Podcasts about indigenous storytelling

Release Date: 04.16.2025 Hoporenkv Native American Podcast: “Reel Reflections” Special Guest: Everett Osceola (Seminole Tribe of Florida) Film Liaison Cultural Ambassador Florida Seminole Tourism Seminole Tribe of Florida Episode Description: Tune in as Everett Osceola, Seminole Tribe of Florida Member who is Film Liaison and Cultural Ambassador for the Seminole Tribe of Florida's Tourism Department, joins us once again to share his reflections on the success from the 10th anniversary of the Native Reel Cinema Fest, hosted at Seminole Tribal Fair and Powwow earlier this year. He regales us with tales of the triumphant event, identifies the lessons learned for future Native Reels, and shares valuable advice for fellow Native cinephiles who hope to make their own mark on the world of Indigenous film and media. Episode Resource Links: https://www.facebook.com/ReelNativeFest/ https://www.instagram.com/nativereel/ https://filmfreeway.com/NativeReelCinemafestival-1

"going to see it played live with the musicians just in front of you, its can be overwhelming"

WAYS OF KNOWING: A NAVAJO NUCLEAR HISTORY tells the story of the impact of uranium mining on the Navajo community. This film is a unique collaboration between a Navajo storyteller Sunny Dooley and nuclear nonproliferation expert Lovely Umayam where the story of US nuclear history is told through an indigenous lens. This means telling the story of how nuclear policy has impacted Navajo land, but also on the intergenerational impact on the Navajo people. The fully immersive quality of 360 video allows Dooley to preserve the full context of how she would tell the story to her community. This was my favorite interview from SXSW 2025 as it is another great example of how the immersive quality of VR is able to capture and transmit indigenous ways of knowing, and how this indigenous perspective is also changing how nuclear nonproliferation experts are thinking about these nuclear policy issues. This film would also not be able to be told the same way if it was only 180 degrees, and it is a prescient example of the affordances of VR to be able to tell the story of a place with its full relational context. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

X'unei Lance Twitchell, writer and cultural consultant for Molly of Denali talks with John Thompson about winning an Emmy and bringing Indigenous voices to storytelling. 

X'unei Lance Twitchell, writer and cultural consultant for Molly of Denali talks with John Thompson about winning an Emmy and bringing Indigenous voices to storytelling. 

Peter Kirk is a multi-award-winning Indigenous TVC and film director, creator and connector at Campfire x. Campfire x is an Indigenous-owned and run creative consultancy agency that brings Indigenous thinking and talent into the mainstream by unifying the 97% of Australians who are not Indigenous with the 3% who are. They develop creative strategies that communicate to all of Australia and de-risk how companies and brands engage with the world's oldest storytellers, enriching the nation's view of itself. Peter shares the benefits and challenges of working with Indigenous creators and storytellers and the fundamental changes we need to make as an industry, brand leaders and individuals to access this benefit directly and maximise the performance of genuine and authentic storytelling.   Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/managing-marketing/id1018735190  Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/75mJ4Gt6MWzFWvmd3A64XW?si=a3b63c66ab6e4934  Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/managing-marketing  Listen on Podbean: https://managingmarketing.podbean.com/  For more episodes of TrinityP3's Managing Marketing podcast, visit https://www.trinityp3.com/managing-marketing-podcasts/  Recorded live on Zoom and edited, mixed and managed by JML Audio with thanks to Jared Lattouf.

This week on The Side Woo, Sarah talks with grad school buddy Roberto Fatal about their beautiful short films, student loan debt, using grant money for good and the hilarity of sci-fi's white apocalypses. About Roberto Fatal Roberto Fatal [they/them/ellos] is a Meztize Chicana filmmaker and storyteller. They come from Rarámuri, Genízaro, and Spanish ancestry. Their Queer, gender fluid, Mestize/Mixed identity informs the sci-fi, films they make. Their work centers on humans who sit at the intersections of time, space and culture. From this unique vantage point, these characters can bridge divides, see all sides, find new paths forward and recall multiple histories long forgotten. The mixed people of Fatal's stories can connect us deeply to an undercurrent of humanity that we often overlook in a world that is increasingly divided. Survival, intersectional identity, perseverance, love, empathy, community, connection and creation are at the heart of their characters and films. Fatal is a Sundance Film Institute Native Film Lab  Fellow Alum and an Imagine Native Director's Lab feature film fellow alum.  Their debut feature script, ELECTRIC HOMIES, was selected by GLAAD x The Black List as one of the best unproduced screenplays of 2022 and was awarded the 2023 SFFILM Rainin Screenwriting Grant. Learn more about Roberto's work here: https://robfatal.myportfolio.com/video-art-and-film

Indigenous stories and perspectives are underrepresented in the storytelling of this province, and correcting that imbalance is the mandate of a new performance collective. We welcome the artistic curator with Indigenous Performing Arts NL to the On The Go studio to hear more about what kinds of stories they plan to share. (Jamie Fitzpatrick with LeahDawn Helena)

Kaitlin B. Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity. She also speaks on these topics to diverse audiences who are interested in truth-telling and healing. Besides her books, Kaitlin has written online for Sojourners, Religion News Service, On Being, SELF Magazine, Oprah Daily, and more. Her work has been featured on CBS and in USA Today. She currently lives in Philadelphia with her family.https://www.kaitlincurtice.com/https://www.instagram.com/kaitlincurtice/Support the showFollow Moms Who Create:Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/momswhocreatepodcast/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/momswhocreatepodcastMonthly Meeting Book Club - https://www.facebook.com/groups/momswhocreatebookclubWebsite - https://www.momswhocreate.com/

Unsettled Scores co-founders and composers Spy Dénommé-Welch and Catherine Magowan, have explored the unique medium of opera to tell the captivating tale of two sisters from Northern Ontario, their ancestral tree, and old but familiar visitors. This art breaks eurocentric operatic structures, redesigning a safe space for diverse audiences to experience the transformative power of Indigenous storytelling and opera.

This week on rabble radio, Stephen Wentzell sits down with Red Buffalo Nova, an Ojibwe Two-Spirit, transgender artist, filmmaker, and storyteller to talk about how their multi-layered Indigenous identity informs their creative and professional work.   About Red Buffalo Nova Weipert Red Buffalo Nova Weipert (he/him/they/them) is an Anishinaabe Ojibwe, Two-Spirit and transgender interdisciplinary artist, writer, director, educator and storyteller. Nova is a proud enrolled member of the Pinaymootang First Nation located in Treaty 2 territory, and is a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.  They are a long time collaborator, producer and video mentor with Access to Media Education Society (AMES) and their work has screened at festivals such as imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (2021) and Vancouver Queer Film Festival (2022).  If you like the show please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And please, rate, review, share rabble radio with your friends — it takes two seconds to support independent media like rabble. Follow us on social media across channels @rabbleca. 

Today on the show we are talking about genetics and this province. You will hear about the Newfoundland curse, Texas vampires, and the latest from the Provincial Medical Genetics Program. Up first though a conversation about the importance of amplifying Indigenous literary voices and challenging their erasure.

You can find a podcast on just about anything these days. Out in the podcast world, you'll find a number of shows from First Nation, Inuit and Métis hosts including the Dene Yati podcast Driving While Indigenous. This edition of InFocus is looking at how Indigenous Peoples are telling their stories through podcasts.

Plug into the diversity matrix where caucasity ticks all the boxes. Join the roll call of industry babies and diversity daddies with SIS this week.Watch the full first season of SIS for free: https://vimeo.com/showcase/9902229Sign petition: https://chng.it/BH49fgydvWOpen letter to NZ Film & TV Industry: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CjzmNu2JcFP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_linkWebsite | Apple | Patreon | Twitter | Instagram

Dive into the waters of community, legacy and peace through centuries of rich history in Aotearoa. Prepare for the Aunty ambush with MURU this week.Video interview:https://youtu.be/VQgG5TM_J28Website | Apple | Patreon | Twitter | Instagram

Inspired by actual events, MURU is the story of a local Police Sergeant ‘Taffy' Tāwharau (Cliff Curtis), who must choose between duty to his badge or his people, when the Government invoke antiterrorism powers to launch an armed raid on Taffy's remote Urewera community, on a school day.MURU is now showing in Australian CinemasWebsite | Apple | Patreon | Twitter | Instagram

We had the opportunity to talk to Comic Book Creator/Writer Scott Wilson about Indigiverse and Dark Heart at Sydney Oz Comic Con! Watch the video interview!https://youtu.be/2s7lfvOO3xAMost people are oblivious to the dangers that lurk in the shadows. Dark Heart reveals a 65,000 year old story of the Elder Protectors that stand between Us and Them. They defend the Lore that protects the people. If the Lore is broken by the dying of the light, who will stand and protect us from the evil that comes in the night?Writer: Scott WilsonArtist: Katie Houghton-WardColour Artist: Justin RandallEditor/Letters: Wolfgang BylsmaChapter 1 is available for purchase through their website: https://indigiverse.au/shelf/dark-heart-1/https://www.instagram.com/scottlewiswilsonTasty links below...Site: https://fyrpodcast.comApple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/for-your-reference/id1453532214Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ForYourReferenceTwitter: https://twitter.com/ForYourRefPodInsta: https://www.instagram.com/foryourrefpodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6oOmo_3tzdD0VtBzt2d0JA

Planet Women envisions a world where the vibrant diversity of earth's people collaborate to care for the planet. Currently, the organization is focused on three geographic areas defined by rivers —  the Congo, Amazon, and Colorado River Basins. Each area has an immense influence over global climate patterns and biodiversity or an outsized impact on the communities that depend on them.Of course, since Forever Our Rivers works in the southwestern United States, we're most interested in Planet Women's work along the Colorado River. And this podcast centers on their innovative Overflight Project. The initiative pairs volunteer women pilots with indigenous women leaders and youth from in and around the Colorado River Basin. The pilots then fly the women over their homelands, sparking inspiration and storytelling along the way. Planet Women plans to capture and share these stories of a landscape in the midst of aridification as seen through the eyes of indigenous women in flight. To learn more and to see photos from the flights and their progress across the Basin, visit the Overflight Storymap. In this episode, we talk to  Joanna Marshall, Planet Women's director of development and marketing, and Amber Gray, a pilot and the Overflight Project's aviation operations director. We also speak to Crystal Tulley-Cordova of the Navajo Nation and the Indigenous Women's Leadership Network. Crystal is a principal hydrologist for the Navajo Nation and a participant in the Overflight program. If you are or know of indigenous woman leaders or youth who would like to participate in the Overflight Project email TheOverflightProject@gmail.com.Fact-checking notes: In this episode, we briefly discuss the amount of oil that the United States and California import from the Amazon. We cite a 2021 study as reported by NBC News in an article titled, Crude reality: One U.S. state consumes half of the oil from the Amazon rainforest, and the California Energy Commission's Foreign Sources of Crude Oil Imports to California 2021. Support the show

“Most people used to say, the Amazon is like the lung of the planet. I say it is like the heart. If you see the Amazon, you can see a heart and all the rivers are like veins. When you clog all these veins, the body is going to collapse. This is happening now." Let us welcome Dr Fernando Trujillo, a marine biologist who is the Scientific Director of Foundation Omacha, an NGO he established in 1993 to promote the conservation of river species and their ecosystems in South America. Fernando guides us through his studying history, achieving an MSc in Environmental Sciences (University of Greenwich) and a Doctorate in Zoology (University of Aberdeen) with the ambition of working with marine vertebrates. He was encouraged to work with dolphins in the Amazon. Although nervous, this place became his paradise so built his career around it. Fernando's PhD allowed him to research Amazon River Dolphin behaviour, and habitat use and develop a technique to count them. From here, he developed the South American River Dolphin Initiative. “Each tree is an ecosystem, 50 m high, there are hundreds, if not thousands of animals; ants, insects, spiders, frogs, mammals and reptiles. So every time you burn an area, you are killing millions of animals and plants." Fernando informs us about the importance of the Amazon to the world, and how damaging it will affect everyone. Fernando and Sabrina then discuss the development of Foundation Omacha and its impact. They then discuss the perception of the residents and indigenous people to conservation and how it changed over time. Throughout Fernando's career, connections are key in conservation. Connecting indigenous people to wildlife, and westernised people to indigenous to learn from each other and promote change to benefit everyone. “We need to learn, we need to move forward, we need to be committed to something. It's important. It's not a fight of a few people. It's a fight with everybody. We are all on this amazing blue planet that we all call Earth, and we need to do something” Read about Omacha HERERead about the Amazon River Dolphin HERERead about Fernando's Whitley award HERE and Fernando's work HERE Become a member HERE

The third Wednesday of every year is National Canadian Film Day, a nationwide event that celebrates the best in Canadian cinema. This year is no different, and tomorrow's event promises to be one of the best yet, with screening events in every province and territory and around the world. This morning I sat down with Jack Blum, executive director of Reel Canada (the organisation that puts National Canadian Film Day on), to speak about this year's event, the tribute to the late Jean-Mac Vallée, and the focus on indigenous filmmaking.To learn more about National Canadian Film Day and find a screening event near you, head to their website, CanFilmDay.ca (or their Twitter, @CanFilmDay).You can find more information and all of our other content on this episode's homepage. CONNECT WITH US:        Homepage:         Twitter:             Facebook:             Instagram:             YouTube:             Email:             SUPPORT:             Patreon:             Ko-Fi:      Meanwhile, relax and enjoy your flight. 

A HUGE thank you to Professor Patricia Elliott and the incredible students that took part in this project. We are so grateful for the opportunity to partner with you in order to share these stories. Special thanks to Bee Bird, Kaitlin Howie, Lori Deets, Crystal Greene, and Amber Bear for sharing your hard work with the Know Justice podcast audience. Thanks to all the students for their great work. The future of journalism and storytelling is in good hands! Visit the Indigenous Communications Arts website for more information about the program.Thanks to Elder Archie Weenie, Angel Whitford, Kim Beaudin, Coady Jipol, and Harold Johnson for sharing your experiences and expertise. We are so thankful to you for sharing your stories with us.--------Know Justice is brought to you the John Howard Society of Saskatchewan. Visit our website to learn more about our justice work.Please subscribe and rate our podcast on whichever listening platform you use.You can connect with us any time on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you have any suggestions, topic or guest ideas, or are just looking to connect, please send us a direct message on any one of our social media platforms.

Tora and Tara will focus on STEM in storytelling, including its seeming absence in pourquoi tales and STEM teachings in Native American stories.

Tanya Denning-Orman, a proud Birri and Guugu Yimidhirr woman from Central and North Queensland, who leads National Indigenous Television (NITV), an Australian channel dedicated to Indigenous voices, overseeing its diverse and innovative multiplatform content, since it joined Special Broadcasting Service's (SBS) in 2012, and more recently became SBS's first Director of Indigenous Content. Tanya plays an instrumental role in developing and delivering First Nations storytelling across the SBS network.  As a champion for strong Indigenous media, she holds several industry Board positions, including Media Diversity Australia, First Nations Media Australia, and the World Indigenous Television Broadcast Network. Creativity Without Frontiers available at all relevant book retailersStay in touch with Unknown OriginsMusic by Iain Mutch Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/unknownorigins)

Community organizer and educator Tai Simpson uses storytelling to help build cultural bridges and create change for future generations. This talk was filmed at TEDxBoise. All TEDx events are organized independently by volunteers in the spirit of TED's mission of ideas worth spreading. To learn more about TEDxSHORTS, the TEDx program, or give feedback on this episode, please visit http://go.ted.com/tedxshorts. Follow TEDx on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TEDx Follow TEDx on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tedx_official

For much of our nation's post-white settlement history, the voices of Indigenous Australians have been largely missing from the story of who we are and where we've come from. This omission is all the more tragic because of the rich history of storytelling that exists in Indigenous culture.For nearly 20 years, Rhianna Patrick was one of the leading Indigenous voices on the ABC, documenting the experience of our First Nations communities on programs like AWAYE! and Speaking Out. But the responsibility of carrying these stories and working in a mainstream media landscape built on colonisation took a heavy toll and she left the ABC in 2020.In this episode, Rhianna talks to host Ben Hart about the differences in the way Indigenous Australians approach stories, and what non-Indigenous storytellers can learn from the care and respect that sits at the heart of this approach (Hint: things might take a bit longer, but the payoff is huge).Rhianna also talks about her new role at Australia's only 100 per cent Indigenous owned and operated media organisation Indigenous X, why there's a growing interest in stories from a First Nations perspective and why mainstream media organisations need to do more than just increase the headcount of Indigenous journalists in their newsrooms.Looking for more on the art, craft and science of storytelling? Check out our sister website The Story. Follow The Story on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Kamala Todd is a Métis-Cree community planner, educator, curator, and filmmaker. Her film credits include Indigenous Plant Diva, Cedar and Bamboo, RELAW: Living Indigenous Laws, and Sharing our Stories: the Vancouver Dialogues Project. She writes and directs for children's television, including the Indigenous science series Coyote's Crazy Smart Science Show and the Cree-language series Tansi! Nehiyawetan, both on APTN. She created a video series about Indigenous law for UVic's Indigenous Law Research Unit, and Welcome to Our Homelands for Immigrant Services Society of BC. The latter extends a welcoming message to newcomers to Canada, as well as a glimpse into Indigenous history in Canada that serves as a jumping off point for further learning. In short, Kamala's work not only elevates and amplifies Indigenous stories, but empowers others to find and use their voices. In this compelling conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger, Kamala speaks to the ways in which her work aims to dismantle white supremacy through the sharing of stories that, ultimately, bring people together. Episode sponsor: Fish Flight Entertainment

On the season premiere of Face to Face: Mohawk actor Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs sits down with host Dennis Ward to discuss Indigenous representation in the film industry - also a look at what's next for Jacobs following the success of Reservation Dogs.

On the season premiere of Face to Face: Mohawk actor Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs sits down with host Dennis Ward to discuss Indigenous representation in the film industry - also a look at what's next for Jacobs following the success of Reservation Dogs.

Ishkōdé Records is a new Indigenous women-owned label created to foster and amplify Indigenous voices. Ishkōdé Records arrives to advocate for Indigenous artists, songs and stories in the commercial music landscape. Led by artists, organizers and activists Anishinaabekwe ShoShona Kish (Digging Roots) and solo artist Amanda Rheaume, Citizen of the Metis Nation of Ontario, Ishkōdé approaches the independent label operations through the lens of women and artist entrepreneurship, long-standing industry experience and cultural and ancestral processes. The word Ishkōdé means fire in Anishinaabemowin.Find out more about Ishkōdé Records HERE.Amanda Rheaume is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario and a singer/songwriter that has self-managed her music career for over 15 years. Her album Keep a Fire was nominated for a JUNO Award and won a Canadian Folk Music Award for Indigenous Songwriter of the Year. Amanda identifies as she/her and is an active and proud member of the LGBTQ2S+ community. Amanda is also the Director of Operations for the International Indigenous Music Summit, Co-Founder of Ishkōdé Records and Project Coordinator for the new National Indigenous Music Organization here in “Canada.”Find out more about Amanda HERE.ShoShona Kish is an Anishinaabekwe community organizer, producer, activist and  artist in JUNO award-winning band Digging Roots. Co-Founder of Ishkōdé Records, Kish is also the Artistic Director of the International Indigenous Music Summit and has curated and collaborated on projects with Canada's National Art Centre, the Women of the World Festival and the Sydney Opera House. Kish's work has been recognized with Folk Alliance's Spirit of Folk Award and WOMEX's Professional Excellence Award.Find out more about ShoShona and Digging Roots HERE.

02:01 - Sy's Superpower: Making Complex Topics Digestible * Sy on YouTube: "Computer Science Explained with my Cats" (https://www.youtube.com/SyBrandPlusCats) 06:28 - Approaching Learning to Code: Do Something That Motivates You * Greater Than Code Episode 246: Digital Democracy and Indigenous Storytelling with Rudo Kemper (https://www.greaterthancode.com/digital-democracy-and-indigenous-storytelling) * Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) * Terrastories (https://terrastories.io/) 11:25 - Computers Can Hurt Our Bodies! * Logitech M570 Max (https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-M570-Wireless-Trackball-Mouse/dp/B0043T7FXE) * Dvorak Keyboard (https://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/) 13:57 - Motivation (Cont'd) * Weekend Game Jams * The I Do, We Do, You Do Pattern (https://theowlteacher.com/examples-of-i-do-you-do-we-do/) 22:15 - Sy's Content (Cont'd) * Sy on YouTube: "Computer Science Explained with my Cats" (https://www.youtube.com/SyBrandPlusCats) * Content Creation and Choosing Topics 33:58 - Code As Art * code:art (https://code-art.xyz/) / @codeart_journal (https://twitter.com/codeart_journal) * trashheap (https://trashheap.party/) / @trashheapzine (https://twitter.com/trashheapzine) * Submission Guidelines (https://trashheap.party/submit/) * Casey's Viral TikTok! (https://www.tiktok.com/@heycaseywattsup/video/6988571925811367173?lang=en&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1) 41:34 - #include ＜C++＞ (https://www.includecpp.org/) * Lessons learned creating an inclusive space in a decades old community (Sy's Talk) (https://developerrelations.com/community/lessons-learned-creating-an-inclusive-space-in-a-decades-old-community) * QueerJS (https://queerjs.com/) * Emscripten (https://emscripten.org/) * Graphiz it! (http://graphviz.it/#/gallery) Reflections: Mandy: Digging into Sy's videos. Casey: Working within content creation constraints. Sy: Make a video on register allocation. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double's superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams and you can help. Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and dev ops engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir, and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join. That's link.testdouble.com/join. MANDY: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 247. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here with our guest today, Sy Brand. SY: Hey, everyone! CASEY: Sy is Microsoft's C++ Developer Advocate. Their background is in compilers and debuggers for embedded accelerators. They're particularly interested in generic library design, making complex concepts understandable, and making our communities more welcoming and inclusive. They can usually be found on Twitter, playing with their three cats, writing, or watching experimental movies. Hi, Sy! Good to have you. SY: Hey, thanks for having me on. CASEY: The first question we like to ask, I think you're prepared for it, is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? SY: Yeah, so very topically, I think one of my superpowers is forgetting what topics I want to talk about when recording podcasts and that, I acquired through having ADHD and forgetting to write things down. But I did write things down this time so maybe that won't be too much of a problem. But I think one of my other ones is making complex topics digestible, trying to take computer science topics and distill them down into things which are understandable without necessarily having a lot of the background knowledge, the resources you'd expect. I gained that mostly through my background in computer science and then my interest in public speaking and communication and performance poetry, trying to blend those together to make things easier to understand, lower the barrier for entry. CASEY: I love it. Making complex topics digestible. That's definitely a skill we need more of in the world. MANDY: Absolutely. So Casey told me you are a bit of a teacher and you do a lot of teaching on, is it YouTube? So making things easier to digest. Like I said, during the preshow, I've been trying to learn to code on and off for 12 years, as long as I've had this career, and I've started and stopped, gotten frustrated and stopped, and I've tried different things. I've had mentors and I feel like I've let my mentors down and I've tried this and that. I've tried the code academy and I don't know. So how do you do it? Can you tell us a little bit about how you do that? SY: Sure. So most of the topics that I am interested in teaching is, because I come from a background of compilers and debuggers and very low-level systems, those are the things that I want people to get excited about because I think people look at compilers, or C++, or low-level programming and think, “Oh, this is not very interesting,” or new, or it's too complex, or it requires too much of a degree, or whatever. But none of that is true. You can write a compiler without having to have a lot of the background knowledge you might expect and you can learn C++ without having to – it can be a lot easier than people make art. So I want to make these concepts seem interesting and understandable because they're deeply interesting to me and they've been working on them for a large part of my life and I still love it and find them fascinating. So I want to share that with people. CASEY: What's your motivation when you're working on these? Is it to understand things that are complex, or are you solving problems you have, or other people have, or maybe a blend, or other motivations? I'm wondering what gets you so pumped about it. SY: Yeah, so I think it's a few different things. I make videos on Twitter, or YouTube, things like that of explaining concepts that I'm already familiar with and it's pretty much stuff that I could write an entire video off the top of my head without having to do any research. So I've done videos on explaining what a compiler is and all the stages of compilation, or a video on higher cash performance works, or [in audible 05:48] cash configurancy, garbage collection. These are all things I could just sit down and write something on and don't have to do a lot of research. Then there's the more exploratory stuff. I've been live streaming the development of a Ranges library for C++, which is being able to compose operations, building up a pipeline of operations for your data and then declarative manner so that you don't have to deal with a lot of memory allocations and moving data, or a range yourself. You just say, “Here's all the steps that I want to occur,” and then someone who has written all of these pipeline operations deals with how that actually happens. I've been developing that library live and trying to teach myself hired to do all of these things as while also teaching other people at the same time. MANDY: So is it right to assume that maybe I've been going about learning to code in all the wrong ways and that I've just picked a language and tried to dive in, or did I miss some of the conceptual stuff? And if so, as I suspect, a lot of the conceptual stuff has gone over my head. So where do you suggest, if you were giving me advice, which yes, you are giving me advice. [laughter] Where would you suggest, as a brand-new beginner coder, what kind of software concepts I need to research and understand before actually diving into an actual programming language? SY: Honestly, I don't think that there's a single answer there and I don't think there's a lot of wrong answers there. From my perspective, the best way to learn how to code is doing something that motivates you and that gets you excited because coding is hard and when you hit those bumps and things are going wrong, if you don't have that motivation to keep going, then it's very easy to stop. I know I've done it in trying to learn certain concepts and things like that before, because I felt like, “Oh, I should learn this thing, but I wasn't really interested in it,” and then I find out it was hard and stopped. The best way that I learn is finding something where I'm like, “Hey, I want to build this thing,” or “I want to understand this because I want to solve this problem,” or “because I want to dove on that knowledge with something else.” It's always the motivation, but then I'm coming from if you're someone with ADHD, or something like me, then it's pretty much impossible to do anything without [chuckles] having a strong motivation behind it. So that kind of comes into my way of learning as well. MANDY: That's super interesting. Actually, the last episode we did was with Rudo Kemper and he did a project with Ruby for Good. I went to that and I actually got really excited, intrigued, and wanted to get involved and learn how to code because I was really interested and passionate about the project that he presented, which was Terrastories, which was handing down indigenous knowledge technologically so that stories aren't lost in just having oral traditions, that these stories are actually being recorded and are living somewhere on the internet. So that's really interesting. I went to that and then of course, pandemic happened. It didn't happen again last year, but I'm thinking about going back this year. I'm hoping maybe I can be on a team with somebody that could just shadow and sit there and maybe Casey would let me be that person because rumor has it, Casey is going to be there. Ruby for Good on the East Coast in the fall. CASEY: Yeah, I'll be there. I'd be happy to have you shadow me. Also, my role lately has been a higher level. Last time I was a product manager for the team not coding and this year I'm going to be helping the teams be happy and effective across the board because there's always a team, or two that need some alignment work so that they can be productive the whole weekend. MANDY: That's interesting. Okay. Well, I'm sure I'll find somebody who wouldn't mind me doing a kind of shadow. CASEY: For sure. MANDY: Yeah, cool. CASEY: That's the kind of environment it is. MANDY: Absolutely. CASEY: Yeah. SY: That definitely sounds like the right kind of thing like something where you hear about something, or you look at this project and you think, “Hey, I want to get involved. I want to contribute to this.” That's what can drive a positive learning experience, I think it's that motivation and that motivation could just be, “Hey, I want to get into the tech industry because it pays well and we need money to live because capitalism.” That's like totally legit as well. Whatever you find motivates you to work. MANDY: Yeah, that's why I'm here. I had to find a way for my daughter and I to live. SY: Yeah. MANDY: So I got into tech and podcasts and then I'm working for all these people who I always considered so much smarter than me. I was like, “I could never learn that. I'm not good enough.” But now since joining the podcast as a host and coming on here, I'm feeling more and more like I am smart enough, I could do the thing and so, I'm actually really getting into it more. But it's just that being on the computer for so many hours doing the work stuff makes it hard to also break into the wanting to do the learning outside of my work hours – [overtalk] SY: Right, yeah. MANDY: Because it's so much computering. SY: Yeah, or just split the good screen from bad screen. CASEY: I've been computering so much, I have a tendonitis in my right pinky now from using the arrow keys on the keyboard too much, I think and bad posture, which I've been working on for years. Computers can hurt our bodies. SY: Yeah, definitely. I use the Logitech M570 mouse, which I switched to a number of years ago and was one of the best changes I ever made for using the computer and also, switching to Dvorak for keyboard layout. CASEY: Okay. I use that, too. SY: Nice! CASEY: Dvorak. It's not better, but I learned it. [laughter] It might be more better for my health maybe, but I'm not faster. That's what people always ask. SY: I'm definitely – [overtalk] CASEY: Instead of ASDF, it's a AOEU under your fingers; the common letters right at your fingertips. You don't need the semicolon under your right pinky. [laughter] Why is that there? SY: Yeah. MANDY: Yeah. I was going to ask for us what you were even talking about there. So it's just basically reconfiguring your keyboard to not be QWERTY thing? SY: Yeah, exactly. MANDY: Okay. SY: That means you have to completely relearn how to type, which can take a while. Like when I completely stopped using QWERTY at all and just switched to Dvorak, I didn't even buy a Dvorak keyboard, I just printed out the keyboard layout and stuck it to my monitor and just learned. For the first while, it's excruciating because you're trying to type an email and you're typing 15 words per minute, or something. That's bad. I did definitely did get faster shifting to Dvorak. Before I think I used to type at like 70, 80; I type around a 100 words per minute so it changed my speed a bit. But to be fair, I don't think I typed properly on QWERTY. I switched 10 years ago, though so I can't even remember a whole lot. [chuckles] MANDY: That's interesting, though. That gives me something I want to play around with right there and it's not even really coding. [laughter] It's just I'll be just trying to teach myself to type in a different way. That's really interesting. Thank you. [chuckles] CASEY: Yeah. It was fun for when I learned it, too. I think I learned in middle school and I was I practiced on AIM, AOL Instant Messenger, and RuneScape. SY: Nice. CASEY: I didn't dare practice while I had essays due and I had to write those up. That was too stressful. [laughter] CASEY: Summer was better for me. SY: Yeah, I switched during a summer break at university. CASEY: Low stakes. I needed the low stakes for that to succeed. SY: [laughs] Yeah. CASEY: We were talking about what motivates you to learn programming and I wrote up a story about that for me actually recently. SY: Okay. CASEY: At the highest level, my first programming class, we modeled buoys and boats and it was so boring. I don't know why we were doing it. It didn't have a purpose. There was no end goal, no user, nobody was ever going to use the code. It was fine for learning concepts, I guess, but it wasn't motivated and I hated it and I stopped doing CS for years until I had the opportunity to work on an app that I actually used every day. I was like, “Yeah, I want to edit that.” I just want to add this little checkbox there. Finally, I'll learn programming for that and relearn programming to do useful things for people. Motivation is key. SY: Yeah. I think because I started doing programming when I was quite young, I knew it was definitely the classic video games, wanting to learn how to make video games and then by the time I actually got to university, then I was like, “Yeah, don't want go into the games industry.” So didn't end up doing that. But I still enjoy game jams and things like that. If you're not again. CASEY: That's another thing you might like, Mandy. It's a weekend game jam. MANDY: Hm. CASEY: I don't know how into gaming you are, but it's also fun, lower stakes. People are just partying. Not unlike Ruby for Good. They happen more often and I like how it feels at a game jam, a little better than a hackathon because you're building something fun and creative instead of using a company's API because they told you to. SY: [laughs] Yeah. MANDY: Yeah, I was honestly never exposed to video games as a child. They were a no-no in my household and that's one of the things that I always cursed my parents for is the fact that I am the worst gamer. [laughs] My daughter makes fun of me. I'll sit down and like try to – she's 12 and I'll try to do something. She'll be like, “Wow, this is hurting me to watch you, Mom,” [laughs] and I'm like – [overtalk] CASEY: Ouch. MANDY: No, she called me a try hard and I was like, “Yeah, I'm trying really hard to just go forward.” Like I'm trying really hard to just jump over this object, [chuckles] I was like, “If that makes me a try hard well, then yes, I'm trying very hard. Thank you.” SY: Yeah. My 6-year-old has now got to the point where he can beat me at Super Smash Brothers so I'm not feeling too good about that. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. My 6-year-old nephew beat us all in Mario Kart a couple weeks. SY: Yeah. [laughs] I can still beat in the Mario Kart. That, I could do. [laughs] MANDY: Yeah. A lot of the games she does looks fun, though so it's something I would be interested in, it's just something that I haven't been exposed to. I'm really excited now that—I don't want to say the pandemic is nearing an end because it seems to be not happening, but I'm excited – [overtalk] CASEY: True. Things are opening up. MANDY: Right now. Until they start closing down again. CASEY: Yeah. MANDY: Because I'm so excited for things like Ruby for Good, driving down to D.C. and seeing some of my friends, and I would be interested in going to one of those game things, as long as people are just like, “Oh yeah, we can be patient with her because she's never done a game before.” [laughs] CASEY: Yeah. My last game jam had eight people on the team and zero had ever done game development before. We figured something out. SY: [chuckles] Yeah. MANDY: Oh, that's fun. SY: Like muddle along. CASEY: Yeah. Somebody did like level design. They did a title map. Someone did sprites. They were like, “I'm going to do a sprite tutorial now.” Sprite is moving like a walking character. We had learned all the terms for it. We didn't know the terms either, but it was a good environment to learn. MANDY: It seems it. It seems like if you have a happy, healthy environment. For me, it was just, I was becoming stressed out. I had a standing meeting once a week with a really, really awesome person and it felt like it was more of like, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I have to work this into my already busy workweek and if I don't, then I'm completely wasting their time,” and I started to feel guilty to the point it brought me down. I was just like, “I don't think this is good for either one of us right now” because I'm feeling too much pressure, especially with the once-a-week thing and it's like to get through this chapter and then get through this chapter, and then I'd have a question and I'm not good at writing things down and then I'd forget. It seems like that might be more of a strategy to learn for me. I think a lot of people, there's different strategies like you have your visual learners, or you have your audio learners and I think for me, it would be cool just like I said, shadowing somebody. Like, if I just like sat there and it wasn't weird for me just to watch it over somebody's shoulder while they're doing this thing, that would a more conducive environment to the way I learn. CASEY: Yeah. I like the pattern, You do, We do, I do. Have you heard of that one? MANDY: No. CASEY: Or I do, We do, You do depending on the perspective. So it's like shadowing first and then doing it together where you're both involved and then you can do it on your own. It's a three-step process to make it a little bit easier to learn things from other people. SY: Yeah, that makes sense. MANDY: Yeah, that sounds like how kids learn. It's how we teach our children like I do, now we're going to do it together, now you do it. Yeah, I definitely have used that with my kid. [chuckles] CASEY: And it's just completely reasonable to do that as adults. That's how human brains work. MANDY: Yeah. No, I don't feel – that's the thing I would have to not almost get over, but just be like, “Oh my gosh, I'm 2 years old. I'm learning like I'm a toddler and that's so embarrassing.” But I think that that is a great way to learn and a great way to approach learning in general. I just started a book on learning more about crystals and it's the beginner's guide and she said, “You read this book and then you can move on to reading this other 700-page book that I've authored, but you should probably read this concise guide first.” I think a lot of people feel the pressure to dive into the super smart, or what they perceive as being the super smart way of diving in like, picking up the Ruby book, or the books that everyone talks about when there's so many other great resources exist that break it into smaller, bite-sized, digestible chunks. I think there's no shame in learning like that and I think a lot of people think that they just need to dive right in and be like, “Oh, this is the hard book, I'm going to go for the hard book first.” Like no, start with the easiest, start small. SY: Yeah. I think as you say, it definitely depends on how you learn what kind of resources you find interesting and engaging. CASEY: I've heard a similar story from a lot of friends, Mandy, where they really want to learn something, maybe programming in general, or a language, and then they psych themselves out, or they don't have the bandwidth in the first place, but they don't realize it and they struggle through that and the guilt because they want to, but they don't have time, or energy, which you also need. It's really common. A lot of people that I know are really motivated to do a lot of stuff; they want to do everything. I know some people who are fine not doing everything and that's great because they're probably more grounded. [chuckles] [laughter] But a lot of people I know really want to learn at all and it's a tension; you don't have infinite time and energy. SY: Yeah. I definitely fall into wanting to learn absolutely everything and right now. MANDY: So what kind of things are you teaching right now, Sy? What kind of content are you putting out there? SY: Yeah. So like I said, a lot of it's to do with low-level programming, like how memory actually works on a computer and how it affects how we program things. Because for a lot of people, if you come from a higher-level programming background, you're used to memory being abstracted away from what you do. You deal with variables, you deal with objects, and the implementation of the programming language deals with how that actually maps onto the underlying hardware. But if you really need to get the most performance you possibly can out of your system and you're using a little bit lower-level language like C, or C++, or Rust, or Swift, or something, then you need to understand how your processor is actually handling the instructions and that is actually handling your memory accesses in order for your performance to actually be good. Some of it is not obvious as well and does not match with how you might think memory works because the processors which we're using today are based in so much history and legacy. A lot of the time, they're essentially trying to mimic behavior of older processors in order to give us a programming model, which we can understand and work with, but then that means that they have to work in certain ways in order to actually get performance for the high-performance modern systems we need. So having an understanding of how our caches work, how instruction pipelines work, and things like that can actually make a really big difference down with the low-level programming. MANDY: Okay. So I'm looking at your Twitter and then looking at your pinned tweet, it says, “I made a YouTube channel for my ‘Computer Science Explained with my Cats' videos.” How do you explain computer science with your cats? Because that's something I could probably get into. SY: Yeah. So I have three cats and – [overtalk] MANDY: I've got you beat by one. SY: Nice. What were your cats called? MANDY: I have four. I have Nicks after Stevie Nicks. I have Sphinx because he looks so regal and I have Chessy and I have Jolie. SY: Cool. Mine are Milkshake, Marshmallow, and Lexical Analysis cat. MANDY: [laughs] Cool. SY: [chuckles] Yeah. So the things explained with my cats, it's mostly I wanted to explain things with my cats and random things, which I find around my house. So I remember I have a Discord server, which I help to moderate called #include , which is a welcoming inclusive organization for the C++ community. We were talking about hash maps and how hash maps are actually implemented, and I realized that there's a lot of different design areas in hash maps, which can be difficult to understand. I wanted to try and explain it using boxes and teddies and my cats so I set up a bunch of boxes. These are all of the buckets, which your items could go into it and then there's some way to map a given teddy to a given box. Let's say, it could be how cute it is. So if it's super cute and it goes in the west most box, and if it's kind of cute, then it goes into the box after that and so on and so forth. That's kind of how hash maps work. They have a bunch of memory, which is allocated somewhere, a bunch of boxes, and they have some way of mapping given items to a given box, which is called a hash function. In this case, it was how cute they are and then you have some way of what happens if two teddies happened to be as cute as each other, how do you deal with that? There's a bunch of different ways that you could handle that and that's called hash collision. Like, what do you do with collisions? Do you stick them in the same box and have a way of dealing with that, or do you just put them in the next box up, or a few boxes up, or something like that? There's whole decades worth of research and designing, which go into these things, but the concepts map quite nicely onto boxes and teddies and how cute they are. [chuckles] MANDY: I love that. SY: They are also explaining how caching works with chocolate, like the intuition with memory access is you ask for some chunk of memory and you get that chunks. You ask for a single chunk of chocolate and you get that chunk of chocolate, but in reality, that's not what happens in most cases. In most cases, you're actually going to get back a whole row of chocolate because it's most likely that if you're going to get a bit of chocolate, you're probably going to be accessing the bits which are right next to it. Like, if you have an array and you're processing all of the elements in that array, then you're just going to be stepping along all of those elements. So it's much faster to bring all of those elements would be right into memory at once. That's what happens in modern processors. Without you having to ask for it, they just bring in that whole row of chocolate. So I tried to – [overtalk] CASEY: That's so polite. [laughs] When your friend asks for a single chip, or a single piece of chocolate, you know what they want more. SY: [laughs] Yeah. CASEY: How generous of you to give them the whole bag. [laughs] Whether they want it, or not though. SY: Yeah. MANDY: So are these videos relatively short, or are they more long-form videos? SY: Yeah, they are 2 minutes long. MANDY: Oh, cool. SY: I try and keep them within the video limit for Twitter videos, which is 2 minutes, 20 seconds. MANDY: Okay, cool. See, that's something I could probably commit to is watching one of those videos not even maybe once a day because sometimes that's a little bit, much pressure every day. So maybe I try to work out three to four times a week. So saying I'm going to do this three to four times a week and I'm going to not stress on I'm going to do this every Monday. Generally three to four times a week, I think that's something I could, could commit to. SY: Yeah. Trying to get them within 2 minutes, 20 seconds can be really tough sometimes. Like it's quite – [overtalk] MANDY: Do you do a lot of editing? SY: Yeah. I would sit down and I'll write the whole episode, or video, or whatever and just get in all of the content that I want, just put it onto a text document and then I'll start filming it in whatever order I want, and then I start editing and then quite often, I realized that I've got 2 minutes, 40 seconds worth of content, or something and I can't quite cut it down and I have to reshoot something and then reedit it. I try to get it all done within a single day because if I don't get it done in a single day, then it ends up taking even longer because I get distracted and things like that. I need to focus just getting this one thing done. MANDY: So you're doing these within hours? SY: Yeah. MANDY: From start to finish, how many hours would you say you invest in these videos? SY: Start to finish, about 5, 6 hours, something like that. Like I said, I don't really have to do a lot of research for them because they're things I know very well, so I can pretty much sit down and just write something and then most of the time is spent in editing and then captioning as well. MANDY: Very cool. CASEY: I've been doing a bit of video editing lately and it takes so long. SY: Yeah, it really does. CASEY: I'm not surprised it takes 5, or 6 hours. [laughter] MANDY: No, I'm not either. I do all the podcasts editing. For those of you listening, who do not know, I edit all these podcasts and it takes roughly even 5 to 6 hours for audio, because I also put other work into that, like doing the show notes and getting the transcripts. Now I have those outsourced because I don't have enough hours in the day, but there's a lot of different parts to editing, podcasting, screen casting, and stuff that I don't think a lot of people know that these 2-minute videos that you do really do take 5 to 6 hours and you're putting these out there for free? SY: Yeah. MANDY: Wow. That's amazing. I assume you have a full-time job on top of that. SY: Yeah. Because my position is a developer advocate, I can count that as is doing work so I don't have to do that in my own time. MANDY: Very cool. Yeah, that's cool. I love DevRel so working in DevRel, I do that, too. I'm a Renaissance woman, basically. Podcast editing, DevRel conference organizing, it's a lot. SY: Yeah. MANDY: So I give you mad props for putting stuff out there and just giving a shout out to people who might not be aware that content creation is not easy and it does take time. So thank you. Thank you for that. Because this seems like the kind of stuff I would be able to ingest. SY: Yeah, thanks. MANDY: And that's cool. CASEY: I'm especially impressed, Sy that you have these interests that are complex would expand and you can explain the well and you find the overlap with what people want to know about. [chuckle] I think maybe in part from the Discord, you hear people asking questions. Can you tell us a little bit about what that's like? How do you decide what's interesting? SY: Yeah. I ask people on Twitter what they would find it interesting, but I also, because right now I'm not really going to conferences, but previously I'd go to a lot of conferences and people would come up to me and if I give a talk on compilers, for example, come and say like, “Oh hey, I never knew how register allocation worked. It was super interesting to know.” So I don't think I've done a video on register allocation yet actually. I should do one of those. MANDY: Write that down. SY: [laughs] Yeah. That's the kind of thing. Just because I spent a lot of time in communities, conferences, Discords, on Twitter, you get a feel for the kind of topics which people find interesting and maybe want to know how they work under the covers and just haven't found a good topic. Even function calls like, how does a function call work in C at the hardware level? If you call a function, what's actually happening? I did a video on that because it feels like such a fundamental thing, calling a function, but there's a lot of magic which goes into it, or it can seem like a lot of magic. It's actually, I want to say very well-defined, sometimes less so, but [laughs] they are real so there is random reason. MANDY: Very cool. I want to talk about the other content creation that you do. So code art journal and trashheap zine, do you want to talk about those a minute? SY: Sure. So code art was an idea that I had. It's a journal of code as art. I'd hear a lot of people saying, “Oh, coding is an art form.” I'd be like, “Okay. Yes. Sometimes, maybe. When is it an art form? When is it not? What's the difference between these?” Like, I spent a lot of time thinking about art because I'm a poet and I spend most of my free time researching and watching movies. Code as art is something which really interested me so I made this journal, which is a collection of things which people send in of code which they think is art and sometimes, it's something you might immediately see and look at it and think, “Okay, right, this is code and it's fulfilling some functional purpose,” and maybe that functional purpose gives it some artistic qualities just by how it achieved something, or if it does something in a very performant manner, or a very interesting manner. Other times, you might look at it and say, “Okay, well, this is code, but it's more aesthetic than functional.” And sometimes it's things which you might look at and think, “Okay, is this even code?” Like there was someone sent in a program written in a language called Folders, which is a esoteric programming language entirely programmed using empty folders on your hard drive, which I absolutely love. I'm super into esoteric programming languages so I absolutely loved that one. [chuckles] But yeah, so the – [overtalk] CASEY: That sounds so cool. Where can people find it? Is it online also? SY: Yes, it's in print and there's also, you can get the issues online for free in PDF form. There is a third issue, which is pretty much fully put together on my machine, I just haven't done the finishing touches and it's been one of those things that's just sat, not doing anything for months and I need to get finished. [chuckles] And then trashheap zine is another thing that I co-edit, which is just utter trash, because as much as I love more explicitly artistic films and writing and things like that, I also have a deep love of utter, utter trash. So this is the trashiest stuff that we could possibly find, even the submission guidelines that I wrote for that is essentially a trash pond, but random submission guidelines. So if you have trash, please send our way. MANDY: Yeah. I was going to say, what you consider trash? What trashiest [laughs] enough to be in these zines? SY: I can read out, where's my submission guidelines? The URL for the zine is trashyheap.party, which I was very, very pleased with and the website looks awful. I spent a lot of time making it as awful as I possibly could. Things like any kind of – [overtalk] CASEY: I love the sparkles. SY: Yes! CASEY: When the mouse moves, it sparkles. SY: Isn't it the best, seriously? Yeah. CASEY: Every website should have that. SY: Yeah, totally. Like texts you sent your crush at 4:00 AM while drunk where you misspelled their name and they never spoke to you again, or draft tweets which you thought better of sending, purely Photoshop pictures of our website. [laughter] A medically inaccurate explanation of the digestive system of raccoon dogs. All good stuff. MANDY: That's amazing. CASEY: I know a lot of people who would be cracking up reading this together. [laughter] CASEY: That sounds great. There's so much treasure in this trash heap. MANDY: Yeah. Don't worry, folks, we'll put links in the show notes. CASEY: Oh, yeah. SY: Yeah. One of my favorite things with it was when we'd get all of the submissions, we would get together and just project them up on a wall and read them together and so much so bad, it's hilarious in the most wonderful way. CASEY: That sounds like a party itself. SY: It is, yes. CASEY: The be trashheap party. SY: Absolutely. CASEY: It's kind of taking me back to early pre-YouTube internet when we watch flash cartoons all the time and a lot of those were terrible, but we loved them. SY: Yes. I made some as well, they were so bad. [laughter] I remember getting a very non legal version of flash and making the worst stick flash renovations I possibly could. CASEY: Oh, speaking of content creation, I've been learning some animation and 3D modeling animation lately. I had my first ever viral TikTok; it had over 9,000 views. SY: Wow! Nice. CASEY: And so when I look at my phone, if it's not the notifications muted, it's annoying. I have to turn it off. [laughter] SY: Yeah – [overtalk] MANDY: Congratulations! [laughs] CASEY: Thank you. So the video is a USB thumb drive that won't insert, even though you flip it over. That's been done before, but what I added was misheard lyrics by the band Maroon 5. Sugar! USB! That's what I hear every time. Mandy, have you done any art? MANDY: Have I done any art? CASEY: Lately? MANDY: Oh. Yeah. Well, actually – [overtalk] CASEY: You've been doing some home stuff, I know. MANDY: Yeah. I've been doing plant stuff, gardening, but this weekend, I actually took my daughter to a workshop. It was called working with resin—epoxy. SY: Oh, cool. MANDY: And we got to make coasters. The teacher brought stickers, feathers, and crystals and it was like a 3-hour workshop and I think my daughter had extra resin. Her birthday is on Thursday this week and I noticed she was making kind of the same ones and I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I'm making gifts for my friends that come to my birthday party.” I just thought it was so sweet that I was like – [overtalk] SY: Oh, so sweet. MANDY: Usually birthday parties, you receive gifts, or whatever and she's like, “No, I would like to give them gifts for my birthday,” and I was like, “Oh, that's adorable.” So I've been trying to do more things with my hands and get off the screens more, which has been the major thing keeping me back from being on code. I've made a strict weekend policy where I do not touch my computer from Friday evening to Monday morning, unless it's an absolute dumpster fire, I need to do something, or if a takeout menu looks better on my computer than it does on my phone. [laughter] Then I'll pop it open, but I won't read the email, or do the Slack. And then this Saturday I'm taking a course in astrology. It's all-day workshop so I'm excited to kind of dive into that stuff a little bit more. CASEY: So cool. It's hard to believe we can do these in person again. I'm not over it. MANDY: I know. I'm so afraid to get excited over it and then have it be taken away again. CASEY: Yeah. Sy, tell us a little more about #includes . I've actually heard of it. It's a little bit famous online. It's an inclusive community, I know from the name. SY: Yes. CASEY: Tell us more about it. SY: So it actually started off on Twitter as a half joke; Guy Davidson tweeted being like, “Hey, so why isn't there a diversity and inclusion organization for C++ called #include?” Because #include is it's like a language concept in C and C++ and people were like, “Hahaha yeah, you're right,” and then Kate Gregory was like, “You're right. We should make one.” So we did [chuckles] and we started off with like six of us in a Slack channel and then ended up moving to Discord and starting our own server there and now we are a few thousand members. Back when we had in-person conferences, we would have a booth at pretty much every major C++ conference, we had scholarships, which we would send people on, we got conferences to improve by having live captioning and wheelchair accessible stages and gender-neutral bathrooms instituting and upholding code of conduct, things like that. We started off thinking, “Hey, if we could get some conferences to have a code of conduct or something that would be great,” and then it ended up being way, way, way bigger than any of us thought it would become, which is amazing to see. CASEY: That's so cool. What a success story. SY: Yeah. CASEY: How long has it been going on now? SY: I guess about 3, or 4 years. Yeah, probably closer to 4 years. My sense of time is not good the best of times, but something around 4 years. CASEY: I'm curious if another language community wanted to do something similar if they're inspired. Is there a writeup about what y'all have done? 
SY: I've given talks. CASEY: That we can point people to. We can put that in the show notes. SY: Yeah. I've given a couple of talks, as I said. CASEY: Talks, that would be good. SY: Other people have given talks as well. I gave a slightly longer form talk DevRelCon, London in 2019, I think, which was on the lessons which we learned through trying to build a welcoming and inclusive community. Community which has already been around for decades because C++ was first standardized in 1998 so it's been around for quite a long time and has a lot of history. CASEY: That sounds great. I can't wait to watch it. SY: Yeah. I know that there's other languages. You have JavaScript, QueerJS, which is a really cool community and I'm sure there are other languages which have similar things going as well. CASEY: I had never heard of QueerJS. I'm queer and JS. SY: Yeah. CASEY: I'm glad I had this moment just now. SY: It's cool. They have a Discord and I can't remember how active the Discord is, but they would have meetups across the world, they have one in London and in Berlin and bunch of other places, and talks and community. It seems really cool. CASEY: That's awesome. SY: I wanted to give a talk about C++ and JavaScript because you could link target JavaScript with C++ these days, which is kind of cool. CASEY: I've used Emscripten before. SY: Yeah. CASEY: I didn't use it directly, other people did. It turned Graphviz into a JavaScript. A program that runs in JavaScript instead of normally, it's just CSS. So I could draw circles pointing to other circles in the browser, which is what I always wanted to do. Graphviz.it, that “it” is my favorite Graphviz editor. It's online. SY: Cool. I like Graphviz a lot. Emscripten is really cool, though. Basically a way of compiling C++ plus to JavaScript and then having the interoperation with the browser and the ecosystem that you might want to be able to call JS functions from C++, or other way around, and do things which seem operating systems E, but have to be mapped inside the browser environment. CASEY: That's powerful. I'm also glad I've never had to use it directly. Other people made libraries doing it what I needed. Thank goodness. [chuckles] Abstraction! SY: Yeah. I've not used a whole lot, but I did find it fairly nice to work with when I did. I made a silly esoteric programming language called Enjamb, which is a language where the programs are cones and it runs on a stack-based abstract machine and the interpreter for it is written in C++. I wrote a command line driver for it and also, a version which runs in the browser and that compiles using Emscripten. It was really cool and I picked it all up with CMake, which is the main C++ build systems that you could just say, “Hey, I want to build the combine line version for my platform” like Windows, or Mac, or Linux, or whatever, or “Hey, I want to build it for the web,” and it would build the JavaScript version in HTML page and things like that. It's pretty cool. I recently made another esoteric programming language, which you program using MS Paint. You literally make shapes with MS Paint and you give the compiler an image file, and then it uses OCR and computer vision in order to parse your code and then generate C from that. [laughs] It's pretty ridiculous, but I had so much fun with it. CASEY: OCR is Optical Character Recognition? SY: Yes, exactly. CASEY: So I'm picturing if I wrote a program on a napkin and a computer could maybe OCR that into software. SY: Yeah. So it uses OCR for things like function names because it supports function calls and then uses shapes for most things. It has things like a plus sign, which means increment what it's currently being pointed to, or right, or left, or up, or down arrow is for moving things around. You would actually make an image file with those symbols and then I used OpenCV for working out what the shapes were. It was the first time I've ever done any kind of image recognition stuff. It was a lot easier than I expected it to be; I thought we'd have to write a lot of code in order to get things up and running and to do image detection. But most of the simple things like recognizing hey, this is a triangle, or this is a plus sign, or this is a square, and things like that were pretty, you don't need a lot of code in order to do them. That was mostly when you had to say like, “Okay, this is a triangle, but which direction is it pointing in?” It got a little bit more complicated; I had to do some maths and things like that and I'm terrible at maths. [chuckles] So that was a little bit more difficult, but it was a lot fun to get started with and I had a much lower barrier to entry than I expected. CASEY: Now I want to play with OCR and image recognition. I haven't done that for 10 years. It was not easy when I tried it last time with whatever tool that was. SY: [chuckles] Yeah, I did it – [overtalk] CASEY: For the future! SY: [laughs] Definitely. Yeah. I did it with Python and Python has fairly nice OpenCV bindings and there's a ton of resources out there for predicting most of the basic stuff that you would expect. So there's a lot of learning resources and decent library solutions out there now. CASEY: Cool. All right. We're getting near the end of time. At the end, we like to go through reflections, which is what's something interesting that stood out to you, something you'll take with you going forward from our conversations today. MANDY: I really am excited to dig into Sy's videos. They seem, like I said earlier in the show, something I could commit to a few times a week to watching these videos especially when they are concepts that seem so much fun, like cats, teddy bears, cuteness levels, and things like that. I think that would be a great start for me just to in the morning while I'm still drinking tea just before I even dive into my email, check out one of those videos. So I think I'll do that. SY: Thanks. CASEY: Sy, I liked hearing about your process side with your constraints like 2 minutes, 20 seconds on Twitter, that's such a helpful constraint to make sure it's really polished and dense. It takes you 5 to 6 hours and you make things that people ask about, that they're interested in. That whole process is fascinating to me as I try to make more viral TikToks. [laughter] Or whatever I'm making at the time. SY: Yeah. CASEY: I always wondered how you made such good stuff that got retweeted so often. Cool things of insight. SY: Yeah. Mostly just time. [laughs] I guess, it makes me remember that I definitely want to make a video on register allocation because I love register allocation. It's such a cool thing. For those who don't know, it's like if you have a compiler which takes your code and maps it onto the hardware, your hardware only has a certain number of resources so how do you work out how to use those resources in the best manner? It maps onto some quite nice computer science algorithms like graph coloring, which means it maps quite nicely visually, I could probably make a pretty cool graph coloring visualization with some random things I have strewn around my room. CASEY: I can't imagine this yet, but I will understand that clearly soon I bet. MANDY: That's awesome. Well, I just want to wrap up by saying thank you so much for joining us today, Sy. This has been a really awesome conversation. And to folks who have been listening, thank a content creator. It takes time. It takes energy. It's a lot of work that I don't think a lot of people, unless you've done it, really understand how long and in-depth of a process it is. So thank one of us content creators, especially when we're putting this content out for you for free. To do that for us Greater Than Code, we do a Patreon page and we will invite Sy to join us and we would like you to join us as well. If you are able to donate on a monthly basis, it's awesome. It's patreon.com/greaterthancode. All episodes have show notes and transcripts, and we do a lot of audio editing. So join us if you're able. If you are still a person who is greater than code and cannot afford a monthly commitment, you are still welcome to join us in our Slack community. Simply send a DM to one of the panelists and we will let you in for free. So with that, thank you so much, Casey. Thank you again, Sy. And we'll see you all next week. Special Guest: Sy Brand.

02:45 - Rudo's Superpower: Being Pretty Good At Lots of Things! * Learning How to Learn on the Fly * Digital Democracy (https://www.digital-democracy.org/) * Earth Defenders Toolkit (https://www.earthdefenderstoolkit.com/) * Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) * Problem-Solving & Mastery: “Fake it until you make it!” 13:14 - Digital Democracy (https://www.digital-democracy.org/) & Terrastories (https://terrastories.io/) * The Amazon Conservation Team (https://www.amazonteam.org/) (ACT) * Matawai People (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matawai_people) * Capturing & Recording Oral History * Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) * Mapbox (https://www.mapbox.com/) * Indiginous-Requested, Indiginous-Led * Taking Action When Invited * Listen Before Action * Co Creation * Mapeo (https://www.digital-democracy.org/mapeo/) 27:39 - Defining an “Earth Defender” * Earth Defenders Toolkit (https://www.earthdefenderstoolkit.com/) 30:40 - Community Collaboration/Development Best Practices Without Overstepping Boundaries * Tech Literacy 35:52 - Getting Involved/Supporting This Work * Digital Democracy (https://www.digital-democracy.org/) & Earth Defenders Toolkit (https://www.earthdefenderstoolkit.com/) * Stakeholders & Ownership 45:03 - Experiences Working w/ These Projects * Anyone Can Contribute * Meeting Fellow Dreamers 47:33 - Oral Traditions & Storytelling: Preserving History Reflections: Jacob: Getting involved and connecting virtually. Mandy: Register for Ruby For Good! (https://ti.to/codeforgood/rubyforgood) Happening in-person this year from September 23-26 at the Shepherd's Spring Retreat (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=39.5070593%2C-77.7891734+%28Shepherd%27s+Spring%2C+16869+Taylors+Landing+Rd%2C+Sharpsburg%2C+MD+21782%29), in Sharpsburg, Maryland! Mae: Being able to adapt and learn as a superskill. Be proud of the things you can do. Rudo: It's inspiring to build community around software and the needs that it serves. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: Coming soon! Special Guest: Rudo Kemper.

Eleanor speaks with the first Maori novelist, whose magical story The Whale Rider was a hit movie. And, the award-winning Aboriginal Australian writer, whose powerful poetry and memoir explore her history as part of Australia's Stolen Generation.

Governor General's award-winning writer Thomas King speaks to us about the high wire act of mixing humor and tragedy and how an inherent respect for the material goes a long way in storytelling. Plus, how his experience filmmaking posed completely different creative challenges compared to writing.For a transcript & to shop this episode, click here.Please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode!To shop books and products mentioned in this episode visit: indigo.ca/podcast 

Welcome to Episode 13 of See the Change Podcast. This is Part 1 of our conversation with filmmaker and activist Morgan Tsetta. In this episode, we talk about her start in film and her turning point from Hollywood aspirations to Indigenous storytelling. We also discuss her advocacy for Yellowknife Dene in holding the federal government accountable for reconciliation for the historic Giant Mine. Morgan Tsetta is a Yellowknives Dene First Nation filmmaker and photographer, currently living on unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Watuth Nations, colonially referred to as Vancouver, Canada. With a passion for film, photography, and her Native culture, Morgan is committed to emphasizing the voices of Dene people, and the power of self-representation for Indigenous sovereignty. Connect with Morgan TikTok Instagram Twitter Website Giant Mine Resources Press Release: YKDFN Giant Mine Compensation Backgrounder: Giant Mine Monster Report: Summary of Research on the Establishment, Administration and Oversight of the Giant Mine and its Impacts on the Yellowknives Dene First Nation There is a Monster Under the Ground Giant Mine Monster Media: Interviews with local Dene elders Guardians of Eternity: confronting Giant Mine's toxic legacy SeeChange Initiative Facebook Twitter Instagram Website CommunityFirst Micro-site

This week is another take over class by the incredible Writing Revolution In Place Collective (WRIP). WRIP is a “community based research collective that uses poetic and creative research strategies to study topics that shape our different lives in the city. Each WRIP term takes up a different topic, they have studied: treaty 6, gentrification, the TRC, and they are currently studying how gender intersects with other structures of power to shape our most intimate and institutional encounters”. WRIP is run out of the Learning Centre Literacy Association. We also have a long conversation with Christine Stewart, an instructor from the UofA, about poetics and the importance of thinking about how language works to shape and make sense of our everyday world. Words have the power to uplift and oppress, this is important for us to think about, it means that we can reshape our world and the worlds of others through language. Check out the resource page from this week, on hum101onair.ca, for more reading and thinking about this.

This week on Hum we focus on life writing -- we talk autobiography with Dr. Julie Rak, speak to local playwrite, composer, and drag queen Darrin Hagen about documenting queer Edmonton history, and hear from Poet Laurate Nisha Patel about the importance of self-care when sharing your story.

A few weeks ago we met up with Chubby Cree, a women-led Indigenous drum group, at the Starlite room. We were able to record 5 songs and an amazing interview with Carol, Robyn, and Noah of Chubby Cree! And by we, I mean Jason Borys (of Ag47) with help from Kris Harper (from Ag47 and nêhiywak, see week 7 for an interview with Kris). We also catch up with Jason Borys who has been a tremendous help with all things sound these past months, thank you Jason! Needless to say, it's a great class, enjoy!

This week's class is introduced by a UofA instructor, Brian Fauteux, who teaches classes in popular music. He shares a bit of the long and complex history of American recorded popular music. We also catch up and learn from some more local musicians. This week they are both from the hip community - DJ CreeAsian and MC Tzadeka.

This week is the first of a two part class on storytelling and music. We will hear from Kris Harper, from nêhiyawak and Ag47, who shares with us a bit of his journey as a storyteller. We also meet a local luthier, Leila Sidi of TunaTone Instruments, who centres her practice around accessibility and possibility.

This week we meet Zane Hamm, Mpoe Mogale, and Morẹ́nikẹ́ Ọláòṣebìkan. Zane is an instructor from the UofA that spends a lot of time thinking about how images can be used as a way to share and explore people's past, present, and future. Mpoe is a trained dancer and movement based artist who share with us how they use their body to challenge us through art. Morẹ́nikẹ́ is the founder of Ribbon Rouge Foundation. Ribbon Rouge Foundation uses art as a tool of positive social change for African, Caribbean, and Black individuals and communities impacted by HIV. Morẹ́nikẹ́ speaks to us not just about the power of story, but the also the power of listening.

Take a trip across the ocean with us this week as we learn about the traditions, practice, and role of storytelling in East Africa. Not only is this week's class full of interesting ideas, learning, and people doing cool things, but there are also a couple of amazing stories from internationally celebrated storytellers Chunga Otiende (founder of Story Makers Society in Kenya) and Tololwa Mollel! If you are curious about the practice of storytelling, our guests this week have some great ideas of how to sharpen your telling practices to entertain and educate your audiences. As you will hear, storytelling plays a very important role in East Africa, and across Africa as a whole. Africa is a VERY large continent, and in case you need a geography refresher, here is a map to explore while listening to tonights class.

This week we will be meeting Kyla Pascal, Juanita Gnanapragasm, Mishma Mukith, and Alexis Hillyard as we discuss how food tells a story, and how food creates space and comfort for storytelling. Each of our guests shares how food is a place where they have discovered new stories and how food can be used to create opportunities for voices we don't often hear to share their stories. Eating is a matter of survival, and many of our guests will argue that so are stories. So why not combine the two, and have some fun eating and swapping stories!

In our second class on Indigenous storytelling, Josh Languedoc tells us about his play Rocko and Nakota, Elder Bonny Spencer shares a story about star blankets and poet, writer and educator Naomi McIlwraith speaks to us about the importance of language in story.

In part 1 of a 2 part class on Indigenous Storytelling, we talk to Elder Bonny Spencer about storytelling as medicine and ceremony, Josh Languedoc about theatre and the importance of positionality in storytelling, Tanya Ball about Michif Trickster stories and introduce our first class activity. To access class activities and additional resources, please visit our website: https://hum101onair.wordpress.com/

In the first class of Humanities 101 (Hum) Fall 2020, we welcome learners, share how Hum is adapting to the conditions of covid, and outline the weeks ahead. We speak to Elder Bonny Spencer about Indigenous storytelling, David Ward about the role of public radio in Education, Matthew James Weigel about poetry, treaty and family history, and hear Hum intern Morningstar Willier interview her Kokom Constance about the little people. If you are interested in participating in Humanities 101 please check out our website: hum101onair@wordpress.com.

We meet Perci Moeketsi who plays Nelson Mandela in Madiba — a stage musical celebrating Mandela's life, we pay tribute to Richard Gill who has died at the age of 76, Elena Carapetis's The Gods of Strangers takes us to Port Pirie in 1947 where southern European immigrants seek refuge after WWII, we discuss the importance of Indigenous Australians telling their own stories on stage, and we dive into the archives to hear Richard Gill in conversation about the Victorian Opera production of The Rake's Progress in 2012.

Delta Kay, Bruce Pascoe and Kim Scott open our eyes, ears and hearts to the richness that lies within Indigenous Storytelling. Chaired by Adam Shoemaker.

It's been a great autumn for podcast anniversaries! 1.) One year ago on October 6, Indian and Cowboy made its internet debut. Indian & Cowboy is a listener supported media network consisting of Indigenous media makers, artists, storytellers, musicians & producers rooted firmly at the intersection between digital media art, podcasting & Indigenous Storytelling.  Roshini Nair did this feature for rabble radio with Ryan McMahon, the founder of Indian and Cowboy. (click on the link for a transcript of Roshini's entire interview for rabble.ca) And 2.) The rabble podcast network celebrated its 10th birthday on September 10, 2015 in Toronto.  It was a dynamic night, full of lots of things for us to think about as we look back and consider the future of podcasting. On the panel — Meagan Perry, who was our podcast network executive producer before she was bumped up the ladder to rabble.ca's editor in chief. Victoria Fenner, who took over from Meagan as executive producer of the rpn, moderated the evening.   Also on the panel were Wayne MacPhail, one of our co-founders of the network, and Rick Harp of MEDIA INDIGENA , an interactive, multimedia magazine dedicated to Indigenous news, views and creative expression. And Nora Young, co-founder of the podcast The Sniffer and also host and producer of CBC Radio's program Spark. Nora begins our excerpt from the rabble 10th anniversary by talking about the big broadcasters and podcasting.