wang plan to do at least a demo version of BASIC that would run on the original computer. And when the demo went successfully on Groundhog Day in 1977. This is the time frame we're talking about. I I started work on July 5th, the year before it. With Tandy? Yeah. Okay. We rolled into town on the 3rd, and of course they're closed for the 4th. And on the 5th I started, and there was the wandering around in the desert at the beginning of that, and Don's probably talked about how I was moved from there to their audio factory and then to the old saddle factory. Tandy used to be primarily a leather company before they bought Radio Shack in 1966 or something like that. And anyway, when the software didn't come out, I ended up writing the software, too. So I designed all the hardware and all the software. I didn't do the power supply. Chris Klein did the power supply. And, a little bit of the analog video circuitry, but it was very little part of that. Because we were just making a video signal. I did all the digital stuff on that. Yeah.  Randy Kindig: So the software ended up being what was the level one ROM, right?  Steve Leininger: Yeah, the level one ROM started out as the Li-Chen Wang BASIC. But he had no I. O. in his software, so I was doing the keyboard scanning. I had to do the cassette record and playback. Had to implement data read and data write Peek and poke, which is pretty simple. Put in the graphic statements. Yeah, oh, and floating point. Now, floating point, luckily, Zilog had a library for that, but I had to basically, this was before APIs were a big deal, so I basically had to use their interface, To what I had written and had to allocate storage, correct? We're talking about 4K bytes of ROM. I know, yeah. Very tiny, and to put all the I. O. in there, and to make it so that you could be updating the screen, when you're doing the cassette I put two asterisks up there and blinked the second one on and off, you remember that?  Randy Kindig: Oh yeah. Steve Leininger: Sort of as a level set.  Randy Kindig: Yeah.  Steve Leininger: And someone said, oh, you should have patented that thing. And actually I have seven or eight patents, U. S. patents, on different parts of the computer architecture.  Randy Kindig: Oh, do you?  Steve Leininger: But not the blinking asterisk, which is probably a patentable feature.  Randy Kindig: Yeah, I wish I'd had that on other machines, that I ended up having. So that would have been nice, yeah. I liken what you've done with what Steve Wozniak did, for the Apple II. You're somebody I've always wanted to talk to because I felt like you were one of the important pioneers in their early years. What do you have to say about that? Do you feel like what you did was ... Steve Leininger: in retrospect, yes. And I have a greater appreciation for people like the Wright Brothers. If you think about the Wright Brothers they took all their stuff from their Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop down to Kill Devil Hills. We now know it as Kitty Hawk. But they would take the stuff down there by train, and then they would have to put it in horse driven wagons. Think about that. And people would ask them, what are you going to use the airplane for? It's what are you going to use a home computer for? Yeah, to maintain recipes and to play games.  Randy Kindig: Do your checkbook.  Steve Leininger: Do your check, home security. There's a whole lot of stuff that we talked about. And other giants entered the field: Multiplan, which became Lotus 1 2 3, which became Excel. Not the same company, but the idea, could you live without a spreadsheet today? Very difficult for some things, right?  Randy Kindig: Yeah. Yeah, it's ubiquitous.  People use it for everything. Yeah. Yeah. So you've been, I talked with David and Teresa Walsh. Or Welsh, I'm sorry, Welsh. Where they did the book Priming the Pump. Steve Leininger: That's very that's pretty close to the real thing.  Randy Kindig: Is it? Okay. They named their book after what you did and said; that you primed the pump for home computers. Can you expand on that and tell us exactly what you meant by that?  Steve Leininger: It again goes back to that shoulders of giants thing, and I forget who said that; it's actually a very old quote, I can see further because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. And I think the thing that we brought to the table and Independently, Commodore and Apple did the same thing in 1977. There were three computers that came out inexpensive enough that you could use them in the home. They all came with ROM loaded BASIC. You didn't have to load anything else in. They all came with a video output. Some had displays. Some Commodore's was built in. One of ours was a Clip on and you had to go find one for the apple. For the Apple, yeah. Apple had a superior case. Apple and Radio Shack both had great keyboards. Randy Kindig: apple was expandable, with its... Steve Leininger: yeah, Apple Apple was internally expandable, yeah. And, but it cost $1,000. Without the cassette. Without the monitor. It wasn't the same type of device.  Randy Kindig: I was a college student. And, I looked at all three options. It was like the TRS-80; there are Radio Shacks everywhere.  You could go in and play with one; which was nice. And they were inexpensive enough that I could actually afford one. Steve Leininger: And, Radio Shack can't duck the, if you did something wrong, you had to fix it.  Randy Kindig: That's right. Let's see here. So initially the idea was to have a kit computer by Tandy? Steve Leininger: Yeah. I'm not sure whose idea that was. It made some kind of sense. Because that's the way the Altair was, and Radio Shack did sell a number of kits, but in the process of still kicking that around, saying it could be a possibility. I was one of the ones that said it could be a possibility. Within the same group that I did the design work from, they also would take kits in that people had built and troubleshoot the things if they didn't work. We had a couple engineers that would see if you connected something wrong or something.  If you didn't, sometimes it was a matter that the instructions weren't clear. If you tell someone to put an LED in, yeah. You specifically have to tell them which way to put it in. And might be an opportunity to tweak your timing. Yeah. Anyway, we get this clock in, and it was a digital clock. Seven segment LEDs probably cost 50 bucks or more. Which is crazy. But It says, put all the components in the board, turn the board over, and solder everything to the board. And, pretty simple instructions. This had a sheet of solder over the entire bottom of the board. Someone figured out how to put two pounds of solder on the back of this thing. And, as we all got a great chuckle out of that, You realize, oh, you don't want to have to deal with a computer like this. You really don't. And Lou Kornfeld, who was the president at the time, didn't really want the computer. But he said, it's not going to be a kit. All right. That, that, that took care of that. great idea. Great idea.  Randy Kindig: Were there any other times when you thought the computer might, or were there any times, when you thought the computer might not come to fruition? Any snags that you had that made you think that maybe this isn't going to work?  Steve Leininger: Not really. I was young and pretty well undaunted. Randy Kindig: Pretty sure you could,  Steve Leininger: yeah I, it wasn't any, it wasn't any different than building one at home. I'd been building kits since, night kits, heath kits, that kind of stuff, since I was a kid. And home brewed a couple things, including a hot dog cooker made from two nails and a couple wires that plugged into the wall. Don't try that at home.  Randy Kindig: No kidding.  Steve Leininger: But, it's funny if you If you look it up on, if you look that kind of project up on the internet, you can still find a project like that. It's like what's it called? Anvil tossing, where you put gunpowder under an anvil, shoot it up in the air. What could possibly go wrong? Don't,  Randy Kindig: It's very well documented in books like Priming the Pump, Stan Veit's book, which I assume you're familiar with, and Fire in the Valley, what your involvement was with the Model 1. But there was some mention of your involvement with the Expansion Interface and other TRS 80 projects. What else did you work on while you were there?  Steve Leininger: The Color Computer, the Expansion Interface. The model three to a little.  Randy Kindig: Okay.  Steve Leininger: Little bit. The model two was the big one. And point I just got tired of the management there.  Randy Kindig: Did you? Okay.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. I my mind was going faster than theirs, and they made the conscious decision to do whatever IBM has done, but do it cheaper. That, to me, that's not a. Didn't say less expensively either, so the whole thing just troubled me that, we're not going to be able to do anything new unless IBM has done it. And at about the same time the Macintosh came out and a superb piece of work. Yeah.  Randy Kindig: Okay. So what education training and previous work experience did you have at the time you got hired by Tandy that made you uniquely qualified for that project that they were looking for?  Steve Leininger: I'd been playing around with electronics since I was in the third grade. Actually, electricity.  Randy Kindig: The third grade, wow.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. My, my mom got me a kit that had light bulbs and bells and buzzers and wire from, I think it might have been the Metropolitan Museum. They had a kit. They, they've got a, they still today have an online presence. It, of course the materials have changed, but the kit had all these parts and it had no instructions. And I don't know if that was by design or it didn't have instructions, so I had to learn how to hook up wires and light bulbs and bells and switches to make it do things. And, in the process, I found out that if you put a wire right across the battery terminals, it gets hot. And, interesting stuff to know. Pretty soon, I was taking this stuff in to show and tell in the third grade. Look, and I was very early in electronics. It's electricity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then my mom would take me to the library. She was quite a voracious reader, and I'd go to the library. technical section specifically the Dewey Decimal 621, which was electronics and things like that. Randy Kindig: you still remember that.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. And in the 590 series, there's some good stuff too. And I would usually take out a stack of books, even though I was a horrible reader because I'm dyslexic and ADD. So I have an attention span and reading problem. But the technical stuff I was reading about pipeline architecture processors while I was still in junior high. And not that was important to where I ended up, but it was important because I understood the words and data flow, and stuff like that. And between that and building the kits and things like that, I When we moved to Indianapolis, my dad moved jobs down to Indianapolis. Randy Kindig: Oh, you lived in Indianapolis?  Steve Leininger: Yeah. So I moved from South Bend down to Indianapolis. So I probably passed your house as . Actually we came down through Kokomo, but but yeah.  Randy Kindig: I actually grew up in that part of the state. Just south of South Bend.  Steve Leininger: Okay. So yeah La Paz, Plymouth,  Randy Kindig: yeah, Warsaw, Rochester.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, I was born in Rochester.  Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. So that's where I grew up in that area.  Steve Leininger: Okay, there you go. My dad's from Akron.  Randy Kindig: Are you serious?  Steve Leininger: I am serious.  Randy Kindig: Akron's where my wife grew up. And I was just 10 miles from there.  Steve Leininger: The general store there, Dan Leininger and Sons, that's my great grandfather. Randy Kindig: Really?  Steve Leininger: Yeah.  Randy Kindig: I'll be darned. Okay. Okay.  Steve Leininger: So now it all makes sense.  Randy Kindig: That's amazing.  Steve Leininger: Anyway, we started a garage band. This is before Apple's garage band. And I made my own amplifier. It basically had the sun sun amplifiers back end on the thing and a Fender Showman front end on it. Completely home brewed really loud amplifier. And I had a friend who had a guitar amplifier that was broken, and he had taken it down to the music store there. And after six weeks of not getting it back, they said we've had trouble with our technician and all that. I asked if I could go down and look at it, and in 15 minutes I had his amplifier fixed. And they said, do you want tom so you want a job? All right. Yeah, because I'd been doing, I'd had a paper route before and I don't think I was doing anything since we'd moved and ao I started working in a music store and they ended up with two music stores and then an organ store next door and I started repairing that kind of stuff. And this was the end of my first year in college. Went to the extension in Indianapolis.  Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. And Was that I U P U I?  Steve Leininger: IUPUI, yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I U P U I.  Randy Kindig: Huh. I went there as well.  Steve Leininger: Yeah and learned Fortran there, got all my first year classes out, and then moved on up to the campus. And because we'd always go to the library, and because my mom would often take me to the library, the newsstand not too far from the library, and she'd get a couple magazines, but she let me get an electronic magazine. And, I didn't understand these things, pretty soon you start understanding the pic, you start understanding it. This is a resistor, I built a little shocker box based on a design in probably elementary electronics. And It's like a handheld electric fence.  Randy Kindig: Oh, wow.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. Think hot dog cooker. Anyway, so I learned some electronics that way. A lot of that was self taught. I learned quite a bit more by working in the music store, again, this was before I was taught any formal electronics. And actually when I moved up to campus on Purdue, I thought I was going to be a world class guitar amplifier designer. That's where I thought. And it turns out my analog gut feelings aren't, weren't as good as other people's. Paul Schreiber does a much better job with electronics, with analog electronics than I do. But digital electronics, I understood this stuff. I would hang out in the library and I'd read the trade magazines. So I was up to date on, I was way more up to date than a typical professor would be on current electronics. And in 1973, which was the end of my junior year, Electronics Magazine had an article on the Intel 8008. And I said, Oh, I understand this. See, I'd already been taking assembly language. Now they didn't teach assembly language programming in the electronics school. They had Fortran, but there was no way to get from Fortran to ..they weren't teaching programming languages. I had to go to the business school where I learned assembly language on the school's CDC 6600 mainframe.  Randy Kindig: Really?  Steve Leininger: Yeah.  Randy Kindig: Through the business school?  Steve Leininger: Yeah. And for those of you who have never tried assembly language programming, it looks like a foreign language until you just internalize it in your brain: there's ADD, A D and A D C for ADD with carry, and there's a whole bunch of different things. There's different ways to move data around, but you're only doing a few really basic things, and if you do it fast enough, it looks like it's instantaneous. That's the way even your phone works today. It's because you're doing it fast enough. It fools you.  Randy Kindig: Yep. Wow. Do you ever look back at these days, at those days, with amazement? As far as how far the industry has come?  Steve Leininger: Oh yeah. And, it's funny because you wouldn't, you couldn't probably, but you wouldn't start over again. I had to learn, I had to learn digital video. Actually the giant that I, whose shoulders I stood on there was the late Don Lancaster. He had a book called TV Typewriter Cookbook. And actually that came out a little bit later, but he had a TV typewriter series in Radio Electronics Magazine. And basically alphanumeric display. If you think about it, just the glass teletype, the keyboard display and a serial interface at the time that the RadioShack computer came out was selling for 999. Another 400 on top of what we were selling the whole computer for. Because we had a microprocessor in there. We didn't have a whole lot of options. We didn't have a whole lot of fluff. In fact Motorola said, send this to your schematics and your parts list and let's see if we can minimize your circuit. And after two weeks they sent it back. He said, you did a pretty good job here. . .  Randy Kindig: Okay. Huh. You still stay in touch with people at Tandy?  Steve Leininger: A few of them. It's actually been more lately. Because it's almost more interesting now. It's like the, I don't know whatever happened to Atwater and Kent, of the Atwater Kent radio. But, that's an old school radio that now you've got people that rebuild them and got them all polished up and all this kind of stuff. But for a while they ended up in the dump. I'm sure, there are some trash 80s that ended up in the trash.  Randy Kindig: I'm sure.  Steve Leininger: Yeah but I've gotten rid of lots of PCs that don't meet my needs anymore, right? Randy Kindig: Sure. Yeah, we all have, somewhere along the way. It seemed like you were really quiet there for a long time and that you were difficult to get in contact with. Steve Leininger: I wasn't really that difficult. I didn't maintain a social media presence on the thing, but things that I had my own consulting company for quite a while. I actually came back to Radio Shack two more times after I left. One was to come back as a technologist there. The politics still didn't work out well. Then I came back as a contractor to help them with some of their online things. I actually had a website called Steve's Workbench. Steve Leininger: And you can find it on the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine. And it had some basic stamp projects. And we were going to do all sorts of other things. But I managed to upset the people at RadioShack. com. They didn't have a big sense of humor about someone being critical about the products that they'd selected. And I, I did a... I was going to start doing product reviews on the kits, how easy it was to solder, whether it was a good value for the money and all that kind of stuff. And I gave a pretty honest review on it. And Radio Shack didn't appreciate the power of an honest review. It's what makes Amazon what it is, right? You go in there and if there's something that's got just two stars on the reviews, Yeah, you really got to know what you're doing if you're going to buy the thing, right? And if you see something that's got a bunch of one star and a bunch of five star reviews Yeah, someone's probably aalting the reference at the top end. And so I mean they had such a fit that when they changed platforms For RadioShack. com, they didn't take Steve's Workbench with it And I basically lost that position. Radio Shack should own the makerspace business right now. They at one time, one time I suggested, you ought to take a look at buying Digikey or maybe Mouser. Mouser was right down the street from us. They already had their hands into Allied, but these other two were doing stuff, more consumer oriented, but they didn't. They were making, they were flush with money from selling cell phone contracts. And they thought that was the way of the future until the cell phone companies started reeling that back in. At a certain point, you don't want to be paying your 5 percent or 10 percent royalty to Radio Shack for just signing someone up.  Randy Kindig: Yeah. Okay. I didn't realize you had ever gone back and worked for them again.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, twice,  Randy Kindig: and so I'm curious, did you meet any other famous figures in the microcomputer revolution while you were working at Tandy?  Steve Leininger: At Tandy, let's see.  Randy Kindig: I'm just curious.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, Bill Gates, of course. I went out when we were working on level two BASIC. And Bill Gates I think was probably a hundred- thousand- aire at that time. And, working in a, thhey had a floor in a bank building in Seattle. He took me to the basement of his dad's law firm, and we had drinks there, and I went out to his house on the lake. This was not the big house. I've never been there. It was a big house on the lake, but it wasn't the one That he built later on. So I knew him early on run across Forest Mims a couple times. And of course, he's the shoulders upon which a lot of electronic talent was built and some of the stuff is lost. Jameco is actually bringing him back as a… Jameco is a kinda like a Radio Shack store online. It's yeah it is, it's not as robust as DigiKey or Bower, but they've held their roots.  Someone I've not met Lady Ada from Adafruit would be fun.  Randy Kindig: Yeah. Would, yeah.  Steve Leininger: I, that, that's another thing that, if we had something along those lines, that would have been cool, but the buyers weren't up, up to the task and they when you don't want criticism at a certain point you've got to quit doing things if you don't want to be criticized.  Randy Kindig: Sure. When you finally got the Model 1 rolled out and you saw the tremendous interest, were you surprised in the interest that it garnered?  Steve Leininger: I wasn't. I wasn't. In fact, there's a quote of me. Me and John Roach had a discussion on how many of these do you think we could sell? And, this is actually quoted in his obituary on the, in the Wall Street Journal. I, Mr. Tandy said you could build 3, 500 of these because we've got 3, 500 stores and we can use them in the inventory. And to take inventory. And John Roach thought maybe we could sell, up to 5, 000 of these things in the first year. And I said, oh no, I think we could sell 50, 000. To which he said, horseshit. Just like that. And that, now I quoted that to the Wall Street Journal, and they put that in his obituary. Yeah I don't know how many times that word shows up in the Wall Street Journal, but if you search their files you'll find that it was me quoting John Roach. So … Randy Kindig: I'll have to, I'll have to look for that, yeah, that's funny. So you were not surprised by the interest,  Steve Leininger: no, it, part of it was I knew the leverage of the stores I'd been working, when we introduced the thing I'd been working for the company for just over a year. Think about that. And it wasn't until just before probably, it was probably September or October when Don and I agreed on the specs. I'd keep writing it up, and he'd look at it. Don actually suggested that, demanded, he doesn't, in a, but in a good natured way, he made a good case for it, that I have, in addition to the cassette interface on there, that I have a way to read and write data. Because if you're going to do an accounting program, you got to be able to read and write data. I actually figured out a way to do that. There were a couple other things. John Roach really wanted blinking lights on the thing. And my mechanical, the mechanical designer, there said that's going to cost more money to put the LEDs in there. What are you going to do with them? And, Mr. Roach was, you know, familiar with the IBM probably the 360 by then? Anyway. The mainframes. Yeah, mainframes always had blinking lights on them.  Randy Kindig: Exactly.  Steve Leininger: And since it's a computer, it should have blinking lights. And Larry said, Larry the mechanical guy said what are you going to do with them? I said, I can't, I said I could put stuff up there, It's… Randy Kindig: What are they going to indicate?  Steve Leininger: Yeah. And then, he said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to make the case without holes for the lights and just don't worry about it. That was the end of the discussion. Mr. Roach was probably a little disappointed, but yeah, no one else had them,  Randy Kindig: it's funny to think that you'd have blinking lights on a microcomputer like that. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any aspect of the Model one development you would do differently if you were doing it today?  Steve Leininger: Yeah, I would, I would've put the eighth memory chip in with the, with the video display so you get upper and lower case. Randy Kindig: Yeah, there you go. Okay.  Steve Leininger: Might've put buffers to the outside world. We had the, the microprocessor was buffered, but it was, it was very short distance off the connector there. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot I would have changed. Software could have been written a little better, but when one person's writing all the software the development system that I had was a Zilog development system. And 30 character percent a second. Decorator, line printer. The fact that I got it done is actually miracle stuff.  Randy Kindig: Yeah, and you got it done in a year, right?  Steve Leininger: And it was all written in assembly language. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got it all done in a year.  Randy Kindig: That's a good year's work. Steve Leininger: It is.  Randy Kindig: Building a computer from scratch, basically, and then getting it...  Steve Leininger: and back then we had to program EEPROMs. We didn't have flash memory. Okay. Didn't hardly have operating systems back then. Not that I was using one. There was something in the Zilog thing, but yeah we were so far ahead of things, we were developing a product rather than a computer. And maybe that's the whole difference is that we had a product that you pull it up, plug it in, and it says these are TRS 80 and it wasn't the Model 1 until the Model 2 came out.  Randy Kindig: Yeah, exactly. It was just the TRS 80. Yeah. So I have to know, do you have any of the old hardware? Steve Leininger: I've got a Model 1. I don't use it except for demonstrations now. I actually have two. I've got one that works and one that's probably got a broken keyboard connector from taking it out of the case and holding it up too many times.  Randy Kindig: Were these prototypes or anything?  Steve Leininger: They are non serial production units. I've got the, I've got a prototype ROM board that's got the original integer basic that I wrote. I don't have the video boards and all that kind of stuff that went with it when we did the original demonstration. Let's see we had four wire wrapped, completely wire wrapped industrial wire wrapped versions that we used for prototyping the software. One went to David Lein, who wrote the book that came with the thing, the basic book. One I had at my desk and there were two others. Yeah. And they got rid of all of those. So a cautionary tale is if you do something in the future where you've got that prototype that was put together in Tupperware containers or held together with duct tape, you need to at least take pictures of it. And you might want to keep one aside. If it turns out to be something like the Apple III, you can probably get rid of all that stuff. If it turns out to be something like the Apple II, The RadioShack computer, the Commodore PET, you really ought to, enshrine that. The original iPhone. Apple did stuff that was, what was it, can't remember what it was. They had a they had a thing not unlike the... 3Com ended up getting them. Anyway the hand of the PDAs, no one knows what a Personal Oh, digital assistant. Yeah. Yeah. We call that a, we call that a phone ...  Randy Kindig: Palm Pilot. Yeah.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. Palm Pilot. That's the one. Yeah. I've got a couple of those. I've got three model 100's. I've got one of the early… Randy Kindig: Did you work on the 100s? Steve Leininger: I used it, but I didn't work on it. The design. No. Okay. That was an NEC product with Radio Shack skins on it.  Randy Kindig: Oh, that's right. That's right.  Steve Leininger: Kay Nishi was the big mover on that. Yeah. Let's see I've got an Altair and an ASR 33 Teletype. Yeah, we're talking about maybe the computer's grandfather, right? I've had a whole bunch of other stuff. I've probably had 40 other computers that I don't have anymore. I am gravitating towards mechanical music devices, big music boxes, that kind of stuff.  Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. Cool. Interesting. Steve, that's all the questions I had prepared. Steve Leininger: Okay.  Randy Kindig: Is there anything I should have asked about that?  Steve Leininger: Oh my,  Randy Kindig: anything you'd want to say?  Steve Leininger: Yeah, I, I've given talks before on how do you innovate? How do you become, this is pioneering kinds of stuff. So you really have to have that vision, man. The vision, I can't exactly say where the vision comes from, but being dyslexic for me has been a gift. Okay and this is something I tell grade school and middle school students that, some people are out there saying I, I can't do that because, it's just too much stuff or my brain is cluttered. Cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what's an empty desk the sign of? Embrace the clutter. Learn a lot of different things. Do what you're passionate about. Be willing to. support your arguments, don't just get angry if someone doesn't think the way you do, explain why you're doing it that way. And sometimes it's a matter of they just don't like it or they don't have the vision. The ones that don't have the vision, they never, they may never have the vision. I've quit companies because of people like that. But When you've got the vision and can take it off in your direction, it could just end up as being art. And I shouldn't say just art, art can be an amazing thing. And that behind these walls here, we've got a pinball machine and gaming conference going on. And it is nutcase. But is there stuff out there you look at and say, Oh, wow. Yeah. And I do too. Keep it a while going. Randy Kindig: Very cool. All right. That's a great stopping point, I think. All right. I really appreciate it, Steve taking the time to talk with us today.  Steve Leininger: Thanks, Randy.  

[00:00:15] Samuel Chiang: When I was probably 11, maybe 12 years old, I told my grandfather I wanted to be like him.   He was a lawyer, and he immigrated to Canada after us. And he was a specialist in the Canadian government when he arrived in Canada, because he knew Chinese law.  When I said to him, I want to be like you, he said to me, your English must be impeccable. And I said, okay. He said, but I wouldn't want you to practice as a defense lawyer. I said, why? He didn't answer the question right away. He said, you may want to be a corporate lawyer. That always stuck with me. And then he said, you don't want to be a defense lawyer because sometimes you could be defending somebody, and then in the midst of a trial, they confess to you everything. [00:01:16] Samuel Chiang: And you're stuck. He said, it's very painful to handle that type of thing in the midst of a trial. ++++++++++++++= [00:01:24] Tommy Thomas: Our guest today is Samuel Chiang. Samuel has a diverse and accomplished background that significantly influenced his leadership. He was born in Taiwan and later moved to Canada where he grew up and began his professional career. He graduated from the University of Toronto when he began his career at Ernst & Young in Canada. In addition to Ernst & Young, Samuel has served in senior leadership roles with The International Orality Network, Trans World Radio and Partners International. He also served as the president and CEO of The Seed Company, a Bible translation organization within the Wycliffe family. Under his leadership, the organization focused on making scriptures available in oral and written forms for unreached and Bibleless peoples. Along the way he gained a great appreciation for using technology in the workplace. And he pioneered the use of AI in both the private and non-profit sectors.  He and his wife Robbi make their home in the Dallas Metroplex. Let's pick up on the conversation with Samuel Chiang. [00:02:46] Tommy Thomas: What's your happiest memory of childhood? [00:02:51] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, it depends on which segment. I remember, in my early teens, playing my violin. Whether it was solo, whether it was ensemble, whether it was orchestral, that was very special, that I remembered. I remember playing tennis, teaming together in tennis. [00:03:11] Samuel Chiang: It was great. You might not know this about me, I'm a five-time immigrant, and so my immigrant experience, even when I was younger, first arrived from Taiwan to Canada, everything was new. That was a wonderful memory. [00:03:28] Tommy Thomas: At what age did y'all come to Canada? [00:03:31] Samuel Chiang:   I was a little bit over 10 years old. And, so everything was new, yeah, all the senses were new. I only had the alphabet and seven phrases of courteous language, thank you, excuse me, will you please, those types of languages.  And that's how I started in Canada. [00:03:54] Tommy Thomas:  Do you remember how long it took you to get reasonably fluent in English? [00:04:01] Samuel Chiang: Oh, my goodness, it was quite a long time. Let's just say, you're grade five, grade six, grade five, in Canada. Probably I did not become fluent until I was nearly 16. [00:04:15] Tommy Thomas: Wow. So, what's the greatest gift that your parents gave you? [00:04:24] Samuel Chiang: I think immigrating to Canada.  They're both Christians. They said to us, we don't want you to be conscripted into the military in Taiwan. And so, we want to give you and your brother a chance to experience things very differently. And I believe the gift of Canada in that immigration and the growth in that environment was the greatest gift my parents gave to us. [00:04:55] Tommy Thomas:   What was high school like in Canada? [00:05:00] Samuel Chiang: I went to a high school that was 66 percent Jewish. And I knew the sons and daughters of literally captains of industries. And I watched how they grew up in a very unique setting. Jewish people, by and large, love the arts, are great contributors to society as a whole, from history to research, etc. And when they love the arts, their sons and daughters are top in their forms in terms of music, et cetera. So it was, they pulled me along. I was a learner. I thought I was good at playing my violin, but these other students were even better than I am. And they pulled me along. [00:05:45] Tommy Thomas:  You decided to go to university.  Did you consider a lot of colleges and universities, or did you pick one and say, I'm going there? [00:05:55] Samuel Chiang: My goodness. in Canada, it's interesting in Canada, you get to pick three. I did. And then it was ultimately my parents saying to me, if you went to this university and lived at home, we'll pay for everything. I accepted that and actually stayed home and went to University of Toronto, and studied economics and finance and accounting and it was good. It was good to be in Toronto. [00:06:23] Tommy Thomas: How did you get into the econ and finance and accounting field?  Did you know somebody that had been a CPA or an economist? [00:06:32] Samuel Chiang: No, numbers were always of interest to me. And, let me rewind the conversation a little bit, for myself. When I was probably 11, maybe 12 years old, I told my grandfather I wanted to be like him. He was a lawyer, and he immigrated to Canada after us. And he was a specialist in the Canadian government, when he arrived in Canada, because he knew Chinese law and when I said to him, I want to be like you, he said to me, your English must be impeccable. And I said, okay, he said, but I wouldn't want you to practice as a defense lawyer. I said, why? He didn't answer the question right away. He said, you may want to be a corporate lawyer. That always stuck with me. And then he said, you don't want to be a defense lawyer because sometimes you could be defending somebody, and then in the midst of a trial, they confess to you everything. [00:07:42] Samuel Chiang: And you're stuck. He said, it's very painful to handle that type of thing in the midst of a trial. And I listened to that. And so, I thought, do I want to be a corporate lawyer? But reading was not my strong suit. Not yet at that time. And then I love numbers. And so, that's the way I went into accounting, finance and economics. [00:08:12] Tommy Thomas: So, what was your favorite part of college? [00:08:21] Samuel Chiang:   At University of Toronto, there were two things. One was in social sciences, sociology, and then the other one was actually computer science which surprised me because in high school, I never took computer science, but at University of Toronto, at that time still had to use those card decks where you punch holes and all that, and we used that to solve problems.  That was solving problems and I loved it. [00:08:50] Tommy Thomas:   You and I would be from that age. Yes. We took Fortran and COBOL, and we had those big, big boxes of cards. And, yes, I remember those days. What is something that people are always surprised to find out about you? [00:09:13] Samuel Chiang: They would say to me, even most recently, they would say, oh, you speak English so well. I don't know what to say about that. That's a surprising thing. Actually, the world over, I have had people saying that to me. [00:09:30] Tommy Thomas: Think back to your first management job when you actually had some people that you were responsible for.  What do you remember about that? [00:09:40] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, I remember very specifically at Ernst & Young that even when I have people reporting to me, even though I was maybe really green in my experiences, people were just very respectful. They were very accepting and very professional. [00:09:58] Samuel Chiang: That just made me feel like they were helping me to do what I needed to do. And even though I might not even have much experience in doing any supervision, I always remember the way that people accepted me. They were very professional, very respectful. [00:10:21] Tommy Thomas: Each of us probably has times in our life where in the South, we would say our metal has been tested. I'm not sure what the Canadian equivalent with that, or the Chinese equivalent for that would be, but have you had times in your life when your metal was tested? And if so, how did you come out of it? [00:10:39] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, so very specifically, I remember in high school, in one of the violin pieces in the ensemble, I worked hard to get the lead part in that ensemble, very specifically for a competition. I didn't get it. Another student who was a great younger got it. And yeah, my heart was crushed. But that was one of those sorts of moments. I had to really console myself to say, okay, this is the Bach triple violin concerto. So, there are three leads. I got none of those, but I'm still the lead for the entire ensemble. And that's a role to play. So, I better play it well. And so that was the first time. The second time was, that I recall very specifically, was in an organization. On the one hand, being interviewed to be the CEO of the organization. On the other hand, I had a whole group of people complaining about me and they were doing an examination about my ministry practices and procedures and all that stuff. [00:12:02] Samuel Chiang: And, I remember during the interview that the board chair said, I just hope that examination piece will go away soon so that we can interview you properly. As it turns out, that examination piece did not go away anytime soon. It took nine months, but it was great. It was a wonderful experience with the Lord. I would never trade it for anything else. Because I was in that situation, they decided not to interview me further for the candidacy of CEO for that organization. That was crushing, but between the two, I would never trade the experience with the Lord going deep with him, and don't even want to come out of the water, if you will, we're out of the ocean, if you will, and just want to stay longer. So that's a heart matter that was very deep within me. [00:13:06] Tommy Thomas: You've built a lot of organizations over the years, been CEO, founded companies. Let's talk about hiring for a minute. When you're hiring at the cabinet level in general, what are you looking for? [00:13:18] Samuel Chiang: At the cabinet level, the C level, I often look for their EQ, the emotional quotient, that's pretty important to me, their character, their culture. And then their competency, character and culture. Those are non-negotiables competencies, you could throw that where you could delegate some of it away, but their emotional quotient, their culture, their character. [00:13:50] Tommy Thomas: What's your favorite or most effective interview question? [00:13:57] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, I think we might even start around the same place. Tell me a little bit about your childhood. I would love to hear the friends and the friendships and the relationships that you have had. And then I also ask often, tell me a little bit about how you left home for your work, for your college, for your university. [00:14:23] Tommy Thomas: Wow. That is a penetrating question. Yeah. How you left home. Yeah, one of my recent podcast guests said that one of the things she wished that she learned earlier was how to terminate somebody with grace and dignity. What have you learned about terminating people when it's just not working out? [00:14:52] Samuel Chiang: My biggest piece about termination is, I have to be very clear. I have to tell myself not to pass on any problems further. Oftentimes you terminate because people handed it to you. And, with grace and all that be very clear, keep the dignity of the individual, offer ways to consider rescaling, or in some cases offer them the possibility for HR to help them to look for their next assignment. [00:15:28] Samuel Chiang: Those are some of the things that I have practiced and have practiced consistently. The clarity is very important for people. [00:15:43] Tommy Thomas:   You've been president of The Seed Company and other organizations but take us into that presidency. How did you get there? What was it like when you got there? [00:15:57] Samuel Chiang: Oh, wow. Yeah. I have served on the board of The Seed Company. And I learned a lot. And then I remember, it's a long story. I'll keep it short. I was invited to come off the board to apply and I did. And it was the summer of 2014. And during that time, I wasn't quite sure I was supposed to apply, even though I'd been invited. So, I prayed, and it was during the time that the summer of 2014 was, the Ebola crisis in West Africa. I was actually in West Africa at the time, and the Lord met me, twice. Nothing audible, but it was a sense of understanding from the Lord. And because of those two understandings, very deep, very unique moments. It was almost like he was having inner conversations with me. It was out of that experience that I put myself forward. [00:17:08] Samuel Chiang: And then I also asked the Lord, I said, I need to know that I have a specific assignment within The Seed Company or Bible translation as a whole. And he did, he put on my heart the need for the Old Testament very specifically. So, it was through that and ultimately, the visa process that came into this country, in the United States on a O-1 visa. And then, when I was pointed into the role and started, the board was ever so kind to provide an onboarding coach. That was marvelous in the sense that I lived overseas, working in Hong Kong for 25 years, coming into the United States. I discovered much later; I have multiple massive gaps. And the board was so kind to bring along onboarding coaching and subsequent coaches for me to bridge the gap and understand things. And so that was wonderful in the role. It was challenging. It was knee driven every day, asking God for things that I've never asked before, and then watching and understanding God's leading in that. +++++++++++++++++ [00:18:29] Tommy Thomas: Now, I probably don't know all the, know the whole, how to explain that, but my understanding was that The Seed Company was, at least at one level, a way of shortening the Bible translation process from the classical Wycliffe M.O. Is that correct? Is that more or less, right? Yes. So you, if you're operating there, I'm assuming you had some pushback from people that had been in the field translating the classical way for many years. How did y'all resolve that and realize that those two things could probably peacefully coexist? [00:19:07] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, I think I'll answer that on multiple levels. One level is for the desire of people receiving the scripture sooner rather than later. Everyone, it's almost a justice issue, isn't it? Everybody has a right to the scripture, and will they receive it sooner rather than later? So that is the DNA within and then the indigenous model, which The Seed Company was founded upon, of the indigenous church doing the translation of the Word. That's a little bit different and we need both. [00:19:49] Samuel Chiang: We absolutely need both of the people who have been called. But the calling of the missionary and the calling of the indigenous translator, they're the same call to serve God, and in a very specific field, Bible translation. And so, we need both. Coexistence doesn't always come easy, even today. I'm still involved in Bible translation in other organizations. And even today, it's still not easy. Even with church-based translation, and even with artificial intelligence, that friction continues and the friction that continues, it's really a sense of working it out relationally, horizontally, and then vertically with God. What is God's desire in all of this? So, man's side of holding on to the tension is always very interesting. [00:20:57] Tommy Thomas: A pastor on the East Coast once told me, see if I remember this right, he said the most difficult thing in the world is living in the center of the tension of God's will. [00:21:07] Samuel Chiang: Oh, my goodness, it really is.  And then in Bible translation, it's not only living in the center of God's will, but the desire to have quality assurance, really super wonderful, clear, natural language of the translation, so that the community as a whole will say that is God's Word for me. [00:21:33] Tommy Thomas: What's the most ambitious project you've ever undertaken and how did you get the team to follow you? [00:21:41] Samuel Chiang:   Probably the most ambitious one that I've taken was when we did the First Light Project. First Light Project was a technology project. And then to have content providers that will link in with the studies of the Chinese word of all resident on a software program into China. Now, we have to remember, this is back in the mid 90s and late 90s. And everything back then, it was still slow. A cell phone was not really in existence. People remember satellite phones. And then people in China were still at that time, having some scriptures, scripture was at that time, sometimes carried into China. And oftentimes, the good work of your friend Ed Cannon, FEBC, and then, Trans World Radio were broadcasting into China and people were scribing word for word the precious word of God, and we thought in a multiple horizon scenario, they will have the software and technology available to them. [00:23:01] Samuel Chiang: Maybe what we could do is provide Bible resident on the software with content writers on it, and then give it to the church in China. That was avant garde. It was at the forefront of its time. And, trying to get people around the world on it, has been, that wasn't just in Hong Kong, but it would get people around the world on it was both exciting and exhausting. [00:23:27] Tommy Thomas: So, if I could have shadowed you for maybe a year or so during that time, what would I have observed? What would you be doing? Oh, wow. If you were shadowing me back in the 90s during that period of time, you would probably get something like this on a typical day. I would be in Hong Kong. Early in the morning, making calls to North America, trying to raise funds. I would be during the daytime working with technical teams and contacting teams first to make sure the accuracy of the Bible in digital format will be there. And then in the afternoon, I will be working with the technical teams in India because it was not a Chinese team that wrote it. It was actually the technical team in India that wrote the software for it, for the Chinese Bible. And so that would be a typical day of working, very exciting. [00:24:26] Tommy Thomas: I want to stick with the technology piece for a minute. I know our good friend, Bill Hendricks, told me that you'd been involved in a couple of AI projects. Can you take us into the world of AI and how it intersects with the nonprofit sector in general, and maybe talk about some pros and cons, some risks and rewards. [00:24:46] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, sure. A little bit about AI, artificial intelligence, is, for me, the ones I have been involved in, very specifically, it was 2016 on a Sunday morning. I read in the news that Google AI beat the South Korean in gold chess. And then the newspaper reported that in any given second, the Google AI could calculate a hundred million moves. That got my mind thinking very quickly about the number one issue at that time in Bible translation was in sign language, there was not a scripture, not a full text of scripture for sign language. And it got my mind thinking that people who are deaf in the deaf community when they sign, our body could only make so many gestures. To us, it might seem like millions, but it's a limited set. It's not unlimited. So, we thought maybe the computer vision could help solve that. And so that got us started on the artificial intelligence side of things and we created a not for profit and, and ultimately, we filed patents in that not for profit and then, a year and a half after it got started, not only the US Trademark and Patent office approved all those patents, the board of that not for profit asked us to spin it out into a for profit company and we did ultimately. [00:26:39] Samuel Chiang: So that's a little bit of background to that. Could I expand a little bit? [00:26:44] Tommy Thomas: Absolutely. You're talking to a novice here. I'm probably learning as much or more than anybody that's listening to this. [00:26:50] Samuel Chiang: When we spun it out. The company name is called Avodah, AVODAH.com or AVODAH.ai. [00:27:01] Samuel Chiang:  It is a God story that we actually got that name. We had prayed in wanting to have a single word that would represent, work, worship and service. And we knew the Hebrew name for it, that the word for it, Avodah or Avoda. But to grab that domain name was not the easiest. [00:27:25] Samuel Chiang: We're very thankful to God that it came. And as we spun it out, into the for profit, it's actually working on both the healthcare side as well as the language side, so as to serve, again, the language communities, who are without the word of God. And then also the healthcare side, for what we call ambient technology, ambient sensing. [00:27:50] Samuel Chiang: So, it stays in the background. And it listens to your case. Let's just say you were the doctor. I walked into your office. You've maybe had a nurse practitioner that will meet with me, take my case, and then you as a doctor would meet me and look at the summary of the nurse practitioner has written down. And the ambient AI technology sits in the background listening to the conversation once with the nurse practitioner and the second time again with the doctor. And then it's AI assisted, in helping, the doctor to either confirm or augment the decision and then on top of that, once the patient leaves it does automatic coding into the insurances, et cetera. [00:28:40] Samuel Chiang: So that will reduce the amount of time in a doctor's office, the front office, and then it increases the ability for doctors to serve more patients and, hopefully, save money and maybe increase the revenue. [00:28:56] Tommy Thomas: Wow. You hear people that are fear mongers about AI and what it might do to us and then you hear a story like that obviously made a huge difference. Where does the fear mongering play in? [00:29:14] Samuel Chiang: Yeah, I think the fear mongering is very real and, unfortunately, people have misused AI in many different senses from voice for actors to pictures that portray individuals wrongly. [00:29:31] Samuel Chiang:: And then of course, people use it, in ways that influence and affect, ultimately to the elections. All those are in place. So it is a very large piece that is under consideration for many of the societies right around the world. And it is a concern. (00.20.56) Tommy Thomas: Thank you for joining us today. If you are a first-time listener, I hope you will subscribe and become a regular. You can find links to all the episodes at our website: www.jobfitmatters.com/podcast. If there are topics you'd like for me to explore, my email address is tthomas@jobfitmatters.com.  Word of mouth has been identified as the most valuable form of marketing. Surveys tell us that consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of advertising. If you've heard something today that's worth passing on, please share it with others. You're already helping me make something special for the next generation of nonprofit leaders. I'll be back next week with a new episode. Until then, stay the course on our journey to help make the nonprofit sector more effective and sustainable.   Links and Resources JobfitMatters Website NextGen Nonprofit Leadership with Tommy Thomas The Perfect Search - What every board needs to know about hiring their next CEO Beyond Literate Western Models - Contextualizing Theological Education in Oral Contexts - Samuel Chiang Orality Breakouts - Using Heart Language to Transform Hearts - Samuel Chiang & Avery T. Willis   Connect tthomas@jobfitmatters.com Follow Tommy on LinkedIn   Listen to NextGen Nonprofit Leadership with Tommy Thomas on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify  

Sonja Blignaut is a complexity expert. That might not sound relevant to incident response in reliability engineering. But it is!Our systems are becoming more complex and so are the resulting incidents.Learning about complexity can help reliability folk go into an incident with less anxiety, which we'll explore in this episode.We'll explore the causes of complexity in incidents and how the Cynefin framework classifies incidents.We'll also deep dive into the concept of complexity itself and dispel a common issue where it gets mixed up with complicatedness.About SonjaSonja is a co-founder of Complexity Fit and founder of More Beyond focusing on helping teams build capacity for sensemaking, collaboration, and wayfinding.She has a background in programming from her early career as a meteorologist, having worked in C and Fortran, and then progressing to working as a web developer.You can connect with Sonja to learn more about complexity via LinkedIn. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit read.srepath.com

This is a special episode for me, personally.This marks 300 episodes of the Software People Stories. The journey has been very enriching. But more of that, in a few weeks, when we complete six years of the podcast.In addition, the guest today is a person who has been a mentor to me and whose qualities technically and as a leader, I admire.I am in conversation with Gunaseelan Narayanan, known as Guna. Guna is an executive coach with a long career in IT before that.In this conversation, he talks aboutTwo phases of his careerStarting with FORTRAN programming and transitioning into microprocessorsHis career at HCL - the only company he was associated with throughout his careerShifting to creating user focused solutions and telecom areasGaining experience with multi-national partnershipsGuna has over three decades of experience in the Information Technology industry. Currently he is an Executive Coach, helping senior executives enhance their leadership capabilities. He started his career as a software engineer in R&D department of Hindustan Computers Limited in 1979. He held various technical and managerial roles in HCL R&D and HCL-HP R&D before transitioning to HCL Technologies. In HCL Technologies he was in key delivery and business leadership roles including head of Engineering and R&D Services Line of Business and head of Delivery Excellence.Guna holds M.Tech. degree in Computer Science and B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering, both from IIT Madras. He is a certified Executive Coach from Coaching Foundation India https://www.linkedin.com/in/gunaseelan-narayanan-13246b23/

...Hot Hot Hot!...Ibiza Chill Factor...Sunshine Tunes...(Mostly 90s P.O.P. Promos)01. -02. The Grid - Floatation (Progressive Mix).03. Moodswings - Live Longer (Spiritual High Mix).04. Sheer Taft - Cascades (Hynotone Mix).05.  -06. Fortran 5 - Groove (Herbal Supper Mix).07. -08. -09. -10. Fortran 5 - Midnight Trip (Less Noise Mix).11. Leftfield - Not Forgotten (Hard Hands Remix).12. Bam Bam Muzique - Milk of Magnesia.13. -14. SteX - Still Feel The Rain.If you likey like (on a `Scorccio` Day) > Listen Part I - something i prepared earlier > CALL A WAVE (podomatic.com)Dxps: Happy Holidays

Do you want to gain a deeper understanding of how PKI, AI, and cryptography are shaping software development? Our special guest is Loren KohnfelderLoren Kohnfelder's journey into the world of AI and cybersecurity began with an early exposure to mainframe programming at the age of twelve. His fascination with software development grew from experimenting with basic assembly language, COBOL, Basic, Fortran, and RPG. Over the years, he witnessed the evolution of programming languages and the crucial shift towards memory safety. As he delved deeper into the world of AI, Loren's perspective on the application of AI in cybersecurity evolved, emphasizing the importance of trust and clear policies. His insightful narrative highlights the significance of automation and the need for transparency within the security industry, offering a unique and relatable perspective on the ever-changing landscape of software development and cybersecurity.Discover how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the cybersecurity landscape and its impact on software development.Understand the critical role of trust in AI cybersecurity and how it influences decision-making in software development.Learn about the triaging approach to automating cybersecurity and its significance for software developers and IT professionals.Explore effective methods for monitoring and evaluating the performance of AI in cybersecurity to enhance software development practices.Gain insights into the importance of transparency and knowledge sharing in cybersecurity for informed decision-making in software development.I believe in challenging all this stuff because I think we have plenty of room for improvement and we need to keep going at it. We can't give up and resign ourselves to business as usual. We have to keep pushing it and asking, why is that? Why can't we do it this way? Why isn't it better? Keep trying. - Loren KohnfelderIn this episode, you will be able to:Discover how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing cybersecurity and what it means for the future of software development.Explore the triaging approach to automating cybersecurity and its potential to streamline threat detection and response.Uncover the significance of transparency and knowledge sharing in cybersecurity for fostering a more secure digital environment.Connect with Loren KohnfelderLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kohnfelder/Designing Secure Software Book: https://a.co/d/07h5nQnaConnect with usWebsite: securitymasterminds.buzzsprout.comKnowBe4 Resources:KnowBe4 Blog: https://blog.knowbe4.comJames McQuiggan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmcquigganErich Kron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erichkron/Music Composed by: Brian Sanyshyn - https://www.briansanyshynmusic.comAnnouncer: Sarah McQuiggan - https://www.sarahmcquiggan.comShow Notes created with Capsho - www.capsho.comSound Engineering - Matthew Bliss, MB Podcasts.If you'd like to ask Matt what he can do for your podcast, visit https://www.mbpod.com and schedule a consultation today! 

In order to understand In Search Of… The Dark Star, Jeb and Blake will first need to get Sirius; Sirius-B, that is!   Links from this episode:   Siris (A part of the Canis Major constellation)    Jeb discussed a couple of evocative artworks:  Appeal to the Great Spirit (Dallin) End of the Trail (Fraser)    North African musket (Moukahla) Colonial Williamsburg Hoop Rolling Jacquard Loom Punched Cards technology The Hans Guggenheim art project Isaac Koi UFO archives The Tribal Eye BBC documentary series (YouTube)   Regarding Temple, Puhairich, Young, and The Nine The Sirius Mystery by Robert Temple Editorial letter about Temple from The Observatory Dogon Shame by Phillip Coppens Griaule's Legacy: Rethinking "la parole claire" in Dogon Studies Pop Culture References (affiliate links): Conjure Wife - aka Burn Witch Burn Bewitched Bell, Book and Candle ===== Images: The "orbit" of the Dogon dark star. Nimoy posing with a tribal mask - our initial NFA image. Later we get to see his legs in this seated NFA supplementary: Hans Guggenheim initially appears in just a vest and pants. Later, he too is in more of a Safari look, and has a professorial pipe as well.   Dr Gary Chapman, Astronomer The man who first photographed Sirius B - Dr Lindenblad A little of the FORTRAN code that powers the orbit animation in the episode:   We don't have enough information to know who made Nimoy's safari clothing, but if you want to try and track down a very close approximation, this example from J. Peterman's (est 1987) is as close a match as I've seen. You would still need to find it in a vintage shop because at present they don't sell these.    

Veel bedrijven en overheidsinstellingen gebruiken nog archaïsche programmeertalen als Fortran of Cobol uit de vorige eeuw. Deze talen doen wat ze moeten doen, terwijl ze niet altijd voldoen aan de eisen die we tegenwoordig aan software stellen. Je zou kunnen denken, weg ermee. Je kunt ook kijken hoe bijvoorbeeld techgiganten als Facebook, Apple en Google omgaan met legacy software. Zij kiezen voor een evolutie aanpak, waarbij ze hun bestaande systemen verbeteren en uitbreiden.

Veel bedrijven en overheidsinstellingen gebruiken nog archaïsche programmeertalen als Fortran of Cobol uit de vorige eeuw. Deze talen doen wat ze moeten doen, terwijl ze niet altijd voldoen aan de eisen die we tegenwoordig aan software stellen. Je zou kunnen denken, weg ermee. Je kunt ook kijken hoe bijvoorbeeld techgiganten als Facebook, Apple en Google omgaan met legacy software. Zij kiezen voor een evolutie aanpak, waarbij ze hun bestaande systemen verbeteren en uitbreiden.    Hoogleraar Chris Verhoef noemt dat: groeien en snoeien. Hij betoogt in deze Technloog dat je van je spagetti code stap voor stap lasagna zou moeten maken. Zijn verhaal brengt ons bij Apple via Facebook bij de SVB (Sociale Verzekeringsbank). Opdat we het oude koesteren en het nieuwe omarmen.  Gast: Chris Verhoef    Links Bert Hubert over het mislukken van IT-projecten    Cobol programmeurs gevraagd See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on April 5th, 2024.This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai(00:38): M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey EarthquakeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942880&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:11): So you wanna de-bog yourselfOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942288&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:00): Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapseOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942122&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(05:50): The Rise and Fall of Silicon GraphicsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39944496&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:43): An IRC client in your motherboardOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39940975&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:37): Cloudflare acquires PartyKit to allow developers to build real-time multi-userOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39941859&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:30): Apple Updates App Store Guidelines to Permit Game Emulators, EU Music App LinksOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39946694&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:19): Fortran on WebAssemblyOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39944275&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(14:15): A Lego model of financial capitalismOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39940959&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(15:57): Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training dataOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942104&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

Cameron Dawson, Newedge Wealth Chief Investment Officer, says that signs of a recession will come from the market, not the Fed. Bill Dudley, Former NY Fed President & Bloomberg Opinion columnist, expects central banks to introduce digital currencies amid disarray in the crypto sector. Mike Mayo, Wells Fargo Senior Equity Analyst, says AI can take the relationship between banks and technology to another level. Katy Kaminski, AlphaSimplex Chief Research Strategist, says she's concerned about the risk-on rally in the bond market. Norman Roule, Center for Strategic & International Studies Senior Adviser, breaks down the latest on the Israel-Hamas war amid the release of more hostages from Gaza. Get the Bloomberg Surveillance newsletter, delivered every weekday. Sign up now: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/surveillance Full transcript:  This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. I'm Tom Keane, along with Jonathan Farrow and Lisa Abramowitz. Join us each day for insight from the best and economics, geopolitics, finance and investment. Subscribe to Bloomberg Surveillance on demand on Apple, Spotify and anywhere you get your podcasts, and always on Bloomberg dot Com, the Bloomberg Terminal, and the Bloomberg Business app. Cameron Dawson tear eyed over the quality of that data. Check Cio of New Edge Wealth joining us right now. What's your conviction the next year? I'm talking about you need to get conviction. Now, do you have a lot of conviction? I think that we have to judge as we go into the end of the year when we look at where we in the year with positioning and sentiment and valuations and earnings expectations, because if we get to a point where those things are stretched, where people have been drawn into the market, everybody chases the market into a rallying to the year end, that's when you probably want to start asking questions of how sustainable or durable is We learned that lesson really powerfully this year in the opposite direction. People were underweight, valuations had come in, positioning was very light, and that set up for a very powerful year this year. One really difficult thing for a lot of people is to get two things right. Won the call on the economy and to what the economy means for financial markets. I was looking at Deutsche Bank's call yesterday least when I were going back and forth on this, They've got recession one hundred and seventy five basis points of cuts. Then bink chat is saying fifty one hundred on the SMP. Is good news bad news? Or is bad news good news? What is it? I mean, it's sort of that I want it all and I want it now kind of mentality, which is that I want a FED that's supportive, and I want an economy and earnings that are going to be growing very strongly. And I have to think that we need to ask the question of if a strong economy and strong earnings are consistent with having FED rate cuts and a recession, and if we can have both at the same time, meaning that if the FED is cutting rates, can we really grow earnings at twelve percent next year? Do we actually have the potential that we could have a third year in a row of earnings being closer to flat. If we have a recession. Well, this is John Sulfis basically saying people think we're late cycle, we're actually mid cycle. That if the Federal cuts rates is just sort of a mechanical year over year trying to adapt restrictiveness to inflation, and that that will pave the way for companies to continue to evolve, particularly in the consumer cyclicals. Thoughts. Yeah, it's interesting. You go back to the times when the Fed cut rates and we didn't have a recession ninety five, ninety eight, and twenty nineteen. What's interesting is that the Fed was actually very fearful of a recession in each of those times. They talked about the US not being an island. What's interesting is that the market wasn't scared of a recession. There was no impact to earnings. You had the market hitting all time highs as they were cutting rates. So I think we have to take the cue from the market if it starts to sniff out that data is weakening, that data is starting to come in where we need to be cutting earnings stents we don't hit all time highs in markets, that's when you'd say maybe recession risk is actually higher. So what's your conviction is it to basically shift away from the conviction of everybody else that equities are going to go higher and to take the other side. I think it's incredibly important to remain invested even in times of uncertainty, and the way that we do that is focusing on quality, focusing on companies that can block and tackle, which just means that I want to take out the risk that the economy is going to roll over and I'm going to have big earnings downside. But I also don't want to be over levered. I don't want to be overextended on risk having to have the best case scenario in order for my investments to work. So it's still that middle ground. It's worked really well this year, it likely works really well next year as well, as we think we are still in that late cycle environment. What's so interesting to me is the idea of developing a conviction with five percent money market fund trillions out there. Is part of your optimism of that money shifts given disinflation yields? Yeah, you know, it's a really good question. If all the money market funds is truly investible cap not all, but even at the margin that supports the bid. And we do know that investors compared to the twenty twenty two peak are about three percent less allocated to equities than they were at the peak and twenty twenty two looking at the AAII data, so that would suggest that there is still money on the sidelines, that there still is positioning to be drawn back in. And the good news is that there's cash, there's liquidity. In order to do that, we'll have to continue to watch that data because once people get fully invested, this is critical. I don't mean to interrupt, but you've nailed it. Three percent as the delta here from AAI or whatever it is, AARP, whatever. But the answer is if that money shifts and makes up the three percent difference, what does that do in SMP or Dell points, Well, it likely means that we can continue the rally, But then it calls into question the durability of the rally. Do we test the twenty twenty two high, do we break through it with gusto and really have the kind of rally that we saw coming out of time like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, or instead, do we have this sideways chop that looks a lot more like what we experienced in the seventies or even in the two thousands. And it's Chris Harvey is talking about did you just request a down forecast? I did, just busting this. You have a down forecast? Absolutely not. I'm sorry. That was beautiful. Do you want to explain why you don't have a down forecast because it's a price weighted index? Thank you, Cameron Tak Is that enough? Jar Denney SPX five thousands, forty one thousand on the show clip that? I mean, honestly, you guys just gonnatrol each other all morning beautiful. And I said, the perfect ending to this exchange was very good. You know it was great. It was very good. Camera. Thank you. It's going to see it. Cameron Dawson, I knew ittch Wealth, welcome back anytime. I'm going to play this off my book of the year years ago, Ken rog I was very courageous, The Curse of Cash. He's writing about where we are with digital currencies, what the Bank of International Settlements in Geneva thinks, what Central Bank says. He was at the New York Fed. Thanks. Bill Dudley joins us right now writing an important column on c B d C central bank digital currencies, Bill Dudley, very valuable and thought provoking. This morning, we just saw criminal trials, guilty verdicts, maybe appeals involved. But are we getting away from the presumed criminality, the punishment, the secrecy that Ken Rogoff had the courage to talk about. Well, I think that the crypto space is in disarray right now, and the real question now is our central banks around the world going to introduce central bank digital currencies to sort of take up that slack. I think that's going to happen, probably going to be more evolutionary than revolutionary, because it depends on what payment system that you're starting with. I think we're central bank digital currencies could play a very very important role. This is highlighted a new paper that we put out by the brent Witz Committee is really on cross border payments. We had a system of central bank digital currencies where the interfaces were harmonized, you could probably execute payments on a cross border basis at a fraction of the cost. Today, for a lot of migrant workers when they're sending their payments abroad, it costs over five percent of the value of the payment just to execute the trade. It's very slow. So we can certainly do a lot better than than we're doing right now now in this process. The FIT is very far far behind in terms of their work on central bank digital currencies, and in the US there's a quite a bit of skepticism about the need for central bank digital currencies. Why is this work continue? Well, that's so hard of the matter. I'm going to go to Raphael Our owns a high ground on this at BIS. He's documented the incredible friction of transactions in the real world. We all thought we'd be trading bitcoin and you know, John would be down at Selene trading bitcoin for a sweater, but the answers were not. We could really get down to where this is efficacious for central banks. We could really squeeze us down to where there's no transactional friction. Well, that'll obviously always give a little bit of transactional friction, but we can do a lot better than we're doing right now. I mean, in central bank digital currencies should be a pretty significant improvement over cash. I'll be just the safest cash, but in terms of the fault risk, because you'll be guaranteed by the sovereign nation, but you don't have worries about storage. You can transact with digital cash across long distances, So to me, it's like cash plus it's superior to cache and something that we the US should start to innovate on. There's a concern bill that as you disintermediate banks, essentially those agents that really capitalize from those frictions that exist, that some of the functioning of markets that traditionally has supported things like treasuries starts to ebb away. How concerned are you as you start to adopt new, less friction build methods and as capital markets slow in the wake of rate hikes, how much does that really disintermediate banks that really are still essential for the functioning of the treasury market. It really depends on central bank digital currency design, and I think there you want to have a two tier system where the banks continue to own the customer relationships. Central banks don't want to have customer relationships with hundreds of millions of households, so they should hand that off to the banking system. The second thing you want to do is make sure that the central bank digital currency doesn't pay interest. If it doesn't pay interest, it's basically going to be used for payments, not for investment, So that preserves the role of the central of commercial banks as intermediaries. So I think if you do those two things essentially protect that the commercial banking system is providing financial intermediation services, but the central bank helps provide a better payments medium. The reason why I ask is on a broader sense away from digital currencies, is there is increasing concern about how much of the risk taking activity and how much, frankly, of financial market functioning has moved outside of the highly regulated banks into the private sector. Earlier this morning, UBAS chair Clem Kelliher came out warning again that there's a bubble in private markets and that there's risks building there as an increasing amount of lending moved to that area. Are you concerned about that? Do you think that there is this sort of situation forming on the heels of rate hikes, on the heels of the more tightly regulated banks that deserves greater scrutiny. Absolutely? I think this notion that all we need to do to fix the problems that we saw in March of twenty twenty in the banking system is to appile a lot higher capal requirements on the largest banks. I think that's misguided. Increase the cabal requirements on the biggest banks, You're just going to push activity out into the non regulated banking sector, and that's going to make the financial system less secure, more unstable than the current regime. So I think we need to think really hard about what were the problems in March twenty twenty and how to address them. Bill, thanks for catching out with us. Give us an your view on that built outly the former New York Fed President Lie So this is joy. Why don't you bring in mister Mayo here because he's all AI in bankings, which makes me very happy actually because Thanksgiving dinners several of them. All of the discussion was about artificial intelligence. Mike Mayo focused on artificial intelligence as well, saying that it's not just going to be in big tech, it's also going to be in banks that you need to have AI talent at the financial institution, saying the marriage of banks with tech, including AI, is a long term positive that can help the industry trend toward record efficiency. Joining us now is the one and only Michael Mayo, Mike, thank you so much for being with us. So tell us just how much banks could benefit at a time where people have written them off as utilities that are overspending and are not going to make big returns. Well, if you're a bank and don't have an AI strategy, then you don't have a strategy because if the bank across the street has calculators or spreadsheets or Bloomberg terminals, yes, and you don't have those, then how are you going to compete? So AI is here to stay. The marriage of banks and tech has been a good one. It's stalled recently, but I think AI can rekindle that relationship by taking the productivity benefits which have been revenues per employee have improved by one third over the last decade. So banks and tech have been working, but I think AI can take that to another level. Is it a kind of thing where there'll be a few winners you mentioned Golias Mike Mayo in your noe is a kind of thing where four or five will win and the rest lose? Or can it actually be a benefit distributed across the industry? Well, I think most jobs at banks will be impacted. I mean, think of what I do. I'm an analyst, and analysis can be improved by this extra tool called a Now I do think there will always be a human in the loop for most cases. In other words, to prepare for your show today, Lisa and Tom, I went to chat GPT and said, what should I say in one sentence about this? And they said it's a revolution that will enable productivity, savings and better customer service. Well that's an improval. Well that's an improved starting point. But you know it's partly wrong. First, I'm not sure it's a revolution, especially at banks. It tends to be more of an evolution, and simply by enabling that potential doesn't mean that becomes a reality. And you've seen false starts cloud, You've had some buyers remorse. Blockchain didn't come out as quickly as expected. You know the dot com bubble one point. Oh, Tom, you remember all these Internet pollows which didn't survive. So I'm positive on the implications of AI, but I also I'm aware of the cast come back even further. George Ball E. F. Hutton. They blew it. They couldn't keep up on technology. This is Lisa. When there were cards with holes in them and a thing called Fortran. The answer is I want to know who the losers are going to be in this. I mean, I know you've got single best buys in all this, but what is the scale of the losers that you see in technology and banking three to five years out. Well, I do think Goliath is winning, and you have this poll by Evident. I know they've had the founders on your show. In fact, they have an all day conference in New York City tomorrow. So JP Morgan is number one front and center right now and their investment in technology are paying off. I'm surprised to see City Group in the top ten for all their issues with their back office, and they have major issues. They're making some efforts with AI. On the other hand, those banks that have not advanced with digitization and the cloud and getting their data together could struggle. And I do wonder about some of these mid sized banks. I mean, do they have the scale to really leverage these solutions and getting talent. Talent is such a big issue and you can't just buy talent off shelf. You can get solutions, but who's actually going to implement those solutions in each business line? So when I'm listening to you, I'm thinking how much are they're going to pay them. I mean, we're talking about open AI paying eight hundred thousand dollars to engineers at just at of a base level. I mean, how much your bank's going to have to pay some of this talent to come to their bank and develop similar solutions that can effectively support and reduce certain headcount in certain areas well. I think what you'll see is you'll see a reduction in headcount and some of those savings plowed back into paying other employees more money, especially AI engineers. They're in serious demand. But if you go to one of the largest banks, you have a whole career path. You can scale these solutions across tens of millions of customers as opposed to going to a smaller bank. I mean, what's your pitch. Now? There are some smaller banks in this evidence survey that performed quite well because they were already ahead on technology. So I think those winning in technology can keep winning more and those that are behind are going to have to have kind of a existential moment here. This can all work if banks have the cash to invest right and that sort of you put a pause on that at a time when potentially there could be a slow down and there could be some kind of reduction in revenues tied to slowing capital markets how much I understand this is a longer term call, but how much do you see a thawing in that kind of environment next year versus a tightening and the screws I mean, this is sort of one of the big disagreements for the backdrop for banks and capital markets activity at a time where yields are still high, but we also are potentially going to start seeing the effects of that. Well, I promise you I will be the first analyst to ask that question or earnings calls. If banks are spending too much money. Banks have no choice because of the headwinds from rates, recession possibility, and regulation. They must get more efficient. So if I'm the CEO of any bank and you're coming to me with the program for AI and want to invest a lot of money, I'd say, great, where are you saving the money to fund that? Nobody cares. All we want to know from Mike Mayo is what to do this year? Twelve months out, twelve months ago now flat on its back. We've had a magnificent seven moonshot right now. Keith briat Indexes twenty five percent above the pandemic low. Is this the year twenty twenty four of the banks? Do you load the boat here on banking? Well, look, the long arc of the benefits of the industry de risking has still yet to play out. Banks didn't get credit through the pandemic. The excuse was the government stimulus. Right now, you had some smaller regional banks fail earlier this year, so it's still delayed. So I still think over the next two to three years you see the benefit of the improved banking industry resiliency play out, and then they aren't as risky as perceived and they re rate at least back to historical And then the bigger question is longer term for the rerate above. Now, it's not immediate tom. I think as you get further out, you get better inflection points when it comes to banks, bread revenues, interest rates, effects, monetizing that capital markets backlog, and more clarity on regulation, which is a very big issues. Still, just real quick, just to follow up on the AI, what is the right AI investment? Is it getting some sort of application to write your reports for you. Is it being able to collate data from your customers to basically prescribe what they're going to do or want. What's the correct way. There's no one size fits off when it comes to AI investments. It's about banks tailoring those AI investments to their use cases that they have that's unique to them. So I find interesting anything related to compliance, fraud, cyber that's where you're seeing some really low hanging fruit early benefits. I think when it comes to some additional automation in the back office. I love what it can do for technology, the idea of Cobyl program change to Python, change to c plus plus, the ability to change archaic code. And by the way, most or almost all large banks still are advertising for Cobyl programmers. Tom, why are you killing me? By my first programming class at punch cards too so fourteen Yeah, what were that? Ancient? Lisa is like, what are they talking about? Single? Best buy ten seconds, JP Morgan and City Group. I had said, Okay, Barbell approach, Barbell approached, Mike Mayol, thank you so much, as WILLI s Fargo, Kati Kaminski, Chief Investments, trying to just to Alpha Simplex joins us now Katie the journey the low on a tenure yield back in twenty twenty in spring fifty basis points the high over the last couple of months through five percent. It paid to be short this bond market. You have been short, but the turnaround in the last couple of months has been brutaled the other way. We've come from five percent down to four forty on a ten year Katie, you've been short. Are you still short? And if you are, why, Yes, still short? But that has to do with different signals having different views. Take a look at the chart for the year. If you look at the year chart, the last month has been a miraculous turnaround relative to where we've come. So we're still way ahead of where we began the year, even prior to what happened in post what happened in the regional banking crisis. And so I think the key question to ask yourself about bonds right now is where are we going next? We have been looking all year for a distant version of the curve, and we got that in October, and the next point is still really uncertain. Are we moving to a steeper curve and if so, which way? Or are we just going to move around and sort of a range until we figure out what's actually happening with the Fed, Katie, Why is it not as simple as taking a look at the economic data coming out showing that it is disappointing much more frequently than it is outperforming, and just sort of leaning into that which the rest of the market seems to be doing. This is a good question, because really what I find the most concerning about the last month is there's been a massive has gone rally on weaker economic data, and that to me is sort of a relief rally from where we've come, because we've been through a lot, particularly in bonds, and so I think most people are buying right now because they're saying, if we see cuts soon, then we know that yields are going to come down. My concern is that it could take a lot longer than people think, pointing out that inflation is still way above target, or at least one percent above target, so we could take a year or so to get there. People are very quick to think that things are over when they take time to actually get through the system. Katie, we're setting up for the new year. I want to go back to the advent of all this, and this is trend based studies, and it's Andrew Low the giant, and you know, working with Elf Simplex and Wells Wilder and Monroe Trout, John Henry and the rest and the Germaine question twenty years ago is the same today. If you look at trend based studies or the complexity of trend based setups, are they elegant right now? Is the math good or are you blind? Well? Turning points are notoriously difficult for trend following. It's because we're not really set up to pick the tops and bottoms of big moves. And what happens in these turning points is we have to figure out using math, where is the next step of the trend. And that's where right now is an inflection point. And I'm looking forward to see if we can actually see that steeper curve. And when we've done historical analysis, what you do see is flat curves or steepening of curves. Is very difficult for trend signals because it's moving. Everything's moving, so it's a stochastic environment and you've got to find a new trend. What is the key attribute for our listeners and viewers to establish the trend? Well, I think the key thing that we always think about as trend followers. We try to blend different views. So right now, the long term view is still cautious. The shorter term view is very very optimistic, And if you combine those two together, you're really sitting in a situation now where we need more data and we need more time to understand where the market's going next. And that's why I think the market is so focused on every data point that comes out, because we're trying to sift through which view is correct. Is there a new trend, have we moved to a new era, a new phase of the of the curve shift, or are we still sort of treading water trying to figure that out. Time is expensive for shorts, and that's something that we have seen play out again and again. How much are some of the short positions being washed out adding to the rally? The stability that we've seen in bond yields over the past week and something that you think maybe can't last, Yes, of course, but I think there's a lot. There's been plenty of shorts this year, especially last year as well. When you think about where we've gone, we definitely need a balance between shorts and longs in this market. We have seen more buying pressure recently, which has been of perhaps causing some deceleration or deleveraging in short positions. But from the trend space, that's a strategy that's much more slow moving than some that you might be discussing. But there are definitely potential that some people are unwinding shorts as well. Hey Kitty, thanks for the update. Still short on this bomb market, Keady Commitski of Alpha Simplex. We take immense pride and I'm talking for the wonderful team we have working twenty four seven of giving you people of experience as we look at the horrific war in the Eastern Mediterranean. We've been advantaged by Norman Rule to say he's a former senior US intelligence official at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, barely describes his public service to the nation. Mister Roland, I want to cut to the chase here my amateur reading of fiction. Is it a ceasefire? Is an intelligence opportunity? Is this ceasefire good for the Israelis to develop intelligence in Gaza? Good morning, and you are absolutely correct. Keep in mind that the Israelis have a variety of means of intelligence. They must ingest a preasent. Prisoner interrogations take quite a while. Laptops have thousands of pages of data that must be reviewed, and you're looking to identify locations of individuals, hiding sites, weapons capacities, movement profiles, so that your troops can then use this as they plan operations when hostilities resume. So this is indeed probably one of the busiest periods for Israeli and partner intelligence. Does their military effort on a longer cease fire? Well, their military right now is supportive of the hostage release. They are concerned obviously that they allowed hostages to be taken and there because of the failure of October seventh, and this period is allowing that innocent Israelis are returning home, but that does not undermine their commitment to eradicating Hamas. Do we understand Have they articulated an endgame? Norman, No, And I think it may be a bit unfair to even think about what an endgame may be. So let me give you a give you an example. We are, in some ways in the easiest period of hostage negotiations. Once the negotiations turned to Israeli soldiers or men, you're going to see Hamas perhaps demand a lot more from the Israelis, the Israelis are unlikely to give, and therefore this could extend the hostage negotiations far longer than Israel could permit. And also we're looking at a period of time when the American presence among the hostages remains significant. Only one American has been released, likely because Hamas wishes to keep American political pressure on Israel. So it may well be that Americans may not be released in the initial period. There's something that you've said that I'd like you to explain to our audience. You said it's important not to confuse procedural hangups with strategic differences on hostage releases. Can you just go through what that actually means, Norman. In the early days of hostage negotiations, you've got issues such as how do you bring hostages to a safe location, exactly which hostage is going to be released, and what that particular group holding the hostages feels about their loss of that influence. And then on the Israeli side, you've got prisoners who have committed in some cases quite horrific acts, and the families of the individuals behind those sentences are going to be unhappy about the release. So you're going to have a process of working through this. But it doesn't mean that each side in this issue isn't interested in the release and the ceasefire. In fact, all sides involved Hamas, Israel, the United States, Qutar, they all benefit from a ceasefire and hostage release. Norman, can you just elaborate on the different factions within the Hamas group that are holding hostages and why they might be reluctant to release certain hostages. How this is sort of playing out in a political sphere over in Gaza. Well, we not only have different factions among the Palestinians, primarily Hamas, palestin Islamis Shihad criminal groups that may have taken hostages and seek to sell them to their own Palestinian partners, but we also have a communications problem. Imagine if you are these various groups and you know the Israelis are looking for your communications and looking for your movements, how do you exchange the data and conduct those intra Palestinian negotiations just to get that process going. It's a very complicated situation. What do you expect Tony Blinken to do on his latest tour of the region. We're always going to push for some sort of continued pressure on Hamas to release not only hostages, but to think about how they would consider a day after event. There's been very little actual crystallization of what day after means. You may have anything from an international police presence to Hamas thinking it can still survive because it will retain hostages for a period of time. And these talks are ongoing among all the various partners, and perhaps most important here are going to be the Saudist because they're leading such a large portion of the Islamic the Islamic world in Israel. It's really to make sure that he has a sense of where the coalition is in terms of resumption of hostilities and how Natanya, who is handling the various hostage debates within his own government. Norman role Aaron David Miller with us yesterday was just brilliant, and how this is not nineteen sixty seven, if that is true, and if there's not going to be a Camp David visit, a Camp David accord. Whatever our memory is of normal diplomatic ties, what do you presume will be the administration's approach to finding some kind of accord. Where are we a year from now, two years from now? Very difficult to think forward. First, you've got to identify which partners are going to show up for a camp David's style agreement meeting. I mean, think about it. Will Benjamin Netanyahu survive in his current political situation? It's stoutful. Who is going to be the leader of the Palestinians? Abu Mazen Mahammuda Bass, the head of the Palestine Authority is eighty eight years old. There will be no hamas presidents at the table. So who do you bring to the table that those entities don't actually exist at present? That's a massive question. Norman has tried to get your for you, it always says no one. Roll of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Subscribe to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast on Apple, Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live every weekday starting at seven am Eastern. I'm Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can watch us live on Bloomberg Television and always on the Bloomberg Terminal. Thanks for listening. I'm Tom Keen and this is Bloomberg,See 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Holiday Challenges Series - Ep 1 - Advent of Code Since some of the information you are about to hear is time specific, I want to let you know that I am recording this near the end of November in 2023. Whichever holidays you celebrate this time of year, life generally gets busy and stressful. It could be shopping or cooking or cleaning or school activities or buying, assembling, wrapping, and delivering gifts or planning time with family or dealing with visiting family or scheduling time off from work or managing extra work while others have scheduled time off or a whole plethora of other things. This time of year can be stressful. A few years ago, I discovered a fun activity, which challenged my mind and helped me focus and detach from the stress for a little while each day, through the month of December. It helped me manage the stress in an enjoyable way. Since then, I have found and tried several other similar activities, so I wanted to share a little about them with you for the next few episodes so you can see what might work for you. The first I would like to share is called the Advent of Code Challenge (https://adventofcode.com/). In HPR episodes 2973 (https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr2973/index.html) and 3744 (https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr3744/index.html), Daniel Perrson shared some great details about this challenge. I encourage you to go review his episodes. But the TLDR (Or maybe the TLDL -- Too Long Didn't Listen?) for Advent of Code is that it is a 25 day challenge which begins on December 1. Once you register at adventofcode.com, Each day, you will be presented with a problem to solve and some sample data to use for verification that your program works. You can choose to use any programming language or application you desire produce the answer. Last year, I used this to brush up on my Python skills. Others use Visual Basic, C (and all its variants), Rust, Go, etc. I have seen people use Cobol, Fortran, and Pascal, or even Microsoft Excel. It is really up to you. You are then presented a dataset which is unique to your login, and against which you run your code. When complete, you submit the answer came up with on the adventofcode.com web site and they will tell you if you are correct or not. If you are competitive (And REALLY GOOD) there is a Global Leaderboard. If you want to compete with a group of friends, you can build your own leaderboard and invite others to take part with you. There are tons of resources online, from youtube channels to reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/), to Discord (https://discord.gg/tXJh262) So, if you are looking for a way to challenge your mind and detach from holiday stress, Advent of Code may be something you might try. If this is not your cup of tea, I will be sharing several other options for holiday challenges in future episodes.

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I started a new project. If you know me at all, this is not unusual. Having worked in the IT industry for nearly 40 years it's also not unusual that projects have a way of surprising you and this project was no different. Recently I've been talking about antennas, a topic close to the heart of many amateurs and one that garners a lot of opinion and in my experience, much less in the way of facts, so being a firm believer of facts, I set out to add some of those to the discussion. After having described that the environment is not often discussed in the context of antenna behaviour, coupled with the personal experience that it has by far the biggest influence, I set out to discover if I could use my computing skills to simulate this problem to build a picture that would speak a thousand words. Prompted by a friend who shared with me a link to an opinion that stated that dipole antennas didn't have 2.15 dBi gain, but in fact, apparently, had 8.5 dBi gain, I was energised to find out where this number came from. I figured I'd spin up some antenna modelling software, use a standard model of a dipole, then simulate it at various heights above the ground and see what I could learn. Any good journey starts with a single step, so I started with looking for a generic model of a dipole antenna. I've played in this space before, so I was familiar with the fact that most, but not all, antenna modelling tools use a piece of software called NEC2 to do the actual calculations. Its models are described using text files ending in the .NEC extension. This software goes back to punch card days, so the format for the NEC2 files is essentially a stack of punch cards, so much so that every line in the text file is called a card and any software that uses the underlying NEC2 tool describes it in that way. I won't bore you with the syntax, it's, let's put it this way. If you've been around computers for as long as I have, you're familiar with a tool called "sendmail", which is known to be user-friendly, just very particular with whom it makes friends. The NEC2 card format is much the same. It's not that surprising, and for added nostalgia, NEC2 was written in FORTRAN, originally in 1981 at the Lawrence Livermore Labs by Jerry Burke and Andrew Poggio. It was later released to the public. There's translations to C and C++, but they use the same notion of cards, so no magic progress there. I started learning the syntax, and eventually came across a text-book with an example of cards that describe a dipole. Mind you, there were plenty of disclaimers around how poorly the ground was simulated and wouldn't you know it, the file format uses meters as the dimension, rather than wavelengths, so as far as I can tell, you can't simulate a quarter wave antenna, you have to simulate one of a specific length, so much for using a standard model of a dipole. I found a tool that uses Python to issue NEC2 commands and as a surprise to nobody, it too uses cards. I used it to discover that for a particular type of ground, at some unknown height, the optimum length for a 10m WSPR dipole antenna is 5,225.87 millimetres long, apparently. You know it's true, it says so right there on the screen. I'm skipping over having to compile the software that was supposed to be a ready made Python library, but I digress. There was a tool, written in TCL, that visualised NEC2 output, last updated 18 or so years ago and I unsuccessfully tried to make it work. Then there were those who suggested to fire up some random Windows tool on my Linux box, but as far as I can tell, I'd have to do the height adjustments manually, not ideal if you want to visualise from say, ground to geostationary orbit, one millimetre at a time and output an image at every step. I searched the net for others who would surely have trodden this path long before I came along, only to discover that my search-fu is clearly broken, or any website with promising information has long ago been booted off the Internet, leaving "For Sale" signs on the domain name. I came across one file which simulated a dipole in free space. It had, to use the NEC2 terms, 11 cards. When I run that through "nec2c", it generates a 12 megabyte file with over 104-thousand lines of output. Only takes 650 milliseconds to generate. If only I could visualise it. I also came across a whole range of physics programs, which is not that surprising, since essentially antenna design is physics, but those tools require that I start learning a whole new way of building antennas, apparently from electrons, preferably whilst getting a degree in physics with a specialisation in computational electromagnetics. Then there was the Wolfram Alpha notebook model for a simple dipole, only 3,200 lines of code, so, you know, trivial to use. So, here's the thing. Has nobody in living memory simulated a dipole at more than three heights and documented the process? Am I really the first human on the planet to think of this? Oh, yes, I did find a project that simulated different lengths of dipoles, but I'll leave those for another day. And finally, I also found "xnecview", which does generate images, but it too is very particular whom it makes friends with and I've yet to discover if it can generate what I'm looking for. As for the 8.5 dBi, I'm still looking. My current best guess is that at some specific height a dipole has an ugly spike that has 8.5 dBi gain and that someone used that number without looking at the detail, but, who knows, there's plenty of opinion to go around. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Episode 419 avec Benoît et Xavier.La revue de presse :• A comme Arduino (00:02:50) : Se connecte à Elastic Search. Un client pour la collection d'information horodatée. (Sources : arduino.cc et github.com) • E comme Espace (00:10:09) : La sonde Voyager 1 a été mise à jour. Le code en Fortran 5 de la sonde Voyager 1 a été mis à jour après 42 ans et après avoir parcouru 24 milliards de km . (Sources : huffingtonpost.fr, cnetfrance.fr et nasa.gov) • L comme Leica (00:16:51) : L'AI ne passera pas par elle. Le premier APN avec Content Authenticity Initiative. (Source : dpreview.com) • M comme Mot de passe (00:24:01) : Proton se lance dans le partage de mots de passe. Proton Pass ajoute une fonctionnalité de partage de mots de passe sécurisée. • S comme Shaper Trace (00:28:53) : Du croquis au vecteur. Tracer précis au millimètre près pour CNC et imprimante 3D. (Source : shapertools.com) • S comme Stabilisation (00:37:05) : Sortie de la DJI Osmo Pocket 3. DJI a présenté la Osmo Pocket 3. (Sources : presse-citron.net et dji.com) Dossier : Osmo Pocket 3 : pourquoi et comment stabiliser ? (00:46:26)• La stabilisation en vidéo: pourquoi (short intro) (Source : gitzo.com)• Les débuts (Source : tiffen.com)• La stabilisation numérique (Source : wikimonde.com)• La stabilisation optique / mécanique (Source : wikipedia.org)• Cas d'usage: les drones (Pourquoi stabiliser images drone? Méthodes? Conseils) • Nacelles • Cas d'usage et évolution: Cinéma Retrouvez toutes nos informations, liens, versions du podcast via notre site : LesTechnos.be

Despite the fact that Fortran has been around since the 1950s, it remains a very relevant programming language today and has an active community of keen engineers. In this episode I'll take a sweep from the origins of Fortran, how to deal with legacy (Fortran 77), how the language evolved to modern day use cases of Fortran. In the course of the episode you'll hear from Thomas Clune (NASA, US), Wim Vanderbauwhede (Uni. Glasgow, UK), Milan Curcic (Uni. of Miami, US) and Ondrej Certik (GSI Technologies, US). Fortran-lang website: https://fortran-lang.orgFortran-lang GitHub: https://github.com/fortran-langLFortran website: https://lfortran.orgLFortran GitHub: https://github.com/lfortran/lfortranMilan's book: https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortranNeural-Fortran: https://github.com/modern-fortran/neural-fortranFastGPT: https://github.com/certik/fastgptUS Fortran Standard Committee: https://j3-fortran.org/Ondrej's website: https://ondrejcertik.com/Milan's website: https://milancurcic.com/Tom Clune's site at NASA: https://sciences.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/thomas.l.clune Wim Vanderbauwhede's site at Uni Glasgow https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wim/pFUnit testing framework https://github.com/Goddard-Fortran-Ecosystem/pFUnit gFTL template library: https://software.nasa.gov/software/GSC-17742-1 Wim's paper (Journal of Supercomputing 2021): Making legacy Fortran code type safe through automated program transformation https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11227-021-03839-9 Support the Show.Thank you for listening and your ongoing support. It means the world to us! Support the show on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/codeforthought Get in touch: Email mailto:code4thought@proton.me UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie US RSE Slack (usrse.slack.com): @Peter Schmidt Mastadon: https://fosstodon.org/@code4thought or @code4thought@fosstodon.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

With tracks from Liebe ist Cool, Steve Lazard, Linkwood, Ben Hauke, Derrick L Carter, Yyard, Session Victim, Lea Lisa, Jably, Hyenah & Nanghiti Aviankoi, Captain Mustache, Earth People, Purple Disco Machine Vs. Sugarhill Gang, Boys' Shorts, Mall Grab & Loods, Fortran 5, DJ Hell, Love Inc., Ivory (It), Space Ranger, Badknife, Scott Grooves. Contact: dj@ribeaud.ch.

Norah joins Ben this week for a discussion about recursion, and speaking of… Happy Second Anniversary to us!  Norah has just seen another loud musical, and Ben is champing at the bit to talk about the game he's been playing lately.  They start their circuitous loop with some Canadian music industry trivia, a correction for the dystopia episode, the definition, and unintentionally making fun of the Scottish.  More loop centric topics include… making jewelry, an area of downtown Chicago, digital music, computer programming languages, rollercoasters, mathematics, Norah's Summer job in college, and “time loop” movies.  On the topic of video games, Ben explains the importance of engaging gameplay loops, his stance on game reviews, and his experiences with the game Deathloop by Arkane Studios.   00:00:21 - Ben's recursion joke fail, and Norah sees the “updated” musical Tommy  00:02:42 - Other musicals… American Idiot and Jagged Little Pill, and “also known as music” 00:04:27 - Interesting Canadian music idiosyncrasies, and a dystopia episode correction 00:07:02 - 2nd Anniversary, weird duck callback, and a heartfelt THANK YOU to listeners! 00:09:30 - The definition according to Web and Ox, and Ben adds back some superfluous stuff 00:12:17 - “So I Married an Axe Murderer,” vegetarian haggis, loopholes, jewelry, and the loupe  00:15:05 - Jump rings, perspectives of helixes, the Chicago Loop, and US state opinions 00:18:57 - Ben is mistaken, what is in “the Loop,” the Chicago fireworks, and M3Ps? 00:21:17 - Audio formats, songs on a loop, “My Weekly Mixtape” shoutout, and recursion  00:23:30 - Norah is above BASIC, FORTRAN 77, and other loops in computer programming 00:25:08 - Marry the FORTRAN teacher, middle school is NOT grade school, and classrooms 00:27:45 - Mental math, Adderall, first looping rollercoaster “Flip Flap Railway,” and clothoids 00:32:26 - “Shuttle Loop” rollercoasters, strange loops, the Möbius strip, and Socrates 00:35:10 - A child's perspective on math, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the U-505 00:37:07 - Submarines are cramped, the coal mine, model trains, and going in to video games 00:39:30 - Ben explains gameplay loops, a rare dad joke from Norah, and Donut County 00:43:25 - Match 3 game loops, Norah understands, and Ben mentions Deathloop 00:45:19 - A discussion about movies, television, and books using the “time loop” concept 00:48:07 - Celebrating “Groundhog's Day,” and “The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle”  00:49:34 - Ben undersells the movie Looper, and other “living the same day” movies 00:51:35 - The premise (relatively spoiler free) and game mechanics of the game “Deathloop” 00:54:03 - Discrepancies in user and news outlet reviews, and the start of Ben's critique 00:57:33 - “Redfall,” how skill trees work, a disclaimer, and the importance of intelligent AI  01:01:00 - Seven, Norah comes clean on playtime, some balancing is needed, and a bug 01:03:17 - Ben nitpicking about reviews, know your reviewer, and closing the show!   Follow Two Vague on… Our website: http://www.twovaguepodcast.com  On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/two_vague_podcast On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@twovaguepodcast On Twitter: https://twitter.com/TwoVaguePodcast For show appearance and other inquiries, contact us at: twovaguepodcast@gmail.com   FUN FACT - The Great Train Story is a 3,500-square-foot HO scale model railroad display located in the Transportation Zone of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry!

In this episode, we speak with Jeff Bezanson, one of the co-creators of the Julia programming language and the CTO of JuliaHub. We start with the history of Julia and why it took a while to take off, the key principles behind the language, how it provides the speed of C with the ease of Python, and what it's been like running such a large open-source project. He sheds light on the original motivation for Julia, the process of creating it, and its involvement in AI.Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).Things mentioned:"Telescoping Languages by Ken Kennedy"“Julia: Dynamism and Performance Reconciled by Design”Donald FischerChris Rackauckas: "A Julia Library for Neural Differential Equations"RR: Record and Replay FrameworkDell XPS laptop preloaded with UbuntuABOUT JEFF BEZANSONJeff Bezanson is one of the co-creators of the Julia programming language, along with Stefan Karpinski, Alan Edelman, and Viral B. Shah. He is also a co-founder of JuliaHub, a company that grew out of this project. He has a Ph.D. from MIT where he worked as a research scientist and he has authored a number of academic papers on the Julia language. The intention behind the creation of Julia was to establish a language that was both high-level and fast. His work on it has earned Jeff the J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software.Highlights:[Jeff Bezanson]: You had to give up performance. That was just a law of the universe that they all learned. Then if you wanted performance, you had to use C or Fortran or something. This was just the way it was. I got introduced to that world of thinking in college and I thought it was really surprising because I knew that high-level languages could be fast. I knew there were good Lisp implementations, you had the ML family languages, there were really good high-level languages that had really, really good compilers and could be fast. And nobody seemed to be using them, which I just thought was amazing. I made it this mission to “Can we get all these people to realize that high-level languages can be fast, and they should be using a high-level language that's fast?” So [Julia] is my attempt to do that.— [0:02:59 - 0:03:44][Jeff Bezanson]: People have been trying to speed up dynamic languages of various kinds for a long time. That's been one of the long-running research threads in computer sciences, starting with a language like Smalltalk, for instance. How do you make it run fast? There's a whole zoo of both dynamic and static techniques. There are some really cool stuff people have invented to take these languages that you can't necessarily statically analyze using standard compiler techniques, and yet, nevertheless, generate fast code from them. It's a fun game to play is how do we compile these languages that are not cooperative? So that makes it a challenge, which makes it a good research problem. But to me, it's kind of annoying because why do you always have to fight the language design? So instead, I approached it from the opposite direction and said, “All right. What are all the techniques that are known and available for doing this? Then how would you design a language to make those techniques work well?”— [0:13:18 - 0:14:12]Let us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonOr by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don't have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.dev

Episode: 2589 In which automatic calculation leads to the black-boxing of mathematics.  Today, mathematics vanishes.

If you've ever used an IF statement (and if you're reading this, there's almost a 100% chance you have), you can thank FORTRAN. Of course, you can thank it for plenty more, as Girish and Faith discuss in This Week in Tech History, celebrating the first time researchers ran a FORTRAN program. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fun with FORTRAN?! An extreme data breach and its consequences. Rogue 2FA apps live in action. Juicejacking revisited. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Original music by Edith Mudge.

Stephanie is joined today by a very special guest, Andrea Goulet. Andrea founded Empathy In Tech as part of writing her book Empathy-Driven Software Development (https://empathyintech.com/). She's also the founder of the community Legacy Code Rocks (https://www.legacycode.rocks/) and the Chief Vision Officer of two companies: Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/) and Heartware (https://www.heartware.dev/) (which provides financial support to keep Empathy In Tech running). Stephanie has strong opinions about the concept of "Makers and Menders" that the Corgibytes folks have written/spoken about, especially around those personas and gender stereotypes. Andrea joins Steph to evolve the conversation and add nuance to the discussion about legacy code/maintenance in our community. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Makers and Menders from Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/blog/2015/08/14/makers-vs-menders/) Empathy in Tech (https://empathyintech.com/) Legacy Code Rocks (https://www.legacycode.rocks/) Forget Technical Debt — Here's How to Build Technical Wealth (https://review.firstround.com/forget-technical-debt-heres-how-to-build-technical-wealth) Equal Partners by Kate Mangino (https://bookshop.org/p/books/equal-partners-improving-gender-equality-at-home-kate-mangino/18336353) Sustainable Web Development Episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/368) Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn., And today I'm joined by a very special guest, Andrea Goulet. Hi, Andrea. ANDREA: Hello, thanks for having me. STEPHANIE: So here on The Bike Shed, we like to start by sharing something new in our world. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and anything new going on for you? ANDREA: Yeah, so I have a background in strategic communications, and then kind of made a windy journey over to software. And so, for the past 13 years, I've been focused on modernizing legacy systems. And legacy is kind of a loose term; something you write today can be legacy. But essentially, we kind of help modernize any kind of software, any language, any platform, any framework. And so, over the course of doing that, in the work that I did before I came to software, I had a very technical understanding of empathy and communications and had just done a lot of that. And I just noticed how much that mattered in creating healthy and sustainable codebases. So now I'm kind of taking that experience, and I've got a book contract called "Empathy-Driven Software Development." So I've been working on just diving into a lot of the really deep research. So that's been kind of my focus for the past two years. And it's been really surprising because there were things that were positioned as truths, and then it's like, wait a second, neuroscience is completely upending everything. So it's been a fun learning journey. And I'm excited to share some of the things that I've learned over the years, especially [laughs] in the past two years with this book. So that is the new thing with me. And it's...I was telling you before it just feels like a constant new thing. Anybody who's written a book...it's the hardest thing I've ever done, so... [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, that sounds tough but also kind of exciting because you're learning so many new things that then kind of shape how you view the world, it sounds like. ANDREA: Yeah. Yeah, it really does. And I think I really like diving into the details. And I think what started this was...my business partner, Scott, at the time, really embodied the stereotypical 2010 software developer down to the scruffy beard and dark-rimmed glasses. And what I found incredibly interesting was he had this belief of I'm good with machines, but I'm bad with people. And he just had this really deeply ingrained. On the flip side, I had this belief of, oh, I'm good with people, but I'm bad with machines. I'll never learn how to code. And I found that really interesting. And personally, I had to go through a journey because we went on...it was the first time either of us had ever been on a podcast. So this was about ten years ago. And at the end of the podcast, Scott was the only one on there. And he said, you know, the person asked about his origin story and about our company Corgibytes. And he was like, "Yeah, you know, Andrea is amazing. She's our non-technical founder." And by that time, I had been coding next to him for like three years. And I was like, why the heck would you call me non-technical? And I just felt this...what is it that I have to do to prove it to you? Do I have to actually go get a CS degree? I know I'm self-taught, but does that mean that I'm not good enough? What certificates do I need? Do I need to sit down next to you? Do I need to change my lifestyle? Do I need to look like you? So I was really upset [laughing] and just thinking through, how dare you? How dare you label me as non-technical? And Scott is very quiet and patient, great with people, I think. [laughs] And he listened and said, "I use the words that you use to describe yourself. When we were in a sales meeting right before that phone call, I paid attention to how you introduced yourself, and I pretty much used the same words. So when you call yourself technical, I will too." That shattered my world. It shattered my identity because then it put the responsibility of belonging on me. I couldn't blame other people for my not feeling like I didn't belong. That journey has just been so profound. This is what I see a lot of times with empathy is that we have these kinds of self-identities, but then we're afraid to open up and share. And we make these assumptions of other people, but, at the same time, there's real-world evidence. And so, how do we interpret that? In addition to this, Scott...like, part of the reason I called myself non-technical was because all of the people I saw who were like me or had my background, that's the word that was used to describe someone like me. And when I would go to a conference, you know, I have a feminine presentation. And this was ten years ago. My very first conference was 300 software developers, and there were probably about 295 men. And I was one of five women in the room. And because I looked so different and because I stood out, the first question that anybody would ask me, and this was about 30% to 40% of introductions, was, "Are you technical or non-technical?" And I had to choose between this binary. And I was like; I don't know. Am I technical? Like, is it a CEO that can code? I don't know. But then I have this background. And so I would just default to, "No, I guess I'm non-technical," because that's what felt safe because that's what they assumed. And I just didn't know, and I didn't realize that I was then building in this identity. And so then, as part of trying to create a warm and inclusive organization, we did one of the unconscious bias surveys from Harvard. And what astonished me when I did that myself was that I didn't have a whole lot of bias, like, there was some. But the most profound bias was against women in the workplace, and it stood out a big one. I was like, how is it that I can be someone who's a fierce advocate, but then that's my own bias against people like me? What the heck is going on? So really exploring all of this. And I think Scott and I have had so many different conversations over the years. We actually ended up getting married. And so we have a personal reason to figure a lot of this stuff out too. And when we start to have those conversations about who am I and what's important to me, then all of a sudden, we can start creating better code. We can start working together better as a team. We can start advocating for our needs. Other people know what we need ahead of time. And we're not operating out of defensiveness; we're operating out of collaboration and creativity. So the book and kind of everything is inspired by my background and my lived experience but then also seeing Scott and his struggles, too, because he had been told like, "You're a geek. Stay in the computers. Stay in the code. You're not allowed to talk to customers because you're bad at it," and flat out was told that. So how do we overcome these labels that people have put on us, and then we've made part of our own identity? And which ones are useful, and then which ones are not? Because sometimes labels can create a sense of community and affinity and so how do we know? And it's complicated, but the same thing, software is complicated. We can take skills like empathy and communication. We can look at them schematically and operationalize them when we look at them in kind of detail. So that's what I enjoy doing is looking under the hood and figuring out how does all this stuff work? So... [laughs] STEPHANIE: I did want to respond to a few things that I heard you say when you're talking about going to a conference and feeling very much in the minority. I went to my first RailsConf in 2022, my first RailsConf in person, and I was shocked at the gender imbalance. And I feel like every time I used the women's restroom; I was looking around and trying to make a connection with someone and have a bit of a kinship and be like, oh yes, you are here with me in this space. And then we would have a conversation and walk out together, and that felt very meaningful because the rest of the space, you know, I wasn't finding my people. And so I feel that very hard. I think this is also a good time to transition into the idea of makers and menders, especially because we have been talking about labels. So you all talked about this distinction between the different types of work in software development. So we have greenfield work, and that is writing code from scratch, making all the decisions about how to set up an application, exploring a whole new domain that hasn't been codified yet. And that is one type of work. But there's also mender-type work, which is working in existing applications, legacy code, refactoring, and dealing with the complexity of something that has stood the test of time but may or may not have gotten a lot of investment or care and bringing that codebase back to life if you will. And when I first heard about that distinction, I was like, yes, I'm a mender. This is what I like to do. But the more I thought about it, I started to also feel conflicted because I felt pain doing that work as well. ANDREA: Oh, interesting, yeah. STEPHANIE: Especially in the context of teams that I've been on when that work was not valued. And I was doing maintenance work and fixing bugs and either specifically being assigned to do that work or just doing it because I knew it needed to be done and no one else was doing it. And that had caused me a lot of frustration before because I would look around and be on a team with mostly White men and be like, why aren't they picking up any of this work as well? And so I was thinking about how I both felt very seen by the acknowledgment that this is work, and this is valid work, and it's important work, but also a little bit confused because I'm like, how did I get here? Did I pigeonhole myself into doing this work? Because the more I did it, the better I got at it, the more comfortable and, to whatever degree, enjoyed it. But at the same time, I'm not totally sure I was given the opportunity to do greenfield work earlier in my career. That could have changed where my interests lie. ANDREA: Yeah, it is. And it's funny that you mentioned this because I actually I'm a maker. But yeah, I created this community, and I'm known for this thing. And I had a very similar experience to how do I exist as someone who's different in this kind of community? And I think part of it is, you know, there's a great quote by George Box, who is a statistician, and he says, "All models are wrong; some are useful." And I think that's kind of the whole idea with the maker-mender is that it is a signal to be like, hey, if you like fixing stuff...because there is so much shame, like, that's what we were responding to. And Scott had the opposite problem of what you have experienced, where he was only allowed to work on greenfield work. They were like, "No, you're a good developer. So we want you working on features. We won't let you fix the bugs. We won't let you do the work that you like doing." And so that's why he wanted to create Corgibytes because he's like, "This work needs to be done." I am so personally passionate about this. And when we were having these conversations 13 years ago, I was talking to him about product/market fit and stuff like that. And I was like, "You like fixing software, and there's a lot of software out there to be fixed." I just was very, very confused as to why this kind of existed. And we had been told flat out, "You're never going to find anybody else like Scott. You're never going to be able to build a company around people who find a lot of joy in doing this work." And I think that this comes down to identity and kind of the way that Legacy Code Rocks was built too. A lot of the signaling that we put out there and the messaging and stuff really came from Scott's feeling of, like, I want to find more people like me. So being in the women's bathroom and like, how do I find more menders? Or how do I find people...because we were walking through a Barnes & Noble, and it was like a maker fest, maker everything. And he's like, "I don't have a community. There's nowhere for me to go to create these meaningful connections," exactly like you were saying. "I have maybe two people in my network." And then we were at a conference in 2015. We were at the large agile conference. And it was one of the first ones that I've been to that had a software craft track. And we met like 20 people who were really, like, I just saw Scott light up in a way that I hadn't seen him light up because he could geek out on this level that I hadn't seen him do before. And so when I asked, like, "How do you guys stay in touch afterwards?" And they're like, "Oh no, we don't. We don't know how to build a community." And it's like, well, okay, well, we can get that started. To your response of like, how do you operate when it is presented as a binary? And it's like, am I this, or am I this? This kind of gets down to the idea of identity-wise, is it a binary, or is it a spectrum? I tend to think of it kind of like an introvert-extrovert spectrum where it's like there is no wrong or right, and you can move in different places. And I think being able to explain the nuances of the modeling around how we came up with this messaging can get lost a lot of times. But I'm with you, like, how...and that's kind of something now where it's like, okay, maybe my role was to just start this conversation, but then everybody's having these ideas. But there are people who genuinely feel seen, you know. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting because what I'm hearing is that when there's this dominant narrative of what a developer should be, and should be good at, and what they should do, it's kind of like what you were saying earlier about how hard it was for you to claim that identity yourself. People who feel differently aren't seen, and that's, I think, the problem. And I'm very, very interested in the gender aspect of it because one thing that I've noticed is that a lot of my female developer friends do do more of that mending work. So when you talk about feeling like there was no community out there, it just wasn't represented at the time, you know, a decade ago for sure. And still, even now, I think we're just starting to elevate those voices and that work. I wanted to share that at thoughtbot; we have different teams for different business verticals. And so we do have a rapid validation prototyping team. We do have a greenfield like MVP, V1 product team. And then we also have a team, Boost, the team that I'm on. That is more team augmentation, working with legacy code and existing systems. And it was not lost on me that Boost has the most women. [laughs] ANDREA: Yeah, because you have the concept of cognitive load and mental load. STEPHANIE: Yes. ANDREA: Women at home end up taking a lot more of this invisible labor that's behind the scenes. Like, you're picking the kids up from school, or you're doing the laundry, or all these things that are just behind the scenes. And this was actually something...so when Scott and I also got married, that's when I first became aware of this, and it was very similar. And it was, okay, how do I...because Scott and I, both in our business and in our personal partnership, we wanted it to be based on equity. And then also, like, how do I show up? And for me, the hardest thing with that was letting go of control where it's like, it has to be a certain way. It's hard for me to comment on the broader enterprise level because what I see at Corgibytes is we have gender parity. That's been pretty balanced over the course of our..., and we're a small boutique company, so it's different. But then, in the larger community of Legacy Code Rocks, it tends to be more male. There are actually fewer women in there. And I think, too, like there's this idea of testers and QA, like, I think that falls in there as well, and that's heavily dominant. And I think sometimes it's like, oh...and I think this kind of comes to the problem of it, like, it's the way that we think about the work in general. And this might be useful just to think about kind of the way that it came about was, you know, makers and menders was we were putting together [laughs] actually this talk for this conference that we went to. And my background in marketing, I was trying to wrap my brain around when is it appropriate for mending? And I had my marketing degree. It's like, oh, the product lifecycle. And Scott's retort was, "It needs to be a circle. We're agile, so it needs to be a circle." And I was like, this doesn't make any sense. Because look, if you have maturity and then you have it...oh my gosh, it'll link back to innovation, and then you can do new stuff. And so yeah, I think when we describe makers and menders, and this is true with any label, the idea in the broader model is that makers and menders aren't necessarily distinct, and your team should 1,000%...everyone should be contributing. And if you only have one person who's doing this work, you're at a detriment. That's not healthy for your codebase like; this should be baked in. And the mender is more of like, this is where I get my joy. It's more of an opt-in. But I think that your observation about the invisible labor and how that gets translated to maintenance work is accurate. A lot of times, like when Scott was describing his thing, it's like, there's the movie "Office Space." I might be dating myself. But there's this guy, Milton, and it's like, "Just go to the basement." He was told maintenance is where good software careers go to die. [laughs] And so over the years, it's like, how do we celebrate this and make it more part of the maker work? And it's similar to how introverts and extroverts...it's like, we all work together, and you need all of it. But there is an extrovert bias. And extroverts are seen more as, oh, they have leadership traits and stuff. But increasingly, we're starting to see, no, actually, that's not the only way that you can be effective. So I think it's hard. And I think it does come down to belonging. And I think that there are also different cultural impacts there. And it comes down to just a lot of different lived experiences. And I so appreciate you sharing your point of view. And I'm curious, what would help you feel more like you belong? Is it the work and the environment that you're in that's kind of contributing to this feeling? Or is it other things in general or? STEPHANIE: Okay, so I did want to address real quick what you were saying about mental load and household labor because I think I really only started thinking about this after I read a book called "Equal Partners" by Kate Mangino, where she talks about how to improve gender equality at home, and I loved that book so much. And I suddenly started to see it everywhere in life and obviously at work too. And that's kind of what really drove my thinking around this conversation, maintenance work being considered less skilled labor or things that get offloaded to someone else. I think that really frustrates me because I just don't believe that's true. And to get back to what you were asking about what would make me feel more seen or valued, I think it's systemic. But I also think that organizations can make change within their cultures around incentives especially. When you are only promoted if you do greenfield work and write thousands of lines of code, [laughs] that's what people will want to do. [laughs] And not even just promotions, but who gets a kudos in Slack? Or when do you get positive encouragement? As a consultant, I've worked on different client teams that had different values, and that was when I really struggled to be in those environments. I have a really strong memory of working on a greenfield project, but there was another male developer who was just cranking out features and doing all of this work and then demoing it to stakeholders. But then there was one feature that he had implemented but had faked the data. So he hadn't finished the backend part of it but just used fake data to demo the user interface to stakeholders. And then he moved on to something else. And I was like, wait; this isn't done. [laughs] But at that point, stakeholders thought it was done. They thought that it was complete. They gave him positive feedback for finishing it. And then I had to come in and be like, "This isn't done. Someone needs to work on this." And that person ended up being me. And that was really frustrating because I was doing that behind-the-scenes work, the under-the-hood work for something that had already been attributed to someone else. And yeah, I think about that a lot and what systems or what the environment was that led to that particular dynamic. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! 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You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! STEPHANIE: Do you have any advice for leaders who want to make sure there's more equity for people who like to do mending and legacy code work? ANDREA: Yeah, absolutely. I am so grateful for your questions and your perspective because this is not something that's talked about a lot, and it is so important. I wrote an article for First Round Review. This was in 2016 or 2017. And it was called "Forget Technical Debt — Here's How to Build Technical Wealth," and so if you want to link to it in the show notes. It's a really long article and that goes into some of the specifics around it, but it's meant for CEOs. It really is meant for CEOs. And I do think that you're right; some of it is that we have lionized this culture of making and the work that is more visible. And it's like, oh, okay, great, here's all the visual design stuff. That's fantastic, but then recognizing there's a lot of stuff that's behind the scenes too. So in terms of leaders, I think some of it is you have to think about long-term thinking instead of just the short-term. Don't just chase the new shiny. Also, you need to be really aware of what your return on investment is. Because the developers that are working on maintaining and making sure that your mission-critical systems don't fail those are the ones that have the highest value in your organization because if that system goes down, your company makes money. Greenfield work, yes, it's very...and I'm not downplaying greenfield work for sure. I'm definitely, [laughs] like, I love doing that stuff. I love doing the generating phase. And at the same time, if we only look towards kind of more the future bias...there's a great book that we were featured in called "The Innovation Delusion" that talks about this more in general. But if we only look at the visible work that's coming, then we forget what's important now. And so for leaders, if you're running a software company, know where your mission-critical systems are and recognize the importance of maintaining them. That's the very first step. The second step is to recognize the complexities of a situation, like, to think about things in terms of complex systems instead of complicated systems. And I'll describe the difference. So when I came to software, I had been working in the creative field, like in advertising, and branding, and copywriting, and all that. And we got inputs. We kind of ran it through this process, and then we delivered. And we did a demo and all of that stuff. It was when is the timeline? When is it done? Big air quotes. And we were pretty predictably able to deliver on our delivery day. Sometimes things would go wrong, but we kind of had a sense because we had done the same pattern over and over again. You don't get that in legacy code because the variables are so immense that you cannot predict in the same way. You have to adopt a new strategy for how do you measure effectiveness. And the idea of measuring software productivity in terms of new features or lines of code, like, that's something that goes all the way back to Dykstra [laughs] in the 1970s around, is that the right way? Well, a lot of people who code are like, "No, that's not." This is a debate that goes back to the earliest days of computing. But I think that the companies that are able to build resilient systems have a competitive advantage. If a leader wants to look at their systems, whether that is a social system and the people in their organization or whether or not it's their software if you look at it from a systems thinking, like, there are interactions that I need to pay attention to not just process, that is super key as well. And then the last one is to recognize, like, one of our core values is communication is just as important as code. I would be remiss to neglect empathy and communication in part of this, but that really is so important. Because when we position things in terms of...and I don't know as much about thoughtbot and kind of the overall strategy, but kind of an anti-pattern I have seen just in general in organizational behavior is that when you structure teams functionally and silo them, you're not getting that diversity of thought. So the way that we approach it is, like, put a mender on a maker team because they're going to have a different perspective. And then, you can work together to get things out the door faster and value each other's perspectives and recognize strengths and shadows. So, for me, as a maker, I'm like, I've got a huge optimism bias, and we can go through all this stuff. And for Scott, it's like he struggles to know when he's done. Like, for me, I'm like, cool, we're 80% done. I got it. We're good to go. And for Scott, he'll work on something, and then it's like, I have to stop him. So recognizing that we help each other, that kind of thought diversity and experience diversity goes across so many different vectors, not just makers and menders. But I think, to me, it's about reframing value so that you're not just thinking about what it is right now in this moment. And I think a lot of this comes down to investor strategy too. Because if you've got an investor that you're trying to appease and they're just trying to make short-term monetary gains, it's much harder to think in terms of long term. And I think it's developers understanding business, business understanding the struggles of developers and how they need lots of focus time, and how estimating is really freaking hard, and why if you demand something, it's going to be probably not right. And then coming up with frameworks together where...how can I describe this in a way? So to me, it really is about empathy and communication at the end of the day when we're talking about interactions and how do we operationalize it. STEPHANIE: I like what you said about reframing value because I do believe that it starts from the top. When you value sustainability...my co-host, Joël, had an episode about sustainability as a value in software development. But then that changes, like I mentioned before, the incentive structures and who gets rewarded for what type of work. And I also think that it's not only diverse types of people who like doing different types of work, but there is value in doing both. And I know we talked about it being a spectrum earlier, but I strongly believe that doing the legacy code work and experiencing what it's like to try to change a system that you are like, I have no idea why this decision was made or like, why is the code like this? That will help inform you. If you do do greenfield work, those are really important skills, I think, to bring to that other type of work as well. Because then you're thinking about, okay, how can I make decisions that will help the developers down the line when I'm no longer on this project? ANDREA: Exactly, which is a form of empathy. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, it is a form of empathy, exactly. And the reverse is also true too. I was thinking about, okay, how can working in greenfield code help inform working with legacy code? And I was like, oh, you have so much energy when the world is completely open to you, and you can make whatever decisions to deliver value. And I've really struggled working in legacy code, feeling like I don't have any options and that I have to repeat a pattern that's already been set or that I'm just kind of stuck with what I've been given. But I think that there is some value in injecting more of that agency into working with legacy code as well. ANDREA: Well, and I think, too, I think you hit it on the head because, like I said, with the mental load at home, it was like, I had to be okay with things failing where it's like, it wasn't exactly the way I would do it, and I had to be okay with that. Like, oh, the dishes aren't put in the dishwasher exactly the same way I would do it. I'm not going behind it. And like, okay, it's not perfect. That's...whoo, it's going to be okay. And I think that's kind of what we experience, too, is this idea of we have to figure out how we work together in a way that is sustainable. And I think that, similar to my experience with the technical, non-technical piece, there is an onus. Now, granted, I want to be very careful here to not...there is trauma, and there is absolutely horrific discrimination and abuse. And that is not what I'm talking about here in terms of power dynamics. I am talking more about self-identity and self-expression. And I think that if you are in a community like makers and menders, yeah, we're less represented. There is a little bit of an onus, the technical, non-technical, like the onus of understanding what non-technical means and where I can push back is really important work for me to do. Because what I was surprised with was everyone there, like, when I started asking...so my response ended up being, "Help me understand, why did you ask that question?" And I took ownership of the narrative. And it was like, oh, well, what I found was that most of the people were like, if you're a recruiter, I don't want to waste your time with a bunch of stuff that you don't want to talk about. And then being able to say, "Oh, okay, I can see that, and you assumed that I was a recruiter because of the way I looked. And I understand the intention here. Next time, if I'm at a software conference, assume that I know how to code and assume that I'm here for a reason." And a great opening question is, "What brought you here?" I'm like, oh, okay, when we ask a close-ended question, we position things as a binary, like, are you technical or non-technical? That creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, and it's hard. But if I open it up and say, "What brought you here?" Then I can create my own narrative. There is an aspect of setting boundaries and pushing back a little bit like you said, agency. And that can be really hard because it gets at the core of who you are, and then you have to really explore it. And what I found, at least, is in the majority, there have been exceptions, but in the majority of the male-dominated groups that I've been in in my career in software, the majority are very welcoming and want me to be there. But I feel inadequate, and it's more impostor syndrome than I think it is people being discriminatory. Learning about the differences between that and where is my responsibility and where's your responsibility in this that's a tough tension to play. STEPHANIE: Absolutely. And I think that's why it's really important that we're having a conversation like this. I think what you're getting at is just the harm of the default assumption that is chronic, [laughs] at least for me sometimes. And you mentioned earlier the history of computing a little bit. And I was really excited about that because I did a little bit of digging and learned about women's history in computing and how after World War II, programming, you know, there were so many women. In fact, I think by 1960, more than one in four programmers were women, and they were working on mission-critical work like for NASA for, you know, during World War II for code-breaking. And I read that at the time, that work was deemed boring and tedious, and that's why men didn't want to do it. They wanted to work on hardware, which was what was the cool, creative, interesting work. And the computing work was just second class. That's changed, but in some ways, I'm thinking about, okay, where are we now? And to what degree are we kind of continuing this legacy? And how can we evolve or move beyond it? ANDREA: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And in some of the research for the book, one of the things I learned is a lot of people know the name, John von Neumann. He created the von Neumann architecture, that is the foundation of all the hardware that most of us use today. And the very first kind of general purpose digital computer, ENIAC, all...I think it was eight of the people who were programmers for that were women. That team was led by John von Neumann's wife, Klára, and you never hear about Klára. You have to go digging for that. And The Smithsonian actually just about 8, 10 years ago did a big anniversary and then realized none of those women were invited to the press conferences. They were not invited. And so there is kind of this...similar to generational wealth, it's the thing that gets passed down. Like, if you're in the rooms in the early days...there was a quote by John Backus, who created FORTRAN and the Backus–Naur principle, where he talked about programming in the 1950s. He has an essay, and he was like, yeah, I mean, an idea was anybody who claims it, and we never cited our sources. And so it was whoever had the biggest ego was the one who got credit. And everyone's like, great; you're a hero. And so I think that's kind of the beginning of it. And so if you weren't invited into the room, because in the 1950s, in addition to gender, there was legislation that prevented...we weren't even allowed to use the same bathrooms. You had White bathrooms and Black bathrooms. So you had very serious barriers for many different people getting into that room, and I think that gets to the idea of intersectionality as well. So the more barriers that you had, the harder it was going to be. And so then you get the stereotypes, and then you get the media who promotes the stereotypes. And so that is what happened to me. So I grew up in the '80s and '90s, and just every movie I watched, every TV show portrayed somebody who was, quote, "good" with computers in a very specific way. I didn't see myself in it. So I was like, oh, I'm not there. But then, when I talk to Scott, he's like, "Oh, I never saw that. I never saw the discrimination. I just saw this stuff." That's part of it is that if you were in that position where discrimination, or difficulties, or stereotypes had been invisible to you, the onus is on you to learn and to listen. If you are in a situation where you feel like you have been in the minority, the onus is on you to find ways to become more empowered. And a lot of times, that is setting boundaries. It's advocating for yourself. It's recognizing your self-worth. And those are all things that are really hard. And saying, hey, if we want to be sustainable, everyone needs to contribute. I'm happy to train everyone, but this is not going to work. And being able to frame it, too, in terms of value, like, why? Why is it a benefit for everyone building that empathy? And you're right, I mean, there are absolutely cultures where...who was it? I think it was Edward Deming. And he said, "A single person is powerless in the face of a bad system." And so if you're in a system that isn't going to work, recognizing that and can you move into a different system? Or can you change it from within? And those are all different questions that you've got to ask based on your own fortitude, your own interests, your own resources, your own situation. There is no easy question. But it's always work. And no matter who you are, it's always work. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. I joined as co-host of this podcast just a few months ago. And I had to do a lot of reflecting on what I wanted to get out of it and what my goals were. And that's why I'm really excited to have you on here and to be using this platform to talk about things that are important to me and things that I think more people should know about or think about. So before we wrap up, Andrea, do you have anything else you want to say? ANDREA: I want to reinforce that if you feel joy from mending, it's awesome. And there are communities like legacycode.rocks. We have MenderCon, and it's a celebration of software maintenance. So it can be really great. We have a virtual meetup every Wednesday. And there's a kind of a core group of people who come, and they're like, it's like therapy because there are a lot of people who are in your situation where it's like, I'm the only person on my team who cares about automated tests, and I have no idea like...and just having people who kind of share in that struggle can be really helpful, so finding your community. And then I think software maintenance is really, really critical and really important, and I think we see it. Like, we're seeing in the news every day in terms of these larger systems going down. Just recently, Southwest Airlines and all of these flights got canceled. The maintenance work is so, so valuable. If you feel like a mender and you feel like that fits your identity, just know that there is a lot of worth in the work that you are doing, an immense amount of worth in the work that you are doing, and to continue to advocate for that. If you are a maker, yes, there is absolutely worth in the work you're doing, but learn about menders. Learn how to work together. And if you are a leader of an organization, recognize that all of these different perspectives can work together. And, again, reframe the value. So I am so grateful that you framed the conversation this way. It's so important. I'm very, very grateful to hear from you and your point of view. And I hope that you continue to push the narrative like this because it's really important. STEPHANIE: Aww, thanks. And thank you so much for being on the podcast. ANDREA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.

On today's episode of 'Your Business Greatness,' host Simone Sloan, Executive Strategist, Founder, and Executive Coach at "Your Choice Coach," speaks with Linc Kroeger. He is the President of Knight Moves and is passionate about fighting social inequity. He served on a technical association for Iowa boards for three years. Podcast Key Points: Linc talks about Knight Moves, the objectives, and who the company is really trying to help and how the transition took place to where he is today. Linc's biggest challenge across the whole country is the community college instructor shortage. Even if they offer Knight's curriculum, they cannot provide the instructors. They are trying to come up with creative ways to do this and one of them is pure online or even outsourcing offshore. Episode Highlights After graduating from high school back in 1986, Linc joined the Air Force, went into Fortran training and technology, and was able to go right from high school into a job. For the last decade Linc has been in the consulting technology space, and in his last company he was the CEO of a technology services company. In Linc's 35 years working in corporate America, he did not see many moves happening in the DEI space. Knight Moves is an organization looking at elite technology and bringing professionals in their training. Some of the interesting data around indigenous groups is that they have one of the lowest attendance rates to four-year colleges, but they can have the most unused scholarships. No one gets excluded from our program because they cannot afford it, says Linc. As soon as you start building trust, you start getting referred to the network. When you go in and you recruit a group of students and then 2 or 3 of them drop out in the first three weeks because it doesn't work for them, that's probably the biggest, toughest challenge we had, says Linc. The Knight Move started as a nonprofit and then we flipped as a social benefiting or B Corp model because as a B Corp we do not have to make a profit, says Linc. There are some really creative things you can do out there if you are doing something valuable for a social benefit and impact that goes along with it. Words of wisdom: In anything that you choose to do in life, find your flow and flow Connect Simone Sloan: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube Linc Kroeger https://www.kKnightmoves.org/ or https://www.linkedin.com/in/linc-kroeger-19674b/

Victor is a software consultant in Tokyo who describes himself as a yak shaver. He writes on his blog at vadosware and curates Awesome F/OSS, a mailing list of open source products. He's also a contributor to the Open Core Ventures blog. Before our conversation Victor wrote a structured summary of how he works on projects. I recommend checking that out in addition to the episode. Topics covered: Most people should use Dokku or CapRover But he uses Kubernetes anyways Hosting a Database in Kubernetes Learning technology You don't really know a thing until something goes wrong History of Frontend Development Context from lower layers of the stack and historical projects Good project pages have comparisons to other products Choosing technologies Language choice affects maintainability Knowing an ecosystem Victor's preferred stack Technology bake offs Posting findings means you get free corrections Why people use medium instead of personal sites Victor VADOSWARE - Blog How Victor works on Projects - Companion post for this episode Awesome FOSS - Curated list of OSS projects NimbusWS - Hosted OSS built on top of budget cloud providers Unvalidated Ideas - Startup ideas for side project inspiration PodcastSaver - Podcast index that allows you to choose Postgres or MeiliSearch and compare performance and results of each Victor's preferred stack Docker - Containers Kubernetes - Container provisioning (Though at the beginning of the episode he suggests Dokku for single server or CapRover for multiple) TypeScript - JavaScript with syntax for types. Victor's default choice. Rust - Language he uses if doing embedded work, performance is critical, or more correctness is desired Haskell - Language he uses if correctness and type system is the most important for the project Postgresql - General purpose database that's good enough for most use cases including full text search. KeyDB - Redis compatible database for caching. Acquired by Snap and then made open source. Victor uses it over Redis because it is multi threaded and supports flash storage without a Redis Enterprise license. Pulumi - Provision infrastructure with the languages you're already using instead of a specialized one or YAML Svelte and SvelteKit - Preferred frontend stack. Previously used Nuxt. Search engines Postgres Full Text Search vs the rest Optimizing Postgres Text Search with Trigrams OpenSearch - Amazon's fork of Elasticsearch typesense meilisearch sonic Quickwit JavaScript build tools Babel SWC Webpack esbuild parcel Vite Turbopack JavaScript frameworks React Vue Svelte Ember Frameworks built on top of frameworks Next - React Nuxt - Vue SvelteKit - Svelte Astro - Multiple Historical JavaScript tools and frameworks Underscore jQuery MooTools Backbone AngularJS Knockout Aurelia GWT Bower - Frontend package manager Grunt - Task runner Gulp - Task runner Related Links Dokku - Open source single-host alternative to Heroku Cloud Native Buildpacks - Buildpacks created by Heroku and Pivotal and used by Dokku CapRover - An open source PaaS-like abstraction built on top of Docker Swarm Kelsey Hightower's tweet about being cautious about running databases on Kubernetes Settling the Myth of Transparent HugePages for Databases Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) Kubernetes Local Persistent Volumes Longhorn - Distributed block storage for Kubernetes Postgres docs Postgres TOAST Everything I've seen on optimizing Postgres on ZFS Kubernetes Workload Resources Kubernetes Network Plugins Kubernetes Ingress Traefik Kubernetes the Hard Way (Setting up a cluster in a way that optimizes for learning) How does TLS work Let's Encrypt Cert manager for Kubernetes Choose Boring Technology A Linux user's guide to Logical Volume Management Docker networking overview Kubernetes Scheduler Tauri - Build desktop applications with web technology and Rust ripgrep - CLI tool to recursively search directory for a regex pattern (Meant to be a rust replacement for grep) angle-grinder / ag - CLI tool to parse and process log files written in rust Object.observe ECMAScript Proposal to be Withdrawn Ruby on Rails - Ruby web framework Django - Python web framework Laravel - PHP web framework Adonis - JavaScript NestJS - JavaScript What is a NullPointerException, and how do I fix it? Mastodon Clap - CLI argument parser for Rust AWS CDK - Provision AWS infrastructure using programming languages Terraform - Provision infrastructure with terraform language URL canonicalization of duplicate pages and the use of the canonical tag - Used by dev.to to send google traffic to the original blogpost instead of dev.to Transcript You can help edit this transcript on GitHub. [00:00:00] Jeremy: This episode, I talk to Victor Adossi who describes himself as a yak shaver. Someone who likes trying a whole bunch of different technologies, seeing the different options. We talk about what he uses, the evolution of front end development, and his various projects. Talking to just different people it's always good to get where they're coming from because something that works for Google at their scale is going to be different than what you're doing with one of your smaller projects. [00:00:31] Victor: Yeah, the context. Of course in direct conflict with that statement, I definitely use Google technology despite not needing to at all right? Like, you know, 99% of people who are doing like people like to call it indiehacking or building small products could probably get by with just Dokku. If you know Dokku or like CapRover. Are two projects that'll be like, Oh, you can just push your code here, we'll build it up like a little mini Heroku PaaS thing and just go on one big server, right? Like 99% of the people could just use that. But of course I'm not doing that. So I'm a bit of a hypocrite in that sense. I know what I should be doing, but I'm not doing that. I am writing a Kubernetes cluster with like five nodes for no reason. Uh, yeah, I dunno, people don't normally count the controllers. [00:01:24] Jeremy: Dokku and CapRover, I think those are where it's supposed to create a heroku like experience I think it's based off of the heroku buildpacks right? At least Dokku is? [00:01:36] Victor: Yeah Buildpacks has actually been spun out into like a community thing so like pivotal and heroku, it's like buildpacks.io, they're trying to build a wider standard around it so that more people can get involved. And buildpacks are actually obviously fantastic as a technology and as a a process piece. There's not much else like them and you know, that's obvious from like Heroku's success and everything. I know Dokku uses that. I don't know that Caprover does, but I haven't, I haven't really run Caprover that much. They, they probably do. Like at this point if you're going to support building from code, it seems silly to try and build your own buildpacks. Cause that's what you will do, eventually. So you might as well use what's there. Anyway, this is like just getting to like my personal opinions at this point, but like, if you think containers are a bad idea in 2022, You're wrong, you should, you should stop. Like you should, you should stop. Think about it. I mean, obviously there's not, um, I got a really great question at an interview once, which is, where are containers a bad idea? That's probably one of the best like recent interview questions I've ever gotten cause I was like, Oh yeah, I mean, like, you can't, it can't be perfect everywhere, right? Nothing's perfect everywhere. So it's like, where is it? Uh, and of course the answer was networking, right? (unintelligible) So if you need absolute performance, but like for just about everything else. Containers are kind of it at this point. Like, time has born it out, I think. So yeah, I always just like bias at taking containers at this point. So I'm probably more of a CapRover person than a Dokku person, even though I have not used, I don't use CapRover. [00:03:09] Jeremy: Well, like something that I've heard with containers, and maybe it's changed recently, but, but something that was kind of holdout was when people would host a database sometimes they would oh we just don't wanna put this in a container and I wonder if like that matches with your thinking or if things have changed. [00:03:27] Victor: I am not a database administrator right like I read postgres docs and I read the, uh, the Postgres documentation, and I think I know a bit about postgres but I don't commit right like so and I also haven't, like, oh, managed X terabytes on one server that you are making sure never goes down kind of deal. But the stickiness for me, at least from when I've run, So I've done a lot of tests with like ZFS and Postgres and like, um, and also like just trying to figure out, and I run Postgres in Kubernetes of course, like on my cluster and a lot of the stuff I found around is, is like fiddly kernel things like sort of base kernel settings that you need to have set. Like, you know, stuff like should you be using transparent huge pages, like stuff like that. But once you have that settled. Containers are just processes with name spacing and resource control, right? Like, that's it. there are some other ins and outs, but for the most part, if you're fine running a process, so people ran processes, right? And they were just completely like unprotected. Then people made users for the processes and they limited the users and ran the processes, right? Then the next step is now you can run a process and then do the limiting the name spaces in cgroups dynamically. Like there, there's, there's sort of not a humongous difference, unless you're hitting something very specific. Uh, but yeah, databases have been a point of contention, but I think, Kelsey Hightower had that tweet yeah. That was like, um, don't run databases in Kubernetes. And I think he called it back. [00:04:56] Victor: I don't know, but I, I know that was uh, was one of those things that people were really unsure about at first, but then after people sort of like felt it out, they were like, Oh, it's actually fine. Yeah. [00:05:06] Jeremy: Yeah I vaguely remember one of the concerns having to do with persistent storage. Like there were challenges with Kubernetes and needing to keep that storage around and I don't know if that's changed yeah or if that's still a concern. [00:05:18] Victor: Uh, I'd say that definitely has changed. Uh, and it was, it was a concern, depending on where you were. Mostly people who are running AKS or EKS or you know, all those other managed Kubernetes, they're just using EBS or like whatever storage provider is like offering for storage. Most of those people don't actually have that much of a problem with, storage in general. Now, high performance storage is obviously different, right? So like, so you'll, you're gonna have to start doing manual, like local volume management and stuff like that. it was a problem, because obviously CSI (Kubernetes Container Storage Interface) didn't exist for some period of time, and like there was, it was hard to know what to do for if you were just running a Kubernetes cluster. I think a lot of people were just using local, first of all, local didn't even exist for a bit. Um, they were just using host path, right? And just like, Oh, it's on the disk somewhere. Where do we, we have to go get it right? Or we have to like, sort of manage that. So that was something most people weren't ready for, especially if you were just, if you weren't like sort of a, a, a traditional sysadmin and used to doing that stuff. And then of course local volumes came out, but I think they still had to be, um, pre-provisioned. So that's sysadmin stuff that most people, you know, maybe aren't, aren't necessarily ready for. Uh, and then most of the general solutions were slow. So like, I used Longhorn (https://longhorn.io) for a long time and Longhorn, Longhorn's great. And super easy to set up, but it can be slower and you can have some, like, delays in mount time. it wasn't ideal for, for most people. So yeah, I, overall it's true. Databases, Databases in Kubernetes were kind of fraught with peril for a while, but it wasn't for the reason that, it wasn't for the fundamental reason that Kubernetes was just wrong or like, it wasn't the reason most people think of, which is just like, Oh, you're gonna break your database. It's more like, running a database is hard and Kubernetes hasn't solved all the hard problems. Like, cuz that's what Kubernetes does. It basically solves a lot of problems in a very generic way. Right. So it just hadn't solved all those problems yet at this point. I think it's got decent answers on a lot of them. So I, I mean, I don't know. I I do it. Don't, don't take what I'm saying to your, you know, PM meeting or your standup meeting, uh, anyone who's listening. But it's more like if you could solve the problems with databases in the sense before. You could probably solve 'em on Kubernetes now with a good understanding of Kubernetes. Cause at the end of the day, it's all the same stuff. Just Kubernetes makes it a little easier to, uh, do it dynamically. [00:07:50] Jeremy: It sounds like you could do it before, but some of the, I guess the tools or the ways of doing persistent storage were not quite there yet, or they were difficult to use. And so that was why people at the start were like, Okay, maybe it's not a good idea, but, now maybe there's some established practices for how you should run a database in Kubernetes. And I, I suppose the other aspect too is that, like you were saying, Kubernetes is its own thing. You gotta learn Kubernetes and all its intricacies. And then running a database is also its own challenge. So if you stack the two of them together and, and the path was not really clear then maybe at the start it wasn't the best idea. Um, uh, if somebody was going to try it out now, was there like a specific resource you looked at or a specific path to where like okay this is is how I'm going to do it. [00:08:55] Victor: I'll just say what I normally recommend to everybody. Cause it depends on which path you wanna go right? If you wanna go down like running a database path first and figure that out, fill out that skill tree. Like go read the Postgres docs. Well, first of all, use Postgres. That's the first tip there. But like, read those documents. And obviously you don't have to understand everything. You won't understand everything. But knowing the big pieces and sort of letting your brain see the mention of like a whole bunch of things, like what is toast? Oh, you can do compression on columns. Like, you can do some, some things concurrently. Um, you know, what ALTER TABLE looks like. You get all that stuff kind of in your head. Um, and then I personally really believe in sort of learning by building and just like iterating. you won't get it right the first time. It's just like, it's not gonna happen. You're get, you can, you can get better the first time, right? By being really prepared and like, and leave yourself lots of outs, but you kind of have to like, get it out there. Do do your best to make sure that you can't fail, uh, catastrophically, right? So this is like, goes back to that decision to like use ZFS as the bottom of this I'm just like, All right, well, I, I'm not a file systems expert, but if I. I could delegate some of that, you know, some of that, I can get some of that knowledge from someone else. Um, and I can make it easier for me to not fail catastrophically. For the database side, actually read documentation on Postgres or the whatever database you're going to use, make sure you at least understand that. Then start running it like locally or whatever. Again, Docker use, use Docker locally. It's, it's, it's fine. and then, you know, sort of graduate to running sort of more progressively, more complicated versions. what I would say for the Kubernetes side is actually similar. the Kubernetes docs are really good. they're very large. but they're good. So you can actually go through and know all the, like, workload, workload resources, know, like what a config map is, what a secret is, right? Like what etcd is doing in this whole situation. you know, what a kublet is versus an API server, right? Like the, the general stuff, like if you go through all that, you should have like a whole bunch of ideas at least floating around in your head. And then once you try and start setting up a server, they will all start to pop up again, right? And they'll all start to like, you, like, Oh, okay, I need a CNI (Container Networking) plugin because something needs to make the services available, right? Or something needs to power the ingress, right? Like, if I wanna be able to get traffic, I need an ingress object. But what listens, what does that, what makes that ingress object do anything? Oh, it's an ingress controller. nginx, you know, almost everyone's heard of nginx, so they're like, okay. Um, nginx, has an ingress control. Actually there's, there used to be two, I assume there's still two, but there's like one that's maintained by Kubernetes, one that's maintained by nginx, the company or whatever. I use traefik, it's fantastic. but yeah, so I think those things kind of fall out and that is almost always my first way to explain it and to start building. And tinkering iteratively. So like, read the documentation, get a good first grasp of it, and then start building yourself because you'll, you'll get way more questions that way. Like, you'll ask way more questions, you won't be able to make progress. Uh, and then of course you can, you know, hop into slacks or like start looking around and, and searching on the internet. oh, one of the things that really helped me out early learning Kubernetes was, Kelsey Hightower's, um, learn Kubernetes the hard way. I'm also a big believer in doing things the hard way, at least knowing what you're choosing to not know, right? distributing file system, Deltas, right? Or like changes to a file system over the network is not a new problem. Other people have solved it. There's a lot of complexity there. but if you at least know the sort of surface level of what the thing does and what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to do it, you can make a decision on, Oh, how deep am I going to go? Right? To prevent yourself from like, making a mistake or going too deep in the rabbit hole. If you have an idea of the sort of ecosystem and especially like, Oh, here, like the basics of how I can use this thing, that's generally very good. And doing things the hard way is a great way to get a, a feel for that, right? Cause if you take some chunk and like, you know, the first level of doing things the hard way, uh, or, you know, Kelsey Hightower's guide is like, get a machine, right? Like, so, like, if you somehow were like, Oh, I wanna run a Kubernetes cluster. but, you know, I don't want use necessarily EKS and you wanna learn it the hard way. You have to go get a machine, right? If you, if you're not familiar, if you run on Heroku the whole time, like you didn't manage your own machines, you gotta go like, figure out EC2, right? Or, I personally use, hetzner I love hetzner, so you have to go figure out hetzner, digital ocean, whatever. Right. And then the next thing's like, you know, the guide's changed a lot, and I haven't, I haven't looked at it in like, in years, actually a while since I, since I've sort of been, I guess living it, but it's, it's like generate certificates, right? So if you've never dealt with SSL and like, sort of like, or I should say TLS uh, and generating certificates and how that whole dance works, right? Which is fascinating because it's like, oh, right, nothing's secure on the internet, except that we distribute root certificates on computers that are deployed in every OS, right? Like, that's a sort of fundamental understanding you may not go deep enough to realize, but if you are fascinated by it, trying to do it manually would lead you down that path. You'd be like, Oh, what, like what is this thing? What is a CSR? Like, why, who is signing my request? Right? And it's like, why do we trust those people? Right? And it's like, you know, that kind of thing comes out and I feel like you can only get there from trying to do it, you know, answering the questions you can. Right. And again, it takes some judgment to know when you should not go down a rabbit hole. uh, and then iterating. of course there are people who are excellent at explaining. you can find some resources that are shortcuts. But, uh, I think particularly my bread and butter has been just to try and do it the hard way. Avoid pitfalls or like rabbit holes when you can. But know that the rabbit hole is there, and then keep going. And sometimes if something's just too hard, you're not gonna get it the first time. Like maybe you'll have to wait like another three months, you'll try again and you'll know more sort of ambiently about everything else. You get a little further that time. that's how I feel about that. Anyway. [00:15:06] Jeremy: That makes sense to me. I think sometimes when people take on a project, they try to learn too many things at the same time. I, I think the example of Kubernetes and Postgres is pretty good example, where if you're not familiar with how do I install Postgres on bare metal or a vm, trying to make sense of that while you're trying to into is probably gonna be pretty difficult. So, so splitting them up and learning them individually, that makes a lot of sense to me. And the whole deciding how deep you wanna go. That's interesting too, because I think that's very specific to the person right because sometimes you wanna go a little deeper because otherwise you don't understand how the two things connect together. But other times it's just like with the example with certificates, some people they may go like, I just put in let's encrypt it gives me my cert I don't care right then, and then, and some people they wanna know like okay how does the whole certificate infrastructure work which I think is interesting, depending on who you are, maybe you go ahh maybe it doesn't really matter right. [00:16:23] Victor: Yeah, and, you know, shout out to Let's Encrypt . It's, it's amazing, right? think Singlehandedly the most, most of the deployment of HTTPS that happens these days, right? so many so many of like internet providers and uh, sort of service providers will use it right? Under the covers. Like, Hey, we've got you free SSL through Let's Encrypt, right? Like, kind of like under the, under the covers. which is awesome. And they, and they do it. So if you're listening to this, donate to them. I've done it. So now that, now the pressure is on whoever's listening, but yeah, and, and I, I wanna say I am that person as well, right? Like, I use, Cert Manager on my cluster, right? So I'm just like, I don't wanna think about it, but I, you know, but I, I feel like I thought about it one time. I have a decent grasp. If something changes, then I guess I have to dive back in. I think it, you've heard the, um, innovation tokens idea, right? I can't remember the site. It's like, um, do, like do boring tech or something.com (https://boringtechnology.club/) . Like it shows up on sort of hacker news from time to time, essentially. But it's like, you know, you have a certain amount of tokens and sort of, uh, we'll call them tokens, but tolerance for complexity or tolerance for new, new ideas or new ways of doing things, new processes. Uh, and you spend those as you build any project, right? you can be devastatingly effective by just sticking to the stack, you know, and not introducing anything new, even if it's bad, right? and there's nothing wrong with LAMP stack, I don't wanna annoy anybody, but like if you, if you're running LAMP or if you run on a hostgator, right? Like, if you run on so, you know, some, some service that's really old but really works for you isn't, you know, too terribly insecure or like, has the features you need, don't learn Kubernetes then, right? Especially if you wanna go fast. cuz you, you're spending tokens, right? You're spending, essentially brain power, right? On learning whatever other thing. So, but yeah, like going back to that, databases versus databases on Kubernetes thing, you should probably know one of those before you, like, if you're gonna do that, do that thing. You either know Kubernetes and you like, at least feel comfortable, you know, knowing Kubernetes extremely difficult obviously, but you feel comfortable and you feel like you can debug. Little bit of a tangent, but maybe that's even a better, sort of watermark if you know how to debug a thing. If, if it's gone wrong, maybe one or five or 10 or 20 times and you've gotten out. Not without documentation, of course, cuz well, if you did, you're superhuman. But, um, but you've been able to sort of feel your way out, right? Like, Oh, this has gone wrong and you have enough of a model of the system in your head to be like, these are the three places that maybe have something wrong with them. Uh, and then like, oh, and then of course it's just like, you know, a mad dash to kind of like, find, find the thing that's wrong. You should have confidence about probably one of those things before you try and do both when it's like, you know, complex things like databases and distributed systems management, uh, and orchestration. [00:19:18] Jeremy: That's, that's so true in, in terms of you are comfortable enough being able to debug a problem because it's, I think when you are learning about something, a lot of times you start with some kind of guide or some kind of tutorial and you follow the steps. And if it all works, then great. Right? But I think it's such a large leap from that to something went wrong and I have to figure it out. Right. Whether it's something's not right in my Dockerfile or my postgres instance uh, the queries are timing out. so many things that could go wrong, that is the moment where you're forced to figure out, okay, what do I really know about this not thing? [00:20:10] Victor: Exactly. Yeah. Like the, the rubber's hitting the road it's uh you know the car's about to crash or has already crashed like if I open the bonnet, do I know what's happening right or am I just looking at (unintelligible). And that's, it's, I feel sort a little sorry or sad for, for devs that start today because there's so much. Complexity that's been built up. And a lot of it has a point, but you need to kind of have seen the before to understand the point, right? So I like, I like to use front end as an example, right? Like the front end ecosystem is crazy, and it has been crazy for a very long time, but the steps are actually usually logical, right? Like, so like you start with, you know, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, just plain, right? And like, and you can actually go in lots of directions. Like HTML has its own thing. CSS has its own sort of evolution sort of thing. But if we look at JavaScript, you're like, you're just writing JavaScript on every page, right? And like, just like putting in script tags and putting in whatever, and it's, you get spaghetti, you get spaghetti, you start like writing, copying the same function on multiple pages, right? You just, it, it's not good. So then people, people make jquery, right? And now, now you've got like a, a bundled set of like good, good defaults that you can, you can go for, right? And then like, you know, libraries like underscore come out for like, sort of like not dom related stuff that you do want, you do want everywhere. and then people go from there and they go to like backbone or whatever. it's because Jquery sort of also becomes spaghetti at some point and it becomes hard to manage and people are like, Okay, we need to sort of like encapsulate this stuff somehow, right? And like the new tools or whatever is around at the same timeframe. And you, you, you like backbone views for example. and you have people who are kind of like, ah, but that's not really good. It's getting kind of slow. Uh, and then you have, MVC stuff comes out, right? Like Angular comes out and it's like, okay, we're, we're gonna do this thing called dirty checking, and it's gonna be, it's gonna be faster and it's gonna be like, it's gonna be less sort of spaghetti and it's like a little bit more structured. And now you have sort of like the rails paradigm, but on the front end, and it takes people to get a while to get adjusted to that, but then that gets too heavy, right? And then dirty checking is realized to be a mistake. And then, you get stuff like MVVM, right? So you get knockout, like knockout js and you got like Durandal, and like some, some other like sort of front end technologies that come up to address that problem. Uh, and then after that, like, you know, it just keeps going, right? Like, and if you come in at the very end, you're just like, What is happening? Right? Like if it, if it, if someone doesn't sort of boil down the complexity and reduce it a little bit, you, you're just like, why, why do we do this like this? Right? and sometimes there's no good reason. Sometimes the complexity is just like, is unnecessary, but having the steps helps you explain it, uh, or helps you understand how you got there. and, and so I feel like that is something younger people or, or newer devs don't necessarily get a chance to see. Cause it just, it would take, it would take very long right? And if you're like a new dev, let's say you jumped into like a coding bootcamp. I mean, I've got opinions on coding boot camps, but you know, it's just like, let's say you jumped into one and you, you came out, you, you made it. It's just, there's too much to know. sure, you could probably do like HTML in one month. Well, okay, let's say like two weeks or whatever, right? If you were, if you're literally brand new, two weeks of like concerted effort almost, you know, class level, you know, work days right on, on html, you're probably decently comfortable with it. Very comfortable. CSS, a little harder because this is where things get hard. Cause if you, if you give two weeks for, for HTML, CSS is harder than HTML kind of, right? Because the interactions are way more varied. Right? Like, and, and maybe it's one of those things where you just, like, you, you get somewhat comfortable and then just like know that in the future you're gonna see something you don't understand and have to figure it out. Uh, but then JavaScript, like, how many months do you give JavaScript? Because if you go through that first like, sort of progression that I, I I, I, I mentioned everyone would have a perfect sort of, not perfect but good understanding of the pieces, right? Like, why did we start transpiling at all? Right? Like, uh, or why did you know, why did we adopt libraries? Like why did Bower exist? No one talks about Bower anymore, obviously, but like, Bower was like a way to distribute front end only packages, right? Um, what is it? Um, Uh, yes, there's grunt. There's like the whole build system thing, right? Once, once we decide we're gonna, we're gonna do stuff to files before we, before we push. So there's grunt, there's, uh, gulp, which is like grunt, but like, Oh, we're gonna do it all in memory. We're gonna pipe, we're gonna use this pipes thing to make sure everything goes fast. then there's like, of course that leads like the insanity that's webpack. And then there's like parcel, which did better. There's vite there's like, there's all this, there's this progression, but how many months would it take to know that progression? It, it's too long. So they end up just like, Hey, you're gonna learn react. Which is the right thing because it's like, that's what people hire for, right? But then you're gonna be in react and be like, What's webpack, right? And it's like, but you can't go down. You can't, you don't have the time. You, you can't sort of approach that problem from the other direction where you, which would give you better understanding cause you just don't have the time. I think it's hard for newer devs to overcome this. Um, but I think there are some, there's some hope on the horizon cuz some things are simpler, right? Like some projects do reduce complexity, like, by watching another project sort of innovate so like react. Wasn't the first component, first framework, right? Like technically, I, I think, I think you, you might have to give that to like, to maybe backbone because like they had views and like marionette also went with that. Like maybe, I don't know, someone, someone I'm sure will get in like, send me an angry email, uh, cuz I forgot you Moo tools or like, you know, Ember Ember. They've also, they've also been around, I used to be a huge Ember fan, still, still kind of am, but I don't use it. but if you have these, if you have these tools, right? Like people aren't gonna know how to use them and Vue was able to realize that React had some inefficiencies, right? So React innovates the sort of component. So Reintroduces the component based model component first, uh, front end development model. Vue sees that and it's like, wait a second, if we just export this like data object, and of course that's not the only innovation of Vue, but if we just export this data object, you don't have to do this fine grained tracking yourself anymore, right? You don't have to tell React or tell your the system which things change when other things change, right? Like you, you don't have to set up this watching and stuff, right? Um, and that's one of the reasons, like Vue is just, I, I, I remember picking up Vue and being like, Oh, I'm done. I'm done with React now. Because it just doesn't make sense to use React because they Vue essentially either, you know, you could just say they learned from them or they, they realize a better way to do things that is simpler and it's much easier to write. Uh, and you know, functionally similar, right? Um, similar enough that it's just like, oh they boil down some of that complexity and we're a step forward and, you know, in other ways, I think. Uh, so that's, that's awesome. Every once in a while you get like a compression in the complexity and then it starts to ramp up again and you get maybe another compression. So like joining the projects that do a compression. Or like starting to adopting those is really, can be really awesome. So there's, there's like, there's some hope, right? Cause sometimes there is a compression in that complexity and you you might be lucky enough to, to use that instead of, the thing that's really complex after years of building on it. [00:27:53] Jeremy: I think you're talking about newer developers having a tough time making sense of the current frameworks but the example you gave of somebody starting from HTML and JavaScript going to jquery backbone through the whole chain, that that's just by nature of you've put in a lot of time right you've done a lot of work working with each of these technologies you see the progression as if someone is starting new just by nature of you being new you won't have been able to spend that time [00:28:28] Victor: Do you think it could work? again, the, the, the time aspect is like really hard to get like how can you just avoid spending time um to to learn things that's like a general problem I think that problem is called education in the general sense. But like, does it make sense for a, let's say a bootcamp or, or any, you know, school right? To attempt to guide people through the previous solutions that didn't work, right? Like in math, you don't start with calculus, right? It just wouldn't, it doesn't make sense, right? But we try and start with calculus in software, right? We're just like, okay, here's the complexity. You've got all of it. Don't worry. Just look at this little bit. If, you know, if the compiler ever spits out a weird error uh oh, like, you're, you're, you're in for trouble cuz you, you just didn't get the. get the basics. And I think that's maybe some of what is missing. And the thing is, it is like the constraints are hard, right? No one has infinite time, right? Or like, you know, even like, just tons of time to devote to learning, learning just front end, right? That's not even all of computing, That's not even the algorithm stuff that some companies love to throw at you, right? Uh, or the computer sciencey stuff. I wonder if it makes more sense to spend some time taking people through the progression, right? Because discovering that we should do things via components, let's say, or, or at least encapsulate our functionality to components and compose that way, is something we, we not everyone knew, right? Or, you know, we didn't know wild widely. And so it feels like it might make sense to touch on that sort of realization and sort of guide the student through, you know, maybe it's like make five projects in a week and you just get progressively more complex. But then again, that's also hard cause effort, right? It's just like, it's a hard problem. But, but I think right now, uh, people who come in at the end and sort of like see a bunch of complexity and just don't know why it's there, right? Like, if you've like, sort of like, this is, this applies also very, this applies to general, but it applies very well to the Kubernetes problem as well. Like if you've never managed nginx on more than one machine, or if you've never tried to set up a, like a, to format your file system on the machine you just rented because it just, you know, comes with nothing, right? Or like, maybe, maybe some stuff was installed, but, you know, if you had to like install LVM (Logical Volume Manager) yourself, if you've never done any of that, Kubernetes would be harder to understand. It's just like, it's gonna be hard to understand. overlay networks are hard for everyone to understand, uh, except for network people who like really know networking stuff. I think it would be better. But unfortunately, it takes a lot of time for people to take a sort of more iterative approach to, to learning. I try and write blog posts in this way sometimes, but it's really hard. And so like, I'll often have like an idea, like, so I call these, or I think of these as like onion, onion style posts, right? Where you either build up an onion sort of from the inside and kind of like go out and like add more and more layers or whatever. Or you can, you can go from the outside and sort of take off like layers. Like, oh, uh, Kubernetes has a scheduler. Why do they need a scheduler? Like, and like, you know, kind of like, go, go down. but I think that might be one of the best ways to learn, but it just takes time. Or geniuses and geniuses who are good at two things, right? Good at the actual technology and good at teaching. Cuz teaching is a skill and it's very hard. and, you know, shout out to teachers cuz that's, it's, it's very difficult, extremely frustrating. it's hard to find determinism in, in like methods and solutions. And there's research of course, but it's like, yeah, that's, that's a lot harder than the computer being like, Nope, that doesn't work. Right? Like, if you can't, if you can't, like if you, if the function call doesn't work, it doesn't work. Right. If the person learned suboptimally, you won't know Right. Until like 10 years down the road when, when they can't answer some question or like, you know, when they, they don't understand. It's a missing fundamental piece anyway. [00:32:24] Jeremy: I think with the example of front end, maybe you don't have time to walk through the whole history of every single library and framework that came but I think at the very least, if you show someone, or you teach someone how to work with css, and you have them, like you were talking about components before you have them build a site where there's a lot of stuff that gets reused, right? Maybe you have five pages and they all have the same nav bar. [00:33:02] Victor: Yeah, you kind of like make them do it. [00:33:04] Jeremy: Yeah. You make 'em do it and they make all the HTML files, they copy and paste it, and probably your students are thinking like, ah, this, this kind of sucks [00:33:16] Victor: Yeah [00:33:18] Jeremy: And yeah, so then you, you come to that realization, and then after you've done that, then you can bring in, okay, this is why we have components. And similarly you brought up, manual dom manipulation with jQuery and things like that. I, I'm sure you could come up with an example of you don't even necessarily need to use jQuery. I think people can probably skip that step and just use the the, the API that comes with the browser. But you can have them go in like, Oh, you gotta find this element by the id and you gotta change this based on this, and let them experience the. I don't know if I would call it pain, but let them experience like how it was. Right. And, and give them a complex enough task where they feel like something is wrong right. Or, or like, there, should be something better. And then you can go to you could go straight to vue or react. I'm not sure if we need to go like, Here's backbone, here's knockout. [00:34:22] Victor: Yeah. That's like historical. Interesting. [00:34:27] Jeremy: I, I think that would be an interesting college course or something that. Like, I remember when, I went through school, one of the classes was programming languages. So we would learn things like, Fortran and stuff like that. And I, I think for a more frontend centered or modern equivalent you could go through, Hey, here's the history of frontend development here's what we used to do and here's how we got to where we are today. I think that could be actually a pretty interesting class yeah [00:35:10] Victor: I'm a bit interested to know you learned fortran in your PL class. I, think when I went, I was like, lisp and then some, some other, like, higher classes taught haskell but, um, but I wasn't ready for haskell, not many people but fortran is interesting, I kinda wanna hear about that. [00:35:25] Jeremy: I think it was more in terms of just getting you exposed to historically this is how things were. Right. And it wasn't so much of like, You can take strategies you used in Fortran into programming as a whole. I think it was just more of like a, a survey of like, Hey, here's, you know, here's Fortran and like you were saying, here's Lisp and all, all these different languages nd like at least you, you get to see them and go like, yeah, this is kind of a pain. [00:35:54] Victor: Yeah [00:35:55] Jeremy: And like, I understand why people don't choose to use this anymore but I couldn't take away like a broad like, Oh, I, I really wish we had this feature from, I think we were, I think we were using Fortran 77 or something like that. I think there's Fortran 77, a Fortran 90, and then there's, um, I think, [00:36:16] Victor: Like old fortran, deprecated [00:36:18] Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I think, I think, uh, I actually don't know if they're, they're continuing to, um, you know, add new things or maintain it or it's just static. But, it's, it's more, uh, interesting in terms of, like we were talking front end where it's, as somebody who's learning frontend development who is new and you get to see how, backbone worked or how Knockout worked how grunt and gulp worked. It, it's like the kind of thing where it's like, Oh, okay, like, this is interesting, but let us not use this again. Right? [00:36:53] Victor: Yeah. Yeah. Right. But I also don't need this, and I will never again [00:36:58] Jeremy: yeah, yeah. It's, um, but you do definitely see the, the parallels, right? Like you were saying where you had your, your Bower and now you have NPM and you had Grunt and Gulp and now you have many choices [00:37:14] Victor: Yeah. [00:37:15] Jeremy: yeah. I, I think having he history context, you know, it's interesting and it can be helpful, but if somebody was. Came to me and said hey I want to learn how to build websites. I get into front end development. I would not be like, Okay, first you gotta start moo tools or GWT. I don't think I would do that but it I think at a academic level or just in terms of seeing how things became the way they are sure, for sure it's interesting. [00:37:59] Victor: Yeah. And I, I, think another thing I don't remember who asked or why, why I had to think of this lately. um but it was, knowing the differentiators between other technologies is also extremely helpful right? So, What's the difference between ES build and SWC, right? Again, we're, we're, we're leaning heavy front end, but you know, just like these, uh, sorry for context, of course, it's not everyone a front end developer, but these are two different, uh, build tools, right? For, for JavaScript, right? Essentially you can think of 'em as transpilers, but they, I think, you know, I think they also bundle like, uh, generally I'm not exactly sure if, if ESbuild will bundle as well. Um, but it's like one is written in go, the other one's written in Rust, right? And sort of there's, um, there's, in addition, there's vite which is like vite does bundle and vite does a lot of things. Like, like there's a lot of innovation in vite that has to have to do with like, making local development as fast as possible and also getting like, you're sort of making sure as many things as possible are strippable, right? Or, or, or tree shakeable. Sorry, is is is the better, is the better term. Um, but yeah, knowing, knowing the, um, the differences between projects is often enough to sort of make it less confusing for me. Um, as far as like, Oh, which one of these things should I use? You know, outside of just going with what people are recommending. Cause generally there is some people with wisdom sometimes lead the crowd sometimes, right? So, so sometimes it's okay to be, you know, a crowd member as long as you're listening to the, to, to someone worth listening to. Um, and, and so yeah, I, I think that's another thing that is like the mark of a good project or, or it's not exclusive, right? It's not, the condition's not necessarily sufficient, but it's like a good projects have the why use this versus x right section in the Readme, right? They're like, Hey, we know you could use Y but here's why you should use us instead. Or we know you could use X, but here's what we do better than X. That might, you might care about, right? That's, um, a, a really strong indicator of a project. That's good cuz that means the person who's writing the project is like, they've done this, the survey. And like, this is kind of like, um, how good research happens, right? It's like most of research is reading what's happening, right? To knowing, knowing the boundary you're about to push, right? Or try and sort of like push one, make one step forward in, um, so that's something that I think the, the rigor isn't in necessarily software development everywhere, right? Which is good and bad. but someone who's sort of done that sort of rigor or, and like, and, and has, and or I should say, has been rigorous about knowing the boundary, and then they can explain that to you. They can be like, Oh, here's where the boundary was. These people were doing this, these people were doing this, these people were doing this, but I wanna do this. So you just learned now whether it's right for you and sort of the other points in the space, which is awesome. Yeah. Going to your point, I feel like that's, that's also important, it's probably not a good idea to try and get everyone to go through historical artifacts, but if just a, a quick explainer and sort of, uh, note on the differentiation, Could help for sure. Yeah. I feel like we've skewed too much frontend. No, no more frontend discussion this point. [00:41:20] Jeremy: It's just like, I, I think there's so many more choices where the, the mental thought that has to go into, Okay, what do I use next I feel is bigger on frontend. I guess it depends on the project you're working on but if you're going to work on anything front end if you haven't done it before or you don't have a lot of experience there's so many build tools so many frameworks, so many libraries that yeah, but we [00:41:51] Victor: Iterate yeah, in every direction, like the, it's good and bad, but frontend just goes in every direction at the same time Like, there's so many people who are so enthusiastic and so committed and and it's so approachable that like everyone just goes in every direction at the same time and like a lot of people make progress and then unfortunately you have try and pick which, which branch makes sense. [00:42:20] Jeremy: We've been kind of talking about, some of your experiences with a few things and I wonder if you could explain the the context you're thinking of in terms of the types of projects you typically work on like what are they what's the scale of them that sort of thing. [00:42:32] Victor: So I guess I've, I've gone through a lot of phases, right? In sort of what I use in in my tooling and what I thought was cool. I wrote enterprise java like everybody else. Like, like it really doesn't talk about it, but like, it's like almost at some point it was like, you're either a rail shop or a Java shop, for so many people. And I wrote enterprise Java for a, a long time, and I was lucky enough to have friends who were really into, other kinds of computing and other kinds of programming. a lot of my projects were wrapped around, were, were ideas that I was expressing via some new technology, let's say. Right? So, I wrote a lot of haskell for, for, for a while, right? But what did I end up building with that was actually a job board that honestly didn't go very far because I was spending much more time sort of doing, haskell things, right? And so I learned a lot about sort of what I think is like the pinnacle of sort of like type development in, in the non-research world, right? Like, like right on the edge of research and actual usability. But a lot of my ideas, sort of getting back to the, the ideas question are just things I want to build for myself. Um, or things I think could be commercially viable or like do, like, be, be well used, uh, and, and sort of, and profitable things, things that I think should be built. Or like if, if I see some, some projects as like, Oh, I wish they were doing this in this way, Right? Like, I, I often consider like, Oh, I want, I think I could build something that would be separate and maybe do like, inspired from other projects, I should say, Right? Um, and sort of making me understand a sort of a different, a different ecosystem. but a lot of times I have to say like, the stuff I build is mostly to scratch an itch I have. Um, and or something I think would be profitable or utilizing technology that I've seen that I don't think anyone's done in the same way. Right? So like learning Kubernetes for example, or like investing the time to learn Kubernetes opened up an entire world of sort of like infrastructure ideas, right? Because like the leverage you get is so high, right? So you're just like, Oh, I could run an aws, right? Like now that I, now that I know this cuz it's like, it's actually not bad, it's kind of usable. Like, couldn't I do that? Right? That kind of thing. Right? Or um, I feel like a lot of the times I'll learn a technology and it'll, it'll make me feel like certain things are possible that they, that weren't before. Uh, like Rust is another one of those, right? Like, cuz like Rust will go from like embedded all the way to WASM, which is like a crazy vertical stack. Right? It's, that's a lot, That's a wide range of computing that you can, you can touch, right? And, and there's, it's, it's hard to learn, right? The, the, the, the, uh, the, the ramp to learning it is quite steep, but, it opens up a lot of things you can write, right? It, it opens up a lot of areas you can go into, right? Like, if you ever had an idea for like a desktop app, right? You could actually write it in Rust. There's like, there's, there's ways, there's like is and there's like, um, Tauri is one of my personal favorites, which uses web technology, but it's either I'm inspired by some technology and I'm just like, Oh, what can I use this on? And like, what would this really be good at doing? or it's, you know, it's one of those other things, like either I think it's gonna be, Oh, this would be cool to build and it would be profitable. Uh, or like, I'm scratching my own itch. Yeah. I think, I think those are basically the three sources. [00:46:10] Jeremy: It's, it's interesting about Rust where it seems so trendy, I guess, in lots of people wanna do something with rust, but then in a lot of they also are not sure does it make sense to write in rust? Um, I, I think the, the embedded stuff, of course, that makes a lot of sense. And, uh, you, you've seen a sort of surge in command line apps, stuff ripgrep and ag, stuff like that, and places like that. It's, I think the benefits are pretty clear in terms of you've got the performance and you have the strong typing and whatnot and I think where there's sort of the inbetween section that's kind of unclear to me at least would I build a web application in rust I'm not sure that sort of thing [00:47:12] Victor: Yeah. I would, I characterize it as kind of like, it's a tool toolkit, so it really depends on the problem. And think we have many tools that there's no, almost never a real reason to pick one in particular right? Like there's, Cause it seems like just most of, a lot of the work, like, unless you're, you're really doing something interesting, right? Like, uh, something that like, oh, I need to, I need to, like, I'm gonna run, you know, billions and billions of processes. Like, yeah, maybe you want erlang at that point, right? Like, maybe, maybe you should, that should be, you know, your, your thing. Um, but computers are so fast these days, and most languages have, have sort of borrowed, not borrowed, but like adopted features from others that there's, it's really hard to find a, a specific use case, for one particular tool. Uh, so I often just categorize it by what I want out of the project, right? Or like, either my goals or project goals, right? Depending on, and, or like business goals, if you're, you know, doing this for a business, right? Um, so like, uh, I, I basically, if I want to go fast and I want to like, you know, reduce time to market, I use type script, right? Oh, and also I'm a, I'm a, like a type zealot. I, I'd say so. Like, I don't believe in not having types, right? Like, it's just like there's, I think it's crazy that you would like have a function but not know what the inputs could be. And they could actually be anything, right? , you're just like, and then you have to kind of just keep that in your head. I think that's silly. Now that we have good, we, we have, uh, ways to avoid the, uh, ceremony, right? You've got like hindley Milner type systems, like you have a way to avoid the, you can, you know, predict what types of things will be, and you can, you don't have to write everything everywhere. So like, it's not that. But anyway, so if I wanna go fast, the, the point is that going back to that early, like the JS ecosystem goes everywhere at the same time. Typescript is excellent because the ecosystem goes everywhere at the same time. And so you've got really good ecosystem support for just about everything you could do. Um, uh, you could write TypeScript that's very loose on the types and go even faster, but in general it's not very hard. There's not too much ceremony and just like, you know, putting some stuff that shows you what you're using and like, you know, the objects you're working with. and then generally if I wanna like, get it really right, I I'll like reach for haskell, right? Cause it's just like the sort of contortions, and again, this takes time, this not fast, but, right. the contortions you can do in the type system will make it really hard to write incorrect code or code that doesn't, that isn't logical with itself. Of course interfacing with the outside world. Like if you do a web request, it's gonna fail sometimes, right? Like the network might be down, right? So you have to, you basically pull that, you sort of wrap that uncertainty in your system to whatever degree you're okay with. And then, but I know it'll be correct, right? But and correctness is just not important. Most of like, Oh, I should , that's a bad quote. Uh, it's not that correct is not important. It's like if you need to get to market, you do not necessarily need every single piece of your code to be correct, Right? If someone calls some, some function with like, negative one and it's not an important, it's not tied to money or it's like, you know, whatever, then maybe it's fine. They just see an error and then like you get an error in your back and you're like, Oh, I better fix that. Right? Um, and then generally if I want to be correct and fast, I choose rust these days. Right? Um, these days. and going back to your point, a lot of times that means that I'm going to write in Typescript for a lot of projects. So that's what I'll do for a lot of projects is cuz I'll just be like, ah, do I need like absolute correctness or like some really, you know, fancy sort of type stuff. No. So I don't pick haskell. Right. And it's like, do I need to be like mega fast? No, probably not. Cuz like, cuz so I don't necessarily don't necessarily need rust. Um, maybe it's interesting to me in terms of like a long, long term thing, right? Like if I, if I'm think, oh, but I want x like for example, tight, tight, uh, integration with WASM, for example, if I'm just like, oh, I could see myself like, but that's more of like, you know, for a fun thing that I'm doing, right? Like, it's just like, it's, it's, you don't need it. You don't, that's premature, like, you know, that's a premature optimization thing. But if I'm just like, ah, I really want the ability to like maybe consider refactoring some of this out into like a WebAssembly thing later, then I'm like, Okay, maybe, maybe I'll, I'll pick Rust. Or like, if I, if I like, I do want, you know, really, really fast, then I'll like, then I'll go Rust. But most of the time it's just like, I want a good ecosystem so I don't have to build stuff myself most of the time. Uh, and you know, type script is good enough. So my stack ends up being a lot of the time just in type script, right? Yeah. [00:52:05] Jeremy: Yeah, I think you've encapsulated the reason why there's so many packages on NPM and why there's so much usage of JavaScript and TypeScript in general is that it, it, it fits the, it's good enough. Right? And in terms of, in terms of speed, like you said, most of the time you don't need of rust. Um, and so typescript I think is a lot more approachable a lot of people have to use it because they do front end work anyways. And so that kinda just becomes the I don't know if I should say the default but I would say it's probably the most common in terms of when somebody's building a backend today certainly there's other languages but JavaScript and TypeScript is everywhere. [00:52:57] Victor: Yeah. Uh, I, I, I, another thing is like, I mean, I'm, of ignored the, like, unreasonable effectiveness of like rails Cause there's just a, there's tons of just like rails warriors out there, and that's great. They're they're fantastic. I'm not a, I'm not personally a huge fan of rails but that's, uh, that's to my own detriment, right? In, in some, in some ways. But like, Rails and Django sort of just like, people who, like, I'm gonna learn this framework it's gonna be excellent. It most, they have a, they have carved out a great ecosystem for themselves. Um, or like, you know, even php right? PHP and like Laravel, or whatever. Uh, and so I'm ignoring those, like, those pockets of productivity, right? Those pockets of like intense productivity that people like, have all their needs met in that same way. Um, but as far as like general, general sort of ecosystem size and speed for me, um, like what you said, like applies to me. Like if I, if I'm just like, especially if I'm just like, Oh, I just wanna build a backend, Like, I wanna build something that's like super small and just does like, you know, maybe a few, a couple, you know, endpoints or whatever and just, I just wanna throw it out there. Right? Uh, I, I will pick, yeah. Typescript. It just like, it makes sense to me. I also think note is a better. VM or platform to build on than any of the others as well. So like, like I, by any of the others, I mean, Python, Perl, Ruby, right? Like sort of in the same class of, of tool. So I I am kind of convinced that, um, Node is better, than those as far as core abilities, right? Like threading Right. Versus the just multi-processing and like, you know, other, other, other solutions and like, stuff like that. So, if you want a boring stack, if I don't wanna use any tokens, right? Any innovation tokens I reach for TypeScript. [00:54:46] Jeremy: I think it's good that you brought up. Rails and, and Django because, uh, personally I've done, I've done work with Rails, and you're right in that Rails has so many built in, and the ways to do them are so well established that your ability to be productive and build something really fast hard to compete with, at least in my experience with available in the Node ecosystem. Um, on the other hand, like I, I also see what you mean by the runtimes. Like with Node, you're, you're built on top of V8 and there's so many resources being poured into it to making it fast and making it run pretty much everywhere. I think you probably don't do too much work with managed services, but if you go to a managed service to run your code, like a platform as a service, they're gonna support Node. Will they support your other preferred language? Maybe, maybe not, You know that they will, they'll be able to run node apps so but yeah I don't know if it will ever happen or maybe I'm just not familiar with it, but feel like there isn't a real rails of javascript. [00:56:14] Victor: Yeah, you're, totally right. There are, there are. It's, it's weird. It's actually weird that there, like Uh, but, but, I kind of agree with you. There's projects that are trying it recently. There's like Adonis, um, there is, there are backends that also do, like, will do basic templating, like Nest, NestJS is like really excellent. It's like one of the best sort of backend, projects out there. I I, I but like back in the day, there were projects like Sails, which was like very much trying to do exactly what Rails did, but it just didn't seem to take off and reach that critical mass possibly because of the size of the ecosystem, right? Like, how many alternatives to Rails are there? Not many, right? And, and now, anyway, maybe let's say the rest of 'em sort of like died out over the years, but there's also like, um, hapi HAPI, uh, which is like also, you know, similarly, it was like angling themselves to be that, but they just never, they never found the traction they needed. I think, um, or at least to be as wide, widely known as Rails is for, for, for the, for the Ruby ecosystem, um, but also for people to kind of know the magic, cause. Like I feel like you're productive in Rails only when you imbibe the magic, right? You, you, know all the magic context and you know the incantations and they're comforting to you, right? Like you've, you've, you have the, you have the sort of like, uh, convention. You're like, if you're living and breathing the convention, everything's amazing, right? Like, like you can't beat that. You're just like, you're in the zone but you need people to get in that zone. And I don't think node has, people are just too, they're too frazzled. They're going like, there's too much options. They can't, it's hard to commit, right? Like, imagine if you'd committed to backbone. Like you got, you can't, It's, it's over. Oh, it's not over. I mean, I don't, no, I don't wanna, you know, disparage the backbone project. I don't use it, but, you know, maybe they're still doing stuff and you know, I'm sure people are still working on it, but you can't, you, it's hard to commit and sort of really imbibe that sort of convention or, or, or sort of like, make yourself sort of breathe that product when there's like 10 products that are kind of similar and could be useful as well. Yeah, I think that's, that's that's kind of big. It's weird that there isn't a rails, for NodeJS, but, but people are working on it obviously. Like I mentioned Adonis, there's, there's more. I'm leaving a bunch of them out, but that's part of the problem. [00:58:52] Jeremy: On, on one hand, it's really cool that people are trying so many different things because hopefully maybe they can find something that like other people wouldn't have thought of if they all stick same framework. but on the other hand, it's ... how much time have we spent jumping between all these different frameworks when what we could have if we had a rails. [00:59:23] Victor: Yeah the, the sort of wasted time is, is crazy to think about it uh, I do think about that from time to time. And you know, and personally I waste a lot of my own time. Like, just, just rec

Jenn first took us back in her studies, discovering FORTRAN and MATLAB and hating every minute of it. Fast forward a few years, she found she was missing the visual aspect of programming, and as soon as she put a finger into web development, off, she went. We spoke about her first jobs, good and bad managers. We spoke about transitioning from small to big to small companies. We discussed the advantages of a strong product company. And we finally talked about engineering management and how Jenn became a manager and reflected upon her former experiences.Here are the links from the show:https://www.twitter.com/mybluewristbandhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferewong/https://www.mochimachine.com/https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/five-questions-with-jennifer-wong/CreditsCover Heliotrope by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.Your host is Timothée (Tim) Bourguignon, more about him at timbourguignon.fr.Gift the podcast a rating on one of the significant platforms https://devjourney.info/subscribeDev InterruptedWhat the smartest minds in engineering are thinking about, working on and investing in.Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

Dassler shoes was started by Adolf Dassler in 1924 in Germany, after he came home from World War I. His brother Rudolph joined him. They made athletic shoes and developed spikes to go on the bottom of the shoes. By 1936, they convinced Jesse Owens to wear their shoes on the way to his gold medals. Some of the American troops who liked the shoes during World War II helped spread the word. The brothers had a falling out soon after the war was over. Adolph founded Adidas while Rudolph created a rival shoe company called Puma. This was just in time for the advertising industry to convince people that if they bought athletic shoes that they would instantly be, er, athletic. The two companies became a part of an ad-driven identity that persists to this day. One most who buy the products advertised hardly understand themselves. A national identity involves concentric circles of understanding. The larger a nation, the more concentric circles and the harder it is to nail down exactly who has what identity. Part of this is that people spend less time thinking about who they are and more time being told who they should want to be like. Woven into the message of who a person should be is a bunch of products that a person has to buy to become the ideal. That's called advertising.  James White founded the first modern advertising agency called ‘R. F. White & Son' in Warwick Square, London in 1800. The industry evolved over the next hundred or so years as more plentiful supplies led to competition and so more of a need to advertise goods. Increasingly popular newspapers from better printing presses turned out a great place to advertise. The growth of industrialism meant there were plenty of goods and so competition between those who manufactured or trafficked those goods. The more efficient the machines of industry became, the more the advertising industry helped sell what the world might not yet know it needed. Many of those agencies settled into Madison Avenue in New York as balances of global power shifted and so by the end of World War II, Madison Avenue became a synonym for advertising. Many now-iconic brands were born in this era. Manufacturers and distributors weren't the only ones to use advertising. People put out ads to find loves in personals and by the 1950s advertising even began to find its way into politics. Iconic politicians could be created.  Dwight D Eisenhower served as the United States president from 1953 to 1961. He oversaw the liberation of Northern Africa in World War II, before he took command to plan the invasion of Normandy on D Day. He was almost universally held as a war hero in the United States. He had not held public office but the ad men of Madison Avenue were able to craft messages that put him into the White House. Messages like “I like Ike.” These were the early days of television and the early days of computers. A UNIVAC was able to predict that Eisenhower would defeat Adlai Stevenson in a landslide election in 1952. The country was not “Madly for Adlai” as his slogan went.  ENIAC had first been used in 1945. MIT Whirlwind was created in 1951, and the age of interactive computing was upon us. Not only could a computer predict who might win an election but new options in data processing allowed for more granular ways to analyze data. A young Senator named John F. Kennedy was heralded as a “new candidate for the 1960s.” Just a few years later Stephenson had lambasted Ike for using advertising, but this new generation was willing to let computers help build a platform - just as the advertisers were starting to use computers to help them figure out the best way to market a product. It turns out that words mattered. At the beginning of that 1960 election, many observed they couldn't tell much difference between the two candidates: Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. Kennedy's democrats were still largely factored between those who believed in philosophies dating back to the New Deal and segregationists. Ike presided over the early days of the post-World War II new world order. This new generation, like new generations before and since, was different. They seemed to embrace the new digital era. Someone like JFK wasn't punching cards and feeding them into a computer, writing algorithms, or out surveying people to collect that data. That was done by a company that was founded in 1959 called Simulmatics. Jill Lepore called them the What If men in her book called If/Then - a great read that goes further into the politics of the day. It's a fascinating read. The founder of the company was a Madison Avenue ad man named Ed Greenfield. He surrounded himself with a cast of characters that included people from John Hopkins University, MIT, Yale, and IBM.  Ithiel de Sola Pool had studied Nazi and Soviet propaganda during World War II. He picked up on work from Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy and with students ran Monte Carlo simulations on people's acquaintances to formulate what would later become The Small World Problem or the Six Degrees of Separation, a later inspiration for the social network of the same name and even later, for Facebook. The social sciences had become digital. Political science could then be used to get at the very issues that could separate Kennedy from Nixon. The People Machine as one called it was a computer simulation, thus the name of the company. It would analyze voting behaviors. The previous Democratic candidate Stevenson had long-winded, complex speeches. They analyzed the electorate and found that “I Like Ike” resonated with more people. It had, after all, been developed by the same ad man who came up with “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands” for M&Ms. They called the project Project Microscope. They recruited some of the best liberal minds in political science and computer science. They split the electorate into 480 groups. A big focus was how to win the African-American vote. Turns out Gallup polls didn't study that vote because Southern newspapers had blocked doing so. Civil rights, and race relations in general wasn't unlike a few other issues. There was anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, and anti-a lot. The Republicans were the party of Lincoln and had gotten a lot of votes over the last hundred years for that. But factions within the party had shifted. Loyalties were shifting. Kennedy was a Catholic but many had cautioned he should down-play that issue. The computer predicted civil rights and anti-Catholic bigotry would help him, which became Kennedy's platform. He stood for what was right but were they his positions or just what the nerds thought? He gained votes at the last minute. Turns out the other disenfranchised groups saw the bigotry against one group as akin to bigotry against their own; just like the computers thought they would. Kennedy became an anti-segregationist, as that would help win the Black vote in some large population centers. It was the most aggressive, or liberal, civil-rights plank the Democrats had ever taken up.  Civil rights are human rights. Catholic rights are as well. Kennedy offered the role of Vice President to Lyndon B Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader and was nominated to the Democratic candidate. Project Microscope from Simulmatics was hired in part to shore up Jewish and African-American votes. They said Kennedy should turn the fact that he was a Catholic into a strength. Use the fact he was Catholic to give up a few votes here and there in the South but pick up other votes. He also took the Simulmatics information as it came out of the IBM 704 mainframe to shore up his stance on other issues. That confidence helped him out-perform Nixon in televised debates. They used teletypes and even had the kids rooms converted into temporary data rooms. CBS predicted Nixon would win. Less than an hour later they predicted Kennedy would win. Kennedy won the popular vote by .1 percent of the country even after two recounts. The Black vote hat turned out big for Kennedy. News leaked about the work Simulmatics had done for Kennedy. Some knew that IBM had helped Hitler track Jews as has been written about in the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. Others still had issues with advertising in campaigns and couldn't fathom computers. Despite Stalin's disgust for computers some compared the use of computers to Stalinistic propaganda. Yet it worked - even if in retrospect the findings were all things we could all take for granted. They weren't yet. The Kennedy campaign at first denied the “use of an electronic brain and yet their reports live on in the Kennedy Library. A movement against the use of the computer seemed to die after Kennedy was assassinated.  Books of fiction persisted, like The 480 from Eugene Burdick, which got its title from the number of groups Simulmatics used. The company went on to experiment with every potential market their computer simulation could be used in. The most obvious was the advertising industry. But many of those companies went on to buy their own computers. They already had what many now know is the most important aspect of any data analytics project: the data. Sometimes they had decades of buying data - and could start over on more modern computers. They worked with the Times to analyze election results in 1962, to try and catch newspapers up with television. The project was a failure and newspapers leaned into more commentary and longer-term analysis to remain a relevant supplier of news in a world of real-time television. They applied their brand of statistics to help simulate the economy of Venezuela in a project called Project Camelot, which LBJ later shot down.  Their most profitable venture became working with the defense department to do research in Vietnam. They collected data, analyzed data, punched data into cards, and fed it into computers. Pool was unabashedly pro-US and it's arguable that they saw what they wanted to see. So did the war planners in the pentagon, who followed Robert McNamara. McNamara had been one of the Quiz Kids who turned around the Ford Motor Company with a new brand of data-driven management to analyze trends in the car industry, shore up supply chains, and out-innovate the competition. He became the first president of the company who wasn't a Ford. His family had moved to the US from Ireland to flee the Great Irish Famine. Not many generations later he got an MBA from Harvard before he became a captain in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II primarily as an analyst. Henry Ford the second hired his whole group to help with the company.  As many in politics and the military learn, companies and nations are very different. They did well at first, reducing the emphasis on big nuclear first strike capabilities and developing other military capabilities. One of those was how to deal with guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgencies. That became critical in Vietnam, a war between the communist North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese. The North was backed by North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union, the South backed by the United States, South Korea, Australia. Others got involved but those were the main parties. We can think of McNamara's use of computers to provide just in time provisioning of armed forces and move spending to where it could be most impactful, which slashed over $10 billion in military spending. As the Vietnam war intensified, statistically the number of troops killed by Americans vs American casualties made it look computationally like the was was being won. In hindsight we know it was not.  Under McNamara, ARPA hired Simulmatics to study the situation on the ground. They would merge computers, information warfare, psychological warfare, and social sciences. The Vietnamese that they interviewed didn't always tell them the truth. After all, maybe they were CIA agents. Many of the studies lacked true scholars as the war was unpopular back home. People who collected data weren't always skilled at the job. They spoke primarily with those they didn't get shot at as much while going to see. In general, the algorithms might have worked or might not have worked - but they had bad data. Yet Simulmatics sent reports that the operations were going well to McNamara. Many in the military would remember this as real capabilities at cyber warfare and information warfare were developed in the following decades. Back home, Simulmatics also became increasingly tied up in things Kennedy might have arguably fought against. There were riots, civil rights protests, and Simulatics took contracts to simulate racial riots. Some felt they could riot or go die in in the jungles of Vietnam. The era of predictive policing had begun as the hope of the early 1960s turned into the apathy of the late 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr spoke out again riot prediction, yet Simulmatics pushed on. Whether their insights were effective in many of the situations, just like in Vietnam - was dubious. They helped usher in the era of Surveillance capitalism, in a way. But the arrival of computers in ad agencies meant that if they hadn't of, someone else would have.  People didn't take kindly to being poked, prodded, and analyzed intellectually. Automation took jobs, which Kennedy had addressed in rhetoric if not in action. The war was deeply unpopular as American soldiers came home from a far off land in caskets. The link between Simulmatics and academia was known. Students protested against them and claimed they were war criminals. The psychological warfare abroad, being on the wrong side of history at home with the race riots, and the disintegrating military-industrial-university complex didn't help. There were technical issues. The technology had changed away from languages like FORTRAN. Further, the number of data points required and how they were processed required what we now call “Big Data” and “machine learning.” Those technologies showed promise early but more mathematics needed to be developed to fully weaponize the surveillance everything. More code and libraries needed to be developed to crunch the large amounts of statistics. More work needed to be done to get better data and process it. The computerization of the social sciences was just beginning and while people like Pool predicted the societal impacts we could expect, people at ARPA doubted the results and the company they created could not be saved as all these factors converged to put them into bankruptcy in 1970.  Their ideas and research lived on. Pool and others published some of their findings. Books opened the minds to the good and bad of what technology could do. The Southern politicians, or Dixiecrats, fell apart. Nixon embraced a new brand of conservatism as he lost the race to be the Governor of California to Pat Brown in 1962. There were charges of voter fraud from the 1960 election. The Mansfeld Amendment restricted military funding of basic research in 1969 and went into effect in 1970. Ike had warned of the growing links between universities as the creators of weapons of war like what Simulmatics signified and the amendment helped pull back funding for such exploits. As Lepore points out in her book, mid-century liberalism was dead. Nixon tapped into the silent majority who countered the counterculture of the 1960s. Crime rose and the conservatives became the party of law and order. He opened up relations with China, spun down the Vietnam war, negotiated with the Soviet leader Brezhnev to warm relations, and rolled back Johnson's attempts at what had been called The Great Society to get inflation back in check. Under him the incarceration rate in the United States exploded. His presidency ended with Watergate and under Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, the personal computer became prolific and the internet, once an ARPA project began to take shape. They all used computers to find and weigh issues, thaw the Cold War, and build a new digitally-driven world order. The Clinton years saw an acceleration of the Internet and by the early 2000s companies like PayPal were on the rise. One of their founders was Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel founded Palantir in 2003 then invested in companies like Facebook with his PayPal money. Palantir received backing from In-Q-Tel “World-class, cutting-edge technologies for National Security”. In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 as the global technological evolution began to explode. While the governments of the world had helped build the internet, it wasn't long before they realized it gave an asymmetrical advantage to newcomers. The more widely available the internet, the more far reaching attacks could go, the more subversive economic warfare could be. Governmental agencies like the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) needed more data and the long promised artificial intelligence technologies to comb through that data. Agencies then got together and launched their own venture capital fund, similar to those in the private sector - one called In-Q-Tel. Palantir has worked to develop software for the US Immigration and Customers Enforcement, or ICE, to investigate criminal activities and allegedly used data obtained from Cambridge Analytica along with Facebook data. The initial aim of the company was to take technology developed for PayPal's fraud detection and apply it to other areas like terrorism, with help from intelligence agencies. They help fight fraud for nations and have worked with the CIA, NSA, FBI, CDC, and various branches of the United States military on various software projects. Their Gotham project is the culmination of decades of predictive policing work.  There are dozens of other companies like Palantir. Just as Pool's work on Six Degrees of Separation, social networks made the amount of data that could be harvested all the greater. Companies use that data to sell products. Nations use that data for propaganda. Those who get elected to run nations use that data to find out what they need to say to be allowed to do so. The data is more accurate with every passing year. Few of the ideas are all that new, just better executed. The original sin mostly forgotten, we still have to struggle with the impact and ethical ramifications. Politics has always had a bit of a ruse in a rise to power. Now it's less about personal observation and more about the observations and analyses that can be gleaned from large troves of data. The issues brought up in books like The 480 are as poignant today as they were in the 1950s.

Financial management can make or break a business. Any business undertaking attempted without taking cost drivers, growth prospects, and value realization goals, among other critical factors, into account is leaving a big, wide door open to problems.Jack Boyles, Managing Director at Marcum LLP, understands this perfectly well. With his extensive experience in financial planning and modeling, valuations, and funding strategies, Jack keeps a trained eye on both the micro and macro factors that influence today's rapidly evolving financial services sector.In this episode of The Modern CFO, Jack talks with host Andrew Seski about critical factors to consider for growing companies, how he deals with the unexpected, and the valuable lessons he learned over his 25-year-long career as founder, investor, and CFO of several companies.‍‍Show Links Check out Marcum LLP Connect with Jack Boyles on LinkedIn or via email Check out Nth Round Connect with Andrew Seski on LinkedIn ‍TranscriptPlease note that the transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. The content in the podcast is not intended as investment advice, and is meant for informational and entertainment purposes only.‍‍[00:00:00] Andrew Seski: Hello everyone and welcome back to The Modern CFO podcast. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Seski. Today, we're joined by Jack Boyles. Jack, thank you so much for being here. [00:00:19] Jack Boyles: Thank you. I'm looking forward to our conversation. I reviewed a number of your other podcasts. They're all great and I learned something in each one.[00:00:25] Andrew Seski: So today, Jack serves as CFO at Marcum. Jack's based in Boston and has been a CFO across a number of industries and is insatiable when it comes to learning new things, trying new industries. [00:00:38] But one of the things that we've been talking about, maybe ad nauseam, but between us is the idea that maybe there is a certain time and place where CFOs can have their biggest impact at, you know, either a type of financing, an industry, and maybe CFOs shouldn't necessarily grow across all stages and all different types of industries. Maybe they should be specialized and maybe there is a time and place for that CFO who can drive the most value. [00:01:05] So this is a topic I really want to dive into and really dig our teeth into because Jack has such a unique vantage point, serving his entire career really honing in on this idea. So Jack, I got to turn it over to you to tease out some of the value and insights here on sort of that topic and whatever else we can foray into across all of the experiences you had as a CFO.[00:01:26] Jack Boyles: Thanks for the great introduction. Yeah, I'm not CFO of Marcum — number one. Marcum has a group of consulting CFOs and so I now work with roughly a half-dozen small and medium-sized companies as a fractional CFO. Prior to that, I've been CFO of a number of companies in which I was founder, investor, angel, and always had a CFO title in a wide variety of verticals — distribution and logistics, software manufacturing, IT services, natural resources. [00:01:57] And right now my portfolio includes a SaaS company — a company working on carbon credits with blockchain — and another marketplace for health services. So, you know, it's a pretty broad spectrum and I've enjoyed it because there has been a number of learning opportunities. [00:02:14] But returning to your theme, I found I'm really good at the five million to 50 million-dollar service orientation companies. And I've realized that that's where I can add the most value. I'm not somebody who can take a company public, although I've sold a number of companies to Fortune 500 companies. But it's really recognizing there are different skill sets for those by both vertical and by size of company, if you will, the capital intensity and sort of the economic structure underlying the business.[00:02:45] So I can break down those and, you know, they're all interesting problems, but it's really a different skill set for each one of them. And you need to manage differently as that, you know, financially-oriented team member. [00:02:58] Andrew Seski: In terms of where some of this interest comes from from my end is the fundraising environment over the last few years dramatically changing in the last few months. So what may have been, you know, a company doing five to 10 million then that could have been valued, and maybe in the software land, maybe even at a hundred X multiples at one point, just an absolute crazy valuation and fundraising environment to, you know, a very, very immediate, almost shift in going from, you know, pure growth orientation to conservative cost cutting, you know, headcount reduction. And I think the question there stems not only just from where the CFO can be the most valuable in their niche and their competency, but also how to weather the volatility of different market cycles. [00:03:42] And there are a lot of variables to play with here so I really like your answer that the CFO can be really valuable by identifying their impact in a niche due to all of the other market environments and volatility in the markets that could, you know, shift strategy and financial strategies that a company may pursue.[00:03:58] Jack Boyles: Well, you're shining a spotlight on, you know, certainly what is the most critical thing for growing companies, which is, do they have access to capital? And is it the right capital on the right terms and in the right timing? You know, obviously, you progress from family and friends to seed rounds, to Series A and up. [00:04:17] But it's really more important, or the starting point for that analysis is really, what's driving the need for cash? Is it building your organization? Is it financing working capital? Is it plant and equipment expansion? Is it building relationships that you need to invest in? So really understanding from a, what I would call a fairly granular level, what are the cost and capital drivers in your business and really internalizing that, that economic, that, you know, the calculus of the business, because that's gonna tell you what kind of capital you need and where to go knocking on the door. It's seldom the case that you're gonna be the first guy knocking on that door, but making sure that they understand your economic model is critical.[00:04:59] And so to narrow your field down on who you're focusing on and what you're offering and making sure, I mean, whether you look at PitchBook or anything else, it's fairly easy to qualify those people and what their investment criteria are. Most firms are very upfront about what they invest in and there's nothing wrong with reaching. But there's also economy and wisdom and finding people who've done your deal before with like competitors because they understand it. They get it. Whether you consider that investor a bank or a venture capital or a family office, find people who have done it before. They're gonna bring more knowledge to the deal — in the one they do because they are always seeking to be better. Their due diligence will be a lot more efficient and helpful to you.[00:05:43] Andrew Seski: So I want to dive into something that comes up on most podcasts. When we talk about people's route to CFO roles, there's a very traditional background of accounting courses throughout undergrad and maybe a consulting job or a Big Four role. We've had a mix between a very traditional and maybe some nontraditional of serving in the Navy. And I want to go back in time to Dartmouth undergrad and leaving school. What was your, some of those first roles? Did you have sort of a traditional background? Because I want to then kind of hit on all the successes you've had because you have a pretty incredible track record as well. [00:06:19] Jack Boyles: Not at all. I got an MBA at Dartmouth and I was something of a quant jock having a mathematics degree and liking computers, which was kind of a new thing then. And, you know, took all the accounting courses. And when I got close to what the careers looked like with the Big Eight — and there were eight at that time — versus the other things that were out there, I chose consulting. [00:06:41] I joined a firm, Temple, Barker & Sloan, in Boston, worked with them for years. And candidly, they liked me because I spoke business and I could write Fortran. Those were the qualifications. And so I ended up doing most of the financial modeling on a broad range of projects and really, you know, got to be known as something of a guru in figuring out the economics in how to simplify them to the important details. I mean, that's an important notion. [00:07:07] Getting a level of detail right is sometimes the hardest thing to do right in making a projection. Too detailed — you can't maintain it, change it, and it's not useful as a policymaking tool. Too macro — it's not informing you on what the really important relationships are between the resources and their results in a business.[00:07:28] I did that for a number of years, worked across telecommunications, oil and gas, resource recovery, some consumer products, and then got tired of working for big companies because, you know, you were kind of siloed. And so when I looked over my years in consulting, the fun companies were all small and growing. That made the choice easy. So I went off on my own and one after another, you know, lived out that dream. [00:07:53] Andrew Seski: So you've mentioned early on that you are really passionate about continuous learning. And I think you probably identified consulting as one of those ways to be very, very oriented to try to be a value adder early on in your career but also across a lot of different industries so that you can continue to learn. It's very clear that you maintain that theme by being able to have a similar job title across all of these different types of firms.[00:08:18] But how are you thinking about that in terms of some of the risk profile of — I think there are a lot of CFOs who have probably fairly, just a pretty well-defined risk adversity — but going from big consulting shop to smaller firms to deploy some of that knowledge, did that phase you at all or were you pretty comfortable in those positions? [00:08:37] Jack Boyles: My wife didn't ask a lot of questions about what I was doing. So honestly, I was blessed with somebody who was very supportive and understanding and had confidence that I could make it work, whatever I chose to do. And she's, you know, she's been half-right.[00:08:52] Andrew Seski: Well, let's start talking about some of the consistent themes across these CFO roles because you do have a lot of experience in successful exits. Like I mentioned, your track record is incredible. So I want to dive into some of the themes and valuable lessons that we can share to the network of CFOs and listeners today.[00:09:11] And maybe it starts with the kind of continuous learning aspect of always trying to drive forward continuous learning. Maybe it's the definition of what a modern CFO is across being somebody who's really proficient in understanding and measuring the value of technology versus maybe opportunity cost. So were there any things that stood out really early in your career that were cemented later across some of the more successful exits that you've had?[00:09:40] Jack Boyles: I think one of the most important things to do is not overestimate your team's understanding of what the CFO is really supposed to do. And I think it's really helpful when engaging, you know, with a new team to lay out, you know, your assessment of what the roadmap is and what the principle projects are, the priorities, timing, and resource required for them. [00:10:02] Above all, we have to be good project managers. Yes, we have to have the financial disciplines and understand how to put financial statements together and make intelligent decisions about IT, infrastructure, and risk mitigation, and so forth. But really laying out that roadmap for your team members and really saying, "These are the things I own," "These are the things I need your support with." And don't assume that they really understand what the role is and how integrating it needs to be in how the business develops. [00:10:33] You know, the CFO should really take responsibility for building the infrastructure to support the vision of the people who are creating the products and services and the technologists in this day and age that are driving it forward. But to really confirm their understanding of your role, the need for detail, the need to measure what they're doing and provide regular feedback in particular that monitors their progress against their objectives. So to me, that's a lesson I learned over and over again and every time I skip it, it's like, how did I miss that? It's just, I thought I had learned that lesson the last time. And that's critical whether it's, you know, regardless of what industry you're in. [00:11:12] You mentioned the other thing about the thing that keeps me motivated. You know, one of the things that happens at business school and when you're a math major is you acquire all these analytical techniques and tools. You know, I'm really in the business of, you know, old tools for new problems. And so when somebody talks to me about security policy — huge issue for most companies today in the security, you know, whether it's compliance with GDPR or SOX to any of those issues — you know, you don't hear anybody talking about applying Bayesian analysis to that, which is, we all know the technique, but use that framework to structure the decision, to add quantitative data and substance where you can, but also understand, you know, what you're not gonna know and is undiscoverable and be able to make decisions. [00:11:59] You know, the role of a CFO if they're effective with not only the preparation of financials but can adapt that data to the decision making that's in front of them — that's critical. That's a valuable, valuable partner in your decision-making process. Not that they don't get a vote — they do and should have a vote — but the reality is making sure we've chosen the right analytical framework and context for the problem, understand what we know, what we don't know, what's worth researching, and how much time and resources are we willing to spend to improve the decision. Critical thing. And it cuts through a lot of the maxims you hear from one CFEO or, you know, one entrepreneur or the other, speed is everything in one case, fail fast. You hear all these things, but putting it in structure and putting numbers to it really helps you apply those lessons in a very focused and constructive way.[00:12:54] Andrew Seski: I want to continue to talk about this just for a moment because we've had now the pandemic. It looks like we already have a looming recession. When we talk about constructing sort of traditional models with a little bit of leeway and communicating out, you know, exactly what the role of the CFO is, how do you create and think, or how do you personally think about how to create some sort of, you know, configurability around circumstances changing and some sort of flexibility in terms of, you know, creating the models that would be able to handle, you know, some of the maybe more unforeseen types of events that we've had in the last few years?[00:13:29] Jack Boyles: Oh. [00:13:30] Andrew Seski: It's a complex question. [00:13:32] Jack Boyles: Well, I mean, you know, there's great literature on that over the past 10 years, starting with The Black Swan and the work of The Undoing Project, which is about people, you know, two psychologists won the Nobel Prize in economy and economics for really undoing capital markets theory, is what they did, and sort of challenge some of the basics of, you know, thinking fast and thinking slow, which is Daniel Kahneman's famous book. [00:13:59] Andrew Seski: Is Undoing, is that a Michael Lewis? [00:14:01] Jack Boyles: Yes. The Undoing Project is the story of Kahneman and his partner that led to the Nobel Prize. Kahneman, you know, his partner died in this research, but Kahneman continues to write and is still very influential about thinking about how decisions are made and what we, what we just assume and make decisions on every day, which needs to be tested, which is sort of at the root of these unforeseen things that nobody saw coming. [00:14:29] I'll segue back to something I raised earlier: security issues today. You know, when you ask Amazon and you've moved all your stuff to their cloud services, you know, what are you gonna do to make sure we never fail? And they say, you're making an assumption that we're not gonna fail sometime. Assume that the network's gonna go down at some point. That's a real risk. How are you gonna handle it? We can't provide that guarantee. I think about risk in that way, which is I really do carefully consider obsolescence risk of products and services. That's particularly relevant today given the pace of technological innovation and disruption going on. [00:15:05] I think, you know, we have to think very carefully in most businesses. The current clients that I have are not really geared in doing flexible planning regarding the likely wage expectations of, you know, anybody they're hiring. You know, it's not just the commission you pay a recruiter. It's the fact that the basic wages are gonna be 10% higher. So really working through at a fairly, you know, a mid-granular level, which is wages, resources, regulation can change and fundamentally alter the nature of competition in your vertical competitors themselves as well as new products and services. And I think you just have to be structured about that and really be honest. [00:15:47] People wave a hand at it by saying we've got very strong customer relationships. Well, yeah, maybe you do. I can look back and see what the recurring revenue is per customer and I'm not sure what that tells me, you know, given the threats to their business, the threats of competitors, you know, this is a free market capital society. They're gonna earn money for their shareholders and do what they think is right for them. You really have to be very circumspect about placing too much reliance on those strong customer relationships that you've had forever and even the legal contracts underneath them. I tend to be a skeptic when it comes to that.[00:16:26] Andrew Seski: Right. Having a really, really specific understanding of stakeholders, you know, not just your stakeholders but their stakeholders and, you know, whether that's their investors, the shareholders, employee owners, you know, the things that affect their businesses and your clients' businesses as well.[00:16:40] Jack Boyles: Everybody at the table.[00:16:42] Andrew Seski: Everyone at the table.[00:16:43] Jack Boyles: Everybody at the table has alternatives and it's important to understand that you can't, you know, neglect any of them and because whether it's your circumstances or their circumstances that changes dramatically, you both have to re-examine the relationship and be prepared for it.[00:16:59] Andrew Seski: One of the things we were talking about just before we started recording were some big shifts that have taken place in terms of where financial data is stored, maybe the, like sort of the future of the CFO role. And I want to touch on some of that because I think it'll reframe some of the conversation into what we can think about in terms of strategic planning in the next three to five years or even zooming out further with more innovative technologies. You mentioned you had a blockchain company that you're working with doing carbon credit so you're hitting two major themes that, even in the news right now around climate change and government funding, some new climate initiatives.[00:17:35] So I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about some of the macro things that have happened in terms of where technology and financial services have intersected, especially in the role of the CFO. [00:17:45] Jack Boyles: My perspective is if you look back over 50 years, there have been three or four major events that wholly changed the way finance was supported within companies, starting with the creation of ADP. When Frank Wattenberg created that company back in the sixties, nobody dreamed that you'd ever have the confidence to outsource the most confidential data you had, which is the compensation of your employees. You know, 10 years later, you were considered inefficient and backwards if you weren't using an outsourcer to manage the payroll processing problem. They did it better. They did it more competently. They were well-equipped to keep pace with a compliance requirements that constantly changed. Looking back, it was like, why didn't we do that earlier? [00:18:29] A couple years later, we moved from big, secure IBM mainframes to running our financials on little local area networks everywhere that rolled up. It was a revolution from having to have a mini computer, a mainframe to process your financial data or, worse yet, do a lot of it manually. That happened, you know, overnight. We all changed again with the year 2000 worries and upgraded all of our technology. [00:18:58] The last thing that happened was the move to the cloud. In 2015, I remember talking to financial partners about, you know, was anybody else contemplating moving their accounting onto these crazy platforms, NetSuite and Intacct? Not a one. I talked to a dozen companies. Not a one. Three years later, they were behind the eight ball if they weren't in that project. And now you have to have a very stable, very small business if you haven't moved your financials to the cloud, whether it's on Oracle or SAP or Intacct or NetSuite or QuickBooks Online. [00:19:34] And I predict the next, you know, role to change is the CFO. I think that the reality is the breadth of skills that a CFO had to bring 20 years ago is irrelevant today, largely. You know, the person you want in that role has great familiarity with the vertical, has great familiarity and comfort with the size of company — how many people, what's the size of the management team. You work entirely different if you're in a C-suite of a Fortune 500 than if you're one of three people running a 50-million-dollar company and you have very intimate and intense relationships with the other members of that C-suite. [00:20:13] So I think that's going to change and you're going to find, you know, CFOs, particularly for growing companies, change more often. Somebody who's really good from startup to 10 million. Somebody else has a different skillset from 10 to a hundred million, and you need somebody else for the IPO. They're different skillsets. You know, the lower you go, the broader range of skills you have to marshal and more hats you have to wear as you go up the chain, you become more of a manager and in public relations role. [00:20:46] So within the sectors that I serve, I find that it's as important for me to be able to source critical services, whether it's in IT, professional services, legal accounting, insurance, or other specialty services, whether it's R&D tax credits, 401(k) advisory work, issues of that nature. So I'm, you know, a third sourcing agent for all the professional services, a third, you know, controller, whatever accounting hat I have to wear. And third really business planner partner to the other executives. [00:21:20] Andrew Seski: So that's really helpful in terms of contextualizing all of the dynamic requirements of the CFO today. And I think it's really helpful to look backwards before looking forward. One of the things I want to segue slightly into — maybe it's more consistent or maybe it's even changing now because of everything that is more standardized and in the cloud — but I want to talk about liquidity and exits and relationship with CEOs. [00:21:45] You've had a number of exits and I'm trying to decide if I have an opinion whether or not transactions will always be complicated. You're always gonna need to bring all of the stakeholders we've mentioned into the same room to hash through details and figure out what's best for buyers and sellers. And while there might be some standardization, there's still a ton of human-level emotion behind, you know, exits. [00:22:09] So I want to know if there's been any sort of intersection between the efficiency of due diligence and exit planning. Has technology influenced all of that or is it still highly manual? A little emotional as always in building great companies and maybe having an exit, but it'd be a fun thing to think through and talk about because it's been a hard few years. I think the number of transactions that happened in the last few years have probably been off the charts. In the early 2020, I think 2020, there was record number of IPOs, first half of the year. So just thinking through that, I would love to hear either stories or lessons learned or, you know, your perspective on whether or not you think technology's gonna impact liquidity and exits. [00:22:50] Jack Boyles: Well, I think two things. In terms of the mechanics of it, you know, the progress in deal rooms and standard terms and analytical tools to look and value companies is extraordinary today. The tools at our disposal to do financial analysis have never been better. I think the hidden value of the technology isn't just the deal room and the ability to communicate better. I think you also find that people who've done a number of transactions are starting to put more and more emphasis on what are the fundamental infrastructure systems that are in place. [00:23:25] If I'm buying a company that's using the same systems I do, hallelujah. My transaction implementation cost have been cut by two-thirds. I'm not retraining their staff. I'm not reinventing the wheel. I'm doing some data cleanup at consolidation. So if you're a small company or mid-size company with a view towards being bought or buying others, choosing an industry standard platform for your ERP is critical, you know, that's not customized. It greatly simplifies and ensures the success of a transaction because it means you spend, you know, two months integrating operations rather than a year. Time is of the essence in these transactions. [00:24:07] And I think we're gonna go into a phase, particularly with, if we are in fact in recession and are likely to see a number of quarters and the capital pools are gonna dry up or be constraints fundamental, I think you're gonna see a wave of consolidations among these companies and that's gonna be their choice, either sell their IP and their customer lists if they're just technologists or go out of business because I don't think the subsequent rounds that were readily available two years ago are gonna be coming as quick or be as favorable in terms of valuations. [00:24:40] So when you look at the, you know, how the worm's turning, I would urge mid-size companies, who are revenue, you know, have profitability, positive cash flow, to really think about who are the comparable and natural acquirers for them. Chances are those companies, if they need to exit or thinking about it, they probably know who their acquirer is. And I would in some cases that, you know, urge them to have those conversations before they engage in investment banker because we're all looking at the same two-year outlook, which is highly uncertain in terms of both economic environment, as well as the availability of capital. And I'd plan for that. [00:25:20] In most cases, you know, companies that are consolidating in some form, they already know who the players are. And they know, and they're very thoughtful and intentional about what they're gonna look like to facilitate that and remove obstacles to combinations. [00:25:35] Andrew Seski: So just thinking from an investor's standpoint and from a founder's standpoint, I think in the next three to five years, there's kind of a double-edged sword here. I think on one hand, there's some excitement around if there is a downturn and money is being spent more strategically and maybe a little less out of fear of missing out on opportunities than there is that shakeup where really there could be some market dominators, if they can survive a downturn and really capture a big part of the market share in their industries.[00:26:07] So I think that is somewhat exciting to see the shakeup. It's probably nerve-racking as well for both investors and founders in the same vein. But I was gonna ask if you were really excited about anything on that kind of time horizon. I know we just mentioned the next two years feel very uncertain. But just from all these different perspectives, I was thinking it might be unique to hear what you might be excited about in the next three to five.[00:26:30] Jack Boyles: Personally, I think, you know, the whole promise of blockchain technology, in particular smart contracts, is really going to change finance in very fundamental ways that most people don't grasp yet. When I consider simple things that we had, you know, trade finance, importing goods from another country where it used to be a long, drawn-out procedure with very strict guidelines for the documentation and a very globally revered process for clearing payments and managing the transport of goods. That's a blockchain transaction. That's a smart contract today and it's collapsing.[00:27:05] Well, you know, that's, those same technologies are gonna influence lots of things in the finance world. And so I honestly see financial organizations changing dramatically. So individually as somebody who's working with small companies as a finance guy, I find that very exciting to anticipate those changes because it'll be as important as outsourcing payroll and moving your financials to the cloud and fractionalizing your CFO. It's really gonna change the way things work. [00:27:34] And the, to me, the biggest question is, it's not "if," it's "when." Is it, it could be two years. It could be five years. It could be seven. I'm not smart enough to know what the obstacles to adoption are. Oh, maybe I do. Yeah, I'm guessing it'll be government.[00:27:48] Andrew Seski: Well, I think there are a ton of regulatory pushes being made like, as we speak, basically. But I'm glad to see that a lot of the blockchain applications that are catching some traction are around decentralized finance. It's a really hard problem to solve. But there are a lot of people trying to put certain blockchain applications out there where it's sort of a square peg in a round hole. It's a more natural fit, I think, in a lot of the legalese of smart contracts being digitized. So I'm also looking forward to that. [00:28:17] I always ask whether or not you feel something is, you know, maybe undervalued or underestimated in the world from your vantage point. I know we've touched on a lot of big themes across innovative technology, across the changing role of the CFO. But just wanted to give you the opportunity if you wanted to take the conversation in really any direction where you just feel that people may not fully appreciate something that's more clear to you given all of your industry experience. [00:28:45] Jack Boyles: This is hard for somebody who's a numbers guy to say, but the proper functioning of teams is more important than I ever wanted to admit, you know, as I chose to be a math major and then went, you know, focused on quantitative things in my consulting career. And I think COVID and virtualization of so many organizations, I think there'll be another library filled with the books consultants write in three to five years about what separates those companies that did that well and knew how to bring back and re-engage their workforce. [00:29:18] The successful company that, you know, that we write about five years from now is not the one that said, well, you know, starting 2023, you've gotta spend two days a week in the office. They're gonna be a lot more sensitive to it. They're gonna be a lot more, they'll learn a lot more from how the teams functioned during COVID and immediately thereafter and they'll figure it out. And that's gonna separate the real winners and the teams that have, you know, long-term, excess profitability, and market valuations, and all of those other good things from the rest. Because once you can do that, you're accessing a global workforce, which means you can, you know, do a much better job optimizing, you know, targeted recruiting at the best cost. You'll find centers of excellence and be able to tap into them much more rapidly than a firm that's constrained and tied into some old HR, you know, notions of how this should work. [00:30:11] So I can't predict who those companies are, but that's what I'm watching very carefully. What are the innovative companies doing when it comes to how they manage their workforce, how they reward their workforce now that we've broken the model that says you show up in the same place every day. [00:30:27] And you know, certain industries are, certain companies, those that process medical claims, for example, have led in sort of, well, we don't have to do this in New York City; we can do it in Upstate New York. Or, you know, there are lots of examples of people that have taken a function and done it well, but it tends to be a very routine function and it tends to be easily supported remotely.[00:30:50] You know, the last two years gave us an opportunity to blow everything up and try new models. As somebody who's enjoyed a business career and continues to enjoy seeing what's coming, I'm really looking forward to seeing who the winners are in that race. [00:31:04] Andrew Seski: Yeah, absolutely. I was curious if you, I know you've been somebody over the course of your career who's continuously pushing the envelope on trying to find whatever is on the horizon. I'm curious as to if there are any unique sources that you look to. I mean, I've mentioned on other podcasts, I still get a physical Wall Street Journal. I'm very careful on how I curate social media and how I get news. And it's, you can just so easily be bombarded. I'm curious as to how you curate what you receive or if there are any kind of unique ways that you go seek out information or book recommendations. [00:31:38] And I only ask because Nth Round just launched a newsfeed because we are the same way. Everyone on our team has such unique access to really different types of news and we consolidate it and try to, you know, just showcase what we're thinking about that we think is interesting. It's always kind of a really unique niche between finance, technology, regulation, but it's important to us. And it's just a really interesting mix of news. So I'm just kind of curious as to, you know, as you look to your next revolution of Web3 and blockchain and everything that's happening in the world of technology and finance and regulation, kind of how you're sifting through, you know, the huge amount of content.[00:32:16] Jack Boyles: You know, honestly, we're drinking from a fire hydrant right now.[00:32:20] Andrew Seski: Absolutely. [00:32:21] Jack Boyles: I mean, just, you know, there's so much new technology and I've never prided myself as someone who can create technology. But I've always thought I was pretty good at seeing its applications and where I could really have a role. So having said that, you know, I do scan, I love to listen to a16z podcast. They always seem to be ahead of the curve in terms of identifying a technology and sort of what the fundamental economics are that are gonna, you know, lead to mass adoption. So I find that to be a great source of ideas in thinking about what's coming next. [00:32:54] Myself, I tend to go to raw data. Who is the ex-CEO of Microsoft, not Bill Gates' successor. Who's created a, you know, an American facts database. So I'll open the phone book, essentially, of facts — the Census Bureau, the tax rolls, you know, Bureau of Labor and Statistics — and look at something that may, you know, based on the idea that there's a new technology, say, well, if this applies to plumbers, how many plumbers are there in the world? You know, where are they, what do they do? Really understanding, sort of not trying to solve a global, you know, moonshot problem, but is there a problem everybody has in their household every day that this widget, this service might address? [00:33:37] To me, I am a low-hanging fruit guy. So if there's a problem that says, you know, there was really a better mouse trap, I'd be all over it because I can estimate how many mice there are and think about the problems of addressing that problem. So that's kind of how I think about things. [00:33:54] I do have an example. I ran into a company that was doing field service in electronic repairs. I looked at it and said, well, there's 300 or 400 companies you have to maintain relationships with for warranties. And there's four to 5,000 of you guys across the nation. And there's only one national player? That doesn't seem right. There's an arbitrage. There's a roll up here. [00:34:14] So to me, that was an interesting problem. I worked on it. We merged a couple companies, interesting things. But I'll look at the existing situation in an industry. I think I'm pretty good at looking at the macro forces of how an industry works, how a business works, see where there's a real arbitrage and next opportunity to exploit, you know, not trying to reinvent the wheel, but make it work better, consolidate where possible. [00:34:40] Andrew Seski: Well, stay on after the recording. I've got a very funny story. I'll have to confirm, but I believe it's told on the podcast, it's a Steve Ballmer story about early Microsoft days. But one of our podcast guests had to report to Ballmer and got some very implicit advice in his early career about efficiency and modeling, you know, assumptions after data. So we'll talk about that as we wrap up. [00:35:03] But how would you recommend people get in touch if they'd like to talk to you about any of these concepts that we've covered today or get in touch with Marcum about maybe utilizing some of the services that you're currently serving? [00:35:16] Jack Boyles: The easiest thing. I'm on LinkedIn and very visible, Jack Boyles. There aren't that many of them. So you should be able to find me. There's also a jack.boyles@marcumllp and msn.com as well. So, happy to take all calls and look forward to chatting with anybody who found this an interesting conversation. [00:35:34] Andrew Seski: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining The Modern CFO podcast. And I hope to talk again soon.[00:35:38] Jack Boyles: Great. Thanks, Andrew. Take care.‍

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: In your opinion, who is the most snubbed scientist / inventor? Mine would be Rosalind Franklin - Did you ever meet Martinus Veltman. Did you ever use his computer algebra system Schoonship? Were you associated with any of the other CAS systems like REDUCE, LAM, SHEEP, CADABRA at Cambridge? - What computer language were you using when you were doing your early particle physics research? What do you think of Fortran and REDUCE? - What is your perspective on Theranos? Did you have awareness / skepticism of the company before it collapsed? - What are tensors and where did they originate from? (I use them for machine learning but don't even know what they are!)

This episode of the #citizencosmos podcast features Mark Jackson, the founder of Microtick - a short term options and decentralized price oracle for DeFi built on Tendermint. We have discussed Mark's career journey, his work with exchanges, options, liquidity, price discovery, price manipulation, project values and coding using punch cards. The Microtick project's goal is to provide a globally agreed upon, real-time consensus price - without requiring direct financial coupling to any underlying asset. The project is built on decentralized blockchain technology and the game-theoretical foundation of Schelling points. Mark's Twitter (https://twitter.com/mjackson_mtm) We spoke to Mark Jackson about Microtick and: Options & liquidity Miami conference & Buterin Payment channel Cooperative price discovery Stability of the market Price manipulation & market makers Mark's career Punch cards, coding & EVM Implementation on Ethereum Problems in the Cosmos ecosystem & fundraising DiscoveryDex & stable price mechanism True values of a project The future of blockchains Daily motivation The projects and people that have been mentioned in this episode: | Cosmos (https://cosmos.network/) | Citizen Cosmos (https://www.citizencosmos.space/) | Microtick (https://www.microtick.com/) | Bitcoin (https://bitcoin.org/) | Ethereum (https://ethereum.org/) | ShapeShift (https://shapeshift.com/) | Tendermint (https://tendermint.com/) | HP (https://www.hp.com/ru-ru/home.html) | Apple (https://www.apple.com/) | Fortran (https://fortran-lang.org/) | Franklin Computer Corp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Franklin_Computer_Corp.) If you like what we do at Citizen Cosmos: Stake with Citizen Cosmos validator (https://www.citizencosmos.space/staking) Help support the project via Gitcoin Grants (https://gitcoin.co/grants/1113/citizen-cosmos-podcast) Listen to the YouTube version (https://youtu.be/OQ0jkQg7Jys) Read our blog (https://citizen-cosmos.github.io/blog/) Check out our GitHub (https://github.com/citizen-cosmos/) Join our Telegram (https://t.me/citizen_cosmos) Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/cosmos_voice) Sign up to the RSS feed (https://www.citizencosmos.space/rss) Special Guest: Mark Jackson.

In episode 10 of the podcast (@AugmentedPod (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod)), the topic is “A Brief History of Manufacturing Software.” Our guest is Rick Bullotta, Partner, TwinThread, and co-founder, ThingWorx. In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee of Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which merged with BTR to form Invensys, which, in turn, merged with French multinational Schneider Electric, and later the CTO. Rick Bullotta was also the co-founder of Lighthammer Software which was later acquired by SAP, then in 2009 founding ThingWorx, the first complete, end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry. After listening to this episode, check out Thingworx as well as Rick Bullotta's social profile. * Thingworx (https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/iiot/product-brief/thingworx-platform) * Rick Bullotta (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickbullotta/) Trond's takeaway: Wonderware, Lighthammer, and ThingWorx are prominent parts of manufacturing software history, and there's a chance that the 4th company he now is involved with, Tulip, also will be. I do things with things is Rick Bullotta's motto. The things he does, he does them well, and it is an internet of things, more than anything else. I, for one, am eagerly listening to what he predicts will happen next. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like episode 4: A Renaissance of Manufacturing or episode 5: Plug-and-Play Industrial Tech. Augmented--the industry 4.0 podcast. Transcript: Augmented reveals the stories behind a new era of industrial operations where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In Episode 10 of the podcast, the topic is a Brief History of Manufacturing Software. Our guest is Rick Bullotta, Partner at TwinThread and Co-Founder of ThingWorx. In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee with Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which then merged with BTR to form Invensys, which in turn merged with French and multinational Schneider Electric and later the CTO. Rick Bullotta was also the Co-Founder of Lighthammer Software which was later acquired by SAP. Then in 2009, founding ThingWorx, the first complete end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial internet of things, which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry. Augmented is a podcast for leaders hosted by futurist, Trond Arne Undheim, presented by Tulip.co, the manufacturing app platform, and associated with MFG Works, the manufacturing upskilling community launched at the World Economic Forum. Each episode dives deep into a contemporary topic of concern across the industry and airs at 9:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time every Wednesday. Augmented - the industry 4.0 podcast. TROND: Rick, how are you today? RICK: Good morning. TROND: Well, it's a nice morning. I wanted to talk to you about some history. RICK: Sure. TROND: Well, you are a bit of a legend in this field, Rick. You've been basically part of almost every development in this field for several years. I wanted us to spend a little time today, not just going into your history of background as the founder of several startups that have had very significant impact on the industry but also just bring people in a little bit to the environment and how it has changed, and how based on your perspective, you see it evolving. You had a degree from Cornell, and then you went on to fund several companies. Can you bring us back to those days when you were studying industrial engineering at Cornell? What was the environment then for manufacturing? And what was it that brought you into the thought that you would start engaging sort of entrepreneurial software development in manufacturing of all fields? RICK: Just to be clear, I barely graduated. [laughter] So I had a fantastic time in college. But that was when I think we thought of engineers as mechanical engineers, or chemical engineers, the physical aspects of making things, building things, vending product as opposed to...I think software and technology was kind of a nascent concept there, at least certainly in manufacturing. But I actually switched degrees from mechanical engineering to operations research mid-stride there, realizing that looking at pieces of broken metal under a microscope wasn't for me. So I graduated. My degree was in operations research, and actually, my first position was at a very progressive steel company called Lukens Steel, doing essentially industrial engineering work. However, this was what? 1985, dawn of the PC, dawn of a new gen of computing. And some opportunities opened up there to kind of take on some additional responsibilities that involved applying computing to simulations and optimization models, all the stuff that I studied but never thought I'd actually practice. So I'd spend a lot of time in the local library checking out software, take the disc home, teach myself to code. An opportunity then opened up to go into steel plant operation. So I used to run a heat-treating process. And that's one thing that a university degree won't prepare you for, having 15 steelworkers working for you. That's where you get a real education. You also quickly realize that the exception is the rule on the manufacturing floor. And we'll talk later about how it gave me a great appreciation of the importance of the role of people in this whole process and not just technology. But yeah, I spent a few years in that role and then moved back over to an industrial computing group. And we were applying at the time very advanced technology, mini computers, very innovative user interfaces, high levels of automation to some of these processes back at the very site that I worked. And the very operations that I worked at was one of the first places for that. So that's kind of where I got into the technology side of things. But I like to say I was blessed and lucky, right? This crusty, old steel company happened to be very, very committed to investing in technology. And it was a learning opportunity for me. And then, across the years, I moved into systems integration. I did some stuff in discrete manufacturing. I had the opportunity; again, luck sometimes happens here, to work for arguably the first well-known company in the industrial software space company called Wonderware, first IPO in the space. And I joined very early, which is kind of cool. TROND: The Wonderware story is somewhat famous for people inside of manufacturing, but just in case, there are some listeners here who don't really appreciate how early Wonderware was. What was the situation when you created your first product? And why, in your account, has it become so emblematic of that early-early era? And what year are we talking about exactly when that entered the stage with Wonderware? RICK: So late '80s, early '90s Wonderware came on the scene. I joined in; I believe it was '93. And my role there was actually in sales. So you'll find that a lot of my life experiences are all the elements that help build a successful business: sales, marketing, technology. So the founding team there...and there'll be a circle of life moment here in a little bit when we talk about how ThingWorx came to be. The two key co-founders there, Dennis Morin and Phil Huber, recognized the value. And they harnessed the PC revolution and Microsoft Windows. So we're talking Wayback Machine when Windows looked like the Mac user interface. There wasn't a lot of PC application on the plant floor. There were some very interesting companies that I had worked with, competitors to Wonderware but a bit earlier companies like [inaudible 7:28] But we were just kind of at that inflection point where people were comfortable with the role of the personal computer as this kind of human interface to all the automation systems that we had. What Dennis and Phil did was really twofold. And this, I think, ties into a lot of the innovation we're seeing today is they democratized the ability to build applications. They made it easy and fun. So the whole experience wasn't coding; it was very visual. It leveraged kind of a drag and drop experience. You didn't need to understand software to apply it. You could build these incredible applications literally in minutes or hours, connect them to the physical world. I don't know if you've ever seen some of the classic applications they've built. But they're those process mimics, very dynamic graphics that represent the physical world. And I learned a lot during that period about the importance of two things: one is ease of use and empowering others to build applications, particularly in the manufacturer domain. Second was, ironically, the importance of marketing. If there's one thing, that company did extraordinarily well in addition to having a great product was getting the message out there, maintaining a larger-than-life image. And the company grew rapidly to 5 million, 10 million, 15, 20, and on and on, and then IPOed. But there wasn't anybody in history that didn't know the name. Go to a trade show...this is a company that kind of put some perspective. I think the first year I was there; we did about 20 million in revenues. We spent about a million-five on a party. That's kind of the priorities were well balanced there. But what an extraordinary group of people to learn from; I developed lifelong mentors and friends at that company that fast forward to my last company, some of those same people came and joined my team. So it was a complete honor to work with them again, so yeah. TROND: So back in those days, what was it that Wonderware apart from the marketing side, and like you said, the menus and things...first of all, who was the target audience at this point? Was this still process engineers that were doing this, or was it still the IT department managing? RICK: Typically process engineers, and that was the democratization, taking it out of that...let's go back to my time in the steel industry. We were writing Fortran code, PL/M code. We were writing code. We were creating database schema, all the kinds of classic development processes. And it was part of a corporate IT function. Now, this shifted to empowering two main groups, process engineers inside these manufacturing companies and, secondly, a new breed of systems integrators that were very, very focused on this automation domain. So historically, they may have done the physical automation, the PLCs, the actuators, sensing distributed control systems. Now they were able to take on this role. Two other things happened. Just prior to the advent of things like [inaudible 10:42] and Wonderware, that user experience was physical gauges, and push buttons, and things like that, and sliders. Now, it became digital. In a way, this was almost like magic at the time. It's virtual reality. It's like a lot of people the first time...I'll never forget my mother the first time she played solitaire on a PC and that virtual card dragging. It was just utter magic. Well, similar experience here, right? People were able to reproduce these and rapidly reconfigure. But to your point, I would say, yeah, it was those in-house process engineers and the systems integrators that helped implement these systems. TROND: Were you all aware of how innovative you were? I mean, clearly, the marketing department thought you were something special. But did you realize at the time how timeless and etched into manufacturing history Wonderware would become later? Were you aware of how far ahead this was? Or were the customers telling you that clearly? RICK: That's a great question. I think it was a combination of both. We had an almost cult-like customer following that was pretty unique, and it created a lot of energy. They knew we were doing something interesting. But we had very legitimate competitors who were also doing super cool stuff. I think another life lesson here was a lot of companies create great products. To bring great products to market at scale is a whole nother task. It's a whole nother challenge. And I think what we had going for us was an absolutely extraordinary distribution channel, global distribution channels, and very energetic, bright people, independent businesses that could sell, support, implement this technology. That allowed us to achieve scale pretty quickly. But the customers were the primary feedback loop. We won all kinds of awards from the trade rags, all that kind of stuff. I definitely think it was the kinds of applications that the customers were building. That always gives you energy when you see that. TROND: Rick, give me another sense of as we're sort of moving to your next company, just bring us back to that time with the early years of Wonderware. What were some of the things that were challenging to you on the application side then that today we would laugh off and it would just be like a line item? What were some of the things that were really complicated that you were so proud of having accomplished? RICK: Well, let's just take the obvious, which is sort of the inverse of Moore's law. If we turn the clock back that many years, we have half as much compute power every year. And to have a very graphical dynamic user experience, it had to be reliable. I would not underestimate the incredible work that that development team did to take not only a new product in what we built with InTouch, which was the product at the time but also Windows itself. It wasn't evolved. It wasn't mature. It certainly wasn't targeted at these kinds of mission-critical applications. So those were the kinds of things you had to work with. You had to make it robust, reliable, and take advantage of very, very limited compute and visualization capability at the time. It changed the modalities by way...people typically, you know, we were all used to keyboards at the time. Now it's touch; it's a mouse. It's a different means of interaction. And then how do you bring that? Some interesting challenges. Like, I'm a task worker down on the floor in protective equipment and gloves, and how do I interact with that? So all kinds of creative stuff to try and bring a whole new modality of human interaction to a pretty demanding segment. TROND: So what then happened to you? What happened around you leaving Wonderware and moving on to the next challenges? Because you've also had a foray in larger companies, but then you immediately went back to the startup world. Give me a sense of what was your thinking then? RICK: Sure. So there was a little detour as there are often in our careers. [laughs] I left and experimented. I actually came back to Wonderware a second time prior to my first startup in a product management role. I got to see M&A. So we got involved in a couple of key acquisitions that I was intimately involved in. So that was another learning experience for me. Then I saw this opportunity at a level above the Wonderwares of the world, of the OSIsofts of the world, of all these kinds of operational systems that we had. They were islands. No one had that holistic view, a supervisor, an operator. No one was sharing information. And so the light bulb went off. This is actually about when the web technologies were starting to get a little traction, the browser, the Netscape effect, ubiquitous TCP/IP connectivity, Ethernet, and the plants. So that's when the light bulb went off. Let's see if we could do something not dissimilar from the way a Wonderware product will connect all your centers and controllers. Why not provide a unified way to see all the systems that you have? So basically, that's what became Lighthammer, and that was in 1998, we started that company. But the intent was, again, to provide that unified view of first...it was called the Plant Information Portal. That was another cool word at the time, right? Portals. And so that was the objective, it's kind of unified visibility. I started the company with some colleagues that I knew from Wonderware. And we built, I think, something pretty groundbreaking there. TROND: And the situation then was there was this need for almost like an information service to kind of...it was almost like an early portal for the industry in a sense. RICK: I think what we found...the unique thing about the industrial space I like to say that everything's a legacy the moment it gets put in. Everything has proprietary APIs, interfaces, and protocols. My approach has always been solve hard problems because you're going to have fewer competitors, and the value is there. So we tried to solve a pretty hard problem, all these like debubblizing all these different crazy systems that were scattered around. Yeah, so that's really what the objective was initially, unified visibility. But then we realized if people can see that information, why can't other systems? So it rapidly progressed from just being empowering people with information to empowering other lines of business systems. So your supply chain systems, warehouse systems, ERP systems can now be informed with real information in a timely manner. And that was what got us on SAP's radar. TROND: Well, because the point was there that you started discovering the importance of standards. And there were standards at that time, but they were very basic web standards. And you started realizing that even in the side of the industrial field, you had to start depending on that. Is that also what got you involved in the intersection of interoperability and also open sourcing certain types of software? RICK: Yeah. In fact, we were actively involved in a lot of open-source projects. I think that was also early in the open-source world. So if something was broken, no one was going to fix it for you; you fix it, right? TROND: [chuckles] RICK: So yeah, if you want to leverage and get value out of open source, you better be prepared to give back. So as a company, we definitely gave back to a lot of interesting projects that became part of the Lighthammer stack. The other thing that I think is important to understand is, and this pattern repeats itself in my career, is building tools, not applications. My goal was always to empower people to build interesting stuff. They've got the ideas. They've got the innovations living inside them. But if it's hard, if there's friction at every point in the process, cost, time, whatever, they're not going to undertake it, so whether it was Wonderware stuff we were implementing, Lighthammer, ThingWorx. And nowadays, with solutions like Tulip, it really was all about that takedown friction, empower non-technical people to be innovators and do it fast. TROND: So, Rick, then you got on SAP's radar. Tell me a little bit about not necessarily your experience there per se but just the difference for you in having straddled a startup that gets on the radar of a large company, and now you're working in a large company. What's the situation there? What is their understanding of the shop floor, and how does that all work? Because it gets more complicated when you're that kind of a software environment. RICK: Well, I think SAP was a very good place to be for a number of reasons. SAP was dominant in the manufacturing vertical in terms of cost manufacturing. Customers, the vast majority of them ran SAP for their back-office systems. SAP had kind of light solutions for the manufacturing domain but a desire to go deeper. Secondly, they were launching a partner ecosystem at the time. We wanted to prove that, in fact, partners are an integral part to their offerings. So we were able to kind of get that visibility, but also, we started stealing some revenue. So when you start taking customer spend instead of upgrading that module in my ERP system, I'm going to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on my plant floor. That gets you on the radar too. Interesting sidenote, so after SAP, the salespeople told us something fascinating. If you think about in a typical manufacturing company, there's arguably four to seven times more blue-collar...I hate the term blue-collar, task worker, you know, frontline workers, so to speak. But that's got a new meaning nowadays as opposed to back office. Secondly, we had something that not only had a user license for each manufacturing worker but also manufacturing site costs. So think about comparing selling something to the CFO's office that will run in a data center. The scale and size of the deals were pretty substantial, and there was real value being created. So I think in the first year, our sales grew like 800%, 900% from a pretty good base, having that ready base of manufacturing customers to sell into a global company with global sales and support presence. It's pretty easy to get traction there. TROND: But then you had a stint back at Wonderware before you went on to found a new company. What was that like? So you came back and now kind of almost running the show at Wonderware for a little bit. RICK: No, not really because I think the company...this was an interesting dynamic. The company had grown substantially by that point, so from 60 people in my first experience to probably 800 at that point. I was a remote CTO. This was long before remote work was a thing. It was extremely challenging. And I just think those dynamics kind of made it probably not as effective as I could be. That said, some work that I had done in SAP research is what kind of led to the ideas behind ThingWorx. And I actually think, to be blunt, I think Wonderware at the time could have realized those pretty well. Collectively, we could have brought that product to market probably faster of what became ThingWorx. But it just for a variety of reasons, it wasn't the right time, fit, location, all those kinds of things. So dove back into it again, got the band back together, so to speak. TROND: How did that happen? Because at this point, you're not new to startups, and you have had a taste of the corporate world, in fact, in two leading positions, I guess. What is it that then motivates you to go back into that grind, and then you found a groundbreaking company? [laughs] RICK: Part of it is you feel like you cheated on the test. You've got the scars. You've had the lessons learned. I think we had a pretty well-rounded idea on what the new product was going to be, how we were going to take it to market. So I think we actually went in with a pretty solid plan rather than just A; we're going to do some R&D. Secondly, my business partners at Lighthammer were my business partners at ThingWorx, common investors. And some new folks that I worked with at Wonderware joined the team. It was sort of...I'm not going to say we couldn't fail. There were a lot of things we could have done wrong. But we had an incredible team of people with a lot of experience building companies like this, selling software like this. I had a pretty good feeling that we were on the right track there. TROND: And what exactly was ThingWorx in the early days? Because you read things like machine to machine, and those are terms that only much later...today we call internet of things. But you guys were very, very early, honestly, in that domain to produce products in that space when most people were just starting. Machine to machine didn't mean anything to people back then. RICK: And I think where we did well was going a little bit beyond that. And you'll see, once again, it's a pattern that repeats itself, the importance of people, the machines, and the other systems and processes that people have in their companies. Synthesizing all those together is actually where the value nexus is just massive. Any one of those taken in isolation or the connections between them, yeah, there's value to be done. But so we went in kind of with a broad...rather than just machine to machine. And there were some companies doing cool stuff just for getting updates down to an MRI machine or whatever. But we tried to go beyond that. We also realized early on the classic issue; it's good to know what you don't know. And remote access over unreliable links and all that stuff was something...My team had primarily lived in what we would jokingly call the internets of things. Everything's on the local network. You have different considerations. So we acquired a company, a super team, a small company that had a lot of expertise in the kind of internet of things and that remote connectivity, remote management, and that was this the second wave of rocket fuel to get things going. TROND: That's interesting you say that because I think that temptation for many would be you're so far ahead, and you start building things, and you're building things in the future. But I mean, surely, the reality is the shop floor and other things, and you're dealing with poor internet connections. Forget skills. I mean, you're actually dealing with a network that doesn't scale to your idea. RICK: Exactly right. And it was a very interesting balance between...I oversimplify kind of that industrial IoT is smart, connected operations and things like that, so factories, power plants, and then connected fleets of stuff, trucks, MRI machines, light towers, and cities, radically different requirements. One's 98% on-prem, one's 99.9% cloud, one's intermittent, unreliable, expensive connectivity, one's reliable, isolated. So we built a platform to serve both of those tests. In retrospect, we probably made compromises along the way to accommodate that. But still, today, I think PTC's revenue with ThingWorx is fairly well split between those two domains. But that was an interesting challenge on its own because the requirements were dramatically different. TROND: But again, you got acquired. So is this a pattern in your companies? Or is it more a pattern in the field that, at a certain point...because, I mean, I'm making this up here. But is there something about the industry itself that lends itself very easily to just in order to get that scale, you have to be acquired, and it's very desirable? Or is it more a choice that you each time made to say we've built it to a certain scale? RICK: I think in our segment, there are the rare few that an IPO track makes sense, and it's achievable. I think, for the most part, companies in our domain are...they're talking acquisitions to technology companies, cloud companies, enterprise app companies, industrial automation companies. So they have the luxury of we can be the innovation engine. It doesn't have to come off... If you think about a BigCo that wants to build something organically, every dollar they submit...first of all, they're typically 10 to 20 times, and it's just reality, less efficient in developing software for a variety of reasons. And that money comes off the bottom line. So it's actually an interesting dynamic that it's almost more attractive for them as well. But the ThingWorx story is super interesting in the sense that I told someone the other day...so Jim Heppelmann super visionary right there. He had this concept of the digital twin and IoT connected with products way back. And he actually took some of his best and brightest people, his CTO, a number of other people, moved them out of their office, put them in the Cambridge Innovation Center, and said, "Go create something." Well, along the way, we got introduced to that team. And they came to the conclusion that, hey, it's going to be faster, cheaper. We can get to market capture mindshare quicker through acquisition. And if you think about it, that's a very...immature is not the right word. I don't even know what the word I'm looking for here, but it's you've just been given an opportunity to intrapreneur. You've got a clean sheet of paper, all the fun stuff after grinding out your day job for years. And you make that decision to well; we're not going to do that. We're going to go buy a company. I have huge respect for that. And it turned out to be a very good decision for everyone involved. So that's actually how that happened. We were an intrapreneurial effort at a relatively large company, decided to go and become acquisitive instead. And that's worked out quite well. TROND: So we haven't talked so much about the surrounding companies throughout these years. But were there other companies doing innovative things? I'm not so familiar with the history of all of the kind of less successful or less visible manufacturing IT companies throughout the early '90s. What was wrong with some of those, and why don't we talk about them? I mean, are they also still part of the picture? Were there smaller acquisitions that go into this history? RICK: Yeah, there's actually a lot that we were doing right. It was a big enough pie that the gorilla, you know, in the segment might only have a 20-something percent market share. So it was still fairly fragmented. It's partially because of geography, partially because of different segments, and partially just because it was such a big opportunity. The companion market to a lot of what I was doing, for example, at Wonderware and Lighthammer, was the data side of it. So that's the historian companies. Greatest example of that recently is the acquisition of OSIsoft by AVEVA for $5 billion, biggest little company you never heard of. I mean, just a fantastic success story. They stuck to what they did very well and built essentially a dominant market position. They had competitors with good products as well. But I think they're one of those success stories in that space that's only visible to most people now. We had competitors in almost every company I've ever worked at that had great solutions. But this is, again, where I think the X factor stuff comes into play. Your go-to-market machine, the passion that your team and people have that's contagious. If people really believe and they interact with customers and partners, it's just magic. The second thing was, again, where you're really doing useful stuff for customers. Some companies were software companies. Some companies were really just integration companies masquerading as software companies. But, Trond, you know this. There's no shortage of bright people on this planet, and it's -- TROND: Well, sure, there's no shortage of bright people. But I guess this is the third segment that I wanted us to get into. You kind of have a third career now, which is this portfolio life, I guess. [laughs] You can characterize it yourself, but I don't know how to explain it otherwise where you're seeing, first of all, a number of companies and the maturity, I guess, in the space, that's a little different. But you are in a different stage in your career. And I want to eventually get to Tulip and discuss why you got involved with that. But first, maybe you can address some of these portfolio things that you're doing right now. RICK: Sure. TROND: Obviously, mentoring a lot more and getting involved on the board side. How do you see even just the last five years? What's happening right now? Where are we right now with manufacturing software? RICK: So generically, I would say I'm doing manufacturing and adjacent stuff, kind of IoT industrial. I am so excited that it's cool again, right? Because it was for two decades. It was like -- TROND: Well, you were never concerned about that, surely. [laughs] RICK: But, you know, what's the old...in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So if you were cool within your segment, you didn't have to be that great. And you could have done underselling what we achieved at the different companies. But I think it really has visibility now. There's investment money flowing into it. I think the increasing importance of...we kind of hit that little productivity inflection point where it started to flatten out. People are investing in technology. The challenges around people there's just not a lot of know-how, or there's much less know-how about everything from manufacturing operations to the different tasks that get performed to the technologies. So, how do we offset that? So technology is starting to fill an increasingly important role of focused VCs, and focused investors, and focused incubators around this kind of stuff. I think that's probably the biggest change. And then, like any technology segment, the building blocks, the Lego blocks that we build from, just get better and better and better. Someone that wants to add AI capabilities to their solution today, it's never been easier. I want to add Vision. Now, what you do with it can be very differentiating. But my point is that the building blocks we have today are just better than ever. I think the challenge...what's changed maybe in a negative, I think the way you get to customers, get to market has changed and become more challenging. An example, if you think about a venture-funded or otherwise funded startup, turn the clock back 10 or 15 years. We primarily sold perpetual licenses plus maintenance. So you get a big chunk of revenue upfront. Today in the SaaS and subscription world, in essence, we're all in the financing business. We're financing our cost of sales, our R&D., So the capital requirements for companies in our segment are bigger than they ever have been. And we see that with some of the raises, but that's just a reality. That dynamic perhaps even gets ignored sometimes, but it is a big change. Yeah, and then, you know, just to -- TROND: And what got you to Tulip? RICK: So I think it was actually indirectly through Wonderware, if I recall. So Natan and team and Rony and team were looking around at comparables. What are some companies that have been successful growing a business in this space? And he kind of had the hit list of Wonderware folks that he wanted to talk to. And somewhere, somehow, I don't recall the exact moment, but we connected up, and I got it. When he explained what they were doing. The light bulb went off, and I said, "I'd love to be part of this." So I'm both an investor and advisor in the company. And also, I love smart people, like innovative people. TROND: [laughs] RICK: And there's no shortage of those in Natan's team. So first visit there, seeing what they were doing, meeting the team, it was like, all right, there's something going on here. TROND: So tell me what it is that you saw because I was also...I was at MIT at the time when Natan created the company. And I remember vividly going into the lab or whatever you want to describe his early workspace. Because that's what it was, right? It felt like a lab. RICK: Sure. TROND: But the stuff that was coming out was incredible. What do you think? Was it the product vision, or was it just a capability of the people that you saw early on? And now that you're looking at Tulip and its environment, what is being accomplished right now, would you say with this new app reality? RICK: I think it was the aggregate of all the above. Because great example, if you recall the first demo scenario with the mixed reality projecting instructions onto the work –- TROND: That was crazy. That demo was for me, the demo of all demos in the -- [laughs] RICK: Absolutely. TROND: It was crazy. RICK: And I said, wow, you're taking a very fresh look at a problem here. And obviously, with their collective backgrounds, really interesting mix of skill sets, they're going to do cool stuff. And I think Natan and team would be the first to admit they were coming in with not a lot of domain knowledge. They had been involved in companies that made stuff, but there was a learning curve for sure. And that's what a lot of...not just myself, but they had a lot of advisors, customer feedback, brought in some folks into the team, and then just learned on the job training, engaging with customers, engaging in pilots. So I think it took a year or two to kind of get grounded in what are some of the realities of the shop floor, not that they didn't have a good idea. But once that kind of confluence of smart people, customers starting to do cool stuff with it, and the end the product itself evolving, then that's kind of when the rocket took off. TROND: Well, this is interesting what you're saying here because as I'm interviewing a lot of people who have innovated in this space, time and again, what comes back is this is not just your average software innovation garage. A lab is not a garage. Literally, you can be as smart as you are. You can have a big team of smart people. But unless you get coupled up with that manufacturing shop floor experience, you don't stand a chance, or you just can't build. You can't get past the demo. Tell me more about that one because you have had it ingrained. We talked about this a few minutes ago. You started out that way. But there are so many more innovators these days that they can't; well, maybe they can start out, but they haven't started out on the shop floor, so many of them. RICK: I wish they would...everybody who wants to get in this space needs to do...the equivalent of in law enforcement would be a ride-along. You go and spend a couple of nights working the streets. You realize how things really work. It's not like TV. It's not like you read in your textbooks. So there's no substitute for it, even if it's like super-concentrated real-world experience actually going out and spending some time with customers, real-world experience. But I also think it's the third leg of the stool, which is important. It's the technology expertise and creating products. It's manufacturing domain knowledge and then figuring out how to get it in front of customers and sell it. We can never underestimate the importance of that. So that's another thing that I think Tulip took a lot of very iterative and A/B style testing approaches to go-to-market models and continue to innovate and experiment. It's a challenging space to do low-touch, but they've found a niche with that, particularly as a means to plant seeds of customers that can take a first taste of the technology like, wow, that's pretty awesome. The holy grail, I think, for a lot of companies in our space to try to figure out how to do that. No one's really completely cracked the code yet. So it's a kind of combination model. But the domain expertise, a couple of key hires, for example, a great example is the hires they made in the pharmaceutical industry. So life sciences now has become a really, really powerful vertical for Tulip as a result of bringing in civilian expertise plus the evolution of the product from a platform and tooling and some hardware to application, so the app marketplace that they launched. Now when I'm a buyer, you can approach not only that developer buyer, that integrator buyer, but now you can approach a business buyer and say, "I've got all these apps you can assemble together or just use as is." That was also a maturity thing. So it took the domain knowledge, interaction with customers, and then you can progressively build more into the software itself and less that the customer has to configure. That maturation has been pretty exciting to see. TROND: Rick, we've been through a history here that's very, very exciting to me and, I think to listeners. What's next for the digital factory, for the manufacturing, execution systems, all these acronyms? I tried to shy away from them a little bit because we had so many, many other interesting things to talk about today. But if you're looking to the next decade, the holy grail you mentioned, or this final integration project that would marry software, hardware, shop floor, and considering all the challenges that just the past year has brought us, and let's not even bring into it all of the other challenges of this decade and of this century, if you're going to go into the big words. Where are we headed? RICK: I'll maybe focus on where I hope we head, which looks perhaps a little bit different. I started the discussion with one of the things that I learned in my first job working in the plant flow is the importance of people, the knowledge that they have, the experience that they have. People in a lot of our processes are still the sensor, the algorithm, and the actuator. Like it or not, we haven't yet reproduced the human hand. We haven't yet reproduced the human brain. There are some really unique things about humans. And in that context, I hope that the next decade or so is about collaborative technology and how we use robotics, and AI, and information, and mixed reality to help people be better at what they do. And there's always a risk of dehumanization in something like that where people become interchangeable and they don their Iron Man assembly suit. But I'll maybe take a more optimistic view that it's really...we're going to continue to increase productivity output. But there are so many roles like that that could benefit from the synthesis of all these cool technologies that we have. I maintain that there's no such thing as an AI market. There's no such thing as an IoT market; that they're all just building blocks, right? It's what we assemble to solve some actual problem that is interesting. I'm hoping, and I'm confident, that the bar to implement these things becomes increasingly lower. AR is a great example today. It's hard. Building content is time-consuming and difficult. So maybe that's the next one that needs to bring the content creation to mixed reality, next-gen robotics, codebots, and some really interesting stuff happening there. The democratization of machine vision, and audio, and meta sensing that's happening. TROND: But it's interesting you're saying they're still our building blocks, and they're still our collaboration challenges. And maybe those collaboration challenges are going to have to last longer than a decade, and maybe we need more building blocks. But what comes after that once a critical mass of building blocks get assembled? And you have watched this decade by decade that there's a certain coalescence of building blocks, and then a new platform is formed. But still, in this industry, as you have said, so far, most of the time, these new platforms merge into the more traditional platform players, or they merge into more established. Is that a pattern that you see also in this decade? Or will we see the first mega conglomerates come out of completely new manufacturing combination platforms that are integrating all of these technologies and doing something truly new and can sustain their own new creation, whatever iteration of the manufacturing industry that would become? RICK: And I don't know if it's going to be necessarily the suppliers that become the mega innovators. What may well happen is that the manufacturers themselves start to become because the tools have become so powerful that they become the mega. If you actually take a deep dive into a lot of really innovative manufacturing companies, it's the machines that they built to make the product. It's the processes they use to make the product. That's where some of the real breakthroughs happen. That doesn't come from outside. Now, sometimes suppliers can provide some of that equipment. So maybe this is just an amplifier for that. And the second thing is I know is coming is this massive disintermediation of manufacturing. So we already have companies where the brand owner contracts the design of the product. It contracts people to make the products. It contracts people to service the product and sell the product. So they're literally just the brand name on top of it. Now you matrix that, right? Where you have companies with very, very flexible manufacturing capacity that's additive or traditional. Who knows, right? But I think a manufacturing supply chain 10-20 years from now is going to look radically different. Fewer companies will be making stuff on their own. But the companies that are making stuff will be really applying some innovative technology to be flexible, versatile. That's never going to happen for grunt commodity stuff where the cost to produce matter; you do purpose-built. But increasingly, look at the proliferation rate on new product introductions and electronic products and so many different things in our lives, clothing, right? There are so many things that we could innovate faster if the manufacturing systems themselves could adapt faster. Maybe that's an outcome. TROND: Well, I mean, whichever of these scenarios pan out, it seems to me that at least segments of this industry, if it remains, you know if you can talk about it as one industry anymore, is going to be super exciting. So that brings me, I guess, to just my closing question. If you were to advise a young person today who is maybe thinking about college, or they're thinking about should I follow my passion, which happens to be actually going and making and building things? Or should I get a theoretical education, or is that a false choice? Where should they go today? There's this dichotomy between getting a four-year education versus just going and getting some skills like we have been talking about, so you have some inkling of where you actually need to be to understand in order to produce the innovations. RICK: I think all the above, and let me elaborate on that a little bit. When I was in university, I created my own co-ops in the summer. So I worked...I sought them out. My son's at Drexel University now, and a co-op program is an integral part of his education there. For a lot of folks, getting kids particularly exposed to co-ops and those kinds of internships give you two things. It might tell you what you don't want to do just as much as you want to do, which is I think a lot of people in their career would wish they knew that earlier. It helps you get that real-world experience and just interacting with people. So I think that aspect of in your university education doing a diverse and interesting set of co-ops would be very valuable. Having a liberal arts aspect to any technical education or focus skills education is still valid. You have to know how to read, write, speak, those kinds of things. Design is ever increasingly important. The polymath is going to be a great skill to have. Secondly, learning has never been easier. You've got so many online resources as well. If you need a technical skill, I mean, I could probably learn neurosurgery on YouTube if I really needed to if there was no other option, you know, 60% chance that patient would live. TROND: [laughs] RICK: But we have so many different resources. I'm a believer in lifelong learning. So it's not a static thing. Certainly, a highly specialized skill if you're going to be geneticists doing CRISPR whatever, you need to spend 8-10 years of true rigorous study to master a lot of that kind of stuff. Maybe not; maybe that's even getting easier. TROND: Ricky, you just brought me back to eighth grade and my one-week internship at the National Geological Lab, where I was sorting through minerals. And it's incredible how one week is etched into my mind. I don't think about it every time, and I haven't thought about it for years. But while you were just describing with seeking out these internships, you brought it all back to me. And I can almost remember how the Monday was different from the Tuesday rotation when I went through that institute. There is just no comparison to that kind of real-life experience. RICK: And the other advice that I give any person is versatile set of skills. Do a sales role sometime in your life. You might hate it, you might despise it, but you're going to learn what the salespeople in your company go through. You might love it, and it becomes a career. Communications, what your marketing folks have. Having a diverse set of skills and getting exposure...maybe it happened accidentally for me. Those were the opportunities that presented themselves, but I think having that diverse skill set and toolbox is extremely valuable, particularly if you want to start a company. TROND: Rick, I thank you so much. We have gone way over what I had promised and even my promise to our listeners to be very succinct. But this has been, for me, at least a fascinating roller coaster through your career and throughout manufacturing, both history and future. I thank you very, very much. RICK: My pleasure. TROND: You have just listened to Episode 10 of The Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. And the topic was A Brief History of Manufacturing Software. Our guest was Rick Bullotta, Partner at TwinThread and Co-Founder of ThingWorx. In this conversation, we talk about how Rick has shaped manufacturing software history and the lessons learned from being an early employee at Wonderware, the famous precursor to manufacturing automation, back in 1993, a company first sold to British engineering giant Siebe in 1998, which merged with BTR to form Invensys, which in turn merged with French multinational Schneider Electric and later the CTO. Rick Bullotta was also the Co-Founder of Lighthammer Software, which was later acquired by SAP. Then in 2009, founding ThingWorx, the first complete end-to-end technology platform designed for the industrial internet of things, which was acquired by PTC in 2003. We also touch on his current advice to founders in the industrial space, his board role at Tulip, and what he sees lie ahead for the industry. My take is that Wonderware, Lighthammer, and ThingWorx are prominent parts of manufacturing software history, and there's a chance that the 4th company he now is involved with, Tulip, also will be. I do things with things is Rick Bullotta's motto. The things he does, he does them well, and it is an internet of things, more than anything else. I, for one, am eagerly listening to what he predicts will happen next. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at Augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 4: A Renaissance of Manufacturing or Episode 5: Plug-and-Play Industrial Tech. Augmented- the industry 4.0 podcast. Special Guest: Rick Bullota.

Tomas Petricek is a lecturer at the University of Kent and a partner at fsharpWorks. He believes that the most fundamental work is not the one solving hard problems, but the one that offers new ways of thinking. He follows this belief in his academic research on programming systems and the history and philosophy of computing, but also in his writing on functional programming and in his F# training and consulting.   Before joining Kent, Tomas did a Ph.D. on context-aware computations at the University of Cambridge, worked on F# tools in Microsoft Research, and built novel tools for data exploration at The Alan Turing Institute.   Topics of Discussion: [4:19] The Turing Institute, and a little bit more about Alan Turing. [6:01] How can we distill 70 years into something understandable in a reasonable period? [8:52] What were the early cultures of programming? [14:00] Fortran programming and how ALGOL was designed by a sort of more academic crowd as a universal programming language. [15:00] We hear some well wishes from listeners and past guests for the 200th episode! Thank you! [21:27] Tomas discusses hacker culture and how the term programmer has changed over the years. [26:06] Tomas's prediction on where the culture of programming is going next. [27:03] The amazing ad for a programming system called Flow-Matic. [29:22] Why we need escape hatches is because there is a fundamental flaw with no-code and low-code approaches.   Mentioned in this Episode: Architect Tips — New video podcast! Azure DevOps Clear Measure (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's YouTube Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Cultures of Programming Sonic-Pi.NET Tomas Petricek Twitter fsharpworks Twitter Tomas Petricek Website   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

This week on 8111, John Berton!! John was born in the midwest. His dad was a mathematics professor and his mother was a musician. John loved movies as a kid and, through his dad, had early access to computers. He learned Fortran in high school and was fascinated by the logic of programming. John attended Denison University and studied communications and even had his own radio program. For grad school he attended Ohio State and studied computer graphics with American artist and computer art pioneer Charles Csuri. His interest in film, music, physics, and programming led him down the path that would eventually lead to working in visual effects. After grad school John went to work with Charles Csuri at his new company, Cranston/Csuri in Ohio. They made some of the first early flying logos for HBO, CBS, Cinemax, and many others. John later went to work at Mental Images in Berlin. From there he made the connection to ILM where he came to work in 1989 on Terminator 2. John's ILM credits include; T2, Men in Black, Star Trek VI, Hook, Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, The Mask, Casper, Star Wars: A New Hope Special Edition, Deep Rising, The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and Men in Black 2. Since ILM, he has continued to work on films and television creating visual effects in projects including; I, Robot, Charlotte's Web, Bedtime Stories, Krrish3, Godzilla, 13 Reasons Why, and Deep Water. John taught for a while at Drexel in Philadelphia and left when he had a chance to come work at Lytro developing light-field rendering. Today John is back working in visual effects on a project for Netflix. John was my Visual Effects Supervisor on Deep Rising and The Mummy. Working on John's teams are some of my favorite memories from my time at ILM. He is absolutely brilliant, and  approaches his work with equal parts technological prowess and thoughtful artistry. It was awesome to reconnect with him and hear his amazing story. 

Imagine a game that begins with a printout that reads: You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. In the distance there is a tall gleaming white tower. Now imagine typing some information into a teletype and then reading the next printout. And then another. A trail of paper lists your every move. This is interactive gaming in the 1970s. Later versions had a monitor so a screen could just show a cursor and the player needed to know what to type. Type N and hit enter and the player travels north. “Search” doesn't work but “look” does. “Take water” works as does “Drink water” but it takes hours to find dwarves and dragons and figure out how to battle or escape. This is one of the earliest games we played and it was marvelous. The game was called Colossal Cave Adventure and it was one of the first conversational adventure games. Many came after it in the 70s and 80s, in an era before good graphics were feasible. But the imagination was strong.  The Oregon Trail was written before it, in 1971 and Trek73 came in 1973, both written for HP minicomputers. Dungeon was written in 1975 for a PDP-10. The author, Don Daglow, went on the work on games like Utopia and Neverwinter Nights Another game called Dungeon showed up in 1975 as well, on the PLATO network at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana. As the computer monitor spread, so spread games. William Crowther got his degree in physics at MIT and then went to work at Bolt Baranek and Newman during the early days of the ARPANET. He was on the IMP team, or the people who developed the Interface Message Processor, the first nodes of the packet switching ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet. They were long hours, but when he wasn't working, he and his wife Pat explored caves. She was a programmer as well. Or he played the new Dungeons & Dragons game that was popular with other programmers. The two got divorced in 1975 and like many suddenly single fathers he searched for something for his daughters to do when they were at the house. Crowther combined exploring caves, Dungeons & Dragons, and FORTRAN to get Colossal Cave Adventure, often just called Adventure. And since he worked on the ARPANET, the game found its way out onto the growing computer network. Crowther moved to Palo Alto and went to work for Xerox PARC in 1976 before going back to BBN and eventually retiring from Cisco. Crowther loosely based the game mechanics on the ELIZA natural language processing work done by Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1960s. That had been a project to show how computers could be shown to understand text provided to computers. It was most notably used in tests to have a computer provide therapy sessions. And writing software for the kids or gaming can be therapeutic as well. As can replaying happier times.  Crowther explored Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky in the early 1970s. The characters in the game follow along his notes about the caves, exploring the area around it using natural language while the computer looked for commands in what was entered. It took about 700 lines to do the original Fortran code for the PDP-10 he had at his disposal at BBN. When he was done he went off on vacation, and the game spread. Programmers in that era just shared code. Source needed to be recompiled for different computers, so they had to. Another programmer was Don Woods, who also used a PDP-10. He went to Princeton in the 1970s and was working at the Stanford AI Lab, or SAIL, at the time. He came across the game and asked Crowther if it would be OK to add a few features and did. His version got distributed through DECUS, or the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. A lot of people went there for software at the time. The game was up to 3,000 lines of code when it left Woods. The adventurer could now enter the mysterious cave in search of the hidden treasures. The concept of the computer as a narrator began with Collosal Cave Adventure and is now widely used. Although we now have vast scenery rendered and can point and click where we want to go so don't need to type commands as often. The interpreter looked for commands like “move”, “interact” with other characters, “get” items for the inventory, etc. Woods went further and added more words and the ability to interpret punctuation as well. He also added over a thousand lines of text used to identify and describe the 40 locations. Woods continued to update that game until the mid-1990s. James Gillogly of RAND ported the code to C so it would run on the newer Unix architecture in 1977  and it's still part of many a BSD distribution. Microsoft published a version of Adventure in 1979 that was distributed for the Apple II and TRS-80 and followed that up in 1981 with a version for Microsoft DOS or MS-DOS. Adventure was now a commercial product. Kevin Black wrote a version for IBM PCs. Peter Gerrard ported it to Amiga Bob Supnik rose to a Vice President at Digital Equipment, not because he ported the game, but it didn't hurt. And throughout the 1980s, the game spread to other devices as well. Peter Gerrard implemented the version for the Tandy 1000. The Original Adventure was a version that came out of Aventuras AD in Spain. They gave it one of the biggest updates of all. Colossal Cave Adventure was never forgotten, even though it was Zork was replaced. Zork came along in 1977 and Adventureland in 1979. Ken and Roberta Williams played the game in 1979. Ken had bounced around the computer industry for awhile and had a teletype terminal at home when he came across Colossal Cave Adventure in 1979. The two became transfixed and opened their own company to make the game they released the next year called Mystery House. And the text adventure genre moved to a new level when they sold 15,000 copies and it became the first hit. Rogue, and others followed, increasingly interactive, until fully immersive graphical games replaced the adventure genre in general. That process began when Warren Robinett of Atari created the 1980 game, Adventure.  Robinett saw Colossal Cave Adventure when he visited the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1977. He was inspired into a life of programming by a programming professor he had in college named Ken Thompson while he was on sabbatical from Bell Labs. That's where Thompason, with Dennis Ritchie and one of the most amazing teams of programmers ever assembled, gave the world Unix and the the C programming language at Bell Labs. Adventure game went on to sell over a million copies and the genre of fantasy action-adventure games moved from text to video.

Why is Fortran, one of the oldest and least-used programming languages, so crucial to modelling the impact of climate change? How do forest growth, cloud formations and soil quality feed impact portfolio risk assessment? And what do ensemble climate models and professional football teams have in common? Matt Goldklang, Climate Scientist at Man Numeric and recent co-author of the award-winning Climate Investment: Positioning Portfolios for a Warmer World, joins Long Story Short to discuss climate models, adaptation versus mitigation game theory, and how your portfolios can adapt to a more chaotic climate future.

It's time to shoot for the stars with Dan Isla, VP of Product at itopia, to talk about everything from astronomical importance of reliability to time zones on Mars. Dan's trajectory has been a propulsion of jobs bordering on the science fiction, with a history at NASA, modernizing cloud computing for them, and loads more. Dan discusses the finite room for risk and failure in space travel with an anecdote from his work on Curiosity. Dan talks about his major take aways from working at Google, his “baby” Selkies, his work at itopia, and the crazy math involved with accounting for time on Mars!In this episode, we cover: Introduction (00:00) Dan's work at JPL (01:58) Razor thin margins for risk (05:40) Transition to Google (09:08)  Selkies and itopia (13:20) Building a reliability community (16:20) What itopia is doing (20:20) Learning, building a “toolbox,” and teams (22:30) Clockdrift (27:36) Links Referenced: itopia: https://itopia.com/ Selkies: https://github.com/danisla/selkies selkies.io: https://selkies.io Twitter: https://twitter.com/danisla LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danisla/ TranscriptDan: I mean, at JPL we had an issue adding a leap second to our system planning software, and that was a fully coordinated, many months of planning, for one second. [laugh]. Because when you're traveling at 15,000 miles per hour, one second off in your guidance algorithms means you missed the planet, right? [laugh]. So, we were very careful. Yeah, our navigation parameters had, like, 15 decimal places, it was crazy.Julie: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, building things with purpose, and embracing learning. In this episode, we talked to Dan Isla, VP of Product at itopia about the importance of reliability, astronomical units, and time zones on Mars.Jason: Welcome to the show, Dan.Dan: Thanks for having me, Jason and Julie.Jason: Awesome. Also, yeah, Julie is here. [laugh].Julie: Yeah. Hi, Dan.Jason: Julie's having internet latency issues. I swear we are not running a Gremlin latency attack on her. Although she might be running one on herself. Have you checked in in the Gremlin control panel?Julie: You know, let me go ahead and do that while you two talk. [laugh]. But no, hi and I hope it's not too problematic here. But I'm really excited to have Dan with us here today because Dan is a Boise native, which is where I'm from as well. So Dan, thanks for being here and chatting with us today about all the things.Dan: You're very welcome. It's great to be here to chat on the podcast.Jason: So, Dan has mentioned working at a few places and I think they're all fascinating and interesting. But probably the most fascinating—being a science and technology nerd—Dan, you worked at JPL.Dan: I did. I was at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, right, after graduating from Boise State, from 2009 to around 2017. So, it was a quite the adventure, got work on some, literally, out-of-this-world projects. And it was like drinking from a firehose, being kind of fresh out to some degree. I was an intern before that so I had some experience, but working on a Mars rover mission was kind of my primary task. And the Mars rover Curiosity was what I worked on as a systems engineer and flight software test engineer, doing launch operations, and surface operations, pretty much the whole, like, lifecycle of the spacecraft I got to experience. And had some long days and some problems we had to solve, and it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot at JPL, a lot about how government, like, agencies are run, a lot about how spacecraft are built, and then towards the end a lot about how you can modernize systems with cloud computing. That led to my exit [laugh] from there.Jason: I'm curious if you could dive into that, the modernization, right? Because I think that's fascinating. When I went to college, I initially thought I was going to be an aerospace engineer. And so, because of that, they were like, “By the way, you should learn Fortran because everything's written in Fortran and nothing gets updated.” Which I was a little bit dubious about, so correct folks that are potentially looking into jobs in engineering with NASA. Is it all Fortran, or… what [laugh] what do things look like?Dan: That's an interesting observation. Believe it or not, Fortran is still used. Fortran 77 and Fortran—what is it, 95. But it's mostly in the science community. So, a lot of data processing algorithms and things for actually computing science, written by PhDs and postdocs is still in use today, mostly because those were algorithms that, like, people built their entire dissertation around, and to change them added so much risk to the integrity of the science, even just changing the language where you go to language with different levels of precision or computing repeatability, introduced risk to the integrity of the science. So, we just, like, reused the [laugh] same algorithms for decades. It was pretty amazing yeah.Jason: So, you mentioned modernizing; then how do you modernize with systems like that? You just take that codebase, stuff it in a VM or a container and pretend it's okay?Dan: Yeah, so a lot of it is done very carefully. It goes kind of beyond the language down to even some of the hardware that you run on, you know? Hardware computing has different endianness, which means the order of bits in your data structures, as well as different levels of precision, whether it's a RISC system or an AMD64 system. And so, just putting the software in a container and making it run wasn't enough. You had to actually compute it, compare it against the study that was done and the papers that were written on it to make sure you got the same result. So, it was pretty—we had to be very careful when we were containerizing some of these applications in the software.Julie: You know, Dan, one thing that I remember from one of the very first talks I heard of yours back in, I think, 2015 was you actually talked about how we say within DevOps, embrace failure and embrace risk, but when you're talking about space travel, that becomes something that has a completely different connotation. And I'm kind of curious, like, how do you work around that?Dan: Yeah, so failing fast is not really an option when you only have one thing [laugh] that you have built or can build. And so yeah, there's definitely a lot of adverseness to failing. And what happens is it becomes a focus on testing, stress testing—we call it robustness testing—and being able to observe failures and automate repairs. So, one of the tests programs I was involved with at JPL was, during the descent part of the rover's approach to Mars, there was a power descent phase where the rover actually had a rocket-propelled jetpack and it would descend to the surface autonomously and deliver the rover to the surface. And during that phase it's moving so fast that we couldn't actually remote control it, so it had to do everything by itself.And there were two flight computers that are online, pretty much redundant, everything hardware-wise, and so it's kind of up to the software to recover itself. And so, that's called entry descent and landing, and one of my jobs towards the end of the development phase was to ensure that we tested all of the possible breakage points. So, we would do kind of evil Gremlin-like things. We actually—the people in the testbed, we actually call Gremlins. And [laugh] we would—we—they inject faults during the simulation.So, we had copies of the hardware running on a desk, the software was running, and then we'd have Gremlins go and say like, “Hey, flight computer one just went out. You know, what's going to happen?” And you watch the software, kind of, take over and either do the right thing or simulate a crash landing. And we find bugs in the software this way, we'd find, like, hangs in the control loops for recovery, and we had to fix those before we made it to Mars, just in case that ever happened. So, that was like how we, like, really stressed test the hardware, we did the same thing with situational awareness and operations, we had to simulate things that would happen, like, during launch or during the transit from Earth to Mars, and then see how the team itself reacted to those. You know, do our playbooks work? Can we run these in enough time and recover the spacecraft? So, it was a lot of fun. That's I guess that's about as close to, like, actually breaking something I can claim to. [laugh].Julie: Well, I have to say, you've done a good job because according to Wikipedia—which we all know is a very reliable source—as of May 9th, 2022, Curiosity has been active on Mars for 3468 sols or 3563 days, and is still active. Which is really amazing because I don't—was it ever intended to actually be operational that long?Dan: Not really. [laugh]. The hardware was built to last for a very long time, but you know, as with most missions that are funded, they only have a certain amount of number of years that they can be operated, to fund the team, to fund the development and all that. And so, the prime mission was only, like, two years. And so, it just keeps getting extended. As long as the spacecraft is healthy, and, like, doing science and showing results, we usually extend the missions until they just fall apart or die, or be intentionally decommissioned, kind of like the Cassini project. But yeah.Julie: Well, you've heard it here first, folks. In order to keep funding, you just need to be, quote, “Doing science.” [laugh]. But Dan, after JPL, that's when you went over to Google, right?Dan: Yeah, yeah. So, it was kind of that transition from learning how to modernize with cloud. I'd been doing a lot with data, a lot with Amazon's government cloud, which is the only cloud we could use at JPL, and falling in love with these APIs and ways to work with data that were not possible before, and saw this as a great way to, you know, move the needle forward in terms of modernization. Cloud is a safe place to prototype a safe place to get things done quick. And I always wanted to work for a big tech company as well, so that was always another thing I was itching to scratch.And so Google, I interviewed there and finally made it in. It was not easy. I definitely failed my first interview. [laugh]. But then try it again a few years later, and I came in as a cloud solution architect to help customers adopt cloud more quickly, get through roadblocks.My manager used to say the solution architects were the Navy Seals of cloud, they would drop in, drop a bunch of knowledge bombs, and then, like, get out, [laugh] and go to the next customer. It was a lot of fun. I got to build some cool technology and I learned a lot about what it's like working in a big public company.Julie: Well, one of my favorite resources is the Google SRE book, which, as much as I talk about it, I'm just going to admit it here now, to everybody that I have not read the entire thing.Dan: It's okay.Julie: Okay, thank you.Dan: Most people probably haven't.Julie: I also haven't read all of Lord of the Rings either. But that said, you know, when you talk about the learnings, how much of that did you find that you practiced day-to-day at Google?Dan: In cloud—I've mostly worked in cloud sales, so we were kind of post-sales, the experts from the technology side, kind of a bridge to engineering and sales. So, I didn't get to, like, interact with the SREs directly, but we have been definitely encouraged, I had to learn the principles so that we could share them with our customers. And so, like, everyone wanted to do things like Google did, you know? Oh, these SREs are there, and they're to the rescue, and they have amazing skills. And they did, and they were very special at Google to operate Google's what I would call alien technology.And so, you know, from a principles point of view, it was actually kind of reminded me a lot of what I learned at JPL, you know, from redundant systems and automating everything, having the correct level of monitoring. The tools that I encountered at Google, were incredible. The level of detail you could get very quickly, everything was kind of at your fingertips. So, I saw the SREs being very productive. When there was an outage, things were communicated really well and everyone just kind of knew what they were doing.And that was really inspiring, for one, just to see, like, how everything came together. That's kind of what the best part of working at Google was kind of seeing how the sausage was made, you know? I was like, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” [laugh]. And still had some of its big company problems; it wasn't all roses. But yeah, it was definitely a very interesting adventure.Jason: So, you went from Google, and did you go directly to the company that you helped start, right now?Dan: I did. I did. I made the jump directly. So, while I was at Google, you know, not only seeing how SRE worked, but seeing how software was built in general and by our customers, and by Google, really inspired me to build a new solution around remote productivity. And I've always been a big fan of containers since the birth of Docker and Kubernetes.And I built the solution that let you run, kind of, per-user workloads on Kubernetes and containers. And this proved to be interesting because you could, you know, stand up your own little data processing system and scale it out to your team, as well as, like, build remote code editors, or remote desktop experiences from containers. And I was very excited about this solution. The customers were really starting to adopt it. And as a solution architect, once the stuff we built, we always open-source it.So, I put it on GitHub as a project called Selkies. And so, Selkies is the Kubernetes components and there's also the high performance streaming to a web browser with WebRTC on GitHub. And a small company, itopia, I met at a Google conference, they saw my talk and they loved the technology. They were looking for something like that, to help some of their product line, and they brought me in as VP of Product.So, they said, “We wanted to productize this.” And I'm like, “Well, you're not doing that without me.” [laugh]. Right? So, through the pandemic and work from home and everything, I was like, you know, now is probably a good time to go try something new.This is going to be—and I get to keep working on my baby, which is Selkies. So yeah, I've been itopia since beginning of 2021, building a remote desktop, really just remote developer environments and other remote productivity tools for itopia.Julie: Well and, Dan, that's pretty exciting because you actually talked a little bit about that at DevOpsDays Boise, which if that video is posted by the time of publication of this podcast, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. But you're also giving a talk about this at SCaLE 19x in July, right?Dan: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so SCaLE is the Southern California Linux Expo, and it's a conference I really enjoy going to get to see people from Southern California and other out of town, a lot of JPLers usually go as well and present. And so, it's a good time to reconnect with folks. But yeah, so SCaLE, you know, they usually want to talk more about Linux and some of the technologies and open-source. And so yeah, really looking forward to sharing more about selfies and kind of how it came to be, how containers can be used for more than just web servers and microservices, but also, you know, maybe, like, streaming video games that have your container with the GPU attached. The DevOpsDays Boise had a little demo of that, so hopefully, that video gets attached. But yeah, I'm looking forward to that talk at the end of July.Jason: Now, I'm really disappointed that I missed your talk at DevOpsDays Boise. So Julie, since that's your domain, please get those videos online quickly.Julie: I am working on it. But Dan, one of the things that you know you talk about is that you are the primary maintainer on this and that you're looking to grow and improve with input from the community. So, tell us, how can the community get involved with this?Dan: Yeah, so Selkies is on GitHub. You can also get to it from selkies.io. And basically, we're looking for people to try it out, run it, to find problems, you know, battle test it. [laugh]. We've been running it in production at itopia, it's powering the products they're building now.So, we are the primary maintainers. I only have a few others, but, you know, we're just trying to build more of an open-source community and level up the, you know, the number of contributors and folks that are using it and making it better. I think it's an interesting technology that has a lot of potential.Jason: I think as we talk about reliability, one of the things that we haven't covered, and maybe it's time for us to actually dive into that with you is reliability around open-source. And particularly, I think one of the problems that always happens with open-source projects like this is, you're the sole maintainer, right? And how do you actually build a reliable community and start to grow this out? Like, what happens if Dan suddenly just decides to rage quit tech and ups and leaves and lives on his own little private island somewhere? What happens to Selkies?Do you have any advice for people who've really done this, right? They have a pet project, they put it on GitHub, it starts to gain some traction, but ultimately, it's still sort of their project. Do you have any advice for how people can take that project and actually build a reliable, growing, thriving community around it?Dan: Honestly, I'm still trying to figure that out [laugh] myself. It's not easy. Having the right people on your team helps a lot. Like, having a developer advocate, developer relations to showcase what it's capable of in order to create interest around the project, I think is a big component of that. The license that you choose is also pretty important to that.You know, there's some software licenses that kind of force the open-sourcing of any derivative of what you build, and so that can kind of keep it open, as well, as you know, move it forward a little bit. So, I think that's a component. And then, you know, just, especially with conferences being not a thing in the last couple of years, it's been really hard to get the word out and generate buzz about some of these newer open-source technologies. One of the things I kind of like really hope comes out of a two-year heads-down time for developers is that we're going to see some, like, crazy, amazing tech on the other side. So, I'm really looking forward to the conferences later this year as they're opening up more to see what people have been building. Yeah, very interested in that.Jason: I think the conversation around open-source licenses is one that's particularly interesting, just because there's a lot involved there. And there's been some controversy over the past couple of years as very popular open-source projects have decided to change licenses, thinking of things like Elastic and MongoDB and some other things.Dan: Yeah. Totally.Jason: You chose, for Selkies, it looks like it's Apache v2.Dan: Yep. That was mostly from a Google legal point of view. When I was open-sourcing it, everything had to be—you know, had to have the right license, and Apache was the one that we published things under. You know, open-source projects change their license frequently. You saw that, like what you said, with Elastic and Mongo.And that's a delicate thing, you know, because you got to make sure you preserve the community. You can definitely alienate a lot of your community if you do it wrong. So, you got to be careful, but you also, you know, as companies build this tech and they're proud of it and they want to turn it into a product, you want to—it's a very delicate process, trying to productize open-source. It can be really helpful because it can give confidence to your customers, meaning that, like, “Hey, you're building this thing; if it goes away, it's okay. There's this open-source piece of it.”So, is instills a little bit of confidence there, but it also gets a little tricky, you know? Like, what features are we adding the add value that people will still pay for versus what they can get for free? Because free is great, but you know, it's a community, and I think there are things that private companies can add. My philosophy is basically around packaging, right? If you can package up an open-source product to make it more easier to consume, easier to deploy, easier to observe and manage, then you know, that's a lot of value that the rest of the free community may not necessarily need.If they're just kind of kicking the tires, or if they have very experienced Kubernetes team on-site, they can run this thing by themselves, go for it, you know? But for those, the majority that may not have that, you know, companies can come in and repackage things to make it easier to run open-source. I think there's a lot of value there.Jason: So, speaking of companies repackaging things, you mentioned that itopia had really sort of acquired you in order to really build on top of Selkies. What are the folks at itopia doing and how are they leveraging the software?Dan: That's a good question. So, itopia's mission is to radically improve work-from-anywhere. And we do that by building software to orchestrate and automate access to remote computing. And that orchestration and automation is a key component to this, like, SaaS-like model for cloud computing.And so, Selkies is a core piece of that technology. It's designed for orchestrating per-user workloads, like, remote environments that you would need to stand up. And so, you know, we're adding on things that make it more consumable for an enterprise, things like VPN peering and single-sign-on, a lot of these things that enterprises need from day one in order to check all the boxes with their security teams. And at the heart of that is really just increasing the amount of the productivity you have through onboarding.Basically, you know, setting up a developer environment can take days or weeks to get all the dependencies set up. And the point of itopia—Spaces is the product I'm working on—is to reduce that amount of time as much as possible. And, you know, this can increase risk. If you have a product that needs to get shipped and you're trying to grow or scale your company and team and they can't do that, you can slip deadlines and introduce problems, and having a environment that's not consistent, introduces reliability problems, right, because now you have developers that, “Hey, works on my machine.” But you know, they may have—they don't have the same machine, same environment as everyone else, and now when it comes to reproducing bugs or even fixing them, that you can introduce more problems to the software supply chain.Julie: I mean, that sounds like a great problem to solve and I'm glad you're working on it. With your background being varied, starting as an intern to now where you personally are being acquired by organizations. What's something that you've really learned or taken from that? Because one thing that you said was that you failed your first Google interview badly? And—Dan: Yes. [laugh].Julie: I find that interesting because that sounds like you know, you've taken that learning from failure, you've embraced the fact that you failed it. Actually, I just kind of want to go back. Tell us, do you know what you did?Dan: It was definitely a failure. I don't know how spectacular it was, but, like, [laugh] google interviews are hard. I mean—and that's just how it is, and it's been—it's notorious for that. And I didn't have enough of the software, core software experience at the time to pass the interview. These are, like, five interviews for a software engineer.And I made it through, like, four of them. The last one was, like, just really, really, really hard and I could not figure it out. You know, because this is, like, back in the day—and I think they still do this, like, where you're, like, coding on a whiteboard, right? Like, okay, right, this C code on a whiteboard, and it has to work. You know, the dude is, like, right, there compiling it, right? Like, “Okay, [unintelligible 00:23:29], boy.” [laugh].So, not only is a high stress, but it has to be right as well. [laugh]. And so, like, it was just a very difficult experience. And what I learned from that was basically, “Okay, I need to, one, get more experience in this style and this domain of programming, as well, as you know, get more comfortable speaking and being in front of people I don't know.” [laugh].So yeah, there's definitely components there of personal growth as well as technical growth. From a technical point of view, like, my philosophy as being an engineer in general, and software developer, is have a really big toolbox and use the tools that are appropriate for the job. This is, like, one of my core philosophies. Like, people ask, you know, ‘what language do you use?' And I'm like, “Whatever language you needed to solve the problem.”Like, if you're writing software, in a—with libraries that are all written in C, then don't try to do that in, like, Java or something, in some other language that doesn't have those language bindings. Don't reinvent the language bindings. You follow the problem and you follow the tech. What language, what tool will best solve this problem? And I'm always working backwards from the problem and then bringing in the right tools to solve it.And that's something that has paid off in dividends because it's very—problem-solving is fun and it's something I always had a passion for, but when you have a toolbox that is full of interesting gadgets and things you can use, you get excited every time you get to use that tool. Like, just like power tools here, I have a—I don't know, but it's like, “Yeah, I get to use the miter saw for this thing. Awesome. I don't have one? Okay, I'm going to go buy one.” [laugh].Julie: That's actually—that's a really good point, one of the talks that I gave was, “You Can't Buy DevOps.” And it was really all about letting developers be part of the process in choosing the tools that they're going to use. Because sometimes I think organizations put too many constraints around that and force you to use these tools that might not be the best for what you're trying to accomplish. So, I like that you bring up having the ability to be excited about your toolbox, or your miter saw. For me, it would be my dremel. Right? But what tool is going to—Dan: [crosstalk 00:25:39] cool.Julie: Yeah, I mean, they really are—what tool is going to be best for the job that you are trying to accomplish? And I think that that's, that's a big thing. So, when you look to bring people onto your team, what kind of questions do you ask them? What are you looking for?Dan: Well, we're just now starting to really grow the company and try and scale it up. And so we're, you know, we're starting to get into more and more interview stuff, I try to tell myself, I don't want to put someone through the Google experience again. And part of that is just because it wasn't pleasant, but also, like, I don't know if it was really that useful [laugh] at the end of the day. And so, you know, there's a lot about culture fit that is really important. People have to be able to communicate and feel comfortable with your team and the pace that your team is working at. And so, that's really important.But you know, technically, you know, I like to see a lot of, you know—you got to be able to show me that you can solve problems. And that can be from, you know, just work that you've done an open-source, you know, having a good resume of projects you've worked on is really important because then we can just talk about tech and story about how you solve the problem. I don't have to—I don't need you to go to the whiteboard and code me something because you have, like, 30 repos on GitHub or something, right? And so, the questions are much more around problem-solving: you know, how would you solve this problem? What technology choices would you use, and why?Sometimes I'll get the fundamentals, like, do you understand how this database works at its core or not? You know, or why is it… why is that good or bad? And so, looking for people who can really think within the toolbox they have—it doesn't have to be a big one, but do they know how to use the tools that they've acquired so far, and really, just really, really critically think through with your problems? So, to me, that's a better skill to have than just, you know, being able to write code on the whiteboard.Julie: Thanks for that, Dan. And earlier, before we started the official recording here, you were talking a little bit about time drift. Do you want to fill everybody in on what you were talking about because I don't think it was Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness?Dan: No. [laugh]. I think there were some—we were talking about um…clocks?Julie: Clocks skew.Dan: Daylight savings time?Julie: Yeah.Dan: Clock skew, clock drift. There was a time at JPL when we were inserting a leap second to the time. This actually happened all throughout the world, where periodically that the clocks will drift far enough because the orbits and the rotation of the planet are not, like, perfectly aligned to 365 days in a year and 24 hours in a day. And so, every so decades, you have to insert these leap seconds in order to catch up and make time more precise. Well, space travel, when you're planning, you have to—you're planning to the position of the stars and the planets and the orbital bodies, and those measurements are done at such a large scale that you have—your precision goes, like, way out, you know, many, many decimal places in order to properly plan to the bodies up big.And with the Mars Rover, one of these leap seconds happened to come in, like, right, before we launched. And it was like, oh my gosh, this is going to be to—change all of our ephemeris files—the data that you use to track positions—and we had to do it, like, synchronize it all, like, right, when the leap second was going in. And we tested this extensively because if you get it wrong with your spacecraft is traveling, like, 15,000 miles an hour towards Mars, and a one-second pointing error from Earth means, like, you missed the whole planet, you won't even get there. [laugh]. We're not talking about, like, missing the landing site of, like, a few kilometers. No, it's like thousands of kilometers in pointing error.So yeah, things are astronomical [laugh] in units. Actually, that's why they're called AU, astronomical units, when you're measuring the distance from the Sun. So yeah, it was a pretty fun time. A little bit nerve-wracking just because the number of systems that had to be updated and changed at the same time. It's kind of like doing a rolling update on a piece of software that just had to go out all at the same time. Yeah.Jason: I think that's really interesting, particularly because, you know, for most of us, I think, as we build things whether that's locally or in the cloud or wherever our servers are at, we're so used to things like NTP, right, where things just automatically sync and I don't have to really think about it and I don't really have to worry about the accuracy because NTP stays pretty tight. Usually, generally.Dan: Mm-hm.Jason: Yeah. So, I'm imagining, obviously, like, on a spacecraft flying 15,000 miles a second or whatever, no NTP out there.Dan: [laugh]. Yeah, no NTP and no GPS. Like, all the things you take for granted, on Mars are just not there. And Mars even has a different time system altogether. Like the days on Mars are about 40 minutes longer because the planet spins slower.And my first 90 sols—or days on Mars—of the mission, the entire planning team on earth that I was a part of, we lived on Mars time. So, we had to synchronize our Earth's schedule with what the rover was doing so that when the rover was asleep, we were planning the next day's activities. And when it woke up, it was ready to go and do work during the day. [laugh]. So, we did this Mars time thing for 90 days. That was mostly inherited from the Mars Exploration rovers, Spirit and Opportunity because they were only designed to live for, like, 90 days.So, the whole team shifted. And we—and now it's kind of done in spirit of that mission. [laugh]. Our rover, we knew it was going to last a bit longer, but just in case, let's shift everyone to Mars time and see what happened. And it was not good. We had to [laugh] we had to end that after 90 days. People—your brain just gets completely fried after that. But it was bizarre.And there's no time. You have invent your own time system for Mars. Like, there's no, it was called LMST, or Local Mars Standard Time, local mean standard time. But it was all, like, relative to, you know, the equator and where you were on the planet. And so, Mars had his own Mars time that counted at a different rate per second.And so, it was funny, we had these clocks in the Mission Control Room that—there was this giant TV screen that had, like, four different time clocks running. It had, like, Pasadena time, UTC time, Mars time, and, like, whatever time it was at the Space Network. And I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” And so, we were always doing these, like, time conversions in our heads. It was mental. [laugh]. So, can't we just all be on UTC time? [laugh].Jason: So, I'm curious, with that time shift of being on Mars time and 40 minutes longer, that inherently means that by the end of that 90 days, like, suddenly, your 8 a.m. Mars local time is, like, shifted, and is now, like, hours off, right? You're waking—Dan: Yeah.Jason: Up in the middle of the night?Dan: Totally, yeah.Jason: Wow.Dan: Yeah, within, like, two weeks, your schedule will be, like, upside down. It's like, every day, you're coming in 40 minutes later. And yeah, it was… it was brutal. [laugh]. Humans are not supposed to do that.If you're actually living on Mars, you're probably okay, but like, [laugh] trying to synchronize those schedules. I thought you were going from East Coast to West Coast time, working remote was hard. And, like, [laugh] that's really remote.Julie: Dan, that's just astronomical.Dan: [laugh].Julie: I'm so sorry. I had to do it. But with that—[laugh].Jason: [laugh].Dan: [laugh]. [unintelligible 00:33:15].Julie: With that, Dan, I really just want to thank you for your time on Break Things on Purpose with us today. And as promised, if I can find the links to Dan's talks, if they're available before this episode posts, we will put those in the show notes. Otherwise, we'll put the link to the YouTube channel in the show notes to check for updates. And with that, I just want to thank you, Dan, and wish you a wonderful day.Jason: Before we go, Dan, do you have anything that you'd like to plug? Any projects that people should check out, where they can find you on the internet, stuff like that?Dan: Yeah, thank you guys very much for having me. It was a great conversation. Really enjoyed it. Please check out our new product, itopia Spaces, remote developer environments delivered, powered by Selkies. We launched it last fall and we're really trying to ramp that up.And then check out the open-source Selkies project, selkies.io will get you there. And yeah, we're looking for contributors. Beyond that, you can also find me on Twitter, I'm @danisla, or on LinkedIn.Jason: Awesome. Well, thanks again for being a part of the show. It's been fantastic.Dan: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

You're probably thinking “what the F*CK is a dude wall?!”, and today Vanessa talks to the incredible Katie Hafner to find out.  Katie is an author, journalist, and host of the podcast “Lost Women of Science,” whose mission is to tell the stories of female scientists who history has inconveniently forgotten. But how do we prevent this from happening in the future? How do we encourage more girls and women to go into STEM, and how do we ensure their portraits aren't left off the walls of our academic institutions?About KatieKatie Hafner is host and executive producer of Lost Women of Science. She is a longtime reporter for the New York Times, where she continues to be a frequent contributor, writing on healthcare and technology. Hafner is uniquely positioned to tell these stories. Not only does she bring a skilled hand to complex narratives, but she has been writing about women in STEM for nearly 30 years. The author of six books of nonfiction, she is currently host and executive producer of Our Mothers Ourselves, an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers.Show notes:If you see a dude wall, please email: lostwomenofscience@gmail.comListen to Lost Women of ScienceListen to Our Mothers, Ourselves, Katie's other podcastPre-order “The Boys,” Katie's book coming out in July (where the main character and his mom talk in Fortran!)Read the study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about interest and perceived interest in computer scienceConnect with us:Katie Hafner: (Twitter, Website)Lost Women of Science: (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook)Vanessa Vakharia: @themathguru (Insta, Twitter, TikTok)Math Therapy: @maththerapy (Twitter)

We're all familiar with the data science tools like numpy, pandas, and others. These are numerical tools working with floating point numbers, often to represent real-world systems. But what if you exactly specify the equations, symbolically like many of us did back in Calculus and Differential Equations courses? With SymPy, you can do exactly that. Create equations, integrate, differentiate, and solve them. Then you can convert those solutions into Python (or even C++ and Fortran code). We're here with two of the core maintainer: Ondřej Čertík and Aaron Meurer to learn all about SymPy. Links from the show Ondrej Certik: @OndrejCertik Aaron Meurer: @asmeurer SymPy: sympy.org SymPy Docs: docs.sympy.org/dev Tutorials: docs.sympy.org The SymPy/HackerRank DMCA Incident: asmeurer.com SymEngine: github.com SymPy Gamma: gamma.sympy.org Sovled derivative problem - wait for derivative steps to appear: gamma.sympy.org Github Takedown Repo: github.com e: The Story of a Number book: amazon.com Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm --- Stay in touch with us --- Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com Follow Talk Python on Twitter: @talkpython Follow Michael on Twitter: @mkennedy Sponsors Microsoft Sentry Error Monitoring, Code TALKPYTHON AssemblyAI Talk Python Training

Panelists: Paul Hagstrom (hosting), Quinn Dunki, Earl Evans, and Carrington Vanston Topic: Fortran, for better or for worse The year 1954 brought us Fortran (not named after the year though) to help us with our math, and development of SAGE to scan the skies for threats. Topic/Feedback links: IBM 650 Drum memory Wurlizter SideMan (not 1954, but related via tangent) SAGE (Gizmodo) SAGE (Wikipedia) Fortran Fortran 2018, 202x Retro Computing News: system7.app macos8.app Tech details for system7.app, macos8.app Return to Monkey Island ACM opens first-50-years backfile Game of pong in a single sprite Sprite pong video SWTPC 6800 rescue SWTPC 6800 fan site ADB makes fun of the IIGS manual University of Saskatchewan self guided computer history tour A2stream, audio server A2stream demo AppleWin with Uthernet II a2stream file for this very episode: http://yesterbits.com/media/a2s/rcr254.a2stream Vintage Computer(-related) commercials etc.: IBM SAGE (1960) Retro Computing Gift Idea: Atari sneakers See also: Atari NFT sneakers Auction Picks: Carrington: Apple Credit salesperson's kit Apple branded radio lunchbag Earl: MMD-1 8080A Trainer See also: MMD-1 (Oldcomputermuseum) Paul: Funniest CD of the century The drive of a new generation USB evangelism mouse Companion diskette Astra 1620 dual drive for Atari VM 4209 Feedback/Discussion: @rcrpodcast on Twitter Vintage Computer Forum RCR Podcast on Facebook Throwback Network Throwback Network on Facebook Intro / Closing Song: Back to Oz by John X Show audio files hosted by CyberEars Listen/Download:

Panelists: Paul Hagstrom (hosting), Quinn Dunki, Earl Evans, and Carrington Vanston Topic: Fortran, for better or for worse The year 1954 brought us Fortran (not named after the year though) to help us with our math, and development of SAGE to scan the skies for threats. Topic/Feedback links: IBM 650 Drum memory Wurlizter SideMan (not … Continue reading RCR Episode 254: Fortran, for better or for worse →

Watch the live stream: Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by Mergify! Special guest: Pat Decker Michael #0: New live stream / recording time: 12pm US PT on Tuesdays. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified and be part of the episodes. Brian #1: BTW, don't make a public repo private How we lost 54k GitHub stars Jakub Roztočil HTTPie kinda sorta accidentally flipped their main repo to private for a sec. And dropped the star count from 54k to 0 oops They're back up to 16k, as of today. But ouch. “HTTPie is a command-line HTTP client. Its goal is to make CLI interaction with web services as human-friendly as possible. HTTPie is designed for testing, debugging, and generally interacting with APIs & HTTP servers. The http & https commands allow for creating and sending arbitrary HTTP requests. They use simple and natural syntax and provide formatted and colorized output.” Actually, pretty cool tool to use for developing and testing APIs. Michael #2: The counter-intuitive rise of Python in scientific computing via Galen Swint In our laboratory, a polarizing debate rages since around 2010, summarized by this question: Why are more and more time-critical scientific computations formerly performed in Fortran now written in Python, a slower language? Python has the reputation of being slow, i.e. significantly slower than compiled languages such as Fortran, C or Rust. So yes, plain Python is much slower than Fortran. However, this comparison makes little sense, as scientific uses of Python do not rely on plain Python. Used the right way, Python is slightly slower than compiled code. Pat #3: Meta donates $300,000 to PSF to add a second year for the Developer in Residence Brian #4: Dashboards in Python Two suggestions from Marc Skov Madsen The Easiest Way to Create an Interactive Dashboard in Python Sophia Yang & Mark Skov Madsen Includes animated gif showing the dashboard video of Sophia walking through the article in under 6 minutes “Turn Pandas pipelines into a dashboard using hvPlot .interactive" hvPlot is part of HoloViz and this example is pretty short and amazing to get a great dashboard with controls up very quickly. Python Dashboarding Shootout and Showdown | PyData Global 2021 5 speakers, 4 dashboard libraries, nice for comparison. Nice clickable index posted by Duy Nguyen 00:00 - Begin and Welcome 03:15 - Intro to the 4 Dashboarding libraries 07:04 - Plotly - Nicolas Kruchten 22:01 - Panel - Marc Skov Madsen 37:38 - voila - Sylvain Corlay 51:36 - Streamlit - Adrien Treuille 01:10:52 - Discussion Topics Michael #5: sourcepy by Dave Chevell Sourcepy lets you source python scripts natively inside your shell Imagine a Python script with functions in it. This converts those to CLI commands (kind of like entrypoints, but simpler) Type hints can be used to coerce input values into their corresponding types. standard IO type hints can be used to target stdin at different arguments and to receive the sys.stdin Sourcepy has full support for asyncio syntax Pat #6: Xonsh Xonsh Shell Combines the Best of Bash Shell and Python in Linux Terminal Awesome demo video (50 min) https://youtu.be/x85LSyCxiw8 Extras Pat: Donate to the PSF by using https://rewards.microsoft.com Joke: Can you really quit vim? Joke: Forgetting how to count

R is the 18th level of the Latin alphabet. It represents the rhotic consonant, or the r sound. It goes back to the Greek Rho, the Phoenician Resh before that and the Egyptian rêš, which is the same name the Egyptians had for head, before that. R appears in about 7 and a half percent of the words in the English dictionary.  And R is probably the best language out there for programming around various statistical and machine learning tasks. We may use tools like Tensorflow imported to languages like python to prototype but R is incredibly performant for all the maths. And so it has become an essential piece of software for data scientists.  The R programming language was created in 1993 by two statisticians Robert Gentleman, and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. It has since been ported to practically every operating system and is available at r-project.org. Initially called "S," the name changed to "R" to avoid a trademark issue with a commercial software package that we'll discuss in a bit. R was primarily written in C but used Fortran and since even R itself.  And there have been statistical packages since the very first computers were used for math.  IBM in fact packaged up BMDP when they first started working on the idea at UCLA Health Computing Facility. That was 1957. Then came SPSS out of the University of Chicago in 1968. And the same year, John Sall and others gave us SAS, or Statistical Analysis System) out of North Carolina State University. And those evolved from those early days through into the 80s with the advent of object oriented everything and thus got not only windowing interfaces but also extensibility, code sharing, and as we moved into the 90s, acquisition's. BMDP was acquired by SPSS who was then acquired by IBM and the products were getting more expensive but not getting a ton of key updates for the same scientific and medical communities. And so we saw the upstarts in the 80s, Data Desk and JMP and others. Tools built for windowing operating systems and in object oriented languages. We got the ability to interactively manipulate data, zoom in and spin three dimensional representations of data, and all kinds of pretty aspects. But they were not a programmers tool. S was begun in the seventies at Bell Labs and was supposed to be a statistical MATLAB, a language specifically designed for number crunching. And the statistical techniques were far beyond where SPSS and SAS had stopped. And with the breakup of Ma Bell, parts of Bell became Lucent, which sold S to Insightful Corporation who released S-PLUS and would later get bought by TIBCO. Keep in mind, Bell was testing line quality and statistics and going back to World War II employed some of the top scientists in those fields, ones who would later create large chunks of the quality movement and implementations like Six Sigma. Once S went to a standalone software company basically, it became less about the statistics and more about porting to different computers to make more money.  Private equity and portfolio conglomerates are, by nature, after improving the multiples on a line of business. But sometimes more statisticians in various feels might feel left behind. And this is where R comes into the picture. R gained popularity among statisticians because it made it easier to write complicated statistical algorithms without learning an entire programming language. Its popularity has grown significantly since then. R has been described as a cross between MATLAB and SPSS, but much faster. R was initially designed to be a language that could handle statistical analysis and other types of data mining, an offshoot of which we now call machine learning. R is also an open-source language and as with a number of other languages has plenty of packages available through a package repository - which they call CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network). This allows R to be used in fields outside of statistics and data science or to just get new methods to do math that doesn't belong in the main language.  There are over 18,000 packages for R. One of the more popular is ggplot2, an open-source data visualization package. data.table is another that performs programmatic data manipulation operations. dplyr provides functions designed to enable data frame manipulation in an intuitive manner. tidyr helps create tidier data. Shiny generates interactive web apps. And there are plenty of packages to make R easier, faster, and more extensible. By 2015, more than 10 million people used R every month and it's now the 13th most popular language in use. And the needs have expanded. We can drop r scripts into other programs and tools for processing. And some of the workloads are huge. This led to the development of parallel computing, specifically using MPI (Message Passing Interface).  R programming is one of the most popular languages used for statistical analysis, statistical graphics generation, and data science projects. There are other languages or tools for specific uses but it's even started being used in those.  The latest version, R 4.1.2, was released on 21/11/01. R development, as with most thriving open source solutions, is guided by a group of core developers supported by contributions from the broader community. It became popular because it provides all essential features for data mining and graphics needed for academic research and industry applications and because of the pluggable and robust and versatile nature. And projects like tensorflow and numpy and sci-kit have evolved for other languages. And there are services from companies like Amazon that can host and process assets from both, both using unstructured databases like NoSQL or using Jupyter notebooks. A Jupyter Notebook is a JSON document, following a versioned schema that contains an ordered list of input/output cells which can contain code, text (using Markdown), formulas, algorithms, plots and even media like audio or video. Project Jupyter was a spin-off of iPython but the goal was to create a language-agnostic tool where we could execute aspects in Ruby or Haskel or Python or even R. This gives us so many ways to get our data into the notebook, in batches or deep learning environments or whatever pipeline needs to be built based on an organization's stack. Especially if the notebook has a frontend based on Amazon SageMaker Notebooks, Google's Colaboratory and Microsoft's Azure Notebook. Think about this. 25% of the languages lack a rhotic consonant. Sometimes it seems like we've got languages that do everything or that we've built products that do everything. But I bet no matter the industry or focus or sub-specialty, there's still 25% more automation or instigation into our own data to be done. Because there always will be.