Greater Than Code

Mandy Moore
Greater Than Code

For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code. Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript. We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)

  1. 04/06/2022

    277: Joy Is Activism – The Power of Ritual and Intention

    00:44 - Pandemic Life Politics Healthcare Society Work 13:58 - Jay, Happiness, and Fulfillment Personal Development and Self-Discovery Brené Brown Glennon Doyle Elizabeth Gilbert Nihilism Manifestation Gratitude & Daily Journaling Morning Pages EarlyWords 29:09 - Witchcraft & Magic Intention and Ritual Terry Pratchett Franz Anton Mesmer The Placebo Effect Zenify Stress Relief Drink Effort and Intention Reflections: Mandy: Everyone should journal. Reflect on the past and bring it to the present. Damien: Bringing magic into non-magical environments. Aaron: Ritual, intention, reflection, alignment. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 277 of Greater Than Code. I am Damien Burke and I'm joined with Aaron Aldrich. AARON: Hi, I am Aaron and I am here with Mandy. MANDY: Hello, everybody. I'm Mandy Moore and today, it's just the three of us! So if you came expecting more than that, I'm sorry. [laughter] We’re what you get today, but hopefully, we can have a great conversation and we were thinking that we would talk about all the things. I'm doing big hand gestures right now because there's been so many things happening since 2020 that are still happening and how our perspectives have changed. For one, I, myself, can tell you I have grown so much as a person in 2 years. And I'm curious to hear how the two of you have been living your lives since the pandemic. DAMIEN: [chuckles] Where to begin. AARON: I know. It's such a good topic because I feel like everyone's had so much to change, but at the same time, it's like, okay, so 2 million years ago at the beginning of this pandemic. I'm now my third place, third job since the beginning of the pandemic as well and wow, I came out as non-binary in the middle of the pandemic [laughs]. So that was a whole thing, too. I think the question I asked earlier is how much have you radicalized your politics over the course of the past 2 years? [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah, yeah. That's been bouncing around in my head since you said it off mic. Every time I hear the word pandemic now, I think about, “Oh man,” I hesitate on how far to go into this. [laughs] Because I look at the techno-anarchist crypto bros and I can I say that disparagingly and I will say that disparagingly because I was like them. [laughs] I filled out a survey today and they asked like, “How do you rate yourself as on a conservative and liberal scale?” I'm like, “Well, I think I'm super conservative.” And I still do and every time I align with any political policy, it's always an alignment with people who call themselves socialists and leftists and why is that? [laughs] Hmm. [laughter] But anyway, that was the part I was trying not to go back into. [laughs] One of the big realizations in living in a pandemic is that healthcare is not an exclusive good. MANDY: What? [laughter] DAMIEN: That is to say that I cannot, as an individual, take care of my own health outside of the health of the community and society I live in. Didn't know that. In my defense, I hadn't thought about it, [laughs] but that was an amazing realization. AARON: No, I think that was a big thing. I think so much of the pandemic exposed the way our systems are all interconnected. Exposed the societal things. Like so much we rely on is part of the society that we've built and when things don't work, it's like, well, now what? I don't have any mechanism to do anything on my own. What do we do? DAMIEN: Yeah. It's so fundamental in humanity that we are in society. We are in community. We only survive as a group. That's a fundamental aspect of the species and as much as we would like to stake our own claim and move out to a homestead and depend on no one other than ourselves, that is not a viable option for human beings. AARON: Right, yeah. Even out here in rural Vermont with animals and things, we're still pretty dependent on all of the services that are [chuckles] provided around. I'm still on municipal electric service and everything else. There's still dependence and we still rely on our neighbors and everyone else to keep us sane in other ways. DAMIEN: Yeah, and I feel like people in rural areas—and correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't lived in a rural area in maybe ever—have a better understanding of their independence. You know your neighbors because you need to depend on them. In the city—I live in Los Angeles—we depend on faceless institutions and systems. AARON: Yeah. DAMIEN: And so, we can easily be blind to them. AARON: Yeah. I think it mixes in other ways. I get to travel a bit for work and visit cities, and then I end up coming back out into the rural America to live. So I enjoy seeing both of it because in what I've seen in city spaces is so much has to be formalized because it's such a big deal. There are so many people involved in the system. We need a formal system with someone in charge to run it so that the average everyday person doesn't have to figure out how do I move trash from inside the city outside the city. [laughter] We can make that a group of people's job to deal with. Here, it's much more like, “Well, you can pay this service to do it, or that's where the dump is so can just take care of it yourself if you want.” “Well, this farm will take your food scraps for you so you can just bring this stuff over there if you want.” It's just very funny. It just pops up in these individual pockets and things that need group answers are sometimes like pushed to the town. You get small town drama because like everyone gets to know about what's happening with the road and have an opinion on the town budget as opposed to like, I don't know, isn't that why we hire a whole department to deal with this? [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah, but small town drama is way better than big town drama. The fact that half of LA's budget goes to policing is a secret. People don't know that. AARON: Yeah. DAMIEN: Between the LA Police Department and LA Sheriff's Department, they have a larger budget than the military of Ukraine. That's the sort of thing that wouldn't happen – [overtalk] AARON: Don't look at the NYPD budget then. DAMIEN: Which is bigger still, yeah. [laughter] That's not the sort thing that would happen in a small town where everybody's involved and in that business. AARON: Yeah. It happens in other weird ways, but it's interesting. This is stuff that I don't know how has, if it's changed during pandemic times. Although, I guess I've started to pay attention more to local politics and trying to be like, “Oh, this is where real people affecting decisions get made every day are at the municipal levels, the city level.” These are things that if we pass a policy to take care of unhoused, or to change police budget, this affects people right now. It's not like, “Oh, wow, that takes time to go into effect and set up a department to eventually go do things.” It's like, “No, we're going to go change something materially.” It's hard to compare the two because the town I'm in rents a police officer part-time from the next [laughs] municipality over. So the comparison to doesn't really work. [laughter] DAMIEN: Everybody knows exactly how much that costs, too. AARON: We do. I just had to vote on it a couple Tuesdays ago. [laughter] DAMIEN: So then I think back to how that has impacted – I'm always trying to bring this podcast more into tech because I feel guilty about that. [laughs] About just wandering off into other things. But I think about how that impacts how I work in the organizations I work in. Hmm. I recognize I'm learning more about myself and how much I can love just sitting down with an editor and churn out awesome code, awesome features, and awesome products. That brings me so much joy and I don't want to do anything else. And what we do has impact and so, it's so beneficial to be aware of the organization I'm in what it's doing, what the product is doing, how that’s impacting people. Sometimes, that involves a lot of management—I do a lot of product management with my main client now. But also, in other places, you would look at, “Well, okay, I don't need to manage the client's finances”. Not because that's not as important, it's because other people are doing it and I trust how they're doing it. That's something I haven't had elsewhere. The advantage of being with a very small organization is that I have these personal relationships and this personal trust that I couldn't get at one of the vampire companies. What'd they call them? FAANG? AARON: Yeah, FAANG. We've been talking about this because FAANG, but Facebook and Google changed their name. So now, is it just MAAN? DAMIEN: Yeah. AARON: I mean Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, right? DAMIEN: I'm all for the right of individuals to choose what they're called; I don't know if I'm willing to extend that to Facebook and Google. AARON: [laughs] Yeah. DAMIEN: Remember, was it Altria? AARON: Oh, Philip Morris. DAMIEN: Philip Morris, right? AARON: Yeah. DAMIEN: They were just like, “Oh, everything we've been doing is so horrible and harming to society for the past several decades, we'll just change our names and people will forget about it.” AARON: That was Philip Morris. Altria didn't do any of that. DAMIEN: Yeah. Altria didn't do any of that. [chuckles] Yeah, I remember that. AARON: Yeah. I'm curious because I think it's changed for me a bit over this time, too. But I'm curious for folks that have had a sens

    46 min
  2. 03/30/2022

    276: Caring Deeply About Humans – Diversify The Medical Community with Jenna Charlton

    01:09 - Jenna’s Superpower: Being Super Human: Deeply rooted in what is human in tech The User is Everything 04:30 - Keeping Focus on the User Building For Themself Bother(!!) Users Walking A Mile In Your Users Shoes - Jamey Hampton 09:09 - Interviewing Users (Testing) Preparation Identifying Bias Getting Things Wrong Gamifying/Winning (Developer Dogs & Testing Cats) Overtesting 23:15 - Working With ADHD Alerts & Alarms Medication Underdiagnosis / Misdiagnosis Presentation Medical Misogyny and Socialization Masking Finding a Good Clinician Reflections: John: Being a super human. Jacob: Forgetting how to mask. Jamey: Talking about topics that are Greater Than Code. Jenna: Talking about what feels stream-of-consciousness. Having human spaces is important. Support your testers! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hi, everyone and thanks for tuning in to Episode 276 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Hello, like to be here. I'm with my friend, John Sawers. JOHN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Jenna Charlton. Jenna is a software tester and product owner with over a decade of experience. They've spoken at a number of dev and test conferences and is passionate about risk-based testing, building community within agile teams, developing the next generation of testers, and accessibility. When not testing, Jenna loves to go to punk rock shows and live pro wrestling events with their husband Bob, traveling, and cats. Their favorite of which are the two that share their home, Maka and Excalipurr. Welcome to the show, Jenna! [chuckles] JENNA: Hi, everybody! I'm excited to be here with all the J’s. [laughter] JAMEY: We're so excited to have you. JOHN: And we will start with the question we always start with, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JENNA: On a less serious note, I have a couple of superpowers. One I discovered when I was a teenager. I can find Legally Blonde on TV [laughter] any kind of day [laughs] somewhere. It's a less valuable superpower than it used to be. But boy, was it a great superpower when you would be scrolling and I'm like, “Legally Blonde, I found it!” [laughter] JAMEY: I was going to ask if one of your superpowers was cat naming, because Excalipurr is very good. It's very good. [laughs] JENNA: I wish I could take credit for that. [laughter] Bob is definitely the one responsible. JAMEY: So it's your husband superpower, cat naming and yours is Legally Blonde. Got it. JENNA: Mine is Legally Blonde. [laughter] I also can find a way to relate anything to pro wrestling. JAMEY: I've seen that one in action, actually. Yes. [laughter] JENNA: But no, my real superpower, or at least as far as tech goes is that I am super human. Not in that I am a supremely powerful human, it's that I am deeply rooted in what is human in tech and that's what matters to me and the user is my everything. I'm not one of those people who nerds out about the latest advancement. Although, I enjoy talking about it. What I care about, what gets me excited, and gets me out of bed every day in tech is thinking about how I can solve a deeply human problem in a way that is empathetic, centers the user, and what matters to them. JAMEY: Do you feel like you were always like that naturally, or do you feel like that was a skill that you fostered over your career? JENNA: I think it's who I am, but I think I had to learn how to harness it to make it useful. I am one of those people who has the negative trait of empathy and when I say negative trait, there's that tipping point on empathy where it goes from being a powerful, positive thing to being something that invades your life. So I am one of those people who sitting in a conference room, I can feel the temperature change and it makes me wiggle in my seat, feel uncomfortable, get really awkward, and then default to things like people pleasing, which is a terrible, terrible trait [laughs] that I fight every day against. It's actually why remote work has saved me. But I've had to learn how to take caring about people and turn it into something that's valuable and useful and delivers because we can talk about the user all day and take no action on it. It's one thing to care about the user and to care about people. It's another thing to understand how to translate that care into something useful. When I learned how to do that in testing, my career changed and then when I learned how to translate that to product, things really started to change. JAMEY: That's amazing. JENNA: Thank you. [laughs] JACOB: I feel like so often at work I sit down at 9:00 AM and I'm like, “Okay, what do our users need in this feature, or how could this potentially go wrong and hurt our users?” And then by 9:20, everything's off the rails. [laughter] As work happens and here's a million fires to put out and it's all about things in the weeds that if I could just get them to work, then I could go back to thinking about to use it. You know what I mean? How do you keep that focus? JENNA: So part it is, I don't want to say the luck, but is the benefit of where I landed. I work for a company that does AI/ML driven test automation. I design and build experiences for myself. I'm building for what I, as a tester, needed when I was testing and let's be honest, I still test. I just test more from a UAT perspective. I get to build for myself, which means that I understand the need of my user. If I was building something for devs, I wouldn't even know where to begin because that's not my frame of reference. I feel like we make a mistake when we are designing things that we take for granted that we know what a user's shoes look like, but I know what my user's shoes look like because I filled them. But I don't know what a dev shoes look like. I don't know what an everyday low-tech user shoes look like. I kind of do because I've worked with those users and I always use my grandmother as an example. She's my frame of reference. She's fairly highly skilled for being 91 years old, but she is 91 years old. She didn't start using computers until 20 years ago and at that point, she was in her 70s. Very, very different starting point. But I have the benefit that that's where I start so I've got to leg up. But I think when we start to think about how do I build this for someone else and that someone isn't yourself, the best place to start is by going to them and interviewing them. What do you need? Talk to me about what your barriers are right now. Talk to me about what hurts you today. Talk to me about what really works for you today. I always tell people that one of the most beneficial things I did when I worked for Progressive was that my users were agents. So I could reach out to them and say like, “Hey, I want to see your workflow.” And I could do that because I was an agent, not a customer. They can show me that and it changed the way I would test because now I could test like them. So I don't have a great answer other than go bother them. Get a user community and go bug the heck out of them all the time. [laughs] Like, what do you mean? How do you do this today? What are your stumbling blocks? How do I remove them for you? Because they've got the answer; they just don't know it. JAMEY: That was really gratifying for me to listen to actually. [laughter] It's not a show about me. It's a show about you. So I don't want to make it about me, but I have a talk called Walking a Mile In Your Users’ Shoes and basically, the takeaway from it is meet them where they are. So when I heard you say that, I was like, “Yes, I totally agree!” [laughs] JENNA: But I also learned so much from you on this because I don't remember if it's that talk, or a different one, but you did the talk about a user experience mistake, or a development mistake thinking about greenhouses. JAMEY: Yes. That's the talk I'm talking about. [laughs] JENNA: Yeah. So I learned so much from you in that talk and I've actually referenced it a number times. Even things when I talk to testers and talk about misunderstandings around the size of a unit and that that may not necessarily be global information. That that was actually siloed to the users and you guys didn't have that and had to create a frame of reference because it was a mess. So I reference that talk all the time. [laughs] JAMEY: I'm going to cry. There's nothing better to hear than you helped someone learn something. [laughter] So I'm so happy. [chuckles] JENNA: You're one of my favorite speakers. I'm not going to lie. [chuckles] JOHN: Aw. JAMEY: You're one of my favorite speakers too, which is why I invited you to come on the show. [laughs] JENNA: Oh, thank you. [laughter] Big warm hugs. [laughs] JOHN: I'm actually lacking in the whole user interviewing process. I haven't really done that much because usually there's a product organization that's handling most of that. Although, I think it would be useful for me as a developer, but I can imagine there are pitfalls you can fall into when you're interviewing users that either force your frame of reference onto them and then they don't really know what you're talking about, or you don't actually get the answer from them that shows you what their pain points are. You get what maybe they think you should build, or something else. So do you have anything specifically that you do to make sure you find out what's really going on for th

    56 min
  3. 03/23/2022

    275: Making Change Happen – Why Not You? with Nyota Gordon

    01:47 - Nyota’s Superpower: To hear and pull out people’s ideas to make them more clear, actionable, and profitable! Acknowledging The Unspoken Getting Checked 07:15 - Boundaries and Harmony 10:35 - News & Social Media Addiction Filtering Bias 18:54 - The Impact of AI 23:00 - Anyone Can Be A Freelance Journalist; How Change Happens Chelsea Cirruzzo’s Guide to Freelance Journalism Casey’s GGWash Article About Ranked Choice Voting First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy | Derek Sivers 40:13 - The Intersection of Cybersecurity and Employee Wellness: Resiliency @selfcare_tech Reflections: Casey & John: “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths.” – Nyota Damien: You can be the expert. You can be the journalist. You can be the first mover/leader. Applying that conscientiously. Nyota: Leaving breadcrumbs. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater. DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 275 of Greater Than Code. I'm Damien Burke and I'm here with John Sawers. JOHN: Thanks, Damien. And I'm here with Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're all here with our guest today, Nyota Gordon. Nyota is a technologist in cybersecurity and Army retiree with over 22 years of Active Federal Leadership Service. She is the founder, developer, and all-around do-gooder at Transition365 a Cyber Resiliency Training Firm that thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness. Welcome, Nyota! So glad to have you. NYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you. CASEY: Yay! All right. Our first question—we warned you about this—what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? NYOTA: My superpower is to hear, pull out people's ideas, and make them more clear, more actionable, and more profitable. DAMIEN: Ooh. NYOTA: Yeah, that's one of my friends told me that. And how did I get it? I'm a words person. So I listen to what people say, but I also listen to what they don't say. CASEY: What they don't say. NYOTA: Yeah. CASEY: Can you think of an example? NYOTA: Like that. Like when you did that quiet thing you just did, I saw that mind blown emoji because there's a lot in unspoken. There's a lot in body language. There's a lot in silence. When the silence happens, there's a lot when someone changes the topic, like that stuff is a lot. [chuckles] So I listen and I acknowledge all of that. Maybe we all hear it, or don't hear it depending on how you're processing what I'm saying, but we don't always acknowledge it and respect it in other people, DAMIEN: You have to listen to the notes he’s not playing. [laughter] Do you ever have an experience where things that are not said do not want to be heard? NYOTA: Absolutely. But that's part of acknowledging and so, you can tell when people are like, “I do not want to talk about that.” So then I would do a gentle topic change and not a hard left all the time, because you don't want to make it all the way weird, but it may be like, “Oh, okay so you were talking about your hair, like you were saying something about your hair there.” I try to be very mindful because I will get in your business. Like, I will ask you a million questions. I'm very inquisitive and maybe that's one of my superpowers too, but I'm also aware and I feel like I'm respectful of people's space most times. CASEY: I really like that in people when people notice a lot about me and they can call it out. When I was a kid, my family would call me blunt, not necessarily in a bad way, but I would just say whatever I'm thinking and not everyone likes it right away. But I really appreciate that kind of transparency, honesty, especially if I trust the person. That helps a lot, too. NYOTA: I was just saying that to my mom, actually, I was like, “You know, mom, I feel like I need a different quality of friend,” and what I mean by that is my friends just let me wild out. Like I ask them anything, I say anything, but they don't kind of check me. They're like, “Well, is that right, Nyota?” Like, Tell me, why are you saying it like that?” But they just let me be like ah and I'm like, “Mom, I need to be checked.” Like I need a hard check sometimes. So now you're just letting me run wild so now I'm just seeing how wild I can get. Sometime I just want maybe like a little check, a little body check every now and then, but I try to be mindful when it comes to other people, though. It's the check I want is not always the check that other people want. CASEY: Right, right. DAMIEN: What is it like when you're being checked? What happens? NYOTA: It's hard to come by these days so I'm not really sure [chuckles] when I'm getting my own, but I'll ask a question. I'll just kind of ask a question like, “Well, is that true?” people are like, “This world is falling apart,” and you know how people are because we are in a shaky space right now and I'm like, “But is that absolutely true for your life?” How is everything really infecting, impacting what have you being exposed to in your own life? So as we have the conversation about COVID. COVID was one of my best years as far as learning about myself, connecting with people better and more intimately than I ever really have before and we're talking virtually. So things are going on in the world, but is it going on personally, or are you just watching the news and repeating what other people are saying? JOHN: That's such a fascinating thing to do to interrupt that cycle of someone who's just riding along with something they’ve heard, or they're just getting caught up in the of that everything's going to hell and the world is in a terrible place. Certainly, there are terrible things going on, but that's such a great question to ask because it's not saying there's nothing bad going on. You're not trying to be toxically positive, but you're saying, “Let's get a clear view of that and look at what's actually in your life right now.” NYOTA: That part, that part because people are like, nobody's looking for crazy Pollyanna, but sometimes people do need to kind of get back to are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else? DAMIEN: That's such a great way of framing it: are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else? NYOTA: Yeah. CASEY: It reminds me of boundaries. The boundary, literally the definition of who I am and who I care about. It might include my family, my partner, me. It’s may be a gradient even. [chuckles] We can draw the boundary somewhere on that. NYOTA: Yeah, and I think we also get to speak even more than boundaries about is it in harmony? Because I feel like there are going to be some levels that are big, like my feelings are heard, or I'm feeling like I just need to be by myself. But then there are these little supporting roles of what that is. I think it's as you see, some parts are up and some parts are down because sometimes when it comes to boundaries, it's a little challenging because sometimes there has to be this give and take, and your boundaries get to be a little bit more fluid when they have to engage with other people. It's those darn other people. [chuckles] DAMIEN: But being conscientious and aware of how you do that. It's a big planet with a lot of people on it and if you go looking for tragedy, we're very well connected, we can find it all and you can internalize as much of it as you can take and that's bad. That is an unpleasant experience. NYOTA: Yeah. DAMIEN: And that's not to say that it's not happening out there and that's not to say that it's not tragic, but you get to decide if it's happening to you, or not. NYOTA: Right. DAMIEN: And that’s separate from things that are directly in our physical space, our locus of control, or inside of the boundaries that we set with ourselves and loved ones, et cetera. NYOTA: Because it's so easy to – I say this sometimes, guilt is a hell of a drug because sometimes people are addicted to guilt, addicted to trauma, addicted to a good time and not even thinking of all the things that come with those different levels of addiction. So I think we get fed into this news and this narrative, like we were speaking of earlier a of everything's bad, this is a terrible place, everyone's going to hell. Whatever the narrative is the flavor of the moment and there's so many other things. It's a whole world, like you said. It's a whole world and I think the world is kind of exactly what we're looking for. When I was in the military, every town is exactly what you need it to be. [laughter] Because if you're looking for the club, you're looking for the party people in little small towns. But I could tell you where every library was. Don't call me nerdy because I am, but I don't care. All right. I could tell you where every library was. I could tell you where every place to eat. I could te

    53 min
  4. 03/09/2022

    274: Managing People Versus Servers with Arpit Mohan

    02:03 - Arpit’s Superpower: Tenacity Tenacious D 05:03 - Managing People vs Servers Establish Consistent Language and Shared Level of Understanding Written Word Following Up User Manual (Persona Investigation) Consensus Algorithms: Single Sources of Truth & Responsibility Independent Failures: Build and Establish Trust Conway’s Law Somathesis – Collective Problem Solving: Music, Science, Software - Jessica Kerr Reliability & Uptime Reflections: John: Meeting minutes and clear communication is a form of active listening. Mae: Thinking about trust in terms of reliability and uptime. Arpit: Collective Problem Solving: Music, Science, Software - Jessica Kerr Mandy: Tenacity. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater. JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mae Beale. MAE: Also here with us is our show creator, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Thanks, Mae! I’m Mandy and today, I’m here with our guest, Arpit Mohan. From unscrewing his childhood Tamagotchi to taking apart a computer, Arpit has always tinkered with technology. But while working on a mobile game that went viral seemingly overnight, Arpit realized he was on to something big: a way to put customizable app tools directly into developers’ hands. So he and two co-founders created Appsmith, an open-source project built by engineers for engineers. With Appsmith, Arpit can do what he loves most: using technology to help people accomplish more. Welcome to the show, Arpit. ARPIT: Thank you so much for having me. Super glad. MANDY: We like to kick off the show by asking all of our guests: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ARPIT: One of my superpowers is I am tenacious. I am really, really tenacious. You give me a problem to work on, you give me something, especially a measurable problem to work on, and I will ensure that it'll get done. I'll keep thinking about it. I'll keep chipping away at it. At some point of time, it'll get done. Maybe because I'm a little competitive by nature and to me, it seems that most problems, or most things are accomplishable if you just kind of stick with the problem, you continue to work on it, and that's what I've done right from childhood. So yeah, I think that's one of the things that I've always excelled at. JOHN: You say that you've always had that from childhood. When did you realize that that was the thing that you were doing that was different from maybe how other people approach problems? ARPIT: Well, once I graduated from university from my undergrad, that's when I started up our first company back in 2010 and while every startup founder hopes and wishes that you only have to ever start up once in your life and that's the one startup that becomes a unicorn, a billion-dollar company, gives you the exit so you can retire on a beach. Unfortunately, that did not pan out for us. While the first startup was a mild success, lukewarm success, I would call it at best, me and my other co-founder, we kind of kept at it for about 12 years now and so, Appsmith is actually officially the third company that we are working on and maybe I think the 30th, or 40th product. I just lost count of number of products that we've built, we've launched, we've failed at miserably for a large part of them and seen a lot of success with some of them like the mobile game in the past. So a lot of startup founders tend to start up once, or twice and then give up and maybe move on to a corporate job. But that's when I realized that if you keep at something, if you keep continue to do something, you start to fractured luck and at some point, lady luck does smile at you. So I think just the startup journey is when I realize that tenacity is something that a lot of people lack. MAE: I love it. Arpit, I keep – are you familiar with Tenacious D? Yeah, absolutely. Tenacious D, a fantastic movie. Love the music especially at the end where he kind of sings with the devil, I think. It's a really, really good song. [laughter] Although, I wouldn't probably tattoo on myself, but yeah, I love the movie and the actor. Jack Black, right? MAE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kept wanting to call you Tenacious A so, that's your name for me now. ARPIT: Absolutely. MANDY: So Arpit, we invited you on the show today because you wanted to talk about managing people versus servers and I'm interested in this topic because, because I want to figure out what do you mean by that? ARPIT: Yeah. So as engineers, there's always a lot of mind space and thought that goes into how we write, or manage a code, manage our infrastructure, and manage our server. But managing servers is actually the easy part of up because if a server does not work, or it's not to your liking, you can always reboot the server. You can get a different server and with AWS, or Azure, or any other cloud, it happens with the click of a button. Unfortunately, or fortunately, people are much trickier. You can't just reboot a person and that's what actually makes managing people, working with people, leading people a much more interesting experience and it also is a lot of learning that happens with everybody that you work with because the same person evolves over time. So even if I'm working with you, Mandy, over here, we may be working together for 5 years, but the Mandy of 5 years ago is a very different person from what she is today. An Ubuntu system 16.04, you keep it on for the next 30 years, that is exactly what you will have. So the amount of learning that you have when you're managing a server is constant, or it plateaus up after a while. But the interesting part about people is that there's always something new to learn about your colleague, your partner, or just humans in general. That's what I find very, very interesting about the difference between servers and people and why they might be two slightly different sides of the coin. But I think there is a lot to be learned, or a lot to be derived from engineering principles when we deal with people. For example, there's a lot of literature around how to manage a distributed system. A distributed system is nothing but a cluster of servers, or a lot of servers that form a cohesive unit and operate as one. So when you do a google.com search, you are actually hitting some large cluster of servers posted by Google, but is presented to you as a single Google search. All these servers are operating as a cohesive unit. We can derive a lot of learnings from how a company, or engineers manage these large clusters of servers and how we can cohesively manage a large group of people to act as one towards a common goal, towards a common outcome, and that is something that I find very fascinating. MAE: I agree completely. I love and am fascinated people. And I would add to your list of always new things to learn as also about one's self. Like we too are changing and/or most people don't have a good lock on exactly [chuckles] who they're, what they're doing. So a lot of constantly changing variables is super fun place to be. Have you, Arpit, taken this analogy any steps further of like – and so, there's this system upgrade that we apply, or I don't know, have you explored any deeper into this analogy? ARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. This is something I've thought about a lot and something that I try to practice in our day-to-day job. Appsmith is an open source project. We deal with a lot of people, a lot of contributors, and a lot of community users as well on a daily basis and we are globally distributed across the planet. So a lot of learnings that I've had as a distributed systems engineer, I've tried to apply it to Appsmith the project and to the work that we do on a day-to-day basis. One of the immediate examples is that whenever you have a distributed system, a very important aspect of it is having a consistent language, or an interface where two microservices can talk to each other. So if I have a service, a microservice A and a microservice B, for them to communicate with each other, there is a predefined interface that is well defined. This applies to people as well, that whenever you are interacting with multiple other folks in the team, if you don't have a shared language, you don't have a shared understanding of the topic at hand, the problem at hand, that's when things start to go awry. So one of the first things to actually do, whenever you start working with anybody for that matter, is establish a level, a consistent language and a consistent interface so that both the parties are always on the same page. They're always if I say X, you understand exactly what I mean and it’s not like you have a different version of X in your head as compared to what I have. A lot of times, for humans especially, the illusion of communication is that it has happened and that's

    42 min
  5. 03/02/2022

    273: Motorcycling Adventures with Kerri Miller

    02:28 - Kerri’s Superpower: Having an Iron Butt The Iron Butt Association 06:39 - On The Road Entertainment FM Radio Country Music Community/Local Radio Roadside Attractions The World Largest Ball of Twine Mystery Spot Mystery Spot Polka 15:11 - Souvenir Collection & Photography Fireweed Ice Cream Clubvan Lighthouses National Parks 25:42 - Working On The Road 27:37 - Rallies, Competitive Scavenger Hunts Traveling Salesman Problem 30:40 - Tracking, Tooling, Databases Penny Machine Locations Penny Costs 1.76 Cents to Make in 2020 35:36 - Community Interaction; Sampling Local Specialties Cinnamon Rolls Salem Sue, World’s Largest Holstein 38:40 - Recording Adventures Kerri’s Blog: Motozor Stationary & Sassy (Jamey’s Podcast) 41:46 - Focus / Music Bandcamp Steely Dan Neil Peart (Rush) 42:22 - Directed Riding vs Wandering/Drifting Reflections: Mandy: Taking time to enjoy yourself is SO important. Jamey: Get started! Create a map, now. Coraline: Permission to go down rabbit holes: wander aimlessly, and explore. Aaron: If I’m not having fun, why am I doing this? Resetting expectations to your purpose. Chelsea: Making “it didn’t always look like this!” stories accessible to folks. Kerri: It’s a marathon. You can’t do a lot of things in a single step. We have traveled far from where we began. Greater Than Code Episode 072: Story Time with Kerri Miller This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: CORALINE: Hey, everybody and welcome to Episode 273 of Greater Than Code. You may remember me, my name is Coraline and I’m very, very happy to be with y'all today and to be with my friend, Jamey Hampton. JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm also excited to introduce my good friend, Aaron Aldrich, and it's our first time co-hosting together so I'm excited about that, too. AARON: Oh, Hey, it's me, Aaron Aldrich. I'm also excited. I'm so excited to host with all these people and I will introduce you to Chelsea. CHELSEA: Him folks. I'm Chelsea Troy and I am pleased to introduce Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hey, everybody. It's Mandy. And today, I am here with one of my favorite people! It's Kerri Miller, and you may know Kerri as an engineer, a glass artist, a public speaker, a motorcyclist, and a lackwit gadabout based in the Pacific Northwest. Generally, she's on an epic adventure on her motorcycle somewhere in North America. Will she meet Sasquatch? That's what I want to know and that's why she's here today because we're not going to talk about tech, or code today. We're going to catch up with Kerri. If you're not following Kerri on these epic adventures, you need to be because I live vicariously through her all the time and you need to, too. Kerri is a prime example of living your best life. So without further ado, Kerri, how are you?! KERRI: Oh my gosh. With an intro like that, how can I be anything but amazing today? Can I just hire you, Mandy just to call me every morning and tell me how exciting I am? MANDY: Absolutely. [laughter] KERRI: No. I'm doing really, really well. The sun actually came out today in the Pacific Northwest. I've been telling people lately that if you want to know what living in Seattle is like, first go stand in the shower for about 4 months [laughs] and then get back to me. So to have the sun bright and it’s 53 outside, it’s amazing. AARON: 53 does sound amazing. It's been like so far below freezing for so long here that I've lost track. Every once in a while, I go outside and it's like 30 and I'm like, “Oh, this is nice!” [laughter] JAMEY: Are we going to ask Kerri the superpower question? Because I feel like she's come on and answered it a bunch of times already. [laughs] We could ask her about Sasquatch instead. MANDY: I mean, I thought her superpowers were having epicly awesome adventures, but maybe she has a different answer. KERRI: Well, in the context of this conversation, I think that my superpower is being able to sit on a motorcycle for ridiculously long amounts of time. CORALINE: Kerri, would you say you have an iron butt? Is that what you call that? KERRI: Yes. I mean, of course, the joke being that I belong to a group called the Iron Butt Association, which is dedicated to promoting the safe and sane practice of long-distance endurance motorcycle riding. So the only requirement to join, besides having the defective gene that makes you want to sit on a motorcycle for hours and hours on end, is to be able to ride a 1,000 miles on a motorcycle in 24 hours, which once you do it once, you very quickly decide if you ever want to do it again and if you do decide you want to do it again, you are one of the ingroup. AARON: What's a reference point for a 1,000 miles? That's a number that I only know conceptually. KERRI: Let's see. It is a 1,000 miles almost exactly from Seattle to Anaheim to the front door of Disneyland. It's a 1,100 miles from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida. CORALINE: Oh, wow. KERRI: It's 2,000 miles from my house in Seattle to Chicago. JAMEY: What made you feel like you wanted to sit on a motorcycle for that long? KERRI: I don't really have a short answer for that, but I'll give you an honest answer. I mean the short answer is the jokey one to say, “Oh, I've got a defective gene. Ha, ha, ha.” But when I was in – I grew up in the country and had a lot of a lot of struggles as a teenager and the way that I escaped from that was to go get in my car and drive around the back roads of New England. Dirt roads, finding old farmsteads and farm fields and abandoned logging roads and that gave me this real sort of sense of freedom. When I moved out to Pacific Northwest—no real friends, no family out here—I spent a lot of time in my car exploring Pacific Northwest. I had a lot of those same vibes of being by myself and listening to my good music and just driving around late nights. When I got into to motorcycling, I rediscovered that joy of being by myself, exploring things, seeing new things, and if I wasn't seeing something new, I was seeing how had changed this week, or since last month, or since last few years since I've been through a particular region. And my motorcycling is basically an extension of that, it's this sort of urge to travel. A desire to be by myself under my own control, my own power, and to learn and discover new stories that I'm not learning just by sitting in my apartment all day. I work from home. I've worked remotely for 8, or 9 years now, so anytime I get to leave the apartment is a joy and adventure, but doing so for longest ended periods of time just lets me see more of the world, expand my own story, and learn the story of others as I travel. Being a single solo lady on a motorcycle, I'm instantly the object of interest wherever I stop and it doesn't help that I have rainbow stickers and all sorts of stuff all over my bikes. My motorcycle helmets are crazy pink, rainbow reflective, got unicorn horns, and things all over my bike, so people see me as being super approachable. Every time I stop for gas, or to get a burger, or a soda, or something, people come up to me and they want to tell me their stories. It's usually about the motorcycle, they're really interested about. It's usually middle aged and old men come up to me to say, “Oh, I had a motorcycle when I was in college and then I got married and had a kid.” You can kind of see them deflate a little bit. Or I've had lots of kids come up because it's covered with stickers and a lot of the stickers, they're all kind of at a kid eye level. They see them and they get really excited, they want to come over and talk to me. With rainbow bandanas and everything, I think I look safe as a biker. I'm not dressed in black and skulls and so, people see me as approachable and they want to come up and talk. So there's a lot of those great interactions that I get to have with people along the way. CORALINE: And you said at the beginning, when you were driving around the Pacific Northwest, you were listening to your good music. Do you also listen to music on the motorcycle and some of those have fancy speakers in the helmet and all that sort of stuff where you just go quiet and just listen to the road? KERRI: Honestly, over the course of the day, because I will ride 18, 20 hours a day if you just let me go and if I'm trying to make distance, I'll do that. It's kind of a mix, but for the most part, I actually do listen to something. The last few years, I've really embraced and tried to understand and integrate into my personal identity, having ADHD and how does that manifest for me and I found that if I'm riding my motorcycle and I'm not listening to something, my mind wanders. But weirdly, if I'm listening to something, then I'm paying attention and focused, patrolling the motorcycle and being safe and then whatnot, which seems paradoxical. But that's just how my brain works. So I pretty much always have something going. Until recently, I had a Spotify playlist with about 1,800 songs on it that was rotating through. I tried to do audiobooks and podcasts, but that's a little tricky with all the wind noise and whatnot. I'm trying to protect my hearing. Other than that, I also listen to a lot of FM radio, which is great. So I have opinions on country music now, which I never thought I was going to have opinions on that at before. Yes, country music is great. It's all over. Even in Seattle, we have country music, bars, and whatnot, but you don't just walk down the street in Seattle and hear country music. You

    59 min
  6. 02/23/2022

    272: People First – Self-Awareness and Being Excellent To Each Other with Ashleigh Wilson

    02:14 - Ashleigh’s Superpower: Ability To See “The Vision” The Queen’s Gambit 03:35 - Intentionality: “People First” Call Me Out: Intention vs Impact “This Doesn’t Make Sense” Log Emotional Fitness Surveys “Dare To Lead” Book Club 10:55 - Listen Digging in to Defensiveness / Uncomfortableness Little Things Add Up Building Connections and Relationships 15:10 - Building Trust – Why is vulnerability not professional? Alleviating Fear North Star: Being Excellent To Each Other Self Awareness & Emotional Intelligence Discernment Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs 21:02 - Personal Growth and Development Brené Brown Glennon Doyle Morning Pages The Holistic Psychologist: Future Self Journaling 27:24 - Intersexuality and Identity: How do you show up? Privilege Gender Somatics Safety Solidarity 36:37 - Making and Dealing With Mistakes Taking Feedback Lead With Gratitude Ego Checks 40:05 - Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) Visibility and Understanding Health and Wellness Benefits Sacred vs Safe Spaces / Safe vs Brave Spaces Dan Price 45:52 - Fundraising & Venture Capital (VC) The House of Who Reflections: Mandy: Eating a shame sandwich in order to learn and grow. Chanté: North Star = Being excellent to each other. Ashleigh: Celebrating intersections of identity. Aaron: The “This Doesn’t Make Sense” log. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater. MANDY: Hello, everybody and welcome to Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore, I use she/her pronouns, and I'm here with our new panelist, Aaron Aldrich. Welcome, Aaron! AARON: Thanks! And hey, I'm Aaron. I use they/them pronouns and I am also here with Chanté Martínez Thurmond. CHANTÉ: Hey, everyone, Chanté here. I use she/her/ella pronouns and I am so glad to introduce our guest today, Ashleigh Wilson. Welcome, Ashleigh. AARON: Thank you for having me! Hello, Ashleigh here and I use she/her pronouns. CHANTÉ: Ashleigh is the Founder and CEO of Auditmate, the world's first elevator and escalator auditing system. After discovering that customers were an afterthought to most companies, Ashleigh left the corporate world and founded Auditmate under a "people first" mentality. Ashleigh knows discrimination first-hand as a queer woman working in the tech industry and she aims to create a space where everyone has permission to be human. What a great bio. ASHLEIGH: Thank you. Thanks for having me. CHANTÉ: It's a pleasure. Ashleigh, the first question we ask our is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ASHLEIGH: My superpower is my ability to see the vision and it's a bit of a witchy. I don't know where it comes from, but the best visual representation I've ever seen of it as if anyone has seen The Queen’s Gambit and when she can move the chess pieces on the ceiling? When I'm in the zone, and it's often when I'm half sleep, it just connects and I'm like, “Oh, this is how it works,” and I can just see the path forward. I can't force it. [chuckles] I don't get to choose when it happens. It just happens, or it doesn't. But when I get those deep downloads on the vision and the path forward, and then I think the skill that's been learned to couple with that is then how to make a plan to execute it because the vision can be one, but that execution does not work alone. [chuckles] AARON: That's awesome. I like that and I like that you mentioned the skill that gets paired with that. I can relate to a superpower can't exist in a vacuum; it needs some way to be harness and used. [chuckles] ASHLEIGH: Absolutely. CHANTÉ: I love that, too. Aaron, where you're going with that, because what it makes me think about Ashleigh, just reading your bio and kind of getting a preview of some of the things you care about, how have you been intentional about building a people first organization, or a startup in this space and using that superpower and maybe either finding people who compliment you there, or who are distinctly different? But I'd love to hear how you've been intentional about that. ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think it starts with first of all, when you feel othered in any organization, like coming in and being able to set the culture is like, “Oh, I'm going to do all of these things.” But as Aaron mentioned earlier, it's not in a vacuum and so, I think the intentionality has been, what is the mission? What is the north star? How do we treat each other? And then at every new hire at every new customer acquisition, it then iterates, iterates, iterates, and iterates. You have to be willing to learn, to take feedback, and to eat a shame sandwich every once in a while, when you screw it all up and you have to admit it [chuckles] because it happens every single time. I've been called to the carpet. I think one of the biggest ways that I've been intentional is being communicative about call me out, call me out. I'm never going to know all of the things all the time and I think that my team knows me well enough to know my intentions, but it comes in intentions versus impact conversation. I can only know my intentions unless you tell me how this impacts you. I can't know and so, creating a culture of my team being able to call me out and be like, “Hey, your intention was good. The impact sucked. Let's talk about it.” [chuckles] AARON: What's that like practically to get folks like on that side and able to call you out because I know for – I'm thinking about it and I know I can to jump into any corporate culture, even startup and be like, “Yeah, I feel comfortable calling out my boss on this.” [chuckles] ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't think we feel like we have a corporate culture at least yet. AARON: Yeah. ASHLEIGH: But that also took time in creating. So one way that we did it was we have something called that this doesn't make sense log so that people can just document either things in the system, or things in the culture, or things in policies that just are kind of dumb. Like why do we do this this way? This doesn't make sense. This makes my job harder than it should be. The we need to get X done, but you're making us do Y and Z that don't go toward the greater mission. And then also we created an emotional fitness survey for every employee so that each person – and it's left in one place so each person says, “I want to receive praise publicly, or privately,” or “If I need to get feedback, I want to receive it like this,” or these just different questions on how people to be communicated to. I think setting up those conversations as people log in and it's okay to speak up, it's okay to push back, I expect you to push back on me makes people feel more comfortable, but it takes a while. It does. CHANTÉ: I love that. I use something very similar to that for my own consulting business in my firm and it's been something that we really lean into helpful to just make sure that it's transparent and it's a nice reminder as a leader that your answers to questions can change. Giving people permission to say, “You know what, how I'm showing up today is different than how I showed up yesterday, because life.” [chuckles] ASHLEIGH: Totally. CHANTÉ: So I really love that. The other sort of burning thing that I have for you is, because I read that you had been in this business so I'm guessing that you had learned from people and maybe it was a family business. I might have missed that part. I'm curious how doing it your way this time with these sort of principles is different than the way maybe you were mentored to do it, or what you've seen in the past and why that's important. ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I don't know that I had ever seen it modeled before. I was raised in the elevator industry and before that, my stepdad was in the elevator industry and my dad was salesman of any type, door-to-door salesman selling vacuums to cleaners, to cars, to whatever the case may be and I've never fallen in line. I was always the kid in school that was like, “Why do you do it that way? When you can do it this way? Why are we doing this? That doesn't make sense and that doesn't feel good?” And people are like, “Well, we don't really care how you feel,” and I'm like, “But why it doesn't feel good?” Like why do people want to work where it doesn't feel good? This doesn't make sense to me.” That feeling in my tummy has always been so wrong that it's either a hard yes, or a hard no and I'm like, “How do you operate in a hard no all the time?” Why do we expect people to operate in these visceral responses to this? Just watching how teams have responded and how you almost want to beat the individuality out of people to get performance to a certain standard, or something, like that somehow makes it better for everybody to be like that whole homogeny equals happiness saying? It was never true to me and so

    55 min
  7. 02/16/2022

    271: EventStorming with Paul Rayner

    00:58 - Paul’s Superpower: Participating in Scary Things 02:19 - EventStorming Optimized For Collaboration Visualizing Processes Working Together Sticky (Post-it) Notes 08:35 - Regulation: Avoiding Overspecifics “The Happy Path” Timeboxing Parking Lot Inside Pixar Democratization Known Unknowns 15:32 - Facilitation and Knowledge Sharing Iteration and Refinement Knowledge Distillation / Knowledge Crunching Clarifying Terminology: Semantics is Meaning Embracing & Exposing Fuzziness (Complexities) 24:20 - Key Events Narrative Shift Domain-Driven Design Shift in Metaphor 34:22 - Collaboration & Teamwork Perspective Mitigating Ambiguity 39:29 - Remote EventStorming and Facilitation Miro MURAL 47:38 - EventStorming vs Event Sourcing Sacrificing Rigor For Collaboration 51:14 - Resources The EventStorming Handbook Paul’s Upcoming Workshops @thepaulrayner Reflections: Mandy: Eventstorming and its adjacence to Technical Writing. Damien: You can do this on a small and iterative scale. Jess: Shared understanding. Paul: Being aware of the limitations of ideas you can hold in your head. With visualization, you can hold it in more easily and meaningfully. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDY: Welcome to Episode 271 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here today with a guest, but returning panelist. I'm happy to see Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Thanks, Mandy. It's great to see you. I'm also excited to be here today with Damien Burke! DAMIEN: And I am excited to be here with both of you and our guest today, Paul Rayner. Paul Rayner is one of the leading practitioners of EventStorming and domain-driven design. He's the author of The EventStorming Handbook, co-author of Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, and the founder and chair of the Explore DDD conference. Welcome to the show, Paul. PAUL: Thanks, Damien. Great to be here. DAMIEN: Great to have you. And so you know, you are prepared, you are ready for our first and most famous question here on Greater Than Code? PAUL: I don't know if I'm ready, or prepared, but I can answer it, I think. [laughter] DAMIEN: I know you have prepared, so I don’t know if you are prepared. PAUL: Right. DAMIEN: Either way, here it comes. [chuckles] What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? PAUL: Okay. So a couple of weeks ago, there's a lake near my house, and the neighbors organized a polar plunge. They cut a big hole in the ice and everyone lines up and you basically take turns jumping into the water and then swimming to the other side and climbing out the ladder. So my superpower is participating in a polar plunge and I acquired that by participating with my neighbors. There was barbecue, there was a hot tub, and stuff like that there, too. So it was very, very cool. It's maybe not a superpower, though because there were little kids doing this also. So it's not like it was only me doing it. JESSICA: I'll argue that your superpower is participating in scary things because you're also on this podcast today! PAUL: [chuckles] Yeah, there we go. DAMIEN: Yeah, that is very scary. Nobody had to be fished out of the water? No hospital, hypothermia, any of that? PAUL: No, there was none of that. It was actually a really good time. I mean, being in Denver, blue skies, it was actually quite a nice day to jump into frozen. MANDY: So Paul, you're here today to talk about EventStorming. I want to know what your definition of that is, what it is, and why it's a cool topic to be talking about on Greater Than Code. PAUL: Okay. Well, there's a few things there. So firstly, what is EventStorming? I've been consulting, working with teams for a long time, coaching them and a big part of what I try and do is to try and bridge the gap between what the engineers, the developers, the technical people are trying to build in terms of the software, and what the actual problem is they're trying to solve. EventStorming is a technique for just mapping out a process using sticky notes where you're trying to describe the story of what it is that you're building, how that fits into the business process, and use the sticky notes to layer in variety of information and do it in a collaborative kind of way. So it's really about trying to bridge that communication gap and uncover assumptions that people might have, expose complexity and risk through the process, and with the goal of the software that you write actually being something that solves the real problem that you're trying to solve. I think it's a good topic for Greater Than Code based on what I understand about the podcast, because it certainly impacts the code that you write, touches on that, and connects with the design. But it's really optimized for collaboration, it's optimized for people with different perspectives being able to work together and approach it as visualizing processes that people create, and then working together to be able to do that. So there's a lot of techniques out there that are very much optimized from a developer perspective—UML diagrams, flow charts, and things like that. But EventStorming really, it sacrifices some of that rigor to try and draw people in and provide a structured conversation. I think with the podcast where you're trying to move beyond just the code and dig into the people aspects of this a lot more, I think it really touches on that in a meaningful way. JESSICA: You mentioned that with a bunch of stickies, a bunch of different people, and their perspectives, EventStorming layers in different kinds of information. PAUL: Mm hm. JESSICA: Like what? PAUL: Yeah. So the way that usually approach it is, let's say, we're modeling, visualizing some kind of process like somebody registering for a certain thing, or even somebody, maybe a more common example, purchasing something online and let's say, that we have the development team that's responsible for implementing how somebody might return a product to a merchant, something like that. The way it would work is you describe that process as events where each sticky note represents something that happened in the story of returning a product and then you can layer on questions. So if people have questions, use a different colored sticky note for highlighting things that people might be unsure of, what assumptions they might be making, differences in terminology, exposing those types of unknowns and then once you've sort of laid out that timeline, you can then layer in things like key events, what you might call emergent structures. So as you look at that timeline, what might be some events that are more important than others? JESSICA: Can you make that concrete for me? Give me an example of some events in the return process and then…? PAUL: Yeah. So let's say, the customer receives a product that they want to return. You could have an event like customer receive product and then an event that is customer reported need for return. And then you would have a shift in actor, like a shift in the person doing the work where maybe the merchant has to then merchant sent return package to customer. So we're mapping out each one of these as an event in the process and then the customer receives, or maybe it's a shipping label. The customer receives the shipping label and then they put the items in the package with the shipping label and they return it. And then there would be a bunch of events that the merchant would have to take care of. So the merchant would have to receive that package and then probably have to update the system to record that it's been returned. And then, I imagine there would be processing another order, or something like that. A key event in there might be something like sending out the shipping label and the customer receiving the shipping label because that's a point where the responsibility transfers from the merchant, who is preparing the shipping label and dispatching that, to the customer that's actually receiving it and then having to do something. That's just one, I guess, small example of you can use that to divide that story up into what you might think of as chapters where there's different responsibilities and changes in the narrative. Part of that maybe layering in sticky notes that represent who's doing the work. Like who's the actor, whether it's the merchant, or the customer, and then layering in other information, like the systems that are involved in that such as maybe there's email as a system, maybe there's the actual e-commerce platform, a payment gateway, these kinds of things could be reflected and so on, like there's – [overtalk] JESSICA: Probably integration with the shipper. PAUL: Integration with the shipper, right. So potentially, if you're designing this, you would have some kind of event to go out to the shipper to then know to actually pick up the package and that type of thing. And then once the package is actually delivered back to the merchant, then there would be some kind of event letting the merchant know. It's very hard to describe because I'm trying to picture this in my mind, which is an inherently visual thing. It's probably not that interesting to hear me describing something that's usually done on some kind of either mirror board, like some kind of electronic space, or on a piece of butcher's paper, or – [overtalk] DAMIEN: Something with a lot of sticky notes. PAUL: Something with a lot of sticky notes, right. DAMIEN: Which, I believe for our American listeners, sticky notes are the

    58 min
  8. 02/09/2022

    270: Trust Building and Authenticity with Justin Searls

    How to Trust Again – Justin Searls Why has trust become so rare in the software industry? Developers don't trust their own ability to program, teammates don't trust each other to write quality code, and organizations don't trust that people are working hard enough to deliver on time. This talk by Justin Searls is a reflection on the far-reaching consequences distrust can have for individuals, teams, and organizations and an exploration of what we stand to gain by adopting a more trustful orientation towards ourselves and each other. 01:57 - Justin’s Superpower: Having Bad Luck and Exposing Software Problems 04:05 - Breaking Down Software & Teams Shared Values Picking Up on Smells to Ask Pointed Questions Beginner’s Mindset RailsBridge 12:49 - Trust Building Incremental Improvement What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How successful people become even more successful by Marshall Goldsmith Credibility Reliability Intimacy Selfless Motivation Authenticity Detecting Authenticity Laziness Does Not Exist 29:14 - Power Politics & Privilege Leadership Empathy Safety Exposure; “Don’t Cross The Net” Masking 42:06 - Personal Growth & “Bring Your Whole/True Self” RubyConf 2019 - Keynote: Lucky You by Sandi Metz How to Trust Again – Justin Searls This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers based in the United States and Canada. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater. JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 270 of the Greater Than Code podcast. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm joined with my co-panelist, Mae Beale. MAE: And I'm joined with another panelist, Chelsea Troy. CHELSEA: Hi, I'm Chelsea and I'm here with our guest, Justin Searls. He's a co-founder and CTO at Test Double, a consulting agency on a mission to improve how the work writes software. His life's work is figuring out why so many apps are buggy and hard to use, why teams struggle to foster collaboration and trust, and why it's so hard for organizations to get traction building great software. The Test Double Agents work with clients to improve in all of these ways and more. Hi, Justin! How are you today? JUSTIN: Hello. I'm great. Thank you so much for having me. CHELSEA: Of course. So we like to kick off our sessions by asking you, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? JUSTIN: Well, one superpower might be that I like to give counterintuitive answers to questions and [laughs] my answer to this would be that I have really, really bad luck software and hardware. My entire life has just fallen over for me left and right. Bugs come and seek me out. In college, I was in the computer science program and so, I was around a lot of computers, like Linux data centers and stuff, and I think I went through either personally, or in the labs that I used 20 hard drive failure years in 4 years. People started joking that I had an EMP around me. So I started to just decide to lean into that not so much as an identity necessarily, but as a specialty of root cause analysis of like, why do things fail? When I see a bug, what does that mean? And to dig in to how to improve quality in software and that then extended to later in my career, when I was working on delivery teams, like building software for companies and institutions. That meant identifying more root causes about what's leading to project failure, or for teams to break down. Now I'm kind of moving, I guess, popping the stack another layer further. I'm starting to ask what are the second and third order consequences of software failing for people having for others? I see this in my family who are non-software industry family members, when they encounter a bug and I'm watching them encounter a bug, their reaction is usually to think that they're the ones who screwed up, that they're stupid, that they just can't figure it out. I'm literally watching software that somebody else wrote far away just fail and that's just no good, right? So I think that the fact that I just so easily expose problems with software and sometimes the teams that make it almost effortlessly, it's really given me a passion and a purpose to improve and find opportunities to just make it a little bit better. MAE: When you talk about software and/or teams breaking down and you're mentioning bugs. So I'm assuming that that's mostly what you mean by breaking down? I'm curious if you have kind of a mental model of software always breaks down these four ways. Teams always break down these three ways. I don't know if you have any reference texts, or things that you've come across as far as like a mental model for what is the world of breaking down? How do we characterize it? JUSTIN: That's a great question and I feel like having been basically doing this for 15 years now, I should be prepared with a better answer. I've always resisted building I guess, the communicative version of an abstraction, or a framework for categorizing, simplifying, and compartmentalizing the sort of stuff that I experience. In some ways, my approach [laughs] is the human version of machine learning where I have been so fortunate, because I've been a consultant my entire career, to be exposed to so many companies and so many teams that that has developed in me a pattern recognition system that even I don't necessarily understand—it's kind of a black box to me—where I will pick up on little smells and seemingly incidental cues and it'll prompt me to develop a concern, or ask a pointed question about something seemingly unrelated, but that I've come to see as being associated with that kind of failure. I think your question's great. I should probably spend some time coming up with quadrants, or a system that distills down some of this. But really, when I talk about bugs, that is a lagging indicator of so many things upstream that are not necessarily code related. One of the reasons I want to be on the show here and talk to you all the day is because I've been thinking a lot about trust and interpersonal relationships starting with us as individuals and whether we trust the work that we're doing ourselves, or trust ourselves to really dive in and truly understand the stuff that we're building versus feel like we need to go and follow some other pattern, or instructions that are handed to us. To kind of try to answer your question more directly, when I see teams fail, it usually comes down to a lack of authentic, empathetic, and logical targeted relationships where you have strong alignment about like, why are we in this room? Why are we working together? How do we best normalize on an approach so that when any person in any role is operating that is consistent with if somebody else on the team had been taking the same action that they would operate in the same way so that we're all marching in the same direction? That requires shared values and that requires so many foundational things that are so often lacking in teams as software is developed today, where companies grow really fast. The pay right now is really, really high, which is great, but it results in, I think a little bit of a gold rush mentality to just always be shipping, always be hustling, always be pushing. As there's less time for the kind of slack that we need to think about—baking in quality, or coming back to something that we built a couple weeks ago and that maybe we've got second considerations about. Because there's that kind of time, there's even less time sometimes for the care and feeding that goes into just healthy relationships that build trust between people who are going to be spending a third of their life working together. CHELSEA: You mentioned picking up on little smells that then lead you to ask pointed questions. I think that's really interesting because that kind of intuition, I've found is really essential to being a consultant and figuring out how to ask those questions as well. Can you provide some examples of situations like that? JUSTIN: Yeah. I'll try to think of a few. I had a client once that was undergoing—this is 10 years ago now—what we called at the time, an agile transformation. They were going from a Waterfall process of procuring 2 year, $2 million contracts and teams to build big design upfront systems that are just thrown over a fence, then a team would go and work on it, and then it would go through a proper user acceptance testing onto something more agile, I guess. Adopting Scrum and extreme programming, interpersonal process, and engineering practices. That was just meant to be more, I guess, iterative of course, innovative, collaborative, more dynamic, and able to let the team drive its own destiny. All that sounds great and you walk into the team room and they just invested millions of dollars into this beautiful newly restored historic building. I sit down with everyone and I look at them and they've got the cool desks at the time and cool open office b

    1h 3m
4.8
out of 5
42 Ratings

About

For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code. Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript. We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)

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