Podcast appearances and mentions of Kathy Sierra

Is Agile still relevant in today’s fast-paced world? Brian and Joshua Kerievsky reveal the four game-changing principles of Modern Agile that prioritize safety, empowerment, and continuous value delivery. Overview In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with Joshua Kerievsky, a pioneer in the Agile community and the creator of Modern Agile. They discuss how Agile practices have evolved, the critical role of safety and empowerment, and how to deliver value continuously in today’s fast-paced world. Don’t miss these insights into creating better teams, products, and results through simplicity and experimentation. References and resources mentioned in the show: Joshua Kerievsky Industrial Logic Joy of Agility by Joshua Kerievsky Modern Agile #33 Mob Programming with Woody Zuill #51: The Secrets of Team Safety with Julie Chickering Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Experimentation Matter: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation by Stefan H. Thomke Agile For Leaders Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course Accurate Agile Planning Course Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Joshua Kerievsky is the founder and CEO of Industrial Logic and author of Joy of Agility. An early pioneer of Extreme Programming, Lean Software Development, and Lean Startup, Joshua is passionate about helping people achieve genuine agility through principle-based approaches like Modern Agile. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back. And this is another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here as I always am. I am Brian Milner and today I am joined by Joshua Kerievsky and really excited to have Joshua here with us. Welcome in Joshua. Joshua Kerievsky (00:16) Thank you so much, Brian. Happy to be here. Brian (00:19) Very excited for Joshua to be here. Joshua's been around for a while. He's been doing this for a long time. He said, you know, when we were talking before, and he's been involved with Agile before, it was called Agile. And, you know, that probably tells you all you need to know there. But a couple other things here about him, just so that you kind of can place him a little bit. His company is Industrial Logic, Inc. and he's the CEO and founder of that company. He has a book called Joy of Agility that's out there that I highly recommend. It's a really great book. And he's also closely associated with something that maybe you've been aware of, maybe you've heard of, maybe you haven't, but something called Modern Agile. And that's what I thought we'd focus on here for our discussion is really to try to understand a little bit about it. especially for those of you, maybe you haven't heard of it, haven't been around it before. So... Why don't we start there, Joshua? Tell us a little bit about what was the need that was trying to be filled with something like modern Agile. Joshua Kerievsky (01:19) Well, it goes back to a conference I attended in Prague back in around 2015. And I was giving a speech, a keynote speech there, and that ended. And then I went and said, well, I'm going to go join the OpenSpace. And I was just looking at what people were talking about at the OpenSpace. And at that point in time, I had already been experimenting with a ton of stuff that just kind of different from what we had been doing 10 years earlier or even later than that. I mean, just this was new things that we were doing, whether it was continuous deployment or ideas from lean startup or ideas from the pop and dykes and lean concepts applied to agility or just a lot of things that were just different. And none of the sessions I was seeing in the open space seemed to be talking about any of that stuff, like giving up story points or moving away from sprints until continuous flow. just nothing was being talked about. So I just said, well, I'm going to host a session, and I'll call it, I don't know, a modern Agile. And so that's as far as I got in terms of thinking about the name. I just wanted to run a session where we could talk about, there's a lot of new things we're doing that kind of display some of the older ideas. And they're very useful, I found. So the session ended up getting a lot of attention. 60, 70 people showed up there. So we had a big group. And it was well received. People were fascinated by the stuff that they weren't aware of. And so I then repeated this open space event in Berkeley. Like a month later, was Agile Open Door Cal in Berkeley was running and did it again. And again, there was tremendous interest. in this, so much so that I decided to write a blog and wrote the blog and started getting more conversations happening. And that sort of began the movement of describing this thing called Modern Agile. And it took a few twists and turns in the beginning, but it wasn't sort of, I guess, if anything, I felt like Agile needed to be a little more simple. in terms of what we were explaining, because it was starting to get very complex with frameworks, enterprise frameworks coming along like safe and just too many moving parts. And so what ended up happening is I wrote some things and people started to notice, there's kind of like four things there that are really valuable. One of them was The names changed a little bit over time. But anyway, what ended up was four principles emerged. And that really became modern Agile. Brian (03:58) That's awesome. just for listeners here, I've pitched attending conferences in the past. If you've listened to this podcast, you've heard me say that, and I'll create things come out of that. And here's an example, right? This is something that was open space discussion. Open space, if you're not familiar with that, at conferences, can, if there's an open space day or a couple of days, then anyone can present any topic they want. And whoever shows up is who shows up. And this one got a lot of attention. And a movement grew from this open space topic, which is awesome. So let's talk. You mentioned there's four principles here. And I like the distinction here we're making also between the frameworks and the practices versus the cultural aspects or the philosophy behind it. And returning to those roots a little bit more from what Agile originally was. So you mentioned there's kind of four areas of this. Let's walk our way through those. I know the first one, or one of the first ones here is make people awesome. So help us understand, what do you mean by make people awesome? Joshua Kerievsky (04:59) Probably the most controversial of principles, because you'll get people coming along saying, wait a minute, people are already awesome. What are you talking about? And it comes from my, I'm a big fan of Kathy Sierra. And her blog was incredible. And her book, she wrote a book called Badass, Making Users Awesome. And in her book, she was really wonderfully clear about Brian (05:07) You Joshua Kerievsky (05:24) that teams that build products ought to focus on the user of the products more than the product itself. In other words, she would say, don't try to create the world's best camera. Try to create the world's best photographers. Big subtle difference there. Like that is focusing so much on empowering the users, making them awesome at their work or whatever they're doing, whether it's art or accounting or whatever, whatever your product does, how can you give them something that elevates their skills, that gets them to a point of awesomeness faster? And that's what she was talking about. So I thought, what a wonderful message. And initially, I used language like make users awesome. you know, having been an entrepreneur myself and created products and sold them and You learn a heck of a lot when you make your own product. And we've made several products over the years at Industrial Logic, probably the most successful of which was our e-learning software. And that has taught me so many, so many lessons. One of them is you have to serve an ecosystem of people. You can't just make your main user awesome. What about the person who's buying the software? How do you make them awesome in terms of helping them buy something that's going to get used? If they buy your e-learning and they never use it, they've wasted a lot of money. So we've got to make sure that their reputation is intact because they made an excellent investment and it got used and it got into valuable, it created value in the company. So how do I make the buyer awesome? How do I make the person that like rolls out the licenses to people awesome? How do I make their experience awesome? How do I make my colleagues awesome so that we love what we're doing and really enjoy working together? So it kind of morphed from make users awesome to make people awesome. And it's so expanded. If anything, we set the bar higher. And all of the principles of modern agile are like unachievable. They're all kind of high bars, right? But they're the goal that we go towards. So that really is it. It's about creating Brian (07:23) Ha Joshua Kerievsky (07:35) you know, wonderful, you know, the in Great Britain, they use awesome kind of sarcastically sometimes, right? They'll say, well, that's awesome. You know, and so for them, it would be brilliant. You know, I thought of making an English version. We have many translations of modern agile, and I thought of making an English version, which would be a proper British English version, make people brilliant. But it's meant to be to empower folks to give them something. And it's so it is. Brian (07:43) Ha You Joshua Kerievsky (08:04) It does have a product focus in the sense of we're typically building a system or a product that someone's going to use and it's going to give them skills they didn't have before or abilities they didn't have before that are going to be very valuable. Brian (08:18) Yeah, I love that. And there's a sort of a servant nature to that servant leaders, not servant leadership as much, but servant nature of I'm serving these people and how do I, how do I serve them in a way that really empowers them? Kind of reminds me of like, you know, the, the great principle with, with dev ops of just, know, if I can, if I can empower the developers to be able to do these things on their own. And so they don't need someone else to come and check the box and do everything for them. You're making them awesome. You're empowering them to be more than they were otherwise. Joshua Kerievsky (08:54) Yes, yes, absolutely. I I think we've seen a history in the software field of a lot of tools coming along and helping. It's not just tools, it's also methods as well. I mean, I'm entirely grateful to the Agile software development movement because it helped nudge everything towards a far better way of working and to make us more awesome at our craft. yeah, you have to have a North Star though. If you're going to build something, You have to know, what are we going for here? What are we shooting for? And with Cathy's influence, again, it's not so much make the greatest product in the world. It's, that focus on the users, the people who are going to be using the work, using the product. Brian (09:34) That's really good. Let's talk about the second one then on my list here, the make safety a prerequisite. What was the point here behind this principle? Joshua Kerievsky (09:40) Yes. So starting probably around 2011 or so, I could not stand going to the Agile Conference anymore. It had just become too commercial and too filled with just people hocking stuff. And it just was bothering me too much. I couldn't go. So I ended up going to South by Southwest, which is an Brian (09:54) You Joshua Kerievsky (10:09) Enormous conference tens of thousands of people show up So it'd be 20,000 30,000 40,000 people showing up for these for this event, which is musical film technology just it's just wild and I came across this book by Charles Duhigg called the power of habit. He was there that year and In that book. Well, first of all that particular year was 2012 that I went my first year there it poured The rain, it was every day, it was unusual for that time, but it was just like pouring rain. So what could you do? I bought some books and I was sitting there in my room reading them. And I'm reading this book, The Power of Habit, and I come across this chapter called The Ballad of Paul O'Neill. Now who the heck's Paul O'Neill? Well, it turns out Paul O'Neill is this incredible guy, a complete business maverick. He ended up becoming the treasury secretary under Bush and not. in 2000 for a short period of time, but that's another story. And he ran Alcoa for about 13 or 14 years. And so the Ballot of Paul O'Neill is very much about what he did at Alcoa to turn the company around. And in essence, you could say he made safety a prerequisite. That safety was his guiding light in turning that company around, which meant left people empowered to do all kinds of things. So it went way beyond safety, but started there. And it's an incredible story. I've written about it in Joy of Agility. I got so into Paul O'Neill that I ended up interviewing his main lieutenant. And then I got a chance to interview him a couple of times. the man's a genius. He passed away a few years back. Absolute genius. this concept of safety started to really pull at me in the sense that I felt, first of all, extreme programming, and I'm a big practitioner of extreme programming, brings a tremendous amount of safety to software development. It may not be as explicit in saying safety, safety, safety. When you look at extreme programming, doesn't really talk about safety, but it's implicit. And these days, Kent Beck's much more vocal about, you One of his missions is to make software development safer for geeks. But safety to me is almost like I found my home. Like safety was something that, what I learned through Paul O'Neill was that it's a doorway to excellence. And he transformed a hundred year old company with safety. I would complain about companies we were working with that were 25 years old and had an embedded culture. Like, how are we gonna change this company? But safety started to be this thing that I hadn't really thought enough about, and making it explicit opened up a lot of doors, right? And I became very interested in the work of Amy Edmondson, who's extremely famous today, but back then she was not so famous. And huge fan of hers. I, you know, I can email her and she'll email me back and she wrote a nice thing about my book. So. She has done some incredible work there. And so when we talk about safety in modern agile, it's psychological safety. It's financial safety. It's any of the safeties. There are many safeties that we could talk about. And it looks at all of them, right? It's brand safety, software safety in terms of security. you know, of the software and on and on and on. So make safety prerequisite is vast and big in terms of what we're trying to do there. Making it a prerequisite means it's not an afterthought and it's not a priority that shifts with the winds. It is permanent. It is something that we know we have to have in place. And it's very, very hard to achieve. Just like make people awesome is hard to achieve. Boy, is make safety a prerequisite difficult. Brian (13:43) Hmm. Yeah, I love Amy Edmondson's work as well. I'm just kind of curious. does the safety kind of inclusive of things like quality as well? Do you intend that to be part of what you mean by safety? Joshua Kerievsky (14:11) Well, mean, to the extent that it makes it safer to do good software development. So if bugs are happening all the time, you can't make people awesome, typically if you don't have quality. If you have really poor quality, nobody's being made awesome. They're experiencing all kinds of problems with your product. So make people awesome and make safety a prerequisite are very much tied together. That is, there is no real excellence without safety. You could think you're having an excellent experience, so that all of a sudden there's a major problem, and boy, are you unhappy. So they really go hand in hand. You could have the most incredible restaurant, and then one day you've got food poisoning happening. Great, no one's come to your restaurant. So you will not make anyone awesome if you don't make safety a prerequisite, and quality is part of that. Brian (14:57) Awesome. Well, let's move on to the next one then, because the next category is one that just resonates with me a lot. Experiment and learn rapidly. What was kind of the thought behind this one? Joshua Kerievsky (15:06) Yeah, and this is one where it that's shorthand, if you will, because you can only fit so many words on a wheel there. But it's important to know that that really means experiment rapidly and learn rapidly. And that comes a lot out of it in the influences of something like Lean Startup. I'm a huge fan of that book and of Eric's work, Eric Reese's work. Brian (15:13) Ha Joshua Kerievsky (15:29) And the fact that we can experiment rapidly and learn rapidly rather than just building everything and then learning slowly. Right? How can we do cheap experiments quickly to decide what's important to work on and what isn't? Let's not build stuff nobody wants. Let's find more time with our customers and understand their needs better so we can build the right things that make them awesome. In other words, and a lot of these are interconnected. In many respects, modern Agile is a Venn diagram. ideally want all four principles to be overlapping. And right there in that middle is where you really want to be. Not easy. But experimenting, learning rapidly, yeah. So challenge yourself to find ways to do quick, cheap, useful experiments. You can do lot of unuseful experiments. Amazon experienced that. There's a story in my book about how Amazon had to start just shepherding the experiments a little more and having some better criteria. Because you could do an endless array of experiments and not get anywhere. There's a wonderful book called Experimentation Matters by a Harvard business professor. Wonderful book as well. But I love experimentation and learning. And I see it as critical to building great products. So that's that principle there. Brian (16:46) Yeah, there's a real difference, I think, in organizations that put value on that learning process. if you see it as a valuable thing, that we invest time to gain knowledge, then that really can truly make an impact when you go forward. I know I've talked about this in classes sometimes where people will say, isn't it a little bit selfish from the organization to try to always just figure out what's going to sell the best? or what's going to work the best in advance of putting something out. My response is always, well, yes, there is a benefit to the business, but there's a benefit to the customer as well because they would rather you work on things that they care more about. Joshua Kerievsky (17:24) That's right. Yeah. I mean, we once put out an experimental product to a large automotive company. And we were really excited about it. We had a whole list of features we wanted to add to it. But we were like, you know what? Let's just get this primitive version kind of in their hands just to see what happens. it turned out that we learned very rapidly that they couldn't run the software at all. There was some proxy. that was preventing communication with our servers from their environment. So it was like, excellent. We learned really quickly that instead of those fancy new features we want to add to this thing, we're going to fix the proxy problem. And to me, that's the nature of evolutionary design is that we create something, get it out there quickly, and learn from it rapidly and evolve it. So it goes hand in hand with that as well. Brian (18:11) That's awesome. Well, there's one category left then, and that is deliver value continuously. So what was the genesis of that? Thinking about delivering value continuously. Joshua Kerievsky (18:19) So that was heavily influenced by my own journey into continuous delivery and continuous deployment and that whole world. We got into that very early. I was lucky enough to catch a video by Timothy Fritz, who he worked with Eric at IMBU. And he coined the term continuous deployment. And that video is actually no longer on the Brian (18:43) Ha Joshua Kerievsky (18:44) But this was something that I became enamored of was doing continuous deployment. And we started doing it at Industrial Logic with our own e-learning software back in about 2010. And by the time you get to like 2015, it's like, hey folks, there's this thing where you can do a little bit of work and ship it immediately to production in a very safe way, a safe deployment pipeline. It's friggin' awesome. But the principle doesn't just apply to that because this modern agile is not just about software development. It's how can I work in a way that gets value in front of people as fast as possible? So for example, if I'm working on a proposal, great, I'm not going to work for two weeks and then show you something. I'm going to put something together, a skeleton, I'm going to show it to you and say, what do you think? Does this add value? Where would we improve this? Blah, blah, Again, going hand in hand with evolutionary design. continuous delivery of value is something that is a way of working. With artists that I work with, they'll do a quick sketch or two or three sketches of something first before we start settling in on which one do we like the best and how do we want to craft and refine that. So there's a way of working in which you're delivering value much more finely grained and approaching continuously instead of in bigger batches. Brian (20:05) Yeah. I love the connection there between artists as well, because I've got a background in music, and I'm thinking about how when you go to write a song or create a new work like that, you start off with the roughest of demo tapes, and you move from there to increasingly more sophisticated versions of it until you finally have the finished product. But no one thinks that's strange or thinks that's weird in any way. But you're right. Sometimes there's this attitude or kind of I think in some organizations of, we can't let anyone see that until it's absolutely finished, until it's done. Joshua Kerievsky (20:39) Yeah, yeah, and that maybe that's that there's some fear there, you know, because they don't want to be thought of as, you know, being lesser because they put something rough in front of someone. Whereas I view it as a, you know, to me, it's a sign of weakness when you when you only send something polished because you haven't had the courage or the sense of safety to put something rough where we can make better decisions together early on. So. There's a lot of learning, I think, around that. But it's a challenging principle of its own, deliver value continuously. And people would say, well, what does value mean? Value is one of those words where it's unclear, because you could improve the internal design of a software system. Is that value? It probably is. But you've got to be able to quantify it or prove that it's going to help make things more graceful in terms of flowing features out. yeah, quantifying, communicating what the value is. is important. I'm also a big fan of maximizing the amount of work not done, as it says in the manifesto. So how can we do less and deliver more sooner? Our motto in industrial logic now is better software sooner. And a lot of these principles go straight into that. that drives it. Brian (21:38) Yeah. That's really great. Yeah, I love these four principles and I think that they really represent a lot. There's a lot that's baked into each one of these things. And I'm sure as you kind of put this together with the community and started to talk more about it, I'm sure there were some challenges. I'm sure people came up to you and said, well, what about and how about this? Is there anything now looking back on this that you'd say, gosh, we really... really didn't quite cover this or, know, this is maybe I could fudge it and squeeze it in this area, but you know, there's this other thing that I really think would be important to kind of mention here as well. Joshua Kerievsky (22:28) Well, you know, it's funny, because I thought I was going to write a book. I started collecting stories. I love telling stories, and I find stories to be a great way to help educate people. Not the only way, right? But as part of some of the workshops I give, you tell a story. Hopefully it's a story that's sticky, that sticks in the person's brain. And over the years, I collected stories like that, stories of agility. I thought I'd be writing a book about modern agile when I started writing Joy of Agility. Gradually, as I wrote more and more stories, they didn't quite fit into all those four principles. And I think the lesson I learned there was that I was starting to talk about what pure Agile means, the word Agile. What does it really mean to be Agile? Whereas modern Agile is really almost in the context of product development, of building services or products for people. Whereas Agile itself is even more pure. And so the... the book itself got into the difference between quickness and hurrying, which you can relate to this. You could say experiment and learn rapidly. Well, OK, maybe we shouldn't rush it. Don't rush. Be quick, but don't hurry is one of the mantras in Joy of Agility. So adapting, right? Adapting, we talk about adapting all the time. So to be agile, you need to be able to adapt quickly. These four principles in modern agile don't say anything about adapting. Brian (23:46) Ha Joshua Kerievsky (23:48) So that's kind of implied, but it's not there. So it's a different lens on agility. If anything, I'd say the make people awesome principles are not meant to. It created some dislike, I'd say, from some people. It could have been called empower people, potentially, although a lot of people really love make people awesome. I don't know so much what I'd change there. I'd say we have a .org. So it's a modernagile.org is a website. There's a pretty large Slack community, which, know, four or 5,000 people on that. We don't certify anyone in modern agile, so there's no certifications, but it's something that is neutral in the sense that whether you practice Scrum or Kanban or Safe or whatever, these principles can influence you. And, you know, but again, this all came out of like, when I went to that open space conference in Prague, I had no idea I was going to talk about modern agile. You know, it was not like a predetermined thing. It was just like, my God, they're not talking about the modern ways we're doing stuff. So, and I always encourage people to, you know, keep pushing the limits and keep modernizing. I said to my own company the other day, our wonderful ways of working that we've been doing now for years that have evolved, they're probably antiquated as of today. You know, with generative AI, what would we do differently? Let's have a perspective on our own work as it needs to be modernized constantly. So the term modern in modern agile means always be modernizing, always be looking. Okay, I've had people say, well, Josh, some things don't need to be modernized. There's things that are just evergreen. They're classic. I'm like, absolutely. I'm not changing evolutionary design anytime soon. I find it to be quite useful in so many contexts. So yes, there's the evergreen stuff. And then there's the stuff where you can, indeed, discover a better way. The manifesto itself says, we are discovering better ways of working. Great. Keep that going. Keep modernizing and looking for easier, simpler, quick, easy grace. as the dictionary definition of Agile says, how can we work with quick, easy grace? That's always going to be improving, hopefully. Brian (26:12) Love that, yeah. And you're right, I mean, think there's some, to some people I think that there's, I guess at times an attitude of, you this is all new stuff or this is a brand new concept and something they don't really see the connection backwards in time to how these things are all built on other ideas that have been progressive over the years. So the idea of, yeah, this is, you know, we're, we're not saying that certain ideas are bad because now we're trying to modernize them. We're just saying we're trying to apply that same principle forward into kind of the context of today, which I don't see anyone should have a problem with that. Joshua Kerievsky (26:48) That's right. That's right. Well, and if you are experimenting and learning rapidly with your own process, which I highly encourage, chances are the way you work today will be different than it was yesterday. You will be exploring, like we use discovery trees today. We didn't use them before. Years ago, no one knew what a story map was. There wasn't such a thing as a story map. Now we have story maps. There's constant improvement happening. And you've got to be open-minded and willing to try new things and drop old stuff. We thought sprints and iterations and extreme programming was absolutely fundamentally part of the way to work. Then we started experimenting with dropping them and turned out, wow, this is pretty cool. We like this. It works pretty darn well for our purposes. That came through experimentation. some of our experiments were terrible, just terrible. It's not an experiment if you already know the outcome. keep pushing the limits of what can make you happier and more joyful at work in terms of producing great stuff. Brian (27:46) Awesome. That's great stuff. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on, Joshua. This is great stuff. just, you know, we'll put all the links to the books mentioned and everything else in our show notes for everybody. But as Joshua said, you can go to modernagile.org and find out more about this if you'd like to. You'll find information there about Joshua himself or his company again is Industrial Logic, Inc. And, you know, his book again, just to mention that, Joy of Agility. We were talking how some people get that title a little mixed up or whatever, but it's just the three words, joy of agility. So just look out for that book. I think you'll find it a rich resource for you. Joshua, thanks so much for coming on. Joshua Kerievsky (28:25) Thank you, Brian. Thanks to you. Thanks to Mountain Goat and the folks there. And I really appreciate chatting with you. It was really wonderful.

Start the Emotional Horsemanship Foundation Online Course here!https://www.emotionalhorsemanship.com/emotional-horsemanship-foundation-online-courseFind out more about Kathy here: https://www.intrinzen.horse/https://www.pantherflow.com/https://www.instagram.com/pantherflowshttps://www.instagram.com/intrinzen/Kathy Sierra is a self confessed controversial figure to the horse world, and for that reason and many others, I absolutely adore her.   In my opinion, Kathy Sierra is at least 50 years ahead of her time.    Kathy comes to horses from a unique multi-disciplinary background;  she majored in exercise physiology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and worked in the fitness industry for 10 years.  She graduated in computer programming from UCLA and then enjoyed a long career in silicone valley in tech, being a pioneer in digital technologies in the 1990's.  She has published books on computer programming and specialises in game design… where she became an international expert in the neuroendocrine physiology of PLAY and how to use it according to science to improve intrinsic motivation.   She has a deep interest in cognitive science driven from her own diagnosis of epilepsy.   After a long career in tech Kathy left that career after she fell victim to serious online harrassment that included doxing, death threats, doctored images of her face next to a noose posted on blogs and forums, and her threats were reported in the news.  After infamous and self professed internet trolls admitted their responsibility for the harassment to the New York Times, Kathy saw this as a sign to step back from her career in computer programming and technology.  The harassment was driven from of course, her pioneering and fearless approach to promoting the absolute best and most cutting edge information available to us… no matter whose feathers it may ruffle.   Kathy comes from a horsey family, her sister being a very dedicated dressage rider, and Kathy herself being a lifelong fan of the Icelandic breed.   She took her understanding of cognitive science, play science,  pain science and the mammalian neuroendocrine system and began a grassroots movement on instagram called at the time INTRINZEN she she presented scientifically cutting edge principals of the above and how it relates to horses.   using those principals her students then make unique implementations and adapatations to their horses.  Her work has the potential to completely throw out an outdated biomechanics model of horse training and usher in a new, more fun, more free, lesss fearful future of physical training and development of horses.   For this reason, she is often the persona non grata to many horse traiers and biomechanics experts because her wide and deep knowledge base cuts their work out at core as being based on bad science.   Kathy is a friend.  Someone who has always supported me, often at ties when nobody else did.  She is not someone whom I agree with on everything, but I don't need universal consensus to love, respect and learn from my colleagues.   It is my pleasure to present this conversation with Kathy on the podcast.  I have old conversations between us already up on Youtube, but this is a fresh one!  Enjoy! For more information check out www.emotionalhorsemanship.com!

Paul LaRoche shares his profound journey of discovery, from being adopted away from his Native American heritage to reconnecting with his biological Lakota family. Raised in a middle-class farming community, Paul's story unfolds as he learns about his true identity and the rich cultural legacy that was hidden from him. In this episode, Paul discovers the inspiring work of the Cherokee National Youth Choir. Founded in 2000, the choir plays a pivotal role in preserving the Cherokee language and culture through music. Directors Mary Kay Henderson and Kathy Sierra discuss the choir's mission, the selection process, and the impact of the choir on its young members. They share touching anecdotes of how music and cultural pride have transformed the lives of these young singers, fostering leadership and self-confidence. Join us as we explore the power of music in cultural preservation and the poignant stories of young Cherokee singers who carry their heritage forward with pride.

If you choose to listen to but a handful of my podcast episodes, please let this be one of them. The Instagram algorithms saw fit to bring me and Kathy together, and I can't help but feel that they actually got it right this time. Kathy's Instagram account may be dominated by pictures of horses, […]

Kathy Sierra is the creator/curator of Intrinzen and the Pain Science Workshop, and she's well known on Instagram as PantherFlows. Kathy has ten years working in human sports medicine as a training director in Los Angeles. She then went back to school for computer science, working after as a game developer and software architect. Kathy eventually worked in Hollywood and taught “interaction design for intrinsic motivation” at UCLA Entertainment Studies and Universal Studio, and went on to create an educational book series in technology that sold over 2 million copies. Horses have been a lifelong passion, but not her profession. However, when her beloved horse Draumur was nearly euthanized, Kathy felt it was her fault, so she took everything in her background on motivation, learning psychology, neuroscience, and movement science, and synthesized a path forward to help him when conventional methods failed. In this episode, we discuss movement motivation, the nervous system, pain science, and so much more.

This week Tim sits down with Paul Hudson, the man behind Hacking With Swift, 100 Days of Swift and 100 Days of SwiftUI. They discuss what's to be expected from WWDC 2023, attending iOS conferences and Paul's recent family trip to Canada.Support More Than Just Code podcast – iOS and Swift development, news and adviceHacking With SwiftKathy Sierra - WikipediaSwift Style, Second Edition: An Opinionated Guide to an Opinionated Language by Erica Sadunmary beard (@wmarybeard) / TwitterStopTheMadnessEleventh Doctor Meets the Tenth Doctor | The Day of the Doctor | Doctor Who Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/mtjc. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.gotopia.tech/bookclubRead the full transcription of the interview hereSteve McConnell - Author of “Code Complete” & CEO at Construx SoftwareJeffrey van Gogh - Director of Engineering at Google & Secretary of the Board at Kotlin FoundationRESOURCESstevemcconnell.comDESCRIPTIONWidely considered one of the best practical guides to programming, Steve McConnell's original “Code Complete” has been helping developers write better software for over three decades. The author's timeless techniques and strategies are still relevant in spite of the evolution of programming languages or the shift from waterfall to agile. He revises the impact these changes have had on the software environment together with Jeffrey Van Gogh, Director of Software Engineering at Google. They don't step away from covering some of the controversial subjects from the book and give relevant advice for programmers that are just entering this space.The interview is based on Steve's book "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction".RECOMMENDED BOOKSSteve McConnell • Code CompleteSteve McConnell • Software EstimationSteve McConnell • Rapid DevelopmentSteve McConnell • Professional Software DevelopmentTrisha Gee • Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEATrisha Gee, Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates • Head First JavaMichael Nygard • Release It! 2nd EditionFord, Richards, Sadalage & Dehghani • Software Architecture: The Hard PartsMartin Kleppmann • Designing Data-Intensive ApplicationsTwitterLinkedInFacebookLooking for a unique learning experience?Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.techSUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.gotopia.tech/bookclubRead the full transcription of the interview hereTrisha Gee - Lead Developer Evangelist at Gradle, Java Champion & Co-Author of "Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA"Helen Scott - Developer Advocate at JetBrains & Co-Author of "Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA"BLOG POSTShelenjoscott.comtrishagee.comDESCRIPTIONWe're frequently taught to use a text editor when we're learning to write code so that we understand the fundamentals. However, if we treat our IDE as a text editor, we are doing ourselves a disservice. As professional developers, we no longer need to learn the fundamentals; we need to deliver working applications. We can use the features of an IDE to help us with this.IntelliJ IDEA is an extremely fully-featured IDE that can help professional developers with almost any task they need to perform, and this can be overwhelming to get to grips with. Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA uses two approaches to help newcomers and experienced users alike:• Tutorials that walk through writing code and developing applications that show when, why and how to use IntelliJ IDEA features to create working applications.• A questions-and-answers approach that demonstrates which features can be used to solve the problems that professional developers face.Seeing how to use IntelliJ IDEA from these different angles not only showcases the most useful features but also teaches multiple approaches for using these features. No matter which technologies you use or how you like to work, reading this book will help you find an approach that enables you to work comfortably and productively with IntelliJ IDEA.* Book description: © leanpub.comThe interview is based on Trisha's & Helen's co-authored book "Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA"RECOMMENDED BOOKSTrisha Gee • Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEATrisha Gee, Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates • Head First JavaKevlin Henney & Trisha Gee • 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should KnowMichael Nygard • Release It! 2nd EditionAditya Y. Bhargava • Grokking AlgorithmsFord, Richards, Sadalage & Dehghani • Software Architecture: The Hard PartsTwitterLinkedInFacebookLooking for a unique learning experience?Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.techSUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily

Brought to you by OneSchema—import CSV data 10x faster: https://oneschema.co/lenny; Pando—always-on employee progression: https://www.pando.com/lenny; and Lenny's Job Board—hire the best product people, find the best product gigs: https://www.lennysjobs.com/talent.—Zoelle Egner is best known for her time at Airtable (currently valued at $11 billion), where she was the 11th employee and built and led the initial marketing and customer success teams. Currently she's the Head of Marketing and Growth at Block Party, a company that designs consumer tools for online safety and anti-harassment. In today's episode, we explore the marketing strategies that helped Airtable punch above its weight and build an established brand. We also dig into how Airtable was able to find its first super-users, how customer success played a key role in getting early traction, and the do's and don'ts for marketing investments. Zoelle also shares her experience working for VaccinateCA (which ended up playing a massive role in helping get people vaccinated during the pandemic) and several tips for obtaining valuable customer feedback.Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-from-airtables-unconventional-growth-strategy-zoelle-egner/#transcriptWhere to find Zoelle Egner:• Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoelle• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoelleegner/Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/Referenced:• Patrick McKenzie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/patio11• The Last of Us on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/the-last-of-us• Airtable: https://www.airtable.com/• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/• Block Party app: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/• Kathy Sierra's book Badass: Making Users Awesome: https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019• Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com/• Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/• Notion: https://www.notion.so/• Zapier: https://zapier.com/• Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Computing-Taste-Algorithms-Makers-Recommendation/dp/0226822974• Ancillary Justice: https://www.amazon.com/Ancillary-Justice-Imperial-Radch-Leckie/dp/031624662X/• The Happiness Lab podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/id1474245040• Gastropod podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gastropod/id918896288• Everything Everywhere All at Once on Showtime: https://www.sho.com/titles/3493875/everything-everywhere-all-at-once• Extraordinary Attorney Woo on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81518991• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Webflow: https://webflow.com/• Clay: https://www.clay.com/• MKT1 Newsletter: https://newsletter.mkt1.co/• Emily Kramer on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-build-a-powerful-marketing-machine-emily-kramer-asana-carta-mkt1/In this episode, we cover:(00:00) How VaccinateCA helped bridge a gap in infrastructure(05:00) Zoelle's lessons from her time at VaccinateCA(18:04) How Zoelle broke into the tech industry(19:01) Flocking patterns(24:21) What Block Party does(24:32) Zoelle's storytelling(29:15) Tactics for punching above your weight as a small startup(31:30) The importance of having a highly detail-oriented person on staff(33:33) Why Airtable used billboards(36:43) Growth and marketing strategies at Airtable(42:29) Using data provided by your customers to build features that help future customers(50:59) Why customer success and marketing should be one team(52:56) Things to avoid in marketing(58:04) The power of templates(1:00:58) Why Airtable did not prioritize templates for top-of-funnel revenue (1:02:04) Why just getting PR to “get PR” is not a good strategy(1:04:57) The importance of getting customer feedback and investing in customer success(1:05:51) Simple strategies for getting customer feedback(1:07:53) Lightning roundProduction and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Show notes and referenced links: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1553456558264164356Old talk version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzK4IxHv3W0Join the Coding Career Community: https://learninpublic.org/Follow for future spaces: https://twitter.com/Coding_CareerTranscript[00:00:00] Chad Stewart: I think we should set up the whole thing first in case, people might be coming off the street and they don't necessarily know exactly about the chapter of the book. I definitely think you should talk a little bit about that first. [00:00:10] swyx: I do opinion introduce it. Yeah. Yeah.[00:00:13] That'd be great. Do you wanna give it a shot? I wanna see what what your take on it is. Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. I'll give it a shot. So, [00:00:20] Chad Stewart: So pretty much the idea. Well, so first of all the, currently the chapter actually is at the end of the book. And a lot of you get a lot of, the, you get a lot of other information before you get to this chapter.[00:00:32] And the kind of idea is that, all that other information is important. It's great. But if you don't necessarily know how to implement. Then, yeah, it's not particularly useful. And so my understanding, you of took the idea of hairs, things that that you could use to start implementing some of these things.[00:00:53] And then one of the things that actually really enjoyed really liked I read over the chapter again, just to to refresh myself, was the idea of not everything to use all the time. You have tactics which you use whenever they come up, then you have strategy. Which you use, like you use a little bit more often.[00:01:13] I don't remember what the third one is, but it is like levels of when you use them principles. Yes. Principles. Thank you. When you use them often. So the chapter resonated with me mostly because of a lot of the things that you were talking about is like habits and like laying the foundation for success.[00:01:30] Part we talked about it in the Mito last week in terms of keeping yourself physically healthy, but just also, it's just generally your habits, both your physical habits, like learning, expanding your knowledge, networking, interacting with people it's just having that foundation laid out so that, leveraging the other topics of the book was is what you call.[00:01:53] It was easier. I know we had that, this kind of discussion about about maybe putting it earlier in the book, but that's the reason why I decided, Hey, maybe this would be the first thing to talk about because this is something that, we talk up in the industry, but not really, yeah. So just wanted to talk about [00:02:11] swyx: anyways. Yeah. That's a great recap. Yeah, that's fantastic recap. Okay. Job done. Thank you everyone. Yeah. Wow. And you didn't even I didn't even tell you I was gonna ask you anyway. I just love hearing about it from other point of view.[00:02:23] But yeah, you can see how it's weird to put it at the front of the buzz. I have to go through and set up all the context first, which is like 39 chapters of random shit. And then but, and then I come in at the end with a really strong chapter. Right. But I think my reflection is like, Imagine you would hand it the golden book of advice.[00:02:42] Like maybe my book is like not the golden book of advice, but maybe someone else's book in book of advice. Can you convert that advice into results and the chances are, is it's no, because it's not really, you're not really lacking for advice. You're really lacking for systems to implement that effectively in your career, in your life.[00:03:03] Right? To actually put things in action and follow through on them. It's not ideas, it's execution, it's not motivation, it's discipline. And so like it's really boring blocking and tackling stuff. But then I felt like if I did not talk then everything I, everything else I talk about is a complete waste because like this that's the real sustainable advantage.[00:03:24] I think for sure, I was very influenced by atomic habits. Like you can have all the fancy trading strategies that you want, but ultimately, your net worth is a trailing indicator of your financial habits. Did you save enough? and, did you did you did you put did you pay down the interest rate on the things that you're supposed to pay down first before chasing the investment in other categories?[00:03:48] And I definitely feel like, when people give high level career advice, they tend to overstep in terms of the high stakes, the very dramatic, the very flashy, the very sexy, or very smart sounding ideas. And there's just the boring, like eat of vegetables, versions of the ideas. Isn't talked about enough when actually it is the predominant.[00:04:08] Thing to get right. So, yeah. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. I cut you off. Oh, no, I see you also join on your personal, so, I'm talking to two CHADS. Oh [00:04:15] Chad Stewart: yeah. One that's a duck and one that's an actual person. Yeah. No, so I would, I, so I do agree with you. But, and I guess it's I try not to say too much about the, on, on like you're delivering the chapter as opposed to the chapter's contents itself.[00:04:30] But like I do agree that, like the thing that everybody's interested in, like you said, the gold as you put it is definitely. The, what you call it the flashy advice, the, this is how you negotiate your salary. These are the technologies that you choose, as opposed to the eat, your vegetables as you call it version is, get up every day and code, get up every day and read tech, tech news, or get up every day and network, specifically the phrase network, where network is just this bland, instruction that you're, that [00:05:02] swyx: everybody gives, know, which network what you supposed to do when people say I'm gonna get up to date end network.[00:05:06] What is that? I [00:05:08] Chad Stewart: have no clue. I just, I say it all the time. And then I sit down and okay, what am I supposed to do? Ha [00:05:15] swyx: oh, but so my version of that right. Is to learn in public. Right? And I know, this, so, like it's weird to come to, to reach out, to let's, here's an unenlightened version of networking, which is.[00:05:26] You're just, you're gonna go out there and you're gonna look for some industry mentor and you're gonna cold email them and say, please, can you be my mentor? Which is an unspecified job of indeterminate length for no money. So good luck. But if you learn the public you're putting your interests out there, you're you progress out there and people can help you with specific dimensions and you can build your network that way by building up assets of value that you exchange for something else.[00:05:50] And I think that's a really positive some way to network and I highly encourage people [00:05:54] Chad Stewart: to do that. Yeah, no, I definitely agree. I definitely agree. And I guess like that's like the going back to the operating system of you is like the more kind of boring part, because that is something that you have to do all the time, it's the grind, right?[00:06:11] Like everybody is trying to tell you to grind, but they don't necessarily tell you. You know why it's important and they don't tell you that it gets boring. Well, I guess it's implied that it gets boring, but, but yeah okay. You know what, I'm just going to say that. I think anyways, you think [00:06:26] swyx: what [00:06:26] Chad Stewart: kind?[00:06:27] Yeah. What do you think? No, I was just like, I just, as I was thinking, I just hit a roadblock in my head and I just like, yeah, no. [00:06:33] swyx: Okay. That's an action cancellation, when you're playing fighting games and you're doing something and you're like, oh, Nope. oh, you on the path I want to go down.[00:06:44] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, there's two things. One is keeping going through the daily grinds having good habits, letting them compound part of that is, your physical body, part of that is your mental. Your mental storage space, so, we talk about sleep.[00:07:00] We talk about building a second brain and then the third section is building a scheduler which is how do you take on multiple tasks and multitask prioritize them and then try not to drop any tasks. I think that's a very foundational skill, I'll talk about that. But the last bit I really which is to keep your kernel alive, which is the process zero, the kernel that, the process that schedules other processes.[00:07:23] And for me or for most developers that is some concept of drive, right. If you lose your drive, you burn out. And I think something that maybe a lot of people don't discuss is yeah, like there's a lot of burnout in the industry and that's of game over You talk about the differences between lasting in this industry five years versus 50 years, like it's basically, do you have a love for programming?[00:07:43] Do you have a reason that you do what you do? And I think I tend to try to remind people that it is not about chasing money. It's not just about chasing money. Money's good. But there, there can also be a higher purpose to the things that we work on. [00:07:56] Chad Stewart: I definitely agree. And I guess of going down the it's not about chasing money, it's not, so I guess my thing is, it's less about, you want to chase the thing that interests you.[00:08:08] You know what I mean? Like I, and I think that's something that like, especially in the industry, we do a really good we do a really good job of telling people that these are the things that are important and pushing up the things that they are interested in, yeah. So say, like for instance, you're just a front end Devrel and you love doing UI UX, but everybody just convinces you that UI UX is not the thing to do by the way.[00:08:33] I'm just picking this because probably because I'm most related to it, not necessarily the situation, but just the anyways. But yeah, like this is your thing, but everybody tells you, oh, you really need to get into the cloud. No something else, right? Like it's backend engineering and you do that and you get good at it, but it's not the thing like that will eventually lead to burnout as well.[00:08:58] Like it's really, at least my understanding of burnout is really when there's like the reward that you're getting for the actions that you're doing, don't match with the rewards that you want. That's probably a bad description of it, but yeah you know what you're getting versus what you actually want.[00:09:18] If those things don't align and they don't align for long enough, then you know, you just don't want to do it anymore. You're not getting properly rewarded. Yeah. For the things that [00:09:27] swyx: you're doing. Yeah. That's that's the burnouts phase. I feel like I had more to share that, but I always like to turn into a discussion, where this is an open discussion.[00:09:36] If people want to raise their hands and talk about, any of these concepts the, from the physical, to like the brain stuff to scheduling and to burnouts, we can always have that open . actually got some feedback from one of my previous spaces that apparently people can't really raise their hands until they're invited.[00:09:52] I'm not sure how this works. [00:09:54] Chad Stewart: Yeah, I'm not necessarily sure. Either. Like usually, so like you have a request button for people that are new to spaces, you have the request button and then that will tell us that you're you want to come up and then we can bring you up and then you can like, raise your hands and stuff like that.[00:10:10] I also want to point out I forgot to, to say this, but we have a link as well for a Slido. So say for instance, you actually do have a question and you don't want to necessarily come on stage. It's you can go to the Slido and just ask your question there and monitoring that. So the link to the Slido, if you notice that there's a tweet at the top of this space, we call it jumbotron.[00:10:34] The tweet has that link to that slack. Ah, there it is. Test [00:10:38] swyx: question anonymous. Yeah, that was me. That was. Oh, you see, [00:10:42] Chad Stewart: it's anonymous. You're supposed to not let anybody know. Oh, right, right, right. [00:10:47] swyx: Okay. Whoop . [00:10:49] Chad Stewart: Yeah. So feel free to do that as well. But yeah, this is this kind of an open ended que even though spaces are ne not necessarily, I guess you have to cultivate that, but yeah, this is a open ended space.[00:11:02] So if you have any questions, feel free to, to jump up and ask them, just ask them however you want. Like even feel free to to tweet at the tweet. [00:11:12] swyx: And I'll monitor that as well. This new chat feature in in Twitter. So we can try that out. Okay. So maybe I'll put it this way. Yeah. One thing.[00:11:21] One thing, one thing I wanted to offer is I think that there's an there's an image that I think you said in your recap resonated with you a lot, which is that we have principles, strategies, and tactics. We talk about the sort of three levels of applications that we offer or that we think about principles are always on.[00:11:40] Chad Stewart: Are you still there? [00:11:41] swyx: I feel like Shawn. Yeah. So strategies are like big apps. You constantly run them. Right. And you always all your datas in them. So you take your time to choose. It's like slack or discord notion of OneNote. F sketch is like a big, bigger decision, but tactics are like utilities.[00:11:55] So they're one off you, you picked them up when you need them and you drop them when you're done. So, and I really one of the big breakthroughs was really. Seeing that it align to your job strategies, align to your career and principles, align to human life. And that's the individual scale at which each of these things operate.[00:12:15] And to me, that was like when I realized that I was like, oh, okay. Each of these things apply on different time scales. And part of the joy of being human is, or having operated, have to operate all these things at once. [00:12:25] Chad Stewart: Yeah. That's really interesting, actually. Never really. I mean, I have thought about it, but not necessarily to that level of, like you said, the utilities are the things that you pick up really quickly and you leverage really quickly.[00:12:38] And then, like it's, I've just never thought about it in that kind of timescale that I thank you. I really appreciate, I'm really happy. [00:12:45] swyx: This is recording. I'm like in general I, I actually feel like there's a lot of things we can steal from computer science to run like the rest of our lives because.[00:12:54] It's and this is not a new thing. And there's a book called that tries to take a stab at this, but I think doesn't go far enough. Like one of the things that I did not end up writing about was how we do hyper parameter tuning for machine learning. And it turns out that there is a perimeter that you can tweak to essentially say how excited you should be by progress.[00:13:21] If you make some progress, how much more aggressive should you be? I think it's the alpha perimeter, but I mean, it doesn't really matter what you call it. If you tune it too high, if you tune it higher, you'll learn faster. Because if you have, if you try something, you have initial bit of success, then you're like, okay, screw it.[00:13:35] I'm gonna do 10 X more, whatever I just did. And then you're like, okay, I have 20 X more success. All I'm gonna put a hundred X more than whatever I just did. And then you find that there's a usually converge on a, some local global minimum. Minimum is a good thing in machine learning. And, but I also find there's some grads in which you can overshoot by being too excited about stuff.[00:13:54] And the fact that you have this result in machine learning that you can apply to normal human learning is actually fascinating. So I, I feel like, basically what I wanna do is take computer science learnings and apply their analogies to life. So I don't know if I lost you there [00:14:09] Chad Stewart: no.[00:14:09] I'm so I'm trying to kind imagine that as well. No, I'm just I'm listening. I'm trying, you know what, I'm not gonna lie. Some of it did go over my head [00:14:17] swyx: but it's very thorough. I feel I need to draw it out, but like at the same time, that's the point of podcasts or Twitter spaces, you can just mouth blog, the stuff that.[00:14:26] You don't dare to write down cuz it's not fully . [00:14:28] Chad Stewart: Right. And then not only that you can kinda get people's opinions on it. So like I would, so my immediate thought is that yeah, you you want to tune that, but I would also say you're not let to necessarily get it perfect. And it's just like about being constantly improving.[00:14:46] Yeah. Or, so you don't want to, you don't want to chase perfection because you chase perfection and you're never gonna get anything done. Whereas it's this is good enough for now. And then when you either have time or when you want to, at some event you decide to make improvements.[00:15:02] Right? Yeah. And the thing is you want to make improvements, but you don't want to make improvement often too much and you don't want to make improvements too little, [00:15:12] swyx: Yeah. So, so we have a principle, right? Good enough is better than best. Stop looking for things that are best because that involves obsessing over benchmarks, carrying what influencers think, keeping up with everything new.[00:15:25] And when you obsess with good enough, you turn from the external facing point of view to the internal painting. Point of view, you focus on what you need done. You focus on what you need, well, and you focus on what you enjoy and once you hit good enough, move on. And I feel like that's a fundamentally healthier with life, I guess.[00:15:41] Yeah. Yeah definitely agree. Question. Oh, so thanks for, so whoever submitted that Slido that is our first submission. So we do have a Slido pinned to the top of the thingy, the space. Yeah. Twitter should just build this instead of building like co tweeting or or like the hot take reaction button or whatever that is which I'm also very.[00:16:03] Kind of miff that I didn't get, but whatever, like it's just real, it's just like a really weird feature. Nobody wants to run that company going on. There's no adults supervision going on in, in that company. So the question is, what are your favorite calendar hacks. Do you have any chats?[00:16:19] Chad Stewart: I don't know, so, okay. I guess, let me think. Man, because my whole calendar strategy is, I don't even know if I wanna call it a hat, but so something that I do is that I will make a calendar event. I don't know if it's a hat, but I'll make a calendar event. And I always make the calendar.[00:16:35] I always make the event also happen like at 8:00 AM in the morning so that, my day starts and it's oh, okay, I have this is the stuff that I want to do today. And then it will tell me obviously when the event is going to actually happen. And so I set an alarm on my phone for that time, but I set it for the, for 10 minutes before, and then I just hit the snooze button.[00:16:56] I don't know if that's helpful, , but like it, I'm just like it. I very rarely miss meetings because of that whole setup, [00:17:01] swyx: yeah know. Yeah. That's super smart. I wanna offer the operating systems analogy, right. Which is amazing. We, for someone like me, I, I never really did an operating systems course, but I just I pulled up, I watched some lectures and I pulled up some texts on that and just read the basic, overview of stuff.[00:17:20] There are scheduling algorithms for processes and it, and one of these I wish I could show an image here. I can't really show an image. So there are three main things that you wanna have, right? You wanna have a single source of truth to store all the queues that you're on the task uses that you're accumulating.[00:17:36] You wanna be able to prioritize, so you need some kind of garbage collection slash planning period. And then you need to batch work. So you reduce context switching. So, the first algorithm. Is basically just process scheduling queues. And I'm just gonna read from this slide. It says process migrates among the queues throughout this slide.[00:17:52] So, I have an image here of what a CPU does to do scheduling or what an operating system does is do scheduling has a ready queue in IO Q and it waits for child execution and it waits for interrupts. And those are. Analogous to the types of things that can come into and out of our operating system and the next task, I think is really interesting.[00:18:11] There most job pool systems have a long term scheduler versus a short term scheduler. So you can, you have a long term storage of jobs. You pop some off into a ready queue for your CPU, which is. To process. And that goes from long term to short term. And once your short term scheduling is done, you put the, put it back into either your exit or if you can't finish it, you put it back into a waiting queue.[00:18:34] That's just such a really good analogy for the stuff that you have to do long-term versus the short term and to manage it really well. There's more than that. There's like other decisions. There's also ways to decide about scheduling. So for example, you can design by requirements, you scheduling criteria, you wanna maximize CPU that utilization and you wanna maximize throughput.[00:18:53] In other words, you wanna maximize, the amount of resources that you're, that you've utilizing, and you wanna maximize the amount of work that you're doing. You wanna minimize turnaround time. You wanna minimize waiting time. You wanna minimize response time. In other words, like when people rely on you, you want to have your operating system work and in such a way that they get response in some kind of minimum as LA.[00:19:12] All of these are just like very reasonable requirements if to design for, but because we don't really design our own operating system, we, the emergent property is that, well, sometimes I take two months to reply to an email cuz , cuz I'm still working on this. But I think having.[00:19:26] Desirable properties and then working backwards, scheduling algorithm is, can really help. There are, there's a whole like library of them. I'm just gonna read some out for people to search there's round, rubbing round Robin scheduling, shortest job, first shortest, remaining time priority scheduling first come first serve.[00:19:46] And then the most complex one, which is multi-level Q scheduling. Those are the in terms of my sort of research. Those are the scheduling algorithms that I researched. I don't know. Does any of those appeal to you? ? [00:19:58] Chad Stewart: It's hard for me because I'm trying to imagine like literally the process, and as you were mentioning, like you have a lot of the kind of images I'm trying to imagine.[00:20:06] A lot of the [00:20:06] swyx: processes it's got for audio only medium. Maybe I'll tweet it out and then I'll attach it to the, I was [00:20:14] Chad Stewart: about to say the same thing. I was about to say the same thing. It's [00:20:16] swyx: just okay. Yeah. No. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, I'm just like, I think like whatever this is we should research the, like scheduling the philosophy of scheduling or the algorithms of scheduling are not limited to CPUs are not limited to operating systems.[00:20:30] Like we could just use them for ourselves. Why don't we use them for ourselves? That seems right.[00:20:38] that seems weird. So, so yeah, I mean, that's my essential assertion and I've been researching this for a while. I've got one more, but if no one, and obviously if anyone has like comments on scheduling systems that work for them you can jump on in. So, you want to work on all these prioritization.[00:20:53] There's a really good article from Sarah ner. It's basically on prioritizing how she works on that. She used to be my boss at nullify. And she says lately I've been working on grouping similar tasks. For example, meetings should happen in succession because it's easier for me to jump from one to another than it is having an hour in between.[00:21:12] I'm more keen to communicate with others on Monday when I'm getting the lay of the land towards the end of the week, my energy is higher. If I'm dedicated to coding, especially if I've allotted uninterrupted time. So essentially what she's telling you is like she's observed herself, what she prefers to do during the week.[00:21:26] And then she's allocated her calendar accordingly. And I saw that I worked with her. I worked for her and Thursday was her. And blocked day to, to work on individual projects. And Monday was the was meeting day. And I definitely think some of 'em are batching actually helps with scheduling because of contact switching and also adapting your own task to whenever you feel like you're most, you're most attuned to finishing them.[00:21:48] So, I thought it was really useful. The article, I think is CSS trick.com/prioritizing still one of the best prioritizing articles I've ever read. I should be tweeting this up, but like, where do I attach it? Do I attach it? [00:21:59] Chad Stewart: So when you tweet something it's weird, when you tweet something, you have to go and then you click the share button in the tweet.[00:22:07] And one of the, one of the options is this. And then you'd be able to put it up in the jumbotron, but it's funny that you mentioned that cuz there is an actual question here that was talking about how do you keep from changing focus too quickly? And I think you did a good job of, of talking about that to be quite honest with you, like act I would even go as far to say that's something that I struggle with even though to be fair.[00:22:33] I'm actually fairly good at context switching, but I never I really think about my week I'm like the furthest I would go is like my day. Like I'll just organize my day in a sense, and I don't necessarily organize my entire week in terms of my level of energy throughout the week.[00:22:52] Oh yeah. It's just always this assumption that my, my level of energy is going to be the same unless an event happens, [00:22:59] swyx: so the most opinionated advice I've been given. So, now that I'm a manager. Is it's weird to have opinions on day of the week. Like what you should do on the day of the week.[00:23:09] It's like they be the same as Friday. Obviously not cuz like Friday, you're like close to weekend. But they're like schedule your one-on-ones earlier in the week because if you need to bump them, you can bump them later and it's still the same week and I'm like, wow, to have such strong opinions on this.[00:23:24] This is is pretty special. So I think that's definitely true. We have Fridays at air by as well. So I think that's, that can be really helpful. And yeah, just scheduling focus time for shipping long projects and then scheduling, scheduling, meeting times together.[00:23:36] I think definitely is very useful for for batching. No, I definitely agree. [00:23:40] Chad Stewart: Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I cut you off. [00:23:42] swyx: Well, calendar there. There's one person saying calendar hacks, right? I think I would be remiss. I didn't mention the ultimate calendar hack. If you do a lot of external. You should use ly.[00:23:52] I uses cow, which is a ly competitor. It's basically the same price, same it's got slightly different features. It's got slightly nicer design and it's by Derek Reimer. Who's a indie hacker. So I just choose this indie hacker that I know compared to a $4 billion giant. But yeah, I think the stigma around can Lee has gone away despite what some venture capitalists mentioned.[00:24:13] And it really saves time scheduling, with the email ping pong of what type available, if you're three times that might work for you, so yeah, that, I guess, as far as hacks go, I think that's a big one. [00:24:23] Chad Stewart: Yeah. I definitely agree. I, which is funny.[00:24:26] I don't even use it as much something I've seriously been contemplating mostly cause I had a lot of people kind reach out, but yeah, I definitely agree with that. So something I also, which I actually struggled with, I would also like kind having just one place to view your entire calendar.[00:24:42] Yeah. So if you have a personal calendar, right. Because you may have a work email, like that is also a big deal as well, just so that, you, don't schedule something when you just simply couldn't see that you had another event, even if it's just like I have two calendars now, one for work and then one for my personal thing, and for whatever reason, it just says busy, doesn't say the actual event, that definitely has been like big [00:25:06] swyx: help as well.[00:25:06] You can tweak that into settings. So yeah, I have it set up so that my personal reflects onto my work and yeah, I try to manage, sometimes I get double booked, which is very annoying, but I mean, it works. I wish Gmail would make it more native. Cuz sometimes I have lesser use emails for business stuff. And sometimes those have calendar events. it starts to break down after a while. yeah. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Calendar hacks. Well, so there's, there is an app called I think it's k.com. It's a, it's one of those YC sort of superhuman for calendar apps. I haven't personally used it, but if I just wanna mention it, cuz it always is in the mix when someone else is talking about this.[00:25:46] Oh, it looks like they got a corporate notion. Oh, not too long ago. Last last month. Interesting. That is either positive or negative. They didn't mention the price. Interesting. [00:25:57] Chad Stewart: That's like the exact, they do exact same as, I don't know, [00:26:00] swyx: to see it's an IDK, but if they were yeah.[00:26:03] Whatever. Anyway, I think I applaud them for trying. I think there are a lot of people also trying to do AI scheduling for for your calendar. So if you just plug it in, they will try to find the best slots for you and optimize your meetings. I haven't really heard from anyone who's used that positively, but I think there are all these people trying to do time block planning for you.[00:26:21] I tried AKI flow for a while, which is a really good time block planning app. It was just a bit too resource intensive for me. And I've given them that sort of performance feedback. Ah, okay. I wanted to throw before we get off this calendar hacking, cuz that there's been a couple other questions that came in on the Slido before we get off the calendar hacking I wanted to go through what I got from calendar port.[00:26:40] So for those who. County Park's fairly famous. So it, I, first of all, I find this his distribution strategy. Very interesting. He very famously does not use social media. But he just writes really good content and then lets other people on social media tell others about him. So I feel like in doing this on this space, I'm of doing his bidding.[00:26:59] It's weird, but it's just a good idea. So I'm just gonna share it. So, he has a podcast. So counterpoint is the, is a computer science professor, but also an author. He wrote deep work, which a lot of people know him for. And he has a podcast called deep S where he goes a little bit more into the ideas behind his book, by the way, every book should have a podcast.[00:27:17] Every book should have a community because then you can engage more with the ideas. It makes you reading much more worthwhile. That's why I do this unity thing. But anyway, so, he actually imple, he actually came up with a genius implementation of how to get control of your time.[00:27:32] It's I think a lot of the scheduling comments and ideas, especially the stuff that we just said, it's oh yeah. I've read it uncles like these. And I, my life hasn't really materially changed cause I don't really have a game plan to implement them in my life. And so he gave it a, he gave it a shot.[00:27:45] He actually did a Dave Ramsey style list of baby steps. Like a seven step plan to. Get control of your life. And I think this is episode 180 4 for people who want to listen to it. I have it clipped on my own mix tape. If you wanna go to Swyx mix tape, or you can go to his podcast but I'll just give you a preview for those listening of this, because I just thought it was so good.[00:28:08] And I thought it was so well matched. The scheduling analogy that we are setting up for the operating system of you. And I just, I cannot think of anything better because he'll even sequenced it correctly all, so let me just get into it. And then we'll talk about the meta. So the first step outta seven is time block planning, give every minute a job, right?[00:28:23] It's no use piling up task in your to-do list. Because you don't ever have a plan for when you're actually gonna do it. So you're just gonna accumulate a giant back level to-do list. You're gonna feel guilty about yourself, and then you're gonna eventually start over and have a new list because your oldest filled up with too much.[00:28:38] So time block plan is basically saying, use your calendar as your to-do list. I have about this, that I can go back and pin, but I think it just makes a lot of sense. If you don't have a plan for setting aside time to do a thing, then you don't have a plan to do it at all. Great.[00:28:50] So I, yeah, I, which is like super brutal, right? I just I mean, it's a lot of work, but I'll put things like read, article on, in a five minute, 10 minute block on my calendar. And that would actually work. I'm pinning it now to the channel. If for those who have never heard of time block planning he has a book, I think he's called time block planner.com.[00:29:08] If you like to, every productivity influencer eventually sells you. A journal of blank pages, right? Whether it's the bullet journal guy, whether it's like the, the time block planning guy, everyone's like, how can we sell you a book of blank, empty pages and make you pay like 23 bucks for it.[00:29:25] But I think it's, , it's worth it. But this, I mean, it's not really about, obviously it makes more money elsewhere, but I just think it's funny in the evolution of influencers, like eventually you shall grow up to either sell your own burgers. If you're Mr. Beast or you shall sell your own productivity planner.[00:29:40] So, so that's the first part of seven, which is time block planning. I think that is a really good baseline to get into the habit of planning out your day consciously and. Making sure that you have space to do the things that you sign up to do and to drop or schedule elsewhere, and the things that you don't have time to do.[00:29:58] Then the second thing is to set up task boards. I think this is biggest Trello a bunch of boards keep track of every task. And in other words, you need to stop drop, right? Like anytime anyone has any expectations on you or you sign up to do anything needs to go somewhere, needs to go in a trusted place, needs to go somewhere, cross platform that you'll see it and you'll address it.[00:30:15] You won't just leave it hanging. And for him, like one, what the value add for him here was he actually gave suggestions on what passports to have, because I think you can have way too many. And that starts to be really really unmanageable as well. So he has four, he has this week, he has ambiguous, he has major projects and he has waiting to hear back.[00:30:35] And I like, I really liked that last one waiting to hear back, which means let's say I do a task this week. And I'll do it. And usually it depends on someone else. Right? Usually I'm like, I'm sending email and I'm like, all, this is long-term project and I'm done with, it goes off my board. And then let's say the other person drops my task.[00:30:50] I don't have a process to go two months later, I go Hey, wasn't I, well, they're supposed to get an email for this and stuff to gets dropped and doesn't get done. So you move a task once you're done with it to waiting to hear back column if you're relying on someone else. And I think I think that's a really fascinating system that that sets this up.[00:31:06] But you realize like this is the first time you start to intersect between long-term planning and short-term planning. The time block plan is for your individual day and the long the task board is for your, your weak plus minus you. Two to three weeks. And I think that makes a lot of sense.[00:31:20] In other words there, there are a lot of things where you cannot use your calendars, your to-do list, cuz like you don't particularly have a time to do them when so you just set up a task board and then and when you do your weekly planning, that's when you move your task board into your calendar, your daily calendar and you set aside that stuff that you sign up to do that makes just a ton of sense.[00:31:38] I, I, when I looked at this, I was like, oh yeah. I mean, out of all the productivity systems that I've seen, like all them were too complex. I couldn't really keep up with that, but I can do these two steps. The third step is full capture. So for him and this is very much a getting things done GTD which is the.[00:31:56] Manual of the of the productivity industry. It's by David Allen. David Allen is a podcast where he airs the entire audio of his GTD workshops, where people pay thousands dollars to list to it. And I've been of going through it. It's really super long, but his examples are super good and it's all free.[00:32:12] So why not? If you want to, if you wanna, if you're interested in getting things done and who the hell is not interested in getting things done it's such an fantastic name. I wish I thought of it. Third step is full capture it. By the end of every day, every obligation has to be out of your head in a trusted system.[00:32:26] What are your trusted systems? There are three trusted systems that he has. One is your email inbox. Two is your calendar. Three is your task board. It should, nothing should exist in your memory because you, your memory's unreliable and you will forget. And you and so I just think like establishing this as a harder task role, it's just such a good thing, because then you have a clear mind to have your personal life.[00:32:45] To enjoy yourself to do go do whatever, because you can pick it up again when you get back to work, but otherwise, how do you enable work life separation? If you're thinking about work while you're still in the rest of your life, like you need to unload. And it's of like a weird operating system thing where, you know, when you spin down your container or whatever, you wanna save your state.[00:33:03] And I think those trusted systems are super. I'll go through the last four really quickly. Four is your weekly plan. So going from daily to weekly at the beginning of each week, build your plan for the week block time for your critical things and make your daily time block plan.[00:33:15] Five is your strategic plan. So now by by stage four outta seven so let me recap. The four first is time block plan two is set up task boards. Three is full capture. Four is weekly plan. So by stage four, outta seven, you should have your week in order. Like every. You should have a plan for that week.[00:33:31] You should you should be much in a much more productive phase in your life because you, or at least know, what's going on. You're being proactive about your time. Five is your spend setting your vision for your professional life on a court annual basis, five year basis, 10 year, 20 year, 30 or 40 year.[00:33:46] And it then eventually feeds into your weekly plan. So this is much more strategic thinking. Six is automate and eliminate. So this, like he leaves the automation step all the way to the end. So basically saying I will source it to an executive assistant if I want to I will reduce the round of context switching by trying to batch stuff like this is off, we talked about with Sarah ner will say no to things that we've signed up for.[00:34:05] And when I look at the totality of everything I want to do, this just is like priority number seven and add to it. So. Let's just not beat around the Bush. I'm just gonna say no to this. Right. And leaving and stepping away from stuff is the most high leverage thing you can possibly do, because that gives you more time to focus on the things that really matter to you.[00:34:22] And yeah, I mean that, that is so brutal, but it's still clear. And then finally seven out of the seven step he says, go for it. Like basically once you have control of your time, take more ambitious projects at big swings because that's the way to build a fantastic career. So, what do you think the seven step plan?[00:34:37] Chad Stewart: No, that's pretty, so, I alright to be, I was trying to absorb as much of that as possible. Like definitely. What was it for me personally, I have the biggest issue with like I do. I have a lot of things that kind of live in my head and I try to put as much of it as I. In places as possible, but to be quite honest, a lot of it still lives in my head, same, and so definitely that's the thing that resonated with me the most. The second thing to be quite honest also is giving once you have everything, when you see like the priority of things that you have, no, being strong enough to be like, look, this is just not going to get done.[00:35:18] I can't get this done. And to just freeing up your time, because I'm definitely one of those people that will be like, Hey, can you do this? Yes. And I will grit my teeth. Yes. And do it anyway. And I just don't have a lot of time for myself. Like me personally, I'm trying to learn more system design stuff because that's my interest.[00:35:39] And I find that I do a lot of my system design stuff at nine 30 at night when I'm trying to get to bed at 10, you know what I mean? Yeah. And I'm like struggling through it and I, I keep up the habit I'm doing it, but, I don't feel like I'm retaining anything, but at the very least I'm keeping up the habit, like it's, that's wasted in my opinion or potentially right.[00:36:01] Because I don't retain anything. So definitely just I don't have the time to do this, please, [00:36:08] swyx: you're gonna have to figure that out. This is the fine art of making time, which is fantastic. Okay. So yeah. So first of all I, and I had, I got a little bit better about this over the past two years.[00:36:17] So you must have an app in your phone that you can just dump notes to yourself. It's, it must be offline first. It must sink every. And you must trust it kinda completely. Right. So for me, it's my second brain. Which I use obsidian for and sings the GitHub. So I know if I ever lose it, if if anything, any data ever corrupts, I can just go to GitHub.[00:36:37] And I think you can use notion for that. You can use things, you can use apple notes. Doesn't really matter. There's this meme, actually, this week, you saw that meme, right? The apple notes meme. It's the tools for thought people you start on with the low IQ people using apple notes, and then the mid IQ people start using.[00:36:54] I don't know, Rome research and obsidian, the things . And then the really high IQ people just back to using apple notes again. I think that kind of makes sense for sure. Jack Dorsey talks about his to-do list and he keeps it in apple notes. And if that guy can run his life on apple notes, why can't you[00:37:11] So I mean, not that I hold him up to be like the Paragon of, of human being, but you can't deny that he's been successful. Right? Right. He has a don't do and don't list. I feel like I clipped this before, but I'm really gonna have trouble pulling it up because I clipped this a long time ago.[00:37:29] Maybe I'll just Jack Dorsey, maybe I'll oh, no, I don't have that. Jack Dorsey don't list. Yeah, won't do list. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's just Google Jack Dorsey. Won't do this. He talks about this in 2018. And I just thought he's just fantastic. Oh, here's this here? He says, okay. It's apple notes.[00:37:45] Oh my God. Okay. He says today, do meditate, workout, tweet, aggression, read, write, consider, follow up. Won't do alcohol, just decided on, he just has a list of like stuff that he just won't do. And, it looks like he's so, he's just always every single day, he just wants to not do alcohol.[00:38:04] And I think that's a super useful question. And then for and then he falls, he finishes off his day with daily questions. What truth did I discover? What am I grateful for? And who did I help? I, this reminds me of actually Benjamin Franklin. Like at the end of his day, he would talk about what good I, what good did I do in my day today?[00:38:20] Like how did I benefit humanity? And I think like having that reflection and consciously living towards. Some small set of purposeful goals, like really helps to align yourself. [00:38:30] Chad Stewart: Definitely agree. As you were say, as you were saying, all of that, the first thing that kind of run to me was atomic habits.[00:38:37] And how one of the stories that the author told was James clear. One of the stories that he told was how he had a friend who was trying to lose weight. And one of the questions she would ask herself is what would a healthy person do? And that effectively became the guide the guide for her.[00:38:57] Not necessarily her life, but her weight loss goals is that she would just always ask that question and it made it more of an intrinsic motivator for her. I, I know in the book he has like levels of, I don't know if it's motivation, but it's like where you want.[00:39:11] To get the drive, to push yourself to do habits. And you have things that's you, your ex, when you have an external motivators, like you want money, you want fame or you want something to pull you towards it. And then when you like the, what he's getting at is you should be more intrinsically motivated where it's you want to be pushed by an idea.[00:39:32] And then that idea is the way you think about you both approaching the world in a sense, yeah. So I, that was like the thing that kind of run out to me as you are, as you're going through the list, it's also very interesting that he that Jack Dorsey takes the time to be grateful.[00:39:48] I feel like that's something that we tend to be very forgetful about, is just like a lot of the times where we're in a very privileged position. Like not to say that everybody is in a great position, but we're a lot of times we're in a very privileged position and is just like being grateful for all the things that we already have, while still trying to achieve more.[00:40:07] It's just interesting that he has that. [00:40:10] swyx: Yeah. Have you, have I read you my favorite quote on motivation and intrinsic pharmacists. Okay. Let me attach it to the tweet so that other people can read along. I read this four years ago and it really. Has guided a lot of my career choices as well.[00:40:25] By then, so I've just pined it up for those following along. And it's from Dan Pink's drive and he calls it extrinsic promises, destroy intrinsic motivation. As children, we are driven by our inner desires to learn, to discover to help others. But as we grow, we are programmed by society to need extrinsic motivations.[00:40:43] We take out the trash, we study hard, we work tirelessly, we'll be rewarded with friendly praise, high grades, and good paychecks slowly. We lose more and more of our intrinsic motivation because extrinsic promises destroy intrinsic motivation. And I'm just like, wow. Yeah, like how much do I, not how much do I do anymore?[00:41:01] Or don't do because no, one's paying me to do it. So I don't do it. And and how different is that from kids who are like, yeah, this looks fun. Let's just go do it. Let's just write out, [00:41:10] Chad Stewart: yeah, no, it's, to be honest with you, I would even go as far as to say that The way I do everything is I guess it's chasing that original kind of ideal of this is just something interested in doing, and I'm just like, I'm just trying to put position my life in a place where it's I can get back to maybe not necessarily reacting oh, this is interesting.[00:41:29] I want to attempt this, but I have all of these other things I have to do, I have all of these other responsibilities or just things that I said that I, well, I guess, responsibilities. So I was just trying to getting back to that, but yeah, it's. Yeah, [00:41:43] swyx: definitely. Cool. Cool, cool.[00:41:45] Did we talk about what keeps you, so we're going back to questions on Slido. Let's finish these out. There's three more questions. What keeps you from changing focus too quickly? Do we talk about that? Yes, that was like things we talked about. That's cool. It's cool. If anyone has has follow up questions, obviously feel free to chat.[00:41:59] Let's go with some more can you share some examples of how you specifically implement operating schedule OS scheduling concepts into how you design your week advances task and doing, thank you. Yeah, so, I think we talked a little bit about the planning phase for, if you, so I listened to the manager tools podcast, and I listen to county reports podcast, and mostly you wanna do your planning on.[00:42:20] Monday morning, you only plan a week out. Right. And part of that is going to be determined for you. You have weekly standing meetings, try to have one-on-ones earlier in a week. And then towards the end of the week, try to do what they call a 15, what they call a 15 five writeup, which is essentially sum up the week in 15 minutes so that you yourself or your manager can look back and track like what, your progress and how you think your week ran.[00:42:46] We have a limited amount of these things, and I think it's incumbent upon us to not let every week go by business as usual going feeling three outta five, instead of a four outta five or 505, like you wake up too many times in the same day, in the same week and are not excited about what you're doing, then we need to start changing that.[00:43:02] Right. So I think for me, that. Well, one thing that I'm part in particularly working on right now in terms of operating, scheduling, operating schedule concepts it's very much the queue thing, right? So I tweeted out earlier it's pinned up here on, on the tweet stream, but having those task boards are basically, which are basically task queues is exactly how an operating system would work.[00:43:23] And you need some sort of scheduling algorithm to prioritize them and take them off of task use into your short term task list, which is the linear sequential list of things you're gonna do throughout your day. EV every single one of us has 24 hours. We hopefully work eight, I don't know, eight to 10 hours a day.[00:43:37] And that's all we have, right? So we have to make the most of what we do there. So, the way that we translate task list to our calendar is essentially the scheduling problem. And I think that, the whole analogy of, what is an operating system, but a general. Way to run a bunch of applications and applications generate tasks.[00:43:55] And we're running those tasks on limited hardware. That is that hardware is our bodies is our time. So it's an optimization problem. We study this algorithm extensively in operating systems. It's time to apply it to. Our own time. [00:44:09] Chad Stewart: so I have a quick question. What happens when you have say for instance, I guess an emergency, yeah. A task comes out of nowhere. It needs to get done. I guess now that I'm thinking about as literally, as I was talking about it, I was reminded of one of Greg's tweets that he mentioned [00:44:27] swyx: GGE he's Hungarian [00:44:28] Chad Stewart: GGE. Thank you. Thank you so much. I've had no idea how to pronounce his name. I know GGE yeah.[00:44:33] GGE one of his, [00:44:35] swyx: try his last name. If you wanna challenge. Yeah, I'm good. [00:44:37] Chad Stewart: Nah, I'm not trying to advise myself, [00:44:39] swyx: but yeah. [00:44:40] Chad Stewart: One of, one of his tweets that he mentioned as a, as an engineering manager, which is essentially, everybody comes and says, oh, we need to get this task done right now.[00:44:49] I hold too much into it because I actually still want to ask the question, but like, how do you not, yeah. How do you how have you dealt with the, the reactionary tasks that come? What, how do you, how have you sorted that out? [00:45:02] swyx: Okay. When emergencies happen. Right. First of all I don't know.[00:45:04] I don't feel like I have that many emergencies. So maybe I'm not that experienced. If anyone else has more experience, more advice, please jump in Jay. You're always a good in our sessions. You're always a good source of advice and wisdom. So now feel free to jump in on that one. I think most things are movable.[00:45:23] And if you just tell people in a very reasonable tone Hey, we had this prior commitments, but this other thing came up and here's why I have to drop you. They'll understand. I think the fortunate thing about being in knowledge work is that usually not firm deadline that you cannot move for valid reasons.[00:45:37] I think just having clear communication and knowing what commitments you've made, being able to ping back essentially have a webhook on your commitments and say Hey, like I gotta job you. I, I got this other thing going on. I think that's the fine way to do it. Yeah. I guess [00:45:51] Chad Stewart: it is like you have to have, you also have to have that level of, I don't know, because I feel like I have the opposite effect where it's just Hey, I have something really important I need to do.[00:46:00] And then the person's yeah, I'm the most important thing. Why aren't you doing it? But [00:46:03] swyx: I'll say one. Yeah, sorry. Having slack is really good, right? You don't wanna run a 100% utilization, just like saying any any cloud service, any I don't know, cluster of any data center. It is actually a bad idea to run.[00:46:16] Try to run your your app, your applications, or your server cluster at a hundred percent utilization at base load. You want to have some slack, you wanna maybe run it 60% so that when bikes happen, you have the ability to absorb at least a little bit of emergency workload. So I, I do think that's true.[00:46:32] That's obviously not what you wanna hear as an employer, to have your people slacking around for some time. But I do think if you are a knowledge worker, if you're a creative worker in particular we should work like lions instead of cow. Right. We should sprint. We should hunt. And then we should laser around waiting for the next big hit.[00:46:50] Whereas for cows, you're just constantly grazing. And so we are not factory workers. We're not, we're not on an assembly line. Humans have, hot streaks and cold streaks and hopefully we just have, better hot streaks than we have cold. But I do think that someone on slack is important.[00:47:03] Chad Stewart: So I'm I'm not at derail the entire conversation, but when you said slack, I was literally like, oh wow. Slack the application. I'm sorry. I just had to make that joke. [00:47:13] swyx: but [00:47:13] Jay Massimilano: pretty Kathy Sierra said something. Yeah. Hey, this is Jay [00:47:17] swyx: that similar, right. Let me introduce Jay. Jay is one of the I don't know what he's doing in our community, but like he's one, like by far way more experienced than any one of us in software.[00:47:26] And he's, yeah, he's one of the biggest source of advice. So I'm super happy that you hear man. [00:47:30] Jay Massimilano: Well, yeah I learned a ton from this from the coding career meetup and I'm, I love that it's I've learned a ton, so it's, that is it's. I think it's, I've learned more than what I've said for sure.[00:47:42] So on, on the topic that you're mentioning about that you'll have to be like lions, Kathy Sierra I think it's in somewhere she's published a while ago. She said only in, in the tech industry, you are expected to. So if you're in medicine, you get to practice what you do is called a practice, right?[00:48:02] So you, and even if you do carpentry or anything, there's always throw away work. You practice, you train for a bit and. You do something new, right. But only in our industry, we expect you pick up a new tool and deploy that to production. Like without any gap or without any element for throwing things away.[00:48:19] Right. There is, there's just now we are not allowed or at least it's just been culturally, not common for us to for a company to allow us to experiment and throw things away. If you start with a new tool, it needs to be you have to take it to production. And maybe a lot of her problems are because of not allowing for throwing things away, work away.[00:48:37] Right. But and she says like in medicine, literally what they do is called practice. But not, that's not the case in ours. So there has to be a lot of learning and I think like when you say lions, it's like, You learn, you compress all your learning digested, and then when you're ready to P your, what exactly you're doing and it's, the output is professional.[00:48:58] And at least in real world, when I, the work that I've seen that we have done when we pick on pick up new technologies and so on is it's usually we implement it wrong. The first version that goes out is, and it hurts customers and not right. And it so yeah, when I when I heard the line thought that's what came to me, what Kathy Sierra said, you need to back more.[00:49:20] swyx: Yeah. Is that any is so Kathy Sarah left the tech before I joined. Okay. She was harassed off of the tech. I. Is that a book? How do you come across her work? She she had a hype, [00:49:32] Jay Massimilano: Head rush. I think her [00:49:33] swyx: blog rush head first [00:49:35] Jay Massimilano: head rush. Let [00:49:37] swyx: me look up. She used to write the head first books. That's how I know her.[00:49:40] Yeah, that, that [00:49:41] Jay Massimilano: is she wrote a blog on headrush dot hype ad.com. It was one of the first blogs I read when I bought my computer. So it's not online anymore. [00:49:50] swyx: Typepad no, I found it. I found it. Oh yeah. Head address that Typepad [00:49:53] Jay Massimilano: yeah, that's a it's it's still online. That's great. Yeah, it's, A's a well up information [00:49:58] Chad Stewart: probably should tweet it and so we can [00:50:00] swyx: post it up here as well.[00:50:01] I'm adding into my thread. So if anyone's following along there is pin tweets at the top of this space and I've just been taking notes. Just cuz what, cuz I love show notes. I love giving. Homework[00:50:14] you guys know that, right? That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Kathy, the other thing that, that Kathy is famous for is the fire flower, right? The there's the picture of the Mario this picture, the fire flower. And then there's a picture of fire, Mario. Yeah. And most vendors or most entrepreneurs try to sell the fire flower when actually users wanna be the fire Mario.[00:50:32] Right. [00:50:33] Jay Massimilano: And I don't know I really miss her. She was one of those who mixes, who I think her LA her most recent book was, is called badass. Yeah. And I that's her jam. Like she, she really care thinks about how to deliver something. Like how creating an impact on the person who is consumed who is using work like, and her advice is around.[00:50:54] For creators, how to make impactful work, how to do impactful work. So, and yeah, I think anyone who has, if you have not heard it I'm sure a lot of people here have never heard [00:51:06] swyx: yeah. I mean, it looks like she stopped blogging in 2007. So this is a long while ago. Yeah. [00:51:10] Jay Massimilano: She was she was docked and someone harassed her.[00:51:14] Yeah. Yeah. And she had leave the scene and yeah, I wish we couldn't have her [00:51:19] swyx: back. Yeah same here. But maybe maybe I'll request this from you, Jay. Because you are very familiar with her work. I love a thread of the best of Kathy Sierra, just write that.[00:51:29] Is he still here? He's just dropped out. [00:51:31] Chad Stewart: Twitter spaces being Twitter spaces. [00:51:32] swyx: Oh man. Oh man. I just made a big ass to him and then he dropped out. Ah, I mean the space is recorded, so it you're still hack. I [00:51:44] Jay Massimilano: had a time limit on my iPhone for one hour Twitter.[00:51:46] swyx: Anyway yes. No, so no, I was basically asking you since you're the Kathy Sarah expert. Can you do a best of Kathy Sierra so that other people can benefit? I, yeah, [00:51:55] Jay Massimilano: I will definitely write one. For sure. [00:51:57] swyx: Just do a Twitter thread. Just go here's like top five things you need to read.[00:51:59] Yes. Yeah. Cool. See content idea, right? Yeah. and it's really not that hard. Like people are interested in like superlative, like best of worst off first time, last time whenever. Yeah. There [00:52:11] Jay Massimilano: are other folks who are also close to her maybe than even know her personally Ryan singer, who used to be at base camp.[00:52:15] swyx: Wait, is he no longer at base cap? He's no longer at base after [00:52:18] Jay Massimilano: the a year ago. [00:52:20] swyx: Oh yeah. I thought he was one of those. Okay. Okay. Yeah. [00:52:25] Jay Massimilano: Oh yeah. So he's no longer at base camp. [00:52:26] swyx: Yeah. Yeah. [00:52:27] Jay Massimilano: He also speaks very highly for like in his work. He Heights are. [00:52:33] swyx: Cool. Well, you can do the same. Yeah, sure.[00:52:35] Yeah. Cool. Cool, cool. So, yeah. [00:52:37] Chad Stewart: Yeah, so I actually wanted to ask, I mean, I think this is one of the, one of the last questions was how do you manage emails? Do you have something like K screener or something like that? I guess wanted to point that out there. Oh [00:52:50] swyx: man. Can I just say I paid the $99 for hay and it was very disappointing.[00:52:57] It's supposed to be fast. It's supposed to be like a new invention of email, whatever. And it was so slow. Every key press took like a second to resolve. I don't know what people's experiences were here, but I was in Singapore at the time and it just didn't have Singapore service or something, but it was just unacceptably slow.[00:53:14] But the screening I thought was interesting. I think it's over, maybe over-optimized for screening things out. I used superhu I've just canceled it. Because I think superhuman, the thing about superhuman is fantastic. Local productivity with shortcuts and offline syncing, right? That is what you want for the fastest possible interaction with your email.[00:53:34] And you've got nice scheduling. They've got nice, learning curve as well as they'll rewards you for reaching inbox zero. Something that they suck at, which I need is filters. It's to set up filters to say all these patterns of email, they come in, I want to go tag them here, archive them, delete them, do whatever.[00:53:51] Right. And they haven't implemented that in four years of existence. So I just, I got tired of waiting and paying, $300 a year for this one missing functionality. And I'm going back to Gmail.[00:54:01] Chad Stewart: How oh, so how do you, I guess, how long have you been using Gmail? I guess how long have you been since you've returned to Gmail? Cause I wanted to pick your brain on some of the [00:54:11] swyx: stuff that you do with Gmail now. Oh, I mean, yeah. I mean, well, I never really left, but guess I'm back on Gmail now.[00:54:17] Yeah. Not too long like a few weeks. I've like I've given superhuman a try twice. One once when my employer paid for it and then two on my own. But I, it just I need filters. I need to be able to easily set up filters and everything else. Like I, the keyboard shortcuts you can get in Gmail as well.[00:54:33] Like I used, I didn't co justify like paying 300 something for, slightly faster email. [00:54:37] Chad Stewart: I hear you. I dunno. I feel left off the loop cause I'm just mostly I don't know. I just, I don't know, like more recently I've been getting a ton of like work emails, cause like I get a lot of notifications from GitHub and like it was ridiculously [00:54:53] swyx: no don't get, yeah leave GitHub notifications outside email, just, leave it inside a GitHub and then, check it whenever you're doing code stuff, but otherwise don't, I think those GitHub was the first thing, one of the first notifications streams that turned off I'll say yeah, make extensive of filters.[00:55:08] Snippets are really useful. Like Bigham, like pre baked replies to everything. Instant shows can help a little bit. And that's when you BCC some, you take someone off to BCC and then you promote up the two list. All those things like having memorizing the keyboard shortcuts, like everyone's working on some version of that.[00:55:24] I think there's a, the, there's some former Gmail engineers who spun out and are making their own take on what a better Gmail could look like. I think it's called shortcut. I haven't tried, I haven't like I've, I haven't mentally on my list to try them. Yeah. I mean, like base is fine.[00:55:39] Just use filters wisely use snippets and I think you're use, use the key

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. This week Jurgen is with us to talk about his latest project: unFIX.work. Jurgen shares his own experience as a product developer (Mindsettlers), and the critical lessons he's learned as a Product Owner for his own business.We discuss how hard it is to define the real problem, as seen by our customers, and the market at large.  In this episode, we refer to Kathy Sierra and her idea of “make your users awesome”, we refer to the Jobs To Be Done Framework, and the work by Clayton Christensen, and discuss the ideas in the book Team Topologies which has been featured here on the podcast.  Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We've put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO's collaborate. About Jurgen Appelo Jurgen Appelo is an entrepreneur, an author, and keynote speaker who applies Agile to his life and his businesses. He's also prolific writer on all topics business and agile. He wrote Management 3.0, How to Change the World, Managing for Happiness and his latest book about entrepreneurship and product development: Startup, Scale up, Screw up. You can link with Jurgen Appelo on LinkedIn and connect with Jurgen Appelo on Twitter.

About DeirdréFor over 35 years, Deirdré Straughan has been helping technologies grow and thrive through marketing and community. Her product experience spans consumer apps and devices, cloud services and technologies, and kernel features. Her toolkit includes words, websites, blogs, communities, events, video, social, marketing, and more. She has written and edited technical books and blog posts, filmed and produced videos, and organized meetups, conferences, and conference talks. She just started a new gig heading up open source community at Intel. You can find her @deirdres on Twitter, and she also shares her opinions on beginningwithi.comLinks: “Marketing Your Tech Talent”: https://youtu.be/9pGSIE7grSs Personal Webpage: https://beginningwithi.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/deirdres 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: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is, in AWS, with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem, and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai, and Stax have seen significant results by using them, and it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the best parts about running this podcast has been that I can go through old notes of conferences I've went to, and the people whose talks I've seen, the folks who have done interesting things that back when I had no idea what I was doing—as if I do now—and these are people I deeply admire. And now I have an excuse to reach out to them and drag them onto this show to basically tell them that until they blush. And today is no exception for that. Deirdré Straughan has had a career that has spanned three decades, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly.Deirdré: A bit more, even.Corey: Indeed. And you've been in I want to say marketing, but I'm scared to frame it that way, not because that's not what you've been doing, but because so few people do marketing to technical audiences well, that the way you do it is so otherworldly good compared to what is out there that it almost certainly gives the wrong impression. So, first things first. Thank you for joining me.Deirdré: Very happy to. Thank you for having me. It's always a delight to talk with you.Corey: So, what is it you'd say it is you do, exactly? Because I'm doing a very weak job of explaining it in a way that is easy for folks who have never heard of you before—which is a failing—to contextualize?Deirdré: Um, well, there's one—you know, I was until recently working for AWS, and one of the—went to an internal conference once at which they said—it was a marketing conference, and they said, “As the marketing organization, our job is to educate.” Now, you can discuss whether or not we think AWS does that well, but I deeply agree with that statement, that as marketers, our job is to educate people. You know, the classical marketing is to educate people about the benefits of your product. You know, “Here's why ours is better.” The Kathy Sierra approach to that, which I think is very, very wise is, don't market your product by telling people how wonderful the product is. Tell them how they can kick ass with it.Corey: How do you wind up disambiguating between that and, let's just say it's almost a trope at this point where someone will talk about something, be it a product, be it an entire Web3 thing, whatever, and when someone comes back and says, “Well, I don't think that's a great idea.” The response is, “Oh, no, no. You just need to be educated properly about it.” Or, “Do your own research.” That sort of thing. And that is to be clear, not anything I've ever seen you say, do, or imply. But that almost feels like the wrong direction to take that in, of educating folks.Deirdré: Well, yeah, I mean, the way it's used in those terms, it sounds condescending. In my earliest, earlier part of my career, I was dealing with consumer software. So, this was in the early days of CD recording. We were among the pioneering CD recording products, and the idea was to make it—my Italian boss saw this market coming because he was doing recording CDs as a service, like, you were a law firm that needed to store a lot of data, and he would cut a CD for you, and you would store that. And you know, this was on a refrigerator-sized thing with a command-line interface, very difficult to use, very easy to waste these $100 blank CDs.But he was following the market, and he saw that there was going to be these half-height CD-ROM drives. And he said, “Well, what we need to go with that is software that is actually usable by the consumer.” And that's what we did; we created that software. And so in that case, there were things the customer still had to know about CDR, but my approach was that, you know, I do the documentation, I have to explain this stuff, but I should have to explain less and less. More and more of that should be driven into the interface and just be so obvious and intuitive that nobody ever has to read a manual. So, education can be any of those things. Your software can be educating the customer while they're using it.Corey: I wish that were one of those things we could point out and say, “Well, yeah, years later, it's blindingly obvious to everyone.” Except for the part where it's not, where every once in a while on Twitter, I will go and try a new service some cloud company launches, or something else I've heard about, and I will, effectively, screenshot and then live tweet my experiences with it. And very often—I'll get accused of people saying, “Ahh, you're pretending to be dumb and not understanding that's how that interface works.” No, I'm not. It turns out that the failure mode of bad interfaces and of not getting this right is not that people look at it and say, “Ah, that product is crap.” It's that, “Oh, I'm dumb, and no one ever told me about it.”That's why I'm so adamant about this. Because if I'm looking at an interface and I get something wrong, it is extremely unlikely that I'm the only person who ever has. And it goes beyond interfaces, it goes out to marketing as well with poor messaging around a product—when I say marketing, I'm talking the traditional sense of telling a story, and here's a press release. “Great. You've told me what it does, you told me about big customers and the rest, but you haven't told me what painful problem do I have that it solves? And why should I care about it?” Almost like that's the foregone conclusion.No, no. We're much more interested in making sure that they get the company name and history right in the ‘About Us' at the bottom of the press release. And it's missing the forest for the trees, in many respects. It's—Deirdré: Yeah.Corey: —some level—it suffers from a similar problem of sales, where you have an entire field that is judged based upon some of the worst examples out there. And on the technical side of the world—and again, all these roles are technical, but the more traditional, ‘I write code for a living' types, there's almost a condescension or a dismissiveness that is brought toward people who work in sales, or in marketing, or honestly, anything that doesn't spend all their time staring into an IDE for a living. You know, the people who get to do something that makes them happy, as opposed to this misery that the coder types that we sometimes find ourselves trapped into. How have you seen that?Deirdré: Yeah. And it's also a condescension towards customers.Corey: Oh absolutely.Deirdré: I have seen so many engineers who will, you know, throw something out there and say, “This is the most beautiful, sexy, amazing thing I've ever done.” And there have been a few occasions when I've looked at it and gone, you know, “Yes, I can see how from a technical point of view, that's beautiful and amazing and sexy, but no customer is ever going to use it.” Either because they don't need it or because they won't understand it. There's no way in that context to have that make sense. And so yeah, you can do beautiful, brilliant engineering, but if you never sell it and no one ever uses it, what's the point?Corey: One am I of the ways that I've always found to tell a story that resonates—and it sometimes takes people by surprise when they're doing a sponsorship or something I do, or whatnot, and they're sitting there talking about how awesome everything is, and hey, let's do a webinar together. And it's cool, we can do that, but I'd rather talk to one of your customers because you can say anything you want about your product, and I can sit here and make fun of it because I have deep-seated personality problems, and that's great. But when a customer says, “I have this problem, and this is the thing that I pay money for to fix that problem,” it is much harder for people to dismiss that because you're voting with your dollars. You're not saying this because if your product succeeds, you get to go buy a car or something. Now, someone instead is saying this because, “I had a painful point, and not only am I willing to pay money to make this painful thing go away, but then I want to go out in public and talk about that.”That is an incredibly hard thing to refute, bordering on the impossible, in some circumstances. That's what always moved me. If you have a customer telling stories about how great something is, I will listen. If you have your own internal employees talking about great something is, I have some snark for you.Deirdré: And that is another thing AWS gets right, is they—Corey: Oh, very much so.Deirdré: —work very hard to get the customer in front of the audience. Although, with a new technology service, et cetera, there was a point before you may have those customers in which the other kind of talk, where you have a highly technical engineer speaking to a highly technical audience and saying, “Here's our shiny new thing and here's what you can do with it,” then you get the customers who will come along later and say, “Yes, we did thing with the shiny new thing, and it was great.” An engineer talking about what they did is not always to be overlooked.Corey: Your career trajectory has been fascinating to me in a variety of different ways. You were at Sun Microsystems. And I guess personally, I just hope that when you decide to write your memoirs, you title it, The Sun Also Crashes. You know, it's such a great title; I haven't seen anything use it yet, and I hope I live to see someone doing that.And then you were at Oracle for ten months—wonder how that happened? For those who are unaware, there was an acquisition story—and then you went to spend three-and-a-half years running educational programs and community at Joyent, back before. Community architect—which is what you were at the time—was really a thing. Community was just the people that showed up to talk about the technology that you've done. You were one of the first people that I can think of in this industry when I've been paying attention, who treated it as something more than that. How do you get there?Deirdré: So, my early career, I was living in Italy because I was married to an Italian at the time, and I had already been working in tech before I left the United States, and enjoyed it and wanted to continue it. But there was not much happening in tech in Italy then. And I just got very, very lucky; I fell in with this Italian software entrepreneur—absolute madman—and he was extremely unusual in Italy in those days. He was basically doing a Silicon Valley-style software startup in Milan. And self-funded, partly funded by his wealthy girlfriend. You know, we were small, scrappy, all of that. And so he decided that he could make better software to do CD recording, as these CD-ROM drives were becoming cheaper, and he could foresee that there would be a consumer market for them.Corey: What era was this? Because I remember—Deirdré: This—Corey: —back when I was in school, basically when I was failing out of college, burning a bunch of CDRs to play there, and every single tool I ever used was crap. You're right. This was a problem.Deirdré: So, we started on that software in, ohh, '91.Corey: Yeah.Deirdré: Yeah. His goal was, “I'm going to make the leading CD recording software for the Windows market.” Hired a bunch of smart engineers, of which there are plenty in Italy, and started building this thing. I had done a project for him, documenting another OCR—Optical Character Recognition—product, and he said, “How would you like to write a book together about CD recording?” And it's like, “Okay, sure.”So, we wrote this book, and, you know, it was like, basically, me reading and him explaining to me the various color book specs from Philips and Sony that explain, you know, right down to the pits and lands, how CD recording works, and then me translating it into layman's terms. And so the book got published in January of 1993 by Random House. It's one of the first books, if not the first book in the world to actually be published with a CD included.Corey: Oh, so you're ultimately the person who's responsible—indirectly—for hey, you could send CDs out, and then the sea of AOL mailers showing up—basically the mini-frisbee plague that lasted a decade or so, for the rest of us?Deirdré: Yeah. And this was all marketing. For him, the whole idea of writing a book was a marketing ploy because on the CD, we included a trial version of the software. And that was all he wanted to put on there, but I thought, “Well, let's take this a step further.” This was—I had been also doing a little bit of work in journalism, just to scrape by in Italy.I was actually an Italian computer journalist, and I was getting sent to conferences, including the launch of Adobe PDF. Like, they sent me to Scotland to learn about PDFs. Like, “Okay.” But then it wasn't quite ready at the time, so I ended up using FrameMaker instead. But I made an entire hypertext version of that book and put it on that CD, which was launched in early '93 when the internet was barely becoming a thing.So, we launched the book, sold the book. Turned out the CD had been manufactured wrong and did not work.Corey: Oh, dear.Deirdré: And I was just dying. And the publisher said, “Well, you know, if you can get ahold of the readers, the people”—you know, because they were getting complaints—they said, “If you can reach the readers somehow and let them know, there's a number they can call and we'll send them a replacement disk.” We had put our CompuServe email address in the book. It's like, “Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Write to us at”—Corey: Weren't those the long string of numbers as a username.Deirdré: Yeah.Corey: Yeah.Deirdré: Mm-hm. You could reach it via external email at the time, I believe. And we didn't really expect that many people would bother. But, you know, because there was this problem, we were getting a lot of contacts. And so I was like, I was determined I was going to solve this situation, and I was interacting with them.And those were my first experiences with interacting with customers, especially online. You know, and we did have a solution; we were able to defuse the situation and get it fixed, but, you know, so that was when I realized it was very powerful because I could communicate very quickly with people anywhere in the world, and—quickly over whatever the modem speed was [laugh] at that time, you know, 1800 baud or something. And so I got intr—I had already been using CompuServe when I was in college, and so I was interested in how do you communicate with people in this new medium.And I started applying that to my work. And then I went and applied it everywhere. It's like, “Okay, well, there's this new thing coming, you know, called the internet. Well, how can I use that?” Publishing a paper manual seems kind of stupid in this day and age, so I can update them much more quickly if I have it on a website.So, by that time, the company had been acquired by Adaptec. Adaptec had a website, which was mostly about their cables and things, and so I just, kind of, made a section of the website. It was like, “Here is all about CDR.” And it got to where it was driving 70% of the traffic to Adaptec, even though our products were a small percentage of the revenue. And at the same time, I was interacting with customers on the Usenet and by email.Corey: And then later, mailing lists, and the rest. And now it—we take it for granted, but it used to be that so much of this was unidirectional, where at an absolute high level, the best you could hope for in some cases is, “I really have something to say to this author. I'm going to write a letter and mail it to the publisher and hope that they forward it.” And you never really know if it's going to wind up landing or not? Now it's, “I'm going to jump on Twitter and tell this person what I think.”And whether that's a good or bad change, it has changed the world. And it's no longer unidirectional where your customers just silent masses anymore, regardless of what you wind up doing or selling. And I sell consulting services. Yeah, I deal with customers a lot; we have high bandwidth conversations, but I also do an annual charity t-shirt drive and I get a lot of feedback and a lot of challenges with deliveries in the rest toward the end of the year. And that is something else. We have to do it. It's not what it used to be just mail a self-addressed stamped envelope to somewhere, and hope for the best. And we'll blame the post office if it doesn't work. The world changed, and it's strange that happens in your own lifetime.Deirdré: Yeah. And there were people who saw it coming, early on. I became aware of The Cluetrain Manifesto because a customer wrote to me and said, I think you're the best example I see out there of people actually living this. And The Cluetrain Manifesto said, “The internet is going to change how companies interact with customers. You are going to have to be part of a conversation, rather than just, we talk to you and tell you what's what.” And I was already embracing that.And then it has had profound implications. It's, in some ways, a democratization of companies and their products because people can suddenly be very vociferous about what they think about your product and what they want improved, and features they'd like added, and so forth. And I never said the customer is always right, but the customer should always be treated politely. And so I just developed this—it was me, but it was a persona which was true to me, where I am out here, I'm interacting with people, I am extremely forthcoming and honest—Corey: That you are, which is always appreciated, to be clear. I have a keen appreciation for folks who I know beyond the shadow of a doubt will tell me where I stand with them. I've never been a fan of folks who will, “I can't stand that guy. Oh, great, here he comes. Hi.” No.There is something very refreshing about the way that you approach honesty, and that you have always had that. And it manifests in different forms. You are one of those people where if you say something in public, be it in writing, be it on stage, be it in your work, you believe it. There has never been a shadow of doubt in my mind that someone could pay you to say something or advocate for something in which you do not believe.Deirdré: Thanks. Yeah, it's just partly because I've never been good at lying. It just makes me so deeply uncomfortable that I can't do it. [laugh].Corey: That's what a good liar would say, let's be very clear here. Like, what's the old joke? Like, “If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying because then you're good at everything.” No.Deirdré: [laugh].Corey: It's a terrible way to go through life.Deirdré: Yeah. And the earn trust thing was part of my… portfolio from very early on. Which was hilarious because in those days, as now, there were people whose knee-jerk reaction was, if you're out here representing a company, you automatically must be lying to me, or about to lie to me, or have lied to me. But because I had been so out there and so honest, I had dozens of supporters who would pile in and say, “No, no, no. That's not who she is.” And so it was, yeah, it was interesting. I had my trolls but I also had lots of defenders.Corey: The real thing that I've seen as well sometimes is when someone is accused of something like that, people will chime in—look, like, I get this myself. People like you. I don't generally have that problem—but people will chime in with, like, “I don't like Corey, but no, he's generally right about these things.” That's, okay, great. It's like, the backhanded compliment. And I'll take what I can get.I want to fast-forward in time a little bit from the era of mailing books with CDs in them, and then having to talk to people via other ways to get them in CompuServe to 2013 when you gave a talk at one of—no, I'm not going to say, ‘one of.' It is the best community conference of which I am aware. Monktoberfest as put on by our friends at RedMonk. It was called “Marketing Your Tech Talent” and it's one of those videos it's worth the watch. If you're listening to this, and you haven't seen it, you absolutely should fix that. Tell me about it. Where did the talk come from?Deirdré: As you can see in the talk, it was stuff I had been doing. It actually started earlier than that. When I joined Sun Microsystems as a contractor in 2007, my remit was to try to get Sun engineers to communicate. Like, Sun had done this big push around blogging, they'd encourage everybody to open up your own blog. Here's our blogging platform, you can say whatever you want.And there were, like, 3000 blogs, about half of which were just moribund; they had put out one or two posts, and then nothing ever again. And for some reason—I don't know who decided—but they decided that engineers had goals around this and engineering teams had to start producing content in this way, which was a strange idea. So, I was brought on. It's, like, you know, “Help these engineers communicate. Help them with blogging, and somehow find a way to get them doing it.”And so I did a whole bunch of things from, like, running competitions to just going and talking to people. But we finally got to where Dan Maslowski, who was the manager who hired me in, he said, “Well, we've got this conference. It was the SNIA, the Storage Networking Industries Association Conference. We're a big sponsor, we've got, like, ten talks. And why don't you just go—you know, I'm going to buy you a video camera, go record this thing.”And I'd used a video camera a little bit, but, you know, it's like, never in this context, so it's like, okay, let's figure out, you know, what kind of mic do I need? And so I went off to the conference with my video blogging rig, and videoed all those talks. And then the idea was like, “Okay, we'll put them up on”—you know, Sun had its own video channels and things—“We'll put it out there, and this information will then be available to more people; it'll help the engineers communicate what they're doing.”And the funny part was, I run into with Sun, the professional video people wanted nothing to do with it. Like, “Your stuff is not high enough quality. You don't meet our branding guidelines. You cannot put this on the Sun channels.” Okay, fine. So, I started putting it on YouTube, which in those days meant splitting it into ten-minute segments because that was all they would give you. [laugh]. And so it was like, everything I was doing was guerilla marketing because I was always in the teeth on somebody in the corporation who wanted to—it's like, “Oh, we're not going to put out video unless it can be slickly produced in the studio, and we're only going to do that for VPs, not for engineers.”Corey: Oh, yeah. The little people, as it were. This talk, in many ways—I don't know if ever told you this story or not—but it did shape how I approached building out my entire approach: The sponsorship side of the business that I have, how I approach communicating with people. And it's where in many ways, the newsletter has taken its ethos. One of the things that you mentioned in that talk was, first, you were actually the first time that I ever saw someone explicitly comparing the technical talent slash DevRel—which is not a term I would call it, but all right—to the Hollywood model, where you have this idea that there's an agent that winds up handling these folks that are freelancers. They are named talent. They're the ones that have the draw; that's what people want, so we have to develop this.Okay, what why is it important to develop this? Because you absolutely need to have your technical people writing technical content, not folks who are divorced from that entire side of the world because it doesn't resonate, it doesn't land. This is I think, what DevRel was sort of been turned into; it's, what it DevRel? Well, it's special marketing because engineers need special handling to handle these things. No, I think it's everyone needs to be marketed to in a way that has authenticity that meets them where they are, and that's a little harder to do with people who spend their lives writing code than it would be someone who is it was at a more accessible profession.But I don't think that a lot of it's being done right. This was the first encouragement that I'd gotten early on that maybe I am onto something here because here's someone I deeply respect saying a lot of the same things—from a slightly different angle; like I was never doing this as part of a large technology company—but it was still, there's something here. And for better or worse. I think I've demonstrated by now that there is some validity there. But back then it was transformational.Deirdré: Well, thank you.Corey: It still kind of is in many respects. This is all new to someone.Deirdré: Yeah. I felt, you know, I'd been putting engineers in front of the public and found it was powerful, and engineers want to hear from other engineers. And especially for companies like Sun and Oracle and Joyent, we're selling technology to other technologists. So, there's a limited market for white papers because VPs and CEOs want to read those, but really, your main market is other technologists and that's who you need to talk to and talk to them in their own way, in their own language. They weren't even comfortable with slickly produced videos. Neither being on the camera nor watching it.Corey: Yeah, at some point, it was like, “I look too good.” It's like, “Oh, yeah. It's—oh, you're going to do a whole video production thing? Great.” “Okay. [unintelligible 00:24:13] the makeup artists coming in.” Like, “What do you mean makeup?” And it's—Deirdré: Oh, it was worse at Sun. We wasted so much money because you would get an engineer and put him in the studio under all these lights with these great big cameras, and they would just freeze.Corey: Mmm.Deirdré: And it's like, you know, “Well, hurry up, hurry up. We've got half an hour of studio time. Get your thing; say it.” And, [frantic noise]. You know, whereas I would take them in some back conference room and just set up a camera and be sitting in a chair opposite. It's like, “Relax. Tell me what you want to tell me. If we have to do ten takes, it's fine.” Yeah, video quality wasn't great, but the content was great.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 no, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: Speaking of content, one more topic I want to cover a little bit here is you recently left your job at AWS. And even if you had not told me that, I would have known because your blog has undergone something of a renaissance—beginningwithi.com for those who want to follow along, and of course, we'll put links to this in the [show notes 00:25:08]—you've been suddenly talking about a lot of different things. And I want to be clear, I don't recall any of these posts being one of those, “I just left a company, I'm going to set them on fire now.”It's been about a variety of different topics, though, that have been very top-of-mind for folks. You talk about things like equal work for equal pay. You talk about remote work versus cost of commuting a fair bit. And as of this recording, you most recently wound up talking specifically about problematic employers in tech. But what you're talking about is also something that this happened during the days of the Sun acquisition through Oracle.So, people are thinking, like, “Wait a minute, is she subtweeting what happened today”—no. These things rhyme and they repeat. I'm super thrilled whenever I see this in my RSS reader, just because it is so… they oh, good. I get I'm going to read something now that I'm going to enjoy, so let me put this in distraction-free mode and really dig into it. Because your writing is a joy.What is it that has inspired you to bring that back to life? Is it just to having a whole bunch of free time, and well, I'm not writing marketing stocks anymore, so I guess I'm going to write blog posts instead.Deirdré: My blog, if you looked at our calendar, over the years, it sort of comes and goes depending what else is going on in my life. I actually was starting to do a little bit more writing, and I even did a few little TikTok videos before I quit AWS. I'm starting to think about some of the more ancient history parts of my career. It's partly just because of what's been going on in the world. [Brendan 00:26:35] and I moved to Australia a year ago, and it was something that had been planned for a long time.We did not actually expect that we would be able to move our jobs the way we did. And then, you know, with pandemic, everything changed; that actually accelerated our departure timeline because we've been planning initially to let our son stay in school in California, through until he finished elementary, but then he wasn't in school, so there seems no point, whereas in Australia, he could be in a classroom. And so, you know, the whole world is changing, and the working world is changing, but also, we all started working from home. I've been working from home—mostly—since 1993. And I was working very remotely because I was working from Italy for a California company.And because I was one of the first people doing it, the people in California did not know what to make of me. And I would get people who would just completely ignore any emails I sent. It was like as if I did not exist because they had never seen me in person. So, I would just go to California four times a year and spend a few weeks, and then I would get the face time, and after that it was easy to interact any way I needed to.Corey: It feels like it's almost the worst kind of remote because you have most people at office, and then you have a few outliers, and that tends to, in my experience at least, lead to a really weird team dynamics where you have almost a second class of folks who aren't taken nearly as seriously. It's why when we started our company here, it was everyone is going to be remote all the time. We were distributed. There is no central office because as soon as you do, that's where things are disastrous. My business partner and I live a couple states apart.Deirdré: Yeah. And I think that's the fairest way to do it. In companies that have already existed, where they do have headquarters, and you know, there's that—Corey: Yeah, you can't suddenly sell your office space, and all 300,000 employees [laugh] are now working from home. That's a harder thing, too.Deirdré: Yeah. But I think it's interesting that the argument is being framed as like, “Oh, people work better in the office, people learn more in the office.” And we've even had the argument trotted out here that people should be forced back to the office because the businesses in the central business district depend on that. It's like—Corey: Mmm.Deirdré: —well, what about the businesses that have since, you know in the meantime sprung up in the more suburban centers? Now, you've got some thriving little cafes out there now? Are we supposed to just screw them over? It's ultimately people making economic arguments that have nothing to do with the well-being of employees. And the pandemic at least has—I think, a lot of people have come to realize that life is just too short to put up with a lot of bullshit, and by and large, commuting is bullshit. [laugh].Corey: It's a waste of time, it's not great for the environment, there's—yeah, and again, I'm not sitting here saying the entire world should do a particular thing. I don't think that there's one-size-fits-everyone solutions possible in this space. Some companies, it makes sense for the people involved to be in the same room. In some cases, it's not even optional. For others, there's no value to it, but getting there is hard.And again, different places need to figure out what's right for them. But it's also the world is changing, and trying to pretend that it hasn't, it just feels regressive, and I don't think that's going to align with where the industry and where people are going. Especially in full remote situations we've had the global pandemic, some wit on Twitter recently opined that it's never been easier for a company to change jobs. You just have to wait for the different the new laptop to show up, and then you just join a different Zoom link, and you're in your new job. It's like, “You know, you're not that far from wrong here.”Deirdré: [laugh]. Yep.Corey: There's no, like, “Well, where's the office? What's the”—no. It is, my day-to-day looks remarkably similar, regardless of where I work.Deirdré: Yeah.Corey: That means something.Deirdré: I was one of the early beneficiaries as well of this work-life balance, that I could take my kid to school in the morning, and then work, and then pick her up from school in the afternoon and spend time with her. And then California would be waking up for meetings, so after dinner, I'd be having meetings. Yeah, sometimes it was pain, but it was workable, and it gave me more flexibility, you know, whereas the times I had to commute to an office… tended to be hellish. I think part of the reason the blog has had a lot more activities I've just been in sort of a more reflective phase. I've gotten to this very privileged position where I suddenly realized, I actually have enough money to retire on, I have a husband who is extremely supportive of whatever I want to do, and I'm in a country that has a public health care system, if it doesn't completely crumble under COVID in the next few weeks.Corey: Hopefully, we'll get this published before that happens.Deirdré: Yes. And so I don't have to work. It's like, up to this point in my career, I have always desperately needed that next job. I don't think I have ever been in the position of having competing offers. You know, there's people who talk about, you know, you can always go find a better offer. It's like, no, when you're a weirdo like me and you're a middle-aged woman, is not that easy.Corey: People saying that invariably—“So, what is your formal job?” Like, “Oh, SDE3.” Like, okay, great. So, that means that they're are mul—not just, they don't probably need to hire you; they need to hire so many of you that they need to start segregating them with Roman numerals. Great.Maybe that doesn't apply to everyone. Maybe that particular skill set right now is having its moment in the sun, but there's a lot of other folks who don't neatly fit into those boxes. There's something to be said for empathy. Because this is my lived experience does not mean it is yours. And trying to walk a mile in someone else's shoes is almost increasingly—especially in the world of social media—a bit of a lost skill.Deirdré: [laugh]. I mean, it's partly that recruiters are not always the sharpest tools in the shed, and/or they're very young, very new to it all. It's just people like to go for what's easy. And like, for example, me at the moment, it's easy to put me in that product marketing manager box. It's like, “Oh, I need somebody to fill that slot. You look like that person. Let's talk.” Whereas before, people would just look at my resume and go, “I don't know what she is.”Corey: I really think the fact that you've never had competing offers just shows an extreme lack of vision from a number of companies around what marketing effectively to a technical audience can really be. It's nice to see that what you have been advocating for and doing the work for, for your entire career is really coming into its own now.Deirdré: Yeah. We'll see what happens next. It's been interesting. Yeah, I've never had so much attention from recruiters as when I got AWS on my resume. And then even more once it said, product marketing manager because, you know, “Okay. You've got the FAANG and you've got a title we recognize. Let's talk to you.”Corey: Exactly. That's, “Oh, yay. You fit in that box, finally.” Because it's always been one of those. Yeah, like, “What is it you actually do?” There's a reason that I've built what I do now into the last job I'll ever have. Because I don't even know where to begin describing me to what I do and how I do it. Even at cocktail parties, there's nothing I can say that doesn't sound completely surreal. “I make fun of Amazon for a living.” It's true, but it also sounds psychotic, and here we are. It's—Deirdré: Well, it's absolutely brilliant marketing, and it's working very well for you. So [laugh].Corey: The realization that I had was that if this whole thing collapsed and I had to get a job again, what would I be doing? It probably isn't engineering. It's almost certainly much more closely aligned with marketing. I just hope I never have to find out because, honestly, I'm having way too much fun.Deirdré: Yeah. And that's another thing I think is changing. I think more and more of us are realizing working for other people has its limitations. You know, it can be fun, it can be exciting, depending on the company, and the team, and so on. But you're very much beholden to the culture of the company, or the team, or whatever.I grew up in Asia, as a child, of American expats. So, I'm what is called a third culture kid, which means I'm not totally American, even though my parents were. I'm not—you know, I grew up in Thailand, but I'm not Thai. I grew up in India, but I'm not Indian. You're something in between.And your tribe is actually other people like you, even if they don't share the specific countries. Like, one of my best friends in Milan was a woman who had grown up in Brazil and France. It's like, you know, no countries in common, but we understood that experience. And something I've been meaning to write about for a long time is that third culture kids tend to be really good at adapting to any culture, which can include corporate cultures.So, every time I go into a new company, I'm treating that as a new cultural experience. It's like, Ericsson was fascinating. It's this very old Swedish telecom, with this wild old history, and a footprint in something like 190 countries. That makes it amazingly unique and fascinating. The thing I tripped over was I did not know anything about Swedish culture because they give cultural training to the people who are actually going to be moving to Sweden.Corey: But not the people working elsewhere, even though you're at a—Deirdré: Yeah.Corey: Yeah, it's like, well, dealing with New Yorkers is sort of its own skill, or dealing with Israelis, which is great; they have great folks, but it's a fun culture of management by screaming, in my experience, back when I had family living out there. It was great.Deirdré: One of my favorite people at AWS is Israeli. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. And it's, you have to understand some cultural context here. And now to—even if you're not sitting in the same place. Yeah, we're getting better as an industry, bit by bit, brick by brick. I just hope that will wind up getting there within my lifetime, at least.I really want to thank you for taking the time to come on the show. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Deirdré: Oh. Well, as you said, my website beginningwithi.com, and I am on Twitter as @deirdres. That's D-E-I-R-D-R-E-S. [laugh]. So.Corey: And we will, of course, include links to that in the [show notes 00:36:23].Deirdré: So yeah, I'm pretty out there, pretty easy to find, and happy to chat with people.Corey: Which I highly recommend. Thank you again, for being so generous with your time, not just now, but over the course of your entire career.Deirdré: Well, I'm at a point where sometimes I can help people, and I really like to do that. The reason I ever aspired to high corporate office—which I've now clearly I'm not ever going to make—was because I wanted to be in a position to make a difference. And so, even if all the difference I'm making is a small one, it's still important to me to try to do that.Corey: Thank you again. I really do appreciate your time.Deirdré: Okay. Well, it was great talking to you. As always.Corey: Likewise. Deirdré Straughan, currently gloriously unemployed. 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 insulting comment that you mailed to me on a CDR that doesn't read.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.

This conversation with Kathy Sierra literally shifted my direction with my horses! It was pivotal in the best possible way and I am excited to share her work with you, as I believe it is one of the keys to changing our minds about our horses, our training, their movement, and their performance, and supporting so many horses to be happier and healthier. It has even shifted my way of thinking as an equine manual therapist, and what I am seeing, how I am working, and how I can support the horses I work with in better ways. I really encourage you to listen to our chat, and if it impacts you as well, please share with your horse communities. Thank you for supporting horses to be happier in their bodies and minds - it is all about the ripples!  Kathy Sierra is the creator of Intrinzen, a movement-science approach to helping horses rediscover a love of movement expression. She has a BSc in Kinesiology, and spent the first half of her career as a *human* movement professional before switching to computer science. She also taught design for motivating experiences at UCLA, Virgin, and Universal Studios. A horse owner for more than 40 years, she combined her background in both movement science and motivation to help save one of her own horses. Eventually she began sharing the Intrinzen science principles and philosophy with others. Find her course Pain Science and Performance here: https://www.pantherflow.com/ Follow Kathy on Instagram at pantherflows Resources from Kathy:  Book - How we learn to move by Rob Gray Books - A Guide to Better Movement by Todd Hargrove Book - Playing with Movement by Todd Hargrove

Horsemanship Breakthroughs Podcast Episode 22⁠⁠ Intrinsic Motivation for Healthy Movement with Kathy Sierra "Nature as an ally instead of adversary”   Kathy Sierra has ten years working in human sports medicine as a training director in Los Angeles. She then went back to school for computer science, working after as a game developer and software architect. Kathy eventually worked in Hollywood and taught “interaction design for intrinsic motivation” at UCLA Entertainment Studies and Universal Studio, and went on to create an educational book series in technology that sold over 2 million copies.   Horses have been a lifelong passion, but not her profession. However, when her beloved horse Draumur was nearly euthanized, Kathy felt it was her fault, so she took everything in her background on motivation, learning psychology, neuroscience, and movement science, and synthesized a path forward to help him when conventional methods failed.    Eventually other people saw them and began to ask for help with their horses, so she created the philosophy and principles of Intrinzen. She lives on a small island near the border of US/Canada with her husband and 6 horses.  

Vielleicht habt ihr diesen Namen ja schon einmal gehört oder gelesen, vielleicht habt ihr diese Trainingsmethode auch schon ein paar Mal in Aktion beobachtet, aber nicht so richtig verstanden was dahinter steht. Deshalb versuchen wir euch einen Einblick in die Intrinzen Philosophie zu geben, die Kathy Sierra zusammen mit Steinar Sigurbjörnson begründet und bekannt gemacht… Weiterlesen Was ist Intrinzen?

Michele Hansen  00:00Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear. We recently refreshed the Geocodio website, and it was really helpful how Oh Dear alerted us to broken links and made it clear what we needed to fix. Broken links are bad for SEO, and so I really appreciate those alerts from Oh Dear. You can sign up for a 10 day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app. Colleen Schnettler  00:28Good morning, Michele. Michele Hansen  00:30Hey, how are you? Colleen Schnettler  00:32Good. How are things in Denmark today? Michele Hansen  00:36Well, this week was kind of a challenge, um, because on, I had a super productive writing day on Monday. So I read Kathy Sierra's Badass over the weekend. Colleen Schnettler  00:52Oh yeah, I've heard of that book. Michele Hansen  00:53I don't know, have you read that?  Colleen Schnettler  00:54I have not. Michele Hansen  00:54Okay, you've read that. Oh, you have not read that.  Colleen Schnettler  00:56I've not read that.  Michele Hansen  00:57It's really good. So in so many ways, it's, I think of it as, like, jobs to be done for people who don't know what Jobs To Be Done is and have never heard of that. Like, it's basically like figuring out like, you're not just building a thing for the sake of it. You're building it because somebody wants to do something, and they don't buy it for the sake of it. Like, they want to do something better. And so it's, it's kind of aligned with StoryBrand in that regard. It's like, you know, your user is the hero, not the product. But it's a little bit more, um, it's, I think it's just a different perspective than StoreBrand. It's very, very practical. And it, the whole thing is kind of written like a PowerPoint. There's like, lots of like pictures and comics. Actually my seven year old, like, while I was reading it, she came over and she was like, oh, what are you reading? Like, pictures. So, you know, she wants to learn how to make a product. I'll leave that one laying around. Um, it's really good. Um, but, so I was reading it because some people had mentioned it in the interviews I did as a book that they liked.  Colleen Schnettler  02:05Okay, great.  Michele Hansen  02:06And yeah, and, and so I read it just sort of as like, reference material. Um, but actually, it ended up like, helping me kind of have a breakthrough with the book on Monday. Um, and so I spent like, the whole day. Uh, yeah, no, all day Tuesday, actually. I spent the whole day Tuesday writing. I didn't get any writing time on Monday, really. And then Tuesday, at like, four o'clock, I was, um, like, signing on to a Zoom, and then my computer crashed.  Colleen Schnettler  02:35Oh, no. Michele Hansen  02:36Like, died, and crashed and like, gone to join the choir invisible like, is now an ex-laptop, like, just totally got like, it was just restarting itself for like, three days. And,  Colleen Schnettler  02:51Oh. Michele Hansen  02:51So, it is now embarking on a lovely journey to the Czech Republic to be repaired, um, and I did not get a lot done the rest of the week, because it was like, trying to figure stuff out with using the, like, the iPad. Like, it was just, yeah. So, you know, but that's real life, right? Colleen Schnettler  03:15Yes, that is real life. So true. Michele Hansen  03:19Oh, so how's it, how's it going for you? Colleen Schnettler  03:23So I got a lot of time, I blocked out a lot of time this week to work on Simple File Upload, and it gave me great joy. Like, I have to say, you know, it's funny because people are always talking about self-care, and in the mom space, like you always see things like go get a pedicure, and I'm like, my self care is like, six hours alone with my laptop with no one to bother me. Is that weird?  Michele Hansen  03:44Heck yes. Colleen Schnettler  03:45Like, I love that. So like, on Monday, such a weirdo.  Michele Hansen  03:50It's so true. Like, it's so true. Like, so much of self-care is like, people just wanting to sell you stuff, and like, reality is it's sometimes it's just leave me alone. Colleen Schnettler  04:01Right? Just leave me alone. So it was, I really had a great week. I got to spend a good chunk of time implementing this feature request, which was something that I thought would be easy, and ended up taking way longer than I thought. So basically, my uploader uses the default styling that comes with drop zone, DropzoneJS, and so I got a request to allow it to be smaller, like 50 pixels by 50 pixels, which I thought would be no big deal. But it turns out once I started digging into the source, the styles are all pinned to 120 pixels by 120 pixels. So it was like, a huge thing to change this because I basically had to rip out all of the static, you know, statically defined CSS and put in, um, flexible CSS, and it was fun. I mean, it was, it was so cool because it was something I enjoy doing, um, something I don't do a lot. I think one of the huge benefits to building your own product is you get exposed to things you wouldn't do in your day job. Like, every job I've had, I have a front end guy, and I have a CSS guy, and I don't really do that very much. Um, it's not a core skill set of mind. So it was kind of fun to get to dive into it and like, learn some new stuff and, and uh, and to ship it. So that made me happy. That brought me great joy. Michele Hansen  05:27It sounds like it did, despite the, the frustration. I'm curious, why did the person need it to be 50 by 50?  Colleen Schnettler  05:35Avatars. So, so many people are using it as avatars, and using it for avatars, and it's pinned to 140 by one, or 120 by 120, which is big. I mean, you look at it, and you're like uh, it's kind of big for a, um, um, a form factor. So, yeah, that's what that was for Michele Hansen  05:56So are we talking about when someone uploads a file, it's turned into that size, or the actual size of the upload, or when they put it on their site? Colleen Schnettler  06:05The actual size of the uploader to fit into, so he actually sent me his form, like, sent me a video of his form, which is really cool. So I could see exactly what he was doing. But his product, um, uses like, avatars, and so he has a small little square where he wants, he wants to enable his users to drop in an avatar, and his form was designed in such a way that that had to be a small square, and the styles I had at the time, like, couldn't support that. Michele Hansen  06:32Oh, so he wanted the uploader to be the actual size of the sort of finished image that would go up. Colleen Schnettler  06:40Yeah, a little bit more like that. Okay. Yeah, so it would, it would be more seamless.  Michele Hansen  06:45Right, so it implies to his user that the image going there should be 50 by 50, because if he had a huge box, they might think that they could upload a huge image.  Colleen Schnettler  06:54Yeah. So that was fun.  Michele Hansen  06:56Gotcha.  Colleen Schnettler  06:56I enjoyed that. I also, like, came to this epiphany, as I've been talking to people, and when I say it, everyone is gonna be like, that's so obvious. But it just occurred to me yesterday, actually, and I've been a little bit frustrated when I've been talking to people because the things people are looking for, and one are all over the map. I mean, it's, it's completely inconsistent.I haven't been able to find a lot of consistency. But what I realized is, front end developers want all of the direct uploading, and the AWS integration, and all of the magic on the back end. Backend developers do AWS all the time, so they don't really care, but they hate doing design. I don't wanna say hate, that's a strong word, but they don't really like design. So they want the pixel-perfect UI on the front end, which makes sense now why front end developers are asking me like, oh, are you gonna make a headless component? And, you know, am I gonna get my images sized perfectly? And then the backend developers are asking me for theming and things like that. So it's two different, like, it makes sense, but like, for some reason this just clicked. So I kind of need to decide, I think, like, which direction I want to go, because it seems like, like I said, the feature set is not the same, and I'm, there's only one of me, so I can't, I, yeah, of course, I'd like to build out all of these things, but I can't do that right now. Um, so I kind of need to decide which direction I want to go as I continue to build out this feature set. Michele Hansen  08:33Yeah, so I'm, I'm curious. It, it sounds like you've heard a lot of different things, uh, from people, which by the way, is like, is totally normal, especially at this point where your reach is, is pretty broad, and you don't you don't have a defined focus. It's, it's normal that you would hear a lot of different things. It doesn't mean you're doing something wrong, like, that's, that's totally expected. But it sounds like if you know you have these two broad categories with different sets of needs, have you like, like, I'm wondering how you might categorize the feedback and suggestions and, and processes you've heard about so far, into those different user types. And then, and then it would be interesting to see if, if one of those groups has a higher propensity to pay versus another or like, I mean, and it might be too broad of a group, like, like, front, like, frontend developers and backend, like, those are those are pretty broad groups, right? Um, but it might, like, like, it might be interesting, or just to think about like, whose needs do you currently serve better? Colleen Schnettler  09:44Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely, yeah, I definitely have to dive more into this, um, and think about it. I like the idea of kind of trying to, uh, kind of box the feature set based on the skill set of the user because I really liked the idea of, of who is more likely to pay for it. I mean, that seems relevant for sure, right? That's why I'm here. Michele Hansen  10:07It's always a good thing to know, right?  Colleen Schnettler  10:08It's a good thing to know. Michele Hansen  10:14Did you ever get in touch with that, uh, the customer we, I think we have called the whale? The, uh, the one that was like, what was it, like, two or three hundred. Colleen Schnettler  10:22This guy is paying me 250 bucks a month, or person, I don't know, I don't want to, but um, this person is paying me 250 bucks a month, and this person has still not cancelled and it's still not using it. I don't, like, I don't know what to expect here.  Michele Hansen  10:36Alright. Colleen Schnettler  10:38I keep expecting a nasty email like, I didn't know I was paying that money. But it's been like, almost six weeks now, I think. So this person has paid that bill at least once. So yeah, no idea. I got nothing. But what I have noticed, so something else we talked about last week was changing my onboarding flow. So I did change the onboarding flow. And, um, Michele Hansen  11:00Oh, you had all those people who were like, it like, wasn't clear to them that they would have to pay for the free trial, so they were,  Right. Getting through to the email setup, but then bouncing, and it's like, why hold on to their emails if it's not worth anything? Colleen Schnettler  11:14Yes, yes. So, I changed that. So, now the signup link dumps you to the pricing page, and then on the pricing page, like, the wording is still kind of rough, but it basically says a credit card is required to sign up for the trial. Um, so that should help me I think get less like, kind of emails I don't need in terms of onboarding. Michele Hansen  11:38Oh, you did change that this week. Colleen Schnettler  11:40Again, I did that yesterday, so it's too soon to say if, um, what difference that'll make. Like, it might take my signups, but at this point, I mean, it's, it's funny, because like, there's so many things I want to do, and there's just one of me, one of me who has a job. So, um, I, I think I have to let this one go. I have to let the extra email addresses, like, I looked at, this morning before our podcast, and saw all the email addresses of people who bounce at sign up, and I'm like, man, like, someday I might be able to, I realize it's like 15, I mean, just from couple days, it's like 15 people. It's like, I have those email addresses, but I'm just gonna let them go because where I am right now in trying to build this, like, I just don't have the bandwidth to try and hunt down people who might never want to pay me at this point. I need to serve, I think I need to serve the people that are paying me and, like, really focus in, you know, on those, on those folks. Michele Hansen  12:37Hmm. I think we, you know, we've talked about it a couple of times how it is just you, and you are one person with a job, and a family, and everything else going on, and you have so many ideas, and I'm curious how you are keeping track of all of those different things that you want to work on. Because it, because it sounds like that, like, mental load of carrying around all of your own ideas and the feedback you're, like, that, like, that, that is a mental load. Colleen Schnettler  13:14Yeah, so right now I keep track of all of that in Notion. But you know, I've gone back and forth in Notion. I know, some people love it, and some people hate it, and like, I don't know, like, a couple years ago, maybe a year ago, I really spent a couple days getting a setup I liked and I used it really, really diligently, and then when things get really busy, that's when you should rely on your tasks, you know, on that the most. But yet, I tend to just let it go because you have so many competing priorities. So I do have a list, but do I actually look at that list? No. I mean, I just, I just am like, I should do this thing next. And then I do the thing. But I do have a list so I don't lose like, these ideas. Michele Hansen  13:59I think I, like, it might be helpful to try to like prioritize those. And also I remember when we were talking about this last time, you had to do that was like, you know, improve the landing page. And it was something that was actually like, 10 steps deep and it like, wasn't one task, and I want I wonder if that would help. Colleen Schnettler  14:21Yeah, being more specific. Um, I do. I do think that would help. I also think,, like, this thing with the, the small styles I mentioned, that ended up taking way longer than I anticipated. So, that's why, like, task management can be challenging, I think because you just, as you know, in software, you just want to have that, you just want to block out like, three days to do whatever you want to do, and it's just sometimes hard to know how long these tasks are going to take. But generally speaking, yeah, breaking them down is, is good. But like, so here's a problem I'm having. Okay, and here's a business idea for anyone listening. You know how Stripe, I know, business idea. Maybe I shouldn't share it, I should just build it. But I don't have time to build anything else. Um, so you know how Stripe provides really cool analytics, like, you log on to Stripe, and I know there's like many, many analytic platforms built on top of Stripe, but even Stripe is nice because you can log on, you can, you know, see what your churn rate is, you can see the lifetime value, you can see all this information about your customers. Heroku has none of that. Like, so I'm not even really tracking people who churn on Heroku. So if you asked me, like, how many people have signed up and then cancelled, I can't even tell you. Like, I mean, if I tried really hard, I could figure it out, but I love how when you sign on to Stripe you, like, get that dashboard right there, like, here's all your information. That would be super cool for Heroku. So, I'm at the point where I'm not even exactly sure because if you churn, I delete your account, so I have to like, go find that information. And of course, of course I say this and every software developer listening is like, yeah, that's so easy to build. Yes, it's so easy to build. So are the other 5000 things I want to do. So to me, like, I know if I was listening to this, I'd be like, well just write that. That's so easy. But um, yeah, I mean, it's such competing priorities. So like, that's something I want to know but not something I have time to build, and what I have, what do I have 20, 20ish, 25ish paying users. With such a low percentage, with such a low number of paying users, it just doesn't seem worth my time right now to really care about that.  Michele Hansen  16:38I think you just hit on something really important, which is that sometimes building something is much easier than more marketing it and figuring out who needs it and why and pricing it. And, you know, building is not easy in its own right, but there there is a real, like, you're going through this challenge right now, and I mean, to me, it makes sense where that's where your comfort zone is that now you have something going but there are definitely some frustrations with that. That the prospect of going to build something else is sort of a shiny ball that jumps out at you. Colleen Schnettler  17:25Oh, totally. And I've given myself a little more permission to do that now that I have paying users, so I know that is a thing. You know, even doing these customer interviews, like, I like people. I like to talk. But before every customer interview, like, I get a little nervous, you know, because it's someone you don't know. You're basically like, cold calling someone asking them for their time and then try not to talk over them. Like, I have just found it to be a really interesting exercise to try and, and do all of those marketing activities. But like I said, this week, when I had my couple days of just coding, like, that's definitely sparks joy. That's my sparks joy place. Like, I love talking to people and meeting people, but I do find that that is harder, and requires a totally different skill set and energy level. Michele Hansen  18:13Absolutely. And, and I notice that you said you, you find yourself nervous beforehand. You said you were nervous, and, but there's different reasons for that, like, you're sort of partly afraid that, you know, they're not going to want to talk to you, sort of like a cold calling sense, but also that you're going to talk too much. Colleen Schnettler  18:33Okay, this is my thing. So I think that I'm like, if anyone who has met me in person, like, I think I'm good in-person with a one, one-on-one. Like, I think I'm good with, like, getting to know someone and like, developing a connection with someone. But I do that by echoing what you say and by like, just getting excited about whatever you're saying. And when I'm doing these customer interviews, something you and I've talked about a lot is like, don't get overly excited and be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that, or oh, you're totally right. But I like to agree. I don't want to say I like to agree with people, but if I agree with you about whatever you're talking with, my natural inclination is to be, is to, uh, fusibly agree with you, right? That forms our bond as friends, as people, and, you know, I agree with you. And um, so what's hard for me is if you're like, oh my gosh, I hate setting up buckets on AWS. That's a good example, because that has happened. I want to be like, I know, it's the worst, like, CORS configuration. Everyone forgets that. But I'm not supposed to do that in a customer interview. So like, me just being like, oh, tell me more about why you hate setting up buckets on AWS or whatever it is, um, is a challenge. Michele Hansen  19:50Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. And, you know, I almost sometimes find myself having double tracks of thinking in my head, like, when someone says something that gets me really excited, like, um, I'll have, I'm like, oh my god, yes. So good. And then you have to be like, can you tell me more about what you find difficult about working with those buckets? Because the thing that you want to find out in the interview is not just that they think it's difficult, but why it's difficult from their perspective, and it's going to be difficult for different reasons from your perspective. And the point is not to build a shared bond over the fact that it's difficult. It's to understand their perspective on it, which may be similar to yours, but is different. But I mean, but it's also, it's normal to get excited, you know, I was, I was listening to an episode of Hidden Brain a couple of weeks ago, where the linguist Deborah Tannen was being interviewed, and she was talking about how people from different regions in the US have different conversation styles. So, people from the Northeast, which includes me, we will talk over other people as a way of showing excitement and engagement with what they're saying. Colleen Schnettler  21:06Yeah.  Michele Hansen  21:06And that is a way of being involved in the conversation, versus somebody from the Midwest or from California, like, they might have to wait and pause naturally before the other person stops speaking in order to share their own perspective on it. And apparently, like, you know, I was, I was talking to someone who sort of studies cross-cultural communication, and they were saying that the way you know, so, so a Californian may interpret that how someone from New York speaks is interrupting. But somebody from Japan may interpret that the way that people from California speak is interrupting.  Colleen Schnettler  21:43Right. Michele Hansen  21:44So all of these things are relative, but I think that kind of conversation style, like I especially find that, like, that, that took me years to tamp down. And I think for me, like, I didn't start tamping that down when I first started doing interviews. Like, that process happened, you know, once I moved from Boston to DC, and you know, that with people from, from the south and the Midwest more who are, who do not use that sort of excited, um, way of talking over people to show engagement. It's very, very different. Like, having people tell me that I was rude forced me to kind of reevaluate that. But of course, if I, if I talk to somebody from New York or whatever, like we're excited and talking over each other, and it's so fun and chaotic, in a way that I just can't do with someone from, you know, Washington State, for example. Colleen Schnettler  22:38Yeah, yeah, I definitely think that's true. And I definitely think it's a skill and, you know, I'm working on it and, uh, trying to learn it. But it's definitely different, like, whole different skill set and energy level than working on features, or working on code.  Michele Hansen  22:55Yeah. And sometimes I find it helpful to remind myself and other people that I'm trying to teach this to is that it's helpful to try these things out in conversations with people. Like, so you might normally start relating to someone, but to try this out just, just to get used to it, but then you don't have to change your conversation style, like, in a social setting. Like, there's nothing, there's nothing that says that one style is intrinsically more valid than another. Like, just because there might be relative differences doesn't mean that one is any better and that there's anything wrong with the way you talk, but it can be helpful to try this out in a social setting at first, just so it feels a little more natural when you're talking to a customer. Colleen Schnettler  23:41Yeah, that is a great idea, and I will continue to practice. It's good to practice on your kids, because they talk a lot anyway. So I feel like, at least mine do. I've been practicing on the kids. Michele Hansen  23:56One of my favorite references from my book, actually, is the book, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and How to Listen So Kids Will Talk, because it's technically a book on parenting, but really, there's so much more to it. And especially for people who find this is really, really counterintuitive and strange to them, I think it's probably because they were spoken to differently as a child, and this kind of way of just, you know, validating what someone is saying and, um, you know, it's, may not come may not come naturally, but, but it can be learned. Colleen Schnettler  24:34Yeah. Michele Hansen  24:34How do you try it out on your kids? I'm curious. Colleen Schnettler  24:37Like, when they tell me something I've tried, literally do it. Like they'll tell me something, I'm like, well, tell me more about like, why this was a problem with Jimmy, or why do you think, you know, like, I'm just trying to be like, cool, calm and collected, which I mean, I mostly am but I try not to get overexcited when they tell me about what their friends did or whatever. Like, oh, okay, tell me more about that. How did you feel about that? You know, stuff like that. Michele Hansen  25:02Yeah. So, before we wrap up for this week, I have to ask, how are the numbers? Colleen Schnettler  25:08So, they're flat. Um, I hit 1k. I didn't actually calculate the exact number, but I think I'm right around 1k. I didn't have any new signups this week, and, or I did, but then this is what brought up the churn discussion. I did have a new sign up, but the person on the $85 a month plan churned, which is unfortunate, um, and there's just, that's why I'm like, there's just so much I want to do. But I think right now, I think for this week, okay, all I can do is plan one thing at a, one week at a time, right. I have a long, I have a list of all the things I want to do. But in terms of staying focused, especially with my time constraints, like, this week, my goal is to get a demo on the homepage because I want to increase signups, like, that's what I want to do right now. So, um, that's my goal for this week. Like, another thing that happened was I went to go put the demo on the homepage, and,  Michele Hansen  26:06It was the CodePen thing, right?  Colleen Schnettler  26:07Yeah, but I want to pull it off of CodePen. It, yeah, it's on CodePen, which is fine, but I want to pull it off of CodePen and literally put a fully functioning demo, like, drop your file here and I'll alert you the URL or something. But the reason I haven't done that is because I had to write, so I had to write all these monkey patches, because I am still on Rails 6.0, which doesn't support CDN serving a file, so I'm patching through it. So I go to put it on the homepage, and then I was like, well, while I'm, you know, while I'm doing this, I should just upgrade Rails, which is, like, not an insignificant task. So then I spend quite a lot of time going through the upgrade of Rails and, and that's really, I think my struggle is I do need to upgrade Rails because as soon as I upgrade, I can pull out those monkey patches, which gives me warm fuzzies, because I don't like to patch rails if I don't have to, right. And the patches are literally, like, the pull request on Rails 6.1, so I know that they're correct. But still, I'd like to upgrade and pull them out. But, um, you know, that's, that's not insignificant. So then I start, I start upgrading, and then I'm like, oh, well, if I'm going to upgrade, I need more test coverage. So then I start writing more tests. And you see how this just snowballs right? Like, until like, I'm like, oh, wait, I literally wanted to put a thing on the web page, and here I am trying to upgrade the whole application, and like, fill out the rest of the, like, write these other tests, and, oh my gosh. I mean, it's fine. If this was all I did with my life, but I have other things to do. Michele Hansen  26:40This feels like the equivalent of like, going to put away a basket of laundry. And then you're like, well, I'm here, I should just organize the sock drawer.  Colleen Schnettler  27:46Yes.  Michele Hansen  27:47And then before you know it, you're actually sorting out all of the winter clothes and putting them away and making a donate pile and then bringing out the summer clothes, and then you turn around two hours later, and there is still a basket of laundry sitting on the bed. Colleen Schnettler  27:59That's literally it, Michele, that's literally what happened to me. Like it was, I was like, Colleen, stay. And it's not that I'm not focused, like, these are all good things, and it's exactly right. I'm like, well, I'm in here. So I should fix this thing. I did that with the CSS stuff, too. I was like, well, I'm in here, so I'm just going to rewrite the whole preview template because why not, like. That is my struggle. Michele Hansen  28:20It sounds like those things, though, like, those things for you are, I feel like soul-nourishing is a little bit of a stretch, but like those are, you know, they spark joy for you.  Colleen Schnettler  28:33They totally do. I mean, and that's why,  Michele Hansen  28:35It's very focused, like what like, like, focused kind of attention and like, total, like, flow, right? That, like, that's the word I was looking for. It sparks flow. Colleen Schnettler  28:47It totally does. And like, I am amazing at focusing. Like, I can sit down for six hours, and like, not even get up, which is not good for my body, but I mean, it, I love, now I sound like a weirdo, but like, I love that. Like I've love, like, I wasn't kidding, like, give me six hours in my laptop and no Slack and no, like, none of that. Um, because it does spark joy. I can like, I really getting these flow states. And I love like, I love doing it. So I think that is relevant because I think I have been really focused on customer interviews, which is great for my business, but kind of draining for my person. So I think spending some time, like, in that flow state is really good for me because it does spark joy. Michele Hansen  29:32You have to recharge your batteries. Colleen Schnettler  29:34Yeah, that's exactly, that's a really good way to put it. That's exactly right. Michele Hansen  29:38You gotta have like, balance, right, like, you know, I think that's one of the things about being an entrepreneur and especially as sort of a you know, small scale entrepreneur like we are, like, there's so many different things we could be doing at any time. And some of those things will spark joy, and some of those will spark the opposite of joy, and all of them are necessary. And we have to find a balance between them. And, like, I've been talking about this lately as, like the concept of reward work, which is like wok that we let ourselves do when we've gotten through the stuff that we didn't really want to do as much or it was more draining, and it sounds like this kind of, um, I think I dubbed it putzing through the code garden for you is like, and sort of just like, weeding and, you know, cleaning things up and repainting your garden shed, like, those are the things that are like the reward work for you. Colleen Schnettler  30:40Yep, totally. Michele Hansen  30:44Well, I think that's probably a good place to end today. I feel like this turned into our like, Real Life Episode, like, your numbers are flat. You had somebody churn. My laptop died, and I didn't get anything done, like.   Colleen Schnettler  31:00Oh, one of those weeks.  Michele Hansen  31:02Yeah, that's how it goes. Alright, well, we'll talk to you next week. Thank you so much for listening, and, um, we love when you tweet out that you're listening to it, or if anything jumped out to you, so we'll chat with you on Twitter.

Paul Hudson joins the show to tell us his origin story that led to running one of the best Swift learning resources in Hacking with Swift. Links & Show Notes Paul on Twitter (https://twitter.com/twostraws) Hacking with Swift (https://www.hackingwithswift.com) Tom Cruise Screaming Trailer (https://youtu.be/kRqxyqjpOHs?t=39) Slack DVD (by Jordan Singer) (https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1350851991640145925) Diversity in Swift (https://swift.org/blog/diversity-in-swift/) Hacking with Swift Live (https://www.hackingwithswift.com/live) SpecialEffect (https://www.specialeffect.org.uk) Kathy Sierra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra) Creating Passionate Users (http://headrush.typepad.com) Head First Book Series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_First_(book_series)) More Launched Website - launchedfm.com (https://launchedfm.com) Twitter - @LaunchedFM (https://twitter.com/launchedfm) Reddit - /r/LaunchedFM (https://www.reddit.com/r/LaunchedFM/)

Adam Rogers is a Content Marketer at Shopify and in this episode he talks to us about how SaaS marketing teams can scale up content marketing. Before working at Shopify, Adam was a content marketing team of one at Kayako where he was competing with the likes of Intercom, Zendesk, and Helpscout, and Adam shares his stories and advice of how you can build an efficient and effective content marketing unit that will let you take on your competition. In addition, Adam talks about: - Understanding the why behind your content - Why you should focus on longer form evergreen content - How you can be savvy with resources to scale up production of this time consuming content - Tips on ensuring quality when scaling - Why and how to work with agency and freelance partners - How to manage your content marketing operations Links Shopify Blog >> https://www.shopify.com/blog Kayako Blog >> https://www.kayako.com/blog Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24737268-badass --- Advance B2B >> www.advanceb2b.com Follow The Growth Hub on Twitter >> twitter.com/SaaSGrowthHub Follow Edward on Twitter >> twitter.com/NordicEdward

Kathy Sierra is the name behind the fabulous @intrinzen Twitter account and the @Pantherflows Instagram account. Kathy has an amazing backstory including time as an exercise physiologist and owner of one of the biggest gyms in California to a career in video game design. More recently she spends her time using ecological principles to develop the movement capabilities of horses. As her website puts it..."We use the principles of exercise physiology, motivation science, and neuroscience in a specific, unique way to develop a horse that is intrinsically motivated to “dance” in true self-carriage. Not for us, but for himself. And all of the wonderful experiences we have the horse — from ground work to riding — are the beautiful, organic side-effect of helping the horse develop autonomy, mastery, and purpose through powerful postures and movements".It is absolutely astounding...as is this conversation....it really doesn't matter if you are into horses or not...trust me...you will not want to miss this conversation...

Kathy Sierra is the name behind the fabulous @intrinzen Twitter account and the @Pantherflows Instagram account. Kathy has an amazing backstory including time as an exercise physiologist and owner of one of the biggest gyms in California to a career in video game design. More recently she spends her time using ecological principles to develop the movement capabilities of horses. As her website puts it..."We use the principles of exercise physiology, motivation science, and neuroscience in a specific, unique way to develop a horse that is intrinsically motivated to “dance” in true self-carriage. Not for us, but for himself. And all of the wonderful experiences we have the horse — from ground work to riding — are the beautiful, organic side-effect of helping the horse develop autonomy, mastery, and purpose through powerful postures and movements".It is absolutely astounding...as is this conversation....it really doesn't matter if you are into horses or not...trust me...you will not want to miss this conversation...

This week, Dan Neumann is joined by David Horowitz, the co-founder and CEO of Retrium! Retrium is an incredible tool that’s all about helping teams have engaging retrospectives that fuel continuous improvement. It enables Agile teams to have more effective conversations, discover new insights, and generate action plans by providing a toolbox of activities, a guided facilitation process, and a space to organize your retrospective documentation in one place.   And speaking of retrospectives, today’s episode is going to be a retrospective deep-dive! Dan and David will be addressing some of the common misunderstandings and misconceptions around retrospectives, why you should hold retrospectives in the first place, some of the common anti-patterns with retrospectives (and how to combat them), and most importantly, how to have much more effective, engaging retrospectives!   Key Takeaways What is the goal of a retrospective? To achieve actionable team learning It’s not just about improving productivity; it’s about getting the team to learn something and try something new (that, in turn, may lead to improvement) They’re not limited to Scrum or Agile (or really any team working together on anything using any process) Anti-patterns of retrospectives: Retrospective disillusionment (where someone has the sense that retrospectives are a waste of time and don’t want to show up to them) Lack of follow-through (if every retrospective led to actionable team learning that eventually led to productivity gains, people would show up and be engaged) Not being cautious of who you invite to the retrospective because if you can’t get the right people in the room, how are you going to retrospect effectively? (It is crucial to think through who you invite based on the circumstances that you’re facing) How to improve your retrospectives: Make sure who you invite is an opt-in that the whole team, through consensus, agrees on bringing in (if you don’t, you’re throwing psychological safety out the window) You can have multiple retrospectives and it doesn’t have to be at the end of the sprint — do what’s best for your team in any given situation Some people may speak too much at the exclusion of others — you can use various ways to level the playing field (one way is to ask everyone to write down their ideas on sticky notes or through ‘dot voting’) Some people feel more comfortable talking 1:1 so you could use something akin to ‘1-2-4-All’ before talking in a group Generally varying the way the conversation takes place is a good way of ensuring everyone has a chance to speak up Having a solid background in meeting facilitation is incredibly beneficial to the success of your retrospective Using open-ended questions (such as, “Does anyone have anything else to say about this?” and counting to ten) can be very helpful for giving everyone a chance to speak The Scrum Master does not have to facilitate the sprint retrospective If you’re facing low-engagement in your retrospectives you can increase empathy by opening up the meeting to others who might want to experience how difficult facilitation really is (it also gives you the chance to experience participating) It can be good practice to reach outside of the scrum team for someone who is a neutral party Ten surface-level conversations are not as effective as having a single deep-level conversation on a single impediment Narrow the scope down to the most minimal amount of impediments possible until you’ve proven that you can do more There are some great facilitation techniques to find the root cause analysis such as the ‘5 Whys’ and ‘Fishbone’ Create space for diverging before converging on a potential solution Rank your action items to get a list of prioritization of which one your team should try/focus on first (you can use the ICE Framework for this) Follow the energy of the team to understand what the team wants to focus on (if no one wants to work on it, it won’t happen) Uplevel the impediments your team is experiencing that it can’t solve Have information radiators in place Ask your team: ‘What, out of everything we just discussed, should we talk about intentionally, frequently, with everybody in the organization, as often as we possibly can?’   Mentioned in this Episode: David HorowitzDavid’s Twitter: @DS_Horowitz David’s Email: David@Retrium.com Retrium Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby The Retrospectives Academy by Retrium Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews, by Norman L. Kerth Dot Voting 1-2-4-All Liberating StructuresRoot Cause Analysis The 5 Whys Fishbone ICE Prioritization Framework Badass: Making Users Awesome, by Kathy Sierra   Want to Learn More or Get in Touch? Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes on AgileThought.com! Email your thoughts or suggestions to Podcast@AgileThought.com or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!

Подписывайтесь на канал подкаста в телеграме: t-do.ru/mspodcast 83-й выпуск подкаста make sense: как улучшить онбординг, чтобы мотивировать использовать ваш продукт с Евгением Казначеевым Собеседник: Евгений Казначеев, Head of Product в Ecwid. ФБ: fb.com/qetzal Пара цитат: «Ваша задача — объяснить пользователю, что именно с вашим продуктом он станет лучше, показать ему путь к тому, чтобы стать лучше, научить, как по этому пути пройти, и давать ощущение, что он все ближе к своей цели. Самое важное — он должен быть ближе к своим целям, а не к вашим». «Смысл в том, чтобы убрать вещи, которые блокируют уже замотивированных пользователей, готовых заплатить вам за продукт. Это самая быстрая штука, которая сразу принесет эффект». О чем говорим: 1:06 — Евгений рассказывает о себе 1:46 — Когда онбординг не нужен 4:12 — Для чего на самом деле нужен онбординг 9:03 — Что самое важное в онбординге 17:06 — Как поддерживать мотивацию использовать продукт 26:35 — Как онбординг может стать препятствием для входа в продукт 31:07 — Как сегментировать high intent и low intent пользователей 32:37 — Интерфейсы, дефолтные настройки и предварительные вопросы 38:55 — Какие вопросы задавать пользователям, чтобы правильно их сегментировать 42:27 — О специально добавленном friction 45:13 — Суммируем: что нужно сделать, чтобы улучшить онбординг 47:00 — Опросы-дуршлаги и два подхода к опросам 53:12 — Как правильно использовать запись экрана 55:17 — Как описать состояние, в котором должен находиться ваш пользователь 1:00:55 — Когда инструкция к продукту не помогает пользователю достигнуть цели 1:04:29 — Онбординг подкаста про онбординг 1:06:35 — Надо ли усложнять отказ от подписки 1:09:14 — Что почитать об онбординге Мы упоминаем: — книгу «Психология влияния» Роберта Чалдини: https://www.chitai-gorod.ru/catalog/book/353311/ — книгу "Badass: Making Users Awesome by Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra": https://www.ebay.com/p/208562255?iid=274064883530 — книгу "Intercom on Onbording": https://www.intercom.com/resources/books/intercom-onboarding — сайт с разборами онбординга: useronboard.com

Rob Fitzpatrick on The Art of Product, Joshua Kerievsky on Being Human, Marty Cagan on Build by Drift, Jutta Eckstein and John Buck on Agile Uprising, and Jocelyn Goldfein on Simple Leadership. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting June 24, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ROB FITZPATRICK ON THE ART OF PRODUCT The Art of Product podcast featured Rob Fitzpatrick with hosts Ben Orenstein and Derrick Reimer. They talked about Rob’s book, The Mom Test. He wrote it for “super-introverted techies” like himself but found it resonated with a wider audience. He explained that one of the reasons he self-published the book is because, when he took it to a publisher, they wanted him to increase the word count simply because they believed, with no evidence, that business books below 50,000 words don’t sell. The hosts asked Rob to describe “The Mom Test” in his own words. He described how, just as you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business is a good idea because she’s biased, you need to be careful when asking anyone whether they think your business is a good idea. This, he says, puts the burden on them to tell you the truth. Instead, he says you should put the burden on yourself of coming up with questions that are immune to bias, so immune that even your mom would give you an unbiased answer. Rob talked about how the value of customer conversations is proportional to how well the problem you are trying to solve is defined. For products like Segway or Uber or a video game, asking customers questions about the problems they want solved is not as effective as it would be when the product is enterprise software. Derrick talked about how, when The Lean Startup started becoming big, it led him to what he calls “idea nihilism” where he started to believe the idea doesn’t matter at all, it is one hundred percent the journey, and the future is unpredictable, so just build something. The next few things he built while in this mindset either did not get off the ground or led him to ask himself why he built a business he hated. Eventually, he concluded that the idea matters a lot. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/90-the-mom-test-with-rob-fitzpatrick/id1243627144?i=1000440137442 Website link: https://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-90 JOSHUA KERIEVSKY ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Joshua Kerievsky with host Richard Atherton. What I loved about this interview is that Joshua described many of the inspirations behind the Modern Agile principles. The first principle, “make people awesome,” was inspired by Kathy Sierra and her focus on making the user awesome. They originally called it “make users awesome” and realized that there is a whole ecosystem besides the end consumers, including colleagues, management, and even shareholders, to make awesome. He clarified that the word “make” is not coercive, but about asking you what you can do to empower others. Regarding the second principle, “make safety a prerequisite,” he talked about being inspired by a story in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit about Paul O’Neill and his turnaround of the hundred-year-old Alcoa corporation. Just as Amy Edmondson had connected psychological safety to physical safety in a previous podcast, Joshua connected psychological safety to product safety. He clarified that making safety a prerequisite doesn’t mean avoiding risk. Speaking about the third principle, “experiment and learn rapidly,” he told the story of the Gossamer Condor, the human-powered aircraft that was created to win the Kremer prize. The team that built the Condor engineered their work so that they could fail safely. The airplane flew two or three feet from the ground and the materials they used were expected to break and be repaired quickly. This let them do multiple test flights per day while their competitors would go through a waterfall process that led to large times gaps between test flights. Finally, he described the fourth principle, “deliver value continuously,” as finding a way of working where you can get feedback early and learn from it, delivering value each time. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/62-modern-agile-with-joshua-kerievsky/id1369745673?i=1000440221993 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/303a9472-75ef-4e7f-94e5-414a3018750a.mp3 MARTY CAGAN ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Marty Cagan with host Maggie Crowley. Marty says that when he shows teams the product discovery techniques he described in his book, Inspired,he finds that they understand the value of the techniques but too often they are not allowed to use them. Instead, their leaders hand them a roadmap and tell them to just build features. When he talks to these leaders, he asks, “Why are you doing this? You know this isn’t how good companies work.” The answer, though not always admitted, is that they don’t trust the teams and, as a result, they don’t empower them. They talked about the defining characteristics of an empowered product team. First among them is for the leadership team to give the product team problems to solve rather than features to build. They also need to staff them appropriately because, if they have been running things the old way long enough, they don’t have the appropriate staff to run things the new way. For example, they may have somebody called a product manager, but they are really a project manager with a fancy title or a backlog administrator. Or they may have designers who are just adding the company color scheme and logo or engineers who are just writing code. Maggie asked what a product leader can tell a stakeholder who is used to thinking in tangible features rather than the problem to be solved. Marty says there is nothing wrong with talking about features, but it is when they get etched into a roadmap that we get into trouble because it becomes a commitment and the time spent on the feature could be better spent on figuring out how to solve the problem. They talked about Objectives and Key Results or OKRs and how they are a complete mess at most companies. The concept is simple and easy if you are already in the empowered team model, but otherwise it is theater because you’re still doing roadmaps while simultaneously trying to tell people the problems to solve. Maggie started describing how they do product discovery and development at Drift and Marty immediately pointed out how the language she used makes the work sound like it occurs in phases as it would in a waterfall project. She explained that they use this notion of phases to communicate out and he pointed out that, even if it is not currently waterfall, there is a slippery slope between speaking about phases and landing in a waterfall mindset. He talked about three things he cares about that distinguish his process from waterfall: 1) tackling the risks upfront, 2) product managers, designers, and engineers literally coming up with prototypes side-by-side instead of having hand-offs, and 3) iterating towards achieving your KPIs rather than having a phase where you’ve declared the design done and have started implementing.  Maggie asked him to enumerate what he thinks product leaders should be doing. First, he said that they need to coach their product managers to get them to competence, which he says should take no more than three months. In the case of hiring product managers straight out of school, the product leader needs to commit to multiple-times-a-week or even daily coaching. Second, he said that product leaders need to take an active role in creating product strategy. This comes back to OKRs where product leaders provide business objectives that product teams translate into problems to solve. The more product teams you have, the less you can expect those teams to be able to see the whole picture on their own, which makes it more important for product leaders to connect the dots for them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/we-talked-to-product-management-legend-marty-cagan/id1445050691?i=1000440847157 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/da82dbda JUTTA ECKSTEIN AND JOHN BUCK ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jutta Eckstein and John Buck with host Jay Hrcsko. Jay asked Jutta how she and John came together to produce the ideas described in their book Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy. Jutta and John met at an Agile conference in Atlanta and got the idea to investigate what Sociocracy could bring to Agile. They soon found themselves thinking, “That’s not really all of it,” and immediately agreed to write a book together about it. Jay started going through the book, beginning with four problem statements: Existing concepts cannot be directly applied to company strategy, structure, or process in the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) world. Companies make decisions from the top down but often people at lower levels who are closer to the realities of the product or market have valuable insights that are currently ignored. There is a collision of values underlying shareholder interests in short-term profits and a focus on the needs of the customers. For a company to be agile, all departments must be agile. However, existing agile systems struggle when applied to non-engineering departments. Jutta described Beyond Budgeting. She said that it sounds like it only has relevance to the finance department, but there is a close relationship between how companies deal with finance and how they are managed. In contrast to Agile, which originated from the experiences of consultants, she says, Beyond Budgeting originated in the experiences of CFOs. She gave examples of the problems with traditional budgeting: In the first scenario, a company’s budget is set annually and, at some point during the year, a project team that had been allocated a certain budget determines that the market has changed and they no longer need a budget as large as they originally thought. She’s never seen this situation lead anyone to give the money back. In the second scenario, the market changes such that the budget needed for the company to succeed in the market exceeds the original budget and it’s too late for anything to be done. Jay brought up the distinction made in the book about the three distinct uses of budgets: 1. a target, 2. a forecast, and 3. capacity planning, and the fact that these should not be combined. Next, they discussed Open Space. John talked about the Open Spaces you often see at conferences and how they increase creative thinking and allow people’s passions to emerge. In the same way, Organization Open Space, where you can come up with a project, line up some people, and go to work, gives you passion bounded by responsibility that leads to creative companies.  John pointed out that the combination of the three concepts, as he and Jutta developed the book, started to interact and come together in ways that made it greater than the sum of its parts. That’s why they gave it a name: BOSSA nova.  Jay brought up how he has already benefitted from what he learned about Sociocracy in the book. He was able to help his colleagues learn about the difference between consent and consensus. The participants in a meeting had been locked in an argument over a maturity model when Jay restated the subject of the disagreement in terms of consent, asking if there was anyone who needed to put a stake in the ground for their position or would they all be willing to let an experiment proceed. This quickly unblocked the stalemate. John related a similar story about helping a group of professors make some decisions about forming a professional association. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bossa-nova-with-jutta-eckstein-and-john-buck/id1163230424?i=1000440982639 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/bossa-nova-with-jutta-eckstein-and-john-buck JOCELYN GOLDFEIN ON SIMPLE LEADERSHIP The Simple Leadership podcast featured Jocelyn Goldfein with host Christian McCarrick. Jocelyn talked about her career, including some time starting her own company, rising in the ranks at VMWare, arriving at Facebook at a critical time in its history, and becoming an angel investor and a venture capitalist. Christian asked about one of Jocelyn’s tweets about motivation as a management superpower. She says that engineers have a lot to offer the discipline of people management because they know how to think about systems problems and most organization problems are systems problems. On the other hand, engineers sometimes lose sight of the fact that human systems are different from programmatic systems in that they have feelings and don’t always behave rationally, but people respond to incentives. Explanations of the importance or urgency of a particular effort and attaching a bonus to it are blunt instruments, but praise and encouragement satisfies people’s needs and engenders long-term loyalty in a way that other incentives don’t. They talked about one of my favorite blog posts of Jocelyn’s on culture. She says that culture is what people do when nobody is looking. It is not people following an order. It is people knowing what to do when they don’t have orders. She says that people often think that culture is a set of traits or qualities and that you can interview for those traits to find someone who is a “culture fit.” She disagrees with this because companies are different from one another and people are obviously portable between companies.  Christian brought up the example of companies that have posters on their walls describing their culture. To Jocelyn, people are less than 10% influenced by the poster on the wall and more than 90% influenced by what successful, powerful people in the company do. When these are in conflict, you get cynicism. She talked about how compensation can be a motivator, but she noted that other people cannot judge your success by your compensation because they don’t know it, so they look for other indicators like title, scope of responsibility, influence, and confidence. So she says you need to be careful when handing out overt status symbols like titles and promotions because people will emulate the recipients of such symbols. The classic example, she says, is the brilliant jerk. When you elevate the brilliant jerk, you’re sending a message that people who succeed in this company and get ahead are jerks. The poster on the wall may not say that, but people will attach more weight to your behavior than what you or the poster say. Jocelyn talked about the undervaluing of soft skills. Engineers are taught early on that their work is fundamentally solo work and she says that is a lie because, if you want to do anything significant, if you’re going to go from rote work to meaningful creative work, the crucial skills are the soft skills we’re taught to disdain or neglect. Regarding recruiting and hiring, she talked about the tendency, at least at Facebook, to treat the phone screen like an on-site interview and create false negative rates that are too high. She did her own test where she brought in for on-site interviews a set of candidates who had previously been rejected at the phone screen stage and found that the same number got hired from her screened-out pool as were hired from the pool of candidates that passed their phone screen. She talked about the benefits and disadvantages of the centralized hiring model. On the plus side, it reduced silos, made teams friendlier to one another, and made employees become citizens of the company first and citizens of the team second. The downside of the centralized model is that there is no hiring manager taking responsibility, so the responsibility passes to the recruiter. Her preference is a blended model that is mostly centralized but with hiring managers taking responsibility and receiving rewards and praise for taking that responsibility. I loved what Jocelyn had to say about diversity and inclusion. She said that when we’re working at these high-growth companies, we’re desperately seeking to hire, we’re interviewing everybody, and we’re hiring everybody who is above our bar. When we look at the result and it is only 5% or 10% female and single digit percentages black or hispanic, some part of us is thinking that must reflect the inputs and to get a different population I would have to lower my bar and accept people who are failing. But this assumes a few things: that your interview bar is fair and that the population who applies to work at your company is the population who could apply to work at your company. If you really value having a more diverse environment, you will go looking for them. If you just sat there and only looked at applicants, you would never have hired that one signal processing engineer you needed or that one esoteric role that is not there in your applicant pool. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-improve-your-management-skills-jocelyn-goldfein/id1260241682?i=1000440957474 Website link: http://simpleleadership.libsyn.com/how-to-improve-your-management-skills-with-jocelyn-goldfein FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

The past week was a good one for both of us on different fronts. Abdulmohsen, having made progress with his health goal of going to the gym but not working on the idea generation guide he's writing, brought up the topic of trade-offs between our goals. We ended up discussing The Four Burners Theory (that success requires abandoning one or two of the "burners" in your life: Health, Family, Friends, Work). We don't agree with the theory but trade-offs are definitely something to consider. We also discuss a few strategies on how to achieve success on multiple fronts. Other topics we discussed: - What motivated Abdulmohsen to achieve his gym goal - "Each of us has their own Everest to climb" and the importance of celebrating your own goals no matter how small or insignificant they seem to others - Walk and talk meetings - The book Badass: Making Users Awesome, by Kathy Sierra (and why it's such a badass book) - The limited reserves of energy and willpower that we have and how taking on too many cognitively straining tasks and activities can deplete us of willpower and we end up making bad decisions This episode also featured a special guest: Abdulmohsen's infant son Tareq in the background (we're still not sure if he was agreeing or disagreeing with what we were saying).

If you choose to listen to but a handful of my podcast episodes, please let this be one of them. The Instagram algorithms saw fit to bring me and Kathy together, and I can’t help but feel that they actually got it right this time. Kathy's Instagram account may be dominated by pictures of horses, […] The post MOTM #090: How to Create a Badass Anything & Everything – with Kathy Sierra appeared first on The Movement Maestro.

This week, Mosie speaks with Kathy Sierra from Intrinzen. “Intrinzen teaches humans to help horses become better at what every horse wants to be: a proud, agile horse.” The two talk about movement and motivational science,

The O’Reilly Programming Podcast: Creating designs that are more flexible and resilient to change.In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson, presenters of the live online training course Design Patterns Boot Camp, and co-authors (with Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra) of Head First Design Patterns, among other books. They are also co-founders of WickedlySmart, an online learning company for software developers.Discussion points: How to use design patterns, which are solutions that have been repeatedly applied to particular object-oriented problems Examples of the types of “non-obvious solutions” that can be achieved through design patterns How design patterns can help create a shared vocabulary that can improve teams’ collaborations The difference between design patterns and design principles WickedlySmart’s projects, including “Game of Life,” which explores the area of cellular automata by building a generative application Other links: Freeman and Robson’s book Head First HTML and CSS, Second Edition The live online training course Introduction to JavaScript Programming, presented by Elisabeth Robson The landmark “Gang of Four” Design Patterns book The O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, October 16-19, 2017 in London The sessions on serverless architecture that will be presented by Mike Roberts at the upcoming O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference

The O’Reilly Programming Podcast: Creating designs that are more flexible and resilient to change.In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson, presenters of the live online training course Design Patterns Boot Camp, and co-authors (with Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra) of Head First Design Patterns, among other books. They are also co-founders of WickedlySmart, an online learning company for software developers.Discussion points: How to use design patterns, which are solutions that have been repeatedly applied to particular object-oriented problems Examples of the types of “non-obvious solutions” that can be achieved through design patterns How design patterns can help create a shared vocabulary that can improve teams’ collaborations The difference between design patterns and design principles WickedlySmart’s projects, including “Game of Life,” which explores the area of cellular automata by building a generative application Other links: Freeman and Robson’s book Head First HTML and CSS, Second Edition The live online training course Introduction to JavaScript Programming, presented by Elisabeth Robson The landmark “Gang of Four” Design Patterns book The O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, October 16-19, 2017 in London The sessions on serverless architecture that will be presented by Mike Roberts at the upcoming O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference

A show about Making People Awesome, Horizontally Hobbled teams, the designer table that caused collaboration issues at Pixar, Kathy Sierra's Badass book and what it teaches us.

00:16 – Welcome to “99 Bottles of Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!” 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen (https://www.greaterthancode.com/2016/11/21/008-sandi-metz-and-katrina-owen/) 01:31 – Collaboration on the Book Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz (https://www.poodr.com/https://www.poodr.com/) People who like me call me disciplined & meticulousPeople who don't call me anal & pedanticIt's the same thing. @kytrinyx @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016 14:56 – Audience: Who is this book for? 99 Bottles of Beer Exercise (https://www.sandimetz.com/99bottles/sample#appendix-exercise) 21:06 – The DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself); Duplication and Replication DRYing too hard: "people encapsulate the pieces that are identical, though they don't represent a complete idea." @kytrinyx @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016 29:21 – Code Review and Naming Things 30:40 – “In what ways is it 99 Bottles a richer kata than fizz buzz (http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest)?” – Benjamin Fleischer (https://twitter.com/hazula) 32:53 – “The 99 Bottles book seems to document all the trade-offs we’ve been implicitly making. Could this possibly be a first step in automating those decisions? i.e.: Might we take those now-explicit rules and partially automate the process of programming?” – Craig Buchek (https://twitter.com/CraigBuchek) 34:47 – Llewellyn Falco: “Sparrow Decks” (http://llewellynfalco.blogspot.com/p/sparrow-decks.html) Kathy Sierra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra) Philip Kellman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Kellman) 39:57 – “what non-Ruby technologies are you interested in right now?” – Darin Wilson (https://twitter.com/darinwilson) The more people involved in a projectthe less important the code becomesand more important the interactions.@kytrinyx @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016 “Code is easy; people are hard. If you want to get things done, you have to get good at people.” - @sandimetz— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) November 21, 2016 45:00 – Sandi’s Unique Approach to Teaching 47:53 – Speaking at Conferences Listening is not how people learn.We learn by doing.To help someone learn-by-doing, ask them questions.@sandimetz @greaterthancode— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) November 21, 2016 Reflections: Coraline: Inspiration to return to work on her book about empathy. Also, exploring whether that visual interpretation of code is the shape of code in the abstract or the shape of the code that’s written on-screen. Sandi: Controversy around the notion that duplication is better than the wrong abstraction. Katrina: We are humans and we have ideas and sharing those ideas makes us visible to other humans. It is also incredibly important and impactful to speak. Jessica: Development of relationships and partnerships with someone who will push you. Sam: Helping people realize things on their own is greater than telling them the answer. Also, practicing better self-control in coding and mentoring. 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 Guests: Katrina Owen and Sandi Metz.

Kathy takes a deep dive into the psychology of motivation and look at simple but powerful tools to help us think about and create products, services, support, and marketing. But secrets to motivation are counter-intuitive. Typically we struggle to get and keep our users motivated by trying to ADD motivation, when the real solution is to find and fix what's BLOCKING the motivation they already have (or easily could have). We can use these tools to help new, existing, and even potential users find and keep the kind of motivation that's strong and sustainable. While this talk focuses on *user* motivation, the tools apply to helping our employees, kids, and ourselves as well. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

When Kathy Sierra sat down to write her book on JAVA, it wasn’t supposed to be a bestseller. They had incredible odds with over 16,000 other books on JAVA already on Amazon. And yet they cut through the noise? How did they do it? They didn’t pull the stunt that most Internet marketers do. Instead they focused on how people read and why they get to the finish line. The more the readers got to the end of the book, the more popular the book became in programming circles. ==================== To find out about their open secret, let’s take a trip into Kathy Sierra land. Part 1: Dependence on memory Part 2: Not Identifying Confusion Part 3: The Perfect Life ==================== It was the around the year 2000 Technology companies that just months prior were considered extremely, reported huge losses and folded. These losses created a economic cascade which came to be known as the dotcom crash. Stuck in the middle of this seemingly thermonuclear disaster were thousands of programmers. One of them was a woman called Kathy Sierra. If you’ve ever dipped your toes into the programming language, JAVA, you’re likely to have heard of Kathy Sierra Her book series “Headfirst Java” has sold well over a million copies. If you look back at the past ten years or more, there’s Sierra’s book—one of the longest running bestsellers of the decade. Yet, Sierra isn’t like one of those in-your-face Internet marketers. Her blog is untended. She jumped off social media back in 2007 and only reluctantly got back online in 2013. She speaks at conferences, but it’s a rare treat. But back to Sierra’s disaster story According to Sierra, back in the late nineties and in the year 2000, anyone landing a job in a dotcom company could get stock options. And then along came the implosion of the dotcoms, and her shares were worth nothing. And this is what Sierra says: “Anyway, I needed a job. I am probably as old as most of your parents. If you are trying to get a job as a programmer when you are competing against people who are half your age — and granted, I was not the most awesome programmer. I was very decent. And we needed regular income. I said we because, my husband, also a programmer, also the same age, same problem. And we had two kids and a dog.” In short, Kathy Sierra was seemingly at a dead end when she wrote her first book, “Headfirst Java”. Yet, Sierra believes in the concept of consumption. Consumption is when you create a product or service that’s so easy to understand and use, that progress is inevitable. Instead of floundering and flipping back to Page 3 or 6 or having to refer back, the reader is able to move forward confidently. Today we’re going to dig deep into that concept of consumption from a Sierra-point-of-view If you’ve followed Psychotactics, you’ll probably be more than aware that consumption has been a driving force of our business since 2006, possibly even earlier. However, I really like Kathy’s work. I really like her passion. I even like the name “a brain-friendly guide”—that’s the title on all her books. And though I won’t ever bother with Java, there are three concepts of Sierra’s consumption model I’d like to share with you. Ready? Well, here goes: Why do people/readers get stuck? Factor 1: Dependence on memory Factor 2: Not Identifying Confusion Factor 3: The Perfect Life. Let’s get cracking with the first element: dependence on memory. Factor 1: Dependence on Memory In a BBC documentary, Michel Thomas, master language teacher, looks around a classroom filled with desks. The sunlight is streaming through the windows, but Thomas’ face is slightly grim, as if he’s reaching for a painful memory. “This reminds me of my own classrooms”, he says. “As a child, as a youngster in high school. And it was (education) always under stress. One had to associate learning with work, with concentration, with paying attention, with homework. Work, it’s all work. But learning shouldn’t be work. It should be excitement. It should be pleasure. And one should experience a constant sense of progression with learning. That is learning to me. A teacher is someone who will facilitate and show how to learn.” Thomas’ classroom looks very different from the traditional classroom The desks are gone. The students help cart in their own furniture, mostly sofas. Plants show up, so does a carpet and the scene resembles a cozy version of your living room than a classroom. Yet what Michel Thomas says at the start of every learning session is far more important This is what he says: I’m going to set up a very important rule, a very important ground rule, and that rule is for you never to worry about remembering. Never to worry about remembering anything and therefore not to try. Never “try to remember anything from one moment to the next. This is a method with the responsibility for your remembering and for learning is in the teaching. So if at any point there’s something you don’t remember, this is not your problem. It will be up to me to know why you don’t remember, individually, and what to do about it.” Kathy Sierra calls this phenomenon “the Page Vaporiser” moment So what is the Page Vaporiser moment? Sierra describes it this way: “Imagine that you’ve written a book, and when the user turns the page, the previous page vaporises. There is no going back. No one can ever turn back. It’s not even an option. What would you do differently to make this work for them? If you knew they couldn’t go back? Or if it was a  video, they can’t—there is no rewind. It’s just one time. It’s like they’re sitting in a theatre, watching a movie. What would you do? Michel Thomas died in 2005, but the message lingers on: Never “try to remember anything from one moment to the next. That’s almost exactly what Kathy Sierra is saying. That the dependence on memory is a problem. It means that you as a teacher, writer, video creator—you’ve not done your job as well as you should. Kathy Sierra and her husband weren’t writers They just loved Java so intimately. It was the one thing they adored and so they decided to write about it. They didn’t know squat about writing or publishing. They even ran headlong into a mountain of rejection slips until finally the publisher, O’Reilly decided to give them a chance. But the real magic, or madness, is that they needed the money desperately. With both of them out of a job, they needed to get their revenue from the book sales alone. When Sierra and her husband, sat down and expressed their source of income, they got a hearty laugh in return. Their editor said: You’re going to have to be in the top two or three selling books for this programming language. So they look up Amazon and there are not 500, or a thousand results. There aren’t even 10,000. There are a whopping 27,078 results. They decide to filter the search string to two words, “Java Programming”. And there are still 16,348 results. “Nobody knew us. We weren’t writers. We had no marketing budget. And the whole Internet said it was just mostly luck.” But Kathy and her husband knew that the book needed to work. They had kids. There was the dog and being middle-aged meant their prospects of work were terribly bleak. They started out the process by looking at the competition and it staggered them how many books were just fabulous. They couldn’t beat over 16,000 books by making their book slightly better. So they went for a goal that most books—and I mean any books, not just Java Programming books—miss to this day. They set out to write a book where the page would vaporise the moment after you read it. The problem was that most people weren’t finishing the books “They were getting stuck. And everyone accepted that,” says Sierra. Nobody reads programming books all the way through. We thought… How can they actually possibly learn if they don’t keep reading it? It doesn’t matter how great the book is. We realised that a lot of these things don’t really matter if people don’t keep going. So now we knew what it was that we’d have to do. We could compete on forward flow. Just getting people to keep going.” Michel Thomas started training language students in a manner that requires no memorisation. Kathy Sierra’s book—same thing. No need to memorise anything. It’s all forward movement. Of course if you’ve been following Psychotactics for a while, you’ll know how this forward movement works. All of the memorisation problems arise because of intimidation. If I ask you to go down to the store and buy me a bottle of full fat milk, you don’t have much to remember do you? There’s zero intimidation involved. But imagine you’re in a foreign country. Now you have the burden of having to figure out the location of the store and trying to say full fat in German, or Italian or Hindi for that matter. The moment you break down things into small bits, your client moves forward instead of being frozen on the previous page When you look at why you seem to fly through reading The Brain Audit, you can see how the seven red bags create an analogy. Do you have to remember the analogy? No you don’t. But what about the red bags? As you progress through the book, every bag is not only explained in detail but every so often there are graphics and reminders of what you’ve learned. Not only what you’ve learned but what you’re about to learn The reason why you find Psychotactics books so easy to read is not because of some great or amazing writing. It’s because of the structure of the book; the way the cartoons remind you about what you’ve learned; the way the summary helps you remember; the way the graphics stick around, not just for decoration but with a perfectly good reason in mind. That reason is the lack of dependence on memory It’s not like we haven’t created bad products or training before. We have. When I first started out at Psychotactics, I remember giving a workshop in Auckland. The workshop was two days long, and had a barrage of information. One person literally fell asleep after lunch. And yet I ploughed on with the training. I felt it was my job to keep the workshop going until the very last minute. I felt that books needed to be 200 pages long. And now I know better The goal is not information. It’s skill. If you, as the client read Kathy Sierra’s books and don’t learn how to program in Java, she’s failed in her job. If you take on French or Italian or German and Michel Thomas doesn’t make you feel like a native speaker, he’s failed. I started out with books that were 200 pages long. And sometimes the book needs that much depth and sometimes it doesn’t. The uniqueness course notes were a little over 90 pages (I think). And the Storytelling course notes were a lot less than that. “We found people were going backwards” says Kathy Sierra. “And they were getting confused. And that takes us to our second point. What causes the confusion? Let’s find out.   Factor 2: Not Identifying Confusion The moment you bring up the term, “Bermuda Triangle”, many of us think of the word “disappear”. There’s a reason for why we associate disappearance with the Bermuda Triangle. Back in 1964, writer Vincent Gaddis wrote in the pulp magazine Argosy of the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle: three vertices, in Miami, Florida peninsula, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda. And it was in this “triangle” that planes and ships seemed to mysteriously disappear. Imagine you’re a captain out at sea in the mid-Atlantic You probably don’t believe a word about the Bermuda Triangle. You know it’s a myth. There’s no basis for ships or planes disappearing. Yet you know that should your vessel disappear, this would be the place where the crazy stuff happens. You know you’re in crazy waters and you’re expecting the worst and preparing for the best. Kathy Sierra recognised the Bermuda Triangle of Java Programming She knew that to-be programmers were getting hopelessly lost at certain points in time. The reason why they lost their way was because they didn’t know they were in rough seas. As you go through a book, for instance, you move ahead progressively. Then suddenly you find yourself struggling. And the way we work through the struggle is to try and barrel our way through the problem. But then the confusion persists and it’s at this point that we just give up. When we conduct the Article Writing Course, there’s one point where everyone struggles It’s called the First Fifty Words. The First Fifty Words are the opening portion of your article. We all know how hard it is to get started on an article, but even so, when you’re on a course, you expect that the guidance will keep you going. You’ve read the notes; listened to the audio; gone over the assignment. And the assignment isn’t just a hit and run. The assignment stretches over a whole week. Surely, that’s enough to understand and implement the lesson. But it’s not. It’s rough work And as a teacher, I should have realised it earlier. But until 2015, a whole nine years after I first offered the Article Writing Course, I didn’t have the insight to spot the problem. Only in 2015, did I allocate two whole weeks to the First Fifty Words. Only in 2016 did the First Fifty Words section move earlier in the course, instead of later. It was the roughest, toughest patch of ocean and I didn’t tell clients it was difficult. And when I mean “tell”, I mean I did tell them. But it’s not enough to tell. You have to make changes so that the client doesn’t give up. A book is different from a course A book doesn’t have a teacher hovering around your assignment. You’re out on your own and you don’t realise that everyone is struggling at Page 45. You think it’s just you. And if you knew well in advance that Page 45-85 was going to be a Bermuda Triangle, you’d be more watchful, but you’d also know you’d finally be out of the Triangle. And that would give you the impetus to battle through. This point—this one point—it’s a real pain for me as a teacher As a teacher, a trainer, a writer—it’s like a big slap in the face. I know there are points in every course where you run into difficulty. Well, sometimes you know and sometimes you realise it when you see clients struggling. And yet, you’re not sure what to do. If you were to tell the client that they’re approaching a difficult patch, would it make things a lot harder? Or do you let them sail right into that stretch and get hammered? And today I tend to agree with Kathy Sierra I tell clients: this First Fifty Words stuff, it’s hard. It’s going to make you feel like you can never get to the other side. And yet it’s not you. You’re not the one that’s the problem. The problem is the problem. Of course, the way to get through a difficult learning is to make sure that you break things down into smaller bits. Like my badminton coach did when I was playing badminton back in 2008. I struggled with overhead shots The moment the opponent would hit the shuttlecock high in the air, there was a good chance I’d lose the point. Either I’d find the shot to hard to take, or my return was so poor that the opponent would smash it back onto my side of the court. What I didn’t know was that many rookie players struggle with the overhead shot. My coach told me so and proceeded to break up the shot into four stages. Stage 1: Sight the shuttle and get under it. Stage 2: Raise left hand up and grip the racquet a bit harder. Stage 3: Step forward just a little bit, as if to smash (this puts your opponent on the defence). Stage 4: Smash or just do a tiny drop shot (the opponent would be too far back to get to the drop shot). In my estimate, we did this routine about 800 times Not all at once, of course. We’d do it for a while, go back to playing a bit and then it was back to the four stages. At first I was completely foxed with all the four stages, but he’d always get me to do one thing at a time. To make sure I wasn’t distracted by the entire routine, he’d get me to hit an imaginary shuttlecock, over and over again. What you’re noticing here is what Kathy Sierra seems to emphasise upon. You have to tell the client that what they’re about to embark upon is difficult. You have to break it up into smaller bits, so that the client can manage the routine. This step of identifying the confusion doesn’t make the learning easier. But the client knows the stage is temporary, and typical. And that struggling is appropriate. And it’s not just you, but everyone who struggles. Confusion is part of the learning process Kathy Sierra’s book started out as a rank outsider, then moved to a million copies. Today it’s closing in on two million copies. In the last decade she’s written just one other book—that’s it. That first book alone has helped her live the life she wants, with her kids and dog and from what I hear, horses. Telling the client that they’re facing a potential Bermuda Triangle seems to be, um, so tiny. It seems almost insignificant. And yet it’s what we all want, right? That’s the second point that Kathy Sierra figured in her journey to write a book that beat all those 16,000 books on Amazon.  Sure we dealt with the Page Vaporiser and making things so simple that the client doesn’t have to remember. And that when things get difficult we need to tell them and use isolation to break down the steps. But it doesn’t stop there. There’s a third point and it’s called “the rest of their life”. What does that mean? Factor 3: The Rest of Their Life When I bought my fully electric car, the BMW i3, I was excited beyond words. I’ll tell you why. The car I drove before the i3 was a Toyota Corolla. Dark blue; never given us a day of trouble in close to ten years, but yes a Corolla. A Corolla with a CD player, no fancy bits and pieces and yes, not even a USB. Which is why I felt like Neil Armstrong going to the moon when I first got into the i3. All these whiz bang buttons, automated parking, and yes, the USB—and bluetooth. Then my head went for a swim. Overwhelm filled my brain. And I had to read the manual. This is precisely what Kathy Sierra has been railing against in the past 10 years or so When you buy a camera, you get all these glossy representations of what the camera can do. Then you pick up that big juicy DSLR camera and you’re stuck in auto mode. So why won’t you go from auto mode to taking pictures like all those great photographers. It’s because of the camera makers and car makers —and we the book writers and course creators. We pretend that the rest of our clients life doesn’t exist. We somehow expect that a client will buy our book, and that the dishes will get washed. While the client reads our book, the plants will get watered and a perfect three-course meal will be set so we can pick at our food—while reading that book. We create products and services for unreal people Instead of seeing them as a readers, we need to see our clients as users. When I buy a car, I need to use it, not read a manual. When I bought your amazing camera, I was already in auto mode, I didn’t need a fancy DSLR auto mode. I need to be thought of as a user, not a buyer, not a client, not a reader. I need to be able to use what I just bought. But no, we run into stupid manuals (and I can assure you the BMW manual is a real downer) So then we turn to the Internet. To access the fun features of my car on an app, I had to find the VIN number. That’s the Vehicle Identification Number (no I didn’t know what it meant). So I did a search on Google and guess what? I ran into a bunch of forums. And I don’t know about you, but there are some real creeps on forums. A newbie like me was asking where to find the VIN number on the car. And these guys on the forums were mocking him. No one seemed to want to answer the question. They simply said, “it’s everywhere”. Don’t get me wrong: I love my i3 I found how to use it with an amazing video on Youtube (made by BMW themselves). But I wish they’d have treated me more like a user than a buyer. And this is what you’ve got to realise when you create a product or service; a book or course; and yes, even a presentation or webinar. I should be able to use your advice right after I experience your product or service. I don’t have time to go through yet another manual, because the garbage has to be taken out and dishes are waiting to be washed. Kathy Sierra goes on and on about this user experience So does Michel Thomas. And this idea of “the responsibility of the learning” is important. It lies with the teacher, not the student. When they buy your book or do your course and they can’t get to the end, it’s because they have a life and you didn’t consider that life. You just created something that suits your needs and ego. When you consider that the clients have a life beyond your product, you design it differently. You stop writing your books like they were a manual You start writing it as you were talking to a friend at a cafe. Of all the three points, Kathy Sierra covers, this one, about the “rest of their lives” is the most conceptual. It seems almost like it needs more breathing space and growing space. But there’s a germ of an idea which is why it’s here in this article. The idea that if your product isn’t sort of self-explanatory, then the rest of my life takes over. And I, as the buyer of your product, don’t get to enjoy it as much as I should or could. Considering that users have a life makes you a more compassionate creator of products; courses; webinars and presentations. That you somehow need to write or create things in a way that bestow a superpower—just one superpower if needed—so that the client can use that power to get another power and another power. And this is despite life sneaking in. Yes, this last point is a bit shaky. But it’s something we need to think about, because even if we were to ignore this last point, the entire message is strong. So let’s review what we’ve just learned, shall we? Summary Factor 1: Get yourself a page vaporiser. Can I remember what you just said? If I have to go back several times, your message was probably too complex. To sort out the problem of memory, you can use graphics, cartoons, captions, and yes, a summary like this one. Factor 2: The second point is remarkably simple: Tell the clients when they’re headed to dangerous waters. Clients feel like they’re the only ones who are not getting it, when in fact everyone doesn’t get it. If something is difficult, tell them it’s difficult. Like for instance this last point about “having a life”, yes, the third point. I get the point conceptually, but it’s hard to understand what to do. So I have to let you know that it’s a difficult point and that it’s not just you. Factor 3: Of course we get to the last point: the one I had the most trouble with. The distinction is between a user and client. Your client needs to be seen as a user so they can use that camera, use that software and not have to wade through a manual. They have a life and if your product or service is not easy, that life takes over. Of all the three points above, there’s one point you can use right away: Telling your client when things are going to be difficult and then telling them when the all clear has been sounded. That is the simplest, most effective thing you can do today. Epilogue: The responsibility for the learning lies with the teacher. If you don’t understand something, it’s not your fault. It’s mine. So said Michel Thomas. As a parent, trainer, presenter, coach or writer, it’s easy to blame the student. Michel Thomas would disagree. I’d recommend you watch some of the videos on YouTube by Michel Thomas and also read Kathy Sierra’s non-Java book called “Badass: Making Users Awesome”. Next Up: How We Sold $20,000 On Stage (In Under An Hour) http://www.psychotactics.com/sell-on-stage/  

Angular Remote Conf   This show is based off the following listener email: “I know you've discussed a couple of times about how hard it is to set up an Angular 2 project. Whilst most of this has nothing to do with Angular itself, it's still the barrier to entry. There's no point in saying how much easier Angular 2 is than Angular 1 if you can't get it running. Even though I'd heard your previous discussions on this, in reality I was totally unprepared as to how difficult it was when I had to do it myself recently. Even the Angular 2 5 minute quick start took me a day to get my head around! I was delighted to hear the Angular team was coming up with Angular CLI. Get the mechanics out the way and lower the barrier to entry. So I typed 'ng new myapp'. Oh! Looking at the properties of the directory I saw Size: 161MB, Contains: 40,531 files, 7,226 folders. Has the JavaScript world gone completely mad? Is this really acceptable? 40,000+ files before I write my first line of code? OK, so Angular CLI has created all this stuff for me but I still have to understand what it's about, or how will I maintain it and keep it up-to-date. What happens if there's an incompatibility in one of the libraries used? It would be great to hear the members of the podcast discuss what they think needs to happen in order to simplify this. Is Angular CLI actually simplifying things, or is it just shifting the 'getting starting' problem to become a maintenance problem? Is it even possible to have a simple Angular 2 project, do we need to just accept that 161MB of disk space is a minimum? Has Angular 2 become out of reach for hobbyists, or is it the exclusive property of experts and full time client-side developers only?”   04:35 - Purpose and Value 15:32 - “Dumpster Fire” 19:01 - Capability and Complexity 26:03 - Getting Setup to Develop in Angular; Investing in Skills Angular 2 5 Min Quickstart Tour of Heroes Tutorial “Has Angular 2 become out of reach for hobbyists, or is it the exclusive property of experts and full time client-side developers only?” Lukas Reubbelke: Angular 2 with Handcrafted Tools, Century-Old Techniques and ES5   Picks Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez (Ward) Wink (Lukas) Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra (Lukas) Learning (Joe) George W. Bush in Dallas: “Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” (Joe) VidAngel (Joe) Opposing protesters meet in Dallas (Chuck) iPad Pro (Chuck) Apple Pencil (Chuck) GoodNotes (Chuck) Adventures in Angular Facebook Page (Chuck)

Angular Remote Conf   This show is based off the following listener email: “I know you've discussed a couple of times about how hard it is to set up an Angular 2 project. Whilst most of this has nothing to do with Angular itself, it's still the barrier to entry. There's no point in saying how much easier Angular 2 is than Angular 1 if you can't get it running. Even though I'd heard your previous discussions on this, in reality I was totally unprepared as to how difficult it was when I had to do it myself recently. Even the Angular 2 5 minute quick start took me a day to get my head around! I was delighted to hear the Angular team was coming up with Angular CLI. Get the mechanics out the way and lower the barrier to entry. So I typed 'ng new myapp'. Oh! Looking at the properties of the directory I saw Size: 161MB, Contains: 40,531 files, 7,226 folders. Has the JavaScript world gone completely mad? Is this really acceptable? 40,000+ files before I write my first line of code? OK, so Angular CLI has created all this stuff for me but I still have to understand what it's about, or how will I maintain it and keep it up-to-date. What happens if there's an incompatibility in one of the libraries used? It would be great to hear the members of the podcast discuss what they think needs to happen in order to simplify this. Is Angular CLI actually simplifying things, or is it just shifting the 'getting starting' problem to become a maintenance problem? Is it even possible to have a simple Angular 2 project, do we need to just accept that 161MB of disk space is a minimum? Has Angular 2 become out of reach for hobbyists, or is it the exclusive property of experts and full time client-side developers only?”   04:35 - Purpose and Value 15:32 - “Dumpster Fire” 19:01 - Capability and Complexity 26:03 - Getting Setup to Develop in Angular; Investing in Skills Angular 2 5 Min Quickstart Tour of Heroes Tutorial “Has Angular 2 become out of reach for hobbyists, or is it the exclusive property of experts and full time client-side developers only?” Lukas Reubbelke: Angular 2 with Handcrafted Tools, Century-Old Techniques and ES5   Picks Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez (Ward) Wink (Lukas) Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra (Lukas) Learning (Joe) George W. Bush in Dallas: “Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” (Joe) VidAngel (Joe) Opposing protesters meet in Dallas (Chuck) iPad Pro (Chuck) Apple Pencil (Chuck) GoodNotes (Chuck) Adventures in Angular Facebook Page (Chuck)

Angular Remote Conf   This show is based off the following listener email: “I know you've discussed a couple of times about how hard it is to set up an Angular 2 project. Whilst most of this has nothing to do with Angular itself, it's still the barrier to entry. There's no point in saying how much easier Angular 2 is than Angular 1 if you can't get it running. Even though I'd heard your previous discussions on this, in reality I was totally unprepared as to how difficult it was when I had to do it myself recently. Even the Angular 2 5 minute quick start took me a day to get my head around! I was delighted to hear the Angular team was coming up with Angular CLI. Get the mechanics out the way and lower the barrier to entry. So I typed 'ng new myapp'. Oh! Looking at the properties of the directory I saw Size: 161MB, Contains: 40,531 files, 7,226 folders. Has the JavaScript world gone completely mad? Is this really acceptable? 40,000+ files before I write my first line of code? OK, so Angular CLI has created all this stuff for me but I still have to understand what it's about, or how will I maintain it and keep it up-to-date. What happens if there's an incompatibility in one of the libraries used? It would be great to hear the members of the podcast discuss what they think needs to happen in order to simplify this. Is Angular CLI actually simplifying things, or is it just shifting the 'getting starting' problem to become a maintenance problem? Is it even possible to have a simple Angular 2 project, do we need to just accept that 161MB of disk space is a minimum? Has Angular 2 become out of reach for hobbyists, or is it the exclusive property of experts and full time client-side developers only?”   04:35 - Purpose and Value 15:32 - “Dumpster Fire” 19:01 - Capability and Complexity 26:03 - Getting Setup to Develop in Angular; Investing in Skills Angular 2 5 Min Quickstart Tour of Heroes Tutorial “Has Angular 2 become out of reach for hobbyists, or is it the exclusive property of experts and full time client-side developers only?” Lukas Reubbelke: Angular 2 with Handcrafted Tools, Century-Old Techniques and ES5   Picks Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez (Ward) Wink (Lukas) Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra (Lukas) Learning (Joe) George W. Bush in Dallas: “Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” (Joe) VidAngel (Joe) Opposing protesters meet in Dallas (Chuck) iPad Pro (Chuck) Apple Pencil (Chuck) GoodNotes (Chuck) Adventures in Angular Facebook Page (Chuck)

Not only some of the smartest advice anyone has given about how to approach software development, there is also a trick that is guaranteed to make you feel more confident, more powerful and more in control of what you do. It costs nothing, takes no time and you can use it whenever you want to. Enjoy! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

02:20 - Eric Normand Introduction Twitter GitHub Democracy Works LispCast Clojure Gazette PurelyFunctional.tv 03:31 -    Old vs Young Programmers Robert C. Martin: My Lawn “Uncle Bob” Martin Speaks at Yale SOM   05:38 - Teaching Fundamentals Kathy Sierra 11:02 - Teaching Backgrounds 12:13 - Why is so hard to be a good teacher? 15:54 - Teacher Feedback 19:46 - Asking Questions 25:56 - Community Education 28:20 - Order of Operation 29:36 - Recognizing Students Understanding of Fundamentals NPR Planet Money: When Women Stopped Coding 31:25 - Should there be prerequisites? 34:30 - How to Assess Where People Are 35:43 - Teaching the Teacher 39:10 - Bootcamps 45:52 - After Bootcamps Mentoring 52:11 - Skill vs Knowledge O'Reilly's Head First Series   More From Eric How to avoid "Makes sense if you already understand it." Making True/False Questions Easy Tap Into Your Social Brain Use Task Analysis to Break a Skill Into Steps Picks Inoreader (Avdi) Windows 10 (Avdi) Sandi Metz's Courses (Avdi) Avdi Grimm: I have a newsletter. You could subscribe, maybe. (Avdi) Ian Steadman: Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y (Coraline) Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Coraline) Wunderlist (Jessica) The Partially Examined Life (Jessica) Together Tech (Chuck) Being Intentional (Chuck) Highrise (Chuck) Eventual Millionaire with Rory Vaden (Chuck) Ruby Rogues (Eric) Yoshiki Ohshima's Youtube Channel (Eric) Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas by Seymour A. Papert (Eric)

02:20 - Eric Normand Introduction Twitter GitHub Democracy Works LispCast Clojure Gazette PurelyFunctional.tv 03:31 -    Old vs Young Programmers Robert C. Martin: My Lawn “Uncle Bob” Martin Speaks at Yale SOM   05:38 - Teaching Fundamentals Kathy Sierra 11:02 - Teaching Backgrounds 12:13 - Why is so hard to be a good teacher? 15:54 - Teacher Feedback 19:46 - Asking Questions 25:56 - Community Education 28:20 - Order of Operation 29:36 - Recognizing Students Understanding of Fundamentals NPR Planet Money: When Women Stopped Coding 31:25 - Should there be prerequisites? 34:30 - How to Assess Where People Are 35:43 - Teaching the Teacher 39:10 - Bootcamps 45:52 - After Bootcamps Mentoring 52:11 - Skill vs Knowledge O'Reilly's Head First Series   More From Eric How to avoid "Makes sense if you already understand it." Making True/False Questions Easy Tap Into Your Social Brain Use Task Analysis to Break a Skill Into Steps Picks Inoreader (Avdi) Windows 10 (Avdi) Sandi Metz's Courses (Avdi) Avdi Grimm: I have a newsletter. You could subscribe, maybe. (Avdi) Ian Steadman: Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y (Coraline) Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Coraline) Wunderlist (Jessica) The Partially Examined Life (Jessica) Together Tech (Chuck) Being Intentional (Chuck) Highrise (Chuck) Eventual Millionaire with Rory Vaden (Chuck) Ruby Rogues (Eric) Yoshiki Ohshima's Youtube Channel (Eric) Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas by Seymour A. Papert (Eric)

02:20 - Eric Normand Introduction Twitter GitHub Democracy Works LispCast Clojure Gazette PurelyFunctional.tv 03:31 -    Old vs Young Programmers Robert C. Martin: My Lawn “Uncle Bob” Martin Speaks at Yale SOM   05:38 - Teaching Fundamentals Kathy Sierra 11:02 - Teaching Backgrounds 12:13 - Why is so hard to be a good teacher? 15:54 - Teacher Feedback 19:46 - Asking Questions 25:56 - Community Education 28:20 - Order of Operation 29:36 - Recognizing Students Understanding of Fundamentals NPR Planet Money: When Women Stopped Coding 31:25 - Should there be prerequisites? 34:30 - How to Assess Where People Are 35:43 - Teaching the Teacher 39:10 - Bootcamps 45:52 - After Bootcamps Mentoring 52:11 - Skill vs Knowledge O'Reilly's Head First Series   More From Eric How to avoid "Makes sense if you already understand it." Making True/False Questions Easy Tap Into Your Social Brain Use Task Analysis to Break a Skill Into Steps Picks Inoreader (Avdi) Windows 10 (Avdi) Sandi Metz's Courses (Avdi) Avdi Grimm: I have a newsletter. You could subscribe, maybe. (Avdi) Ian Steadman: Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y (Coraline) Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Coraline) Wunderlist (Jessica) The Partially Examined Life (Jessica) Together Tech (Chuck) Being Intentional (Chuck) Highrise (Chuck) Eventual Millionaire with Rory Vaden (Chuck) Ruby Rogues (Eric) Yoshiki Ohshima's Youtube Channel (Eric) Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas by Seymour A. Papert (Eric)

01:26 - Neal Ford Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog ThoughtWorks 01:42 - Ambient Information and the Apple Watch “Mean Wrangler” Ambient = Accessible and Available 06:39 - Benefits of Having Ambient Information Safety ETAs 08:52 - When should information be ambient? 12:53 - Notifications 15:58 - Visualizing Information, User Experience Dark Sky Apple Pay 17:09 - Apple Watch as a Fashion Accessory 18:04 - Ambient Control Bluetooth Timers Texting/Voice Control w/ Siri Reminders OmniFocus 22:29 - Training Siri 23:46 - Google Glass Neal Ford: Ambient Information 26:45 - Apps That Shouldn’t Push Ambient Information 29:42 - Customization Watch Faces 32:10 - What can app designers do to make their applications more approachable on the watch? 34:10 - Battery Life 35:00 - Security 36:13 - Could-be Feature Improvements (User Customization)   Other DevChat.tv Episodes Featuring Neal Ford iPhreaks Show Episode #54: Building Your Technology Radar with Neal Ford Ruby Rogues Episode #195: Building Your Technology Radar with Neal Ford Freelancers' Show Episode #145: Life as a Traveling Consultant with Neal Ford    Picks Remote Year (Alondo) Homemade Chicken Broth (Jaim) Adafruit Inductries (Mike) Soaring Society of America (Mike) HMDX - JAM XT Extreme Wireless (Chuck) Orphan Black (Chuck) iOS Remote Conf! Interested? Email chuck@devchat.tv (Chuck) Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson (Neal) Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra (Neal) Bose SoundLink Mini Bluetooth Speaker II (Neal) Beats II Bluetooth Headset (Neal)

01:26 - Neal Ford Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog ThoughtWorks 01:42 - Ambient Information and the Apple Watch “Mean Wrangler” Ambient = Accessible and Available 06:39 - Benefits of Having Ambient Information Safety ETAs 08:52 - When should information be ambient? 12:53 - Notifications 15:58 - Visualizing Information, User Experience Dark Sky Apple Pay 17:09 - Apple Watch as a Fashion Accessory 18:04 - Ambient Control Bluetooth Timers Texting/Voice Control w/ Siri Reminders OmniFocus 22:29 - Training Siri 23:46 - Google Glass Neal Ford: Ambient Information 26:45 - Apps That Shouldn’t Push Ambient Information 29:42 - Customization Watch Faces 32:10 - What can app designers do to make their applications more approachable on the watch? 34:10 - Battery Life 35:00 - Security 36:13 - Could-be Feature Improvements (User Customization)   Other DevChat.tv Episodes Featuring Neal Ford iPhreaks Show Episode #54: Building Your Technology Radar with Neal Ford Ruby Rogues Episode #195: Building Your Technology Radar with Neal Ford Freelancers' Show Episode #145: Life as a Traveling Consultant with Neal Ford    Picks Remote Year (Alondo) Homemade Chicken Broth (Jaim) Adafruit Inductries (Mike) Soaring Society of America (Mike) HMDX - JAM XT Extreme Wireless (Chuck) Orphan Black (Chuck) iOS Remote Conf! Interested? Email chuck@devchat.tv (Chuck) Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson (Neal) Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra (Neal) Bose SoundLink Mini Bluetooth Speaker II (Neal) Beats II Bluetooth Headset (Neal)

Check out RailsClips and RemoteConfs!   01:14 - Breanne Dyck Introduction Twitter My Name Is Breanne: Master the Business of Teaching Online 02:13 - Transitioning: Contracting => Teaching Courses Content Marketing 05:59 - Structuring Content Deep vs Wide Business Model 10:19 - Where do you start? 13:05 - Getting Results Levels of Mastery Surface-Level Learning Higher-Level Mastery Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra Spectrum of Confidence/Competence      The Backwards Brain Bicycle 24:15 - Setting People Up to Succeed Pilots, Alpha and Beta Phases Outcomes and Objectives 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle)     33:57 - Should I charge for pilots? (Pricing) Ramit Sethi 35:39 - Experimentation > Textbook/Traditional Learning 43:22 - Selecting Content For Your Course The 5 Whys Technique Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug 52:50 - Getting and Keeping People Interested in Your Courses Through Completion Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) Passive Participants The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg Planning For Success Picks The Art of Outbound Lead Generation by Blair Enns (Eric) Is Positioning Professional Services Different Than Products? Al Ries Explains (Eric) Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra (Eric) remoteconfs.com (Chuck) God (Chuck) Jesus Christ (Chuck) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Chuck) Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded): 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina (Breanne) Brilliance by Design: Creating Learning Experiences That Connect, Inspire, and Engage Kindle Edition by Vicki Halsey (Breanne) Quiet Power Strategy by Tara Gentile (Breanne) Your Perfect Participant: Unlock What Buyers Want & Need From You by Breanne Dyck (Breanne)

Check out RailsClips and RemoteConfs!   01:14 - Breanne Dyck Introduction Twitter My Name Is Breanne: Master the Business of Teaching Online 02:13 - Transitioning: Contracting => Teaching Courses Content Marketing 05:59 - Structuring Content Deep vs Wide Business Model 10:19 - Where do you start? 13:05 - Getting Results Levels of Mastery Surface-Level Learning Higher-Level Mastery Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra Spectrum of Confidence/Competence      The Backwards Brain Bicycle 24:15 - Setting People Up to Succeed Pilots, Alpha and Beta Phases Outcomes and Objectives 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle)     33:57 - Should I charge for pilots? (Pricing) Ramit Sethi 35:39 - Experimentation > Textbook/Traditional Learning 43:22 - Selecting Content For Your Course The 5 Whys Technique Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug 52:50 - Getting and Keeping People Interested in Your Courses Through Completion Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) Passive Participants The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg Planning For Success Picks The Art of Outbound Lead Generation by Blair Enns (Eric) Is Positioning Professional Services Different Than Products? Al Ries Explains (Eric) Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra (Eric) remoteconfs.com (Chuck) God (Chuck) Jesus Christ (Chuck) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Chuck) Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded): 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina (Breanne) Brilliance by Design: Creating Learning Experiences That Connect, Inspire, and Engage Kindle Edition by Vicki Halsey (Breanne) Quiet Power Strategy by Tara Gentile (Breanne) Your Perfect Participant: Unlock What Buyers Want & Need From You by Breanne Dyck (Breanne)

Adarsh talks Jessie Young, who started her professional life as a political volunteer, worked in marketing, and became a developer after attending a technical bootcamp. PDA Edward "Ted" Kennedy Brookline, MA Sermo RailsBridge "Head First HTML with CSS" by Elisabeth Robson, Eric Freeman (not Kathy Sierra as I had thought) "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine Hungry Academy Dev Bootcamp Pivotal Labs

In the penultimate episode of our series, Kathy Sierra tells us how one tweak could fix everything and ToE’s Chris tells us the secret origin of Facebook. PLUS #marksbros (as in Zuckerberg)  #marxhegel (as in Groucho) ***ALERT*** the DISLIKE CLUB Finale was commissioned by RADIOTONIC from the ABC’s Creative Audio Unit. Download it here. Or subscribe to their podcast. Look for the Dec 21st episode called the Dislike Club – that is part VI (the finale).

In 2007 writer, programmer, and horse trainer Kathy Sierra quit the internet because of misogynist hate trolling. She stayed off the social web for 7 years but last year she came back to see what Twitter was like. She tells us why she only lasted a few weeks and her theory about why so many women are targets online. Plus Danielle Keats Citron explains how we could use the law to drain the cesspool.

Note: Episode 0x5A was released out of sequence, but they are in the order of release date on faif.us (rather than numerical order). Karen and Bradley discuss connections between the so-called “Gamergate” controversy and how it relates to the Free Software community and a few obvious legal issues. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:37) Karen asked if Bradley had heard of the Gamergate situation. (01:30) Matthew Garrett wrote a blog post regarding this topic entitled Actions have consequences (or: why I'm not fixing Intel's bugs any more) (10:23) Mathew was attacked on LKML about this blog post (10:50) Lennart Poettering also wrote an essay recently about aggression and attacking people in Free Software communities. (12:12) Karen mentioned the harassment Kathy Sierra faced in the late 2000s. (13:00) Bradley called out Linux Foundation to ask why they tacitly support the bad behavior by its employees and others in the Linux Project (14:35, 31:10) Bradley mentioned that Antti Aumo in his LinuxCon Europe 2011 keynote, said that a great thing about the Internet of Things is that you can put a lock on your fridge when the wife's on a diet. (16:32) Bradley mentioned the Eddie Murphy's Saturday Night Live skit, White Like Me, which according to the transcript, originally aired on 1984-12-15 on SNL. (24:45) Bradley mentioned FaiF 0x13, which discussed torts and why they're important. (29:50) Bradley wrote a blog post about Bradley mentioned his blog post about John Oliver's discussion of the Miss America Pageant (43:30) Bradley suggested that Intel should have instead given the Gamasutra money to Society of Women Engineers Scholarship fund. (45:30) Karen mentioned the statement Intel published a statement regarding the situation. (47:10) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Note: Episode 0x5A was released out of sequence, but they are in the order of release date on faif.us (rather than numerical order). Karen and Bradley discuss connections between the so-called “Gamergate” controversy and how it relates to the Free Software community and a few obvious legal issues. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:37) Karen asked if Bradley had heard of the Gamergate situation. (01:30) Matthew Garrett wrote a blog post regarding this topic entitled Actions have consequences (or: why I'm not fixing Intel's bugs any more) (10:23) Mathew was attacked on LKML about this blog post (10:50) Lennart Poettering also wrote an essay recently about aggression and attacking people in Free Software communities. (12:12) Karen mentioned the harassment Kathy Sierra faced in the late 2000s. (13:00) Bradley called out Linux Foundation to ask why they tacitly support the bad behavior by its employees and others in the Linux Project (14:35, 31:10) Bradley mentioned that Antti Aumo in his LinuxCon Europe 2011 keynote, said that a great thing about the Internet of Things is that you can put a lock on your fridge when the wife's on a diet. (16:32) Bradley mentioned the Eddie Murphy's Saturday Night Live skit, White Like Me, which according to the transcript, originally aired on 1984-12-15 on SNL. (24:45) Bradley mentioned FaiF 0x13, which discussed torts and why they're important. (29:50) Bradley wrote a blog post about Bradley mentioned his blog post about John Oliver's discussion of the Miss America Pageant (43:30) Bradley suggested that Intel should have instead given the Gamasutra money to Society of Women Engineers Scholarship fund. (45:30) Karen mentioned the statement Intel published a statement regarding the situation. (47:10) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

2:05- Are you born with talent? 5:45 - Valuing effort, not ability 9:20 - Getting into the discomfort zone 13:30 - Do you need talent to become great? Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 24:15 - 10,000 hours research 26:50 - Practice theories 30:00 - Practice by writing small methods Brian Merick: “Programming with that Disreputable Part of Your Brain” from Rocky Mountain Ruby 2013 Kathy Sierra 35:35 - Developing intuition in programming 41:00 - How to start learning something new (and determine what to learn) 49:30 - Making mistakes 53:00 - Strategies for learning by reading “Teach Yourself a New Programming Language in 21 Minutes (Or 2-3 Years, It Depends)” by David Brady 72:00 - Memorization 77:20 - “If you want to learn something, give a talk on it” Picks: Mastery by Robert Greene (Katrina) The Five Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward D. Burger and Michael Starbird (Katrina) So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport (Katrina) “The First 20 Hours- How To Learn Anything” TEDx Talk by Josh Kaufman (Katrina) “The Making of an Expert” by Ericsson (Katrina) Photoreading Personal Learning Course by Paul Scheele (David) How to be Twice as Smart by Scott Witt (David) Make the Most of Your Mind by Tony Buzan (David) Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb (James) Cavalier King Charles Spaniels (James) Jam Plus Bluetooth Speaker (Charles) Lifehacker standing desk (Charles) Vegasaur (Avdi) HelloSign and HelloFax (Avdi) LastPass (Avdi)

2:05- Are you born with talent? 5:45 - Valuing effort, not ability 9:20 - Getting into the discomfort zone 13:30 - Do you need talent to become great? Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 24:15 - 10,000 hours research 26:50 - Practice theories 30:00 - Practice by writing small methods Brian Merick: “Programming with that Disreputable Part of Your Brain” from Rocky Mountain Ruby 2013 Kathy Sierra 35:35 - Developing intuition in programming 41:00 - How to start learning something new (and determine what to learn) 49:30 - Making mistakes 53:00 - Strategies for learning by reading “Teach Yourself a New Programming Language in 21 Minutes (Or 2-3 Years, It Depends)” by David Brady 72:00 - Memorization 77:20 - “If you want to learn something, give a talk on it” Picks: Mastery by Robert Greene (Katrina) The Five Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward D. Burger and Michael Starbird (Katrina) So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport (Katrina) “The First 20 Hours- How To Learn Anything” TEDx Talk by Josh Kaufman (Katrina) “The Making of an Expert” by Ericsson (Katrina) Photoreading Personal Learning Course by Paul Scheele (David) How to be Twice as Smart by Scott Witt (David) Make the Most of Your Mind by Tony Buzan (David) Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb (James) Cavalier King Charles Spaniels (James) Jam Plus Bluetooth Speaker (Charles) Lifehacker standing desk (Charles) Vegasaur (Avdi) HelloSign and HelloFax (Avdi) LastPass (Avdi)

2:05- Are you born with talent? 5:45 - Valuing effort, not ability 9:20 - Getting into the discomfort zone 13:30 - Do you need talent to become great? Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 24:15 - 10,000 hours research 26:50 - Practice theories 30:00 - Practice by writing small methods Brian Merick: “Programming with that Disreputable Part of Your Brain” from Rocky Mountain Ruby 2013 Kathy Sierra 35:35 - Developing intuition in programming 41:00 - How to start learning something new (and determine what to learn) 49:30 - Making mistakes 53:00 - Strategies for learning by reading “Teach Yourself a New Programming Language in 21 Minutes (Or 2-3 Years, It Depends)” by David Brady 72:00 - Memorization 77:20 - “If you want to learn something, give a talk on it” Picks: Mastery by Robert Greene (Katrina) The Five Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward D. Burger and Michael Starbird (Katrina) So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport (Katrina) “The First 20 Hours- How To Learn Anything” TEDx Talk by Josh Kaufman (Katrina) “The Making of an Expert” by Ericsson (Katrina) Photoreading Personal Learning Course by Paul Scheele (David) How to be Twice as Smart by Scott Witt (David) Make the Most of Your Mind by Tony Buzan (David) Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb (James) Cavalier King Charles Spaniels (James) Jam Plus Bluetooth Speaker (Charles) Lifehacker standing desk (Charles) Vegasaur (Avdi) HelloSign and HelloFax (Avdi) LastPass (Avdi)

I'm not sure how many people discuss the pros and cons of allowing public blog commenting on students blogs at their seder table, but that's what's on my mind! The Kathy Sierra situation and Stop Cyberbullying day has left a taste in my mouth worse than matzah with a heaping helping of horseradish. So in [...]