Podcasts about jenn schiffer

Guest Jenn Turner Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes In this episode of Sustain, host Richard Littauer interviews Jenn Turner, a content strategist at Fastly and part of the Glitch team. They discuss Jenn's unusual journey from journalism to open source, the challenges of being a non-technical contributor in a technical field, and the importance of effective communication in open source projects. Jen shares insights about maintaining work-life balance, the role of community in sustaining open source, and the impact of social media changes on community engagement. They also touch on strategies for non-technical contributions to open source and the value of humanities skills in tech. Hit download now to hear more! [00:01:57] Jenn shares her journey into open source. [00:05:09] Richard asks how Jenn navigated being an editor through the world of open source. She emphasizes that many brilliant coders lack the communication skills necessary to bring communities along and highlights the importance of developing critical thinking skills through humanities courses. [00:07:25] Jenn talks about how editors and writers can play an essential role in promoting and communicating the value of open source projects. [00:08:30] We learn that Jenn had to deal with the pressure to learn how to code early in her career, but she recognized coding wasn't her passion. [00:10:38] Jenn explains how she contributed to Node.js community by writing newsletters and serving on the community committee. [00:11:56] Richard and Jenn discuss the challenges of identifying as non-technical while contributing to technical spaces. [00:14:58] Jenn shares how she decoupled her identity from her occupation to prioritize time with her daughter. [00:17:23] We hear advice from Jenn for non-technical people looking to join a project in open source. [00:21:18] Richard and Jenn discuss the importance of event organizing in the open source space, encouraging listeners to get involved with organizing conferences. [00:23:09] Jenn reflects on the challenges of social media and community engagement, and she shares how Glitch and Fastly try to create meaningful conversations in their forums to foster a more centralized community. [00:32:06] There's a conversation on the importance of having a style guide for social media to ensure consistency and fun communication. [00:34:00] Find out there you follow Jenn and find her work online. Quotes [00:05:16] “One of the funny things about the tech industry is how much emphasis is put on the ability to code.” [00:05:24] “You could be the world's most intelligent coder but have no skillset to bring a community along.” [00:13:42] “Truly no one's value is creating code on a project; it's their thought process and all of the intentions and goals and things that they're working towards.” [00:23:33] “You have to have a level of cultural fluency in order to be able to authentically connect with your audience.” Spotlight [00:35:13] Richard's spotlight is Nolan Lawson. [00:37:12] Jenn's spotlight is Lynn Fisher's website, lynnandtonic.com. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) richard@sustainoss.org (mailto:ricahrd@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Open Collective-SustainOSS (Contribute) (https://opencollective.com/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Socials (https://www.burntfen.com/2023-05-30/socials) Jenn Turner Website (https://jennturner.glitch.me/) Jenn Turner Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@jennwrites) Jenn Turner LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennwrites/) Glitch Blog (https://blog.glitch.com/) Glitch (https://glitch.com/) Fastly (https://www.fastly.com/) Human JavaScript by Henri Joreteg (https://read.humanjavascript.com/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 59: Jenn Schiffer on Satire, Coding, Why Teaching OSS is Super Important (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/59) Sustain Podcast-Episode 244: Jan Lehnardt & Alba Herrerías Ramírez of Neighbourhood.ie (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/jan-lehnardt) Sustain Podcast-2 episodes featuring guest Tracy Hinds (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/hinds) Sustain Podcast-2 episodes featuring guest Ashley Williams (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/williams) Whichlight (https://whichlight.com/) Anil Dash Website (https://www.anildash.com/) Robbie Augspurger Website (https://www.robbieaugspurger.com/) Digital Savvies (https://digitalsavvies.com/) Nolan Lawson Website (https://nolanlawson.com/) Lynn Fisher Website (https://lynnandtonic.com/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Jenn Turner.

About AnilAnil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, the friendly developer community where coders collaborate to create and share millions of web apps. He is a recognized advocate for more ethical tech through his work as an entrepreneur and writer. He serves as a board member for organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy and expression, Data & Society Research Institute, which researches the cutting edge of tech's impact on society, and The Markup, the nonprofit investigative newsroom that pushes for tech accountability. Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House's Office of Digital Strategy, served for a decade on the board of Stack Overflow, the world's largest community for coders, and today advises key startups and non-profits including the Lower East Side Girls Club, Medium, The Human Utility, DonorsChoose and Project Include.As a writer and artist, Dash has been a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Wired, written for publications like The Atlantic and Businessweek, co-created one of the first implementations of the blockchain technology now known as NFTs, had his works exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and collaborated with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on one of the most popular Spotify playlists of 2018. Dash has also been a keynote speaker and guest in a broad range of media ranging from the Obama Foundation Summit to SXSW to Desus and Mero's late-night show.Links: Glitch: https://glitch.com Web.dev: https://web.dev Glitch Twitter: https://twitter.com/glitch Anil Dash Twitter: https://twitter.com/anildash TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's guest is a little bit off the beaten path from the cloud infrastructure types I generally drag, kicking and screaming, onto the show. If we take a look at the ecosystem and where it's going, it's clear that in the future, not everyone who wants to build a business, or a tool, or even an application is going to necessarily spring fully-formed into the world from the forehead of some God, knowing how to code. And oh, “I'm going to go to a boot camp for four months to learn how to do it first,” is increasingly untenable. I don't know if you would call it low-code or not. But that's how it feels. My guest today is Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch. Anil, thank you for joining me.Anil: Thanks so much for having me.Corey: So, let's get the important stuff out of the way first, since I have a long-standing history of mispronouncing the company Twitch as ‘Twetch,' I should probably do the same thing here. So, what is Gletch? And what does it do?Anil: Glitch is, at its simplest, a tool that lets you build a full-stack app in your web browser in about 30 seconds. And, you know, for your community, your audience, it's also this ability to create and deploy code instantly on a full-stack server with no concern for deploy, or DevOps, or provisioning a container, or any of those sort of concerns. And what it is for the users is, honestly, a community. They're like, “I looked at this app that was on Glitch; I thought it was cool; I could do what we call [remixing 00:02:03].” Which is to kind of fork that app, a running app, make a couple edits, and all of a sudden live at a real URL on the web, my app is running with exactly what I built. And that's something that has been—I think, just captured a lot of people's imagination to now where they've built over 12 or 15 million apps on the platform.Corey: You describe it somewhat differently than I would, and given that I tend to assume that people who create and run successful businesses don't generally tend to do it without thought, I'm not quite, I guess, insufferable enough to figure out, “Oh, well, I thought about this for ten seconds, therefore I've solved a business problem that you have been needling at for years.” But when I look at Glitch, I would describe it as something different than the way that you describe it. I would call it a web-based IDE for low-code applications and whatnot, and you never talk about it that way. Everything I can see there describes it talks about friendly creators, and community tied to it. Why is that?Anil: You're not wrong from the conventional technologist's point of view. I—sufficient vintage; I was coding in Visual Basic back in the '90s and if you squint, you can see that influence on Glitch today. And so I don't reject that description, but part of it is about the audience we're speaking to, which is sort of a next generation of creators. And I think importantly, that's not just age, right, but that could be demographic, that can be just sort of culturally, wherever you're at. And what we look at is who's making the most interesting stuff on the internet and in the industry, and they tend to be grounded in broader culture, whether they're on, you know, Instagram, or TikTok, or, you know, whatever kind of influencer, you want to point at—YouTube.And those folks, they think of themselves as creators first and they think of themselves as participating in the community first and then the tool sort of follow. And I think one of the things that's really striking is, if you look at—we'll take YouTube as an example because everyone's pretty familiar with it—they have a YouTube Creator Studio. And it is a very rich and deep tool. It does more than, you know, you would have had iMovie, or Final Cut Pro doing, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, incredibly advanced stuff. And those [unintelligible 00:04:07] use it every day, but nobody goes to YouTube and says, “This is a cloud-based nonlinear editor for video production, and we target cinematographers.” And if they did, they would actually narrow their audience and they would limit what their impact is on the world.And so similarly, I think we look at that for Glitch where the social object, the central thing that people organize around a Glitch is an app, not code. And that's this really kind of deep and profound idea, which is that everybody can understand an app. Everybody has an idea for an app. You know, even the person who's, “Ah, I'm not technical,” or, “I'm not really into technology,” they're like, “But you know what? If I could make an app, I would make this.”And so we think a lot about that creative impulse. And the funny thing is, that is a common thread between somebody that literally just got on the internet for the first time and somebody who has been doing cloud deploys for as long as there's been a cloud to deploy to, or somebody has been coding for decades. No matter who you are, you have that place that is starting from what's the experience I want to build, the app I want to build? And so I think that's where there's that framing. But it's also been really useful, in that if you're trying to make a better IDE in the cloud and a better text editor, and there are multiple trillion-dollar companies that [laugh] are creating products in that category, I don't think you're going to win. On the other hand, if you say, “This is more fun, and cooler, and has a better design, and feels better,” I think we could absolutely win in a walk away compared to trillion-dollar companies trying to be cool.Corey: I think that this is an area that has a few players in it could definitely stand to benefit by having more there. My big fear is not that AWS is going to launch stuff in your space and drive you out of business; I think that is a somewhat naive approach. I'm more concerned that they're going to try to launch something in your space, give it a dumb name, fail that market and appropriately, not understand who it's for and set the entire idea back five years. That is, in some cases, it seems like their modus operandi for an awful lot of new markets.Anil: Yeah, I mean, that's not an uncommon problem in any category that's sort of community driven. So, you know, back in the day, I worked on building blogging tools at the beginning of this, sort of, social media era, and we worried about that a lot. We had built some of the first early tools, Movable Type, and TypePad, and these were what were used to launch, like, Gawker and Huffington Post and all the, sort of, big early sites. And we had been doing it a couple years—and then at that time, major player—AOL came in, and they launched their own AOL blog service, and we were, you know, quaking in our boots. I remember just being kind of like, pit in your stomach, “Oh, my gosh. This is going to devastate the category.”And as it turns out, people were smart, and they have taste, and they can tell. And the domain that we're in is not one that is about raw computing power or raw resources that you can bring to bear so much as it is about can you get people to connect together, collaborate together, and feel like they're in a place where they want to make something and they want to share it with other people? And I mean, we've never done a single bit of advertising for Glitch. There's never been any paid acquisition. There's never done any of those things. And we go up against, broadly in the space, people that have billboards and they buy out all the ads of the airport and, you know, all the other kind of things we see—Corey: And they do the typical enterprise thing where they spend untold millions in acquiring the real estate to advertise on, and then about 50 cents on the message, from the looks of it. It's, wow, you go to all this trouble and expense to get something in front of me, and after all of that to get my attention, you don't have anything interesting to say?Anil: Right.Corey: [crosstalk 00:07:40] inverse of that.Anil: [crosstalk 00:07:41] it doesn't work.Corey: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's brand awareness. I love that game. Ugh.Anil: I was a CIO, and not once in my life did I ever make a purchasing decision based on who was sponsoring a golf tournament. It never happened, right? Like, I never made a call on a database platform because of a poster that was up at, you know, San Jose Airport. And so I think that's this thing that developers in particular, have really good BS filters, and you can sort of see through.Corey: What I have heard about the airport advertising space—and I but a humble cloud economist; I don't know if this is necessarily accurate or not—but if you have a company like Accenture, for example, that advertises on airport billboards, they don't even bother to list their website. If you go to their website, it turns out that there's no shopping cart function. I cannot add ‘one consulting' to my cart and make a purchase.Anil: “Ten pounds of consult, please.”Corey: Right? I feel like the primary purpose there might very well be that when someone presents to your board and says, “All right, we've had this conversation with Accenture.” The response is not, “Who?” It's a brand awareness play, on some level. That said, you say you don't do a bunch traditional advertising, but honestly, I feel like you advertise—more successfully—than I do at The Duckbill Group, just by virtue of having a personality running the company, in your case.Now, your platform is for the moment, slightly larger than mine, but that's okay,k I have ambition and a tenuous grasp of reality and I'm absolutely going to get there one of these days. But there is something to be said for someone who has a track record of doing interesting things and saying interesting things, pulling a, “This is what I do and this is how I do it.” It almost becomes a personality-led marketing effort to some degree, doesn't it?Anil: I'm a little mindful of that, right, where I think—so a little bit of context and history: Glitch as a company is actually 20 years old. The product is only a few years old, but we were formerly called Fog Creek Software, co-founded by Joel Spolsky who a lot of folks will know from back in the day as Joel on Software blog, was extremely influential. And that company, under leadership of Joel and his co-founder Michael Pryor spun out Stack Overflow, they spun out Trello. He had created, you know, countless products over the years so, like, their technical and business acumen is off the charts.And you know, I was on the board of Stack Overflow from, really, those first days and until just recently when they sold, and you know, you get this insight into not just how do you build a developer community that is incredibly valuable, but also has a place in the ecosystem that is unique and persists over time. And I think that's something that was very, very instructive. And so when it came in to lead Glitch I, we had already been a company with a, sort of, visible founder. Joel was as well known as a programmer as it got in the world?Corey: Oh, yes.Anil: And my public visibility is different, right? I, you know, I was a working coder for many years, but I don't think that's what people see me on social media has. And so I think, I've been very mindful where, like, I'm thrilled to use the platform I have to amplify what was created on a Glitch. But what I note is it's always, “This person made this thing. This person made this app and it had this impact, and it got these results, or made this difference for them.”And that's such a different thing than—I don't ever talk about, “We added syntax highlighting in the IDE and the editor in the browser.” It's just never it right. And I think there are people that—I love that work. I mean, I love having that conversation with our team, but I think that's sort of the difference is my enthusiasm is, like, people are making stuff and it's cool. And that sort of is my lens on the whole world.You know, somebody makes whatever a great song, a great film, like, these are all things that are exciting. And the Glitch community's creations sort of feel that way. And also, we have other visible people on the team. I think of our sort of Head of Community, Jenn Schiffer, who's a very well known developer and her right. And you know, tons of people have read her writing and seen her talks over the years.And she and I talk about this stuff; I think she sort of feels the same way, which is, she's like, “If I were, you know, being hired by some cloud platform to show the latest primitives that they've deployed behind an API,” she's like, “I'd be miserable. Like, I don't want to do that in the world.” And I sort of feel the same way. But if you say, “This person who never imagined they would make an app that would have this kind of impact.” And they're going to, I think of just, like, the last couple of weeks, some of the apps we've seen where people are—it could be [unintelligible 00:11:53]. It could be like, “We made a Slack bot that finally gets this reporting into the right channel [laugh] inside our company, but it was easy enough that I could do it myself without asking somebody to create it even though I'm not technically an engineer.” Like, that's incredible.The other extreme, we have people that are PhDs working on machine learning that are like, “At the end of the day, I don't want to be responsible for managing and deploying. [laugh]. I go home, and so the fact that I can do this in create is really great.” I think that energy, I mean, I feel the same way. I still build stuff all the time, and I think that's something where, like, you can't fake that and also, it's bigger than any one person or one public persona or social media profile, or whatever. I think there's this bigger idea. And I mean, to that point, there are millions of developers on Glitch and they've created well over ten million apps. I am not a humble person, but very clearly, that's not me, you know? [laugh].Corey: I have the same challenge to it's, effectively, I have now a 12 employee company and about that again contractors for various specialized functions, and the common perception, I think, is that mostly I do all the stuff that we talk about in public, and the other 11 folks sort of sit around and clap as I do it. Yeah, that is only four of those people's jobs as it turns out. There are more people doing work here. It's challenging, on some level, to get away from the myth of the founder who is the person who has the grand vision and does all the work and sees all these things.Anil: This industry loves the myth of the great man, or the solo legend, or the person in their bedroom is a genius, the lone genius, and it's a lie. It's a lie every time. And I think one of the things that we can do, especially in the work at Glitch, but I think just in my work overall with my whole career is to dismantle that myth. I think that would be incredibly valuable. It just would do a service for everybody.But I mean, that's why Glitch is the way it is. It's a collaboration platform. Our reference points are, you know, we look at Visual Studio and what have you, but we also look at Google Docs. Why is it that people love to just send a link to somebody and say, “Let's edit this thing together and knock out a, you know, a memo together or whatever.” I think that idea we're going to collaborate together, you know, we saw that—like, I think of Figma, which is a tool that I love. You know, I knew Dylan when he was a teenager and watching him build that company has been so inspiring, not least because design was always supposed to be collaborative.And then you think about we're all collaborating together in design every day. We're all collaborating together and writing in Google Docs—or whatever we use—every day. And then coding is still this kind of single-player game. Maybe at best, you throw something over the wall with a pull request, but for the most part, it doesn't feel like you're in there with somebody. Certainly doesn't feel like you're creating together in the same way that when you're jamming on these other creative tools does. And so I think that's what's been liberating for a lot of people is to feel like it's nice to have company when you're making something.Corey: Periodically, I'll talk to people in the AWS ecosystem who for some reason appear to believe that Jeff Barr builds a lot of these services himself then writes blog posts about them. And it's, Amazon does not break out how many of its 1.2 million or so employees work at AWS, but I'm guessing it's more than five people. So yeah, Jeff probably only wrote a dozen of those services himself; the rest are—Anil: That's right. Yeah.Corey: —done by service teams and the rest. It's easy to condense this stuff and I'm as guilty of it as anyone. To my mind, a big company is one that has 200 people in it. That is not apparently something the world agrees with.Anil: Yeah, it's impossible to fathom an organization of hundreds of thousands or a million-plus people, right? Like, our brains just aren't wired to do it. And I think so we reduce things to any given Jeff, whether that's Barr or Bezos, whoever you want to point to.Corey: At one point, I think they had something like more men named Jeff on their board than they did women, which—Anil: Yeah. Mm-hm.Corey: —all right, cool. They've fixed that and now they have a Dave problem.Anil: Yeah [unintelligible 00:15:37] say that my entire career has been trying to weave out of that dynamic, whether it was a Dave, a Mike, or a Jeff. But I think that broader sort of challenge is this—that is related to the idea of there being this lone genius. And I think if we can sort of say, well, creation always happens in community. It always happens influenced by other things. It is always—I mean, this is why we talk about it in Glitch.When you make an app, you don't start from a blank slate, you start from a working app that's already on the platform and you're remix it. And there was a little bit of a ego resistance by some devs years ago when they first encountered that because [unintelligible 00:16:14] like, “No, no, no, I need a blank page, you know, because I have this brilliant idea that nobody's ever thought of before.” And I'm like, “You know, the odds are you'll probably start from something pretty close to something that's built before.” And that enabler of, “There's nothing new under the sun, and you're probably remixing somebody else's thoughts,” I think that sort of changed the tenor of the community. And I think that's something where like, I just see that across the industry.When people are open, collaborative, like even today, a great example is web browsers. The folks making web browsers at Google, Apple, Mozilla are pretty collaborative. They actually do share ideas together. I mean, I get a window into that because they actually all use Glitch to do test cases on different bugs and stuff for them, but you see, one Glitch project will add in folks from Mozilla and folks from Apple and folks from the Chrome team and Google, and they're like working together and you're, like—you kind of let down the pretense of there being this secret genius that's only in this one organization, this one group of people, and you're able to make something great, and the web is greater than all of them. And the proof, you know, for us is that Glitch is not a new idea. Heroku wanted to do what we're doing, you know, a dozen years ago.Corey: Yeah, everyone wants to build Heroku except the company that acquired Heroku, and here we are. And now it's—I was waiting for the next step and it just seemed like it never happened.Anil: But you know when I talked to those folks, they were like, “Well, we didn't have Docker, and we didn't have containerization, and on the client side, we didn't have modern browsers that could do this kind of editing experience, all this kind of thing.” So, they let their editor go by the wayside and became mostly deploy platform. And—but people forget, for the first year or two Heroku had an in-browser editor, and an IDE and, you know, was constrained by the tech at the time. And I think that's something where I'm like, we look at that history, we look at, also, like I said, these browser manufacturers working together were able to get us to a point where we can make something better.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I do have a question for you about the nuts and bolts behind the scenes of Glitch and how it works. If I want to remix something on Glitch, I click the button, a couple seconds later it's there and ready for me to start kicking the tires on, which tells me a few things. One, it is certainly not using CloudFormation to provision it because I didn't have time to go and grab a quick snack and take a six hour nap. So, it apparently is running on computers somewhere. I have it on good authority that this is not just run by people who are very fast at assembling packets by hand. What does the infrastructure look like?Anil: It's on AWS. Our first year-plus of prototyping while we were sort of in beta and early stages of Glitch was getting that time to remix to be acceptable. We still wish it were faster; I mean, that's always the way but, you know, when we started, it was like, yeah, you did sit there for a minute and watch your cursor spin. I mean, what's happening behind the scenes, we're provisioning a new container, standing up a full stack, bringing over the code from the Git repo on the previous project, like, we're doing a lot of work, lift behind the scenes, and we went through every possible permutation of what could make that experience be good enough. So, when we start talking about prototyping, we're at five-plus, almost six years ago when we started building the early versions of what became Glitch, and at that time, we were fairly far along in maturity with Docker, but there was not a clear answer about the use case that we're building for.So, we experimented with Docker Swarm. We went pretty far down that road; we spent a good bit of time there, it failed in ways that were both painful and slow to fix. So, that was great. I don't recommend that. In fairness, we have a very unusual use case, right? So, Glitch now, if you talk about ten million containers on Glitch, no two of those apps are the same and nobody builds an orchestration infrastructure assuming that every single machine is a unique snowflake.Corey: Yeah, massively multi-tenant is not really a thing that people know.Anil: No. And also from a security posture Glitch—if you look at it as a security expert—it is a platform allowing anonymous users to execute arbitrary code at scale. That's what we do. That's our job. And so [laugh], you know, so your threat model is very different. It's very different.I mean, literally, like, you can go to Glitch and build an app, running a full-stack app, without even logging in. And the reason we enable that is because we see kids in classrooms, they're learning to code for the first time, they want to be able to remix a project and they don't even have an email address. And so that was about enabling something different, right? And then, similarly, you know, we explored Kubernetes—because of course you do; it's the default choice here—and some of the optimizations, again, if you go back several years ago, being able to suspend a project and then quickly sort of rehydrate it off disk into a running app was not a common use case, and so it was not optimized. And so we couldn't offer that experience because what we do with Glitch is, if you haven't used an app in five minutes, and you're not a paid member, who put that app to sleep. And that's just a reasonable—Corey: Uh, “Put the app to sleep,” as in toddler, or, “Put the app to sleep,” as an ill puppy.Anil: [laugh]. Hopefully, the former, but when we were at our worst and scaling the ladder. But that is that thing; it's like we had that moment that everybody does, which is that, “Oh, no. This worked.” That was a really scary moment where we started seeing app creation ramping up, and number of edits that people were making in those apps, you know, ramping up, which meant deploys for us ramping up because we automatically deploy as you edit on Glitch. And so, you know, we had that moment where just—well, as a startup, you always hope things go up into the right, and then they do and then you're not sleeping for a long time. And we've been able to get it back under control.Corey: Like, “Oh, no, I'm not succeeding.” Followed immediately by, “Oh, no, I'm succeeding.” And it's a good problem to have.Anil: Exactly. Right, right, right. The only thing worse than failing is succeeding sometimes, in terms of stress levels. And organizationally, you go through so much; technically, you go through so much. You know, we were very fortunate to have such thoughtful technical staff to navigate these things.But it was not obvious, and it was not a sort of this is what you do off the shelf. And our architecture was very different because people had looked at—like, I look at one of our inspirations was CodePen, which is a great platform and the community love them. And their front end developers are, you know, always showing off, “Here's this cool CSS thing I figured out, and it's there.” But for the most part, they're publishing static content, so architecturally, they look almost more like a content management system than an app-running platform. And so we couldn't learn anything from them about our scaling our architecture.We could learn from them on community, and they've been an inspiration there, but I think that's been very, very different. And then, conversely, if we looked at the Herokus of the world, or all those sort of easy deploy, I think Amazon has half a dozen different, like, “This will be easier,” kind of deploy tools. And we looked at those, and they were code-centric not app-centric. And that led to fundamentally different assumptions in user experience and optimization.And so, you know, we had to chart our own path and I think it was really only the last year or so that we were able to sort of turn the corner and have high degree of confidence about, we know what people build on Glitch and we know how to support and scale it. And that unlocked this, sort of, wave of creativity where there are things that people want to create on the internet but it had become too hard to do so. And the canonical example I think I was—those of us are old enough to remember FTPing up a website—Corey: Oh, yes.Anil: —right—to Geocities, or whatever your shared web host was, we remember how easy that was and how much creativity was enabled by that.Corey: Yes, “How easy it was,” quote-unquote, for those of us who spent years trying to figure out passive versus active versus ‘what is going on?' As far as FTP transfers. And it turns out that we found ways to solve for that, mostly, but it became something a bit different and a bit weird. But here we are.Anil: Yeah, there was definitely an adjustment period, but at some point, if you'd made an HTML page in notepad on your computer, and you could, you know, hurl it at a server somewhere, it would kind of run. And when you realize, you look at the coding boot camps, or even just to, like, teach kids to code efforts, and they're like, “Day three. Now, you've gotten VS Code and GitHub configured. We can start to make something.” And you're like, “The whole magic of this thing getting it to light up. You put it in your web browser, you're like, ‘That's me. I made this.'” you know, north star for us was almost, like, you go from zero to hello world in a minute. That's huge.Corey: I started participating one of those boot camps a while back to help. Like, the first thing I changed about the curriculum was, “Yeah, we're not spending time teaching people how to use VI in, at that point, the 2010s.” It was, that was a fun bit of hazing for those of us who were becoming Unix admins and knew that wherever we'd go, we'd find VI on a server, but here in the real world, there are better options for that.Anil: This is rank cruelty.Corey: Yeah, I mean, I still use it because 20 years of muscle memory doesn't go away overnight, but I don't inflict that on others.Anil: Yeah. Well, we saw the contrast. Like, we worked with, there's a group called Mouse here in New York City that creates the computer science curriculum for the public schools in the City of New York. And there's a million kids in public school in New York City, right, and they all go through at least some of this CS education. [unintelligible 00:24:49] saw a lot of work, a lot of folks in the tech community here did. It was fantastic.And yet they were still doing this sort of very conceptual, theoretical. Here's how a professional developer would set up their environment. Quote-unquote, “Professional.” And I'm like, you know what really sparks kids' interests? If you tell them, “You can make a page and it'll be live and you can send it to your friend. And you can do it right now.”And once you've sparked that creative impulse, you can't stop them from doing the rest. And I think what was wild was kids followed down that path. Some of the more advanced kids got to high school and realized they want to experiment with, like, AI and ML, right? And they started playing with TensorFlow. And, you know, there's collaboration features in Glitch where you can do real-time editing and a code with this. And they went in the forum and they were asking questions, that kind of stuff. And the people answering their questions were the TensorFlow team at Google. [laugh]. Right?Corey: I remember those days back when everything seemed smaller and more compact, [unintelligible 00:25:42] but almost felt like a balkanization of community—Anil: Yeah.Corey: —where now it's oh, have you joined that Slack team, and I'm looking at this and my machine is screaming for more RAM. It's, like, well, it has 128 gigs in it. Shouldn't that be enough? Not for Slack.Anil: Not for chat. No, no, no. Chat is demanding.Corey: Oh, yeah, that and Chrome are basically trying to out-ram each other. But if you remember the days of volunteering as network staff on Freenode when you could basically gather everyone for a given project in the entire stack on the same IRC network. And that doesn't happen anymore.Anil: And there's something magic about that, right? It's like now the conversations are closed off in a Slack or Discord or what have you, but to have a sort of open forum where people can talk about this stuff, what's wild about that is, for a beginner, a teenage creator who's learning this stuff, the idea that the people who made the AI, I can talk to, they're alive still, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, they're not even that old. But [laugh]. They think of this is something that's been carved in stone for 100 years.And so it's so inspiring to them. And then conversely, talking to the TensorFlow team, they made these JavaScript examples, like, tensorflow.js was so accessible, you know? And they're like, “This is the most heartwarming thing. Like, we think about all these enterprise use cases or whatever. But like, kids wanting to make stuff, like recognize their friends' photo, and all the vision stuff they're doing around [unintelligible 00:26:54] out there,” like, “We didn't know this is why we do it until we saw this is why we do it.”And that part about connecting the creative impulse from both, like, the most experienced, advanced coders at the most august tech companies that exist, as well as the most rank beginners in public schools, who might not even have a computer at home, saying that's there—if you put those two things together, and both of those are saying, “I'm a coder; I'm able to create; I can make something on the internet, and I can share it with somebody and be inspired by it,” like, that is… that's as good as it gets.Corey: There's something magic in being able to reach out to people who built this stuff. And honestly—you shouldn't feel this way, but you do—when I was talking to the folks who wrote the things I was working on, it really inspires you to ask better questions. Like when I'm talking to Dr. Venema, the author of Postfix and I'm trying to figure out how this thing works, well, I know for a fact that I will not be smarter than he is at basically anything in that entire universe, and maybe most beyond that, as well, however, I still want to ask a question in such a way that doesn't make me sound like a colossal dumbass. So, it really inspires you—Anil: It motivates you.Corey: Oh, yeah. It inspires you to raise your question bar up a bit, of, “I am trying to do x. I expect y to happen. Instead, z is happening as opposed to what I find the documentation that”—oh, as I read the documentation, discover exactly what I messed up, and then I delete the whole email. It's amazing how many of those things you never send because when constructing a question the right way, you can help yourself.Anil: Rubber ducking against your heroes.Corey: Exactly.Anil: I mean, early in my career, I'd gone through sort of licensing mishap on a project that later became open-source, and sort of stepped it in and as you do, and unprompted, I got an advice email from Dan Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet, he invented VisiCalc, and he had advice and he was right. And it was… it was unreal. I was like, this guy's one of my heroes. I grew up reading about his work, and not only is he, like, a living, breathing person, he's somebody that can have the kindness to reach out and say, “Yeah, you know, have you tried this? This might work.”And it's, this isn't, like, a guy who made an app. This is the guy who made the app for which the phrase killer app was invented, right? And, you know, we've since become friends and I think a lot of his inspiration and his work. And I think it's one of the things it's like, again, if you tell somebody starting out, the people who invented the fundamental tools of the digital era, are still active, still building stuff, still have advice to share, and you can connect with them, it feels like a cheat code. It feels like a superpower, right? It feels like this impossible thing.And I think about like, even for me, the early days of the web, view source, which is still buried in our browser somewhere. And you can see the code that makes the page, it felt like getting away with something. “You mean, I can just look under the hood and see how they made this page and then I can do it too?” I think we forget how radical that is—[unintelligible 00:29:48] radical open-source in general is—and you see it when, like, you talk to young creators. I think—you know, I mean, Glitch obviously is used every day by, like, people at Microsoft and Google and the New York Timesor whatever, like, you know, the most down-the-road, enterprise developers, but I think a lot about the new creators and the people who are learning, and what they tell me a lot is the, like, “Oh, so I made this app, but what do I have to do to put it on the internet?”I'm like, “It already is.” Like, as soon as you create it, that URL was live, it all works. And their, like, “But isn't there, like, an app store I have to ask? Isn't there somebody I have to get permission to publish this from? Doesn't somebody have to approve it?”And you realize they've grown up with whether it was the app stores on their phones, or the cartridges in their Nintendo or, you know, whatever it was, they had always had this constraint on technology. It wasn't something you make; it's something that is given to you, you know, handed down from on high. And I think that's the part that animates me and the whole team, the community, is this idea of, like, I geek out about our infrastructure. I love that we're doing deploys constantly, so fast, all the time, and I love that we've taken the complexity away, but the end of the day, the reason why we do it, is you can have somebody just sort of saying, I didn't realize there was a place I could just make something put it in front of, maybe, millions of people all over the world and I don't have to ask anybody permission and my idea can matter as much as the thing that's made by the trillion-dollar company.Corey: It's really neat to see, I guess, the sense of spirit and soul that arises from a smaller, more, shall we say, soulful company. No disparagement meant toward my friends at AWS and other places. It's just, there's something that you lose when you get to a certain point of scale. Like, I don't ever have to have a meeting internally and discuss things, like, “Well, does this thing that we're toying with doing violate antitrust law?” That is never been on my roadmap of things I have to even give the slightest crap about.Anil: Right, right? You know, “What does the investor relations person at a retirement fund think about the feature that we shipped?” Is not a question that we have to answer. There's this joy in also having community that sort of has come along with us, right? So, we talk a lot internally about, like, how do we make sure Glitch stays weird? And, you know, the community sort of supports that.Like, there's no reason logically that our logo should be the emoji of two fish. But that kind of stuff of just, like, it just is. We don't question it anymore. I think that we're very lucky. But also that we are part of an ecosystem. I also am very grateful where, like… yeah, that folks at Google use Glitch as part of their daily work when they're explaining a new feature in Chrome.Like, if you go to web.dev and their dev portal teaches devs how to code, all the embedded examples go to these Glitch apps that are running, showing running code is incredible. When we see the Stripe team building examples of, like, “Do you want to use this new payment API that we made? Well, we have a Glitch for you.” And literally every day, they ship one that sort of goes and says, “Well, if you just want to use this new Stripe feature, you just remix this thing and it's instantly running on Glitch.”I mean, those things are incredible. So like, I'm very grateful that the biggest companies and most influential companies in the industry have embraced it. So, I don't—yeah, I don't disparage them at all, but I think that ability to connect to the person who'd be like, “I just want to do payments. I've never heard of Stripe.”Corey: Oh yeah.Anil: And we have this every day. They come into Glitch, and they're just like, I just wanted to take credit cards. I didn't know there's a tool to do that.Corey: “I was going to build it myself,” and everyone shrieks, “No, no. Don't do that. My God.” Yeah. Use one of their competitors, fine,k but building it yourself is something a lunatic would do.Anil: Exactly. Right, right. And I think we forget that there's only so much attention people can pay, there's only so much knowledge they have.Corey: Everything we say is new to someone. That's why I always go back to assuming no one's ever heard of me, and explain the basics of what I do and how I do it, periodically. It's, no one has done all the mandatory reading. Who knew?Anil: And it's such a healthy exercise to, right, because I think we always have that kind of beginner's mindset about what Glitch is. And in fairness, I understand why. Like, there have been very experienced developers that have said, “Well, Glitch looks too colorful. It looks like a toy.” And that we made a very intentional choice at masking—like, we're doing the work under the hood.And you can drop down into a terminal and you can do—you can run whatever build script you want. You can do all that stuff on Glitch, but that's not what we put up front and I think that's this philosophy about the role of the technology versus the people in the ecosystem.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to, I guess, explain what Glitch is and how you view it. If people want to learn more about it, about your opinions, et cetera. Where can they find you?Anil: Sure. glitch.com is easiest place, and hopefully that's a something you can go and a minute later, you'll have a new app that you built that you want to share. And, you know, we're pretty active on all social media, you know, Twitter especially with Glitch: @glitch. I'm on as @anildash.And one of the things I love is I get to talk to folks like you and learn from the community, and as often as not, that's where most of the inspiration comes from is just sort of being out in all the various channels, talking to people. It's wild to be 20-plus years into this and still never get tired of that.Corey: It's why I love this podcast. Every time I talk to someone, I learn something new. It's hard to remain too ignorant after you have enough people who've shared wisdom with you as long as you can retain it.Anil: That's right.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.Anil: So, glad to be here.Corey: Anil Dash, CEO of Gletch—or Glitch as he insists on calling it. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment telling me how your small team at AWS is going to crush Glitch into the dirt just as soon as they find a name that's dumb enough for the service.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Jenn Schiffer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Our special guest today is Jenn Schiffer, Director of Community at Glitch. Today, we will learn all about how cool Glitch really is and it’s free! Also, they are one of the first platforms that let you view source of server-side code. Jenn tells us her internet humor variety show called “Hoobastank2 on Twitch, why she started her satire blog post on Medium when she entered the tech industry, how Glitch is used in the academic areas, and how licensing and sharing should be better communicated in schools. Download this episode to find out more! [00:01:05] Jenn tells us all about what Glitch is. [00:02:11] Richard wonders if this is largely for art projects and is there any functional code that’s being used to run businesses on Glitch. [00:04:45] Jenn talks about having live code on Glitch. We also learn about her internet humor variety show called “Hoobastank2 on Twitch. [00:07:39] Jenn tells us about when she entered the tech industry, teaching computer science, working at NBA, rude blog comments about women in tech, writing satire blog posts on Medium, and “gotchas.” [00:12:11] We find out about the archetype of the users of Glitch. Also, we learn about using Glitch in the academic area, Girls Who Code, and artists and entertainers bringing their exhibitions to Glitch virtually since they can’t run in person safely right now. [00:18:21] Richard wonders if there are any difficulties in using Glitch, how is it hard to use Glitch, and what could be better for teaching open source in general. Jenn shares when she was first introduced to open source. [00:24:50] Justin brings up a point about licensing in open source and not understanding the license and how it should be better communicated in schools in terms of sharing, and Jenn shares her view. [00:31:43] Jenn lets us know where we can find her on the web. Spotlight [00:32:50] Justin’s spotlight is make8bitart.com. [00:33:50] Eric’s spotlights are The Spaghetti Detective and Thingiverse. [00:36:05] Richard’s spotlight is Jim Kang and his website Smidgeo.com [00:36:54] Jenn’s spotlight is the jQuery Project. Quotes [00:07:39] “So around the time Medium had started, 2013(ish), whatever, I just entered actually the tech industry, because I was in Academia, teaching computer science, and I was like, now I want to build computer science.” [00:08:10] “The way that people try to prove that women in tech don’t belong there are with gotchas, like pointing things out that they think are wrong, or maybe they are wrong because we’re not allowed to be wrong.” [00:16:34] “We’re seeing a lot of artists and entertainers that are realizing because of the pandemic and quarantine that they have to think of new, virtual ways to bring their art to the masses.” [00:19:27] “I’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations with a lot of young developers who are in high school, with Discord exploding there are so many gamers that are learning to code because they’re building bots for Discord.” Links Jen Schiffer Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennschiffer) Jen Schiffer Twitter (https://twitter.com/jennschiffer?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Glitch (https://glitch.com/) Hoobastank2 on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/hoobastank2) Hoobastank2 on Twitch Twitter (https://twitter.com/hoobastank2ttv) Jenmoney.biz (https://jennmoney.biz/) Livelaugh Blog (https://livelaugh.blog/) Girls Who Code (https://girlswhocode.com/) Make8bitart (https://make8bitart.com/) The Spaghetti Detective (https://www.thespaghettidetective.com/) Thingiverse (https://www.thingiverse.com/) Eric Berry Twitter (https://twitter.com/coderberry?lang=en) Smidgeo (https://smidgeo.com/) Smidgeo Twitter (https://twitter.com/smidgeo) jQuery (https://jquery.com/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Jenn Schiffer.

The web started off weird, and there’s a wonderful and concerted effort to ensure that, at least parts of it, stay that way. Heroku designer Charlie Gleason and lead strategist Stephen Barlow dive into their experiences working on side projects—small, silly, funny, and emotive vignettes on the web—that span random Arrested Development episode selectors, Kanye West browser-based mini games, collaborative art projects, and everything in between. Learn how to get involved with your own community of makers, why it’s more important to have fun than it is to try and get internet famous, and some things to look out for when working with others. So, put away the kanban board, get inspired, and keep the internet weird with a side project of your own. Links from this episode Charlie’s music video, Tweetflight Stephen’s Kanye Zone Stephen’s community, Botnik Indie game company, Blyts Matt Desl (canvas-sketch) Jenn Schiffer Glitch Tim Holman

If you wanted to hear about the time Jessamyn went on Jesse Ventura's TV show, this episode of the MetaFilter podcast is your big chance! Also we talk about, y'know, MetaFilter and MetaFilterian things and fun stuff and stupid stuff. The whole gamut, basically.Helpful LinksPodcast FeedSubscribe with iTunesDirect mp3 downloadMisc -It's October, let's get spoopy. - Glitch is pretty great - Jenn Schiffer is rad - Nova at 50 - oh also Jessamyn was on Jesse Ventura's show - what up, Gritty Jobs - Seeking nude Yoga/Pilates Teachers in Boston (& NYC) by Autumn Willow - photo project help by tangaroo - Library Director for Mesa County Libraries in Colorado Project - Two-sentence Horror Stories by maxsparber - peaceful, easy gmail by jessamyn - Artpal! by the phlegmatic king - Geeky Librarian things (mostly) by griffey - Definitely not made up Murder She Wrote title cards by clipperton - Wordshore speaks some words by Wordshore - Altered States Podcast-with help from MeFi by GospelofWesleyWillis - Lyric McKerrigan, Secret Librarian by yankeefog - Roguelike Celebration, October 6-7 2018 in San Francisco (third annual!) by dreamyshade MetaFilter - Linux Kernel adopts code of conduct by jenkinsEar - of which cf. Coraline - My time has come! by straight - barf, ralph, blow chunks, pray to the porcelain god by not_the_water - Nintendo Makes Mistake, Gives Internet Ideas by NoxAeternum - a comment by NoxAeternum - All hail Gritty. by everybody had matching towels - Then the lawyers will lead us to reason... by mandolin conspiracy - "Do you want to read a mathematics book?" his professor asked him by LobsterMitten Ask MeFi - Car negotiation pricing ...help by gregjunior - What shape petit fours can I cut from a sheet cake s.t.... by meaty shoe puppet - Did I miss a day of etiquette school growing up? by rocketbadger - Am I an antisocial roommate? by iamsuper - What can we do to honor gender pronouns as event planners? by rockyraccoon - "How do you know it was because of your race?" by jnrs - a comment by jessamyn - What's your favorite piece of trivia? by storybored - Colleague/coauthor convicted of child porn posession – now what? by Anonymous FanFare - Saturday Night Live: Adam Driver, Kanye West by DizzyOnBugSpray Music Featured this episode: - Open to the Sky by Foosnark - The Counterforce by Grangousier - Life, Alexander by Maaik - Arps-speriment #3: Soothing Arps by CarrotAdventure - Caroline by peppercorn - Ed Steamhams - Cooking Out Loud by cortex

This week's episode features Jenn Schiffer talking about the aesthetics and creative community of the Glitch platform. This online platform allows code newbies and experts to remix and share their web and node.js projects and invites meaningful community collaboration. Learn more about the value of creativity in tech education and exploration.

It’s the very first episode of No, You Go! Jenn, Katel, and Sara get together to talk about the itch to get out of a professional rut and start something new—whether that’s changing jobs, launching a company, building a side gig, or maybe even…idk….starting a podcast? > Fuck it, let’s just do it. Let’s be unapologetic women asking to do work, and to be paid fairly for it. > —Becca Gurney, co-founder, Design Choice Read on for more of what we covered, and read the full transcript for all the, like, verbatim quotes, you know? Show notes First, we tell the story of how No, You Go got started: Sara has an idea, but forgets that Austin Kleon already wrote a book called Show Your Work and narrowly avoids totally ripping him off. Jenn shares what it’s like to trade a thousand side projects for some stability—and, oh yeah, one super-cool baby. Katel opens up about how working at home alone can get, well, lonely—and asks us to join her “awesome after-school kickass club.” We all fully embrace the athleisure lifestyle. Next, we kick off the show—and 2018—by hearing how four women who made big changes last year knew it was time for something new: Becca Gurney, co-founder of Design Choice, tells us how the pay gap in the AIGA Design Census plus the 2016 election turned her from freelance designer to outspoken advocate for equality in design. Jenn Schiffer, community engineer for Fog Creek’s Glitch platform, shares how fear kept her stuck in a rut and not doing her best work—until an opportunity to build community for other engineers brought her life back. Lara Hogan, co-founder of Where With All, describes how meeting her now-business-partner led her away from managing engineering teams and toward building a consulting business. Mina Markham, senior front-end architect at Slack (and creator of the famed Pantsuit design system used by the Hillary Clinton campaign), describes trusting her gut to guide her through three new jobs and three cross-country moves in just three years. Also in this episode Archie’s hair, Cheryl Blossom’s lips, and why Riverdale is our favorite CW teen drama Shout outs to Call Your Girlfriend and Shine Theory Jenn’s rad formula for speaking fees post from the Nerdary California Style Sheets forever Lara Hogan’s Donut Manifesto Our endless devotion to Olivia Pope wine glasses Final tips from designer and educator Sam Kapila Many thanks to The Diaphone for the use of their song, Maths, in our theme music! _This episode is brought to you by Codepen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _ Transcript JENN LUKAS: This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by CodePen: a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. It’s like a big virtual sandbox where you can build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. Your profile on CodePen is like your front-end development portfolio. Learn more and create your first Pen at codepen.io. That’s c-o-d-e-p-e-n dot i-o. JL: Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KATEL LEDÛ: I’m Katel LeDû. SARA WACHTER-BOETTCHER: And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. KL: In today’s inaugural episode of No, You Go, we’re talking about the itch to get out of a rut and start something new. First up, we’ll talk about how No, You Go came to be. Then we’ll listen in as a bunch of badass women tell us how they knew it was time for a change in 2017—and how they made it happen. Also on the agenda: our favorite CW teen drama, the politics of donuts, and breaking out the Olivia Pope wine glasses. [Clink] [Musical intro] How it all began [1:10] SWB: One day, I was actually out for a run with Katel. We were up in this really pretty park and it was the middle of all and we were crunching through the leaves, kind of miserably running some—some 10K distance so that we could justify donuts. And I started telling Katel that I had this podcast idea that was all about: how do you go from kind of doing the work, whatever your job is, to being able to kind of like show your work. Like, speak about it or write about it, or something. Like, how do you go from being somebody who’s kind of more heads-down to being more of that like active or visible member of your professional community? JL: Yeah! KL: Yeah! SWB: And I was like, I had this working title, like “Show Your Work” or something like that. And we were like, that sounds like a fun idea. You know, I just had a book come out in the fall and I was really interested in kind of helping other people understand what that process looks like. A lot of people ask me questions because they don’t necessarily know. JL: Me included. KL: And me! SWB: Yeah! Well, and that’s one of the things that we started to want to talk about, is like: how does that whole thing work? And that’s, you know, just one example, right? I mean, it’s not just writing a book, it’s also like, how do you go from working in a field to like, teaching other people how to do it and leading classes. Those kinds of questions. So, I really wanted to start talking about that more, and Katel was the publisher of one of my books, and so I thought she would be like an ideal person to talk about that with. KL: And I thought that was a great idea. I think “Show Your Work” was actually an awesome name for a show—we should do that also. JL: Let’s get this one off the ground first! KL: All right, okay. So, yeah, I am the CEO of A Book Apart and published one of Sara’s books—it’s amazing. And I moved to Philly about two years ago after living in DC for most of my life, and Sara and I became besties really quickly because we had a lot in common. Namely, loving slash hating running and hating running to love donuts, even more. So, one night we were all sitting actually at Jenn’s house, and we were drinking wine and watching Riverdale as we do—we’d all gotten together and [that’s] another thing that we loved and had in common. And we brought it up to Jenn and she got really excited. JL: To be fair, Sara’s giving me that look like, “I’m not quite sure I’m sold on the Riverdale.” SWB: No! I was just thinking, can we have a sidebar about Archie’s hair for a second? JL: Mhmm, Archie’s hair. KL: And now, did you know Sara’s really into Riverdale? JL: Ooh! Did you catch up? SWB: I am super caught up. And Archie’s hair is still ridiculous. And I’m pretty sure that Cheryl Blossom’s lip liner gets bigger and bigger every single episode. JL: It’s awesome. SWB: It’s gonna be her entire face soon. KL: It’s so good. Maybe that’s what I need to do, is just go big with the liner. JL: I love it. You know, I forget, Katel, if you told me this—I always had a problem with Archie’s hair but then, you brought up that like, it helps if you remember that it’s a comic book and then it makes the extreme-ness of his hair a little bit more acceptable. KL: Right, it’s like, it makes the TV show juicy, or like, pulpy? I mean… “juicy” is maybe not the right word, but you know what I mean! SWB: No, no, no, let’s stick with juicy. JL: No, I do know what you mean! And you know, sometimes we just have to watch an episode of Riverdale after a long day. SWB: For professional reasons. JL: But for me, it was super awesome because I just had a child ten months ago, yes indeed. And so, with a child and I’m back working full time—I work as an engineering manager and UI architect down at Urban Outfitters. And sometimes, my lovely friends will come over after my child goes to sleep and we’ll watch Riverdale and talk shop. Which is awesome, ’cause you start to feel a little bit alienated to some extent, from your previous life and you have this awesome new life going one. But then you like, miss parts of your old, so it was really nice to have my friends come to me so that I could keep trying to figure out how to make this balance work. And maybe balance isn’t even the right word, but to like figure out how I can keep doing things that I love along with the new things I love. So, it was super awesome. [5:00] SWB: Yeah, something Jenn has not quite mentioned, is just how much stuff she used to do in terms of like, speaking and side projects, constantly. Like, when I first met Jenn, every other week, I swear it was like, “Oh, I just started this podcast called Ladies In Tech,” or “Oh, I’m working on this web series called Cook Inside the Box, where we make recipes off the back of boxes.” And it was so cool to see her doing all this stuff, and like a lot of people, it’s really hard to do all of that stuff when you have really little kids and a lot of kind of, responsibilities at work. But what we want to talk about, is, how do we make space for some of that and kind of integrate it into our lives no matter what other stuff is going on. JL: That’s what was so nice about talking with you two, is figuring out how that can work. And I know you’ve both been amazing soundbars for me. And I feel very lucky to have both of you in my life and I think that is a lot about what we’re basing this podcast on. It’s like, how we can be stronger together with people who support us and figuring out how to do these things. Even if you’re working with new—and I mean, using a stretch here of calling it a constraint—but, we’re used to like, how we work with constraints. And this is just a new, different part of my life, and it’s really nice to be able to talk to y’all about how that works. KL: This also feels like just a really awesome after school kick-ass club that I’m super excited about. And I feel like, sometimes, you know I don’t have kids and you know that’s a really tough thing to figure into your life when you’re going from, you know, not having them to having them and a career and everything. And I think even for someone who doesn’t have them, it’s like, you’re still trying to manage a bunch of different things and figure out how to like, stay excited, and go outside and like, meet with people and hang out not you know, become a total hermit like I like to do. JL: Oh my god, going outside is so hard sometimes. KL: Exactly! SWB: But I think, this really speaks to the way that I think the idea for the podcast evolved. When we started talking about it with Jenn, what we realized is that, for a lot of us who, you know, consider ourselves ambitious and sort of really interested in our careers but also kind of non-traditional about it. Like not necessarily interested in only ever working at one single company and a lot of us, you know, work in consulting or small companies or we take on side gigs. You can sometimes end up feeling like you don’t have colleagues. And I think that that’s something I’ve heard a lot from—particularly from women the past couple of years. That they were looking for places where they could connect with other people who got their work, even if they weren’t traditional colleagues. And I really look at that as a big piece of what we’re doing here, is kind of taking the place of having that sort of peer group that you maybe used to have at an office. But if you work in lots of non-traditional settings, you don’t have that anymore. JL: And even when you do work in that, sometimes its you know, you still have a variety of interests. So as you said, I used to do a lot of side projects and that’s totally different than my full time job. So, I think, as we were all sitting on the couch and we were getting more and more excited, that’s sort of where the name of this show came to be. Right? SWB: Yeah, I think one of the things that was really funny about that, was that—so, I was sitting there as Jenn and Katel were kind of going back and forth, like, getting more and more excited and hyped about the show. And all of a sudden, they’re talking over each other and Katel—always the gracious one—is like, “no, you go,” and waits for Jenn. And Jenn goes, “that should be the name of the podcast.” And she kind of laughs and I’m like, wait, stop, no that is the name of the podcast now. So, that’s how we named the podcast and started thinking a lot more about you know, what kind of things we’d cover and where we’d go with it. So, kind of getting outside of that, just the idea of showing your work—although that’s part of it—but more thinking about, what are all the different ways or paths that people take to satisfy their ambition or satisfy their need to, you know, create stuff in the world. And how could we go about highlighting those and helping other people see the different kinds of ways their lives might look. And giving people a little more support along the way as they figure out what that looks like for them. JL: I think also, you know, we’ll talk about challenges of being ambitious. I think there’s a lot of things that all people, but especially for us as women, that we always have to balance, right? Being too abrasive versus being too nice and how we manage that in this world—to achieve some of the things that we’re trying to set out to do. SWB: I was thinking about, one of the other podcasts I really like, Call Your Girlfriend—the hosts on that show talk about shine theory. And for them, shine theory is this idea, like, I don’t shine if you don’t. So, the idea is you’re going to have you know, like, you want the smartest and most accomplished women by your side because actually everybody’s better when your friends are successful, too. And I think about that a lot when I think about this show because I’ve got some like, pretty accomplished women by my side working on it. And I think that that is an incredible way to look at how do we, you know, how do we navigate our lives, and how do we think about ambition. [10:00] Because we’re always looking toward these other people that we totally respect and that we can learn so much from, and they’re looking right back at us. And I think it creates this environment where we can be really supportive of each other and also get a little bit more comfortable kind of like, celebrating that ambitious side of ourselves and not pretending it’s not there. Which I think is often what women are expected to do. KL: Yeah, this actually tied back to, Sara, what you were saying a little bit earlier, about you know, having colleagues and we all work in kind of, I think, different setups these days. It’s not necessarily like, Sara and I don’t even go into an office most days, and we have meetings sort of from wherever. And even though you know, we’re all friends and we have—our professions and our careers are kind of intertwined because we work in the same field or area— we don’t work together physically. But we talk and speak and write about similar things and I think we have passions about the same things. And especially in terms of trying to lift other folks up and finding ways to actually do that. We all work in different setups these days and you know, a lot of us—Sara and I included don’t even necessarily go into offices everyday, but I think it’s really important to feel like you have some kind of camaraderie. Some kind of network that you’re able to rely on in your work and obviously outside of that work. For me, it’s been so critical because I literally work by myself in my home and I have—I work with a lot of team members that are just distributed. So for me to have folks that I can see regularly and talk about things that are related to the work I do is so important. I think I was really missing that from going from a big company like National Geographic to a company that was a small startup. That was a huge shock, that was a big change. You know, working with fifty people a day and then all of a sudden being by myself. So this has been incredibly important. I think being able to extend that and hopefully share that and build a community around that is super exciting. JL: Totally. SWB: Yeah, like I remember when I quit my last real job, which was in 2011, I was working at an agency. And I went from an agency to freelancing and consulting in doing content strategy and UX work. And at first, I will tell you I did not have this kind of network. I was mostly feeling really kind of alone in my work. And I would work on a project and get in with the team on that project but they weren’t really ever my team. And so over the years I’ve certainly like built up this collection of you know, like, really cool people who get what I do and who are just there for me. And that network has made all the difference. I don’t think that I would still be consulting, much less speaking and writing books and stuff like that, if I had not built that kind of community. And that’s something I want more people to experience because I think that it’s one of the only things that can kind of help keep you sane and happy. KL: I feel like the dream used to be work from home, and like work for yourself and you know, be your own bossa and sort of be the master of your own time. And it’s great, it has so much—it gives you a lot of freedom and there’s a lot of flexibility but it’s also very lonely a lot of the time and you know, I think you need to find something that actually helps you get through those lonely times. JL: Yeah. SWB: Yeah, like I want the yoga pants, but I also want the like, deep personal friendships. KL: Right! SWB: That come with seeing people really regularly. And so, you know, it’s how do we make a life for ourselves that kind of can bring us both. JL: I got news for you: athleisure. Is my office wear. SWB: Trust me, I have gone full force into the athleisure lifestyle and I am not looking back. So one thing that I do think about, though, in this whole conversation about kind of finding that community and helping to help others, you know, figure out what their path is, is that Jenn, Katel, and I—we really come from relatively similar backgrounds. You know, like we’re similar age and we’re all based in Philly, and we’re all white ladies with professional jobs. Having a lot in common is really good, but we do know that that could be a pretty limited view of what it’s like to work as a woman. In fact, it would be incredibly limited. So one thing that’s really important to us and that we want to do on this show is make sure that we’re bringing in people with a lot of different experiences and different backgrounds. And make sure that we are getting things from perspectives that the three of us would never have. [Musical interlude] JL: You know, speaking of hearing from other voices, I think it’s time we get into our main segment. But before we do, we are so excited to tell you about the sponsor who’s making this very first episode of No, You Go possible: Codepen. CodePen is a powerful tool that allows designers and developers to write code—like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—directly in a browser and see the results as you build. Whether you’re new to front-end code or been writing it for years, it’s the perfect place to learn front-end programming languages, show off what you create, build test cases, get help on tricky problems—and find inspiration. Whenever I have a new idea and I want to get right to making it happen, you know, I don’t want to have to deal with setting up the environment or setting up hosting or build tools, I just go right to CodePen and start building. I can share that code with others on my team and see what they think about it, and then we can go from there. CodePen has so many cool things to explore—like CodePen PRO and Projects, where you can explore tons of awesome Pens. Get inspired and learn from others, and share with them at the same time. Sign up and get started by visiting codepen.io/hello. [Musical interlude] We introduce the badass lady brigade [15:30] JL: So how do we know when it’s time for something new? SWB: That’s a question we asked a bunch of women who had made big changes in 2017—job changes, life changes, that kind of thing. To get us started, let’s hear from one of our favorites. BECCA GURNEY: This is Becca Gurney, half of Design Choice, a graphic design studio in Washington, DC, where we have the aim of empowering women to lead, to get paid, and to be awesome. Our central mission and idea is that we almost make the conscious choice to pay women fairly for the work that they do, and before you can pay them you have to choose them to do the work. So for the four years leading up to this one, I had been freelancing, and I had just fallen into freelancing. I didn’t choose it, I didn’t really go out and take a risk and say hey, this is what I want to do. It was there and I did it, and I just kept doing it. But I had been feeling really unfulfilled and pretty aimless in it. I wasn’t doing great work. I was just doing work, and there was no real point to it. It was awesome that I could make my own schedule and I could go home to make jam whenever I wanted, because I was feeling jammy. But I didn’t think of myself as successful or empowered. And then the election happened, and I didn’t feel successful or empowered. And I was looking around at the leaders in our industry, which is mostly dudes, and I didn’t feel successful or empowered. The AIGA Census data came out and women in my area at my level are being paid $20,000 less a year than men. And so hey, I don’t feel successful or empowered. And the moments that sparked any sort of a feeling that felt good were the moments that I was with women, talking about being fucking unapologetic women. And how could I do that through design and Stacey Maloney was in a bunch of those conversations, and we said, “Fuck it, let’s just do it; let’s be unapologetic women asking to do work and to be paid fairly for it.” And we started Design Choice. JL: How awesome. SWB: I love so much about this. Fucking unapologetic women. I think we qualify, right? JL: I hope so. KL: I think so. Let’s get there if not [laughs]. SWB: Katel, how do you know Becca? KL: We got to be friends when I was in DC. I started working at a coworking space to try to get a little more face time with other human beings when I started this solo thing. And she was just awesome. We became friends really quickly, and we sort of went through some growing pains at this particular coworking space because of management that was not empowering and didn’t make us feel confident about working there, and we moved to a different one. We shared an office. We just really became good friends and got to know each other. Becca is one of those people who, you know that if she says something, that she’s going to do something, she’s gonna do it. She just shows up and she’s such a rock star. I hate using that word, but she is, she absolutely is. She’s creative and amazing and when I listened to this recording that she sent, I almost teared up because I was thinking, oh my gosh, I have felt so similarly—that feeling of like, you’re doing all these things that you’re supposed to be doing, you’re making the money, you’re going to the meetups, you’re doing all the things, but you don’t feel empowered and you don’t feel successful. And like, what is that? And trying to pull all of that apart and get at the root of why, and figure out what you’re going to do to change that, is huge. It’s so huge. And the fact that she came out of that and created this agency, and it isn’t just helping her feel successful and empowered, but also doing really fucking amazing work for companies that should be employing women, is just so rad. SWB: Yeah, I love this idea of her saying that this company is explicitly about hiring women and paying women fairly. And that’s really built into the fabric of it, and she’s not afraid to talk about it that way. Because I think about it in terms of how I spent my own year. [20:00] I think something that I did in 2017 is get comfortable with the idea that my work simply was political—that I couldn’t really create an artificial boundary between the things that I care about professionally, talking about a user’s experience of a piece of software or a website, and the things that I care about personally, which is basically all social justice issues. And so that really came out when I wrote my most recent book. It’s called Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, and essentially I am really taking a direct look at this tech industry that I have been part of for a long time, and highlighting some of the ways it’s gone really wrong for people who are often the most vulnerable or the most marginalized. You know, it was hard but I think I got to a place where I was no longer afraid of saying that out loud, and saying that in front of important people who, in the past, I would have been worried wouldn’t have wanted to hire me for consulting. And now, I’m thinking, okay, I need to find a way to make this an organic and natural part of what I do, because I can’t really live with myself otherwise. KL: Yeah, I think you’re totally right, and that whole unapologetic thing—I feel like there’s so much to unpack there, and something we’re grappling with it every day in everything we do. And I know for me it’s kind of like, you tear a little bit away and you’re like, okay, I made some progress. And then you’re like, but wait, is this fitting in in the right space? So I feel like hopefully, if we do enough of these, we’re really going to get in deep in terms of how people are doing that. JL: Becca wasn’t the only one feeling frustration. Let’s hear another story from Jenn Schiffer. JENN SCHIFFER: At the end of 2016, I was feeling really stuck in a rut. I wanted to do good work, but I didn’t feel like I was in a position to do that. I knew I was going to leave, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and I was afraid to make any changes. But then I was very lucky and very fortunate because Fog Creek approached me about doing community engineering for their new product, Glitch.com. And so I’ve been there ever since, and it’s been great, and I feel like I’m doing my best work, and I’m making an impact. And so I’m hoping in 2018 to keep that momentum going. JL: Oh, Jenn Schiffer. She’s is constantly always saying such smart things, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I really just enjoy everything she does. I didn’t meet Jenn in person until a couple of years ago, but I started following Jenn a while ago because she was posting a lot of awesome humor-filled development posts, which was something quite unique, and she had a really great voice. SWB: You mean she trolled dev bros on Twitter? [Laughter] JL: It was the California Style Sheets post a couple of years ago, which is one of my favorites still, and I think it was awesome and it showed a lot of things, because, yes, being written by a woman, I think a lot of people thought, it must not be humor, it must be serious. And that was—ugh—sigh-worthy. But Jenn was awesome, and I followed that, and was lucky enough to have her on the podcast I used to run, with Val Head, Ladies In Tech, where we’d talk about public speaking and Jenn was a guest on our show. We were lucky to have her. She’s done a lot of awesome things. One of the things I love about Jenn is if there’s a gap or something that she wants, she makes it happen. She was living in North Jersey I believe, and working for the NBA at the time, and there was not a meetup and I think she went into the city for them. And so she decided to start her own North Jersey meetup. And so instead of saying, there’s nothing here around me, she started her own. And I think that’s such an important thing that we can do in this industry. And you can see it now, that she is starting something new again. And I think one of the things that she’s always done is helping people learn. A talk she gave recently she had this great quote: “We don’t learn alone.” And I think that’s true in this industry, but also in many industries where we are just better together and we learn more when we’re around each other. KL: You really feel like she’s bringing you along in the learning, when she’s speaking about—when she’s giving a talk or doing a demo or whatever. SWB: I think that’s one of the cool things about this new role that she has. She went from a role where she was doing a lot of programming to a role where she’s the community engineer. That means that she’s doing a lot more of that educational piece, and helping people make use of this tool Glitch, which is from Fog Creek. And what’s really great about it is that it’s a way to not just do the heads down work, but to be doing the showing your work and sharing of things, and making these things more accessible for people. And particularly making these kinds of tools in tech feel accessible to all kinds of folks, right? I think that’s a big piece of how Glitch has positioned itself on purpose, and that’s in no small part to people like Jenn, who are making it feel like a tool that anyone can pick up and use—and not a tool that only super elite programmers from one very particular background can pick up and use. [25:00] And so I love that about her, and I hope that continues to be a really good move for her, because that was an exciting “something new” that happened last year. Something Jenn talked about though, which I think is something that all of us can relate to, is that feeling of frustration, burnout, being bored, or just not feeling like you have space to do your best work. That’s something I’ve certainly felt. I’ve felt it at different points over my career, but certainly when I last quit my job, one of the big reasons is that I was working an ungodly number of hours. I was the last one in the office every night. I literally set the alarm leaving the office every day for like a year straight. And I simultaneously felt like I couldn’t get my head above water. I was trying to do so much, and it didn’t feel like I could go anywhere. One of the ways that I got out of that was quitting my job, but it wasn’t just quitting the job. It was also getting a new outlook to my work. One of the reasons that I quit my job was so that I could write my first book, which was like my first real effort to give my community some of my expertise and knowledge. And that was a really helpful reframe for me to get me out of that rut. And so I’m curious, have you guys had experiences where you feel like you’ve gotten burnt out or frustrated, and how did you move past them? JL: When I left my last full-time job to start consulting, I at the time was doing a lot of public speaking. I was away more than I was home, and I really loved it. That’s really what gave me the courage to quit my full-time job and start something new. There was something I really loved, I knew what I loved, and it was less being frustrated with anything I was currently doing, and more me seeing something that I really loved doing, and figuring out how I could make that happen. I really loved my job at the time, I was a development director at Happy Cog. But I had been doing it for six years. And it was definitely something I loved, but again, six years is a long time, especially in the tech field. And there was this new thing that I loved a lot. Being able to travel and meet people and teach was something that was super important to me, and for me to be able to full commit to that, it almost forced me—or gave me that boost that I needed—to quit my job at the time and go out consulting and have this freedom to do this thing. So, for me the driver was something I really loved and wanting to do, versus being burnt out or frustrated at a current job. SWB: Totally. I loved what you said about, it wasn’t that there was something wrong with what you were doing. Sometimes I think we get stuck in a rut because we’re like, well, I like the stuff that I’m currently doing. But for me at least, part of being happy does really come down to growth or evolution in what I’m doing. So it’s not a matter of me hating anything that came before necessarily, but I want to bring something new into the fold. New people and new experiences. I want something else to kind of keep it interesting. I want to keep it interesting, and if I’m feeling too steady all the time, then I think I’m bored. So I love this idea that it’s like, okay, is there something out there that you’re really excited about, or that you want to be good at that you’re not yet good at that can really drive us to change things up. KL: I’m gonna be real honest here and say that I’m currently burnt out, and I’ve been struggling with that I think for like the last year. SWB: Weird, how could 2017 burn someone out. How is that possible? [Laughter] KL: Yeah, exactly, It’s like, can you just be burnt out just from being burnt out? And I think I’ve worked through a lot of it, not that it’s something—I think at one point I thought, okay, like, this is something else I need to check off my list, getting through burnout. Which is not how it happens and not how you heal from it. It shocked me into realizing that I needed to make some changes in how I approached my scheduling and, you know, my work. But I think sort of related to what you’re talking about, not necessarily saying I need a different job or I need to change career paths. It’s like, before ABA, I would go to work, you do your job. That’s the thing, it’s this packaged thing. And now it’s not like that. A Book Apart is not like that. Granted I’ve been doing it for years, but it just—you start to think, okay, there’s nothing outside of it. Even though there’s lots of stuff outside of it, and I think I just needed to look for it. This is part of it. I think I’m starting to feel a lot less burnt out. I think I also got really confused—or not confused, I got worried, because I started to think that burnout is just fatigue, and it’s not necessarily just fatigue. It could just be you need a fresh take or a new project or whatever. [30:00] SWB: Yeah, and I think it definitely says a lot. The key to fixing burnout is not always necessarily career change, but sometimes it’s just like, perspective shift and remembering all the other things that you love. You know, people talk about work-life balance, and I always really struggle with that conversation, because work is really important to me, and it’s so intertwined with so many pieces of my life. So I don’t look at it as, work is over here and life is over there. But at the same time, I’ve lived the life where work was consuming me: “Oh, I’m writing this email at 11:30pm.” You know, when you stop seeing any distinction between those different parts of yourself, I think it can be really easy to get so sucked into work, that when things aren’t going well at work, it means that things are not going well for you. So it’s like, if work goes through a rough patch, your whole life sucks, because there’s nothing else there. KL: Right, it’s such a big part of what you do and who you are. And it’s something I never really paused to think about, moving from my twenties to thirties to forties, is that, like, that’s an ongoing thing. It’s an evolution. You don’t just figure it out and then it’s done. SWB: The kind of work that I do evolves all the time, so of course the relationship I have to my work has to evolve all the time to.. That’s only natural. KL: Right. SWB: I think it’s hard sometimes to remember that, because you think, “Oh, well, this used to work for me.” Well guess what, this doesn’t work for me anymore. I am in my mid-thirties now, and my needs are a little bit different. And there are things that I’m not willing to put up with anymore—thank god. JL: Yes. [Laughter] KL: Right. And you can be unapologetic about it. JL: Yeah, and along with being unapologetic, sometimes you really need to trust your gut. Let’s hear from Mina Markham about trusting her gut. MINA MARKHAM: To channel Olivia Pope, it all comes down to a gut feeling with me. When I’m presented with some new opportunity, I kind of do a gut check and see, is this something that I will regret not doing. And if the answer is yes, then I know what I have to do. I have to go ahead and make that change. That’s probably the only thing that can explain how I’ve had so much change in my life the past few years. I’ve had three jobs in three years, all of which required me to pack up my life and move to a new city and basically start over. Each time came with their own instances of doubt or of terror or sometimes just full-on panic, but none of which I have any regrets about doing. So I have learned to trust my gut, trust my instincts to know when it’s time for me to go ahead and make that leap. JL: Oh, Olivia Pope. Inspires me too, but I’ll get to that later. It just inspires me so much when people have the ability to follow their gut, especially when it involves moving. Sara, you’ve moved a ton. SWB: Yeah, I’ve moved a lot of times, and I’ve moved across the country, but I still don’t think I’ve moved as much as Mina Markham has. KL: Yeah, if you’re not familiar with her, Mina was at IBM in Austin at the beginning of those three years she talked about. Then she moved to Brooklyn to work on the Hillary campaign. Now she’s a senior front-end engineer at Slack. So that’s a lot of choices, and a lot of change. And I think trusting your gut becomes really vital in all that. I also think it’s how you get to a place where you actually know what it’s going to look like to have regrets or to not have regrets, and you become okay with it. You kind of can envision it a little bit more. It becomes a cycle that starts to repeat itself, which, that’s how you gain more and more trust in your gut. SWB: What she said reminded me of this column I read a couple of years ago. It’s an advice column called Dear Sugar that Cheryl Strayed used to run. She wrote a response to somebody who asked, like, I’m thinking about having kids, I’m in my late thirties or forty-ish or something like that, and I don’t know if I should, but I think I might regret it. And this person felt like having kids because they thought they might regret not having kids was a bad idea. Now, I don’t have kids. I’m not planning to have kids. But this column really stuck with me, because the way she responded to it, she was like, you know, thinking about your future self and what you might regret is one of the only ways that you can kind of make sense of choices. And she was like, this is actually a really healthy way to look at, like, is this something that I’m going to wish I had done later on? Once you do make a decision, then you have to think of it as other lives that you chose not to lead. I think she called it “the ghost ship that did not carry me.” So it’s like this other ship that you could have been on, but you didn’t take. [35:00] And that would have been this other thing, and you can wave at it from the shore, but it’s not yours. So I think about that a lot when it comes to choices, whether it’s those big life choices, or the smaller day-to-day work choices: what are the ships that I’m choosing to be on? And as long as I’m thinking about where my gut is, and I’m thinking about what is going to be a positive thing for future me, I usually feel pretty good about it. JL: I think this is another habit thing, where the more you get used to making these decisions and being okay with them, the stronger you probably feel being like, this is okay and I’m going to go for this. SWB: Yeah, totally. I think that it’s hard at first to know what does trusting your gut even mean, right? And so I think about, how do I know that I’m trusting my gut? You know, if I start doing something where it’s like, “Ugh, I should really take this project on,” or, “I should really speak at this conference,” and then every time I go to, like, write the email that would be the saying yes email, I get knotted up and I don’t do it, I’ve started to slow down and say, wait a second, why am I sort of hemming and hawing about saying yes to that email? And usually it’s because I have some kind of reservation or misgiving. Versus there are times when people ask me to do something or I am presented with opportunities, and my heart is immediately in it. Now, sometimes I have to say no to those things too, because they don’t fit for one reason or another, but knowing that immediate response of opening yourself up to whatever’s in front of you, versus pushing it away, that means something. And it’s worth taking the time to figure out what your body’s telling you, where that’s coming from. And I think that’s the very beginning of trusting your gut. JL: And sometimes it’s not just about making a decision by yourself. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to find someone else to help you decide what’s next in your life. SWB: Let’s hear from Lara Hogan. Lara is an engineering leader who some of you may have heard of, because it seems like she’s everywhere these days. She was a VP at Kickstarter, and before that she was a senior manager at Etsy, but she’s up to something new, too. Let’s hear about it. LARA HOGAN: How did I know it was time to start something new? In part, it was meeting Deepa, my business partner. She’s just incredible, and with her by my side, I feel like I can do anything. And I also knew that this was the time once I realized, working full-time at a company, I have to do a lot of things all of the time [laughs] that may of course just not be what I want to specialize in. But it occurred to me that as a consultant, I could do the things that I really, really love all of the time, and bring that help and support to a lot of different companies. And that’s just really intriguing to me. SWB: Okay, first of all, I want a Deepa. [Laughter] KL: Yes. SWB: So, Deepa Subramaniam is Lara’s business partner, and they founded this company called Wherewithall, that is doing consulting work on product teams and engineering teams. But most importantly, me and Katel actually had dinner with them a couple of weeks back. And watching them interact with each other and talk about their work, and the way their faces just light up. It’s so great to seem them coming together and creating this thing that they clearly are really passionate about on the work side, but also just as partners. They really make sense and they get one another. I thought that was so great to see. I’ve mostly worked in different kinds of consulting arrangements. Sometimes, me and somebody else will partner up on a project or teach a workshop together, but I’ve never had that kind of long-term, we-are-business-partners thing set up. And I think it goes back to what we said earlier, around how we sometimes have to make our own colleagues. It’s like they’ve literally created a business that allows them to have that kind of collegial relationship. And I think that that’s really powerful and something that’s kind of scary for a lot of us to do—to, you know, make such a firm commitment. But it’s great when it works, right? KL: Yeah, it’s like you wish, you know, and sort of dream about finding your soul mates in your life partner and your best friends. And I feel like it’s becoming a lot more, you know, that this happens with work now, and it’s just really cool. Like, you can work on projects where you’re like, these are the kind of people I want to work with all the time. And then you know what that looks like. JL: Yeah, and I think it’s amazing. But there’s also like, half- and quarter-way points, too, right? So, I think, as you mentioned before, we don’t necessarily traditionally work on the same types of things, but I love both of you, so having chances to work with you is great. And I just remember, like Sara and I, when we were both doing a lot of public speaking, we would go out to happy hour or we would go out to dinner and we would just talk about public speaking things. And even though Sara and I would be talking about completely different things, the business of public speaking was something that we could both talk to and learn from each other. And talk about how we were doing things, how we were organizing, how we were charging. How we were going to do logistics of things—and having someone I could talk to about that was, like, totally priceless for me. [40:00] SWB: Yes! You know, I think that there’s a lot of pressure in culture at large and definitely within the tech industry, to kind of not talk about some of this stuff. For example, don’t talk about how much you charge for things and how much you make off of things. And I know that that can be a touchy and sensitive discussion but I really think that only benefits the people who have the most power. And that’s so problematic. That tends to disproportionately affect women and it tends to disproportionately affect people of color, and particularly disproportionately affects people who are women of color. And so I’m really a big proponent of having as many open and honest conversations about topics like compensation as possible. Because I really think that the fact that we haven’t had enough of those is part of the reason that we hear things like Becca’s statement earlier on, where she talked about the AIGA survey. Which is a designer’s survey showing that women at her level were making $20,000 less than men. It’s certainly not the only reason, but part of the reason that continues to go on unchecked, is because we’re encouraged not to talk about it. So I’m gonna fuckin’ talk about it. JL: Yeah, I wrote a post in, I don’t know, 2015? 2014?—“A Formula for Charging Speaker Fees”—and it’s about… SWB: Oh yeah! KL: It was great! JL: And it’s still, I mean, it’s probably the most visited blog post on the Nerdery. And I mean, that site hasn’t been updated in over a year, but we still get traffic from that post especially. People looking for how to charge, how do I put numbers around something, and so I was thrilled that people are still finding value in that. Because, for me, it was really valuable to talk about it. SWB: So that’s the kind of thing, I think, if you feel sort of isolated—and it’s not just about money, really—but if you feel isolated in your field, or if you feel like you don’t know who you can trust, then you can never really get to a place where you have the confidence to then have that conversation with the people the really matter. KL: Or if you’re just starting out. SWB: Totally. KL: That’s a whole group of people who—like, I wouldn’t even know where to start if I was doing it for the first time and I just had no idea. If I had no idea what to base it off of. So if I found a resource that was helpful like that, it would be so valuable. SWB: Yeah and I think, you know, especially since things like money conversations—it’s like if you try to have one and you’re not that confident about it and you don’t really have any context. If you get pushback, it’s really easy to believe that you’re getting pushback because you were asking for too much. And you don’t have a frame of reference. So, anyway, I think building those relationships to give you more context and get more insight and feedback and, just like you have someone to bounce everything off of—it’s so valuable. I’m really happy to hear people like Deepa and Lara are teaming up because I think that the more of these kinds of powerful relationships between people that exist out there, the stronger any industry is going to be. JL: Completely, yeah. I think that finding advocates in your peers and finding that partnership is so important and valuable. SWB: A lot of the folks we talked to—they were kind of moving from working at a company to starting their own thing. Or otherwise kind of shifting gears in that more consultative way. Jenn, you went from consulting to going back in-house and then you had a baby, so you had kind of different sort of year with a lot of new stuff. But I’m curious: what did that look like for you and what made that work for you at this moment in your life? JL: You bring up a good point, Sara. I think a lot of times, we often say like, “oh i’m starting something new,” and it’s always about quitting your job. And I did that, as I mentioned before. SWB: Quitting your job can be great, let’s not lie about that. But it’s not always great. And it’s not always what you want. JL: And it was what I wanted for a really long time. And I think one of the hardest things for me, because of the vision that comes along with that—the freedom, the working from home, the yoga pants, the ability to do anything you want, essentially, is awesome. And then for me to recognize, you know, what was also awesome, was going back to a full time job. I started consulting for Anthropologie and I worked onsite a couple days a week and I was really enjoying it. I enjoyed the work I was doing, I enjoyed being in-house again, and I really enjoyed working on product as opposed—it was a different change from agency life. And I thought that that was such a nice change—and there was part of me that was really hesitant to go back full time. And, they’d offered the full time work, I still wasn’t sure, and I think part of it was just because I thought what I was supposed to do, was stay consulting. You know, I’d already quit my job—why would I ever go back!? [45:00] And then, I realized for me, that the full time job gave me a lot of stability, in that, in order to try new things such as: BABY. [Laughter] JL: For me, I always like to have at least one or two maybe, super stable things in my life when I try something new. When I first quit my job, I had a very stable relationship—now with my husband, also stable friendships, a lot of stable colleagues, that were really allowing me to try something new. Now I had again, this stability, that was like, ok, I feel pretty great—maybe I’ll go and try this new-fangled baby thing that I hear people talk about. And it was really great to have the support of the people that I work with, also, at the time, figuring out things like maternity leave, figuring out how to make the balance before I went on maternity leave. And so, going back for me, was like a little bit of a hard move but something that I knew was right for me at the time. And something that I really wanted to see through. Will I be full-time forever, I’m not sure! But for right now, I’m enjoying a lot about it. SWB: Yeah, I think that when people start a business or move to doing consulting or something like that, that’s often this sense of like, if they ever change course from that, I think it gets perceived—or there’s a fear that it’ll be perceived—as failure in some way. Or like taking a step backwards. And of course, life’s not really like that, right? There are times when something makes a lot of sense and times when it doesn’t. And I think that’s part of the thing I’m really interested in exploring more in this show. How do we figure out the next steps that are right for us, that allow us to continue to grow. And to try not to buy into some of those bullshit stories about what it means to be successful. For example, none of us have a goal of being tech company founders who go out and get a bunch of venture capital so that we can be the next unicorn company worth a billion dollars. I mean, I guess having a billion dollars sounds—no, I’m sorry, having a billion dollars actually sounds awful. It sounds truly terrible. Because I look at the people who are making that their kind of dream they’re chasing—and I think, would I be happier? I don’t think so. Would I be creating a better world? Probably not. What is really the draw of that except for the idea that it’s what a picture of what success looks like. And I think what I’m hoping we can do here is really talk about of different types of success. JL: Yeah, it’s like, when is the right time for you to do these options that we have. And you know, we’re so lucky that we have options, especially in the tech field where you have a lot of abilities to work agency, to work product, to go consulting. Lots of different options. So I think it’s as you said, not a one size fits all and not always a one size fits all for this time frame forever. SWB: So I know that having a baby was a big new thing, but I also know something that you told me when you were still kind of getting embedded in that job was that it was—and I think you mentioned it a little. You said it was a chance to work on product, which you hadn’t done before. And it you were telling me a lot about some of the challenges of working at scale at this big e-commerce company and all this stuff that was a little bit new. And I’m curious, do you feel like—not only did you create this stability for your but have you also been growing professionally in this new job? JL: Yeah, sure. I think one of the things that was really neat, as you mentioned—working not only at CSS architecture at scale, but also taking on management responsibilities. So consulting, I managed myself, and sometimes some other members of teams. But generally now I’m in a position where I have direct reports. I’m working more in the engineering team and helping people with their career paths again, is really interesting to me and definitely a new challenge. Managing is hard. SWB: People! You know? KL: People are wonderful, and hard, and wonderful, and hard. JL: Exactly. So it’s rewarding in a whole new way and challenging in a whole new way. I haven’t managed since before I was consulting, so it was fun to take that on again. But also just something completely new—it’s nice to see that at this point in my career, these different kind of challenges. But that said, focusing a lot on both the management and the architecture also sort of left this gap where I wasn’t doing as many of the things I was doing before with side projects. So trying to figure out—it’s again, facing this sort of similar thing as I had before, where I’m not burnt out on what I’m doing—there’s just something I love and I miss doing that also. So how do I also get this thing that I love in my life somehow. But not at the same scale as before. Because like I mentioned, it’s that balance. And it all comes down to scale again. Where, I don’t want to quit and got consulting and go travel all over the place again all of the time because I want to be home with some level of stability. But I want new projects also, so talking to both of you was really neat because then the idea of starting something new with this podcast came up. And this, for me, is so exciting, because it acts as an outlet to do a lot of things I loved doing in side projects while still maintaining a lot of this new stability that I found in my life. Fuck Yeah of the Week [50:15] SWB: You know when your friend gets an awesome new job, or publishes an amazing article, or finally pays off their student loans, and you’re so excited that you keep texting them in just like all caps and the fire emoji over and over again? Well, that’s the next segment here, it’s called the Fuck Yeah of the Week—and it’s where we share the people and the things that we think you all should be celebrating. Think of it as the podcast form of the 100 emoji. So Jenn, who is our very first Fuck Yeah of the Week? JL: Well, Sara, I’m gonna go ahead and say, it’s US! Fuck Yeah, Us! KL: Fuck Yeah, YES! JL: You know, I think sometimes you gotta take those moments and celebrate yourself, and I think we should be celebrating ourselves for getting this thing up and running! Here we are, we’ve talked about this idea, and now we are actually in the room recording it, ladies—we’re doing it! SWB: Yeah! JL: It’s awesome. SWB: You know, earlier we heard from Lara Hogan about her, you know, new business and all of that. But this reminds me so much of something that she started writing about years ago. She has a whole site about this—it’s Lara Hogan’s donut site, I don’t know what it’s called. But basically, what she does, is she celebrates every career achievement with a donut. And she started doing it because she realized that whenever something cool was happening, like she was getting a promotion, or she was accepted to give a talk somewhere, she would go, “ok, great,” and then move on to the next thing. And she wasn’t giving herself permission to celebrate that. So she started saying, “ok, every time something major happens, I’m gettin’ myself a donut.” And she takes a picture of it and she puts it on this website. And I think that that’s wonderful, because every time she has a new donut thing to celebrate, I’m like, “hell yeah, get that donut!” JL: Yeah! SWB: And I love that we’re able to do that for ourselves, too, because, yeah, I think we’re often taught to keep looking forward or don’t let yourself have too much of the limelight. And, I hope that anybody who’s listening to this can kind of give themselves a fuck yeah, too, for the things that they’re accomplishing. KL: Definitely, it’s so exciting to see how far Lara’s Tao of Donuts, essentially, has spread. Because you see other people taking photos, you know, of their donuts that they’ve gotten after speaking for the first time, or you know, doing a big demo. And that’s so cool, because you know it ties back to this thing that she, talked about, and that’s super cool. I hope that we see lots more photos of donuts, or your celebration. JL: Our second fuck yeah are these Olivia Pope wine glasses that we are drinking out of today. The Olivia Pope wine glass has always been, for me, my special donut moment. You know, on that show Scandal, when she drinks, and it just was like, “wow, where do I get a glass to just drown my sorrows or celebrate my joys.” Like, that is the glass that holds everything. They sell them at Crate & Barrel. Crate & Barrel is not one of our sponsors, but they could be. KL: They could be. [Laughter] SWB: Are you listening, Crate & Barrel? JL: But! I love these glasses because I take them out when I need to like, either, like, pause and be like, this is life right now, and this is just my moment to just like, take it all in. Be it good, be it bad. But like, here’s just a moment to pause and be like, “Fuck yeah, I got these glasses, and in this case, I got these friends, and I’ve got this wine, and I’ve got this podcast, so, it’s pretty good.” SWB: You know, if you haven’t seen an Olivia Pope wine glass, first off, it’s going to be in the show notes, but if you Google “Olivia Pope wine glass,” you know exactly—immediately—what we’re talking about. KL: It’ll be on our Instagram. SWB: But what’s really key about the Olivia Pope wine glass, is that it’s got a big glass, but it’s also on this long, really slender stem. It’s like a big-deal wine glass. It’s not just like, “Oh I’m having a quick glass of wine.” It’s very much like, “I am having wine now, period.” And, I like that because it does—it kind of creates that space, right? Like, you were saying, Jenn, it’s not just like that you’re going to pour yourself a quick glass. It’s that you’re pausing and taking a moment and you’re allowing yourself to have that bit of joy. And I think that that’s really important, even though, normally I don’t trust myself to use the Olivia Pope wine glass on the regular, but I want them to exist in the world. JL: That’s why I have six of them. [Laughter] KL: They’re great, because they have presence, yet they’re elegant. SWB: So, just like us? JL: Mhmm. SWB: That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia. Our theme music is by Philly’s own The Diaphone, from a song called Maths. In this episode, you heard Becca Gurney, Jenn Schiffer, Mina Markham and Lara Hogan. We’ll be back next week with Episode 2. [55:00] KL: Until then, we leave you with this advice from Sam Kapila, a designer and educator who’s always up to something new: SAM KAPILA: I know it’s time to start something new when I’m a little bit scared….the good sort of scared that inspires me to want to explore something new in a project, or in a job, or scared in a way that you might surprise yourself. It’s also important to start something new when you can’t stop thinking about a certain idea, and it keeps you up at night. It’s in your 3am journal on your bedside, and it’s something that you just can’t wait to start doing and be really proud of. And I think, any time you can be proud of something you are doing, that’s definitely time to start something new.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you were able to enjoy some R&R, and spend some time with friends and family. To kick of a great new slate of guests in 2018, I'm very excited to welcome Jenn Schiffer to the... The post Episode #109: Jenn Schiffer appeared first on PolicyViz.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you were able to enjoy some R&R, and spend some time with friends and family. To kick of a great new slate of guests in 2018, I'm very excited to welcome Jenn Schiffer to the... The post Episode #109: Jenn Schiffer appeared first on PolicyViz.

Most website visitors aren’t human. They’re bots. And these automated accounts are having serious, real-world impact; from the 2016 election to the FCC’s recent, controversial net neutrality vote. Veronica Belmont investigates the rise of social media bots with Lauren Kunze and Jenn Schiffer. Lisa-Maria Neudert measures how bots influence politics. Butter.ai’s Jack Hirsch talks about what happens when your profile is stolen by a political bot. Ben Nimmo teaches us how to spot and take down bot armies. And Tim Hwang explores how bots can connect us in surprising, and meaningful, new ways. IRL is an original podcast from Mozilla. For more on the series go to irlpodcast.org Bots, they’re just like you and me. Except easier to find, especially on Twitter. :) Here’s a handy guide to spotting bots in social media, plus the answers to the bot-or-not quiz you heard on the episode. Leave a rating or review in Apple Podcasts so we know what you think.

Today's episode is a real scream. Recorded in a haunted house, this week's host is longtime podcast friend Anil Dash, joined by Fog Creek's Jenn Schiffer, Stack Overflow engineering manager Matt Sherman, news editor Ilana Yitzhaki, and executive producer Kaitlin Pike. Special guest is Leon Young of Cogniss.

Today's episode is a real scream. Recorded in a haunted house, this week's host is longtime podcast friend Anil Dash, joined by Fog Creek's Jenn Schiffer, Stack Overflow engineering manager Matt Sherman, news editor Ilana Yitzhaki, and executive producer Kaitlin Pike. Special guest is Leon Young of Cogniss.

Building a community for developers: this week Paul and Gina talk to Jenn Schiffer, community engineer at Fog Creek’s Glitch, a platform for developers to write, share, and remix code that is, in Jenn’s words, helping to “lower the barriers for developers to build great things.” Topics discussed include development frameworks, how coding is taught, cultures of harassment online and in the tech world, and the (sort of mindblowing!) way a bloomin’ onion is made.

Creating products like make8bitart.com and glitch.com to lower the barrier to get new people into programming.

Mikeal Rogers, Alex Sexton, and Rachel White discuss PWAs (Progressive Web Apps), Service Workers, and Time in JavaScript. Jenn Schiffer also joined the show to talk about Glitch, our project of the week.

Mikeal Rogers, Alex Sexton, and Rachel White discuss PWAs (Progressive Web Apps), Service Workers, and Time in JavaScript. Jenn Schiffer also joined the show to talk about Glitch, our project of the week.

Animal of the week ... Kea. Raquel is back from nz.js. Wikileaks happened. Uber just can't help it. Lots of JS news from Kahlil: webpack, cycle.js, Rails loves JS, Hoodie.js and Quokka.js. Jenn Schiffer has a new job!

On this week's episode, Jenn Schiffer - aka jennmoneydollars - talks to us about joining Fog Creek as the company's new Community Engineer. She'll be focused on their brand new community, Glitch, which launched today. The gang also listens to Joel rant a lot about a shack he owns.

On this week's episode, Jenn Schiffer - aka jennmoneydollars - talks to us about joining Fog Creek as the company's new Community Engineer. She'll be focused on their brand new community, Glitch, which launched today. The gang also listens to Joel rant a lot about a shack he owns.

00:16 – Welcome to “Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!” 01:15 – Origin Story Bocoup (https://bocoup.com/) 03:05 – Art (http://jennmoney.biz/art/) 06:37 – Viewing Source and Learning How to Code 11:02 – Getting a Computer Science Degree 13:56 – Pixel Art, Sexuality in Tech, and Online Presence @aphyr (https://twitter.com/aphyr) (Kyle Kingsbury) Ashley Madison Data Breach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach) 26:54 – How do potential employers react to your satire? 28:41 – CSS Perverts (https://medium.com/cool-code-pal) 36:03 – Vetting Potential Employers and Company Culture; Dealing with Toxic People Takeaways: Jessica: Everyone has something that they keep quiet about because they aren’t sure of the consequences. Coraline: Being privileged enough to have the responsibility to be public and show people that it’s okay that they are who they are. Astrid: You don’t have to separate your passions. Jenn: We all need a space to feel uninhibited. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode). To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Jenn Schiffer.

Alligators are awesome. Raquel was in Iceland. Electron continues to be awesome. Aliens are signaling us. Pokémon GO may be over. Some follow-up on Functors. Uber is experimenting with autonomous cars. Jenn Schiffer has a new Medium article out. André Staltz explains pure functions in JavaScript.

The panelists talk to Jenn Schiffer about using art to get and keep people interested in programming.

The panelists talk to Jenn Schiffer about using art to get and keep people interested in programming.

The panelists talk to Jenn Schiffer about using art to get and keep people interested in programming.

Engineer and artist Jenn Schiffer talks to us about the Vart Institute, the side project that blends her love of art with her love of javascript. We dive into how she brings those two worlds together, what the difference is between teaching an eight-year old and an eighty-year old how to code (she’s taught both), and about her experience working on the academic side of computer science. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Make 8 Bit Art IRC Montclair State University Casper the Friendly Ghost Ev Williams Sudoku Java Pig Latin iGoogle Impostor Syndrome Uber Mary Cassatt Codeland Conf Codeland 2019

AKA: podcast title link bait! Let’s dig into public speaking with JavaScript-maker, art-maker, writing-maker: Jenn Schiffer! Jenn started in public speaking through teaching and then explains how she made the adjustment to speaking at conferences and how that’s been awesome. We also talk about how the lack of meetups near Jenn in North Jersey led […]The post Jenn Schiffer On Why PHP is the Best Conference Subject appeared first on Ladies in Tech Podcast Feed.