Podcast appearances and mentions of sara chipps

As Sara Chipps delved deeper into the world of open source and moved up into senior engineering and management roles, there was a specific skill she learned about how to work with and manage engineers. "This is something you never get taught in school. This is something we don't stress to junior developers. This is something that senior developers learn late in their careers, is that the ability to influence the opinions of others without conflict is a superpower. "By conflict, I don't mean not disagreeing. I'm more mean in this case, conflict of like a, a public fight or, or people getting angry or upset, like to be able to coach people through what you think is an incorrect opinion to a place where you're in agreement. It's hard, it's sometimes you're impossible, but it's an incredible skill to have. "I love of bureaucracy and open source because that's a place that I've learned that I can be effective. "My responsibility is identifying when people have a limiting mindset of you know, things should be this way and helping them to see the possibilities. What I've learned is that it takes time. Sometimes you have to say the same things 50 times in a row. Sometimes it doesn't work, but growing that muscle of having a message, staying on that message, learning who to identify as allies and to talk through things, that has been a really cool learning as part of my work here." Resources mentioned in this episode https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarajchipps/ (Sara Chipps), Engineering Manager, Flagship Infrastructure, LinkedIn https://jewelbots.com/ (JewelBots), Craft Kits for Budding Inventors https://girldevelopit.com/ (Girl Develop It), women and non-binary adults learn software development skills https://girlswhocode.com/ (Girls Who Code), the world's largest pipeline of female engineers https://www.linkedin.com/in/rginn206/ (Robin Ginn), Executive Director at OpenJS Foundation https://openjsf.org/ (OpenJS Foundation), driving broad adoption and ongoing development of key JavaScript solutions and technologies

Former co-host Sara Chipps  now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner, recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro, a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a site. The two books Ms. Chipps mention as the old standbys for new engineering managers are Peopleware and Smart and Gets Things Done. 

Former co-host Sara Chipps  now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner, recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro, a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a site. The two books Ms. Chipps mention as the old standbys for new engineering managers are Peopleware and Smart and Gets Things Done. 

Sara has been part of the open source community since 2001 and was formerly on the board of the .NET foundation. Recently she was elected to the board of the OpenJS foundation and was eager to get back in the trenches, helping people solve computer problems.In this episode we talk about coding interviews and brushing up on your puzzle solving chops.Later we dive into Ember.js, the framework Sara will be using with her new colleagues at LinkedIn.We explore what it's like to join a team when everyone is still remote and you never get the chance to onboard with your team in person.This week's lifeboat badge winner is Perfect28, who answered the question: Linq OrderBy custom order. Spoiler alert, there are char arrays involved. 

Sara has been part of the open source community since 2001 and was formerly on the board of the .NET foundation. Recently she was elected to the board of the OpenJS foundation and was eager to get back in the trenches, helping people solve computer problems.In this episode we talk about coding interviews and brushing up on your puzzle solving chops.Later we dive into Ember.js, the framework Sara will be using with her new colleagues at LinkedIn.We explore what it’s like to join a team when everyone is still remote and you never get the chance to onboard with your team in person.This week’s lifeboat badge winner is Perfect28, who answered the question: Linq OrderBy custom order. Spoiler alert, there are char arrays involved. 

An interesting idea I heard on the StackOverflow Podcast - locking open source code to contributions, and then having an open plugin ecosystem where people can do whatever they want.- Sara Chipps and Paul Ford on StackOverflow Podcast- Litestream closed to contributions for self preservation- Simon Willison's datasette project

In our latest episode, regular hosts Haitch and Jason are joined by return guest and founder-engineer, Sara Chipps. We cover Zendaya & Rebecca Ferguson’s 2017 musical powerhouse movie, The Greatest Showman! We discuss the struggle for equality, humane treatment of humans and elephants, and have a quick sidebar on Zendaya’s incredible HBO Series, Euphoria. Chapters Introduction (00:00:00) Dune News (00:09:59) Roundtable Discussion (00:14:54) Your Letters (00:48:06) Notes and Links Tim O’Reilly’s 1977 biography Frank Herbert See the movies we’ve watched and are going to watch on our Dune Pod Set List on Letterboxd Dune Pod’s Breaking Dune News Twitter list Rate and review the podcast to help others discover it, and let us know what you think of the show at letters@dunepod.com or leave us a voicemail at +1-415-534-5211. Dune Pod: your one stop shop to get fully prepared for the new Dune movie by delving into the books, as well as the films directed by Denis Villeneuve and featuring the cast and crew of the new film. Dune neophytes and historians alike are welcome to join our tribe. Follow @dunepod on Twitter and Instagram Music by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music Cover art by @ctcher

In this episode, we talk about the history of IRC and the evolution of other community building tools with Sara Chipps, co-founder of Jewelbots and director of public Q&A at Stack Overflow, and Jason C McDonald, CEO and Lead Developer at MousePaw Media. Show Notes DevNews (sponsor) Triplebyte (sponsor) CodeNewbie (sponsor) RudderStack (sponsor) Slack reddit PHP IRC Jewelbots Stack Overflow MousePaw Media C# ASP.NET JavaScript Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1996 video game) The ClueFinders Reader Rabbit Python Visual Basic .NET ham Radio Usenet Discord DEV HTTP Freenode Nickname Registration The Great Split IRCnet DALnet PSF Code of Conduct K lined Eternal September Git Tracy Chou Block Party app Winamp C++ Introducing "Dead Simple Python"

In this episode of The Work Item, we interview Sara Chipps, Director of Public Q and A at Stack Overflow. Sara is also the founder of JewelBots, a company that provides electronic building kits for young inventors. We chat with Sara about community feedback, engineering management career tracks, and building tools for STEM inclusivity.

In addition to her role as PM's on Microsoft's .NEt team, Claire is an Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. Jeff, meanwhile, is a Twitch Partner, technical educator and founder of @theLiveCoders. He can be found streaming live coding projects and challenges as CsharpFritz on Twitch. Both have been working with our own Sara Chipps to organize today's DevAroundTheSun event in order to raise money for those impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.In addition to this episode, you can tune in this morning at 9am Eastern Standard Time to catch a live episode of the Stack Overflow podcast on Twitch, where we'll be highlighting some of the fascinating talks and great speakers happing at DevAroundTheSun, and generally having a few laughs talking about software, tech, and life.

In addition to her role as PM's on Microsoft's .NEt team, Claire is an Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. Jeff, meanwhile, is a Twitch Partner, technical educator and founder of @theLiveCoders. He can be found streaming live coding projects and challenges as CsharpFritz on Twitch. Both have been working with our own Sara Chipps to organize today's DevAroundTheSun event in order to raise money for those impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.In addition to this episode, you can tune in this morning at 9am Eastern Standard Time to catch a live episode of the Stack Overflow podcast on Twitch, where we'll be highlighting some of the fascinating talks and great speakers happing at DevAroundTheSun, and generally having a few laughs talking about software, tech, and life.

Podcast Description “The thing that I keep coming back to is to not speak for or to make decisions or to pretend that I represent anyone that has a different experience or different affinity than I do.”Sara Chipps, is a JavaScript developer based in NYC who has been coding since the adolescence of the web. As user number 4140, she's been avid member of the Stack Overflow community since it was in Beta. As Director of Community there her focus is on inspiring developers to build features that appeal to all coders. Outside of Stack she is the co-founder of Jewelbots, a company focused on inspiring girls in STEM through play. Additional Resources An Open Letter to the GDI Board Timeline Twitter Sara Chipps Become a #causeascene Community Sponsor because disruption and innovation are products of individuals who take bold steps in order to shift the collective and challenge the status quo.Learn more >All music for the #causeascene podcast is composed and produced by Chaos, Chao Pack, and Listen on SoundCloud Listen to more great #causeascene podcasts full podcast list >

We made it to Episode 10, y’all! That’s a wrap on Season 1! Who better to close out our first season than an engineer, entrepreneur, and general superstar we’ve loved for, like, a full decade? Yep, our guest today is Leah Culver, the co-founder and CTO of Breaker, a social podcast app that we’ve all just started using (if you have an iPhone, check it out. Android is coming soon). > I can only do the things I can do. I can keep trying to get better, but I can’t beat myself up about not being like someone else. I just have to sort of be myself and work with what I have and take it to that—that next step. > —Leah Culver, CTO, Breaker But Breaker’s not the first startup Leah’s co-founded—in fact, Jenn fell hard for her very first company, Pownce, a microblogging platform that launched way back in 2007. We talk about that journey, plus: The future of podcasting—like Chompers, a podcast on Alexa kids can brush their teeth to. Women in tech, women in podcasting, and the fact that more women than ever are listening to podcasts, according to the 2017 podcast consumer report from Edison Research. Financing a new laptop as a young programmer by selling laser-etched advertising on it back in 2006. Getting into Y Combinator, an accelerator program for early-stage startups. What Leah’s listening to right now (it’s Modern Love, which you can get on Breaker, of course). Interviewing for 30 jobs, what a company’s snacks say about its culture, and why Leah wants you to stop judging her love for Diet Coke. Also on the agenda: letting people carry things for you (literally and figuratively), peeing with your therapist (no, really), and all the “tiny revelations” we’ve had this season. Thanks so much for joining us for Season 1! We’re taking a couple weeks off, but we’ll be back strong with Season 2 starting April 17. In the meantime, make sure to sign up for the new NYG Newsletter, coming April 20. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _   _CodePen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _ Transcript Katel LeDû Shopify is on a mission to make commerce better for everyone. In fact, they’re the leading global commerce for entrepreneurs. And did you know that they’re hiring? That’s right! And they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply to you. Join a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team where you’ll get shit done. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. Jenn Lukas Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KL I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. JL Hey! It’s Season 1 finale time! How did we make it through 10 episodes? Well it certainly helps to be working on something that we all love. That concept’s no stranger to our guest today, founder Leah Culver, currently CTO of Breaker, a social podcast app. We’ll also talk about tech today versus 10 years ago, using an accelerator application to let you know if you’re ready to leave your job for your startup idea, and the importance and difficulties of self-evaluation. Dun dun dun. But first! How about we check in with ourselves? How y’all doin’, ladies? KL Doing alright. Doing good. How about you? JL I’m—do you ever feel like sometimes you just sigh? But you know what? I read a study one time that sighing is actually healthy for you, so that’s ok. I’m doing ok. I’m doing ok. SWB It was funny, my husband was just telling me that his barber that you shouldn’t sigh because a monk told her not to once. And so I think about that sometimes when I let out a big sigh but I’ve been sighing a lot recently. Like, in fact, kind of a bummer couple of weeks, you know? I uh I tore my ACL which is a little unpleasant. And Jenn and Katel know this because they’re constantly offering to like carry things for me up the stairs such as like glasses of wine, my laptop— JL But we only barely know this because Sara would try as much as she can to hide this fact from most of us. You could barely tell based on your attitude and uh go—go-get-em-ness. KL Yeah and in fact I think we ran on your bad ACL a couple times. So. SWB Actually, they think my ACL has been torn for 14 months and I didn’t know it until I uh twisted something and actually injured myself because the ACL was unstable. And so it’s probably a little bit more torn now. And you know, it really took me out there for a couple of days and then for the past couple of weeks I’ve just been adjusting to what’s essentially like a long-term pre-op lifestyle. Like I have to get surgery. It’s probably not going to happen until September because of a lot of other stuff going on in the meantime—and so I’m at this place where it’s like I’m ok but I can’t do certain things. And some of those are things that are—are really bumming me out. Like I can’t run. And that is a major way that I organize my weeks and think about my time and so I’m kind of adjusting to a lifestyle where I—you know, have to be very careful about certain stuff and I have to wear a brace when I’m out walking for any length of time or trying to do anything physical. And I have to just kind of accept a slower pace, like literally a slower pace! [Mm hmm] And the kinds of stuff that I thought I could do really quickly like, “Oh I’m just going to pop downstairs in between these conference and grab something to drink,” is no longer so quick feeling. And like that is very difficult for me. And I’ve been thinking about like, “Damn. This is going to make me learn some lessons, huh?” Like not just the lessons of, you know, like trying not to injure yourself but the lessons of like, “It’s ok to move more slowly,” and like, “It’s ok to have people help you.” I don’t want to. I don’t want to learn any of those lessons! I’m sorry I don’t want to, I’m sorry I don’t want to learn them at all. They just suck! JL It’s hard, you know, we’ve talked about this on the show before but asking for help is—is really difficult. And even, you know, just something like, “Hey, could you carry this for me?” A few days before I found out I was pregnant, I was in a bike accident and broke my elbow and my ribs, and uh so I had broken ribs, broken elbow, pregnant, and I had to be like, “Hey, can you carry my laptop?” Like everywhere I went because I couldn’t pick up anything. And it was really difficult but I mean I was at the point where, you know, Sutter had to wash my hair because both my elbows… and so I mean you know it’s like—I had not choice but to ask for help. You know, there’s a lot of things as like, you know, generally able-bodied women that, you know, you—you don’t think about. And, you know, you go through life, you’re going, ok, you know, “I’m brushing I’m teeth. I’m able to brush my teeth.” And then all of a sudden you can’t. And it’s so hard! I’ve read a lot about how people with disabilities live their day-to-day lives and go through routines of things that, often, you know, we don’t think about. And when you’re faced with a temporary physical state in which, you know, you can’t do things as fast as you want to. You know, all of a sudden, your world is sort of like turned upside down. You can’t really figure out what’s what and how to get through your day. [5:07] SWB And I feel like, you know, and I mean it’s also, change is just hard for anybody. And I think that what you realize is both how badass people are who, like, figure out how to get through stuff that’s really hard, whether it’s physical or otherwise, and then you also think about how adaptable, in a lot of ways, people are. Right? Like you really can adapt to a lot that you didn’t necessarily realize you could adapt to. And, you know, something that—that I’ve also really been thinking a ton about is the way that—we have talked about sort of like the highs and lows or the peaks and valleys of work and of life, but like, that often that those things are happening at the same time. Like this has been a really good year so far in some ways, for me at least. Where it’s like I’ve got this fucking podcast and it’s going really well and I’m excited about a lot of the stuff that I’m working on and—and at the same time, like not only did I tear my ACL, like I had a pet die earlier this year and it was really hard. Like it was crushingly difficult for me, and I wanted to talk about it on the show, but it was like such a tremendous fresh wound, I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t do it in any way where I could like get through it and out the other end into something anybody would want to listen to. I mean, 45 minutes of ugly crying is fun, I guess, for some people, but like I didn’t—I didn’t want to subject people to that, especially not, like, Episode 2. KL I think it’s really helpful to hear both of you talk about just kind of figuring out how you’re going to move around these things that, you know, become a challenge, right? Or just completely throw you off the way that you think you’re going to get through a day. And I feel like, I mean I’ve struggled with depression my entire life and, I think, over the last year I’ve gone through sort of peaks and valleys, just in that alone, you know? Along with sort of day to day life stuff. And sometimes I—I worry because I feel like not being able to cope, let’s say, on a certain day because of, you know, something that is—just isn’t working right in my brain chemistry or I, you know, just haven’t been able to—to rally around the thing I’m supposed to do that day, is—is really difficult to kind of put a structure around that and to say, “I just need some help today,” or, “I just need to like find a different way to do this because it’s so intangible.” JL And—and it’s interesting like when you hear, you know, “I just need some help today.” Or like Sara, you know, there’s times where like the few times you’ve let us help you carry [chuckling] things up the stairs, on my end, like, it feels good to help. Like [KL absolutely] I want to help. And I think that’s the thing that we sort of have to think of, like the times that I mean you both have helped me on countless situations, I mean like … it feels good to help your friends and, I think, sometimes that makes it easier for me to ask for help [KL definitely]. So think about the fact that like we want to be there and support each other. KL Yeah. And I think that is—that is ultimately—that is the absolute silver lining because I think about everything we’ve just been talking about and the fact that like, Jenn, when you were, you know, saying we want to help Sara carry stuff up the stairs. I’m like, “Oh my gosh! This is all I want to do!” Right? I’m like, “If she needs help doing stuff because she tore her ACL,” I’m like, “You better tell me when you need something because I’ll be at your house the next day.” And I think that we all feel that way. And we all have a lot more people in our lives that—that are willing to do that than we think. And we just have to accept that and ask, you know? JL And I think even like, you know, there’s big things like I—I couldn’t type for a little bit so I had people that would have to like dictate for if we were trying to get stuff done. SWB Would people dictate—like you would dictate code to people?! JL It was like the most intense pair programming. KL You’re like, “Div—no, div!” JL So I mean, you know, but there were small things too like I would be really thirsty and I couldn’t carry like a container of water and like my coworker was like, “Let me get that water for you,” you know? It wasn’t like I was like, “Buy me water!” I just needed someone to just— KL “Just, like, hand it to me!” JL —carry it. KL It’s silly the things that we, you know, don’t think about asking for help or think are too small or whatever. I mean just today, this morning, I was uh at therapy and I was sitting there and I had been thinking for the last five minutes how badly I had to pee and I had the thought, “You can just get through it for the next half hour, it’ll be fine. Like, don’t bother anyone.” JL Half an hour!!! KL I know! And then I was like, “No, I can’t—I can’t even concentrate like this is—this is so dumb. I’m like—I’m not going to get out what I need to get out of the session just because I have to pee.” So I finally, said, “I’m so sorry, I just—I really have to pee all of a sudden. You know, do you mind if I just go?” And she was like, “Oh yeah, you know, of course!” And she kind of paused and she’s like, “Do you mind if I go with you?” And I was like, “Of—of course. Sure!” And she was like, “I’m so sorry. I really have to pee too.” And we just both felt so overwhelmingly like, you know, embarrassed but also relieved and so we did and we moved on and it was great. We both like came back to the session. We were like, “Ahhh!” [10:30] SWB I mean it’s funny though because it’s like there’s little things and that’s—I mean I feel like that could be a metaphor for a lot of parts of life where these little things that sometimes you deny yourself because you’re worried that, I don’t know, you’ll make somebody else like think something weird about you or that somehow it’s more important that you pretend like you’re this perfect … stoic, non-peeing person. I don’t know what that means but— KL Or that you—right, that you can just do everything and carry everything and— SWB Right and like that you never have to make space for your own needs, right? That you can always sandwich your needs into like some other time nobody cares about and that whenever you have to like be like, “Actually, I’m going to raise my hand and say, ‘I need a thing right now,’” that’s uncomfortable and, I don’t know, like uh I think that you should be able to pee when you want to. JL I used to feel that way a lot, too, about like personal things. I would be like, “Well,” I think it’s because I was—I was an on-site consultant for so long that I had to keep my personal stuff a little bit away and now I’m full-time at Urban and I think one of the things is I still felt like, “Oh I can’t tell you what’s going on.” And last week, my son had to have surgery for um—it’s a common surgery, it’s ear tubes, but, you know, he’s a year and it’s anesthesia and there’s a lot of risks and it was scary. And normally I would never tell the to anyone. I would keep that inside, and keep that anxiety and nerves, and like to myself and then I—I’ve been trying something new recently which is where I tell people these things when I’m thinking like, “What’s going on?” And so you know, I’d just be like, “Oh I won’t be here on Friday.” I would just leave it at that. And now I’m like, “My son’s having surgery.” And like not because like I want people’s pity, or I want them—and I think that’s sort of why I never really said anything because it’s like, “Oh, you know, feel bad and worry for me!” It was like, “No, I just want you to know what’s going on in my life because, you know, I’m not going to be able to answer emails because my mind is someplace else right now.” KL Right. And you care deeply about this thing that’s happening and the people you’re telling probably do too because they care about you. SWB And also like you’re a person working with other people. And I think—I think there’s a lot about work culture that encourages us to not come to work as humans and to come to work as workers. And I’ve realized that that doesn’t serve anybody very well. And like I’m still a person when I’m working and—and I even like I’m a consultant still and I—I find myself being much more kind of open about who I am and things I care about. Obviously, you know, you put boundaries around stuff, for sure, but I, you know, like I was talking to a client today about like, “Yup, ACL is torn!” And I was describing like, you know, “I’m really bummed about not being able to run. But, you know, here we are.” And—and then, you know, this client started talking to me about how they just had MRI as well, they have a different knee problem, and it’s like—it’s kind of nice to—you know, you don’t want to necessarily say everything about everything but to be able to bring more of yourself to work. I mean we talked to Stevie last week, I think that was one of the things that they really were communicating was like how wonderful it is when you find a place that wants you to bring more of yourself to work. And that recognizes that there is value in being a human at work. And I think it is valuable to think about like, “Yeah, real people have kids who have to go through surgery like all the time. It happens to people.” And it’s ok. And you’re still awesome at your job. [14:00] JL So I’m really glad you said that about how our workplace, you know, isn’t just about us being workers, it’s about us being people. And I think that our guest today has a lot of great things to say about that. Not just as being the founder of a company like Breaker and a CTO but also as someone who hires for the company and has interviewed at a lot of places, and has had a lot of thoughts about what it’s like to find a good culture fit, and being comfortable at where you work. So I’m really excited to get to our interview with Leah. [Music fades in.] Sponsors JL Today’s show is brought to you by CodePen, a social development environment for frontend designers and developers. Ever want a place to share code with co-workers? Maybe even a potential employer? Your profile on CodePen is like your front end development portfolio. And if you love it like I do, be sure to check out CodePen Pro. With a Pro account you can upload assets like images to use in your code, you can create private Pens, and you can even see changes as you build them with Live View. That’s soooo awesome! There’s also a really cool professor mode for teaching and working real time with your students. Pro accounts start at just nine dollars a month. Learn more at codepen.io. That’s C-O-D-E-P-E-N-dot-i-o. [15:10] SWB Did you know that nearly 30 percent of all websites run on WordPress? True story. And that includes our site, noyougoshow.com. We love WordPress because it’s easy to set up, has great support, and allows us to create pretty much whatever we want. Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on wordrpress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. Plans start at just four dollars a month, and 24/7 support is always available. Start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyyougo for 15 percent off your brand-new website. Interview: Leah Culver JL I first became familiar with Leah Culver around 10 years ago when she brilliantly financed her new MacBook by selling ad space laser etched on it. I then became a super fan when she co-founded the social media site Pownce. Those who knew me then know how much I loved the micro-blogging platform and one thing I thought was so, so cool about it was that one of the founders was a woman and she was an engineer. As a developer, it was inspiring to see the awesome projects Leah was creating. Since then, she’s authored the OAuth and OEmbed API specifications and has gone onto found Convor and Grove, real time chat programs, and is now the CTO of Breaker, a social app for listening to podcasts. I’m thrilled to have her here to talk with us today. Welcome to the show, Leah. Leah Culver Hi! Thank you so much for having me, Jenn. JL Yeah, as I mentioned, it’s like such an honor for us to have you here. I’m a big fan of the work that you’ve done so far which, speaking of, I’d love if you tell us a little bit about Breaker, how it came to be, and what makes it so awesome. LC Sure! And I’m actually a fan of yours too. So this is—this is a pretty fun interview to do. JL Ah thanks! Podcast high five! LC Awesome! The idea behind Breaker was really—I started to get into podcasting a couple years ago um when Serial came out. I don’t know if you guys all listened to Serial. JL Yup, definitely. LC The biggest podcast to ever come out, right? As basically the “hit show” of podcasting. But I hadn’t really been into podcasts before that. I had maybe listened to an episode or two on my computer when someone sent me something. But it wasn’t like I was a regular podcast listener. But I started listening to Serial and I was run—I was training for a marathon at the same time. So, I would listen to episodes when I was training, and I wouldn’t let myself listen to any episodes when I wasn’t running, so it like actually kind of motivated me to get my butt out the door. JL That’s awesome. LC —and do my running. Yeah. So it was great but then when the season ended, I didn’t really know what else to listen to. Or I wanted to listen to other things that were like Serial. Like high-quality podcasts as opposed to, you know, two people chatting and the audio quality being bad and things like that. I was like, “Where can I find really great podcasts?” So I tried like the Apple charts. So I was using the Apple Podcast app on my phone. And I tried looking at the charts, and I didn’t have a ton of success because I didn’t really know how—like I knew that someone picked these shows and these episodes but I didn’t really know how. You know? Like what they caught their eye and like what about them was good. JL Yeah. LC So that’s how I kind of got the idea behind like, “Hey, there could be something better here.” Like I wanted a player where I could also see like—like similar to like Spotify or YouTube. Like how many people are liking this thing? What are the comments on it? You know sort of what’s going on around this content. And that was the idea behind Breaker. JL I love that you found an interest in something and were like, “Well, there’s a gap, there’s something missing that I want.” And instead of just being like, “Well, this sucks. This doesn’t exist,” you created it. LC Yeah! I think that’s the power of being a developer, a designer, or someone that makes things is when you find something in a space that you’re like, “Hey, this thing should exist,” and then the next thought might be like, “Oh. I can make that exist.” JL That’s so cool. So how has it been like has the shift in focusing on podcasting, are you now finding yourself completely involved, not just in running the company of Breaker, but like the podcasting culture? LC Yeah, it’s —it’s been super weird. I’m trying to keep like my Twitter feed non-podcast people so I have like a good sense of how popular podcasting is and it seems like it’s on the rise, even amongst people who haven’t been in the industry a long time, but it’s also getting into that podcasting use has been really interesting. It’s a really old medium, right? Like podcasting has been around since there was—probably like forever, if you think radio. But sort of in its current incarnation of like mobile devices and sort of since the iPod, 2006. But I think it was so difficult then to sort of have like a podcast app or to make it easy to listen, like you had to like download files on your phone and things—that really there was this big opportunity to make things better and I don’t think it’s changed a ton since then. I mean only within probably the past year or two, maybe three years, had there been any new companies in the space. JL Yeah, speaking of the last few years, there’s been quite a few articles that have come out about the lack of diversity in podcasting. Have you found the numbers for women and other minorities in podcasts to be growing? [19:59] LC Yeah! Well, I hope so. I’m pretty optimistic about it. I do see a lot of podcasts and a lot of them still are, you know, two guys discussing a topic. And, actually, that’s my favorite search term to use to get like a lot of results is like podcasts called “Two Guys” dot, dot, dot. But you know I think there are many more women podcasters and I think there is a desire in our culture to hear from voices that aren’t, you know, straight white men, right? So I think there’s a desire for that content. And so I think those are actually like the hottest areas of podcasts to go into. And I wanted to bring it up just because it’s recent news: Edison published The Podcast Consumer 2017 and it’s about podcast listeners, specifically, not podcasters and, overall, the monthly podcast listening for men has not grown at all in—from 2017 to 2018 but podcast listening from women has gone from 21 percent to 24 percent of women listening to a podcast every month. So all of the recent growth in podcasting, you could say, has been attributed to women which I think is great. JL Wow. LC Yeah. JL Yeah that’s amazing. LC Yeah in terms of listenership and I think in terms of content production, we’re seeing the same thing as well. JL What do you hope to see happen in the podcasting industry over the next year or two years or five years? LC Yeah, I just want to see more good content, more great shows. I think it’s still really early days and so there’s a lot of opportunity to really build amazing quality content on a sort of new platform in a sense. And I don’t think that all the experimentation has been done yet, right? So there’s things like smart devices, for example, Gimlet which is a podcast producer, just came out with a new show for the Alexa. Like a show specifically made for that device [hmm] and it’s—the idea is like to get kids to brush their teeth. So it’s like a two-minute long podcast and you say, like, “Alexa, you know, play this podcast.” And it’s such a—I don’t have kids so I haven’t even tried it yet but it’s such like a interesting concept that, you know, we have these new devices that can do things with audio that we couldn’t do before. So I’m—I’m curious about that. I’m curious about audio in cars. Headphones. There’s a lot of stuff that’s going on in the technology space, in like the hardware space that makes podcasting really exciting. JL Yeah wow that is—that is so cool. My son’s one, so we are now brushing but eventually, I think that’s a brilliant idea. LC But yeah, yeah so there’s a lot of—I think there’s a lot of opportunity driven also by the hardware that’s—that’s coming up now and sort of how we’re thinking about our daily activities and how we interact with media. JL That’s so neat, I think a lot of times people get discouraged to try something new like a podcast or writing or anything because they think everything’s been before. So I love this idea of looking at it in a completely new way. LC Oh no. It’s still so early days for podcasting. You—I mean, I feel like back in the day it was like, “Let’s start a blog for this topic,” or, “You should start a Tumblr on this topic.” And now it’s like, “Oh you should do a podcast!” JL Yeah. I’d love to know your opinion is on like podcasting versus vlogging or any sort of video news. LC Uh so I’m actually not much of a video watcher myself. I always like to be doing things and be on the move. Like it’s hard for me to like focus on even watching like a TV show or a movie. Like I listen to podcasts when I’m doing something else, right? So I’ll be cleaning my house, or going for a run, or walking someplace. Like I don’t drive but I would listen—I do listen to podcasts when I do ride in the car which is very rarely. For me it’s about the ability to be like multitasking. So that’s why I’m a little I guess biased against vlogs or video podcasts is I just feel that they don’t feed the same need for me, personally. JL Yeah that makes sense. Yeah I listen to them sometimes when I’m in Lyfts, sometimes because I’m really into something, or sometimes just to avoid awkward driver conversation, but and then also, yeah, when I’m doing stuff around the house. So I’m totally with you on that. So with Breaker, you started that at Y Combinator, along with Convore, can you give our listeners an overview of Y Combinator and what that is and how it helped you get started? LC Sure! Uh so Breaker was my second time doing the Y Combinator program. They offer a three month program twice a year to entrepreneurs, you apply, and hopefully get accepted, and then get to go to Mountain View for three months, and work with the partners there who are a team of really, really smart people. And I was lucky enough to do it back in 2011, for my second startup, and then I purposely sort of applied again for my third startup because I thought it was such a good experience, I think all the partners are really smart, and it’s really nice to have a connection with a lot of founders. It really is like a good network. I think that’s the—the thing that’s most surprising after joining Y Combinator is how much of the value of the program is more from the network than anything else. JL What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about applying but unsure if they should, you know, go all in with their idea for a program like that? [24:48] LC So an interesting thing lately is Y Combinator has been a little more intern—they look for smart founders but they also kind of look for commitment to ideas. So I’d maybe wait til you were pretty sure that you wanted to do it as a startup. We were kind of at the point where we switching from Breaker being a side project and a hobby project, which we actually ran it as a hobby project for about nine months. And then switched over to being full-time just before we were accepted to Y Combinator, we kind of both quit our jobs. So, lucky we got in. But we probably would’ve done it anyways. And I think that’s sort of what they’re looking for is like, “Hey! It’s something I’m really excited about and committed to,” because if you end up doing a startup, you end up kind of doing it for life. But beyond that, it’s good to just fill out the application with yourself and your cofounders because there are a lot of questions in there, in the application itself, that are very clarifying. Like they ask, “What is your equity split?” And they ask things like, “Where will you live?” And then more complex questions like, “Who are your competitors?” And, “What are you afraid of?” And sort of really gets into all sorts of aspects of really early stage startups that are—you know it’s valuable to ask yourself those questions, even if you don’t end up submitting the application. I’d encourage anyone just to fill it out, submit the application, it never hurts, like nothing bad happens if—if it doesn’t get accepted. It doesn’t mean anything. There are so many great companies that are rejected from Y Combinator, because they get thousands of applicants, right? Like they can’t give every single great company—and oftentimes they’ll see a company apply in a year and not get accepted and then they’ll be accepted the next year or the next—in the next six months, you know? JL Yeah, I love that. I think that people are so scared of rejection sometimes that it’s really—it makes it hard to put yourself out there. LC Yeah, I agree and what’s funny is being on the other side of it. So running a startup now I’m hiring people and for me that’s weird because I’m like, “Oh! Sometimes the hiring decision—” that we’re like, “Oh! We’re not hiring right now.” Or, “Oh! You’re not right—quite the right fit.” Really has nothing to do with them as a person. It could just be like the stage our company is at or, you know, something totally out of their control that has nothing to do with the quality of their work. Or the quality of them as a person. So it’s like it’s been very comforting to me, knowing that—so the last time I applied for a job, I applied for 30 different jobs [oh wow!] which is a pretty—yeah it was actually great but I didn’t have that fear of rejection and I actually rejected companies. I actually went in—I actually walked out of two interviews. JL Yeah. Wow. Good for you! LC Because I just—I, you know, I did it because I wanted to save their engineers time. Like they were interviewing me and it was, you know, I didn’t want to waste their time if I didn’t think it was a good fit for me. And I think a lot of the times getting into the company, like visiting their space, having lunch with the team, things like that, really get you that really quick, “Hey, is this the right place for me?” And in this particular case—when I just remember I went in and talked to someone on their product team and I was like, “I just don’t really feel this product vision.” And I was like, “You know I don’t think if I feel the product vision I could be into working here.” Um so it was nothing personal, it was just like, “Uh, I don’t think this is the right fit for me.” JL I love this idea of, you know, I people are like, “Oh I don’t know if I can apply to this job.” And it’s like, “Well, why apply for one? Apply for 30”. LC Yeah definitely! JL I mean I love—I love it. LC And then if you don’t get it, if you don’t get one, it doesn’t really matter because you have 29 more! KL I love that too and the idea that, you know, there is—there is actually room to interview the company that’s hiring. I mean I think a lot of people just don’t even think that that’s a thing that they can do and it absolutely is. It’s something that you should do when you’re trying to feel out what you’re going to do next. It’s like—it’s a big change. LC Yeah and oftentimes in a interview, the interviewer will ask you, “Hey! Do you have any questions about this company?” And like you should have questions, you know, and hard questions. I don’t think anyone gets offended if you’re really evaluating them as well. You’re right. You’re totally right. JL Do you have any favorite questions that you like to ask? Well I mean when you were interviewing, now you’re doing the interview on the other side. LC This is going to sound so petty, but I always wanted to know what their food situation was like because I thought it said a lot about the culture. So I’m a Diet Coke addict, I absolutely love Diet Coke. And it’s super unhealthy, right? Like no one’s going to be like, “Oh yeah, Diet Coke should be in every corporate office.” But I did judge companies based on whether they stocked Diet Coke or not because I would go to interview at some place and they’d be like, “Oh we only do healthy snacks.” But they’d have like really sugary like fruit bars and stuff. And I was like, “Really?” Like snacks are just, you know, such like a privilege anyways. It’s just such like a silly—a silly thing to look at a company for but because of that I think it really is telling in how—how much independence they believe you have as sort of an employee. JL Yeah. I think that’s—I think it’s really neat. I think snacks, the office space, the office space, and like how people are set up and where they’re—like their seating situation. There’s just a lot you can tell with like things you might not think of. Are there windows? LC Yes! Yes! I went to an interview at a major company, I will not tell you which one, and I walked in—and it was for a role that was not like one of their core products. And I walked in and the room—it was freezing cold, there was no windows, and everyone was working in tiny offices like all sectioned off from each other and I knew immediately. I was like, “This is not the job for me.” So yeah I think it all matters. [30:07] JL We mentioned that Breaker was your third startup. Your first was Pownce, which you founded soon after college. What was it like to have big early success like that and, you know, eventually you were acquired by Six Apart. So what was it like to have that success and then letting go of what you made with your first big—big product? LC So I started when I was 24, fresh out of college. I had worked a couple programming jobs in the Bay Area before then. I had moved to the Bay Area because I didn’t like Minnesota winters but also just to have this new opportunity. To be away—none of my family lives in the Bay Area, I didn’t know anyone, it was a chance to be doing something new. And I loved programming. I wanted to do the best I could do. And I felt like that was in the Bay Area and what happened was I met my co-founders Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka and they said, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing this project but we need someone to build it.” Kevin’s a business guy and Daniel’s a designer, and they wanted someone to write the code and I had never built anything of substantial or like a completed app or anything like that. And I just said, “Ok. I’ll do it.” And I think that—I actually remember exactly where I was when I said, “Yeah I’ll do it,” I was in a cafe in Potrero. And I remember saying like, “Yeah, I can do this,” and being like, “I don’t know that I can actually do this.” But I did! I just built it and everything I didn’t know how to do, I looked up on the internet or asked someone else for help. It’s so funny because I was asking all these Django developer—this was the early days of the Django web framework in Python and all these Django developers, I was asking them questions, I was asking them the weirdest questions. Like, “How do I do this like very particular thing?” And they’re like, “I don’t think you need to do that unless you’re building like, I don’t know, like some big site. Like what are you—you know like why do you need to know how to do this crazy, you know, social networking concept?” Like at the time there was really only like Facebook. So it’s like, “Why do you need to know how to do this?” And it’s funny to look back later and I ran into someone and they were like, “Oh, that’s so funny that you said that.” And I ended up building Pownce and I was way in over my head, I had no idea what I was doing, and because Kevin was so popular, he was running Digg at the time. So he was a founder of Digg. He had a ton of followers and people paying attention to him and so he announced, “Hey! Here’s my new project,” and we got hundreds of thousands of new users instantly. And we had an invite-only system and people were selling invites on eBay, and like the whole thing was just weird. And the whole invite—like I had written the whole invite system, so I was thinking, like, they’re selling something on eBay that’s my code, you know? It’s so weird. It was so weird to me but it was such a great experience. What’s funny is I think it has really shaped my whole career in terms of—since then I’ve always been someone who just loves to ship things and get things done and figure it out as I go and I don’t think that would’ve been the case if I hadn’t done Pownce. I probably would’ve followed a more traditional engineering path. JL We’ve talked about this a little bit with Katel, with her role at A Book Apart and sort of saying yes to things even if you’re like, “Well, I haven’t done it before but I’m pretty sure I can do it.” KL And then you’re like, “What the hell?” LC Yeah! Yeah but then you’re like, “Well I could really do anything.” JL Yeah. LC You know? Like once you do the thing, you’re like, “Oh! Well that wasn’t so bad.” KL Yeah. Totally. It’s true. I feel like you—you learn a lot about yourself in a very short amount of time, and I—I definitely wasn’t expecting that. So, I mean, that was a great outcome. LC That’s amazing. JL I love that too like the um—like the retrospect of it in that like, “Well, if—if I went through this, I can do anything.” I was thinking today, I was like, “Ugh, you know I haven’t had much sleep,” and I was like, “Ah I gotta do this podcasting thing,” and I was like, “Well, you know, I also got thrown up by my—by my one-year-old all last night, and if I can do that, I’m pretty sure I can do anything.” KL You survived it! LC This is way less disgusting I hope! Much less! JL Yes. It is much less. So thank you. So Pownce was acquired by Six Apart, what was that like? LC It was an interesting time. I think it was sort of during the sort of tech downturn in 2009. A lot of companies were being acquired or shutting down, and I—when we were acquired I didn’t know they were going to shut down Pownce but they ended up closing down the site, which for me was pretty sad, but I didn’t feel… I was so—I wish I had then felt like I had more control over it. I didn’t feel like I had a ton of control over the acquisition or what happened. I had two co-founders, I was a little bit in over my head, and I think things are much different now. One of the things I’m starting to learn is that a company is more about the longevity. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” is probably the cliche way to say it, but yeah if companies—I draw a lot of inspiration from companies like VenMo, where the company had been around for years and years with no success or with little success and then managed to blow up and become a whole thing and a household name and things like that. And to realize that success isn’t instant and at Pownce I felt very lucky that we did have a lot of success but we didn’t have enough instantly for I think our team to really—to raise money and to feel like it was going some place, and there were a lot of other pressures going on, and I wish I had had the confidence then in what I know now is like, “Oh, hang in there. Keep going.” Then I learned a little bit more with my second startup as well. I was way in over my head, I was the only person working there, and I didn’t feel like I could fundraise. I didn’t feel like I could raise money, even though the product was making money, I didn’t know how to hire, I didn’t know how to do all these things. So, with Breaker, I feel like I’m really getting that third chance but I feel much—I think this time I have that patience and that commitment to sticking through with it for a long time, which before, I think, when you’re an engineer, you’re just like, “Ah! I’ll just move on to the next project or do the next thing,” is very tempting. [36:02] JL Yeah that’s such a—it is such like a complete mindshift as like you mentioned that I can say, and I think that’s one of the things that I always love about being a developer is I have uh started and abandoned many a projects. I have—I own many domain names and then I’m like, “Well, I’ll just let that one go.” So I love it that like you have to make this shift and to run a startup you have to really see it through. LC Yeah and I think the moment that we ended up, you know, really converting it to a company as opposed to a side project for Breaker was the moment it was like, “Ok this is really happening. We’re going to be in this for a long time.” And I feel so lucky because it’s so nice to make a podcast listening app, like, it really is enjoyable. It’s not a painful product to work on, it’s really great. Like I use the product all the time. So it’s really easy. JL So what you’re saying is make something that you love, if you’re going to do it. LC Oh, absolutely. Or something that you care about. You know if it’s a—a cause that you’re passionate about, or if it’s an area that you’re very knowledgeable in, I mean it doesn’t have to be—I’m partial to social networks and communication. So anything about media, communication, social networks is really my wheelhouse. But I think each founder has their own like passion and the thing that they love to do. JL So you are also an author of the OAuth and OEmbed API specifications, which I just think is so cool. So I’d love if you could talk to us a little bit about that and sort of explain to our listeners what that is. LC Sure! So OAuth, the easy way to explain it is: if you every click “Connect with Facebook” to login with a site or “Connect with Twitter,” you’re using OAuth, that’s the backend technology for it. I got involved with helping to build it—it’s actually like, I was one of the original like 12 authors, something like that, of the first specification and I got involved through working on Pownce. We needed a way to authenticate and authorize users to use our API. And through that it’s just become something almost completely different from what it was intended for. It was really intended for API access and now it’s just sort of been this defacto way to like quickly login on the web which I think is fantastic. It’s really cool. It’s like a really interesting turn and one of the things I’m most proud of is helping to come up with like sort of that user interface flow that really I think enable it to become this huge thing. So if you’re going to talk about like, “Oh it’s like the coolest thing that you probably like worked on that, you know, people would actually know,” it’s probably, you know, “Login with Facebook.” My dad said recently, he was like, “Oh you always wanted to be an inventor when you grew up, what happened to that?” And I was like, “Have you ever clicked ‘Login with Facebook’ on a website?!” Yeah but it’s so cool. It’s such a little thing, too, in the whole scheme of the web, it’s so cool to think that like developers have these small like little claims to fame on the web, that’s something that like outlives you and continues on is pretty cool, and I just feel so lucky to be like such a small part of that history. JL That’s really neat. I love that. And then, you know, I also like—I feel like if your—if your dad was like, “Oh yeah, wait! I’ve clicked that!” And then I don’t know, it’s such like, it’s a feel good moment. LC Yeah, yeah. That was pretty funny. JL So before Pownce and before OAuth, one of the things that I think was so cool that you did is similar to, if those that remember the million-dollar website where people had sold pixel space for an advertisement, or some people sold tattoos on their body for funding, but what you did was a lot smarter! I’d like to say, in that you raised money for a new laptop by selling advertising space on it. And I just remember thinking that was so cool and such like an innovative way to use the internet and get social funding for your new laptop. And one of the things I was looking at when I was just researching is that I found some of the articles from then and some of them were like, “Cute Girl Sells Laser-etched Macbook Advertising.” And I was like, wow! I was like, I forgot that that existed. [39:49] LC Yeah, the internet was a different—it was a different time and a different place back then. What’s really interesting is I got started in that project because the company I was working for at the time is Instructables and they had a laser etcher and so the idea was—So I had a really old computer and all of the people that worked at, you know, Squid Labs and Instructables at the time had these like newer laptops and they were all etching them with this laser etcher but I didn’t even have a laptop. So that—the idea came pretty easily. It was like, “Oh! I don’t have a laptop but I have a laser etcher and everyone is etching stuff onto their laptop,” so it really was not like the most genius plan. It was sort of a circumstantial thing but I mean it was really an interesting exercise in marketing more than anything else. I had never really done any marketing on the internet or really been out there at all. I don’t even think I had a blog. I had like no internet presence. There was no such thing as Instagram and Twitter. So really I wasn’t on the web at all and I think what you brought up about sort of the way the media portrayed it is so different than how it would be done today. It’s so—it’s so funny. Like, “Young Cute Girl Does Something on the Internet” like you’d never see that anymore. JL Oh, thankfully. LC It’s probably a good thing. Yeah. Yeah yeah but it wasn’t just that, there were like these “Sexiest Geeks” lists and things like that, and it just would not fly nowadays. JL I mean—I know that we still have like a lot more work to do in terms of, you know, equal pay and equal representation but at least we have made it past some of these. LC Yeah. One of the things I’m actually kind of bothered by recently is I—I’m all for the #metoo movement, but I think what’s kind of slightly disturbing to me about is that we want—I think there’s this desire to talk about workplace inequality and the fact that it kind of gets turned into something sexual or has like this focus on sexual assault. It’s like, “Well, can we make the conversation a little broader?” Like can we talk about power dynamics and women in leadership? And we do but I think it’s less salacious and it doesn’t get as much media attention. And so I’m a little disappointed in that angle of it but hopefully we’ll get there. JL Yeah it’s like there are so many battles—there are so many battles to fight. LC Yeah! Which one? Yeah you know? JL I know it’s like I can—I can like only laugh at it because otherwise I just like, my sighs, sometimes my sighs are so loud. But I just like what are we— LC Yeah so it’s—you’re right. I think maybe it is good to just focus on one bat—one battle at a time but also to have like tangible goals. Like what is the tangible goal of a certain movement? And I think movements are most effective when they have like a piece of legislation you can pass or you know some rules that companies now enact. I think people want simple solutions for complex problems and I think bridging that gap is something that’s really difficult to do. JL Yeah, that is a hundred percent accurate. I think sometimes when we can’t find those solutions, then we feel a little hopeless and I think hopefully though the more that—more people put their heads together about it, the more that those solutions will come. LC And everything changes, and everything gets better. I just listened to an episode of The Modern Love podcast, reading an essay from 2012, which I totally recommend people go check out the latest episode of Modern Love podcast. But it was basically a father talking about his gay son and his gay son’s desire to marry his partner and the essay just feels dated. And it’s not that old. You know? And I think that’s so shocking: how fast things change. And for the better. I mean it’s a good thing. It made me sad and hopeful at the same time. JL So, speaking of getting along and, you know, optimism and productivity, before your role now at Breaker, you were an engineer at Dropbox working on engineer productivity and happiness, which I think just sounds amazing. Can you tell us more about your role there? LC So at Dropbox I ended up working on the engineering product design team, helping—basically helping engineers and designers throughout their lifecycle at Dropbox. So from the time they first joined Dropbox in their first day through moving around between teams or moving up to become a manager or they’re at sort of the exit interview, if they left Dropbox. And it was pretty interesting. So I ended up on that team because I helped build an internal tool for Dropbox, actually a framework for hosting internal tools called AppBox. And I built it sort of during Hack Week, we had these—Dropbox has these like Hack—Hack Weeks where you can work on anything you want and a lot of the times what people work on is stuff for Dropbox. So, you know, a lunch menu, or a seating chart, or all these tools that people at Dropbox use all the time that aren’t, you know, readily available. So their priority tools are—you want to build with like a special sort of like internal company feel to them. So I built this platform for building new tools on top of and then recruited engineers during these Hack Weeks to like build new tools on top of it. So that’s actually what most of what I did was run that project so I can talk about internal too—we didn’t have like an internal tools team, we had like an internal developer tools, sort of more focused on build process and things like that. But what I was working on was more social, and so it didn’t quite fit into that space. So I ended up on this team that worked on the entire engineer’s life cycle which was super interesting. It’s like an interesting problem to think about. [45:10] JL Yeah, I love that. We are constantly trying to figure out how, I mean day one of someone starting new I feel like is one of the most difficult things to work with, starting from like, “Ok, let’s make sure we—they have a computer.” So you’re actually joining us today from New Zealand and you were recently a judge at Webstock. Was that totally awesome? LC Yes! It was so fun. I loved Webstock. It was great. It was the first one I’d ever been able to go to because it’s in New Zealand. And I basically said, “Hey! I’m going to be in New Zealand. I didn’t know Webstock was happening at the time, is there anything I can do to help?” And they were like, “Oh, come be a judge for our startup competition.” I thought that was so great and such an honor. It was really fun. JL Is it hard as a judge to give feedback to others about their products? LC Absolutely. I think it’s hard because I see it from their side, right? Like I’ve done three startups. I’ve done startup competitions. You know, I’ve gone to hackathons and competed and submitted my projects before judges. And, like I said, I think on the hiring side of things it applies here as well, on the judging side, it’s like I think so many of the decisions are just arbitrary. Like you happen to answer a question in the particular right way that the judge wanted to hear, you had like a good looking slide that got people’s attention. Like it seems—it just all seems so arbitrary and all of the competitors this year at Webstock and the BNZ startup competition were all just fantastic. And so it was really hard to say like, “This company is better than another company,” because it’s just—that’s not the way it is. They are just very different. And, like I said, they were all really good. JL So for something like that, what do you find the best way for feedback—like do you find like the line it’s hard to like discourage people because like their project is great but they can’t all win? LC Yeah! I actually went up to most—I tried to make a point to go up to most of the folks who didn’t win and talk with them about their projects just to, you know, I think what matters when you’re building a company is it’s always nice to see someone who cares, who paid attention, and knows what you’re doing, and has follow-up questions, and—and I saw this as well with the other panelists and judges they actually offered to help companies. Like, “Hey, you know, BNZ you didn’t win the competition but how can we help you? Who can we connect you with to take you to that next step?” Because startups, it’s not like you win or lose, it’s like always a constant journey, right? Like even—even when you’re a giant company, you’re not always winning. It’s this constant process. So I think a lot of it is asking those startups, “Hey, how can we help and how can we take you to that next level?” And sometimes that pride of winning the prize matters and sometimes it doesn’t. One of the judges actually lost the same competition she had entered years before and had lost and came back as a judge and has a successful startup here in New Zealand. So— JL I think it’s so important, again, you know we’ve talked about this a lot is like how to keep going with these like products that you obviously love because you’re working on them and putting your heart into and so just wrapping up here: I’d love to hear more about your approach at looking at your work and looking back and saying, “What am I doing right? What are things I wish I’m doing differently?” And like how—how you handle that. LC I actually spend a lot of time doing self-evaluation. And I think mostly because I’m kind of someone who worries a lot. So I’m always sort of thinking about, “Hey, could I be doing this better?” And sometimes I have to sort of almost take that pressure off of myself. One of the things I struggle with personally is that I don’t feel like I act or look like other founders, especially in my attitudes around building product, getting users, things like that. I don’t think I’m completely like your typical startup founder and I have to sort of talk myself into, “You can only be the best person you can be.” And this is like kind of the thing I get pumped up about. I’m like, ok, I can only do the things I can do. I can keep trying to get better, but I can’t beat myself up about not being like someone else. I just have to sort of be myself and work with what I have and take it to that—that next step. So that’s—that’s sort of what I’m always thinking about in terms of self-improvement. And there are definitely things I’m working on right now. I’m working on giving better feedback. That’s something I’m always working on is how can I give feedback well and really help other people as opposed to just like saying what I think which I think is always a struggle. KL Yeah. We’re dying to know. JL That’s great. When you find an answer, please let us know. [49:35] LC I think—yeah I don’t know. I don’t know. I think one of the things I’ve learned is like give feedback in—or, give criticism in private, give praise in public. Really work on how to articulate how I feel about something or think about something. A lot of times I just assume other people think the same way I do which is not true at all, right? Like we think everyone’s like us and our reaction to something is going to be the same reaction that everyone has to that thing and that’s not true. So it’s like how to explain like—like just today I gave feedback on like sort of an unread count of something and I had to say, “Hey, I’m the kind of person where I see an unread number and it makes me anxious and x, y, and z and blah blah blah blah.” And I wasn’t actually complaining about the teacher, I think the teacher’s great, but it was like, “How can we make this a comfortable process for people who are—people who like to check things off their inbox and have everything be done versus someone who just kind of lets things go and doesn’t really care about that. I think those are two very different personality types and so I think a lot of the struggle is like realizing what type of personality I am and how to express that as a user and then looking at other personality types. Like how do users who care about personal stats treat like a product? So I’m not someone who cares about every single stat, about what episodes I listen to or like, or things like that. Like they’re kind of fun to me, I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” There’s some people who are like—coming at this whole game like, “Hey, I want to listen to more episodes of a podcast this week than I did last week.” And so how do put myself in their shoes or like understand that we have users that are—have different mindsets than myself. So that’s—I’m kind of working on that as well. JL That’s awesome. I think those people would not like my 35,000 unread email messages bubble. That’s the thing. LC As long as you’re ok with it. As long as you personally— JL Thank you! It does not bother me. LC I’m so glad I don’t work on email. That’s like the one communication tool I’m like, I say this now, and like say in 20 years, we forget about email. It’ll just be like, “Oh god, ok yeah.” JL Well, I hope we get to have you back on the show then to talk about your new email project so— LC Oh my god no. JL Leah, anything else you’d like to share with our listeners uh today? LC I guess what I’d like to say is definitely check out Breaker, let me know what you think. I actually read every single feedback email people send us, I may not reply personally, but I definitely read them. So if you have feedback uh let us know, we’ve actually really worked hard to create a company based on user feedback because we understand that not everyone is like ourselves. So you could listen to the next episode of this podcast on Breaker. Let us know what you think. JL Well, Leah, thank you so much for joining us today. It was super awesome. LC Thank you so much for having me. Fuck Yeah of the Season: Tiny Revelations SWB So usually, right before we wrap up, we have our Fuck Yeah of the Week. And that’s something or someone we’re super hyped about during that given week. But here we are, this is Episode 10, and we’re taking a couple weeks off after this. And so I think it’s appropriate to not just have a Fuck Yeah of the Week, but to have a Fuck Yeah of the Season because it’s been kind of a badass season for us here at No, You Go. So I’d like to give a big Fuck Yeah to all of the people who have shared their ideas with us and have been so generous with their time and so many of them have given me what I’m calling, like, tiny revelations where they said something kind of off the cuff, they said this one little sentence, and I find it, like, sticking in my brain and I think about over and over and over again and I think we should take a couple of minutes and talk about what some of those are. Katel, what’s your tiny revelation? KL Yeah. Gosh. I think a really recent episode we did with Stevie where they talked about the sentiment of the practice of allyship, has just stuck with me so much and just the idea that we can constantly be working on this, that we can constantly practice being better to each other, being better supporters of each other, and just that it’s a work in progress. I think that that is so important and something that we can all think about and do in very little ways that amount to something much bigger. JL Yeah, that was a great one. Oh, there are so many great ones. One of the ones that really sticks with me is I loved Sara Chipps’ interview. And one of the things Sara said was, “Everyone has a good idea, right? But how do you—how do you get that started?” And she said, “Ideas are worthless unless it’s something that gets made.” So you know if it’s going to take a thousand baby steps then if you start today you’ll only have 999 left. But if you don’t, then it’s never going to happen. And I love that. You know I’ve talked about this before, I’m a really big fan of the—of, you know, the getting things done method and how you go from idea to really getting it somewhere and we talked about that with Leah today and I also loved so many things that Leah said about this, because I feel like I always have so many ideas in my head and I want to be able to take them from that into something tangible and so I loved the advice that Sara had about how to get your product out and running. I just think it’s so cool. KL Sara, what about you? [54:30] SWB It’s really hard to pick because there’s so many things that I find myself returning to but one of the ones that has sort of lodged itself in my brain where like sometimes I’ll literally be in the middle of working on something, or I’ll be like getting ready for bed, brushing my teeth, whatever, and I find myself thinking it is what Eileen Webb said way back in episode two. She said, “Why should my work get all of my best brain?” And I think what made me really get stuck on that was how much it upended assumptions that I had that I didn’t know that I had about work. Like, that I’d always sort of assumed that spending my best brain, like the—the—the parts of the day where I feel the smartest and most competent, spending the bulk of my time on my work was like inherently good. And an inherently like

Today’s show is all about getting started: taking the steps to turn new ideas into living, breathing (and sometimes even money-making) projects. Our guest this week is the totally rad Sara Chipps—the co-founder of Girl Develop It, and now the CEO of Jewelbots, which makes smart, open-source friendship bracelets that girls can code. (We want some for all our BFFs.) > Just start with those baby steps. It’s going to take a thousand baby steps. Everyone has a good idea, right? Everyone. Ideas are worthless unless it’s something that gets made. So you know, if it’s going to take a thousand baby steps, then if you start today, you only have 999 left. But if you don’t, then it’s never going to happen. > > —Sara Chipps, CEO of Jewelbots and co-founder of Girl Develop It Here’s what we covered (and as always, you can find the full transcript below). Show notes First up, we talk about all the URLs we’ve purchased—and how sometimes, spending $5 is just what you need to take your own idea seriously. Jenn shares her love for David Allen’s _Getting Things Do_ne method (and explains how it helped us GTD for our first episode). Katel tells us why “Write Book” is maybe not the best item to put on your to-do list. Sara recounts her love for Jenn’s web series, Cook Inside the Box—where Jenn and our friend Sequoia made recipes from the sides of boxes. Sara’s favorite episode? The one about hot dogs rolled in cornflakes. Mmm hmmm. Then, we fangirl out during our interview with Sara Chipps, who not only created Jewelbots, but also co-founded Girl Develop It. We talk about: Why Sara C. has made it her mission to get more girls and women into coding. The joy of friendship bracelets—no matter how old you are. How to bounce back (and learn something!) when a bunch of kids tell you your idea sucks. Highway1, the hardware accelerator that helped Sara prepare to launch Jewelbots. The importance of finding a co-founder who gets you—like Brooke Moreland, Sara C.’s cofounder at Jewelbots. Why you don’t actually need to be good at math to be a programmer—and how our industry has done newcomers a disservice by pretending otherwise. How Girl Develop It went from a single class in New York City in 2010 to a nonprofit operating in 58 cities and serving 55,000 members (and counting) nationwide. Also in this episode: Woohoo! It’s now light out till, uh, 5:15pm here in Philly, and we can’t be happier about that. We’re already dreaming about two of Philly’s best summertime hangouts: front stoops and beer gardens. Yes, please. Being, like, a totally cool adult. No, really. Ask the kids. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: _CodePen—a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases, and find inspiration. _ _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _   Transcript Sara Wachter-Boettcher Today’s show is brought to you by CodePen. Ever want a place where you can write and share front-end code with others? CodePen is that place. It’s full of awesome inspiration and projects with a great community. And speaking of community, the CodePen World’s Fair is happening in May. We’ll talk more about that in a bit, but be sure to sign up for an account at codepen.io. That’s [spells out codepen.io]. [Intro music] Jenn Lukas Hey! And welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. SWB And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. On today’s show we’re excited to talk about getting started. We’ll discuss how we come up with new ideas and then, once we’ve got ‘em, how do we actually take them to fruition? We’re totally pumped today to talk to Sara Chipps, who has taken two of her amazing ideas, Girl Develop It and Jewelbots, and made them into reality. But first on the agenda, let’s talk about how five bucks turned into a new podcast. Getting started with just $5 [1:20] KL So a couple of weeks after we started talking about the podcast, uhhh, got an email from info@noyougoshow.com and saying that we’re paying five dollars a month for the email address and now we really have to do the podcast. And at that moment I really think it became real and like this thing was really going to be real. So we kind of wanted to start there and talk about how that happened. JL Five dollars is all it takes. Five dollars and a dream. SWB [Laughs] yeah, so I was the one who sent that email and I was like, “Well, I got a credit card! I got five dollars a month. I spend five dollars a month on a lot more dumb shit than [others laugh] email accounts.” So for me it was a really low investment to also look at it and be like, “Dude, we are going to take this seriously. And I think that that’s how most anything I’ve ever done sort of came to be—by figuring out something that was small, but really concrete. And the concreteness is what helps it feel real and feel like something that you’re seriously going to do. KL And a little skin in the game. I mean, I know it’s not much, but you know when you kind of feel like you’re putting some actual cash to it, you’re like, “All right.” [Chuckles.] SWB That’s like a whole latte I can’t buy now. KL Absolutely. JL Yeah, I think that there’s definitely been a couple nights where, you know what? Maybe I’ve had a few glasses of wine and that helped make the appeal of certain domains sound good [laughs]. I’ve been known known to buy a domain or two. SWB I can’t relate to this at all. KL No, me either [all laughing]. JL After an exciting night out. But, you know, there’s one thing, you know, you’ll be at the bar with a friend, you’ll be at the coffee shop with a friend, you’ll be at the house with a friend, and you’ll be like, “Oh I have this idea,” and you’re sorta joking around and you’re like, “You know what? Lemme—lemme just pull that trigger and buy that URL,” and the next thing you know: you’ve got a URL and you’re on your way. SWB Yeah, I’m curious, Jenn, you had Cook Inside the Box a couple years ago, this web series little episodes where you and our friend, Sequoia, would cook recipes from the sides of boxes. I loved this series so much, everybody please go Google this right now if you haven’t seen it [laughter]. So I’m curious: how did that start? JL So I do remember how that happened. Oh my god, so many years ago at Converge in South Carolina, one of my favorite conferences. I think I was with Val Head and Chris Coyier and maybe a couple of other people and we were walking to go get some food. And I was telling them about how I was eating a box of Nilla Wafers and um you know those delicious cookies? And there was a recipe on the side of a box for Nilla Wafers which didn’t make any sense to me because a Nilla Wafer is just like a cookie. You just— KL You just eat it. JL You just open up the box and eat it, right? [KL chuckles] But they had this recipe and I was like, “This is amazing.” We talked about, like, what other boxes could possible have recipes on them and then I became a little bit obsessed with figuring out [laughter] that, and I thought it was really funny. And then one day a few weeks later I was telling Sequoia about this conversation and she was like, “I would totally do that with you.” And I was like, “Really?!?” I was like, someone else— KL This is a good idea. JL —someone else is in invested in this?! That’s amazing! And then that was it. We went to the grocery store and started our user research. SWB What was the first recipe you made? JL It was the Nilla Wafers’ Nilla Yogurt Freeze, which was a mix of strawberry yogurt, frozen with Nilla wafers, and the serving size was: one [laughter]. KL Was it as delicious as it sounds? JL It really actually was. It was just a little bit sad. SWB I think my favorite episode was the one where you rolled hot dogs in ketchup and then rolled them in— JL Cornflakes! Yes, cornflakes. [5:00] SWB Yes! And baked them for…not long enough? And that was a treat. Mm hmm. JL Yeah I heard that was quite—that was when I was a vegetarian so I had an easy out of not eating that, so I avoided that one. KL Yeah, you were like, “That’s all you.” JL Yeah. But yeah, you know, all of a sudden you take this thing that just happens in casual conversation, next thing you know you’ve got a YouTube web series [laughs]. SWB You know something I always think about is that one of the challenges is anything that feels big. Like there’s a lot of steps, there’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of pieces to it. And so some of the biggest stuff that I’ve needed to take all the way from end to end is book stuff. And I don’t consider myself necessarily a like typical writer, just because I think everybody has a different process. But the way I do it tends to be, like, I need to have some kind of outline that’s enough structure, enough substance to it that I can imagine it coming together. And then I have all these weird tricks to actually getting it done where it’s like I pick off the easy chapters first, so then I feel like I have something of substance, all of these different things. But I don’t know a lot about techniques or process for getting something big like that done, just sort of what I’ve cobbled together and made up. Katel, running a publishing company, do you feel like you have developed some of those tools or techniques for people to kind of tackle big things? KL I was actually just talking to an author recently who had [chuckles] told me that for the past couple of months a “to do” on her list had been “write book.” And I was like, “No!” [Laughter] “Don’t do that.” I was like, “That’s too big. You’re never going to get to check it off and that’s going to feel terrible.” So along with looking at kind of how she could break things down and sort of structure them and, just like you said, pick off some things that were a little easier. You know, get a framing set up first and kind of plug in the meatier bits. One thing that we’ve started doing is just having check-ins during the writing process and I think that’s helped a lot because it’s a bit of accountability. So folks don’t feel like they’re just off in the ether writing and writing and not knowing whether they’re going in the right direction. So I think just having some tetheredness helps a lot. JL One of my favorite books of all time is Getting Things Done by David Allen, and he’s got a really, for me, approach that really resonated well, which is, you talk about what the next step is that you have to take. And you don’t worry about, like, what’s the 20-step-ahead step? It’s, what’s the next thing I want to do for this exact thing? So if it’s something like, you know, I want to write a book. Well, I was like, “Well, what’s my next step? Maybe it’s get in touch with someone who I know, like Katel, who publishes books. So my next step is to email Katel.” Just that. Not even, like, come up with an idea, not write it, not find a publisher, it’s just write someone I know. And then the other thing that I really liked about the getting things done approach is if it’s something that it’ll take less than two minutes, to do it right away. So if I can write you an email that just says, “Hey Katel, I want to talk to you about books. Let’s grab dinner sometime this week,” and that’ll take me less than two minutes, then I’d send that email. KL Yeah, I think breaking things down to as small as possible so that you can actually start checking things off your list is—it feels better than anything. SWB You know something that you just said, Jenn, about “if it takes two minutes, just do it.” I totally noticed that when we were working on starting this podcast. So you know one night we’re sitting, talking about lots of different things we needed to do, like all these macro to-do lists, right? Like, “we need to figure out microphones,” and like themes, and guests, and schedules, and like—you know it was very, very broad. And one of the things that we knew we needed to do was start recruiting a few people who could contribute to our first episode where we wanted to have these short snippets. And Katel and I, I think, both had kind of the same reaction, like, “Okay, let’s make a list of those people and assign each of us a list of those people to contact. And then, you know, we’ll do that after this meeting,” and meanwhile Jenn is literally over there like, “Okay, I sent all my emails to my people!” [Laughter] And you know that doesn’t obviously work for everything. It works for those short things though, and I think that that really gave us some momentum, and that momentum at that particular moment was really, really important and helpful, and got us all the way here where we are today! [Laughter] JL GTD, man! KL That’s right [music fades in]. Thanks to our sponsors SWB Hey Katel, do you know what I love getting done? KL Um, nails? Snacks? SWB I mean yes, and also yes. But more than anything, I love thanking our sponsors, because I’ve realized that starting a podcast is just a lot of work. There’s so many little details to take care of and so many pieces that have to fall into place. Getting some support from wonderful sponsors has made that so much easier. One of those great sponsors is wordpress.com! WordPress is the first place I went to create our site: noyougoshow.com. It’s also how I run my personal site, sarawb.com. [10:00] Whether you’d like to build a personal blog, a business site, or both, creating your website on wordpress.com helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. I love WordPress because it’s easy. You don’t need any special skills to create an amazing site fast. You can just pick up a template and go. But it’s also super customizable. So if you’re working with an awesome developer like our co-host Jenn, you can turn your WordPress site into pretty much anything you want. Plus they have 24/7 support and plans that start at just four dollars a month. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo to get 15 percent off your website today. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo. KL We’re also so excited to have CodePen as our sponsor. CodePen is the place to write and share code with the front-end community. You can share your code with others and explore what they’ve created by browsing all sorts of Pens. And this spring, the CodePen community is coming together in real life for the first time ever with a CodePen World’s Fair, taking place May 30th through June 1st in Chicago. Three radical days of hanging out with people who love CodePen as much as you do. Day one is an expo with art exhibits and interactive installations, day two will be amazing conference talks about front-end dev, and day three will feature fantastic workshops! Sign up at codepenworldsfair.com to hear more. That’s codepenworldsfair.com. [Interstitial music fades in and out] Interview: Sara Chipps [11:15] JL So though I’ve had a slew of my own ideas, some better than others, I’ve also been fortunate enough to be part of other projects that were the creation of others. One of these was teaching for Girl Develop It, a non-profit organization that provides affordable programs for adult women interested in learning web and software development in a judgment-free environment. I met Sara Chipps over six years ago. She co-founded GDI in New York and was looking to expand it to Philadelphia. I can’t begin to explain how flattered I was when Sara had asked me to teach the first class here in Philly, which was an intro to HTML and CSS class and, to this day, I can say that it’s been one of my favorite parts of my career. She has since embarked on new feats in robotics and wearable technology, and is the CEO of Jewelbots. I am so, so excited to have Sara here today to talk about the opportunity that she has given people to join in some of these projects with her and hear more about her current adventures! So, welcome to No, You Go, Sara! Sara Chipps Thank you so much for having me! That was the best introduction I’ve ever gotten in my life! JL [Laughs] yay! I’m fangirling here a little bit to have my friend on the show. So I’m super pumped! So, Sara, tell us about Jewelbots. SC Yeah, so Jewelbots is a project that I’ve been working on for the past almost four years. You know, I polled a lot of my male peers about how they got started in programming and how old they were, and what I heard from them is often they were, like, middle school years was apparently the prime time for people to get started programming, and often it was because of gaming or something that is traditionally masculine, which might help explain why there is such a big gender gap. So we set out to make something that was more traditionally feminine and open source. And so we met with about 200 young girls in that demographic and we talked to them about what we could build for them, what would be exciting. And what we heard from them is that their friendships and their friends are the most important thing to them at this point in time. Do you guys remember being that age? JL Oof. Yes [laughter]. SC So, yeah, so what we did was we made smart friendship bracelets. And the way they work is they detect your friends when they’re nearby and they light up when you’re together, and you can use them to send secret messages and things, and they’re also open source. So girls can program them to do all kinds of things, like go rainbow colors when all their friends are in the same place, or one girl made a metronome. They can do all kinds of animations in really cool colors, they can make games, that kind of thing. So it’s been a lot of fun. JL That’s so neat. We did, like, a beach trip a couple of years ago and we made friendship bracelets on the beach and it was the best [laughter]. SC That’s so great! JL So I don’t think that joy of friendship bracelets has faded. SC That’s so awesome. JL Knowing you from Girl Develop It and knowing a bit about Jewelbots, I think that it’s quite obvious you want to encourage women in the STEM field. For this one, would you say that you were thinking more about wearables, like were you really into that? Or were you thinking, like, “Okay, well, I’ve worked with adults. How do I get into younger girls and women getting into this?” What was your inspiration for getting this project started? SC Really it was hearing from adult women things like, “I didn’t know what an engineer was until I got to college.” And just stuff like that made us say, “Okay, when are people learning about this stuff that are getting involved in this field, and how can we make sure that that is something that they know about?” And so that’s kind of how we settled on this age group, is, you know, it’s when a lot of men are typically exposed to programming. JL Right, yeah, so you had this idea and you mentioned you know you got together with about 200 girls that gave you this feedback. How did you decide to sort of start with this? I mean it’s user research, right? How was that the next step you took? [15:00] SC So I started with an idea. So I knew I wanted to do a wearable. I knew it needed to be a bracelet just because you know if you’re doing notifications or anything like that and it’s around your neck you don’t see it, and if it’s on your—if it’s like a ring, it has to be a huge, huge ring. Yeah it’d just be like this monster. JL I would wear it probably—[laughter]. SC That’s great. So my idea was that we would make a bracelet and you could change the color based on your outfit, right? So like I wanted to wear blue today, I would make my bracelet blue. That would be like my look for the day. And I thought this was a great idea. I also thought I had remembered what it was like to be 12. So myself and a friend at ITP, which is a program here at NYU, made a prototype and brought it to schools to see what girls thought, and they were like, “That’s a dumb idea.” Well, they saw it and they’d be like, “This is cool! What is it?” And we’d tell them and they were like, “Oh, I’d never use that.” [laughs] like, “Okay, god!” [Laughter] I know, it was really rough. Because you think you remember, right? I found myself in front of classrooms, like, explaining that I was a cool adult [boisterous laughter]. Like, “I know most adults are lame, but I’m not.” And I was like, “Oh my god, I am, I really am.” [Laughter.] SWB So what did they tell you that they actually wanted to use? Like after they told you that your idea was lame, how did you get out of them some good ideas that would be things they would want to use? SC So instead of saying, like, “What’s your idea?” We asked them more about their lives and their day-to-day and the things that they enjoy using. And just every conversation went back to friendship. You know, like, they all still wear the friendship bracelets—like the ones that we used to make, either the thread ones or those like plastic lanyard type ones, and they still make those, they still wear them, sometimes they’ll wear ‘em like all the way up their arms. So one day when we had compiled some of this feedback and started talking about, “What if we made like a real friendship bracelet?” And we started talking to them about that. That’s when they started really freaking out. Like their whole faces would light up and they’d be like, “Oh my god! I would have to have that!” SWB It’s so refreshing to see people really take their user research seriously, because I think so often user research gets like straight up ignored. So I think that that’s such a huge difference and I think it also speaks to what makes this valuable for actually hitting that mission of encouraging girls to enter STEM because you know you didn’t like accept kind of a shallow answer to that and you really looked at what was going to make it meaningful and connect with them at that deeper level. SC Like we didn’t even think about this until we actually did a hardware accelerator in San Francisco called Highway1. This was my first foray into hardware and so it was a really big help getting into Highway1 where you know what they do is they kind of incubate your company and they have experts there that can help you and guide you through the design and development prototyping process. And our first I just heard some nightmare stories about like, “Here’s something that we built and we didn’t talk to anyone. And here’s how we wasted like millions of dollars for this company because we built this thing that either doesn’t work or there’s this huge error we didn’t foresee or the people just don’t want it.” And so after hearing those stories I was like, “You know what? Um we should probably go talk to some people.” That’s one thing about my job and what we do is that girls in this age group are so fun. They’re so fun. They’re so opinionated and like fierce and hilarious and independent. And so it’s definitely the best part of my job is just meeting these girls and hearing about their lives and just being so impressed. I’m like constantly impressed by girls in this age group and like the cool stuff that they’re doing. JL How did you break into that? Like, how did you get access to being able to talk to these girls and finding out what they wanted? Was it through one of the incubator programs? Was it through NYU? Was it through something else? SC So there’s a statistic like 94 percent of parents in the US want their kids to be exposed to more you know programming and programming resources. And not even 40 percent of schools have computer science programs, and what is called a computer science program in most schools is like not something that we would consider programming. One thing that this has really exposed me to is just what a huge gap there is. Like we tried to like visit the entire demographic of you know socioeconomic classes uh in this age group. So if you go to a private school they will have a computer science program taught by a programmer and if you go to most public schools they have like a typing program taught by a teacher that doesn’t know anything about programming and – if they even have that, you know, sometimes there’s like a computer for an entire classroom to share. [20:00] So what we did is we volunteered to teach some classes. We were like, “Hey, we’re programmers. We’ll teach, you know, some beginner programming classes to your students in exchange for them answering some of our questions.” So that was kind of how we got in there. And it was a pretty neat thing to be able to meet girls and talk to them. JL Yeah, that’s so smart! So you work with a co-founder, Brooke Moreland, on Jewelbots, right? How did you come together? How do you find that you’ve surrounded yourself with people to help make your vision come true? SC Brooke was—when I moved to New York—one of the first people I met. She had a company called Fashism with an ‘s-h’. It was kind of like Instagram before Instagram, where people would upload pictures of their outfits or like fashion and people would like rate their fashion. And it was really popular with teenagers. Like hugely popular. And so with her background, you know, her skillset is just really complementary to mine in the way that she has fashion and business in her background, and I’m more focused on the technology side of things. And so when I started working on this, I reached out to Brooke and was like, “What do you think?” And she’s like, “This sounds awesome.” JL And for me sometimes, I have the problem of like how do you hold an idea that’s like so precious to you and then like trust others? Or like even be brave enough to first mention the idea to someone else? SC Yeah, yeah, I had been working on it for a few months already. And it’s so funny like when you first start prototyping something, it looks like garbage. Right? Like you’re always like—and when I was first working on this I was using Arduino and things were, like, taped together and falling apart and all this stuff. And so I just kind of showed her this thing. And she’s like, “Oh this is cool!” And then you have to find people that I think are like…can see past the tape. KL [Laughs] yes. JL So once, you know, you showed Brooke the idea and she was like, “This is great.” Were you both like, “Okay, we’re going full-time on this”? How did you sort of build up to what Jewelbots is now? SC At the time it was just me and I was full-time on it. And going full-time on a side project is really hard. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without getting into Highway1, as they give you seed funding for your business. So I had already been full-time on it for a few months and then she had just left her job. So we kind of both just jumped in. JL Monetary blockers I think are tough when people have ideas. You know, do you have any advice for people that are sort of like, “Well, what do I do? I have this idea. I’m not sure how to take it to the next level.” SC Before that I had a full-time job and it took me – I had been working on it for maybe about eight months or so part-time before we got into Highway1, before I was able to quit my job, and I’ve definitely been there. You know, Girl Develop It, I always had a full-time job. And it’s really difficult and one thing I learned fairly early in is even if you make the smallest bit of progress at night—you know, like, you get home, you’re exhausted, you don’t feel like working on anything—and you just spend five minutes writing one email, right? If you can get that one email out, or do that one thing that will push things forward, you know you’ll just keep going. The place where you get lost is when there’s, like, three weeks and you didn’t work on it and you’re just procrastinating because you’re like, “I have hours and hours of work to do.” But if you just make sure to take a little time every day, or you know just a few times a week, making sure you’re spending 15 minutes, 20 minutes, you can make sure that things keep growing. JL I like that a lot. Because things can feel overwhelming. You know you take a break from something and all of a sudden there’s so much to do versus a little. So I think that makes total sense. So before Jewelbots, you know as I mentioned, I know you through GDI, Girl Develop It. Can you tell us a little bit about Girl Develop It and how that got started? SC Yeah! So we never set out to make the company that it is today which is a really awesome, big non-profit. So one thing that happens to female developers is you will meet—like someone will be like, “Oh it’s so cool that you’re like a female developer! I know another female developer. You guys should be friends.” [Laughter] And you’re always like, “I mean, thank you, but like [laughs] I have work, I have a job.” SWB And like there’s more than two of you out there. You know, like, “Oh gosh, you have to know this one other person who they happen to have the same job.” It’s like, do you say that every time you meet somebody who’s an accountant? [Laughter] “I also know an accountant!” No, you don’t. SC “Do you know them? Do you know this other accountant?” [Laughter] Yeah so when—so someone had done that to us, and it was actually fortunate because we were talking about how in our computer science classes often we felt like we were afraid to ask questions because we were afraid that, you know, sometimes you feel like you ask a stupid question, it’s something you should know. Like, people in the class are going to be like, “Oh god! Of course the girl doesn’t know this!” [Chuckles] and, like, start throwing batteries at you or something. I dunno [laughter]. JL Huh, Philadelphia style [laughter]. [25:00] SWB But that sounds frustrating, right? It’s like you feel like you can’t just hang out and focus on learning and getting the most out of your class because you have to sit down and be like, “Oh I’m also somehow like a representative for my gender here.” It’s like, that’s a lot of extra pressure and a lot of bullshit. SC It is. It is and so having both shared that experience, we were like, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a place where you know like people could learn and they could ask every stupid question that they think of?,” you know, and not be afraid of having to know that? Because also learning as an adult…like, kids are so fine not knowing things, you know? Like, because kids: you’re not supposed to know. But as an adult, you know, it can be scary asking questions because, you know, you’re supposed to know. So we scheduled just one class, one HTML/CSS class. This is in 2010 when there wasn’t a lot of these boot camps and things like that teaching. And we didn’t know how people were going to come or if they would be into it or anything like that but it ended up selling out, you know, in the first day. And then we planned another class and another class and then people in other cities were like you know, “We want to do this. This sounds cool.” So finally you know it started growing and it kind of like grew like a weed. Like it just kind of—yeah, it was pretty wild. JL So in a lot of teaching for Girl Develop It, I know a lot of times the students they want to make a change in their career and they’re ready to try something new. Do you have advice for people that would want to start a new career, how they get started in doing that? SC Programming isn’t hard. Like, you know, we’ve done this disservice as a community to say that you have to be good at math to be a coder, or you have to be some kind of genius to be a coder, and it’s so not true unless—I mean, yeah, there are, like, people that work—there are like quants that work in finance, and they have very specialized degrees. But most, you know, development jobs where you’re doing web development, it’s not rocket science. You know, it’s not anything that the average person can’t understand if they put in the work. So I think that, first of all, don’t be daunted by it—don’t think it’s not for you or you’re not smart enough, because I promise I’ve yet to meet the person that can’t understand how to, like, do an HTML/CSS page after like you know sitting down for a bit and working to understand it. And also, you know, be ready to put in the work, because it’s definitely hard work. SWB That really brings me back around to thinking about Jewelbots and how powerful it is to bring that to girls who aren’t getting that message, right? Who are like getting far too many messages about technology being something complicated and foreign and sort of you know being kind of alienated from it already at a young age and not even knowing you know what an engineer does. I really like the idea that you’re making it feel accessible and relatable because you’re totally right, this isn’t something that normal people can’t do. It’s not just for special people. And so I’m curious, like, as Jewelbots has grown and developed like, where do you see that going? SC We’re on target.com, we’re on our own website, we’re in a lot of places and it’s grown a lot, which has been very cool. We also were in the Wired store, and I think that the way we see things going is a good question. We’re about to make some big announcements for Jewelbots and kind of ask our audience and our community what they want to see from us in the future. You know, this community has come together of young ladies and they’re building things and sharing with each other and the coolest thing I think is the tiny speaking careers that are launching because of these eight-year-olds—eight-, nine-, 10-, 11-year-olds—that are going out there giving conference talks about programming their Jewelbots, which is so adorable. Like, I cry every time. I really do. And that’s not a joke. I’m just like sitting there crying [laughs]. JL That’s so amazing! SC I know! SWB Yeah, that’s super cool. SC Yeah. But so we’ve shipped 10,000 of them now, and we’re working to figure out what’s next and what we should be working on next. So we’re about to announce some big stuff and then ask the community what they want to see from us. JL Oh I can’t wait to hear more about that. Speaking of speaking, I know that you cut back on speaking to make time for Jewelbots. How’d you come to that decision? SC I don’t know about you, but when I was younger I didn’t really travel. Like my family, like we went to Disney once and my family was very like we drove 20 hours to see family members and that was our vacations which I loved them for. Like [laughs] I’m not complaining. But getting older like being able to travel the world to give conference talks was such a cool experience because I got to see so many different places. But what I started realizing that even though it was fun and glamorous and things it was getting in the way of work, it was getting in the way of like getting things done. And so now when I do talks or when I get you know asked to do talks, I evaluate like, what will this do? Will this help the business? You know um or will this be you know a distraction? [30:00] JL That’s great and then, Sara, have you ever felt blocked or in a rut? And if so, how have you gotten out of it? SC Yeah. And that’s a really good question. Focus can be hard, because there’s just so much going on, and often you feel like you’re doing the same thing every day. I usually focus on my personal life then, or, like, what habits I can bring to my life in general that will be beneficial because often it’s not work, often it’s work affecting life, right? So if in work I need to be doing the same thing every day for a while, that means my other time I should try to do something fun. So I usually focus on adding a new habit or, you know, something in my life that can distract me from the the rut, the day-to-day. JL And then before we wrap up, do you have any final advice for anyone that’s got an idea and wants to get that idea to a product? SC What I say all the time is, just start with those baby steps. It’s going to take a thousand baby steps. Everyone has a good idea, right? Everyone. Ideas are worthless unless it’s something that gets made. So you know, if it’s going to take a thousand baby steps, then if you start today, you only have 999 left. But if you don’t, then it’s never going to happen. So it can be really daunting. You know, I look back and I can’t believe we have like a manufactured product. Like I never—it’s just insane. I never would imagine I could do something like this. But, it just took a thousand baby steps. JL I love it. Sara, thanks so much for joining us on No, You Go today. SC Yeah! [Music fades in] JL You’re so awesome! SC Thank you for having me. [Music fades out] Fuck Yeah of the Week [31:45] JL You know when you’re so excited about something that you just start going google wild and you have like one million tabs open and you can’t wait to read them all? That’s our next segment: the Fuck Yeah of the Week—where we get super excited about someone or something that we just want to google the shit out of. Katel, who’s our Fuck Yeah this week? KL I’m gonna go ahead and say it’s daylight, because this morning when I was making coffee I looked up and I realized that it’s now light out in the morning a little earlier, which is so awesome, because you know just a few weeks ago it was like dark when I was making coffee, which is just really depressing. So I’m just really excited that our days are getting a little longer and I feel like we can get a little bit more light and a little bit more time back into our lives. SWB And a little more energy, right? KL Yeah, definitely. JL I love that. I mean I know when I you know I work on sites so when I’m leaving work when it starts getting dark at four, I’m like, “Okay, well,” you know it’s hard to sort of keep in that mind set where like I’m still at work because then it feels like daytime is work— KL Yeah. JL —and nighttime is home. And so when like the day starts pushing more forward, then I’m like, “Okay, look, I still have this crossover.” It’s not such a hard line between like work and home. It’s just like, “Oh, here’s just my day.” Instead of like, “Here’s work. Here’s home.” It feels so versus each other— KL Yeah! You’re totally right. JL —when it’s day versus, you know? KL It feels like there’s a much crisper line. SWB Plus, every day is one step closer to it being summertime stoop beer season, and that is something that I look forward to saying, “Fuck yeah” to very soon. KL Me too. And beer garden weather. So, fuck yeah, daylight! [Music fades in.] SWB Fuck yeah, daylight! Outro [33:25] JL Well that’s it for this week’s episode [music fades out] of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thank you to Sara Chipps for being our guest today [music fades in]. We’ll be back next week with another episode [music ramps up to end].

Chad is joined by Sara Chipps, cofounder of Girl Develop It & CEO of Jewelbots, to discuss integrating with custom hardware, building a community of young coders, working with retailers, and branding. Sara on Giant Robots Jewelbots #JewelbotsBuild First Lego League Radical Candor Podcast Zero to One- Peter Thiel Robot Conference Room Signage Sara on Twitter Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots!

  Rob and Jason are joined by Sara Chipps to discuss Jewelbots, Arduino and getting girls interested in STEM fields.   Sara Chipps is a JavaScript developer based in NYC. She has been working on Software and the Open Source Community since 2001. She’s been obsessed with hardware and part of Nodebots since 2012. She is the CEO of Jewelbots, a company dedicated towards drastically changing the number of girls entering STEM fields using hardware. She was formerly the CTO of Flat Iron School, a school dedicated to teaching people of all ages how to build software and launch careers as software developers. In 2010 she cofounded Girl Develop It, a non-profit focused on helping more women become software developers. Girl Develop It is in 45 cities, and has taught over 17,000 women how to build software.   News The C++ Annotations, a free up-to-date learners book/reference manual Choosing "Some C++" Over C GCC's move to C++ PacifiC++ Sara Chipps @SaraJChipps Sara Chipps' Blog Links Jewelbots Jewelbots Support Jewelbots is a friendship bracelet that teaches girls how to code Johnny Five Girl Develop It Flat Iron School Sponsors Incredibuild JetBrains  

Chatting with Sara Chipps, CEO at Jewelbots. Music edited from 'Something Elated' by Broke For Free. freemusicarchive.org/music/Broke_Fo…mething_Elated From the Free Music Archive. CC Attribution 3.0 Produced by Rachel James. Positively Gotham Gal is proud to be made in NYC.

Friendship bracelets that teach girls to code! Carl and Richard talk to Sara Chipps about her experiences bringing Jewelbots to life. Sara talks about her idea to get girls more interested in coding by creating something programmable that girls will like - a friendship bracelet! Sara and her team put together a kickstarter in 2015 to raise $30,000 and ultimately raised $167,000 - the product was a hit right from the beginning. The story digs into the challenge of actually making a physical consumer product (as opposed to software), especially how much slower everything takes. But alls well that ends well - the product is shipping and people love it! Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Friendship bracelets that teach girls to code! Carl and Richard talk to Sara Chipps about her experiences bringing Jewelbots to life. Sara talks about her idea to get girls more interested in coding by creating something programmable that girls will like - a friendship bracelet! Sara and her team put together a kickstarter in 2015 to raise $30,000 and ultimately raised $167,000 - the product was a hit right from the beginning. The story digs into the challenge of actually making a physical consumer product (as opposed to software), especially how much slower everything takes. But alls well that ends well - the product is shipping and people love it! Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Sara Chipps, the creator of Jewelbots, and George Stocker, the VP of Engineering at Jewelbots joined the show to talk about connected wearables for kids, keeping UX simple, building a business on open source, and influencing young girls through the possibilities of coding.

Sara Chipps, the creator of Jewelbots, and George Stocker, the VP of Engineering at Jewelbots joined the show to talk about connected wearables for kids, keeping UX simple, building a business on open source, and influencing young girls through the possibilities of coding.

02:28 - Jerod Santo Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Object Lateral, Inc. 02:44 - Adam Stacoviak Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog 02:55 - The Changelog and Beyond Code (Background) 5by5 Wynn Netherland The Changelog #172: GitUp, Git UX, and More with Pierre-Olivier Latour The Changelog #145: 10+ Years of Rails with DHH The Changelog #139: The Rise of io.js with Mikeal Rogers The Changelog #155: The Future of Node.js with Scott Hammond JavaScript Jabber #147: io.js with Isaac Schlueter and Mikeal Rogers   13:50 - The Corporatization of Open Source 16:00 - Sharing Stories of Fascinating People and Choosing Conferences Gophercon 21:21 - Differences Between Communities Ron Evans Ruby Rogues Episode #141: Teaching Kids with Ron Evans 24:54 - Where are The Changelog and Beyond Code’s future plans? OSCON Strange Loop   Questions: Who is your programming hero? If you had to relearn how to code all over again, what would you tell yourself? What’s the most exciting thing in software right now? 31:57 - Interview Wishlist 20 Years of Ruby with Matz 20 Years of JavaScript with Brendan Eich Bill O’Reilly Linus Torvalds 10 Years of Git with Junio Hamano Apple: ResearchKit Sara Chipps 35:43 - Origin Stories Mitchell Hashimoto The Changelog #180: Otto, Vagrant, and Automation with Mitchell Hashimoto LEGO League Picks Personality Insights (Coraline) The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren (Coraline) FamilySearch (Chuck) Snow (Chuck) DISTRICT Roasters (Adam) The Balvenie (Adam) Lismore Scotch (Adam) The Elixir Fountain (Jerod) Robot or Not? (Jerod) Song Exploder (Jerod)

02:28 - Jerod Santo Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Object Lateral, Inc. 02:44 - Adam Stacoviak Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog 02:55 - The Changelog and Beyond Code (Background) 5by5 Wynn Netherland The Changelog #172: GitUp, Git UX, and More with Pierre-Olivier Latour The Changelog #145: 10+ Years of Rails with DHH The Changelog #139: The Rise of io.js with Mikeal Rogers The Changelog #155: The Future of Node.js with Scott Hammond JavaScript Jabber #147: io.js with Isaac Schlueter and Mikeal Rogers   13:50 - The Corporatization of Open Source 16:00 - Sharing Stories of Fascinating People and Choosing Conferences Gophercon 21:21 - Differences Between Communities Ron Evans Ruby Rogues Episode #141: Teaching Kids with Ron Evans 24:54 - Where are The Changelog and Beyond Code’s future plans? OSCON Strange Loop   Questions: Who is your programming hero? If you had to relearn how to code all over again, what would you tell yourself? What’s the most exciting thing in software right now? 31:57 - Interview Wishlist 20 Years of Ruby with Matz 20 Years of JavaScript with Brendan Eich Bill O’Reilly Linus Torvalds 10 Years of Git with Junio Hamano Apple: ResearchKit Sara Chipps 35:43 - Origin Stories Mitchell Hashimoto The Changelog #180: Otto, Vagrant, and Automation with Mitchell Hashimoto LEGO League Picks Personality Insights (Coraline) The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren (Coraline) FamilySearch (Chuck) Snow (Chuck) DISTRICT Roasters (Adam) The Balvenie (Adam) Lismore Scotch (Adam) The Elixir Fountain (Jerod) Robot or Not? (Jerod) Song Exploder (Jerod)

02:28 - Jerod Santo Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Object Lateral, Inc. 02:44 - Adam Stacoviak Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog 02:55 - The Changelog and Beyond Code (Background) 5by5 Wynn Netherland The Changelog #172: GitUp, Git UX, and More with Pierre-Olivier Latour The Changelog #145: 10+ Years of Rails with DHH The Changelog #139: The Rise of io.js with Mikeal Rogers The Changelog #155: The Future of Node.js with Scott Hammond JavaScript Jabber #147: io.js with Isaac Schlueter and Mikeal Rogers   13:50 - The Corporatization of Open Source 16:00 - Sharing Stories of Fascinating People and Choosing Conferences Gophercon 21:21 - Differences Between Communities Ron Evans Ruby Rogues Episode #141: Teaching Kids with Ron Evans 24:54 - Where are The Changelog and Beyond Code’s future plans? OSCON Strange Loop   Questions: Who is your programming hero? If you had to relearn how to code all over again, what would you tell yourself? What’s the most exciting thing in software right now? 31:57 - Interview Wishlist 20 Years of Ruby with Matz 20 Years of JavaScript with Brendan Eich Bill O’Reilly Linus Torvalds 10 Years of Git with Junio Hamano Apple: ResearchKit Sara Chipps 35:43 - Origin Stories Mitchell Hashimoto The Changelog #180: Otto, Vagrant, and Automation with Mitchell Hashimoto LEGO League Picks Personality Insights (Coraline) The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren (Coraline) FamilySearch (Chuck) Snow (Chuck) DISTRICT Roasters (Adam) The Balvenie (Adam) Lismore Scotch (Adam) The Elixir Fountain (Jerod) Robot or Not? (Jerod) Song Exploder (Jerod)

Guest: Sara Chipps @SaraJChipps Full show notes are at https://developeronfire.com/podcast/episode-060-sara-chipps-getting-girls-involved

Brenda talks with Sara Chipps on the desire to educate in code, her inspiration to work on hardware, and the troubles of manufacturing. Upcase: 50% Off Your First Month For Giant Robots Listeners! Jewelbots CSS Dev Conf Girl Develop It Mesh Networking FIRST Robotics Programs Web Summit Barbie, You Can Be Anything Campaign NodeBots Highway1 Sara on Twitter Sara on Medium

Sara Chipps, co-founder of JewelBots, talks with us about the endeavor into building a hardware company, after spending so many years just focused on the software side. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

03:08 - What’s Up with Aaron Patterson? Twitter GitHub Blog Red Hat

03:08 - What’s Up with Aaron Patterson? Twitter GitHub Blog Red Hat

03:08 - What’s Up with Aaron Patterson? Twitter GitHub Blog Red Hat

It started at a conference. When Sara Chipps sat in the audience and watched a speaker use JavaScript to interact with a smoke detector, she was entranced. She left with a bag of LEDs, and a new love for hardware that led to her ultimately starting her hardware company Jewliebots. She talks to us about her transition from software developer to hardware CEO, the differences she's seen between building software and hardware, and what it's like to build a product for teenage girls. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Highway 1 JSON Arduino Wire strippers Soldering irons Mesh network Open source Emily Rose Guiness beer LED Johnny Five Jewliebots Rick Waldron Spark Francis Gulotta Codeland Conf Codeland 2019

Adarsh talks with thoughtbot designer Brenda Storer. Brenda started out as a psychology major and waitress in California, moved to New York City right after 9/11, and finally threw away her waitressing shoes to work as web designer. Bryant Park Chico State Brenda's Robbie Williams site from 1999 David LaChapelle Tilde Club DreamWeaver BUNAC Study Abroad Program 3Com Fountain Titanic FIT, Fashion Institute of Technology Quark Imposter Syndrome Girl Develop It Sara Chipps

In this episode Scott and Rob talk to Chad Myers, Chad Fowler, and Doug Rohrer about the scars they've received from dead end projects they've been on. In addition - Sara Chipps contributes her first story for us - interviewing Scott Reynolds.Download Here

In this episode guests Sumit Chawla & Tim Wise join Peter to discuss offloading a Java server infrastructure to Windows Azure to save pizza money (Starts at 40:31). Guest hosts Gary Russo and Sara Chipps also join me for a wrap up of PDC 2009.