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 sensitivity change to the types of company, not necessarily types of companies, but like, I'm more sensitive to who I'm working for. I think my list of no, I won't work for the X company [chuckles] has probably grown throughout the pandemic and I'm definitely much more critical. Part of it's probably because as in tech we're sort of at an advantage, it is high demand right now and we can be a bit picky about where we work, but I definitely have been [laughs] lately. Much more careful about I'm not just willing to work with anyone. I want someone that's got reasonable values. I interview other companies a lot more and I want to make sure product is not causing harm generally speaking and make sure I get a lot more value alignment out of leadership team and things like that. I don't know if other people have had a similar experience. MANDY: Unfortunately, I haven't had that experience. I'm still working for whoever will give me money. [laughter] But I wish I could do that and I'm currently looking. I mean, I've been trying to break into a full-time DevRel career for I guess, 2 years now and I guess, I'm actively looking. Oh, here we go. If you’re hiring, let me know. [laughter] I guess I am. I'm looking for that job that I'm really feeling fulfilled in is right now I'm not feeling that and I think it's because of the pandemic, I've really stopped to think about what I want in my life and how I want to feel. I want to be happy, I want to be passionate about my job, and I want to wake up and not feel scared to open my computer because – [overtalk] DAMIEN: Wow. MANDY: Are they going to tell me they no longer need my service? DAMIEN: Right. MANDY: And it's been demoralizing really, for me recently, especially because I tried to join a developer relations Slack group just a few months ago and they rejected me flat out and they're like, “You do not work in dev full time. You cannot be a part of our group,” and I'm like, “Oh.” So now I'm like, “Hmm, what do I do in tech?” [laughter] I thought I'd been doing DevRel before DevRel was cool. I'm going to humble brag for a minute, but I have single-handedly put this podcast together and put you people together that you didn't even know and you love each other. You get that vibe. I can tell who's going to get – you're going to love this person and you're going to like – [overtalk] DAMIEN: Oh man, you not only put this podcast together, but you are the sustaining force. You are the heart of it. You are the thing where that all the panelists that are connected to. You are one who gets all of the mechanical, everything besides talking in mics. You do everything else and you're maintaining all these relations with these developers. [laughter] MANDY: I never even wanted to be on mic. I just started doing it because everybody was busy and I was like, “I guess I have to step up.” [laughs] DAMIEN: Whatever it takes to get it done, right? MANDY: Well, yeah. I feel like the topics on this show that we talk about are important and they're even important outside of tech that hence, the whole name: Greater Than Code. There are more things out there than our jobs and our work and I just want to be happy. I want to be fulfilled and I want to be passionate about something and so does my dog. AARON: That was a shift for me, too. That was definitely one of the roles I was in during the pandemic and realized my struggle with it so much was it was clashing with that. It wasn't fulfilling for me, it was clashing with my core values, and it was just like, “You know what, I can't do this anymore.” [chuckles] I'm no longer in a place where I have the energy to do a thing I don't like doing, or don't have some care for. There's always something you don't like doing. There's always some crap around every job that like don't like to do or you have to deal with something, but I'm no longer at a place where I can have a whole job that rubs me the wrong way. MANDY: Yeah. It's hard for me. I should feel great about this, but I'm known as the podcast girl. If you have a tech podcast, you should talk to Mandy, but I'm not just a podcast editor! I do so much more than that. I do operation, I do product management, I do writing; there's so much more that encompasses who I am in tech than the podcast girl. I feel like not a lot of people know that and maybe that's my fault because I guess, I haven't really done a good job of putting myself out there to be like, “Hey wait. But I'm –” because for me, it's still a hustle as a single mom. I have to pay the bills. So it's like, I wish I could be more discerning with the jobs that I take and who I work for, but I don't know. I'm just one of those people of the universe. What will be, will be and if it's meant to be, it'll come to me. [laughs] So I don't ever really actively seek and that's probably half of my problem. DAMIEN: Mm. That's funny because I didn't know all those things about you. I pitch you as a podcast producer and again, I live in a LA, I'm involved in the entertainment industry at a slight level, and the word producer there is very, very powerful and very important. A producer is an executive. A producer is person who gets things done, who makes it happen. I'm not entirely sure what a producer does, even though I've done it. MANDY: I'm not even sure what a – [laughs] DAMIEN: Right, because it's never the same thing. MANDY: No. DAMIEN: It's whatever it takes and that skill. AARON: Yeah. DAMIEN: That being able to be know enough about a movie, or theatrical production, or a podcast, to know what it takes, to be able to manage, and sustain and get it done. That's really what it comes down to: get it done. MANDY: That's why it's so hard for me. Everyone's like, “Do you have a resume?” And I'm like, “I don't know what to put on it!” Like, you tell me you need this done, I'll get it done. If I don’t know how to do it, I'll figure it out because that's what I've done for 13 years. Like I got hired as Avdi Grimm’s virtual assistant because an Indeed.com ad came out and was like, “I need somebody to answer emails for me,” and I'm like, “Don’t know why you can't do that yourself, but sure.” [laughter] And then from there, he had a podcast and was like, “Can you edit my podcast?” And I was like, “Sure,” and then I'm Googling what is a podcast. [laughter] I had no clue. So I got here, I think a lot out of luck from being at the right place and talking to the right person at the right time. But I have busted my ass to just learn what people need me to learn and do what people need me to do. I guess, that's maybe what I should just put on the resume. I'll do what you need me to do. I make it happen. DAMIEN: No, no, no. You put on the resume what your next job is going to be doing. MANDY: [laughs] Yeah, so, it's hard when people ask me for my resume. I have like three resumes and I'm like, “This does not, no.” AARON: It's almost more a portfolio at this point, right. I made this thing happen. I made this thing happen. Here's this other thing that I did. Here's another thing I made happen. DAMIEN: Resumes are horrific. They're not good for anybody and the only people who use them are people who need to filter quickly out of large groups and they're not even good for that. I've long aspired to be at a place in my career where I don't need a resume and I might be there. Steve Jobs didn't have a resume. Didn't need a resume. He didn't send his resume to the board to get that job at Apple back. It's ridiculous. MANDY: Well, that's the thing for me. I get most of my work from word to mouth. DAMIEN: Right. MANDY: So until I really lost a big client and I was like, “Oh, I don't have a resume. Don't you know who I am?” [laughter] DAMIEN: But like, they should. [laughter] AARON: Just say the portfolios level. I mean, it's kind of the same thing, right? This is... MANDY: Yeah. AARON: [laughs] Kind of the same thing. It’s sort of how my resume is morphed in DevRel proper. It's gone from I still kind of have the resume that's like, “Yeah, I worked into these things internally that might not surface otherwise, but also, here's my speaking portfolio and all the things that I have done over the past 3 years. [laughs] You might know me from all of this stuff instead of what's on this resume.” [laughter] MANDY: Yeah. Of course, once I was getting comfortable enough to want to speak, that's when the whole world shut down. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDY: So I have no videos of myself speaking anywhere whatsoever. DAMIEN: Well, I think there might be a few podcasts that you appear on. MANDY: There's a few episodes as of late that I have ventured to be on out of keeping the show alive. DAMIEN: And every episode of this podcast, and I think several others, are shits near portfolio, right? [laughter] MANDY: Then I'd have a really wrong resume. [laughs] AARON: We'll figure it out. DAMIEN: Yeah. AARON: You just need the highlights. MANDY: But I don’t know, a lot of other things have changed for me over the course of the past 2 years. Just in my personal life, I've gotten sober and that was a really hard thing to do during a pandemic. AARON: Yeah. MANDY: When everybody else was out hoarding toilet paper, I was like, “Oh my God, I need beer,” [laughs] and actually, I did. While everybody was stocking up on those other necessities, I was buying cases of beer and putting them in my garage because I was like, “Oh great, the world's ending and I guess, if that's going to happen, I might as well be drunk.” And then – [overtalk] AARON: I mean, it's a fair argument in your defense. MANDY: But then it became a bad problem because when you're home all day and I was home, I worked from home before this. But everything is so damn depressing and you keep the news on the television and next thing you know, it's lunch time and cracking a beer and I'm like, “Whoa, this is… [laughs] where did this come from?” So no, I got sober and I don't drink anymore and honestly, I have never felt better. I've also become a runner. I got a treadmill and I run a 4, or 5 miles a day and I've lost a good amount of weight, probably a lot from alcohol bloat. DAMIEN: [chuckles] Yeah. MANDY: But it's more for me. It's not even about losing a weight because I don't even own a scale because it's more about how I feel. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDY: It's what is about how I feel. So when I went to the doctor's office for my yearly checkup on Monday and I got on the scale because they make you, I said, “Whoa,” [laughs] because I didn't even know. For me, it's about how I feel and I think that that's really, what's brought a lot of things into perspective for me is that at our time here on earth is fine. I want to be here for my daughter especially. She's 13 and I want to be healthy for her. I want to be here for my friends. I ask myself why I'm still in York, Pennsylvania and I haven't left because I do have people around here that I care about. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDY: And other than that, I could take it, or leave it. But because the people who I love are here, that's why I haven't left. DAMIEN: Yeah. MANDY: So that's another thing, the things like the pandemic has just really set me into a lot of personal development work and self-discovery. I journal every day. I read self-help books, which is so weird to me because I was one of those people that were like, “Who are those people that read self-help books?” and now I'm one of them. [chuckles] I want to be Brené Brown and Glennon Doyle’s best friend. [laughter] Those two women are my people. Elizabeth Gilbert. I can give you so many names of people and great authors that just inspire the hell out of me and 2 years ago, I was not that at all. AARON: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for getting at our time on earth is finite and so, in refocusing on what matters to us. Another way I had a friend put it to me, it's like optimistic nihilism. Look, at the end of the day, we're all going to be dead and none of this matters. So you might as well do what makes you happy, right? [laughs] You might as well do the things that are fulfilling and meaningful and try to make other people have a good time, too. You might as well. DAMIEN: I always thought it was ridiculous that nihilism had such a negative connotation. It was like, “No. Okay. I can believe that and be –” [overtalk] AARON: No pressure. At the end of the day, we're all going to die so, no pressure. Do what do what you need to do. Doesn't matter if you succeed, or fail. MANDY: That's like, I'm one of those people that would rather spend their money on experiences. AARON: Yeah. MANDY: Because I don't care how much money I die with. [laughter] I'd rather use it now and take my kid Disney world, which I did 3 years ago. DAMIEN: Nice. MANDY: And enjoy those experiences rather than have a bank account full of dollars that I can't use. DAMIEN: High score. MANDY: Yeah, high score. DAMIEN: Shout out to thriving in hand wavy. I feel embarrassed about this and I don't talk about it much because so many people are suffering. People I love are suffering. People I work with and deal with on a daily basis are suffering, and bad things are happening. This is the best year of my life. This is better than last year and last year was better than the year before. I just keep getting better and my life just keeps getting more awesome. I don't know if I was going anywhere with that, but solidarity with Mandy, I guess. You bought a treadmill. I bought a rower. MANDY: I feel like honestly, the universe gives back what you put out and I guess, I’ve become real – a lot of people are like, “You're like, woo-woo witchy now,” and I'm like, “Aha, yeah.” I kind of like that. So I feel like if you manifest things, you can make that happen and yes, there's things happening. Yes, yes, there are so many bad things happening, but sometimes out of self-preservation, you just have to tune all of that out and just be in your immediate dwell. For me, sometimes I'll go a week without watching news and I feel guilty about that a lot, but it's just like, you know what, if something's going to happen, it's going to happen. AARON: I think the best way someone put that to me was anxiety is not activism. MANDY: Yeah. DAMIEN: Yeah. AARON: Right, so just sitting around making yourself anxious and stressed out about everything and whatever emotion you have, making yourself feel bad doesn't improve the situation, it just also makes you feel bad. So it's okay to take a step back and do the self-care that you need to do because just feeling bad isn't fixing the problem either. So step back, find what you can do. Maybe there's stuff you can do here, in your immediate space that you can take action on. MANDY: Exactly. And also, for drinking other people's problems away, – [overtalk] [laughter] AARON: You can’t drink other people’s – disassociating from other people's problems isn't effective. [laughter] MANDY: No. Let me tell you, I tried. [laughter] DAMIEN: That's such a great statement. Anxiety is not activism, but also the opposite is true. Joy is activism, rest is activism, thriving in a world that doesn't want you to thrive is an act of resistance and activism. Shout out, living a good life. AARON: That's been a good conversation. I think that's easy to forget and I've seen it come up a couple times over the past couple years of what they have been of taking those moments for joy are really important. They can be radical in and of themselves. MANDY: Keep a gratitude journal. There are so many great apps that every day before I go to sleep, I just write one sentence and it gives you an option even to have a picture. So you can snap a picture. Even if it's just like this candle, this candle is burning right here and it smells so good and it's making me happy today. So I'm grateful for the candle. DAMIEN: Yeah, I'm up to approximately 2 years of daily journaling. A buddy of mine got together. We built a daily journaling app based on Morning Pages from The Artist's Way. It's called Early Words. Shout out earlywords.io if you want to join and journal with me. But every day, 750 words. I do it first thing in the morning most days. Stream of consciousness. It has absolutely changed my life. It makes me feel good. It made me a better writer. Not because the writing is good, but because it's taught me to turn off the editor. Writing does have to be good for me to write it. MANDY: Yeah. Big proponent of journaling. AARON: I believe in it. I just don't remember to do it. But that's my own problem. [laughter] DAMIEN: Can we go back? Can we talk about witchcraft? AARON: All right, I’m in. DAMIEN: A friend of mine asked me oh my God, maybe it was a year ago. Maybe it was several months ago. I have no idea. She asked me like, “Do you actually believe in witchcraft? Those magic woo-woo stuff?” It's like, “Well, let me tell you something. Every morning when I wake up in the morning, I make a potion with dried leaves that energizes me. At night, I make a different potion with dried flowers that calm me down and helps me sleep. My literal job is making sand think. Do I believe in witchcraft? I mean, yeah.” [chuckles] MANDY: I mean, it's a full moon today so I have a whole jug of water out charging. I do. I literally have a jug of water on my deck charging for full moon water energy and I use it like, I'll put a little bit in my bath water. I'll put it a little bit of it – I'll cook with it. When I boil some water, put it in there. Does it help? I don't know, but it makes me feel better! DAMIEN: Okay. Wait. It makes you feel better? AARON: Sounds like it’s helping. DAMIEN: Doesn’t that means it helps? MANDY: Yeah. It does. AARON: Yeah. I think that's a good point. I believe in the power of intention and ritual. There's a reason why humans developed rituals over time and sometimes, it's just for us to feel the right thing. But like, feelings are important? DAMIEN: [laughs] But like, feelings are important. AARON: I don’t want to say something controversial on the Greater Than Code podcast such as feelings are important. But they are. Sometimes, while you go through a certain step and it centers you, or you go through a certain set of steps and it makes you feel better, or it helps you process the anxiety you're feeling, or it's like, nope, I need to get centered in my five senses again so I can come back into my body and be here instead of going off on an anxiety spiral. MANDY: Absolutely. AARON: What is witchcraft? I actually love this from Terry Pratchett, one of my all-time favorite authors who does the Discworld series of novels, as a very specific approach to witchcraft, which is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, magic and whatever. But their daily thing is checking on all the people of the village and doing all the work that nobody wants to do. So it's like, how are the elderly doing? Do they need help with anything? Making sure and so takes their bath, making sure this person's animals are taken care of, making sure this sort of thing. Sometimes, it's about appearances and going through the ritual to make sure the community is coming along. Sitting with the dead, all that kind of stuff. And that's witchcraft, that's the bread and butter of witchcraft is knowing the right herbs and poultices to put together, being the heart and soul of the community and being able to get people and helping each other, and move the resources around as needed and that sort of thing. So yeah, I believe in that. [laughs] DAMIEN: Yeah. There was there's a great story and about Anton Mesmer, I learned this shout out to Mary Elizabeth Raines who taught me hypnosis. I learned this when she told me this story when I was doing my hypnosis training about Anton Mesmer, who's considered the [31:10] of hypnotism. He introduced hypnotism to the to the white people. The word mesmerism and magnetic person, magnetic personality, all this comes from Mesmer. He had salons where people would hold onto metal rod that he had “magnetized” and be healed and fall out and screaming have spirit and all that. But Mesmer was very popular and very powerful and the king of France did not like this. The king of France put together a blue-ribbon commission. I don't know if he called it a blue-ribbon commission. Probably not because he spoke French, but put together a commission of scientists to discredit Mesmer. One of these scientists was Ben Franklin, by the way. So they did a double-blind study. They did a proper double-blind test. They had Mesmer come out and magnetize a tree. That was a thing he did. He would magnetize trees, people would come out and hug the trees and then they'd be healed. So they did a study. They had to magnetize the tree and they brought people out who were sick and they said, “Hug that tree. That’s magnetized and you'll be healed.” Some of the trees Mesmer had magnetized, some he hadn't and it turns out it didn't matter. People were still healed and so, they all came to conclusion, “All right. See, Mesmer’s not doing anything. It's all placebo effect.” Mesmer was run out of town and lived in exile for the rest of his days. Nobody bothered to ask why were the people healed? Everybody knows placebo effect is a real effect. Nobody's like, “How do we make it more effective? Why is it working this way? What do we do it? What do we do with that? How can we use that?” MANDY: Yeah. AARON: No, I think it's a super interesting thought. The placebo effect is a powerful and interesting concept overall. We did ourselves a disservice to not understand it. DAMIEN: Yeah. To dismiss it as if it doesn't exist. Not only does it exist, it's increasing. AARON: Hmm. DAMIEN: Because people are getting more powerful. MANDY: Yeah. I'm drinking this Zenify Stress Relief Drink. [chuckles] And does it work? I don't know, but it's delicious and you know what? It makes me happy. You know why? Because it's not alcohol. [laughter] So it's not having a negative effect on me. I'm not getting drunk and doing stupid things. Is it taking away? My stress? Eh. I mean, but I love it. I love it and it makes me feel good. It's a treat. It's a special drink. I have one a day and it's one of those things that instead of missing my case of White Claw Seltzer. I know, I know, I wasn't even a bougie – well, I wasn't even a good drinker. That's what made it a problem. [laughs] AARON: This is far too affordable. MANDY: I was not a discerning drinker, so. [laughs] No, I have my one bougie drink that I have and it makes me feel good. Does it relieve my stress? I don't know, but I don't care either. DAMIEN: Yeah. If it works, it works. One of the great things about placebos is they don't – well, I was going to say they don't have to be expensive, but sometimes it works better when they're expensive. [laughs] MANDY: Moon water is free. DAMIEN: Moon water is, yeah. But, well, it's not free actually. You had to put an effort and intention. MANDY: True. DAMIEN: And I think if you didn't, it wouldn't be as effective. AARON: Effort and intention go a long way. DAMIEN: [laughs] That's a root of magic, isn't it? MANDY: Why can't I just get paid for effort and intention? [laughs] AARON: I mean, if I put my effort and intention into this money tree. [laughter] I've always thought it would be nice if real world jobs worked like Animal Crossing. Like, “Oh, so I can just go pick some stuff up and then you're just going to give money and then we can just move on? Great.” “Now look, I dug up a bag of money. If I just plant this bag of money, I'll get more money. It's fine.” [laughs] DAMIEN: I'm trying to bridge that gap. That's such a great question like when effort and intention is so well, literally magical, why does it seem to not have the impact we want in nonmagical environments, I'll call them? AARON: Mm. DAMIEN: I asked that question because I want to know what to do about that. I want to bring magic to nonmagical environment, to city council, to retail stores. I almost named an online retail store; I don't want to name it. [laughs] But it's a city council to corporate interactions. And there's no reason you can't. Corporations are people. Governments are people. I think requires dealing with them in individually in ways that we're not used to. AARON: Yeah. It's a good question. You've got to be really thinking about… MANDY: My wheels are turning. AARON: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is effort and intention are always going to make the most effect for you because most of it is about aligning your thought processes. It's about taking the, I don't know, I'm just taking this into making the best decision I can to like, okay, if I can focus on this is my goal and my aim and what I'm after, suddenly all of the patterns emerge around that. Oh, now I'm ready for that opportunity, or oh, now this thing is working out, and oh, now this is what is working out because I've focused on my intentions and where I want to put my efforts. I think there's room for these things in other groups. Gets back to what I was thinking about ritual, about how humans are tuned for ritual to tell themselves story. We’re tuned for storytelling and ritual and all this sort of thing. So I think there's room from a tech perspective, I'm thinking about what comes to mind quickly is incident management stuff. Sorry, I'm coming off of SRECon this week so, everything's going to be around that. DAMIEN: Our apologies. [laughter] It’s all right. AARON: It was fantastic, but it's a different podcast. [laughs] But think about that, right? When you're coming in and doing instant reports, it’s so powerful is it to set the intention of the meeting, or any meeting that you have and say, “We are here for this purpose. This is what we're looking to find. We're not looking to do –” Back when Chef had lots to say about this, they'd have those things like we're not here to determine what could have, or should have happened. We're here to find out what did and move the thing. So it's all about setting the intent of that gathering and what outcomes you're after and it focuses the whole conversation can make that meeting more powerful because you've set the focus right off the bat. I think there's room for that other places, too. DAMIEN: That's such a beautiful way of saying it. You described it as setting an attention. AARON: Yeah. S: Whereas, in corporate speak, I would describe it as setting an agenda. AARON: Right, and an agenda is one thing. It's kind of like, “Hey, here's kind of the stuff we're going to do,” but to be like, “We are gathered for this purpose to [laughs] cover this thing.” DAMIEN: No, no. AARON: Right. DAMIEN: Dearly beloved, dear colleague. AARON: Right? Yeah, right. DAMIEN: We are gathered here for this purpose. AARON: Yeah. I mean, we say it this way in personal stuff, why don't we –? Like, it's useful. [laughs] MANDY: It really is. DAMIEN: Because how are you ever going to get something done if you don't know what you're there for? AARON: Right. DAMIEN: Well, you're going to get something done. If you don't have a destination, any road you take is fine. AARON: If you don't have any intention set, it's a series of meetings that could have been emails. [laughter] And then maybe that's the power of it, in a nonmagical space, is forcing yourself to go through this thought process of why am I doing this? Why are we here? What do we want to accomplish? Can probably trim so much of the cruft from all of our meetings and engagements. DAMIEN: That was my favorite sentence as a product manager: what is it you're trying to accomplish? [chuckles] AARON: I say that a lot, DAMIEN: But it is a very, very powerful question. AARON: Especially when you have children asking to use dangerous tools. [laughter] What is it you're trying to accomplish? Maybe we don't need to bust out razor blades. [laughs] DAMIEN: So from an SRE standpoint, when you get together for – what do you call that meeting? An incident review postmortem? Postmortem is a bit – [overtalk] AARON: Yeah, yeah. Post-incident report. There's a handful of names for that reason, but post-incident review. MANDY: Retrospective. DAMIEN: Retrospective, yeah. So the question is, what is it you are trying to accomplish? AARON: Right. DAMIEN: I'm trying to find somebody to blame. AARON: And not blaming. DAMIEN: I'm trying to find somebody to blame so that I look good in my next performance review. AARON: Well, that's what was so important about doing that because that's the shift we're, largely as an industry, trying to make. Finding a person to blame doesn't learn anything about what happened and will teach us nothing for next time. So if we set the intention of like, we're trying to learn from this incident and how we can improve or what we can do better, or maybe there's nothing. Maybe this was just a fluke and let's find that out. That's what we're here to learn. But we're not here to point fingers, or find a root cause because root causes are for plants. [laughter] AARON: Again, that's a whole other podcast. [laughs] MANDY: At the beginning of the pandemic, I owned zero plants. Now, I think I'm the proud plant mother of 20? [laughs] DAMIEN: Wow. AARON: That's amazing. MANDY: I know. AARON: My problem is I can't keep things alive. MANDY: Well, mostly they're all thriving because I set the intention that I was not going to mess this up. [laughter] DAMIEN: There you go. Do you give them moon water? MANDY: I do. DAMIEN: Apparently, it's working. MANDY: I do. Do we want to do some reflections? DAMIEN: Sure. Let's do it. MANDY: I'll start us off. With this conversation, we were just having about the intention and stuff. This is why I think everybody should journal, including CEOs and leaders. Get out a journal, what do you want, and then look back at some of the stuff. I don't it often, but I go back and I'm like, “Oh yeah.” Just reflecting on what you've written in the past and bringing that to the present can really help you put stock in all the things that you want and should be accomplishing. DAMIEN: Yeah. This bringing magic into nonmagical environments and journaling is part of that. A shout out to journaling. Another plug for earlywords.io that I own. Come journal with me because it is a magical thing. It is a ritual I do daily. That clears my mind. That is a practice of the listening to myself. It is a practice of letting go and not controlling what's coming out. Along with that and all the other sort of ways I know of being that I can call magic, I can call hypnotism, I can call NLP, I can call ontological coaching I've done a lot, bringing that into environments where I haven't because they're so useful there and we talked about some of the ways they are and so, we really confirmed more ways of doing that. AARON: I think the things I'm thinking about after this conversation are ritual, intention, and reflection are the big things that are standing up. I think this pandemic, for instance, and how things have changed is because I've had just so much time to have to sit alone by myself and reflect on what's going on externally and internally. But yeah. Anyway, just about setting intentions, of understanding the directions you want to go before going, making sure you're aligned with your goals, and you're not just accidentally wandering down paths that you don't want to be down and turning around and finding out your miserable 10 months later. I think I've thought a lot about the power of even small rituals just to interrupt our standard thought processes and align ourselves with those kind of things. There's been a lot from basic health stuff of here are the rituals I can go through when I'm feeling anxious and I know they'll calm me down to writing in a journal, or directing a group to [laughs] let's align our thought processes. It can be super useful. DAMIEN: Absolutely. MANDY: Awesome. Well, this has been a really fun conversation. I'm glad we just had a panel only episode and I'd love to do more of these in the future. They're really cool. We didn't come to the show with much of an agenda and hopefully, you dear listener, appreciate it. If you would like to give us some feedback, we'd appreciate it. Tweet at us. Join our Slack. AARON: Hire Mandy. DAMIEN: Tell your friends. MANDY: DM me. [chuckles] Tell your friends. DAMIEN: Tell your enemies. MANDY: Tell your enemies, too! [chuckles] We’ll see you all next week.Support Greater Than Code

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 them? JENNA: The first thing is preparation. So I have a list of questions and that time with that user isn't over until I’ve answered them. If it turns out that I walked into that room and those questions were wrong, then we stop and time to regenerate questions because I can bias them, they can bias me, we can wind up building something totally different than we set out to do, which is fine if that's the direction we went end up going. But I need to go into that time with them with that particular experience being the goal. So if I got it wrong, we stop and we start over. Now, not everybody has to do that. Some people can think faster on their feet. Part of being ADHD is I fall into the moment and don't remember like, “Oh, I wrote myself a note, but there's also” – I just read a Twitter thread about this today. I wrote myself a note, but also to remember to go back and read that note. So [laughs] all of those little things, which are why I really hold to, “I got it wrong. We're going to put a pin in this and come. Let's schedule for 2 days from now,” or next week, or whatever the appropriate amount of time is. There have been times – and I'm really lucky because my boss is so good at interviewing users so I've really gotten to learn from her, but there have been times when she'll interview a user and then it totally turns the other direction and she goes, “Well, yes, we're not building this thing we said we were going to build. I'm going to call you again in six months when I'm ready to build this thing we started talking about.” Because now the roadmap's changed. Now my plan has changed. We're going to put a pin in this because in six months, it may not be the same requirement, or the same need. There might be a new solution, or you may have moved past that this may be a temporary requirement. So when we're ready to do it, we'll talk again. But the biggest thing for me is preparation. JAMEY: I have a question about something specific you said during that near the beginning. You said, “They can bias me and I can bias them,” and I wonder if you have any advice on identifying when that is happening. JENNA: When it feels like one of you is being sold? JAMEY: Mm. JENNA: So early in my career, before I got into tech, I worked in sales like everybody who doesn't have a college degree and doesn't know what they want to do with their life does. Both of my grandfathers and my father were in sales. I have a long line of salespeople running through my blood. If I realize that I feel like, and I have a specific way that I feel when I'm selling somebody something because I like to win. So you get this kind of adrenal rush and everything when I realize I'm feeling that. That's when I know ooh, I'm going to bias them because I'm selling them on my idea and it's not my job today to sell them on my idea. I know they're biasing me when I realize that I'm feeling like I'm purchasing something. It's like, oh, okay. So now I'm talking to somebody who's selling me something and while I want to buy their vision, I also want to make sure that it makes sense for the company because I have to balance that. Like I'm all about the user, but there's a bottom line [laughs] and we still have to make sure that's not red. JOHN: So you're talking about a situation where they maybe have a strong idea about what they want you to build and so, their whole deal is focused on this is the thing, this is the thing, you’ve got to do it this way because this would make my life the most amazing, or whatever. JENNA: Yeah, exactly. Or their use case is super, super narrow and all they're focused on is making sure that fits their exact use case and they don't have to make any shifts, or changes so that it's more global. Because that's a big one that you run into, especially when you're like building tools. We have to build it for the majority, but the minority oftentimes has a really good use case, but it's really unique to them. JOHN: What's the most surprising thing you've taken away from a user interview? JENNA: I wouldn't say it's a surprise, but probably the most jarring thing was when I got it wrong the first time and when I got it wrong, I was really wrong. Like not even the wrong side of the stadium, a different city. [chuckles] Like a different stadium in a different city wrong. [laughs] It caught me off guard because I really thought that what I had read and what I understood about the company that I was working with, the customer that I was working with. I thought I understood their business better. I thought I understood what they did and what their needs would be better. I thought I understood their user better. But I missed all of it, all of it. [laughs] So I think that was the most surprising, but it was really valuable. It was the most surprising because I was so off base, but it was probably the most valuable because it showed me how much I let my bias influence before I even step into the conversation. JOHN: Is there a difference between how you think about the user when you have your product hat on versus when you have your tester hat on? JENNA: Oh, absolutely. When I have my product hat on, I have to play a balancing game because it's about everybody's needs. It's about the user's needs. It's about the business' needs. It's about the shareholders’ need. Well, we don't really have shareholders, but the board's needs, the investors’ needs. And when I'm testing, I get to just be a tester and think about what do I need when I'm doing this job? What solves my problem and what doesn't? What's interesting about testing and not every tester is like this, but I certainly am. I mentioned that I like to win. Testing feels like winning when you find bugs. So I get to fill that need to win a little bit because I'm like, “Oh, found one. Oh, found another one. Yes, this is awesome!” I get really excited and I don't get to be that way when I'm product person, but when I'm testing person, I get to be all about it. [laughs] JAMEY: I love that. That's so interesting because to me as a developer, I get a similar feeling when I fix bugs. I feel crappy when I find bugs, [chuckles] but I get that feeling when I fix them. So it's really interesting to hear you talk about that side in that way. I like it. JENNA: Have I ever shared with you that I think developers are like dogs and testers are like cats? JAMEY: Elaborate. JACOB: Let's hear it. [laughs] JENNA: Okay. So I like dogs and cats. That's not what this is about. JAMEY: I like dogs and cats, too. So I'm ready to hear it. [laughs] JENNA: Dogs are very linear. If you teach a dog to do a trick and you reward them in the right way, with the exception of a couple of breeds, for the most part, they'll do that for you on a regular basis. And dogs like to complete their task. If they're a job, because a lot of dogs, they need jobs. They're working animals, it's in their DNA. If their job is to go get you a beer, they're going to go get you a beer because that's their job and they want to finish their job. Cats, on the other hand, with the exception of their job of catching things that move for the most part, they are not task oriented and really, a cat will let a mouse run past it if it's just not in the mood to chase it. It's got to be in the mood and have a prey drive and they don't all. So a cat, you can teach them a trick and if you reward them the right way, sometimes they'll do it and sometimes they won't. Some breeds of cats are more open to doing this than others. But for the most part, cats are much more excited about experimentation. So what happens if I knock on that glass of wall water? What happens if I push on that? What happens if I walk up behind you and whack you in the back of the head? They're not doing it because they're mean, they're doing it because the response is exciting. The reaction to their input in some way is exciting to them as opposed to finishing tasks. Because if you've ever had a cat catch a mouse, they're actually sad after they have caught the mouse. The game is over, the chase is done. It's not fun to give me the mouse; it's fun to chase the mouse. So testers are a lot like that. The chase and the experimentation are a whole lot more fun than the completion. When I find a bug, that's the chase, that's the good part of it. That's like, “Oh yeah, I tracked it down. I figured it out. I found the recreate steps.” After I found the bug, it's not as fun anymore. [chuckles] So I’ve got to find the next one because now I'm back on the hunt and now that's fun again. Dogs on the other hand, it's like, “Oh, I finished the task. I'm getting my reward. I get to cross this off. My list feels really good” Very different feedback. So I think that's part of it is that devs love to finish things and testers love to experiment with things. JOHN: Yeah. JAMEY: I think that's really insightful. JOHN: Yeah. [laughter] JAMEY: I'm like a I put something that I did on my to-do list so that I could cross it off and it feels like I did something kind of person. [laughter] JACOB: I think we, at least I was, early in my career kind of trained to have that mindset and trained away from no, we're not here to like experiment with the newest and coolest thing. We're just trying to ship features. We're just trying to fix bugs. We're just trying to finish the task. Please do not be overly experimental just for fun, which is an over simplification because everyone needs to be creative at some point. But I totally agree. JENNA: Well, and testers do have to balance that, too because there is such a thing as over testing and you hit this tipping point where it becomes wasteful and you move from I've delivered valuable information to now I'm creating scenarios that will never happen. Yes, a user can do pretty incredible things when they want to, but we can only protect from themselves to a point. Eventually, it's like okay, you've reached that tipping point now it's waste. [laughter] JOHN: Yeah. I remember some research that came out recently that if you call the cat and it doesn't come, it understands what you're asking for and it's like, “Nah.” JENNA: Yeah. Maka not so much. But Excalipurr, when she's sleeping, she’ll hear you. That cat is out cold. She has zero interest in what you're saying, or doing. Nothing is going to disturb her well-earned slumber. [chuckles] JACOB: I'm kind of amazed how like my cat is just easily disrupted by the smallest noise when awake and then when he's sleeping, he's dead to the world just like you said. He clearly can't hear it, or if he is, there's something switched off in his brain when he's sleeping, because he's a total spaz when he is awake. [laughter] JENNA: I don't know. I think my vet could explain it better. He actually walked me through what happens in a cat's brain when they were sleeping. I don't remember why. I think we were waiting for a test to come back, or something and he was just killing time with me. But there was this whole neurological thing in their brains that looks for certain inputs and even biochemically, they're wired to certain sounds that are things that they should get awakened by and other things, it's like yeah, that matter. For some reason, though my cats have weird things that they're really tuned into. If you knock on the door, Excalipurr—we call her Purr—will go bananas. She is furious that someone has knocked on the door. Same thing if something beeps like microwave beep, the sound of if I've got a somebody on speaker phone and their car door opens and it beeps, she is mad. She could be dead asleep and she hears that and she is furious. But otherwise, nothing bothers her. She's out cold. [laughs] JAMEY: I also hate when people knock on my door so I can relate to that. JOHN: Yeah. JENNA: Don't come to my door if I'm not expecting you. JACOB: Yeah. JENNA: Also don't call me if I'm not expecting you. [laughs] JAMEY: I have exactly one person I open the door for. His name is Joe and he's our neighborhood person who comes and collects everyone's bottles and cans. But I recognize the cadence of his knocks so that I can answer the door for him and not other people. [laughter] JOHN: So you said earlier that working with ADHD, you had to develop some sort of techniques for how to handle that well in your life. Do you want to talk more about that? JENNA: I don't know if I would say I handle it well, but I handle it. [laughter] Most of the time. Typically, I do you pretty well. So I have lots and lots of alerts for myself. Because as I mentioned, I'll write myself a note, but you still have to have the – somebody said the name of it today and I forgot what it was, but there's a type of memory that tells you to like, “Hey, go look at your notes that you created for yourself,” because you can write the notes, but forget that the notes exist and never go look for them again. So I have lots of like alerts and alarms that tell me like, “Hey, go do this thing. Take your meds. Check to make sure that you have everything you need on the grocery list.” I have a couple of times a day that I have a reminder to go check my to-do list [chuckles] because otherwise, I just won't remember. I'll put the system into place and forget that the system exists and even with those helps, sometimes it'll just slip by especially I'm busy during those alerts. But I try really hard to use those. The most effective thing for me, though is definitely my medication. I was chatting about everybody before we started and I mentioned that because of supply delays and all of the rules around how early you can refill and the rules around not being able to transfer your script from one pharmacy to another and all that kind of stuff, I was without my medication for let's see Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, because I didn't get it until midday yesterday and I was sick. So [chuckles] too many factors at one time that I was just not at all functional over the weekend. I forgot steps in what I was cooking. I forgot things on the grocery list. I couldn't stay awake. That was probably more being sick but. So for me, that's probably the most effective thing. Also, just as a note for those of us assigned female at birth, I that ADHD symptoms get worse [laughs] as we hit 40 and up that all of the hormonal stuff winds up interacting with how our attention is, because I couldn't figure out why my dose had to go up. I was like, “I've been on it forever. Why do we have to raise the dose?” And she's like, “Well, there's some things going on,” and I have a feeling it's all about premenopausal stuff, because for those who don't know, I'll be 40 in June. Not a teenager anymore. [laughs] So all sorts of things that I need to keep it all in balance and things that I'm learning about being in my age group and having ADHD that nobody talks about because of the assumption that ADHD is something only children have and that ADHD is something that you grow out of. When you don't grow out of it; it just kind of changes. And that it's not just men and people who are assigned male at birth that there's a lot of us out there, varying genders. We’ve got to talk about it more because a lot of us feel like we're wandering the wilderness, trying to figure out what's on in our heads. [laughs] JOHN: Yeah. I remember hearing recently that ADHD and ADD present differently in AFAB people and so, it goes underdiagnosed because of that. It doesn't show up in the classical symptom lists in the same way. JENNA: Yeah. So the classic symptom list was developed around pre-pubescent and puberty age boys and in girls, it doesn't tend to present as not being able to sit still. Although, there's still definitely some of that. It presents more in being like a Chatty Cathy as they say like, “Oh, they talk all the time.” So it presents differently and as we get older and all of the other like stuff starts to factor in, AFAB tend to get identified instead as borderline personality disorder, or bipolar as opposed to ADHD, or even anxiety as opposed to ADHD. Because when you feel like your brain is going a mile a minute, it makes you anxious. So they give you an anti-anxiety medication instead of dealing with the fact that you feel like you can't keep up with your thoughts. There are so many different factors there, but we're learning a lot more about the presentation of ADHD and autism in people who are assigned females at birth. JOHN: Yeah. I don't know a ton about the history of the diagnosis and everything, but I can assume well, because it’s the society we live in that there's a giant pile of sexism going on in there, both in who is studied and who they cared about succeeding in classical schooling and the work environment and all sorts of biases up and down the hierarchy. JENNA: Absolutely. There's both, the medical misogyny, but also the socialization because there's an expectation of good girl children and the behavior that girl children should display. So we are socialized to force ourselves to sit even if it means sitting on your hands. You're socialized to doodle instead of wiggling because good girls sit still. So there's all of that kind of stuff that plays into it, too. Even things like if you develop a special interest, which typically people associate with autism, but certainly has some crossover with ADHD because they're very closely related. You learn to either hide that special interest so you just don't talk about it, or you become that person that has the weird quirky thing because ADHD girls are always quirky, right? [chuckles] They're a quirky girl. There's no neurodivergence there. They're just quirky. They're just different. I guess, in many ways, I was kind of lucky because my mom taught autistic, intellectually disabled, and other disabled early childhoods. So she identified early, like kindergarten, that I was probably ADHD. I was dealing with it like really early. Also, she had this kind of belief about raising kids without gender, but also not doing it very well. So I wouldn't say it was a successful thing. [laughs] So let me tell you, we didn't have girl toys and boy toys. We had building blocks and stuff like that. We weren't allowed Barbies. We also weren't allowed Hot Wheels. Very gender in neutral things. But when, as a teenager, I dressed really androgynous, I was told to put on a dress because she is a girl. So I don’t know. [laughter] It didn't really work. But I think that a lot of that played into me being identified really early. I'm probably getting off track, but the benefit of is that I learned a lot about it from an early age and I was able to develop systems that work for me from an early age. Most people who are assigned female at birth don't get the benefit of that. My hope is that our kids, I don't have any kids, but to the people my age that have kids, my hope is that their children are being identified earlier so that they are able to get those systems in place and be more successful in the long term. JACOB: I'm autistic and sometimes I think about the fact that I think that my white male privilege let me get away with some of the less great behaviors that came naturally to me and did not force me to develop masking skills until much later in my life. So when you were talking about that, I can sort of relate to that by the opposite that that's making a lot of sense to me, that I could see how all these sort of societal pressures to sit still and behave weren't put on me. I was just encouraged to just be a weird individual and be myself and how that wasn't put on me in places where maybe it probably should have been. So that makes a lot of sense. JENNA: I have to say, though, I think I've forgotten how to mask COVID has definitely killed masking for me. I have completely forgotten how to make small talk. [laughs] JACOB: Yeah, me too. JENNA: [laughs] I can't do it anymore. I've also forgotten how to fix my face. I was never great at fixing my face. Everything I'm thinking, feeling wears on my face, but I'm even worse at it than I used to be. [laughs] JAMEY: I also struggle with fixing my face, but I've actually been finding that I love wearing face masks in public because I can interact with someone without having to worry about what my face is doing and it takes a lot of the pressure off me, I feel. JENNA: I think it does. So I have resting friendly face. [laughter] For those of you who've never met me in person, I am 4’ 10”. I'm really short. I'm also kind of wide. I'm fine with it. But little ladies in the grocery store will ask me to help them reach things because I look friendly and approachable. [laughter] But I can’t reach them any better than they can! [laughter] Sometimes they're taller than me. So face masks have allowed me to blend in more, which is really nice because I get less of random people coming up to talk to me. People will joke that I make a friend everywhere I go because people just start talking to me and I don't really care. I'll talk to them, that's fine. What I really laugh at is since I can't fix my face, I will put on a plastered-on smile and somebody will be like, “You are really mad at me right now, aren't you?” I'm like, “No, everything's fine. I'm super okay with this,” and they're like, “Yeah, you are furious so we're going to stop.” [laughs] Like I can manage an angry smile without meaning. [laughter] JAMEY: It's interesting what you said about people talking to you randomly, because I also I tend to be that, the kind of person that people talk to randomly in general. I've been having an interesting experience recently where I've been on testosterone for about a year and a half and I'm like finally hitting the point where the way people perceive me in public is different than it used to be. That got cut down dramatically immediately and in a way where people's eyes slide off of me in public. I'm not there in a way that never used to happen to me and it was really interesting realization for me to realize how much of that was the socialization that people think they're entitled to a woman's time and attention. It's not exactly what you were talking about, but it made me think of it and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. [laughs] JENNA: But it's true. It's really true. I think everyone who's perceived as a woman gets it, but gets it in different ways. I tend to get it from people who feel like I'm a safe place to go to. So little old ladies talk to me, little kids talk to me. Now to be fair, bright pink hair, little kids think I'm great. [laughter] Especially when my tattoos are showing, too. The parents are usually like, “Okay, okay. Leave them alone.” [laughter] But I'm also—no offense to anyone who identifies as male in the room—the person that men don't typically stop and talk to, or even notice. I remember I was taking four boxes of nuts to my coworkers and I think it was Fat Tuesday, or something so I was bringing in these special donuts from my favorite donut place around the corner. I had four boxes of donuts and this guy doesn't grab the door, or anything. Just leaves me to try and push the door open with four boxes of donuts. But then granted, she was gorgeous, beautiful blonde starts walking the other direction. He notices her right away, grabs the door, and opens it for her. It's like oh, okay. I've had that happen quite a few times and not to sound dramatic here, but that's part of the reality of living in a fat body that you do get overlooked by others. So the little old ladies tend to tend to gravitate towards me and then other women, men gravitate towards them. I think no matter, what women experience this and people who are perceived as women, because I do identify as non-binary. But let's be honest, people in the broader world perceive me as a woman. We all get it. We just get it very differently and in different ways, but I can't think of a single woman who hasn't experienced it in some way. JAMEY: Definitely. JOHN: Yeah. I've read so many rants frankly from women who have absolutely loved masking well in public because they don't get told to smile and they don't present as female as normal. So they don't fit into that category as much and so, they don't get that same attention. I look very male so no one ever does that to me, but I can imagine what a relief that must be. JENNA: I definitely think it is for some women, especially in super public spaces. JAMEY: I feel like I derailed from ADHD and I want to bring it back. [laughter] I did have a question I was going to ask anyway. So I'm bringing it back to that, which is that I feel like these conversations, like the conversation we're having right now about ADHD, is something that I've been seeing happening more, especially about ADHD and adults. I think it's just something that people have been talking about more the past few years in a way that's positive. I know a lot of people who were like, “Oh, I got diagnosed recently as an adult. I started on medication and I never realized this was what was making my life so hard and my life is so much easier now.” I have several friends that are like really thriving on that currently. So I guess, my question for you is that as someone this whole story you told about being aware of this much younger and being able to make all these coping mechanisms and things like this. What would your advice be to someone who's now, as an adult, realizing this about themselves and then coming to grapple with it? JENNA: Let me preface with this. I'm not one of those people who says medication is the only way; there are lots and lots of ways to manage ADHD symptoms. But I feel like the most beneficial thing you can do for your is to find a clinician that listens to you, that believes you, that doesn't dismiss your experiences because there are as many different presentations of ADHD as there are people who are ADHD. If you've met one ADHD person, you've met one ADHD person; we all have different traits. So finding somebody who is willing to hear you, listen to you, and partner with you, as opposed to try and dictate to you how to manage, how to cope is critical. Part of that is arming yourself with all the information that you can. But the other part of it is being a really, really good self-advocate and if you aren't comfortable with that kind of self-advocacy, finding somebody that's willing to partner with you to help be your advocate. I know a lot of people in the fat community who have personal advocates for medical appointments, because they feel like they're not heard when they go to the doctor. Same thing for us as people who are neurodivergent. We don't get heard all the time and if you feel like your clinician isn't hearing you and because there is a real barrier to getting a new one many times—oftentimes we're stuck with someone. Finding that person that's willing to walk with you is huge. It is really easy to find yourself in a situation where you lose control of your decision-making to a provider who makes the decisions for you, but is clever enough to convince you you're making the decision yourself. That's my biggest advice is don't fall into that trap. If something feels wrong, it's wrong. If a medication doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. There are multiple different types of medications, classifications of them, and different brands for a reason is because we all need something different. Like I went through Ritalin, Adderall, finally to Vyvanse because Ritalin and Adderall weren't working for me. Adderall worked, but it raised my heart rate. Ritalin made me feel manic. My provider listened to me when I said I feel manic. I feel out of control, and she's like, “If on the lowest dose you feel out of control, this is not a way to go.” I have a friend who has been pushed off of taking stimulants because she has a history of addiction. She has a history of addiction because she's ADHD and she was self-medicating. It took four different providers to finally get to somebody who said, “Yeah, the stimulants are what worked for you.” The non-stimulant options weren't working, but she had to go and demand and demand and demand and it was the only way to get heard. So I probably got on a tangent there, but self-advocacy, finding someone who will work with you, and getting an advocate if you don't get hurt. JAMEY: I think that advice will be really helpful for people. So thanks. JOHN: Yeah. JENNA: I'm always very worried that I'm going to cross a line and upset somebody, but it just is, right? JACOB: I don't know what line that would be. I feel like everything you said was just really empowering and I wish someone said that to me 10 years ago, honestly. JENNA: I hope it's helpful, but I've had people who haven't realized that even though they're an adult, because they're neurodivergent that they are forever a child. JACOB: Yeah, I know. JENNA: So their opinion, their experience doesn't matter, it's invalid, and those are the folks that sometimes get really upset when I talk about self-advocacy. That's a big personal journey to realize that hey, you are a grown up. You make these decisions. [laughs] You are allowed to be an adult now. In fact, you need to be an adult now. JAMEY: That's also very insightful, I think. JOHN: Yeah, and interestingly, it ties in with – so my company had an event for Black History Month. We're a healthcare company, we have a lot of clinicians of color and they put together a panel discussion about Blackness in a healthcare context and literally one of the panelists was talking about how do you cope with there's still prejudice, there's still people joining medical school right now that believe that Black people don't experience pain as strongly as other people. How do you deal with that? They said almost literally the same thing. You take advocates with you to your medical appointments so that you can have more opinions. You can have someone to help fight for you, someone to help make those arguments, and point out things that you might not be noticing at the moment about how the provider is acting, or just to give you that moral support to actually voice your like, “Hey, what, wait, wait, wait, this is not right. Let's back up and talk about this again.” So I think that advice is important in so many intersections that I'm glad you laid it out like that. JENNA: It's a really interesting conversation that I wound up having. I've had sleep problems my whole life and by the way, if you're ADHD and you have sleep problems, you're not alone. It's a pretty common symptom [chuckles] to have disrupted and disordered sleep partly because our brains get bored and then we wake up. Our brains don’t know how to focus on sleep. Interesting study that somebody's undertaking. But my neurologist that I see for sleep asked me to be part of a panel conversation with a team of doctors and they basically asked me questions about being ADHD and having sleep issues. And one of the things that these doctors had never really considered is that I know enough about my own body and my own sleep to know why all of the things that they've suggested haven't worked. One of them was like, “Did you try having more potassium?” I remember I just stopped myself and I said, “Listen, my parents have told me stories of how I wouldn't sleep as an infant.” We're talking about somebody who was sleeping 2, or 3 hours a night as a toddler. This is not a new thing. This is not insomnia. This is not stress related, stress induced sleep loss. This is a chronic medical condition. I said, “If you think that I haven't tried more potassium, having peanut butter at night, turning off devices an hour before bed, not watching TV before bed, not reading before bed, using the sleep training apps, going for a sleep study. If you think I haven't done this stuff, I don't know how to help you, because if you think I've made it this far in my life without trying anything, we have a whole another conversation to have.” It's the same thing. I'm going to say this and it's going to sound really hurtful to providers, but they think that we were born yesterday and until that change, we just have to keep proving them wrong. JAMEY: I think that you won't probably hopefully hurt the feelings of providers who aren't like that. Because my suspicion is that providers who aren't like that are like, “God, I know.” [laughter] JENNA: I hope so. I hope so because they're patients, too. I really wonder what it's like for them to go to a doctor. JAMEY: Yeah. I didn't want to totally derail into a different conversation again, but I just want to kind of note that this all really resonates with me also as a trans person, because I know way more about trans healthcare than doctors do. [chuckles] So I go in and I say, “This is what we're going to do because I know all about this,” and my doctor's pretty good. He listens to me and he works with me, but he says like, “Cool, I don't know anything about that so sounds good,” and it's just wild to me that I have to learn about all of my own healthcare to do healthcare. JENNA: Yeah, which that's a whole another conversation about how important it is to – like we talk about diversifying tech, which is important, but we also have to diversify the community. Until there are trans clinicians, until there are more Black clinicians, until there are more assigned female at birth clinicians, we are going to continue to find ourselves in these situations and we're going to continue to find ourselves in dangerous situations. I think about—getting off track for a second because that's what I do. I live in Cleveland. Well, I don't live in the city of Cleveland, but Cleveland is my nearest metro area. I’m 10 minutes outside of the city. Cleveland has one of the worst infant and maternal mortality rates for Black women in the country. We also have some of the lowest numbers of Black OB-GYNs in the country. There is a direct correlation there. No offense to my white men, friends, but all of these white men sitting here in their ivory tower guessing at how they're going to solve this problem while at the same time women like Serena Williams nearly die in childbirth because they don't listen to her. It's like, so you're going to come up with these solutions when you're not even listening to some of the most educated and informed patients that you have? It's why there's a whole coalition of Black women in Cleveland that have started a doula organization that they're becoming doula to support other Black women in the city because they don't feel like the medical community is here for them. It's the exact same thing. Like until we have this diversity that's so needed and required, and reflects patients, people are going to die. JAMEY: Yeah. On the flip side of that, when you do have a provider that shares your background in that way, it's so empowering. My new endocrinologist is trans and the experience is just so different that I couldn't have even fathom how it was going to be different beforehand. [chuckles] JENNA: That's amazing, though. That transforms your care, right? JAMEY: Yeah. Totally. JENNA: But it all comes back to what I said about how I care deeply about the human [chuckles] because this is all the human stuff. [chuckles] JOHN: Yeah. JAMEY: So what we like to talk about here on Greater Than Code, the human stuff. JENNA: That's why I love Greater Than Code. [laughs] I can't help myself, though. Whenever I say human stuff, or think about human stuff, I think about Human Music from Rick and Morty. [laughter] That whole thing has always stuck out in my mind. [laughs] Just look up Human Music from Rick and Morty and you'll get a giggle. [laughs] JAMEY: I think it's a great time to do reflections. What do you think? JOHN: Yeah, I can start. I think there's probably a ton I'll be taking away from this. But I think what struck me the most is right at the beginning when you were talking about your superpower, you talked about yourself as a super human, not super human, but as a just super human, just you're really human. All of us are, but we don't think of ourselves that way. I just love that framing of it as just that I'm here as a human and I'm leaning into it. I really like thinking that way and I'll probably start using that term. JACOB: I related really hard to the forgetting how to mask situation since COVID. I don't know if that's a full reflection, or not, but I relate really hard to that. JAMEY: I feel like in a way my reflection is so general, I think it's so great to talk about stuff like this. I think that it's really important. Like I was kind of saying about we have more people realizing things about theirselves because people are just more are open about talking about this kind of topics. I think that that's really amazing and I think that when people like Jenna come on shows like Greater Than Code and we can provide this space to have these kind of conversations. That, to me feels like a real a real privilege and I almost can't come up with a more specific reflection because I hope people will listen to the whole show. [chuckles] JENNA: What's been really amazing is getting to talk about whatever just feels stream of consciousness in this conversation has connected a lot of dots for me, which is really neat because outside of tech, for folks who don't know, I'm a deacon at my church, which is also a very human thing because I provide pastoral care to people who are in the hospital, or who are homebound, or who are going through crisis, or in hospice care, or families who have experienced a loss. All of these things interconnect—the way that I care for my community, the way that I care for my broader community because I have my church community, I have my tech community, I have my work community, I have my family. All of these very human spaces are the spaces that are most important to me. If you are my friend, you are my friend and I am bad about phone calls and stuff, but you are still somebody who's on my mind and if something happens, I'm your person. You just message me and I'm there. It all interconnects back to all of these like disparate ideas that have just coalesced in one conversation and I love that and that makes my heart very full. JAMEY: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything that you want to plug? JENNA: So I have a couple of talks coming up. At InflectraCon, I am doing a risk-based testing talk and Agile Testing Days, I am doing a workshop on test design techniques. If you came to CodeMash, it's that workshop, it's fun. Support your local testers! That’s my big plug. Support your testers! [laughter] JAMEY: Think about them as the experimental cats. I think that will be helpful for people. [laughter] JENNA: Yes! [laughter] JAMEY: Thank you so much. This was great! JOHN: Yeah, I loved the last line of your reflection. That was beautiful. JENNA: Aw, thank you.Special Guest: Jenna Charlton.Support Greater Than Code

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 tell you all of those things, but then you'll ask me like, “Where's the club?” And I was like, “There's a club here?” Because that's not what I'm looking for. That's not the experience that I'm looking for. So I would dare say every place is exactly what you're looking for, what you want it, what you need it to be. CASEY: We're talking about the news a little bit here and it reminds me of social media, like the addiction to news, the addiction to social media. In a way, it is an addiction. Like you keep going to it when you're bored, you just reach for it. That's the stimulus, that’s your dopamine. I think of both of those, news and social media, as a cheap form of being connected to other humans. A bad, low quality, not a deep connection kind of thing. But what we all would thrive if we had more of is more connections to others, which like community, authentic relationships with people. But that's harder. Even if you know that and you say that's your goal, it takes more work to do that than to pick up Facebook app on your phone. I deleted it from my phone six months ago and I've been happier for it. [laughter] NYOTA: Like delete, delete? Like delete? CASEY: Well, it is on my iPad in case I have to post a shirt design into a Facebook group. I'm not gone gone, but I'm basically gone and I know that I don't interact on it and it's boring. I don't post anything. I don't get any likes. I don't even want to like anyone's post and they'll say, “Oh, you're on.” I don't do anything. Like once every three months, I'll post a design. NYOTA: Is that for every social media channel? CASEY: I'm still on Twitter. NYOTA: Twitter. CASEY: I'm still on Twitter and LinkedIn kind of for business reasons. But if I could drop them, I think I would, too. NYOTA: Did you say if you could? CASEY: If I could drop them and not have business repercussions. NYOTA: Mm. DAMIEN: This sounds like a great idea to make more profitable. NYOTA: [laughs] I'm thinking does a lot of your business come from –? I feel like LinkedIn is social, but. CASEY: I wouldn't say that I get new business from these necessarily, but I do end up with clients and potential clients and people I've talked to before saying, “Ph, I saw that thing and now that I saw you wrote a blog post about doing surveys for an engineering org, now I want to talk to you.” NYOTA: Mm, okay. CASEY: Like that is pretty valuable and when I'm writing something like a blog post, I want to put that somewhere. But anyway, I am happier that I'm off of Facebook and Instagram, which I wasn't getting as much value out of. Other than connection to people, the shallow connection to people and instead I switched to messaging people. I have text message threads and group chats and those are much more intimate, much more stuff being shared, more connection to those individuals. NYOTA: I agree with that. What about you John? Like what is your relationship with social media right now? JOHN: So I've always been sort of arm’s length with Facebook. So it's been just like eh, I check in every week, maybe just sort of see. I scroll until I lose interest, which is 10 minutes the most and then those are my updates. That's all I see and then occasionally, I'll post a meme, or something. I don't really do a lot there. Usually, I keep it around just for the people that I'm in touch with that are only on Facebook and I only have connection to them. But you bring up an interesting point about there's a positive and a negative to being able to filter your social media. For example, with Reddit and Twitter, you only see the stuff for people you're following and/or the subreddits that you're subscribed to. So you can very much customize that experience into something that isn't full of most of the crap people experience on Twitter, or Reddit. So there's that positive there because you can craft a world that's maybe it's all kitten pictures, maybe whatever, and post about programming, whatever it is. But you do have the problem of filter bubbles so that if you are in something that's a little bit more controversial, you do end up with that echo chamber effect and lots of people jumping in, or if you're in a sub that's interesting to you, that's also very contentious and the threads go off the rails all the time, but you can control that. You can see like, “Well, no, get it out of here. I don't need to deal with that static.” I rely on that a lot to sort of focus in on what I'm using it for, whether it's keeping up with specific friends, or specific topics and then trying to filter out as much of the things I don't want as possible. NYOTA: Is Facebook's your only social media channel? JOHN: No, I'm on Twitter. I don't usually post a lot, usually just retweet stuff and read it. NYOTA: That's kind of lame a little bit. I'm not saying, I’m just saying that your social media choices – [laughter] DAMIEN: Wow. NYOTA: But I think you're are right, though. I'm a lot better off for it because I did find myself going down a social media rabbit. It was easy for me to cut off the news. I actually stopped watching the news in 2007 when I became an officer. They were like, “As an officer, you have to watch the news. You have to be aware of what's going on in the world,” and I was like, “Oh, okay,” and then I walked away from that lady and I was like, “I'm not watching the news anymore.” DAMIEN: Hmm. NYOTA: Because I felt like she was trying to trick me in some kind of a way, but you get what you need. If it's something that I need to know, it comes to me it. It comes to me like. Believe me, it'll come to you. She was a little bit too adamant about what I needed and how the news was a part of it. It just felt a little not right and so, I actually stopped. DAMIEN: The news is a very specific thing like that word, the news [chuckles] Is anything new about it? [chuckles] The news is a group of organizations, a group of media organizations that are all very much alike. The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC. These are all organizations that operate the same, they cover the same things, and they do them in largely the same way along of course, some political partisan differences. But it's not new and for most people, it does not serve them, or inform them. NYOTA: Yeah. It's very divisive. DAMIEN: I used to get my news from Jay Leno. [laughter] That was better than CNN more and funnier, too. NYOTA: That part. [laughs] I think it's just interesting how it's such a whole world with a whole bunch of people with various levels of experiencing, bumping into each other, and like you're saying, this is what everyone's reporting on. Nothing else happens? Nothing good happens anywhere else? CASEY: Yeah. NYOTA: Nothing? See, that's not true. [laughter] Like that can't be real for me and so, I'm not going to be able to include that in where I spend my time. JOHN: Yeah. I used to have NPR on in the car whenever I was in the car, I was like, “Oh, it'll keep me inform,” blah, blah, blah. But eventually, I was like, “You know what? They still talk about the same crap. They're just from a perspective I agree with slightly more.” But even when they do human interest stuff, or stuff that isn't about a war, or some sort of crisis in Washington, it's still so negatively biased. Even the stuff that's theoretically positive, it still has this weird you should be concerned about this vibe to it and eventually, I was realizing that there's no room for that in my life. DAMIEN: Yeah. We talk about how harmed full Facebook is to society and individuals. But this is not again, new. [chuckles] Facebook optimizes for engagement, which causes harm as a byproduct. It's the AI-fication of what media has been doing ever since there has been mass media. NYOTA: Yeah. It's interesting because there was a moment in there. So I even got on social media because I was always gone. I lived wherever I lived while I was in the military and so, it was a way to let my family know, “Okay, I'm here. Look, I ate this.” [chuckles] All of those things. So there was a part where Facebook made a drastic turn on my feed and I was like, “Ohm this is so bad!” And then I was like, “Okay, wait, wait. Who's bad? Who is this coming from?” So I cleaned up my whole Facebook feed and then it became a happy place again and then now where it is, it's a place where it's only seven people out of the thousand Facebook friends I have. I was like, “Okay, well that's not it either. That's not it.” So it's just interesting how AI has such a impact of what we listen to, or what we talk about. So now it's these days I'm like new shoes, new shoes, new shoes. Because I want that to come up on my – I don't even – you know what I'm saying? Because I know that you're listening, so I'll get it later. So now I almost treat it like an administrative assistant so I can look it up later. [laughter] CASEY: Hilarious. NYOTA: Yeah. JOHN: Please target some ads around shoes to me. NYOTA: I did. Yeah, because they're listening. CASEY: And it works, doesn't it? I know. NYOTA: Yes. CASEY: I know it works. NYOTA: Yes. CASEY: That still blows some people's minds. If you could say the name of a product and you'll see it the next day. If you have your ads on, it's listening and your phone is listening. Everyone’s phone is listening. NYOTA: Yes, yes. Because you're looking at something like – I don't even really listen to the music. What is it? Spotify! And then it's like, you're listening to Spotify, but why is my mic on? You want to hear me sing the song? Why does my mic have to be on? I don't understand that part. Like why? They'll be like, “Oh, she has a great voice on her.” Is that why you're listening? [laughter] Why are you listening? I don't understand that part. So I don’t know. DAMIEN: There’s a deal coming your way. NYOTA: [laughs] Come on. Let's go. JOHN: I assume the public reason for it is so that you can do voice searches and like, “Hey, play me some more Rebecca Black,” or whatever. But who knows what else they're doing with it once you've got it turned on, right? It could be whatever. DAMIEN: Actually listening in on people is not the technically most effective way of getting those results. If you say the brand name of a shoe, it's probably because the people around you are talking about it and what do they search on Google? What ads have they seen? It's easier to say, “Oh, you're in the room with these people who are interested in these things,” or “You're in conversation with these people who are interested in these things. Let me show you these things without honing through massive amounts of audio data.” CASEY: Yeah. Both are possible and that one's easier. I'm sure they both happen and at what frequency, that's hard to study from beyond outside, but we know it's all possible and we know it's happening. If this is news to anyone listening, you can look this up. There are a million articles about it and they explain why and how, and some people did some empirical tests and I don't have any handy, but I've read it over and over and over on the internet and the internet's always right. NYOTA: That's what I heard [laughs] and not from the news. CASEY: I have these Google Home Minis in my house and all of them, the mics are off. So if ever the power cable gets jingled, it says, ‘Just so you know, the mic's off and I have to say it for a really long time. This is a very long recorded message. So that you'll want to turn your mic back on,” and it says that. Can you believe it? [laughter] DAMIEN: That's not the actual text of the message, right? I have to check. NYOTA: These little home speakers are cool in all the worst ways, but the best ways, too. So my Alexa, I'll be asking her whatever and then I'll say, “Thank you, Alexa,” and she'll say, “You're very, very, very, very welcome,” like she's singing, yes. [laughs] DAMIEN: Wow. You people have corporate spying devices in your homes. It’s unbelievable. NYOTA: But you have one, too. It's just your phone. So we all have them. DAMIEN: Yeah. She promises me she doesn't listen unless I ask. NYOTA: That's what mine said! CASEY: Mine said it! [laughter] I don’t trust them either. I don't even trust that the mic off necessarily works. Part of me is tempted to go in and solder the mic off. I never want the speakers to have the mic. I will not use that feature at my house. But I do want speakers in every room enough that I'm willing to take the risk of the switch not working. NYOTA: Yeah. At this point, I think I've just big brothers watching, or at least listening, [chuckles] Big brother really like, “Oh, I need to turn that off. She's talking about the big brother. We’ll blush over here.” [laughs] CASEY: I want to go back to something I was thinking on the news. Sometimes I hear, or I know about things in the world because I'm someone who's in the world sometimes and the topics I want to hear in the news don't always come up. Like, DC Rank the Vote is happening and there was eventually an article about it and another article. I wrote one, eventually. Anyone can be a freelance journalist. So if the news isn't covering stuff you want it to. NYOTA: I like that. CASEY: You can literally write the news, too. NYOTA: Mm. CASEY: They might even pay you for it. DAMIEN: [chuckles] You can write the news, too. Say it again, Casey. CASEY: You can write the news, too. There's a really cool freelance journalism guide, that I'll put in the show notes, by someone in D.C. Chelsea Cirruzzo, I think. I didn't pronounce check that, but she wrote an awesome guide and it led me to getting an article published in Greater Greater Washington, a D.C. publication about ranked choice voting. I was like, “Why is no one talking about this? It's happening here. It's a big problem.” So I wrote about it. Other people write about it, too and they have since then, but you can be the change you want in the world. You can. Journalism is not as guarded and gated as it might seem. NYOTA: That's so interesting because I think what's interesting is we know that. We know that we can contribute, we know that we can write, but then you're like, “Wait, I can contribute! I can write!” CASEY: Mm. NYOTA: So I think that’s, thank you for that reminder. CASEY: Yeah. But the how is hard and without a guide like Chelsea's, I'm not sure I would have broken in to do it. I needed her to go through it and tell me this is the process, here's the person in the org, what they do, what they expect and how you can make it easy for them, and you need the pitch to have this and that, has to be timely and like –. All that made sense. I'm like, “Oh sure, sure, sure.” But I couldn't have come up with that on my own, no way. NYOTA: But she bundled it together like that. CASEY: Yeah. DAMIEN: I would have never imagined that's a thing you can do because that's an entire degree program. That's a post-graduate degree program, if you'd like, and I see people who've been doing this for 20 years and do it poorly and they seem like smart people. [chuckles] So what makes me think I could do it? NYOTA: Because we can do whatever we want. CASEY: I mean, these publications do have editors and it's their job to help make the quality, at least meet the low bar at minimum that the publication expects. But if you are really nerded out on ranked choice voting, or something, you might be the local expert. If you're thinking about writing an article, you might be the best person to do it actually. NYOTA: Mm, that's good. That's the quota right there. CASEY: So what are you nerding out about lately? Anyone listening to this, think about that to yourself and is there an article about it you can just share? I like that. I don't have to write every article ever. If not, you can think about writing it. NYOTA: I like that. DAMIEN: And what strikes me is like where the bar is for local expert. Like I believe a 100% that you're the local expert on ranked choice voting because I know enough about ranked choice voting to know that people don't understand it. [chuckles] CASEY: Yeah. And after I wrote the article, I found a group of people and so, now there's like 10 of us at this level where we get it and we're advocating for it. But I'm one of the top 10 at that point still, sure. And there are details of it that I know, details other people know that I don't know, and we're all specialists in different nuanced details and together we're stronger and that's a community, too. It's been a lot of fun advocating for that in D.C. JOHN: That's awesome. NYOTA: It's interesting the visual that I'm getting in my head, like you're over here dancing by yourself and then you back up and they're like, “Oh shoot. Other people are dancing to this same song,” and then you look and you'd be like, “Look, y'all, we're all dancing,” but you're still the lead dancer and they're the backup. [laughter] I don't know why I got that visual. CASEY: I like this image. NYOTA: Yeah. CASEY: I want to give the other organizers some credit. I think they're the lead. But I found them eventually. I couldn't have found them if I didn't write the article probably. I looked it up. I Googled it once, or twice. They have a website, but I don't know, it didn't come up for me right away, or it did, but I didn't know how to contact them and getting into breaking into that community is its own barrier. NYOTA: That's unfortunate. But you're the lead to me. I mean, you're Casey. I mean [laughter] they're okay. CASEY: Thank you. NYOTA: I mean they're okay for what they're doing, but they're not you, so. No shade on what they're doing. CASEY: Sure. JOHN: I just posted a link to a talk by Derek Sivers about how the first followers are actually more important than the first leader and it's a fantastic talk. It's pretty short, but really amusing and it makes such a fantastic point. Like Casey, you were out there, you posted the article and then all these other people show up. So now I've got this like group of 10 and then those people – you and they are all doing outreach and they are expanding that group of people that are up to speed on this stuff and are advocating for it. So there's this nucleus and it's expanding and expanding. CASEY: Yeah, and each person we get, then they can bring in more people, too and it's a movement, it's growing. I think we'll have it soon. There's literally already a bill passed in D.C. It's passed a committee and now it's gone to the bigger committee, the whole process, but there's a real bill that's been passed some steps. NYOTA: You might as well do a TEDx. I mean, you might as well. JOHN: Yeah. CASEY: Good idea. Yeah, yeah. NYOTA: But they just let anybody do them. I have one. They just give them out. They're like, “Let Nyota do it.” “Okay. I'll just – let me do it.” You can do it. You have something to talk about, it’s the same. It's like the news. Why not you? CASEY: Yeah. NYOTA: You're already talking about it. CASEY: True. NYOTA: I mean, you get a TEDx, you get a TEDx. [laughter] CASEY: Look at this, Nyota inspiring us. DAMIEN: I'm inspired. Why not me? NYOTA: No, really. DAMIEN: I'm serious. That is not sarcasm. I mean that very sincerely. I'm thinking about all the things I want. I'm going to call Casey later on and go, “Okay. You know how to bring ranked choice voting to a government. How are we going to bring it to another one?” And I think about all the other – CASEY: Yeah. DAMIEN: I'm actually trying to bring ranked choice voting to my neighborhood council. I pushed to an amendment to our bylaws, which has to be approved by another organization, which I can't seem to get ahold of. [laughs] But we're doing it and why shouldn't we be doing it? Why not us? NYOTA: Why not? CASEY: Yeah. Oh, I've got resources to share with you. We'll talk later, Damien. JOHN: Well, that's also great because that again, is going to spread. Once the local organization is doing it, people start getting experience with it. They're like, “Oh yeah, we did it for this thing and it worked out great. Now I sort of understand how it works in practice. Why the heck aren't we doing it for the city council and for the governor?” And like, boom, boom, boom. DAMIEN: Yeah. Ranked choice voting is interesting because as much as people don't understand it, it's really simple [chuckles] and I think overwhelmingly, people need experience with something to understand it. CASEY: Yeah. Yeah. DAMIEN: And we have a lot of experience with plurality voting in this country, in my country at least. We have almost none with ranked choice voting. NYOTA: I think it's interesting how people get so excited about presidential elections and that sort of thing, but your life really happens at your local elections. CASEY: So true. NYOTA: Your quality of life is your local elections, like you're talking about these roads being trashed. Well, that's at the local. Biden and Kamala, they have nothing to do with those potholes all along this road. I think so people miss that. You're like, “Those elections are great. Presidential election, awesome.” But your local elections? Those are what matter for where you live and I'm like, “Why are people missing that?” CASEY: Yeah. DAMIEN: I think it goes back to the news. CASEY: Sure. That's a part. NYOTA: Darn you, news. [laughs] DAMIEN: Right, because national news is leveraged. NYOTA: Mm. DAMIEN: The national broadcast is made once and broadcast to 300 million people in the country. Local news does not have that leverage. CASEY: True. NYOTA: Mm. They need to get their social media presence together then because people are listening to Instagram. CASEY: I'm thinking about everyone's mental model of how change happens, too and I don't think a lot of people have a very developed mental model of what it takes to make change happen. I do a workshop on this actually and one of the examples I use is for gay marriage in the US. You can see the graph; you can look it up. We'll include in the show notes, a picture of gay marriage over time and it's like one’s place, one’s at another place, like very small amount. Just maybe not even states like counties, or some lower level, a little bit of traction, a little bit of traction, a little traction. Eventually, it's so popular that it just spikes and it's a national thing. But along the way, you might look here from the news that when it became a national thing, that's the first time, that's the first thing you heard about it. But along the way, there was all these little steps. So many little steps, so many groups advocating for it, and the change happened over time. I also think about the curve of adoption. It's a bell curve. For the iPhone, for example, some people got it really early and they were really into this thing. Like PalmPilots were really the earlier edge of smart devices. Some people had that; they're really nerdy. Some people are still holding out on the other end of the bell curve. Like my mom's best friend, she still has a flip phone and she doesn't have any interest in a smartphone. I don't blame her. She doesn't need it. But she's the lagger, the very far end lagger of on this model and to get change to happen, you’ve got to start on whoever is going to adopt it sooner and actually like get them involved. Like the smaller states, the smaller counties that are going to support gay marriage or whatever the issue is, get them to do it and then over time you can get more of the bell curve. But a lot of people think change happens when you get the national change all of a sudden, but there's so much earlier than that. So, so, so much. Like years. 30, 40, 50, a 100 years sometimes. [chuckles] NYOTA: Yeah. This is the dance that John was talking about that he posted about this. CASEY: The first follower, yeah. NYOTA: Yeah, first followers. But you get to be the first leader if you allow it. If you really want change like you're saying. Instead of looking for someone to follow, [chuckles] we get to decide how we want to live. DAMIEN: Yeah. This seems true at work. If there's a cultural norm you don't like, you can change it by getting your allies on board and aware of it, socializing it and more and more people and gradually over time and eventually, that thing's not happening anymore. Like, I don't know. An example is eating at your desk over lunch. Not the best social norm. I don't want that at places I work. I want people to take a break, rest, and be better off afterwards. But you can get it to happen gradually by getting more people to go to lunch room, or go out of the office and you can change the culture in the office with enough dedication and time if you put your mind it. NYOTA: Yeah. But what we don't get to do is complain about it. Right? [chuckles] CASEY: Mm. Whenever I have some kind of conflict, I think about do I want to accept it and stop complaining, or do something about it? NYOTA: Mm. CASEY: Or I guess the third option is neither and then I'm just frustrated. I don't like to choose that one if I can ever avoid it. [chuckles] Do something, figure out that I can do something like work on it, or accept it, which is kind of giving up. But you can't do every change you ever think of. NYOTA: No. CASEY: It's not really giving up. Acceptance does not mean giving up, but it does mean you can put your mind down and focus on other stuff. NYOTA: Yeah. That's triage. That's what that is. [laughs] CASEY: Triage. Yeah, yeah. [laughter] DAMIEN: That third option is really important because I choose that a lot. It's important to know that and acknowledge it. [chuckles] It's like, oh no, I've chosen to be frustrated. Okay. NYOTA: Yeah. Good. CASEY: And you can, yeah. Sometimes when I choose to be frustrated, it’s that I'm still working on it. I'm working on figuring out if I can do anything, or not. I don't know yet. DAMIEN: For me, it's I'm not willing to do, or figure out what it is to do, but I'm also not yet willing to accept it so I just shouldn't to be frustrated. CASEY: Sure, yeah, yeah. DAMIEN: And the frustration. If I acknowledge that and recognize that, the frustration can better lead me to go, “Okay, no.” Making the change stinks. But [chuckles] the frustration is worse and lasts longer, so. NYOTA: And then you start speaking from your frustration, which is even worse [laughs] and then it bleeds over. CASEY: Not effective. NYOTA: Yeah, it bleeds over into other things and because now you're saying stuff like, “See, this is what I'm talking about.” [laughter] No, I don’t. No, I don't see what you’re – no. Are we talking about the same thing? Because now you're just frustrated all over the place. CASEY: Yeah. [laughter] NYOTA: What are you talking about again? Are you talking about work? CASEY: When someone's in that situation, I have to ask them, “Would you like to be effective at this?” DAMIEN: Ooh. [laughter] NYOTA: Oh, that's a shank. [laughter] CASEY: They might not want to be. They might just want to vent. That's fine. It helps me set my standards, too. Like, do they want support, or do they want to vent? NYOTA: I'm going to write that down. CASEY: I mean, it sounds pointy. Here's my blunt side showing. I meant it. You can answer yes, or no. It’s why it's a question. I'm not going to give you obvious answer question. I expect one. NYOTA: Yeah. That's good right there because I'm just getting to the part where I'm like, “Do you want me to help, or you just want me to listen?” Because I'll be like, “Oh, I know the answer to this!” And they'll be like, “Oh, I don't. You always trying to help!” First of all, stop talking to me then. [laughter] DAMIEN: Can you tell my friends that? NYOTA: Right? CASEY: Yeah. NYOTA: Like don't come to me because I just want to help. I’ve got a solution and if you don't want a solution, don't talk to me. CASEY: Sure, sure. That's the kind of support you're offering. NYOTA: Yeah. CASEY: You're offering that support and if they want it, great. If they don't, sounds like you're setting the boundary. Good. NYOTA: Right, right. Oh, I don't have a – no, I have no problems setting a boundary. Yeah, no problems because the thing is this is your third time. Like at some point, you need to either want to do something, or quit talking to me about this. CASEY: Yeah. NYOTA: Like that part. CASEY: I'm pretty patient supporting friends like that, but there is a limit to the patience. Yeah, three. That sounds like pretty good. I might even go to six for some people before I start telling them no. NYOTA: Mm. CASEY: [laughs] I mean, “You have to do something, or complain to someone else.” NYOTA: Yeah. Like, are you going to do something – are we still talking about this like? CASEY: Yeah. Some people need the support, but it's not necessarily me they're going to get it from because I don't have that much energy and time to put toward that. NYOTA: Yeah. I just think that's important to, but my friends know that already. Like, don't talk to me about your allergies, or don't talk to me about your fitness, or you can't fit your clothes. For me, I don't buy new clothes because I can't fit them. I won't allow myself to do that. CASEY: Some people do. NYOTA: Yeah, so – [overtalk] DAMIEN: I'm sorry. Buy clothes you can't fit? NYOTA: No, I don't buy new clothes because I can't fit my old ones. DAMIEN: Ah, okay. NYOTA: Right. DAMIEN: I know that one. NYOTA: I only buy new clothes because I want new clothes. DAMIEN: Mm. NYOTA: I put that around myself like, it's not because I don't want to go outside and walk, or you know. But then I don't allow myself to get too thin in the other direction either, because that means I'm doing something that's probably not that healthy, like not eating real food. I will just eat potato chips and that's it. [chuckles] So I have to – like, if it's too far to the left, or to the right, then I know that I'm doing something that's not healthy. I’ve got to reel myself in. I don't have any other checkers. I'm my own self-checker. I don't have a spouse that's going to be like, “Hmm, those jeans look a little snug.” [chuckles] I don't have it. [laughs] It's just – [overtalk] DAMIEN: Well, what I'm hearing, though is it's going to be, you set a high bar for checking people. So for somebody to check you, they're going to have to be really insightful and not candy-coated. NYOTA: I don't like candy. CASEY: Yeah. [laughter] NYOTA: Yeah. CASEY: Like direct. NYOTA: Yeah, because I don't need a bunch of like, “Oh, Nyota. How are you today?!” You don't really have to be like, “Oh, so I heard what you said about that.” I don't think that – that's not right, or however the check comes, like however it comes. CASEY: Yeah. NYOTA: But I want that because I know I'm not right about everything. I know that and I don't pretend to be all-knowing. I just want somebody to kind of reel me in sometimes like reel me in. Please reel me in. [laughter] Because I'll just keep – I'm a habitual line stepper. You know what I'm saying because now I'm just going to keep on seeing what you're going to let me slide with. Even as a kid, my mom was like, “You're always everywhere.” Like, “You're always – like, “We could never find –” I was the kid that why they came out with those harnesses for kids. [laughter] That's – CASEY: What an image. NYOTA: Yeah. I'm that kid because I just want to see, I want to go look, I want to go what's over here. Like what's around. Are you going to let me slide? Are you going to let me say that one? What else you’re going to let me slide with? It's that so that's why they created those harnesses for kids like me. [chuckles] DAMIEN: Your bio says your firm thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness. What's the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness? JOHN: I was just going to ask that. I want to know! NYOTA: I think it's resiliency. DAMIEN: Mm? NYOTA: Yeah. So cybersecurity is that resiliency within organizations and then that wellness of people is that resiliency that's within humans. When those two come together, it's a healthier—I can't say fully healthy. It's a healthier work environment because when we get to show up to work healthy, resilient, drinking water, getting rest, being able to have emotional intelligence, social intelligence; all of those things are what I count as being resilient. And then when you can show up to work that way, then you're not showing up to negatively impact the network because you're not focused. You're not paying attention. You're clicking on every link because it looked like it – it seemed fine. But had you been like you had one moment of awareness to pause, you would see oh, this is not right. When I put my mouse over that, I see that the link at the bottom is not where I'm supposed to be going. So that place is resiliency at work. DAMIEN: That is an extremely advanced view of security, maybe it's from your time as an officer, but the general view of security is it's this wall you put up and you make the wall really secure, you make the wall really strong and really tall, and that way you keep everything out. It's like, well, no. Anybody who has gone to office training school knows about defense in depth. NYOTA: Right. DAMIEN: Knows you can't maintain any particular perimeter indefinitely. The French found that out to much of their chagrin. [laughs] NYOTA: Oopsie. DAMIEN: That's a Emmanuel line reference. That's not news. [laughter] To go all the way to like – and I see where you're going with this. Phishing emails don't work on people who are calm and relaxed when nothing's urgent. NYOTA: Yes. DAMIEN: Where they can go, where they can stop and think, and have that wherewithal and that energy and that reserve. NYOTA: Right, even at home. Especially how all of these scams are on the rise, Navy, federal, IRS, all kinds of people. If you're just one moment aware, you'd be like, “Wait, have I ever engaged my bank in this way?” DAMIEN: Hm mm. NYOTA: Like ever? Have they ever called me and asked me for my six digit? They called me and I didn't call them? Like, I just think if you just take a breath and then think part of being resilient is being able to take more breaths. DAMIEN: Wow. Yeah. Wow. CASEY: Ooh, I like that line. NYOTA: Yeah. We know that one of the biggest vulnerability to cybersecurity posture of anything that happens is people because we are normally that vulnerability, we're normally that weakness in the network because we are human. So anything that we get to do to reinforce ourselves, guard ourselves up, it's always going to have a positive second, third, fourth order of effects. DAMIEN: How does upper management react to that when you come in and say, “We're going to improve your cybersecurity, give your employees more days off”? NYOTA: So I'm actually new having this conversation within leadership, but they already have leadership corporations, they already have this structure in place. Just haven't heard anyone tie it together specifically to their cybersecurity posture. So there's already a lot of wellness initiatives, you can talk to counselors. I think we already have these initiatives in place, but they're just kind of ethereal, they're kind of out here, but to say, “Now tie that not just to our bottom line, because employees are less willing to have turnover, but let's tie it to the security of the network because our employees are aware and they're more vigilant.” So it's just kind of helping them to see the work that we're already doing within corporations. We get to laser focus that into a place. CASEY: Hmm. I like it that this gives way to measuring the outcome of those programs, too. You can correlate it, too. NYOTA: Yeah, instead of like, “Oh, we're happy at work. We're skipping and holding hands down the hallway.” Well, that may not necessarily be what you want, but you do want less infractions on the network. More opportunities to be successful but not having to spend so many manhours undoing cybersecurity risk. CASEY: I want to zoom out. I want to go meta with you. You're helping them become more resilient. How do you make sure your changes there are resilient? When you leave, they persist? You can Mary Poppins out and they're still the way they were before you arrive. NYOTA: Mm, that's a good question. So during the time that we work together, they also buy a bundle of coaching. They have opportunity to come back for where I can do, like, “Hey, y'all it's time for the refresh,” and not in a lame way. I'm actually creating on workshops now and it involves coloring books. Because when we were in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the places we colored, and I just feel like coloring saves lives and when I'm saying people, I'm talking about mine, because it is very calming and not those crazy ones that are really small and you have to have a pen. So I'm talking about a 5th-grade coloring book with big pictures where it's relaxing and you're talking amongst your peers. It involves that. Setting them up with skills to be able to well, if you do nothing else, make sure you're playing the gratitude game in the mornings. What is the gratitude game? I play this game with myself. Every morning when I wake up, I say three things that I'm grateful for, but it can't be anything that I've ever said ever before. DAMIEN: Mm hm. NYOTA: I play this game. It's always making you search for the gratitude, always looking for that shiny light. There's always a better today, a better tomorrow, and so, even if there's something as that and drink water, because there's a lot of things that happens when you're dehydrated. There's a lot of clarity that doesn't happen when you're thirsty and so, even if it's just those two things and reminding people, just those two things have even had an impact on my life. Do you see my skin popping? Do you? [laughter] I'm just saying. Water is your friend. [laughs] So just those, just kind of even a pop in, a retraining. Hey, remember. Remember sleep, remember relaxing, remember get up and walk around your cube, and the filter water is so much better. It tastes so much better than bottled water. I'm just, it's better. I'm holding up my filtered water. Picture here, I keep it at my desk while I work if I'm on a lot of calls in a row. NYOTA: Yeah. CASEY: I can go through water. NYOTA: And that's why you're alert. I don't think people understand that being dehydrated really makes you lethargic and you're like, “Are they talking? I see their mouth moving. I can't pay attention. What is happening. What is that?” And being dehydrated is not good. Don't do that. Just take a little sip of water. We’re talking about water, just take a little sip of your water. Go get some water. [chuckles] If you're listening, get some water. [laughs] CASEY: Reminders help. I'm going to post one of my favorite Twitter accounts, @selfcare_tech. NYOTA: Ooh. Please. CASEY: And they do a water reminder probably every day. Something like that. So I'll just be on Twitter and I'm like, “Oh yeah. Thanks.” DAMIEN: [laughs] See, we can turn social media even to our good. CASEY: Yeah. We can find some benefit. NYOTA: But we get to decide and I think that's another thing that people don't. Like, they negate the fact that you get to decide. You get to decide where your life is, or isn't. You get to decide where you're going to accept, or not accept. You're going to decide if I work at this job, it's for my greater good, or not. We get to decide that. You've already created your life up to this point. So what does it look like later? We've created this life that we have and people take responsibility for that. Who do you get to be tomorrow? Who do you get to be today? The thing is we always get what we ask for. So I've been asking for a bold community, I've been asking for a community that pushes and pulls me and here comes Casey, here comes Andrea, here comes you guys and I'm like, “I think that's so interesting.” We do get what we ask for you. CASEY: It sounds like you're manifesting the world around you. I like that word. NYOTA: Yeah. CASEY: I don't even mean it in a metaphysical spiritual sense, but even just saying. Back when I was an engineering manager and I wanted to become a PM, I told people I wanted to be a product manager and by telling a lot of people, I got a lot more opportunities than I would have. NYOTA: Yes. CASEY: Telling people was very powerful for that. NYOTA: And in my Christian Nyota way, that's what happens. Miracles come through people. So give people an opportunity to be your miracle. JOHN: So we've come to the time on our show where we do reflections, which is each of us is going to talk about the things that struck us about this conversation, maybe the things will be thinking about afterwards, or the ideas we're going to take forward. Casey, do you want to start us off? CASEY: Yeah. I wrote down a quote from Nyota. She said earlier in this episode, “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths,” and I just think that applies anywhere the word resilience applies and I want to meditate on that for over the week. JOHN: I’m right there with you. That is really sinking in and applicable in so many ways. I love it. DAMIEN: Yeah, and involving taking some breaths while you do that, huh? [laughter] I am really inspired by this conversation. The ideas of you can be the expert, you can be the journalist, you can be the first mover, the first leader. Realizing that in my life, I’m going to be looking for ways I want to apply that conscientiously. How to make sure not to try apply it everywhere. [laughs] But I get to decide. I get to decide who I am and who I'm going to be in this world and what this world is going to be like for me, so that's awesome. NYOTA: That is good. I like that one, too. And along those lines for me, it's like when Casey's like, “I mean, I knew this, I knew this, I knew this, I knew this, but when someone had created this bundle for you to be able to follow, I really heard when we do things, leave breadcrumbs so someone can come behind us and also be able to support. Because if you don't – leave some breadcrumbs. So I thought that was – she was like, “I knew these things but she had created this framework for you to be able to do it, too,” and I heard leave some breadcrumbs. So I really like that. DAMIEN: Yeah. John, do you have a reflection for us? JOHN: No, I mean, really, it's the same as Casey's. [laughs] Yeah, that statement is really going to sit with me for a while. I like it a lot. CASEY: I'm going to make a t-shirt of it. NYOTA: [laughs] I love a good t-shirt. DAMIEN: Well, Nyota. Thank you so much for joining us today. NYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored to be amongst such caring, intelligent, thoughtful people and so, I appreciate you all for having me.Special Guest: Nyota Gordon.Sponsored By:Test Double: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building *both* great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is looking for empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in JavaScript, Ruby, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a 100% remote, employee-owned software consulting agency. Are you trying to grow? Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety in projects working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/join.Support Greater Than Code

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 what I do whenever a new contributor, or a new person joins the team, that's the first thing that we kind of sit and do is, “Oh, what's our terminology. What's the level of understanding that we have with each other?” And we just spent the first few days, or weeks just establishing the shared level of understanding with anybody new in the team. It begins with something as basic as having a consistent language. So that's one of the principles. MAE: I suspected that you are going to have some more detail on that. [laughter] I'm so glad I asked and honestly, I would love to hear the outline of how to translate distributed server management to very human focused, human serving management practices. This is super cool. JOHN: Yeah. Actually, before we dive into that, there's one follow-up I'd love to get before we jump off is you have any techniques, or things that you do on a basis to verify that everyone's gotten onto that same page, that the two either individuals, or teams, or groups, or whatever have gotten to that point, or have maintained that sync on their understanding of what they're working on? ARPIT: Yeah, actually, there are a few tactical things, or signals that you pick up on. The first is going back to the basis of all human knowledge, which is the written word. At the end of a particular discussion, or a meeting that you have with somebody, if you share the meeting notes, or minutes of the meeting with the other person. Immediately, the words that are used in the minutes are typically a translation of what the writer has understood, or what the writer is taking away. If there are differences, or discrepancies in the keywords that are being used. For example, let's say, we are talking about an authentication system. In an authentication system, a user role, or a user policy in different systems might be interchangeably used. They might mean the same thing, or different things to you, or me, or whatever, but inherently, if wherever we are talking about roles—like in Google Drive, you have an editor role and a commentator role, and a viewer—versus a policy like a commenter policy, or a viewer policy. So immediately, if the writer is using the word policy, then you know that oh, the keywords that are being used are not the same. That means we're not yet on the same page. That means the writer is probably thinking of something else. They may, or may not be on the same page. We don't know yet. You kind of have to dig deeper and be like, “Oh, why did you use the word policy? What did you actually understand when we talked about the roles when we were talking about?” So the written word is the first thing that I would probably look out for. JOHN: Hmm. ARPIT: The other one is following up where you constantly have, again, it goes back a little bit with distributed systems. So a TCP handshake, the HTTP protocol that we have, a TCP handshake, it's literally a handshake. So there's a SYN and then there's an ACK. The client establishes a connection and the server then acknowledges that the connection has happened. During a conversation, you always try to get an acknowledgement from the other person that, did you understand what I just said, or am I making sense to you, or is this too complicated? So on and so forth. So you look for other signals like a head nod, a confused expression, wide eyes, or just a verbal confirmation that hey, am I making sense? Like right now, did this make sense to you guys? JOHN: Yeah. It immediately struck me that you're talking about an active listening behavior there that's verifying that the right things are being communicated. But it also struck me that meeting minutes are a larger form of active listening for the meeting and not just for an individual set of exchanges and in between two people. Thinking about it that way is actually really helpful to me because it's something I'm practicing to get better at and lumping that meeting summary under that category makes it feel better to me as a thing that I can do. ARPIT: Yeah. Meeting minutes are typically treated with a little bit of – are given, for lack of a better word, a very step treatment, step sisterly sort of treatment where it's just like, oh, this is what we talked about. But I think just if you go through a bunch of the past X meetings, you'll start to see your trend show up and overall, it represents the shared understanding of the entire group and how that understanding has evolved over a period of time. So we go back and read a lot of fast reviews just to see that oh, how have we evolved in our thought, or in our language. MAE: Another one on the initial and maybe this is going to show up in some of your later examples. I apologize if [chuckles] that's the case, but one thing I've tried to adopt, or encourage to some success is a user manual. Even though a lot of people are still figuring themselves out, generally do have an awareness of here are some ticks I have, here are some things that I respond well to, when I hear this, it makes me think that. Those sorts of translations also can go a long way. So it's very similar to your suggestion, just instead of an interpretation of what just got said, a meta level of it. ARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. And that's still the beauty of interacting with other people is that nobody gives you that user manual and with every person, it's an investigative exercise to figure your version of that person's user manual, or the persona that you are to me, like what me is to Arpit is very different from what me would be to her partner, or to her colleague, or to her parent, for example. So everybody has very different user manuals of me, or of a person and they're very different persons and for everybody that you meet, it's literally an investigation. It's a detective investigation to figure this person out and that's why I absolutely love meeting new people because it presents a new challenge. It presents like oh, what do I know of this person, or what side of this person do I know of, or are being presented to, and how can I deeper that understanding of this persona, or this person? JOHN: Yeah. That's fantastic. So you were about to go into of your overall schema for this. I'd love to hear about the rest of it. MAE: Yeah, yeah. We want to hear! We want to hear! [laughter] ARPIT: Okay. So the other one is whenever you have a group of services together, you have something called a consensus algorithm that is at play. For example, you have the Raft consensus algorithm, or the Paxos algorithm that is used. Different systems like Redis, or Zookeeper, or et cetera. Depending on the system, they choose a consensus algorithm. The one thing that is common across all these consensus algorithms is that there is basically, a leader and a follower, or a main, a node and you have other backup nodes, or follower nodes, which basically translates to, there is always a single source of truth in the system. So regardless of how many people that you are organizing, or working with, there needs to be a single source of truth. That's why I am very anti-anarchy as a governance model because I don't think that works. What works really, really well is a democracy where the backup nodes, or the followers, they elect a leader and when the leader no longer exists, maybe at the end of their term, or et cetera, the backup nodes, or the follower nodes choose to elect another leader from amongst themselves. So one of the followers gets promoted to the post of a leader and this happens in literally every single organization and every single governance model, if you will. The leader plays very critical role because the leader is literally answerable to the external system about the happenings that are happening inside the cluster. So if you try to persist data into a cluster of servers and one of the backup nodes does not perform well, or let's say, it's a rogue server, or a rogue person. You don't hold the server, or the follower node responsible. You actually hold the leader responsible and you say that, “Oh, as a leader, you didn't do your job and ensure that the data got persisted correctly. So I'm going to replace you as a leader because you no longer a good leader.” That is true of teams as well that regardless of what everybody else is doing in the team, if you are leading a team, you are responsible for their outcome. You need to take responsibility for their output and their outcome and act like that. And you are the interface for the team to the external world, because the external world will only talk to you. They're not going to talk to a hundred other people that stand beside you; they'll only talk to you. So that's the other consensus algorithms and how we elect a new leader and that's why democracy rocks. Most successful nations have democracy because it's literally the best consensus that we've come up with. The third one is the concept of independent failures. In a distributed system when you have multiple services doing different parts of the workflow. For example, if I try to initiate a refund flow. Now a refund flow needs to go to the order system, cancel the order, go to my payment system, initiate a payment refund, and then maybe talk to the notification system and notify the user that the refund is complete. So there are three different subsystems that are at play in order for the refund to actually successfully happen and this is where the concept of independent failures in a distributed system crop up. Wherein, an order system will actually be focused on accomplishing its job and it relies on the notification system to have done its job. It's not like if the notification system fails, we are going to not cancel the order. The order is canceled. So there's this shared sense of trust that a distributed system must take doing its services so that each server does its job properly and independently without necessarily having to rely on another server. This is true of people as well and this is what I tell a lot of folks within the team. The top priority is to get your job done first, without worrying about what somebody else is doing. So once you've got your job done, you've delivered what you needed to deliver, then focus on what everybody else is doing. Don't try to unnecessarily distract yourself and focus on what is X doing, or what is Y doing unless you've completed what your deliverable is, because there are other people in this shared trust model who are relying on you to do your job well. This is again, why high trust teams operate a lot more efficiently and are able to move a lot faster rather than a trustless system, or a trustless team, because of the shared sense of trust and the corollary to this obviously is the independent failure is the concept of failing early. For example, if I expect somebody else to do their job and I'm dependent on their output for me to complete my job successfully, I better have a backup plan. What happens if the other person does not, or the other team does not deliver on time? Do we have a backup? In the engineering world, people use mock data, or mock APIs so that they can get their job done and while they wait for somebody else, or some other team to deliver. Similarly for teams, or human teams as well is invariably most software projects, I think a ridiculously large number of software projects are delayed, which means that there are some teams which are almost always behind schedule. The way to kind of move forward is to always have, or formulate a backup plan for yourself, your team so that even if the other team does not deliver on time, you are still able to move forward and still have your team's output, or your personal output ready and deliverable so that you can then quickly integrate with the other team once they've given, or they've delivered their output. So you shouldn't be beholden to them and say that, “Oh, team X and delivered. So therefore, I'm stuck.” That's not an excuse. That's how we, again, large teams work well with each other. By the way, as an interesting aside, little bit tangential is something that I learned from airplane engines, or seeing how airplane engines are maintained. It's a different engineering discipline. The beauty of an airplane engine, if you ever kind of look at it, is they're geared for quick maintenance. When a flight lands, because there's a dollar cost attached to how long the aircraft is parked in the bay and the maintenance needs to happen really, really quickly, every part that can potentially fail is literally within one arm's length inside the engine of a human. So they can literally put their arm in, reach for a part, take it out, and replace it for maintenance. The deep maintenance only happens every once in a while. My learning from this was for teams is that part, or everything that can potentially fail in the entire ecosystem should literally be within one arm's length of us as a team being able to change it, or fix it. So instead of having deep processes and deep overarching fixes, as a team, always try to focus on, it's called inversion of control, or dependency, is inverting that control and saying that, “Oh, if there's something that's changing a lot, how do we ensure that we can actually change something really, really quickly and adapt to the situation versus having to necessarily fall back to large overarching code refactors, or large overarching processes that need to be hauled over versus, “Hey, what's the quick thing that we can do, what's the smallest unit of work that we can do in order to actually improve our entire system, or our process as a team”? So that was my takeaway from literally sitting in tons of flights and seeing the maintenance happen outside. JOHN: So it sounds to me like microservices are a part of that because you've got sort of smaller pieces of code that you don't have to go 15 class layers deep in defined where the thing is going wrong on You have the small encapsulated service that it's easy to get to in metaphorically. ARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. And that's why if you look at frameworks like Spring, or I think React also, I think does some parts of this is the whole dependency injection and in version of control where it surfaces. Even if there is a class that is like 15 layers deep, they actually allow you to expose it at the top level so you can just swap out your class at the top which again, sort of maps to what you're seeing in the microservices also. That you can have a cluster of lots of microservices talking in a mesh network to each other a lot, but you’re literally one git push away from changing, or improving something in one microservice, or one workflow. JOHN: Do you have anything in the same toolbox that helps manage once you have a large collection of microservices with their complex interactions, then you get that sort of next order complexity arises out of the system with emergent behavior and whatnot? Do you have anything that helps you, or the team deal with that layer of complexity? ARPIT: Sort-ish of, yes. I think this is something that was actually popularized by Spotify, the Spotify Squads, which is essentially a source code, or as an Appsmith, we call them quads, is a self-contained unit of frontend engineers, mobile engineers, backend engineers, product managers, designers, and QAs put together so that they are able to accomplish a unit of work, or they're able to take a feature from idea to production largely on their own without necessarily having to talk to other people. So if you have a lot of microservices, or a lot of different services that are talking to each other in a complex mesh network, one of the ways basically follow Conway’s law and divide the entire team, or your group of people as well to be responsible for a smaller set of microservices. Sorry, you're familiar with Conway law, right? MAE: I was going to say, I know a lot of people have done Conway's game of life and that, but in case there are people who didn't, I was going to ask if you'd be willing to go into it more. ARPIT: Yeah. Okay. So Conway’s law is actually very interesting. What Conway’s law states is that if you want to find out about the organization hierarchy, or the organization structure of a company, you actually don't need to talk to the people. You actually go look at the code that they've written, or produced because the code is a representation of the organization structure. So if you see a code base that has a lot of microservices with a lot of interfaces between them, then you can be rest assured that the entire, this company, or this organization is organized into a set of smaller teams that are communicating with each other through a shared interface, or through a shared understanding, again. On the other hand, if you see a very monolithic code base with classes randomly talking to each other, or randomly imported, or pulled into each other, then you can be rest assured that this is a much more fluid organization. It's a more cohesive large block where people are just talking to each other a lot more. A very good example of this is Jeff Bezos back in the day. This is early, early days of AWS. There's this famous memo of his wherein he went in and he is literally told everybody in AWS, or Amazon, the two large pizza rule and he said, “No team is going to be larger than what two large pieces can feed,” which essentially limited it to anywhere between 10 to 20 people, depending on their appetite. So this ended up with AWS where now every service in AWS, whether it's EC2, IAM, S3, et cetera, they are actually smaller teams that communicate with each other only via the API and he said that, “Oh, don't you dare talk to this other team without an API.” Eventually, the organization reformed itself in order to meet that code structure that Jeff Bezos wanted. So Jeff Bezos didn't say, “Oh, I'm going to change the organization structure.” He basically wanted the code, or the services in such a manner and he basically sort of – you move one lever and the other one will automatically move. So if you want to make a code change, change your teams, or you change your teams and you'll change the code, whichever you think is the lesser of the evil, or easier thing to do and just do that because the other one will automatically happen. That's the Conway’s law. So to your point about the microservices is again, organize the people and the services will automatically happen where one team handles two, or three services and just get those two, three services running with their uptime with 5 nines, 6 nines, whatever you want. MAE: I have to admit, Arpit when I read some of this description, I have this very visceral reaction to people trying to treat humans like systems and vice versa like, there's certainly things to be learned and applied across, but this is the best most humane human application of these things that I have ever heard and I'm very excited about it. Especially for how you opened up in saying your opener, I should say it more clearly, was about how people are complex and it's hard and it's more of a complexity than figuring out code and for many reasons and layers. So seeing a self-learning algorithm application of how to deal with human systems, love it. ARPIT: Yeah. No, no, absolutely and most of these things are cross-disciplinary in nature and this basically stems from the idea that the history of software is the history of teams. There is no good, or great software that is ever built by a single person, it's always built by teams of people. So it's important that the code, or the server is just the tool and you never hear, I don't know, like da Vinci ever praise his paint brush for Mona Lisa, right? The paint brush is just a tool. That's why I think focusing on the team and how teams collaborate, or how people collaborate with each other is how we will get to better and better software, to better abstraction level, layers, et cetera. Better team organization, or better people organization is how we are going to get to better software. But that in no way means that we can't learn from our engineering disciplines, or what other people have done, whether it's the aircraft industry, or what F-1 is doing to make their cars faster, or what surgeons are doing to make surgeon be safer and apply them and their processes and principles to actually running our own software teams, or tech teams itself. MAE: I have thought often about how the energy with which we build things, it does show up not only structurally, but just where it finds itself directionally. So to put that into practice is pretty cool. You're reminding me also of Jess Kerr’s RubyConf keynote, I think it's 2019. It's a collective problem solving and she's come up with this term “somathesis” and I think that you would really love her work and anybody enjoying hearing about innovation and team dynamics, and how to apply our own discipline to the human aspects back so that there really is two-way communication. We really do have an API with what we're building to ourselves. ARPIT: Nice. That sounds like a very interesting – I haven't heard her keynote yet, but I'm definitely going to give it a watch after this show. So thank you so much for the pointer. The last thing that I wanted to mention as well was when we look at again distributed systems and clusters of server, the reliability and uptime is almost always given a higher preference to simply speed, or speed of response, or speed of your SLA on how quickly did the service respond to my ACP request, or TCP request. That correlates again, very, very highly with teams and people as well, is that regardless of how good coder you are, a good an artist you are, or et cetera, if you are unreliable, or your uptime so to speak is not really there, it's very hard again, to establish that human trust. There's this this book I was reading about how SEAL teams operate because the Navy SEALs are literally the highest functioning team that exists out there and they operate in some very, very adverse conditions and there was this book about how do seals organize themselves and how do they operate. The way the SEAL team members select who's going to be on their team is where they basically draw a quadrant. If you have performance on one axis and trust on the other axis, how much do I trust this person in the middle of a firefight versus performance wise how good of a sharpshooter are you, or something like that. They'll prefer somebody who is of mediocre performance, but higher trust over somebody who is of higher performance and mediocre trust, or low trust. Because at the end of the day, when you're in an adverse situation, or when things go south, what you really want next to you is not the best sharpshooter, but what you want is somebody you can actually trust and software teams are a far cry from what the Navy SEALs do. We have very, very cushy jobs and thank God for it. But you don't want to go into a meeting with a customer, or you're presenting to your CEO in the all-hands and you have your partner who throws you under the bus when something doesn't work. There's a demo effect and things don't work and you don't want to be thrown under the bus in front of everybody. So what you'd rather do is work with somebody who is more reliable, who has “greater uptime”, again for a person, it's how quickly are they responding to you, do they communicate back that hey, I'm getting delayed on X, can we push this meeting forward? Even something as small as, “Hey, I'm running late by 5 minutes on this meeting. Can we push the meeting by 5 minutes, or 10 minutes?” That's a very, very, a small signal of reliability and trust and are invariably the people, correlation, or causation, who will actually end up getting much better performance reviews. They're the ones actually get promoted because again, consensus algorithm, they are the ones who will get elected to be the next leader. They're the people that the team trusts. So what do you want to do in any team is, if you are an engineer in a team, or a new engineer in a team, the first thing to do is not show off how good a coder you are, or how good your code is, but what you want to actually do when you're a new person in a group is establish trust. Like, can you trust me as a human? We have a lizard brain right from Neanderthals to homo sapiens to whatever is that we'd much rather be with people that we trust more than anything else in this world. Reliability and uptime and how do you be the reliable person that, “Oh, I've told Arpit to do X, we know that X will be delivered” so they can then move on and live their lives. So you want to be that person in the team. MAE: Yes! Everyone who's about to be, or is new to a team. We'll hear you say that one again. Arpit, what would you do? What would you want? ARPIT: Build trust, establish trust, forget everything else. JOHN: Definitely. MANDY: This seems like a great time to move on to reflections. Who'd like to start us off? JOHN: I can go first. I've got two things that are takeaways. One is the realization I had earlier about how meeting minutes and clear communication after some group conversation is a form of active listening and ensuring that communication has happened the way you thought it did, which is great in increasing the fidelity of the understanding throughout the team. I love that. And then the other one was, I've been familiar with Conway's law for a long time, of course. It's been around for since 70s, I think at least, maybe even the 60s. But the way you phrased it, where you were saying that you can start with the structure of the code and have that influence the teams, or you could start with the teams and have that influence the structure of the code. Just that idea that you could say, “Okay, well, I kind of think the architecture's going to end up looking like this. That means I'm going to build these teams that do these things and then that will just naturally flow out of the fact that the teams are structured that way is such a fascinating flip to the normal way of thinking about how software is going to get built in multi-team environment. So that's definitely going to stick with me for a while. ARPIT: Awesome. MAE: John, you stole mine! [laughter] Those are definitely on my list, but so many of them. I'm definitely going to re-listen to this and Arpit, I want you to write a book, or I don't know, make a movie. This is great! I love it. So I think the only thing I could add to what you were saying, John, is I loved thinking about trust in terms of reliability and uptime. [laughter] That was really well done. ARPIT: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I really, really want to write a book at some point. That's on my bucket list to kind of do short eBook someday. I hope I can do that. For me, the takeaway is literally this RubyConf talk that you shared because to be honest, I haven't heard a lot about people speaking about the confluence between engineering disciplines and team management principles and human disciplines itself. So I think that's definitely a takeaway for me is to listen to what she said and learn from what she's talking about in the keynote. MAE: And I've been saving up a reading list, too. So I’ll write you after this and we can compare some notes. Also, when you write the book, Arpit, you need to sign it as Tenacious A. [laughter] ARPIT: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. At that point, I'll probably tattoo it. [laughter] Not just sign it. [laughs] MANDY: And then you'll have to come back on the show to talk about it again. JOHN: Yes, yes. ARPIT: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. This has been a really, really fun, very free-flowing, very casual conversation. So thank you so much to all of you for doing that and for having me on the show. It has been a true pleasure. MANDY: Thank you. I just want to say my reflection was just in the beginning when you described your superpower being tenacity, I haven’t thought of that word in such a long time. [laughter] And it’s such a great word. Determination and tenacity, I love the words so that was a great takeaway for me. But again, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was wonderful to have you and we will see everyone next week.Special Guest: Arpit Mohan.Sponsored By:Test Double: 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/greaterSupport Greater Than Code

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’ve got to kind of seek it out and so, I haven't been exposed to it. So listen to a lot of FM country as I cross the vast planes of America and I've also used that to discover a lot of this rebirth that's happened in the last decade of community radio. A lot of small communities have their own low power, super local FM radio you can only pick up for 20 miles at a stretch. So if I'm passing through a town and I see a sign for K, B, C, or whatever it is for some small town, I immediately tune to it. it’s always somebody who's just like, they're not a trained professional. They never went to broadcasting school. They don't have that trained radio voice. They're just talking about sheep that got out, or here's a problem with the town water supply, or whatever it is, what local road is closed. That's just an amazing way of even as I'm passing through a place, if I'm not stopping, I kind of get a little bit of a flavor for that. AARON: Well, just thinking that FM radios generally got to give you more of a flavor for the local area that you're at. I always thought of that as the frustration of FM radio when traveling, like, “All my radio stations keep changing. I don't know where to tune!” But at the same time, that's pretty cool. I love that as a positive of what do they listen to over here? What do they listen to over this part of the country? I would imagine even just where different musical genres are on the dial would probably shift around. Or maybe not. Maybe that's just my…coming up with things, but. KERRI: Yeah. You do learn that there are some patterns, like all of the NPR stations, they're all down in the 800s and also, a lot of the religious radio and the top end of the dial seems to be a lot of rock. The big rock stations seem like 107, whatever the end, or something. The best ones, though are the ones that have local commercials because you get a lot of the same like, law firms and drugs that I don't know if I have even the condition, but I should really talk to my doctor, see if it's right for me. But then you'll get local car places, or I got one when I was down south, somewhere in Louisiana and it was for a combination, an airboat rental and barbecue joint? It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing and the guy had this amazing regional accent, which I never hear up here in the Northwest. We have our own accent, but I got a little taste of this real Southern accent and it was the owner. It was clearly the owner just reading a little script that he wrote, “Come on down and rent a jet boat, bring your dog and your dog can go on it and then we'll have barbecue waiting for you when we get off the dock,” and I'm like, “I'm sold.” Like, “I'm going to turn around, go see this guy right now. This is amazing,” and I actually have that business. I keep a map of every interesting place I hear about as I travel and I put a pin there I'm like, “Someday, I'm going to be coming back by this place and I'm going to be hungry for lunch and I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop here.” So advertising works, I guess, is what I'm saying. JAMEY: Will you share that map with us? [laughter] KERRI: I really should. I really should. It's a lot of fun actually because you read these websites, or roadside attractions, or you hear about some abandoned theme park, or something and it's like, that's kind of a cool thing. You read the article and you move on your day, but I add it to my maps and those maps are my GPS unit. As I'm writing, I've got this old screen in front of me and if I see a little pin appearing on the map in front of me, I can say, “Oh, there's this old waterpark over here,” or “Oh, there's that resort over there that I always wanted to see,” or a particular weird statue, or the birthplace of James Kirk, or whatever it is. So I don't have to remember if the computer could do it for me. JAMEY: I was going to ask if you go to things like the world's largest ball of twine and like –? KERRI: Every time. JAMEY: Okay, cool. KERRI: Every time. JAMEY: I'm glad that I understand you enough to know that you would do that. [laughter] CORALINE: Kerri, have you been in the Mystery Spot? KERRI: I have been in Mystery Spot. MANDY: What is Mystery Spot?! CORALINE: I remember Mystery Spot is some kind of a place where they say gravity is out of whack and everything feels sideways and you're super disoriented. They have this whole mythology around it. I've never been myself, but I did pretend that I'd been there by putting a bumper sticker on my car 15 years ago. [laughter] There's this amazing song called Mystery Spot Polka. Can't remember where I read that, but I think that's how I learned about it. MANDY: I will put that in the show notes. CORALINE: I will find Mystery Spot Polka. It is incredible. MANDY: So Kerri, what are some of the coolest places you have visited? Can you give us a top three rundown? CORALINE: And I really hope that cracker barrel is in that top three, Kerri. JAMEY: But which cracker barrel? CORALINE: Oh, cracker barrels are the same everywhere you go. I really believe there's only actually one cracker barrel, the canonical cracker barrel, and it's multidimensional, so. JAMEY: Yeah. You teleport into it? CORALINE: Yeah. [laughter] KERRI: Well, interestingly enough, I won't call this a danger, but one of the side effects of traveling as much I have in the last 4, or 5 years is strange, random flashbacks to stretches of road and you can't remember where they are. So you were just asking about this and I'm thinking about, “Okay, two places I could talk about,” and then I suddenly, unbidden, had this memory of a stretch of road. I can't remember where that is. I don't even know what state that's in. It was an amazing piece of pavement that I really enjoyed riding and, in that moment, I had this amazing moment. If I skip way ahead to the end of the conversation where I sum everything up and tell you why I ride, or what I get out of doing this is that it's cemented for me, this concept of the impermanence of everything because if I'm having a great day on the bike, it's beautiful afternoon, the temperature's perfect. It's not going to last. The sun is going to go down, the pavement is going to be bad, traffic is going to pick up, it's going to start raining. So I need to enjoy this moment, this curve, this hour, this half hour, this 5 minutes, whatever it is. Something, conversely, if it's bad, if it's raining, or it's dark, or heck, if it's snowing, it's like, this is not going to last. I'll go through this and everything will be great. But once every six weeks, or so, I make a really bad decision on the motorcycle, for instance, like that rain's probably going to clear up, that's not going to be a rainstorm. Nah, this wind is going to die down, it'll be fine. I'll be riding through something and it makes me just completely miserable. 110 degrees, or sideways rain, or whatever, and I think, “Yes, this is it. This is the moment. This is the thing that I'm going to be remembered for. This is the dumb thing that I did,” but it never lasts. I always survive and I walk away with this just amazing memory and this amazing about that time I rode through a rainstorm, or illegally parked my motorcycle in front of the Alamo to just get a photo, [laughs] things like that if it happened. CHELSEA: Kerri, do you collect souvenirs of any kind from some of these travels, or is it specifically photos? Do you post about them specifically anywhere? Maybe you do a whole bunch of things. I've certainly seen a number of your posts, but I guess I'm wondering, I'm imagining myself in these situations collecting stickers, or something like that. Do you have things like that that you look for in these places? KERRI: One of the neat things that I enjoy about traveling my motorcycle is that I just simply can't, I can't buy anything. It's not any space for it. My gear is all pretty well packed tightly. Souvenirs are kind of out unless I'm willing to pay extra ship from home. So it's kind of rare. Although, I have occasionally gotten, if I know that I'm going to be visiting a friend in a day, or two, I'll stop and pick something up and usually, it's a food item that I haven't seen before. In fact, if you follow me on Twitter, you'll see I'm always posting about weird foods, or energy drinks. 90% of the time it's weird stuff I found in a weird gas station on the side of the road, especially when it comes to energy drinks. And it's much more about having that experience of a place at the end of the day. I don't take as many photos as I'd like, or I think that I should. Although, certainly, I do take more than I used to. I've been working on landscape photography with my iPhone because again, I choose not to travel with a full camera rig. Well, I’ve got my iPhone, how can I take photos with that? That turns out to be much more about composition and seeing a moment and grabbing it than having the right lens, or light conditions being just right, or whatever. CHELSEA: Ooh. So I'd be very interested to hear some of your tips for phone photography, because this is a thing. We all have our phones on us and I imagine if I just a little more about how to frame my photos sometimes, I could get something a lot better. KERRI: Some of the basic tips are just photography one-on-one, like how do you compose a shot in terms of the rule of three where you break it up, and you'll see in phones, a lot of times you have the option turn on a grid. So you're looking at a grid and then help you understand how much space something is going to take up in the final shot. You want to line up your horizon, for example, if I'm taking a picture of say, like a harbor. I've taken a lot of photos of lighthouses for reasons I can get into later. So I'm trying to take really nice photos of lighthouses, the sea kind of wants to be right around and take up the lower third of the shot and then two-thirds is the sky. It's about how much of the frame gets filled with different elements will psychologically suggest the viewer, what their importance is, or how they relate to the person who's taken the photograph. So just some basic rules around that. I try to do things where, especially when doing landscape photography, because the iPhone lens is just horrible for this. It’s really meant to take photos of your friends at parties, or your car in the driveway. It's not meant to take landscaping vistas, but you can do some tricks. Actually, I found that zooming in a little bit, not a lot, but just a little tiny bit just brings it a little bit closer and the final result just feels a little different. And then if also, you continue to follow those rules of composition, you can get some good landscape. Putting something in the foreground is really great. So my motorcycle is in a lot of my shots because of that, because it gives some depth to the photo. It helps to not just be like, especially if you're doing a wide-open plane like you do, it's like, oh yes, here's some bars of color. It's like, oh, now here's something to give me perspective and humanize the scale of a landscape. It's just little things like that and that's all stuff that I've learn just because I'm just a naturally curious person. So I'm like, “Well, how do I take better photos of that?” So I went off and did 4 hours of research and audited a class online somewhere. CORALINE: Have all, or most of your travels been continental US, or have you ever gone on a motorcycle trip on another continent, or? KERRI: It depends. Is New Zealand a continent? JAMEY: Well, it's not in the continental US. [laughs] KERRI: Yes. Starting closer to home, though. North America, I've done. So I've done US, Mexico, and Canada. Right when COVID hit, I was actually in Baja, California down at the Southern tip at the Tropic of Cancer on my motorcycle. I rode there all the way from Long Beach, California and I've been up to Alaska through Canada twice now. JAMEY: I'm sorry. I was going to tell a Jerri Alaska story actually, because I was in Alaska – [overtalk] KERRI: Oh, please. JAMEY: Not too long ago and I posted a landscape photo from our rental car on Twitter and I did not label where I was and Kerri was like, “Where are you in Alaska?!” And then we were talking about this and she recommended that I eat fireweed ice cream, which I did and it was wonderful. KERRI: Oh, was it great? JAMEY: [laughs] It was great. So I was going to suggest that your superpower could be recommendations. KERRI: Oh, thank you. That's super flattering, actually. I sometimes think when I finally get tired of tech, I just want to be a tour guide, or something, or write a travel novel, or something. JAMEY: Oh yeah. You’d be great at that. KERRI: Yeah. I love being a hostess and I love – whenever somebody's like, “Oh, I'm traveling,” or “I'm going here,” or I see somebody post photos from someplace I've been, I'm like, “Wait, here's this restaurant, you should go here and make sure you talk to this person and do this.” A year after I got my first bike, no, not even a year. Oh my gosh, it was 5 months after I got my first motorcycle, I went to New Zealand for a conference and said, “Well, hassle in traveling to New Zealand is actually traveling to New Zealand. So I might as well take some time.” I took two weeks and rented a motorcycle and just did a couple thousand kilometers all over the South Island in New Zealand. So those are the four countries I've ridden in. I was going to rent one – I'd been to Berlin a few times and I thought, “Oh, I'll rent a BMW when I'm in Germany, that'd be cool and ride around.” But unfortunately, I got sick while I was in Germany, the one time I was going to do that. So I stayed my hotel and felt bad. JAMEY: How different is motorcycle on the other side of the road in New Zealand? [chuckles] KERRI: I only rode on the wrong side of the road twice. [laughter] Yeah, the shop I rented from actually, they rent to a lot of Americans, I guess. So they put arrows on the windscreen to say, “Drive pass” to help remind us. But it's funny because every single rental car down there, the left side of the car is the one that's completely trashed because when you're riding, we start driving on the wrong side of the road. The side you're not used to. Now, it's like your entire concept as a driver of the opposite side of the car is now completely inverted and so, it's like trying to do something with your left hand when you're right-handed. It's just like, how do left-handed people survive?! Like, what are you doing? [laughs] CORALINE: I was in South Africa a number of years ago and we drove out to this wildlife preserve and the only car I was able a rental, that was not a stick shift because I don't know how to drive stick shift, [chuckles] was this giant club van. So not only I had driven the wrong side of the road, but I was in the largest vehicle I had ever driven. [laughs] Had no idea where the other side of the car might be was, just terrified of exactly that the whole time. KERRI: See, you called it a Clubvan, but all I can imagine, the image that popped in my brain was a party bus. [laughter] So imagine you driving around South Africa in a party bus. [laughter] CORALINE: That would have been amazing. Yeah. KERRI: Very different trip. AARON: I just want to bring it back to lighthouse pictures because as a native New Englander, I need to know why you're taking pictures of all these lighthouses. KERRI: Well, as another native New Englander, hi. AARON: Hi. KERRI: How are you? [laughter] No. So why am I taking photos of lighthouses? One of the things about the Iron Butt Association, which again, is this group dedicated to promoting this, is not just the pure endurance of can you ride a 1,000 miles in 24 hours? Can you ride 1,500 miles in 24 hours? What are the limits of safe endurance events? We also do a number of collection style things. We call them tours. I'm doing a lighthouse tour. So you go to lighthouses and I've got this little passport, my lighthouse passport I got from the United States Lighthouse Society. When they're open, you can get a little rubberstamp in your book to prove that you were there. When they're not open, I take a photo of my motorcycle next to the lighthouse and that's the proof that I've been there. The challenge is I have to visit 60 in 12 months. AARON: Okay. KERRI: And that's the bare minimum. So there's advancing levels of difficulty and they're merit badges for adults, really. [laughter] 60 in 12 months I'm at 25, or 30 now and I scoured the West Coast. I'm going to also hit the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic next month when I'm down there in Florida. There are other challenges like go to 120, or 180 again, over the course of different time periods. You have different difficulty levels. I've also done one which is visiting national parks because national parks have a similar passports stamp program where you can go get these timestamped little cancellations to say I was in the Redwood National Forest, or I was at Wounded Knee, or not Wounded Knee, Little Bighorn, or Devils Tower, or whatever. The challenge there is to visit say, 50 of them, but now you have to do 25 different states. Of course, I've upped the ante and we have the silver level, which is you also have to combine that visiting one park in Washington, California, Florida, and Maine, in addition to those 50 and 25 states. So I did two of those last year and then year before that, I added Alaska just for fun, which is the gold, or insanity level. So it's just these little different ways of encouraging people to go out and travel and see more in the country on their motorcycle. CORALINE: You work from the road, right? KERRI: Yeah, I do actually. CORALINE: I would love hear about how that works with such an aggressive travel schedule. KERRI: That takes a lot of discipline and balance, which I am surprised I managed to pull off [chuckles] given how much I can normally do it without adding to traveling. Usually, what I do is I have days where I am in one place and days when I'm traveling. So for example, on February 28th, I'm going to be heading out for 2 months on the road and my first stops going to be San Diego. I will take that weekend and ride down to San Diego, which again, only 1,300 miles so that's a day and I've rented a little place down in Ocean Beach, a block from the shore and they have Wi-Fi in this little tiny one-bedroom studio. I'll work there and I'll kind of explore San Diego. I'll work all day and, in the evenings, I'll go over ride on the hills, or go up to Legoland, or whatever I want to do in that part of the world. And then Friday night, Saturday, I'll hit the road again for a couple days. This is actually how I initially started traveling these long, long distances was trying to say like, “Okay, I really want to go to Austin, Texas, but it's going to take me four riding days, or whatever to get to Austin, Texas. How do I manage do that and still work from the road?” So well, 2 days away is Denver, Colorado. So why don't I go to Denver? I'll work there for a few days and then next weekend, then I'll skip on. So it's like setting up a series of base camps as if I was attacking Everest so I can break up these big trips. But as I wanted to travel further and further distances overall, I had to actually physically travel, or do longer distances in the same amount of time. Speeding isn't going to do that safely and it actually really doesn't get you there that much faster in the end. So the only way to do that was to figure out how to ride longer more hours in the day, figure that out. JAMEY: Can you talk about these motorcycle scavenger hunt things that you do? KERRI: Yeah. Thanks for asking. I assume you noticed the trophies on the wall behind me. So these are competitive scavenger hunt style rallies. We call them rallies. A lot of people, when you say motorcycle rally, they think about Bike Week in Daytona, or Sturgis out in South Dakota. That's none of this. It is a scavenger hunt and there's a timer on it say, 36, or 60 hours where the night before you get a list of here's all the different places that you could possibly go, you call them bonus locations and at 4:00 in the morning, everyone's released and you're like, “Okay, go, be back in a day and a half.” You go and you take photos of these different places to prove that you went there and every place gets you a certain number of points. The harder it is to get there, or the further away it is, the more points that you would get for going there. You can do combinations for visiting certain places, visit three clown theme places and get the clown bonus, or whatnot. Like a pinball machine, if you will, where you score the right combination, you get more points. So it's a timed competitive thing to who can the most amount of points because you can't visit all of the – they'll give you 80, or a 100 places you could possibly go. You can't go to all of them in the time allotted. So can you construct an efficient route that is also one that you have that you the physical capability to travel in the allotted time and earn enough points to place well? They typically last, 36 hours is one level. We have a few that do 60. I'm doing one this summer that is 9 days long. So we'll be leaving Cheyenne, Wyoming and four days later, we have to be in State College, Pennsylvania where we'll all stop for 10 hours and then we'll turn around and head back to Cheyenne. I actually just put in my application for the Olympics of the Iron Butt Association is called the Iron Butt Rally, which is an 11-day version of the countrywide scavenger hunt – [overtalk] CORALINE: Oh, wow. KERRI: With locations all over North America and Canada. We call it, it’s sort of the Olympics. It happens every 2 years. You actually have to apply to be accepted to enter because otherwise, you'd have a lot of folks that say, “Oh, I could do that,” and they don't really know what they're getting into and it's a little bit unsafe if you haven't done it before and you don't really understand what it takes to do. That's what's coming up my horizon for those and they're very competitive events, although at the end of the day, it's made-up internet points. There are no sponsorships, there's no recognition besides outside of this group of 300, or 400 similarly weirdo people who like riding their motorcycles longways. But no, I've had quite a bit of success competitively in that and that just scratch all the right itches because it's riding a motorcycle. Plus, it's basically a traveling salesman problem. It's a directed graph problem and you work with GitHub all day long and like, “Oh, I understand how to traverse a graph, this is easy.” CORALINE: Speaking of that, Kerri as a long-time software engineer, do you do anything, do you have any software, any kind of tools that you develop for keeping track of all this? KERRI: Yeah, I do a lot with spreadsheets, believe it, or not. The tooling, it’s tricky because at the end of the day, you still have to ride the motorcycle and you can't really automate that. So a lot of the stuff I'm able to do with software is really around using software for planning and analysis. For example, there's a number of different databases around you asked about the collection of the lighthouses and one of the things that I'm around the country collecting this year is pressed pennies. Now a pressed penny machine, actually I think they're fascinating because a pressed penny machine is the only machine still in active production that interacts with the penny in any way, shape, or form. There's no vending machines. There's nothing who deals with the penny besides coin counting machine. Besides the penny smasher, you put a penny, 2 quarters and it smashes a little design in. Again, I've got to go collect a 100 of these from 20 states and 5 of them have to be on the other side of the Mississippi, all these weird rules, but how do you find them? There's one at every cracker barrel. There's eight at Disney, one at SeaWorld. There's some obvious things like that, but it turns out, there's almost 4,000 of these machines in the United States and there's a database for these on this weird creaky, old website written in ASP. It's actually an IP address. It doesn't have a domain name. JAMEY: That's legit. CORALINE: Dark web got pennies. That's amazing. [laughter] KERRI: If only there was crypto involved here, it'd be perfect. So I got to break out some scripting the other day and actually write a little script that went into kind of scrape these old web pages and then parse CHTML and kind of strip out, look, here's the address for the place and store them because you want the name of the place and the address so you can find it. You’ve got to take that and ship it over to Google API, actually get an actual latitude, longitude, and then reform it into the XML format that my GPS device – it's this whole chain of Rube Goldberg machine of how to get this data into a place that I can actually use it. CORALINE: I think the story of the entire internet is made. [laughs] KERRI: Right. CORALINE: Yeah. KERRI: So fast forward to the end of that and now I happen to be the maintainer for a website that maps pressed penny machines across the United States, based on this data that I'm scraping from somebody else's website. AARON: All because you have a DNS name. KERRI: Exactly, exactly. But this actually turned to be really, really crucial because a whole bunch of people in my riding community said, “I really wanted to do that penny collecting hunt and you have 12 months to do it and I'm going to go out to the West Coast.” So I was like, I thought, “I have plenty of places to stop, but I could never find the machines.” It's just like, “Oh, okay. So my putting this information into a format that other people could actually easily digest, that's the value that I'm adding here.” It's inspired at least a dozen people to go out and start collecting smashed pennies. So I've got to be responsible for some uptick in sales on these vending machines. JAMEY: They should sponsor you. AARON: I love the weirdness of these machines that interact with a coin that's so bad at being currency, we just sort of toss them out to the extent that I was at Disney World not too long ago and the machines have their own supply of pennies because people just don't have pennies. So [chuckles] this machine just has a stock of pennies and you can swipe a credit card and be like, “Give me the smashed pennies,” and it charges you a dollar in 1 cent and then goes through and does it. KERRI: God, it's fabulous. A lot of people have heard the story that pennies are actually – it costs more to make a penny than a penny is actually worth in terms of currency. It's wild. But every time I start thinking, “We should get rid of the penny,” I'm like, “That sounds like the craziest, insane conspiracy theory position to ever take.” AARON: But also, the penny is real bad at being currency. [laughs] KERRI: Yeah. Yeah. MID-ROLL: And now a quick word from our sponsor. I hear people say the VPNs have a reputation for slowing down your internet speed, but not with NordVPN, because it's the fastest VPN in the world. I don't have to sacrifice internet speed for better security. With NordVPN, my internet traffic is routed through a secure encrypted tunnel, which protects my data and privacy. I can also have it on up to six devices like my laptop, phone, TV, iPad—all my devices are protected. Grab your exclusive NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/gtc, or use the code GTC to get a huge discount on your NordVPN plan plus one additional month for free. Plus, a bonus gift! It's completely risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money back guarantee. KERRI: Way back at the beginning of this conversation, somebody asked me and sorry, I forgot who asked me about some of the best places I've been and the strangest things I've seen. I kind of got derailed on some poet nonsense, but I realize that I really am a sucker for world's largest ball twine kinds of things. I had this great opportunity. So collecting pennies, lighthouses, and national parks, I'm always just getting off the main roads and things. I see a lot of stuff. I found out that I'm a sucker basically for weird local foods like the fireweed ice cream. Anytime I see something advertised on a menu that I've never heard of before, that's the thing I'm going to order. Cinnamon rolls because when you travel up the Alaskan highway from Dawson Creek, BC up to Alaska, every 60 miles, or so, there's a gas station and a little bakery. So you can get your gas, you can get coffee, and you can get a cinnamon roll and they all claim to have the best cinnamon roll on the Alaskan highway. I stop every 60 miles and get a cinnamon rolls. After about 5 hours, I really just want to fall over and vomit because I'm sick of cinnamon rolls. But now when I travel, if I see some place advertising cinnamon rolls, I'm like, “Well, I’ve got to stop because that's my thing because I like cinnamon rolls because that's reminds me of Alaska.” So I get to go to a lot of these really great small towns and just seeing a lot of how, especially in the central part of the country, so many towns are struggling with just having jobs for people and keeping local economies going that a lot of them will do these sorts of things. They'll have interesting, strange festivals, or hold the film festival about corn, or soy, or they'll paint their water tower, or something. Last year, as I was traveling across North Dakota one time, I saw off on the horizon on a hill—first of all, yes, a hill in North Dakota so that was notable—a giant cow. A giant Holstein cow. This a 100-foot-tall fiberglass cow and so, I said to my riding partner, I'm like, “We're going the cow, right?” And she's like, “Yeah, we're going the cow.” So get off the highway and we rode this little windy dirt road at the top of this hill. It was just this huge giant fiberglass cow that they put on top of the hill 20, 30 years ago and now it's like the 4-H Club with the FFA kids take care of it and repaint it every few years. They collect like, they ask for donations. $5 each and the little two because we're passing through and that's part of our job. That's how I'm interacting with the community and plus man, I got a ton of pictures of this giant cow. It was right at sunset, we were on this hill, and it was actually really beautiful, the prairie, it was spread out for us and it was about an hour east of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. So it's right where the planes start to break up into the what's called Missouri Breaks where the rivers have really broken up the land quite a bit. So it was just gorgeous. It was just absolutely beautiful and I never would've seen that if I didn't stop because there was a giant cow. That's my giant cow story. CORALINE: Kerri, have you ever considered writing down your stories and the stories of the people that you meet along the way and the amazing places you've been? I hate to say the B word, but it would make a pretty interesting book. KERRI: Well, I'll throw back another B word at you, which is blog. I keep a travel blog at motozor.com. Lately, I've been writing more about, because I haven't been doing as much non-directed travel, so a lot of my travel lately has been around these sort of competitive rallies that I've been riding in, which are interesting in themselves because they're like, “Go take your photo with the giant cow,” or “Go to the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada, or whatnot, take a photo there.” I've been writing quite a bit about those sorts of travels, but I also have a huge backlog of articles that I've written for that over the years of all the different trips I've taken to New Zealand, Alaska down into Baja, and the multiple times I've been across the country. The one that I'm working on, that I haven't finished yet because I'm trying a new thing, which is incorporating a series of interview video interviews with my riding partner, is trying to tell the story in written form of the trip that she and I did last summer, where we rode to all 48 states in 10 days starting in New England ending in Washington. JAMEY: Kerri, I have an important question to ask you, but I'm contractually obligated to ask you. How many miles at a time would you say that you live your life? [laughs] KERRI: Well, I guess, I supposed to say one quarter of a mile at a time. [chuckles] JAMEY: Well, Kerri was also a guest on my Greater Than Code spinoff, fast and furious show, Stationary & Sassy, so. KERRI: Which I love. JAMEY: I had to pull it back. [laughs] KERRI: I'll answer that in an obliviously serious way. [laughter] I can go an entire take of gas without putting my foot down. That's kind of fun. One of my current challenges right now is can I ride through the entire state of Oregon, north to south, without getting gas? Because it's 304 miles from the Washington-Oregon border to the California-Oregon border and Oregon doesn't let you pump your own gas and it irritates me. They usually, if they see you're on a motorcycle, they're like, “You got it?” I'm like, “Yeah, I got it. I'm not from here. I pump gas.” So the challenge right now is can I cross Oregon without having to stop for gas and then actually weirdly, mentally breaks up my day. It's kind of weird motorcycle Pomodoro of like, “Okay, I can go 3 hours before I need to stop.” So my day gets broken up into these chunks of where are the stops that I have to make versus the ones I want to make, or excuse me, the ones I want to make versus the ones I have to make. JAMEY: You heard it here, folks. Kerri lives her life 304 miles at a time. [laughter] KERRI: I live my life a quarter tank at a time. [laughter] CHELSEA: Kerri, you mentioned earlier that you listen to music while you're riding because you find that it helps you focus on riding. I find a similar thing with work, whether it's fulltime job work, or side work, I have a much easier time focusing—for the audience, I'm a programmer as well—if I've got something on. I like to listen to Boston Nova, or I also go on turntable.fm, I'm in a heavy metal room there that's kind of fun. I'm curious as to whether you find that music helps you focus anywhere off the motorcycle as well. KERRI: Yes. I am very susceptible to the emotional resonance of music, if that makes any sense whatsoever. There are kinds of music that I just can't listen to before I go to bed, like heavy metal gets me going, jam music. I'm a really huge Phish fan, which surprise, from Vermont, and I wear a lot of tie dye. Of course, I'm in the Phish. But that's the music I like to listen to when I'm riding and when I'm working. But I do a lot of chill hop stuff now. I've gotten into that and I'm finding my way back to a lot of again, country music. But there's this entire alt Nashville scene that's happened in the last 10 years. I completely missed that. I'm kind of getting caught up on these days. My Bandcamp catalog, I think I'm keeping at least three of their engineers paid for; I buy so much stuff on Bandcamp these days. CORALINE: I definitely get what you said about sensitivity to the emotional music definitely resonates with me as a musician. It's kind of weird to admit, but when I'm doing writing, I listen to Steely Dan [laughs] and I actually learned from a friend of mine that William Gibson listened to Steely Dan while he was writing all the seminal cyberpunk novels and thought that's kind of interesting, maybe good company, right? KERRI: Hey, Fagen and Becker, great albums. It's the stereotypical thing that Rush is this big band in programming circles and fun fact, the drummer for Rush was a huge motorcycle guy to the point that they actually had a trailer on their tour bus that he would carry two bikes on the trailer. So he would ride between concert stops. The band do their show and they'd leave on the bus and he got on his motorcycle and like, “See you in Chicago, guys,” “See you in Milwaukee,” “See you in Madison.” The band went along. He had some personal and his wife passed away and his daughter fairly tragically and he wrote an entire book about it, where he didn't really quit the band. Although, they basically shut Rush down for a period of time so the band could work through that. But he took that time and went on the road just writing his motorcycle around. He wrote several books about dealing with grief through riding his motorcycle. I found that to be a really fascinating book and it's one of those touchstones, the Canada motorcycle riders. What little we read, that's definitely a book that everyone recommends to me at some point like, “Oh, have you read this book?” I’m like, “Yes, I’ve read that book.” AARON: It's Neil Peart for anyone who needs to look that up. I relate to the music as a distraction preventative [laughs] as someone who also deals with ADHD. It just makes sense to me. It's like, “Oh yeah, without it, there's so many places for my brain to go,” but if you have music on the back and it's like, “Oh, great. All right. That's where my brain is going to go when it gets distracted, it's just going to listen to this, then I'll go back to riding the bike.” [chuckles] KERRI: Exactly. Exactly. CORALINE: Kerri, you said a word earlier when you were contrasting the way you were riding when you started out and being kind of exploratory versus, I think the word you used is directive there, or a sweet spot for you between directed activity, directed riding versus wandering, maybe even drifting—not a car movie reference. But is there a balance that rejuvenates you, or that energizes you? KERRI: Yes. I've talked to other motorcycle riders about this, where you say, “My gosh, there's so many great things that we see along the way,” and we say, “I would love to stop here.” So for example, when we're doing these rallies where we're collecting things, for example, you stop to take a picture, or something, and then you’ve got to go. You only really stop for 5 minutes because you have this timetable and a schedule that you're trying to execute, or if you're trying to ride 1,500 miles in 24 hours, you can't stop. Your gas stops, you’re timed down to like oh, 5 minutes. So you'll see things. You're like, “Man, I wish I could stop,” or “I wish I had come back here and take this in and give something,” the respect that you want to give it, or really, really dive deep and taste a place, if you will. It's a really common thing in the long-distance thing. Other motorcycles will sometimes say like, “Well, you don't see anything that way.” It's like, “Well, actually, I see a lot. I see way lot more in my days than you see,” but you don't get to stop so you have to kind of try and balance that. That's one thing that I really like about these collection things that I do is, collection challenges, I carry satellite tracker, of course so I can plot out everywhere that I've been. I've been looking at the one for my lighthouse trip so far up and down the West Coast. It's just amazing, I'm going out to every little inlet, point, and little peninsula sticks out into the ocean because that's where the lighthouses are and the things that I've gotten to see through doing that. So one of the reasons that I've gotten into those sort of challenges rather than the pure and endurance is just because it does reward that exploration. While, at the same time, being fairly directed because the directed part of it is researching and planning at home, like finding where are the lighthouses, where are the national parks I need to go visit? What are the hours are things open? Making that plan versus executing on the plan and the execution plan, getting to explore things, I think it's really a lot about the framing of the trip for me. In February, I'm going down to San Diego and then I'm going to, what's called a 50cc, which is coast to coast in 50 hours. So I'll be leading San Diego and within 50 hours, I'm going to be in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Aha. Somehow, I'll do that. I'm not going to be able to stop and see anything along the way, but because I know that's the kind ride I'm embarking on, it becomes okay. It's this weird personal permission structure to give a pass to things that I would really like to see along the way versus say, if I'm doing a lighthouse trip – I did one several months ago down to Disneyland, but I went down the California coast and I found myself like, “Oh, I'm not making any miles. This is so slow. Why is this taking me 3 days to get down to Los Angeles when it normally takes me 1 and a half at most?” So I had to stop and I ended up stopping in this little tiny town. I can't even remember the name of the place, but it's somewhere in Northern coast, California, and there's a little tiny coffee shop there. It's like Two Girls Coffee, or something like that. I just stopped, I got a coffee, and I sat outside. They had a table, it was a nice day, and I was just like, “I'm just going to sit here for 30 minutes and I'm just going to recenter myself and really think about what am I doing here? What do I want to be accomplishing and what set of skills do I need to bring to this moment to maximize how much fun I'm going to have? If I'm not having fun, then why am I doing it?” So just being able to sit there in sunshine for a little bit and just say, “The point of what I'm doing here is to explore and it's to have this experience. It's not get someplace fast. It's not to get someplace far away. It's to explore and see things.” I was so much happier after that and I had a great conversation with a hippie in the parking lot so that was pretty great. MANDY: Bonus. [laughs] Well, we usually end this conversation with reflections. I know, for me, I just want to say that everything you described just makes me feel so happy. I've been on a really big journey to improve my life and just what you said in the last few minutes about just taking time to enjoy, not being in a hurry, slowing down, and recentering yourself. That is all just so important to remember the whole cliché of stopping and smelling the roses. Like just enjoying your life even if it's a quarter tank at a time. JAMEY: I keep thinking about this map that Kerri says that she has, which I actually legitimately would really like to see. But a lot of what Kerri was talking about was resonating with me. I also like to explore and I think about keeping track of places, but I don't have a map and I've been thinking about it for a while. I think it's one of these sunk cost things where I'm like, “Well, if I wanted to do a map, I should have been like doing it already,” but that's not how that works in real life. So if I want to have a map, I should start it now and I think that's my call-to-action. [chuckles] KERRI: When people ask my advice like, “Oh, what motorcycle should I get,” or “What's the best motorcycle to do this, or that?” I always say like, “Oh, well the best motorcycle to do the ride you want to do is the one you have.” I think that's really true of so many things in life is that the trick is just to get started and it's not about the fancy equipment. It's not about the gear. You could just do it. If you just give yourself permission to go do a thing, you can just go do it. CORALINE: I was thinking about how that kind of philosophy relates to how my life circumstances, job situation has changed so much for the past year since I retired from software engineering and the relief of not having to be productive, not having to hit goal, not having to have constraints that I'm not in control of, governing things, and permission to go down rabbit holes. So when you were talking about the giant cow, I was liking that to well, if you were in a hurry to get somewhere, you wouldn't have stopped there. But because you weren't, you had a richer experience. You saw something you hadn't seen before. You hadn't experienced before. I really think that's a lesson we can take all over the place and give ourselves permission, like you said, to wander aimlessly and to explore. That's something that I definitely intend to do in my life and your story of doing that is very inspirational so thank you, Kerri. AARON: I was just latching onto two bits that I really liked. First off, if I'm not having fun, then why am I doing this is probably life lessons to live by. [chuckles] But I also appreciated the moment of resetting your expectations to your purpose. Like, why am I doing this thing? Let me remember, because I had a reason I'm doing it and if I'm not enjoying it right now, where's the mismatch? I like that. Because so often, it's easy, for me anyway, to stumble into doing something and finding yourself like, “Why am I doing this?” and then stepping back and be like, “Okay. All right. I chose to do this because of this and if this is my purpose, then I can let go of this other pressure that I'm putting on myself to go further every day when that's not the reason I'm here.” It doesn't make sense to put that pressure on myself then. KERRI: I feel like that chain, that returning to the beginning point is also a good career skill. You have to get serious about it, or bring this into work realm. But as a senior engineer, staff engineer, and principal, blah, blah, blah, so often, it's not how efficient can I make this loop. It's also going back, is this doing the right thing to do? Like, “Why are we doing this? Is there a better way to solve this sort of problem?” So it's that lesson of what I learned on the road coming back into work, but it's also because work is life as well and if work isn't fun and whatever, then why am I doing it? But that skill comes back into my personal life so there's this free flow of influence going back and forth. AARON: Yeah. That purpose revisit thing is something that I've just been thinking about from events standpoint from doing conferences over the past couple years, like so much had to go back to first principles because it was like, okay, well what was the reason for us doing this? Just recreating the same motion in a different environment isn't necessarily going to get us the same results. What is the reason we're doing this? Let's revisit that and make sure we're still in alignment with it all. I think we can do that more often in our lives, too. Like, “What is the reason I'm doing this thing?” [chuckles] “Okay, it's not accomplishing that anymore. Let's get rid of this practice and try something else,” or not. Maybe the answer is to keep it. CHELSEA: Yeah. One of the things that I think about apropos of what a couple of other folks were mentioning about how easy it is to get caught up in the details when trying to start something as opposed to just picking early anything and getting started. Occasionally, folks will ask me questions like that about blogging and one of the things that I like to do is keep some URLs on hand of some of my earlier pieces, just because it makes it really clear that it didn't always look like this. I just started and it wasn't what people see. I think folks sometimes see someone who's several years down the road of having started something and feeling like they can't start because it won't look like that immediately and it won't. [laughs] But I imagine that having those kinds of stories on hand, what I'm thinking about is how to make those sorts of stories more accessible to folks. Because a lot of what we see understandably about how to do something is from the folks who have mastered it to some degree and it's not as clear where to look to find folks who also are just starting and what to expect your journey to look like right at the beginning. MANDY: Kerri, do you want to leave a us with any parting thoughts? KERRI: A lot of people, when I tell them I rode a 1,000 miles in a day, they're like, “You can't do that.” It’s like, “I’ve done it 12 times.” It’s like, “What are you talking about?” But to kind of carry on to Aaron and to what Chelsea just said, it's a marathon. You can't do a lot of big things in a single step. You have to make that first step and then the second step and then the third step and then you're walking and you're doing the thing. I don't really talk about motorcycling with people who don't motorcycle and everybody who I motorcycle would talk about this. We all do it and so, it's not remarkable. Sometimes I think it's important to realize that what we do accomplish in our lives is fairly remarkable and magic to a lot of people. As software engineers, what we do is frankly, astounding some days and it's important to remember that we have traveled far from where we began when we first started doing this sort of stuff and we may return to that when we change careers, or jobs, or languages, or technologies. Return to that place of not knowing and that can be uncomfortable, but there is so much joy and discovery you can have if you just take that time, and stop and understand and pay attention to your story of where you started, where you're going, and how far along you've actually come. You can't look up the mountain and be intimidated by that. You should turn around and look back down the mountain to see how far you've come. MANDY: That was lovely. Thank you so much and thank you so much for coming back on the show and telling us yet another few stories. The first time you were on the show, I distinctly remember the title being Story Time with Kerri Miller and you never disappoint. I'm so glad that you took time to join us and talk about your motorcycling adventures with us [chuckles] non-motorcycling people. It is super fascinating and it's definitely an awesome topic outside of – that we can relate a lot of the concepts to the tech field, software engineering, development, and all that. So dear listener, if you have a cool hobby like Kerri that you want to come on the show and talk about, we’d love to talk to you because this has frankly been amazing and I really enjoyed this episode. So thank you again and we’ll see you all next week.Special Guest: Kerri Miller.Support Greater Than Code

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, I think I always had this if I feel like this, there has to be someone else that feels like this. I cannot be the only one that wants to show up as my true self and talk about feelings in business meetings! I cannot be the only one. This has to exist. I started a Dare to Lead book club at the Elevator office, which [chuckles] I'm sure you can imagine how that went over. Everybody showed up and I was like, “Oh, so y'all want to act like this is okay and that everyone seems okay. But then look at all of these white cis men in my Dare to Lead book club. Huh.” So it just kind of gave me the affirmation that I needed to say, “People do want to feel good. People do want to talk about and this does actually help the bottom line.” CHANTÉ: I personally love it. What I do for my day-to-day is focus on culture and focus on diversity, equity, inclusion accessibility, and organizations, whether it's on teams, products, services, and offerings. I think that people underestimate what it takes to build something that's special, especially there's not a culture budget. There's a budget for recruiting. There's a budget for performance stuff and for growth. But I'm like, “But what is the fascia? What is the stuff that keeps it together?” And it is the culture. I often like to say, as we're thinking about the future of work and building the next iteration of what work should be in decentralized teams working from home, we do need to lean into the sort of the soft skills that are actually aren't that soft, but they're those emotional intelligence stuff. That makes a huge difference. So is there any advice you might have to leaders like you who are like, “Okay, I guess I might read a Dare to Lead book,” or “I might start to prioritize this”? Where can they start, or what are practical things that you've learned along the way in leading your company in this fashion? ASHLEIGH: Listen. Listen is the first one. Listen when you get defensive, because those moments when your team says something to you that seems so small, insignificant, and annoying because you have all of these big things to do and all of the – you're pushing the company forward and there's this little voice that someone was brave enough to say this little thing that you're like, “Ugh.” That defensiveness, that feeling, whatever that small thing is, is probably a big thing, or will become a big thing and being able to own up to whatever it is that's making you defensive, or uncomfortable and truly listening in and digging into what is the root cause of that? Because it's generally, I don't know if you know the saying like something about the wrapper, it's never the wrapper. You get into a fight about the wrapper on the counter, that's never the wrapper. It's not throwing away the wrapper. It's the underlining way of how we are making people feel and for me, it's been about being able to truly dig into those things. The doesn't make sense log came from one of those experiences. My team, we were in these meetings and they would bring up these little things and be like, “Hey Ashleigh, well, what about this?” And I'm like, “It's not the time for that. We're talking about Z. Why are you bringing up A? We're in this super deep meeting about Z and you're talking about A,” and then they were like, “You're not listening to us. You say that you are people first, but you're not hearing us,” which is like a dagger to the heart. It's gutting and I had to sit with it for days because I was like, “I know I'm people first. I know my intention is right. How am I not translating it? How are my actions not matching my intentions?” When I boiled down to it, it was people didn't have an easy way to bring up little things to me and so, those little things would start to get bigger and then they would bring them up in big meetings because my schedule is booked. We don't have water cooler talk. We don't have walking by someone's desk and being like, “Hey, what's happening with blah, blah, blah?” That stuff doesn't exist and so, these little things were starting to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because there wasn't an easy place to just discuss them. So creating one log alleviated so much pain and made people feel heard about, “Hey, this one email has a misspelling and no one's paid attention to it.” Just little stuff. And then the second thing is that we've been starting is more personal time. We started what I call an AuditMate lounge, which is on Fridays and it's just meant to be logging on and just hanging out with each other. It's water cooler time. You can be working, you can be doing other things, but this is not a business meeting. This is not meant to get things done. It's meant to just hang out. AARON: I like that. I just started working at a new company this month and similar to the team I'm on at least, the DevRel has similar like, “Oh, we're just going to hang out for a bit because I'm around,” [chuckles] and whatever. I've really appreciated it because it's something that I feel like when you're in an office, it's easy to lose track of all the time that you spend just being around those people and building those relationships because it's just rolled into, “Oh, I was getting a coffee,” or “Oh, we went to get lunch,” or “Oh, we went to do this,” and “Oh, I walked by a desk and said ‘Hey’ for a few minutes.” But especially with COVID with everyone remote and at home, or remote companies, it's so easy to forget about that stuff and forget about building those connections that are more than just, “Hey, we work on this thing together.” It's like, “Oh yeah, also, we're people. We should hang out and talk about what people do,” [chuckles] which is sometimes just nothing. ASHLEIGH: Absolutely and it's how we build trust! AARON: Hmm. Yeah. I think that's a big thing, too. MANDY: What are your favorite ways to build trust? ASHLEIGH: Oh, well, I never really thought about it like that. I'm a Scorpio moon and rising so I like all of the deep things like, “Hi, I'm Ashleigh. Tell me about your trauma.” So I think the biggest way [chuckles] that I like to build trust is just in deep conversation, really getting to know each other, being vulnerable, and being able to just take the mask off. MANDY: Do you think you can do that too much, though with coworkers? Where do you find that balance? Because I struggle with that myself. Like how do you be open and completely vulnerable, but professional at the same time? ASHLEIGH: Why is vulnerability not professional? MANDY: That's a great question. ASHLEIGH: I think that's where – and I don't have an answer to it. It's kind of what I'm rambling. But why is vulnerability pegged with femininity and why is vulnerability loaded into being unprofessional, or too much, or too whatever? I think that the vulnerability that I don't want to expose too much is if it's loaded with fear because feelings aren't facts and I don't want to unload fear onto my team if there's something that I'm nervous about. I feel like it's my responsibility to hold those things and to alleviate some fear. But I think unpacking with my team that we can be vulnerable and that is actually more professional because it does make us more efficient. It does make us more trusting, I guess, would be the proper word there. The personal things that I don't share as far as vulnerability is there's some personal life stuff that I don't share, but not because it's not professional, but because it's sacred more. AARON: I think you mentioned something interesting about fear that gets at an interesting balance. From a leadership perspective, you have some responsibility about the vulnerability that you share and what you're able to be vulnerable with your team that maybe different than you want from an individual contributor on that team. You probably want to hear the fears of your team like, “Tell me what you're worried about so I can either alleviate those, or we can work to be in a good place.” But at the same time, sounds like you have some responsibility that I can't unload that on you because I'm the one who's supposed to be [laughs] taking care of that. How does that play out me besides just that one generic scenario? Are there ways you find that balance difficult to walk, or? ASHLEIGH: Yeah, like fundraising. My team needs to trust that I'm going to pay the bills. I don't want them to be worried about having money for payroll, or that we're going to be set up for our next raise, or that, right? There's some basic survival stuff that can be so linked to trauma of if we don't feel like we're going to have food on our tables for our family, if we don't feel like we're going to have continual pay, if we don't – those sort of things that are just human nature. We can't think and we can't perform because it is my duty to take care of my family and if I can't take care of my family with this company, I need to go do what I need to go do. So that's where it's my responsibility to those fears – especially when you are rational, if I'm having imposter syndrome about raising money as a queer woman and it's irrational because, maybe not irrational but loaded because of statistics, I shouldn't unload that on them, or I need to have someone, a mentor, someone that I can go to because they need to be expressed, but that could get bigger and bigger and bigger when shared with my team. So I really think about our north star is being excellent to each other. When my vulnerability is serving to them is when I share and not just when it's serving to me, because it'll make me feel better to express that I'm scared about funding, but it will not make my team feel better. It will, in fact, make them feel worse. CHANTÉ: What I hear is this dance we have to do as folks who have founded companies, or leaders of those companies to have what I consider again, that emotional intelligence. It's like – [overtalk] ASHLEIGH: Totally. CHANTÉ: Because self-awareness is huge and when you get a chance to – when you know your traps, or the traumas and the triggers that keep you stuck, or actually help to get you to another place, you can notice them in others and then the regulation is really important as well to really build relationships that are trusting and then discern it. It's like timing is everything to be like, you have to be able to read the room. You have to be able to be perceptive, read people's faces, and understand that they may have disassociation. They might be smiling, but they actually might be scared shitless [laughs] as you're like, “Oh, we're raising around.” I love how you how you kind of introduce this thought around Maslow's hierarchies of needs. People want to be able to put food on the table and be able to take care of their responsibilities whether that's a family, or a spouse, significant other, friend, or community and that is why we work. [chuckles] We need the money because we're in this capitalistic system. So I just love how you're doing that and where my mind takes me is how did you have the wisdom to do that? Who has been either an example that you admire, do you have a coach, do you have a community? Where are you learning these awesome things? Because I feel like you're so in touch with this emotional intelligence piece that so many people are missing. ASHLEIGH: Thank you. I appreciate that. I did not used to be, [chuckles] to be quite honest and I learned about emotions getting freshly sober at like 24 from Brené Brown. I had no idea. I had no idea. I quit drinking and remember starting to read one of her books and saying that an emotionally intelligent person knew 30 emotions and I was like, “Wait, there's more than happy and sad? You're telling me there's 30? That I should be able to name 30 and know what they feel like in my body?” CHANTÉ: Right, and according to her new book, she has even more stuff. ASHLEIGH: [laughs] Yeah. CHANTÉ: I think there's like 80 plus. ASHLEIGH: I'm like, “Wait, what?” [laughter] “This is a thing?” And that's when it kind of dawned on me, when people would say to me, “You don't get it. You don't get it,” and I'm like, “I don't get what?” And then I was like, “Oh, I'm not going to be able to know what you're feeling until I know what I'm feeling. Cool, great. I have a lot of work to do.” [chuckles] So that's when I think I started unpacking and learning. I was raised by an alcoholic and then became one and then getting sober at a young age was like, “Oh, this is mine and that's yours and I didn't know that I ended and you started.” So really learning and starting to place those things for me and then just reading a lot, a lot of Eastern spirituality, I read a lot of Buddhism books, a lot of yoga books, a lot of Brené Brown vulnerability, shame, rumbling type books. And then I think it's just kind of been like I'll take this from that and really, it just leads from what feels good and what doesn't. MANDY: Personal growth is essential. I'm in the same boat almost. I, too, am sober and it has changed my life. Over the past 2 years, I have done so much work on myself that sometimes I'm doing too much, but I learned – [overtalk] ASHLEIGH: Totally. That’s a thing. [overtalk] MANDY: Brené Brown is one of my heroes, Glennon Doyle, too. ASHLEIGH: I was just going to mention her. Yes, oh my God! MANDY: I love Glennon. Yeah. So personal growth is, I mean, journaling. Every day, I make it a habit and a practice to sit down and just write out my thoughts and my feelings. I highly, highly suggest to anybody who will listen to me to do the same thing. ASHLEIGH: Same. [chuckles] MANDY: Morning Pages are a wonderful thing. If you can do it in the morning, just get everything out of your head. Even the dumbest little thoughts, “dumbest little thoughts.” I mean, there are no dumb thoughts, but just getting all the, I call it taking the trash out. ASHLEIGH: Oh, I like that. MANDY: And just even snippets of any weird dreams, or just little nagging thoughts that are in the back of my head. Getting all those things out is just so essential. ASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely. And do you know The Holistic Psychologist? MANDY: I do. ASHLEIGH: Yeah, and her future self-journaling has also been really helpful at times, like sitting down in the morning and saying, “My future self will feel like this and this is how my future self will take care of me today” has also been really powerful along those same lines. CHANTÉ: Mandy, I loved your question earlier when you were like, “How do you know? Some people are not comfortable in doing that.” So I feel like what's also really true about organizations and teams is just you can have somebody who's kind of the sage, or most wise elder on the team who's like, “I've been through this, I've walked this path,” and then there's people who are like, “Huh, vulnerability.” And then the magic of that leader in the room is finding, or recognizing the spectrum of that and being all these things are actually welcomed and everybody's experience matters. So how do you do that for your team? I'm imagining you have people who are newbies on this journey with you, or people who are like, “This is the best.” Maybe they gravitated and wanted to join you because they recognize parts of themselves in you, but how do you manage that part for your team and kind of carry and make room for the full spectrum of folk? ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I think I'm still learning that one. I think we're always learning that one as our teams constantly change and evolve. The emotional fitness survey helps. I definitely call people out and I'm like, “Okay, how does this feel to everyone? Everyone has to talk, I'm waiting and I will for you to talk,” which I know can be jarring for folks that don't want to share in a group. So really making sure to get everyone's input, that everyone gets used to speaking up in front of the group, and that it is just around Robin mentality, but then also developing those one-on-one relationships so people feel kind being like, “Hey, I'd rather share with you my idea after the call,” or whatever the case may be. But I think it's my job to hold space, it's my job to shut up sometimes and pass the mic, and it's my job to push and to pull. So to really, really look at those levers of who's ready for more and who has the potential to and wants to develop that potential. Maybe it's fear, or maybe it's something that's blocking them that I can help them see. And then for other folks they're like, “Hey, I'm good. I'm chilling. I want to be right here. I don't want to be the big boss. I want to be your right-hand human and let me stay where I'm at.” I'm in my lane. Go away.” So I think it's just really listening to folks and then also help to see what may blocking our views. CHANTÉ: I think I shared that the work I do is diversity, equity, and inclusion accessibility stuff and I often lead a lot and facilitate a lot of conversation around helping leaders and their teams recognize their identities, or intersectionality and recognizing social location and how that plays out with power privilege. One of the things we read about you is that you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I'm guessing that that's a very prominent identity for you because you shared it online openly. Thank you. But I know there's other parts to you. So what are the identities that you lead with? We could start with the most obvious and kind of learn more about you from there. ASHLEIGH: Yeah. So I lead with queer always. Queer is through and through who I am. I realize the privilege I have with the way that I present to the world. In most instances, I will always be safe and I think that it's my responsibility as a VC-backed founder to take that space and I don't really own that for me. I have the privilege of being safe and so, let's make this known and let's make room for more folks while I'm here. I can elbow folks out of the way so that we can keep some more space. But the other parts of me. Gender, I don't really know right now, I'm kind of at the point that I think it's really garbage shit right now. So I don't really know. [laughs] I struggle. I've been in the dance with gender for a while and it's like, I feel like I would be taking up too much space to come out as non-binary and I know that non-binary, you don't have to look a certain way. I realize I have a lot of cis presenting privilege and it's not about that for me. I finally have landed on the conclusion that I don't give a crap about gender at all. It's more genderless and even non-binary feels too boxy for me. I don’t know, I'm kind of ambiguous on that right now. [chuckles] AARON: Actually, I'm just generally agnostic you. ASHLEIGH: Yeah. I feel that. [laughter] CHANTÉ: Yeah. And I loved your response. I'm really into somatics and noticing bodies because bodies show up in space. [chuckles] ASHLEIGH: Yeah. CHANTÉ: People are triggered by bodies sometimes and recognizing it could be that your race, your ethnicity, it could be your age, or your ability, or where you grew up and accent. Are there any other parts of you that you feel like are prominent, or that you lead with, or maybe don't lead with? I’m curious just to hear more about it. ASHLEIGH: I'm pretty heavily tattooed and I also dress kind of funky in most instances. You can't tell right now, but half my hair is orange and half my hair is red. I'm loud, I'm vocal, and I'm very little, but I'm big in spaces. [laughs] I think that makes me different because most of the spaces that I operate in, I've been in this. Oh, the elevator world, it is 98% white men and I'm joking kind of about the industry, but I'm not going to shrink myself anymore. You will be uncomfortable by me. Don't let the crop top fool you. I am a CEO [chuckles] and I'm not going to change my crop top. Like, sorry. CHANTÉ: Yes. See, this is why I'm asking. I mean, I love it. You just naturally went to like, “Okay.” So those are the things that that's how you're showing up. ASHLEIGH: Mm hm. CHANTÉ: Right, and what's true for the industry and what you're in and you kind of already went there, I think it's dope and I think the context matters because you're like, “Yeah. Am I in a room with other queer people who are leading tech companies, or am I in a predominantly male, cis, able-bodied, privileged, born and educated in United States industry where I'm blending elevator technology,” whatever? So thank you for that. ASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely. [chuckles] A lot of times I walk into the room and it's like, either I'm uncomfortable, or they're uncomfortable. So I'm like, “You're going to be uncomfortable today. I'm sorry. I'm going to make you feel things and I'm going to make you recognize your privilege because guess what, we all must be painfully aware of our privilege and if I am in a room all full of white people, all of able-bodied people, all of privileged people in some sense, let's talk about this. Why are we not? Why are we not talking about the humans that are impacted by the work that we're doing? Hello.” AARON: It sounds like that was a big influence for your people-centric company, too. ASHLEIGH: Mm hm. AARON: I don't want to put that experience on you, [chuckles] but – [overtalk] ASHLEIGH: Totally. AARON: I don't want to ask it from a place of naivety and say like, “Oh, did this affect it?” It sounds very obviously your identity and being counterculture to the elevator and escalator world has influenced your company and where you want to go with that and how you want to show up. ASHLEIGH: Absolutely, a 100% being in that space and being different and just being like, “You know what, if I don't own this, I'm going to feel terrible forever and I don't want to because that's great.” It's great and I can walk into the sun in San Francisco and feel fantastic and so, why do I not feel that same confidence level in this boardroom? AARON: Right. ASHLEIGH: You're not going to make me feel small. I'm sorry, you're not. AARON: I think that's a big – I don’t know if I'm seeing so much of a shift. It's a big portion of… I don’t know I want to go with that, but I really like that. You're not going to make me feel small. I like the idea of showing up and you know what, this is me and just because you are uncomfortable, I’m not going to diminish myself. ASHLEIGH: Absolutely and the reason that I do that is me doing that shows other people that it's safe. At least if I'm in the room, you're safe to be who you are if I'm here. AARON: Mm. ASHLEIGH: And so that's why I put queer on my LinkedIn, that's why I lead with that because I know I'm safe and so, if I have – I feel responsible to it. AARON: I know you mentioned you can show up and be safe and create that safety in that environment. Has that been something you had, or had modeled for you, or is that something you had to go out and create this space where you could be that beacon of safety? ASHLEIGH: I think it's been modeled in my queer community. I don't think it had been modeled in corporate culture. I'm also not lost on how privileged I am to be safe and I'm not the bearer of safety and realize that there's many more intersections that go into that and that I'm here to listen and to learn and I don't know everything. [chuckles] Absolutely not. So it's important to just be really vulnerable about what we don't know and to say, “Hey, I'm going to fuck it up and there's going to be ways that I am not aware of my unconscious bias yet. So please teach me and if you don't have emotional capacity to teach me, I'm not saying that it's your responsibility, but if you can call me out, please do.” CHANTÉ: Yeah. That's a really important thing. I feel like being in solidarity with others who are othered. For me, it's like oh shit, we have Black history month coming up around the corner and I have some friends who are Black and queer, or Black, queer, and disabled and they're just like, “Oh, which one should I lead with first?” And I'm like, “All of them.” You shouldn't have to choose any of them over the other parts of yourself, because they're all valid and they all inform your lived experience in this particular body that you're in. I want people to see the complexity and the wholeness of others and just be like, “That is dope.” I love how you said when people have the capacity to teach you, you invite it, but you're not demanding it because so many times we've – I think we all can speak to this on this call. We're all in community. But it is, some of us have more resource and more ability to show up for each other at other points in time because we're going through something [chuckles] that the whole world doesn't know. It is likely because of our identity, our social location, our privilege, and the unique things we're kind of going through as we navigate life. It's really important to just constantly communicate that as well, that you're inviting this kind of calling out, or calling in and that people don't have to educate you. But I hear the willingness to want to show up and learn, which I think is literally a key. [laughs] The willingness. Yeah, awesome. AARON: It's at least half of the battle, right? CHANTÉ: Yes. ASHLEIGH: Totally. My friends and I were having a discussion about community here and it was like, you cannot have a community space that never once is going to screw up, or have an issue, or be called out, or called in. How you move through that, or what, I don't know. If you continue to be a safe space, it’s not in not getting called out. It's how you deal with it. It's how you take that feedback from someone, or the community group and say, “One, thank you for telling me, let's be grateful that someone had the bravery to even speak up and two, then you get to say, is this mine, or not?” Don't lead with the buts, or the whys I did it, or the here's my intent. Don't lead with that. Lead with gratitude that someone felt safe enough to come forward. Someone felt that you were worth getting their feedback, because guess what, if they didn't believe that you would change, they probably wouldn't even tell you. They would just leave. They would just deem the space as unsafe and go. So that in itself, how you take feedback will determine how your community and your company thrives, both. MANDY: And then apologize and move on. ASHLEIGH: Bingo. Yes. AARON: And make material changes to show that you've learned. [laughter] ASHLEIGH: Oh, yeah. [laughter] ASHLEIGH: Good pointer. And then act also important. But [laughs] yes. AARON: That lesson of taking feedback, I think and understanding the value of that is so huge and it's a hard lesson. This is probably the hardest lesson I'm dealing with my kids for instance, is like, “Hey, that first call out, I wasn't really upset with you, but then when you acted super defensive and flipped out, that's the problem that I have. That's not okay.” ASHLEIGH: Totally. AARON: The initial action was just like, “Hey, we need to change this. Let's alter our behavior. Move on. But all the other stuff, that was not good that. That, we need to work on.” ASHLEIGH: Absolutely. AARON: Yeah. It’s a tough lesson. I think it requires an ego check. Like decentering and recognizing oh, this call, it’s not about me. [laughs] ASHLEIGH: Absolutely. Yes, and it's not easy work. You’ve got to eat it. It's not fun. AARON: Right. MANDY: Yeah. I've had to learn not everything's about me. [laughter] MID-ROLL: And now a quick word from our sponsor. I hear people say the VPNs have a reputation for slowing down your internet speed, but not with NordVPN, because it's the fastest VPN in the world. I don't have to sacrifice internet speed for better security. With NordVPN, my internet traffic is routed through a secure encrypted tunnel, which protects my data and privacy. I can also have it on up to six devices like my laptop, phone, TV, iPad—all my devices are protected. Grab your exclusive NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/gtc, or use the code GTC to get a huge discount on your NordVPN plan plus one additional month for free. Plus, a bonus gift! It's completely risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money back guarantee. AARON: A thing I wanted to get back to a little bit. I loved when Chanté was talking about folks who said that were Black, queer, and disabled and this multiple identities and leading with all of them. I think especially industry wise, or big corp wise anyway, we create these interest groups of this is the Black community interest group. This is the pride interest group. This is the disabled workers' interest group. I feel like it misses so much of the you of intersectionality. I'm wondering if you've seen that both, in your space and your identity and being able to create that space of vulnerability yourself, if you've noticed a benefit of that. ASHLEIGH: No, I think that's interesting and I like the note here that employee resources groups can be really great and really crappy. I totally agree. AARON: Yeah. ASHLEIGH: Often, it feels to me that the goal is visibility and understanding at the end of the day. We get great visibility in employee resource groups. We feel seen with people that are like us in some way, or another. But really, we want to have this intersectionality so how do we get both? My gosh. How do we have the representation, which is so important? How do we have the understanding, which is so important? And then how do we move past the feelings of not feeling seen so that we can see others? Because if we don't think it's possible to be seen, we're probably not able to see others and we need an on-staff therapist, really. Let's just be honest. [laughter] CHANTÉ: Yes. ASHLEIGH: Put them on payroll. [laughter] CHANTÉ: I’ve got to get that idea. Now you're talking my language. I'm telling you, I'm telling you if I had it my way, all organizations would offer that as their employee health and wellness benefit is to have somebody who's like on-site and depending on the ratio of people, if you have too many, you got to get several organizational psychologists and folks who are well-versed in trauma. ASHLEIGH: Totally. Yeah. CHANTÉ: But it makes me think of the conversation I often talk about, which is the difference between sacred space and safe space. AARON: Ooh. CHANTÉ: The sacred space is like those ERGs. It's like, yeah, we're going to have our unique identities where we can show up, talk to each other, see each other, and be like, “Oh my God, that really sucked,” or “That was really good. Good job in there.” The places where we're like – the safe spaces are harder because we have to make sure that everyone, when we say psychological safety, they're like, “Yes, I know what that means,” and that people are committed to doing some kind of work, which is why I'm like, “Organizations need to focus more on culture.” ASHLEIGH: Yeah. CHANTÉ: And this is where the like magic can happen, or where it can all fall apart. The sacred versus space is so huge. So, so huge because we can't have enough of people like you, Ashleigh. The world needs so many CEOs like you, then the world would be better and different and I wouldn't mind going to corporate work. [chuckles] But the reality is that you are few and far between. It's based on your identities, based on your lived experience, which is why it is so important to talk about it and to spend time with this episode getting into it. ASHLEIGH: Yeah. No, I completely agree. I also really like the idea of what's the difference between a safe space and a brave space, which plays into that a bit, too. I think in order to be safe, we have to be brave and it's kind of like what comes first vulnerability, or the courage? All the nuance in that, that ends up being this mushy gushy and I completely agree, we need it all and it's possible and I'm a firm believer in it's possible. The people that keep telling me that people first companies can't be profitable. I think it's bullshit. I think it's absolute bullshit. When we focus on people, the profits will come. If we're all safe, if we all believe in the mission, if we're all there because we want to be there, guess what? It will happen in and it will continue to happen and the foundation will be more sturdy and we'll be able to pivot easier because guess what? We move as a pack and I don't know, I guess, I'm just here to prove them all wrong. CHANTÉ: I feel like I love that and I'm also really sad that we have to work really hard to prove that people matter over productivity, [chuckles] that people matter over profits. ASHLEIGH: Yeah. CHANTÉ: My favorite, well, one of my favorite people to follow is Dan Price. He's the CEO of Gravity Payments and he's the guy who went viral when he basically gave up parts of his salary and paid everyone a livable wage. He tweets every day and of brings attention to this. It's just like you're right, Ashleigh that people first companies are rare and I can't believe that that's still happening in 2022, but the ones who are, stick out. There are definitely folks who people fall in line to submit their resume and want to work for you and you have no issue with hiring great talent and probably keeping it. It's the organizations and corporations that are literally extracting people's best parts of themselves in hope of getting a profit for their shareholders. ASHLEIGH: That just sounds so icky, doesn't it? [chuckles] CHANTÉ: Yeah. Yeah. It does. I haven't looked to see who your community is in terms of being venture backed, but when you went out, fundraised, started your company, and you said you were going to be people first, what were the reactions? Did it take you many tries to find folks to fill your cap table who believed in that, too? ASHLEIGH: So our first funding round, it was mostly retired elevator people that want to see the industry turn around, that believe in the industry and feel really crummy about where it's at now and how lost it is. Our entire first round was completely private and then after that, the next round was mostly those people coming in again. I wanted to go non-VC for as long as possible because I know I'm niche, I know I'm different, and if you don't get the vision, I don't want to waste my time trying to explain to you what we're doing, because we're too different. So if you're not with me, I don't have the time to sit here and convince you. The industry is a $100 plus billion a year industry and if you don't see that and don't get it, then bye. But then we ended up taking on some VC funding this round because I got tagged in a LinkedIn post that someone was like, “Where are all the PropTech women?” 98% of the people pitching this VC were all men. We ended up getting a meeting because I've always turned down any VC meeting. We just hit it off and then we went out to lunch and we were very similar. He was a founder himself and so, he understood what I was doing. I was like, “Hey, I'm not building this company to report to venture capitalists and so, if you're someone that expects me to work for you and not to work for my employees, we're not the right fit.” He was like, “No, that's what I expect you to do. Call me if you need me. Otherwise, I'm out of your hair.” I was like, “Great, okay! We can do this.” And then we ended up getting a couple more folks. I think it was really because I got on the phone with them and I was like, “I'm not taking your money,” and they were like, “Excuse me?” I was like, “I'm not taking your money. My round is full. I'll talk to you only because Zane wants me to talk to you. Otherwise, I don't have a conversation with you,” and they were like, “Please extend your round,” and I was like, “Okay, I guess.” So how could this happen? CHANTÉ: Wow, that’s – [overtalk] ASHLEIGH: Is it because I’m being a jerk? [laughs] CHANTÉ: No, it sounds like it happened because you were more aware of who you were and you were sticking to your values and principles, actually. That's what it sounds like from my seat. So speaking of that, are your values of the company reflections of your personal values, or are they collective –? [overtalk] ASHLEIGH: Oh, a 100%. CHANTÉ: To the folks who work with you? ASHLEIGH: Yeah, I think both and we found each other. But building out the values and the mission and the vision was something that I spent a lot of money doing with The House of Who, who is a great organization and the East Bay. They're a branding company and they really helped me articulate the vision, the values, and the mission in a really eloquent way right in the beginning. I think everyone probably looked at me like I was bonkers for spending money on branding before I had any sort of software, or [chuckles] any sort of anything. But for me, it was so important that we had a way to articulate this to the team in an eloquent way that got people on board and really said, “This is who we are and this is who we're going to be.” How do we know what we do before we know who we are? It's not possible. So at that point, the people that align and that gravitate to what our values and vision are, I think we just kind of find each other. MANDY: That's awesome. I loved hearing a little bit about your journey, especially when it comes to venture capital, because I think lot of us just get a weird icky feeling from even hearing about venture capital. So it's always good to hear the good stories. ASHLEIGH: Yeah. MANDY: But since we are coming up on the hour, I was hoping that we could go into reflections and this is where we talk about something that stood out to us, maybe a call-to-action for ourselves, or the listeners. I can start. There was something at the beginning of the show that you said, that I had to write down, was just eating a shame sandwich once in a while. I'm not going to try to say that ten times fast. [laughter] You invited people to call you out and I love that. That's something I always try to do and model. It's the best way to learn, when invited, saying, “If we're talking, I'm going to ask you this. If I'm wrong, can you please let me know? Because I want to learn. I want to grow.” I think that's something that's super important and something that I try to do, especially with children that I'm around. My child, other children that are friends with her, just be like, “I was wrong. I was wrong. I'm sorry and it's just such a good thing to do, just to be humble in that ability to say I was wrong and I learned.” Thank you for that. CHANTÉ: The thing I really love that you said, and I haven't really heard this often, is you said your north star is being excellent to each other and I feel like most people have a north star of growing, or making an X number of profit, or whatever. I just love that. It is because it really does, I think eliminate your value of being people first and demonstrates that that's where you're going to put your time and money. Not only if I had the money, I'd be like, “Okay, Ashleigh, when you're having your next route, I want to invest in you.” But I feel like leading with that and saying that often tells people who might be interested in a job what you're about, tells your clients what you're about, and obviously, the communities in what you're serving. I just love that. So thank you for sharing it. ASHLEIGH: Yeah, absolutely. Chanté, my favorite part of today was you talking about the intersections and celebrating the intersections of identity and I've had so many conversations with friends about the different lanes into the intersection, but I really like that you focused on the intersection. So that intersection as a whole was very cool to me. AARON: I think one of the things I'm going to take with me was your this doesn't make sense log. I love this concept. This speaks to me on so many different levels. One is the way to raise all these little things that get missed without having to work up all of the energy to try and give someone feedback in a one-on-one meeting, or whatever else. But also, as someone who deals with ADHD and from an engineering mindset, just this place to be like, “Hey, I ran across this and it makes no sense. Can we revisit this?” Because the answer might be, “Oh, here's this explanation for why we do it that way,” and you're like, “Oh, now it makes sense to me,” or it might be like, “You're right. Let's figure out a different way to do that.” I just love that there's just this running place that anyone can just dump these thoughts as they run across them is really cool. MANDY: Awesome. Well, Chanté, Aaron, Ashleigh, it's been such a great conversation and thank you all so much for showing up and being vulnerable and having this discussion. It's been great. So with that, I just want to thank you again, thank the audience, and we'll see next week.Special Guest: Ashleigh Wilson.Sponsored By:Test Double: 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/greaterNordVPN: Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/gtc or use the code GTC to get a huge discount off your NordVPN plan + 1 additional month for free! It’s completely risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Promo Code: GTCSupport Greater Than Code

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 little square pieces of brightly colored paper with self-adhesive strip on the back. PAUL: Yeah. The stickies. DAMIEN: Stickies. [chuckles] I have a question about this process. I've been involved in very similar processes and it sounds incredibly useful. But as you describe it, one of the concerns I have is how do you avoid getting over specific, or over described? Like you can describe systems until you're talking about the particles in the sun, how do you know when to stop? PAUL: So I think there's a couple of things. Number one is at the start of whatever kind of this activity, this EventStorming is laying out what's the goal? What are we trying to accomplish in terms of the process? With returns, for example, it would be maybe from this event to this event, we're trying to map out what that process looks like and you start with what you might call the happy path. What does it look like when everything goes well? And then you can use pink stickies to represent alternate paths, or things going wrong and capture those. If they're not tied back to this goal, then you can say, “Okay, I think we've got enough level of detail here.” The other thing is time boxing is saying, “Okay, well, we've only got half an hour, or we've only got an hour so let's see how much we can do in that time period,” and then at the end of that, if you still have a lot of questions, then you can – or you feel like, “Oh, we need to dig into some of these areas more.” Then you could schedule a follow up session to dig into that a little bit more. So it's a combination of the people that are participating in this deciding how much level of detail they want to go down to. What I find is it typically is something that as you're going through the activity, you start to see. “Oh, maybe this is too far down in the weeds versus this is the right level.” As a facilitator, I don't typically prescribe that ahead of time, because it's much easier to add sticky notes and then talk about them than it is to have a conversation when there's nothing visualized. I like to visualize it first and lay it out and then it's very easy to say, “Oh, well, this looks like too much detail. So we'll just put a placeholder for that and not worry about out it right now.” It's a little bit of the facilitation technique of having a parking lot where you can say, “Okay, this is a good topic, but maybe we don't need to get down in that right now. Maybe let's refocus back on what it is that we're trying to accomplish.” JESSICA: So there's some regulation that happens naturally during the meeting, during interactions and you can have that regulation in the context of the visual representation, which is the EventStorming, the long row of stickies from one event to the other. PAUL: Right, the timeline that you're building up. So it's a little bit in my mind, I watched last year, I think it was on Netflix. There was a documentary about Pixar and how they do their storyboarding process for their movies and it is exactly that. They storyboard out the movie and iterate over that again and again and again telling that story. What's powerful about that is it's a visual medium so you have someone that is sketching out the main beats of the story and then they're talking it through. Not to say that EventStorming is at that level of rigor, but it has that kind of feel to it of we're laying out these events to tell the story and then we're talking through the story and seeing what we've missed and where we need to add more detail, maybe where we've added too much detail. And then like you said, Jess, there's a certain amount of self-regulation in there in terms of, do we have enough time to go down into this? Is this important right now? JESSICA: And I imagine that when I have questions that go further into detail than we were able to go in the meeting, if I've been in that EventStorming session, I know who to ask. PAUL: That's the idea, yeah. So the pink stickies that we said represent questions, what I like about those is, well, several things. Number one, it democratizes the idea that it's okay to ask questions, which I think is a really powerful technique. I think there's a tendency in meetings for some people to hold back and other people to do all the talking. We've all experienced that. What this tries to do is to democratize that and actually make it not only okay and not only accepted, but encourage that you're expected to ask questions and you're expected to put these sticky notes on here when there's things that you don't understand. JESSICA: Putting the questions on a sticky note, along with the events, the actors, and the things that we do know go on sticky notes, the questions also go on sticky notes. All of these are contributions. PAUL: Exactly. They value contributions and what I love about that is that even people that are new to this process, it's a way for them to ask questions in a way that is kind of friendly to them. I've seen this work really well, for example, with onboarding new team members and also, it encourages the idea that we have different areas of expertise. So in any given process, or any business story, whatever you want to characterize it as, some people are going to know more about some parts of it than others. What typically happens is nobody knows the whole story, but when we work together, we can actually build up an approximation of that whole story and help each other fill in the gaps. So you may have the person that's more on the business, or the product side explaining some terminology. You can capture those explanations on sticky notes as a glossary that you're building up as you go. You can have engineers asking questions about the sequence of events in terms of well, does this one come before that one? And then the other thing that's nice about the questions is it actually as you're going, it's mapping out your ignorance and I see that as a positive thing. JESSICA: The known unknowns. PAUL: Known unknowns. It takes unknown unknowns, which the kind of elephant in the room, and at least gets them up as known unknowns that you can then have a conversation around. Because there's often this situation of a question that somebody's afraid to ask and maybe they're new to the team, or maybe they're just not comfortable asking that type of question. But it gives you actually a map of that ignorance so you can kind of see oh, there's this whole area here that just has a bunch of pink stickies. So that's probably not an area we're ready to work on and we should prioritize. Actually, if this is an area that we need to be working on soon, we should prioritize getting answers to these questions by maybe we need to do a proof of concept, or some UX work, or maybe some kind of prototyping around this area, or like you said, Jess, maybe the person that knows the answers to these questions is just not in this session right now and so, we need to follow up with them, get whatever answers we need, and then come back and revisit things. JESSICA: So you identify areas of risk. PAUL: Yes. Areas of risk, both from a product perspective and also from a technical perspective as well. DAMIEN: So what does it take to have one of these events, or to facilitate one of these events? How do you know when you're ready and you can do it? PAUL: So I've done EventStorming [chuckles] as a conference activity in a hallway with sticky notes and we say, “Okay, let's as a little bit of an icebreaker here –” I usually you do the story of Cinderella. “Let’s pick the Disney story of Cinderella and we'll just EventStorm this out. Just everyone, here are some orange sticky notes and a Sharpie, just write down some things that you remember happening in that story,” and then everyone writes a few. We post it up on the hallway wall and then we sequence them as a timeline and then we can basically build up that story in about 5, or 10 minutes from scratch. With a business process, it's not that different. It's like, okay, we're going to do returns, or something like that and if people are already familiar with the technique, then just give them a minute, or so to think of some things that they know that would happen in that process. And then they do that individually and then we just post them up on the timeline and then sequence them as a group and it can happen really quickly. And then everything from there is refinement. Iteration and refinement over what you've put up as that initial skeleton. DAMIEN: Do you ever find that a team comes back a week, or a day, or a month later and goes, “Oh, there is this big gap in our narrative because nobody in this room understood the warehouse needed to be reordered in order to send this thing down”? PAUL: Oh, for sure. Sometimes it's big gaps. Sometimes it's a huge cluster of pink sticky notes that represents an area where there's just a lot of risk and unknowns that the team maybe hasn't thought about all that much. Like you said, it could be there’s this third-party thing that it wasn't until everyone got in a room and kind of started to map it out, that they realized that there was this gap in their knowledge. JESSICA: Yeah. Although, you could completely miss it if there's nobody from the warehouse in the room and nobody has any idea that you need to tell the warehouse to expect this return. PAUL: Right and so, part of that is putting a little bit of thought into who would need to be part of this and in a certain way, playing devil's advocate in terms of what don't we know, what haven't we thought of. So it encourages that sense of curiosity with this and it's a little bit different from – Some of the listeners maybe have experienced user story mapping and other techniques like that. Those tend to be focused on understanding a process, but they're very much geared towards okay, how do we then figure out how we're going to code up this feature and how do we slice it up into stories and prioritize that. So it's similar in terms of sticky notes, but the emphasis in EventStorming is more on understanding together, the problem that we're trying to address from a business perspective. JESSICA: Knowledge pulling. PAUL: Yeah. Knowledge pulling, knowledge distillation, those types of idea years, and that kind of mindset. So not just jumping straight to code, but trying to get a little bit of a shared understanding of what all is the thing that we're trying to actually work on here. JESSICA: Eric Evans calls it knowledge crunching. PAUL: Yes, Eric called it knowledge crunching. DAMIEN: I love that phrase, that shared understanding. That's what we, as product teams, are generating is a shared understanding both, captured in our documentation, in our code, and before that, I guess on large sheets of butcher paper. [laughs] PAUL: Well, and it could be a quick exercise of okay, we're going to be working on some new feature and let's just spend 15 minutes just mapping it out to get a sense of, are we on the same page with this? JESSICA: Right, because sometimes it's not even about we think we need to know something, it's do we know enough? Let's find out. PAUL: Right. JESSICA: And is that knowledge shared among us? PAUL: Right, and maybe exposing, like it could be as simple as slightly different terminology, or slightly different understanding of terminology between people that can have a big impact in terms of that. I was teaching a workshop last night where we were talking about this, where somebody had written the event. So there was a repair process that a third-party repair company would handle and then the event that closed that process off, they called case closed. So then the question becomes well, what does case closed mean? Because the word case – [overtalk] JESSICA: [laughs] It’s like what's the definition of done? PAUL: Right, exactly. [laughter] Because that word case didn't show up anywhere earlier in the process. So is this like a new concept? Because the thing that kicks off the process is repair purchase order created and at the end of the process, it's said case closed. So then the question becomes well, is case closed really, is that a new concept that we actually need to implement here? Or is this another way of saying that we are getting a copy of that repair purchase order back that and it's been updated with details about what the repair involved? Or maybe it's something like repair purchase order closed. So it's kind of forcing us to clarify terminology, which may seem a little bit pedantic, but that's what's going to end up in the code. If you can get some of those things exposed a little earlier before you actually jump to code and get people on the same page and surface any sort of differences in terminology and misunderstandings, I think that can be super helpful for everyone. JESSICA: Yeah. Some people say it's just semantics. Semantics’ meaning, its only meaning, this is only about out what this step actually means because when you put it in the code, the code is crystal clear. It is going to do exactly what it does and whether that clarity matches the shared understanding that we think we have oh, that's the difference between a bug and a working system. DAMIEN: [laughs] That's beautiful. It's only meaning. [laughs] JESSICA: Right? Yeah. But this is what makes programming hard is that pedanticness. The computer is the ultimate pedant. DAMIEN: Pedant. You're going to be pedantic about it. [laughter] PAUL: I see what you did there. [laughter] DAMIEN: And that is the occupation, right? That is what we do is look at and create systems and then make them precise. JESSICA: Yeah. DAMIEN: In a way that actually well, is precise. [laughs] JESSICA: Right, and the power of our human language is that it's not precise, that it allows for ambiguity, and therefore, a much broader range of meaning. But as developers, it's our job to be precise. We have to be precise to the computers. It helps tremendously to be precise with each other. DAMIEN: Yeah, and I think that's actually the power of human cognition is that it's not precise. We are very, very fuzzy machines and anyone who tries to pretend otherwise will be greatly disappointed. Ask me how I know. [laughter] PAUL: Well, and I think what I'm trying to do with something like EventStorming is to embrace the fuzziness, is to say that that's actually an asset and we want to embrace that and expose that fuzziness, that messiness. Because the processes we have and work with are often inherently complex. We are trying to provide some visual representation of that so we can actually get our head around, or our minds around the language complexities, the meanings, and drive in a little bit to that meaning. JESSICA: So when the sticky notes pile on top of each other, that's a feature. PAUL: It is. Going back to that example I was just talking about, let's say, there's a bunch of, like we do the initial part of this for a minute, or so where people are creating sticky notes and let's say, we end up with four, or five sticky notes written by different people on top of each other that end up on the timeline that all say pretty much the same thing with slight variations. JESSICA: Let’s say, case closed, request closed. PAUL: Case closed, repair purchase order closed, repair purchase order updated, repair purchase order sent. So from a meaning perspective, I look at that and I say, “That's gold in terms of information,” because that's showing us that there's a richness here. Firstly, that's a very memorable thing that's happening in the timeline – [overtalk] JESSICA: Oh and it has multiple things. PAUL: That maybe means it's a key event. Right, and then what is the meaning? Are these the same things? Are they different things? Maybe we don't have enough time in that session to dig into that, but if we're going to implement something around that, or work with something around that, then we’re going to at some point need some clarity around the language, the terminology, and what these concepts mean. Also, the sequence as well, because it might be that there's actually multiple events being expressed there that need to be teased apart. DAMIEN: You used this phrase a couple times, “key event,” and since you've used it a couple times, I think it might be key. [laughter] Can you tell us a little bit about what a key event is? What makes something a key event? PAUL: Yeah, the example I like to use is from the Cinderella story. So if you think about the story of Cinderella, one of the things, when people are doing that as an icebreaker, they always end up being multiple copies of the event that usually is something like shoe lost, or slipper lost, or glass slipper lost. There's something about that event that makes it memorable, firstly and then there's something about that event that makes it pivotal in the story. For those that are not familiar with the story [chuckles]—I am because I've EventStormed this thing maybe a hundred times—but there's this part. Another key event is the fairy godmother showing up and doing the magic at the start and she actually describes a business policy. She says, “The magic is going to run out at midnight,” and like all business policies, it's vague [laughter] and it’s unclear as to what it means because – [overtalk] JESSICA: The carriage disappears, the dress disappears, but not the slipper that fell off. PAUL: Exactly. There's this exception that for some bizarre reason, to move the plot forward, the slipper stays. But then the definition of midnight is very hazy because what she's actually describing, in software terms, is a long running process of the clock banging 12 times, which is what midnight means is the time between the first and the twelfth and during that time, the magic is slowly unraveling. JESSICA: So midnight is a duration, not an instant. PAUL: Exactly. Yes, it's a process, not an event. So coming back to the question that Damien asked about key events. That slipper being lost is a key event in that story, I think because it actually is a shift in narrative. Up until that point in the story, it's the story of Cinderella and then after that, once the slipper is lost, it becomes the story of the prince looking for Cinderella. And then at the end, you get the day tomorrow, the stuff that happens with that slipper at the end of the story. Another key event would be like the fairy godmother showing up and doing the magic. DAMIEN: [chuckles] It seems like these are necessary events, right? If the slipper is not lost, if the fairy godmother doesn't do magic, you don't have the story of Cinderella. PAUL: Right. These are narrative turns, right? DAMIEN: Yeah. PAUL: These are points of the story shifts and so, key events can sometimes be a narrative shift where it's driving the story forward in a business process. Something like, let's say, you're working on an e-commerce system, like order submitted is a key event because you are adding items to a shopping cart and then at some point, you make a decision to submit the order and then at that point, it transitions from order being a draft thing that is in a state of flux to it actually becomes essentially immutable and gets passed over to fulfilment. So there's a shift in responsibility and actor between these two as well just like between Cinderella and the prince. JESSICA: A shift in who is driving the story forward. PAUL: Right. Yeah. So it's who is driving the story forward. So these key events often function as a shift in actor, a shift in who's driving the story forward, or who has responsibility. They also often indicate a handoff because of that from one group to another in an organization. Something like a sales process that terminates in contract signed. That key event is also the goal of the sales process. The goal is to get to contract signed and then once that happens, there's usually a transition to say, an onboarding group that actually onboards the new customer in the case of a sales process for a new customer, or in e-commerce, it would be the fulfillment part, the warehousing part that Jess was talking about earlier. That's actually responsible for the fulfillment piece, which is they take that order, they create a package, they put all the items in the package, create the shipping label, and ship it out to the customer. JESSICA: And in domain-driven design, you talked about the shift from order being a fluid thing that's changing as people add stuff to their cart to order being immutable. The word order has different meanings for the web site where you're buying stuff and the fulfillment system, there's a shift in that term. PAUL: Right, and that often happens around a key event, or a pivotal event is that there's a shift from one, you might think of it as context, or language over to another. So preorder submission, it’s functioning as a draft order, but what it's actually typically called is a shopping cart and a shopping cart is not the same as an order. It's a great metaphor because there is no physical cart, but we all know what that means as a metaphor. A shopping cart is a completely different metaphor from an order, but we're able to understand that thread of continuity between I have this interactive process of taking items, or products, putting them in the shopping cart, or out again. And then at some point that shopping cart, which is functioning as a draft order, actually it becomes an order that has been submitted and then it gets – [overtalk] DAMIEN: Yeah, the metaphor doesn't really work until that transition. You have a shopping cart and then you click purchase and now what? [laughs] You're not going to the register and ringing it up, that doesn't make any sense. [chuckles] The metaphor kind of has to end there. JESSICA: You’re not leaving the cart in the corral in the parking lot. [laughter] PAUL: Well, I think what they're trying to do is when you think about going through the purchase process at a store, you take your items up in the shopping cart and then at that point, you transition into a financial transaction that has to occur that then if you were at a big box electronic store, or something, eventually, you would make the payment. You would submit payment. That would be the key events and that payment is accepted and then you receive a receipt, which is kind of the in-person version of a record of your order that you've made because you have to bring the receipt back. DAMIEN: It sort of works if the thing you're putting in the shopping cart are those little cards. When they don't want to put things on the shelf, they have a card, you pick it up, and you take it to register. They ring it up, they give you a receipt, and hopefully, the thing shows up in the mail someday, or someone goes to the warehouse and goes gets it. PAUL: We've all done that. [chuckles] Sometimes it shows up. Sometimes it doesn't. JESSICA: That's an interesting point that at key events, there can be a shift in metaphor. PAUL: Yes. Often, there is. So for example, I mentioned earlier, a sales process ending in a contract and then once the contract is signed, the team – let's say, you're signing on a new customer, for a SaaS service, or something like that. Once they've signed the contract, the conversation isn't really about the contract anymore. It's about what do we need to do to onboard this customer. Up until that point, the emphasis is maybe on payment, legal disclosures, and things like that. But then the focus shifts after the contract is signed to more of an operational focus of how do we get the data in, how do we set up their accounts correctly, that type of thing. JESSICA: The contract is an input to that process. PAUL: Yes. JESSICA: Whereas, it was the output, the big goal of the sales process. PAUL: Yes, exactly. So these key events also function from a systems perspective, when you think about moving this to code that event then becomes almost like a message potentially. Could be implemented as say, a message that's being passed from the sales system through to the onboarding system, or something like that. So it functions as the integration point between those two, where the language has to be translated from one context to another. JESSICA: And it's an integration point we can define carefully so that makes it a strong boundary and a good place to divide the system. DAMIEN: Nice. PAUL: Right. So that's where it starts to connect to some of the things that people really care about these days in terms of system decomposition and things like that. Because you can start thinking about based on a process view of this, based on a behavior view of this, if we treat these key events as potential emergent boundaries in a process, like we've been describing, that we discover through mapping out the process, then that can give us some clues as to hmm maybe these boundaries don't exist in the system right now, but they could. These could be places where we start to tease things apart. JESSICA: Right. Where you start breaking out separate services and then when you get down to the user story level, the user stories expect a consistent language within themselves. You're not going to go from cart to return purchase in a case. PAUL: [laughs] Right. JESSICA: In a single user story. User stories are smaller scope and work within a single language. PAUL: Right and so, I think the connection there in my mind is user stories have to be written in some kind of language, within some language context and mapping out the process can help you understand where you are in that context and then also understand, like if you think about a process that maybe has a sales part of the process and then an onboarding part, it'll often be the case that there's different development teams that are focusing on different parts of that process. So it provides a way of them seeing what their integration point is and what might need to happen across that integration point. If they were to either integrate to different systems, or if they're trying to tease apart an existing system. To use Michael Feathers’ term, what might be a “scene” that we could put in here that would allow us to start teasing these things apart. And doing it with the knowledge of the product people that are part of the visualization, too is that this isn't something typically that engineers do exclusively from a technical perspective. The idea with EventStorming is you are also bringing in other perspectives like product, business, stakeholders, and anyone that might have more of that business perspective in terms of what the goals of the process are and what the steps are in the process. MID-ROLL: And now a quick word from our sponsor. I hear people say the VPNs have a reputation for slowing down your internet speed, but not with NordVPN, because it's the fastest VPN in the world. I don't have to sacrifice internet speed for better security. With NordVPN, my internet traffic is routed through a secure encrypted tunnel, which protects my data and privacy. I can also have it on up to six devices like my laptop, phone, TV, iPad—all my devices are protected. Grab your exclusive NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/gtc, or use the code GTC to get a huge discount on your NordVPN plan plus one additional month for free. Plus, a bonus gift! It's completely risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money back guarantee. JESSICA: As a developer, it's so important to understand what those goals are, because that lets us make good decisions when we're down in the weeds and getting super precise. PAUL: Right, I think so. I think often, I see teams that are implementing stories, but not really understanding the why behind that in terms of maybe they get here's the functionality on delivering and how that fits into the system. But like I talked about before, when you're driving a process towards a key event, that becomes the goal of that subprocess. So the question then becomes how does the functionality that I'm going to implement that's described in this user story actually move people towards that goal and maybe there's a better way of implementing it to actually get them there. DAMIEN: Yeah, it's always important to keep that in mind, because there's always going to be ambiguity until you have a running system, or ran system, honestly. JESSICA: Yeah! DAMIEN: There's always going to be ambiguity, which it is our job as people writing code to manage and we need to know. Nobody's going to tell us exactly what's going to happen because that's our job. PAUL: Right. JESSICA: It's like if the developer had a user story that Cinderella’s slipper fell off, but they do didn't realize that the goal of that was that the prince picked it up, then they might be like, “Oh, slipper broke. That's fine.” PAUL: Yeah. JESSICA: It’s off the foot. Check the box. PAUL: Let's create a glass slipper factory implementer object [laughter] so that we can just create more of those. JESSICA: Oh, yeah. What, you wanted a method slip off in one piece? You didn't say that. I've created crush! PAUL: Right. [laughter] Yeah. So I think sometimes there's this potential to get lost in the weeds of the everyday development work that is happening and I like to tie it back to what is the actual story that we're supporting. And then sometimes what people think of as exception cases, like an example might be going back to that merchant return example is what if they issue the shipper label, but the buyer never receives it. We may say, “Well, that's never going to happen,” or “That's unlikely.” But visualizing that case, you may say, “That's actually a strong possibility. How do we handle that case and bake that into the design so that it actually reflects what we're trying to do?” JESSICA: And then you make an event that just triggers two weeks later that says, “Check whether customer received label.” PAUL: Yes, exactly. One thing you can do as well is like – so that's one possibility of solving it. The idea what EventStorming can let you do is say, “Well, that's one way of doing it. Are there any other options in terms of how we could handle this, let's visualize.” With any exception case, or something, you could say, “Well, let's try solving this a few different ways. Just quickly come up with some different ideas and then we can pull the best of those ideas into that.” So the idea when you're modeling is to say, “Okay, well, there's probably more than one way to address this. So maybe let's get a few ideas on the table and then pick the best out of these.” JESSICA: Or address it at multiple levels. PAUL: Yes. JESSICA: A fallback for the entire process is customer contact support again. PAUL: Right, and that may be the simple answer in that kind of case. What we're trying to do, though is to visualize that case as an option and then talk about it, have a structured conversation around it, say, “Well, how would we handle that?” Which I think from a product management perspective is a key thing to do is to engage the engineers in saying, “Well, what are some different ways that we could handle this and solve this?” If you have people that are doing responsibility primarily for testing in that, then having them weigh in on, well, how would we test this? What kind of test cases might we need to handle for this? So it's getting – [overtalk] JESSICA: How will we know it worked? PAUL: Different perspectives and opinions on the table earlier rather than later. JESSICA: And it's cheap. It's cheap, people. It's a couple hours and a lot of post-its. You can even buy the generic post-its. We went to Office Depot yesterday, it's $10 for 5 little Post-it pads, [laughter] or 25 Office Depot brand post-it pads. They don't have to stay on the wall very long; the cheap ones will work. PAUL: [laughs] So those all work and then it depends if you have shares in 3M, I guess, with you. [laughter] Or Office Depot, depending which road you want to go down. [laughter] JESSICA: Or if you really care about that shade of pale purple, which I do. PAUL: Right. I mean, what's been fascinating to me is in the last 2 years with switching to remote work and that is so much of, 95% of the EventStorming I do these days is on a collaborative whiteboard tool like Miro, or MURAL, which I don't know why those two product names are almost exactly the same. But then it's even cheaper because you can sign up for a free account, invite a few people, and then just start adding sticky notes to some virtual whiteboard and do it from home. There's a bunch of things that you can do on tool like that with copy pasting, moving groups of sticky notes around, rearranging things, and ordering things much – [overtalk] JESSICA: And you never run out of wall. PAUL: Yeah. The idea with the butcher’s paper in a physical workshop, in-person workshop is you're trying to create a sense of unending modeling space that you can use. That you get for free when you use online collaborative whiteboarding tool. It’s just there out of – [overtalk] JESSICA: And you can zoom in. PAUL: And you zoom in and out. Yeah. There's a – [overtalk] JESSICA: Stickies on your stickies on your stickies. [laughter] I'm not necessarily recommending that, but you can do it. PAUL: Right. The group I was working with last night, they'd actually gone to town using Miro emojis. They had something bad happen in the project and they've got the horror emoji [laughter] and then they've got all kinds of and then copy pasting images off the internet for things. JESSICA: Nice. PAUL: So yeah, can make it even more fun. JESSICA: Okay. So it's less physical, but in a lot of ways it can be more expressive, PAUL: I think so. More expressive and just as engaging and it can break down the geographical barriers. I've done sessions where we've had people simultaneously spread in multiple occasions across the US and Europe in the same session, all participating in real-time. If you're doing it remote, I like to keep it short. So maybe we do like a 2-hour session with a 10- or 15-minute break in the middle, because you're trying to manage people's energy and keep them focused and it's hard to do that when you just keep going. MANDY: I kind of want to talk a little bit about facilitation and how you facilitate these kind of workshops and what you do, engage people and keep them interested. PAUL: Yeah. So I think that it depends a little bit on the level of detail we're working at. If it's at the level of a few team members trying to figure out a feature, then it can be very informal. Not a lot of facilitation required. Let's just write down what the goal is and then go through the process of brainstorming a few stickies, laying it out, and then sequencing it as a timeline, adding questions. It doesn't require a lot of facilitation hand. I think the key thing is just making sure that people are writing down their questions and that it's time boxed. So quitting while people are still interested and then [laughter] at the end, before you finish, having a little bit of a conversation around what might the next steps be. Like what did we learn? You could do a couple of minutes retrospective, add a sticky note for something you learned in this session, and then what do you see as our next steps and then move on from there with whatever action items come out of that. So that one doesn't require, I think a lot of facilitation and people can get up and running with that pretty quickly. I also facilitate workshops that are a lot more involved where it's at the other end of the spectrum, where it's a big picture workshop where we're mapping out maybe an entire value stream for an organization. We may have a dozen, 20 people involved in a session like that representing different departments, different organizational silos and in that case, it requires a lot more planning, a lot more thinking through what the goal of the workshop is, who would you need to invite? Because there's a lot more detail involved and a lot more people involved, that could be four, or five multi-hour sessions spread over multiple days to be able to map out an entire value stream from soup to nuts. And then usually the goal of something like that is some kind of system modernization effort, or maybe spinning up a new project, or decomposing a legacy system, or even understanding what a legacy system does, or process improvement that will result inevitably in some software development in certain places. I did a workshop like that, I think last August and out of that, we identified a major bottleneck in the process that everyone in the workshop, I think it was just a bunch of pink stickies in one area that it got called the hot mess. [laughter] It was one area and what was happening was there were several major business concerns that were all coupled together in this system. They actually ended up spinning up a development team to focus on teasing apart the hot mess to figure out how do we decompose that down? JESSICA: Yes. PAUL: As far as I know, that effort was still ongoing as of December. I'm assuming that's still running because it was prioritized as we need to be able to decompose this part of this system to be able to grow and scale to where we want to get to. JESSICA: Yeah. That's a major business risk that they’ve got. They at least got clarity about where it is. PAUL: Right. Yeah, and what we did from there is I coached the developers through that process over several months. So we actually EventStormed it out at a much lower level. Once we figured out what the hot mess was, let's map it out and then they combined that with some flow charting and a bunch of other more engineering, kind of oriented visualization techniques, state machines, things like that to try and get a handle on what was going on. DAMIEN: We'll get UML in there eventually, right? PAUL: Eventually. [laughter] You can't do software development without some kind of state machine, sequence diagram. JESSICA: And it’s approximating UML. You can't do it. You can't do it. [laughter] You will either use it, or you will derive a pigeon form of it. PAUL: Right. Well, I still use it for state diagrams and sequence diagrams when I'm down at that technical level. What I find is that there's a certain level of rigor that UML requires for a sequence diagram, or something like that that seems to get in the way of collaboration. So EventStorming sacrifices some of that rigor to be able to draw in everyone and have a low bar of entry to having people participate. DAMIEN: That's a huge insight. Why do you think that is? Is it the inability to hold that much information at a high level of rigor, or just people not used to working at that sort of precision and rigor? PAUL: I think that when I'm working with people that are not hands-on coders, they are in the everyday, like say, product managers, or stakeholders, to use those terms. They're in the everyday details of how the business process works and they tend to think of that process more as a series of steps that they're going through in a very specific kind of way. Like, I'm shipping a certain product, or supporting the shipping. or returning of certain types of products, those kinds of things. Whereas, as developers, we tend to think of it more in terms of the abstractions of the system and what we're trying to implement in the code. So the idea of being able to tell the story of a process in terms of the events that happen is a very natural thing, I find for people from a business perspective to do because that's how they tend to think about it. Whereas, I think as programmers, we're often taught not so much to think about behavior as a sequence of things happening, but more as the structure we've been taught to design in terms of structures and relationships rather than flow. JESSICA: Yet that's changing with event sourcing. PAUL: I think so. EventStorming and event sourcing become a very natural complement for each other and even event-driven architecture, or any event-driven messaging, whatever it happens to be. The gap between modeling using EventStorming and then designing some kind of event-driven distributed system, or even not distributed, but still event-driven is much more natural than trying to do something like an entity relationship diagram and they'd get from that to some kind of meaningful understanding of what's the story of how these functions and features are going to work. JESSICA: On the topic of sacrificing rigor for collaboration, I think you have to sacrifice rigor to work across content texts because you will find contradictions between them. The language does have different meaning before and after the order is submitted and you have to allow for that in the collaboration. It's not that you're not going to have the rigor. It's more that you're postponing it, you're scoping it as separately. This meeting is about the higher level and you need completeness over consistency. DAMIEN: Yeah. I feel like almost you have to sacrifice rigor to be effective in most roles and in that way, sacrifice is even the wrong word. Most of the things that we do as human beings do not allow for the sort of rigor of the things that we do as software engineers and things that computers do. JESSICA: Yeah. DAMIEN: And it's just, the world doesn't work that way. PAUL: Right. Well, and it's the focus in EventStorming on exploration, discovery, and urgent ideas versus rigor is more about not so much exploring and discovery, but about converging on certain things. So when someone says pedant and the other person says pedant, or vice versa, that tends to shut down the conversation because now you are trying to converge on some agreed upon term versus saying, “Well, let's explore a bunch of different ways this could be expressed and temporarily defer trying converge on.” JESSICA: Later in Slack, we’ll vote. PAUL: Yes. JESSICA: Okay. So standardize later. PAUL: Yes. Standardize, converge later, and for now, let's kind of hold that at arm’s length so that we can uncover and discover different perspectives on this in terms of how the story works and then add regulator when we go to code and then you may discover things in code where there are implicit concepts that you then need to take back to the modeling to try and figure out well, how do we express this? Coming up with some kind of term in the code and being able to go from there. JESSICA: Right. Some sort of potential return because it hasn't happened yet. PAUL: Exactly. So maybe it's a potential, maybe it's some other kind of potential return, like pending return, maybe we don't call it a return at all. JESSICA: Or disliked item because we could – or unsatisfactory item because we could intercept that and try to like, “Hey, how about we send you the screws that we're missing?” PAUL: Right. Yeah, maybe the answer is not a return at all. JESSICA: Yeah. PAUL: But maybe the case is that the customer says they want to return it, but you actually find a way to get them to buy more stuff by sending them something else that they would be happy with. So the idea is we're trying to promote discovery thinking when we are talking about how to understand certain problems and how to solve them rather than closing off options too soon. MANDY: So, Paul, I know you do give these workshops. Is there anything? Where can people find you? How can people learn more? How can people hire you to facilitate a workshop and get in touch with you? PAUL: Okay. Well, in terms of resources, Damien had mentioned at the beginning, I have an eBook up on Leanpub, The EventStorming Handbook, so if people are interested in learning more, they can get that. And then I do workshop facilitation and training through my company, Virtual Genius. They can go to virtualgenius.com and look at what training is available. It's all online these days, so they can participate from anywhere. We have some public workshops coming up in the coming months. And then they can find me, I'm @ThePaulRayner on Twitter, just to differentiate me from all the indefinite articles that are out there. [laughter] MANDY: Sounds good. Well, let's head into reflections. I can start. I just was thinking while we were talking about this episode, about how closely this ties into my background in professional writing, technical writing to be exact, and just how you have this process to lay out exactly what steps need to be taken and to differentiate when people say the same things and thinking about, “Well, they're saying the same things, but the words matter,” and to get pedantic, that can be a good thing, especially when you are writing technical documents and how-tos. I remember still, my first job being a technical writer and looking at people in a machine shop who it was like, first, you do this, then you do this, then you do this and to me, I was like, “This is so boring.” But it makes sense and it matters. So this has been a really good way for me to think about it as a newbie just likening it to technical writing. JESSICA: Yeah. Technical writing has to tell that story. DAMIEN: I'm going to be reflecting on this has been such a great conversation and I feel like I have a lot of familiarity with at least a very similar process. I brought up all my fears that come from them, which is like, what if we don't have the right person in the room? What if there's something we didn't discover? And you said something about how you can do this in 5 minutes and how you can do this in 15 minutes and I realized, “Oh, this process doesn't have to be the 6-hour things that I've participated in and facilitated in. It can also be done more smaller and more iteratively and I can bring this sort of same process and thought process into more of the daily work.” So that's super helpful for me. JESSICA: I want to reflect on a phrase that Paul said and then Damien emphasized, which is shared understanding. It's what we're trying to get to in EventStorming across teams and across functions. I think it's also like what we're constantly trying to get to as humans. We value shared understanding so much because we're trapped in our heads and my experience in my head is never going to be the same as your experience in your head. But at some point, we share the same physical world. So if we can get that visual representation, if we can be talking together about something in that visual world, we can pass ideas back and forth more meaningfully. We can achieve this shared understanding. We can build something together. And that feels so good. I think that that constant building of shared understanding is a lot of what it means to be human and I get really excited when I get to do that at work. PAUL: I think I would just add to that as well is being human, I'm very much aware of limitations in terms of how many ideas I can hold in my head at any one time. I know the times where I've been in the experience that many describe where someone's giving me a list of steps to follow and things like that, inevitably I'm like, “Well, I remember like the first two, maybe three,” and then everything after that is kind of Charlie Brown. What, what, why? [laughter] I don't remember anything they said from that point on. But when I can visualize something, then I can take it in one go. I can see it and we're building it together. So for me, it's a little bit of a mind hack in terms of getting over the limitations of how many things I can keep in my mind at one time. Also, like you said, Jess, getting those things out of my mind and out of other people's minds into a shared space where we can actually collaborate on them together, I think that's really important to be able to do that in a meaningful way. MANDY: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today, Paul. We really enjoyed this discussion. And if you, as listeners, would like to continue this conversation, please head over to Patreon.com/greaterthancode. We have a Slack channel. You can pledge and donate to sponsor us as little as a dollar and you can come in, hang out, talk with us about these episodes. If not, give me a DM on Twitter and let me know, and I'll let you in anyway because [laughter] that’s what we do here at Greater Than Code. PAUL: Because Mandy’s awesome. MANDY: [laughs] Thank you, Paul. With that, thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you again next week.Special Guest: Paul Rayner.Sponsored By:NordVPN: Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN deal by going to nordvpn.com/gtc or use the code GTC to get a huge discount off your NordVPN plan + 1 additional month for free! It’s completely risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Promo Code: GTCSupport Greater Than Code

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 because those were still considered cool. I sat down and I couldn't help, but—[chuckles] this is real silly. I couldn't help but notice that there was a pretty strong smell, [laughs] body odor throughout the whole room and it wasn't one person. I'm not picking on somebody here. It was that the interpersonal relationships were so afraid, the fear of failure was so strong, and the deadline pressure that had been exerted from on high was so overwhelming that there was no safety in the room. People were just scared at their job all day long and it was having a material impact that only an outsider who's walking in at 2:00 PM on a Friday detect because everyone else had acclimated. So I walked in and I was like, “Well, what do I –?” [laughs] Obviously, I'm not going to be like, “Hey, it stinks in here.” I’ve got to figure out a way to understand why do people feel unsafe and maybe I didn't have that sentence go through the voice in my head, but it definitely put me on a path towards to maybe the less privileged people in the room, the people who are not the managers to understand what's really going on, what pressures are they under? MAE: I love that the example includes legit real smell. So many times, especially in our industry and part of what this podcast is counteracting, is getting in touch with the fact that we are people and humans. Anyway, I love that you brought [chuckles] that home that way. Also, I wanted to say from earlier, I wasn't trying to corner you into expecting to have a philosophy. I thought you might and it was worth asking. But I recently got asked a similar question about my management philosophy and which authors do I appreciate most, or something. I've been a manager for 25 years and I'm like, “Uh. I don't know. I figure out what is needed and then I deal with that.” I don't understand how to answer. So I just want to give some – pay you back and apologize. I didn't mean to get you – [overtalk] JUSTIN: Not at all and it becomes one of those you know it when you see it. I struggle with this a lot because somebody introduced the concept years ago of beginner's mindset to me where sometimes if I'm a beginner at something, the best person to help me is not the expert—the person who's been doing it for 20 years. It’s somebody who's just a few hours, or a few days, or a year, or two ahead of me because they can still remember what it felt like to be where I am right now. Because I talk a lot, because I tweet a lot, because I show up in a lot of places, and I have an outward facing sales role to potential clients and candidates, I meet a lot of people who come to me and they're like, “How do I learn how to code?” And I'm like, “I can tell you the 15-year version of this story, but it's probably going to be really depressing.” I've taken as a responsibility to like try to—and I need to do a much better job of this—be armed with either resources, or people that I trust, that I can refer folks to so that I'm not totally leaving them hanging. MAE: I love that and yes. Speaking of teaching people how to code and what you said, there's a name for it that I'm forgetting about being a teacher. If you are closer to the student, you actually are a more effective teacher. So there's just two comments. The first one is I'm a part of RailsBridge I helped found the Southeast regional chapter. So if anybody, any listeners out there still want to learn how to code, or are having that same, I don't know how to tell you about my [chuckles] zigzag story and ideally, they wouldn't all be depressing, [laughs] but I'm sure they all include some real low moments. But RailsBridge, which is bridgetroll.org, has recurring events where people can go all over the country and obviously, in pandemic times it's not as much in person, but yeah. And on the comment about teaching and when you mention talking to the people with the least privilege in the room, I'm just really sensitive and appreciative of your sensitivity to power politics and how much they impact so much of what is happening and trust. So for anybody out there who's being asked to help new people and you feel like you're still the new person, you're probably in a better position to help. So just want to offer some encouragement there. I have personally found a lot more confidence in helping people who are just behind me and that anytime you're teaching, you're learning. So just want to put those in. I love that actually your answer, instead of a quadrant, is really just the one word of trust and I appreciated the ways in which you were mentioning trust can be different things. Trust in what you're building. Trust in who's asking you to do it. Chelsea asked for a couple examples and I interrupted. So I apologize, but what are some trust building exercises that you have encouraged, or examples? Maybe even continuing that same story. Six months later, was it a fresher air in there and what are some things they did to make that happen? JUSTIN: Yeah, that story, like so many teams and companies in our industry, didn't undertake the redemption arc that I wish I could convey. I think in fact, to see a big picture problem and the desire to connect that with a big picture tidy solution, a future state where it's all rainbows and unicorns and everyone really getting along well. Sometimes that sets, for me personally and when I see consultants who are less experienced, who can see that end state in mind and they know maybe the top three hit list of stuff that needs to happen to help that organization get to where they need to be. We can sometimes set the bar so high for ourselves in terms of expectations of like, what does it mean to help them become better, that we can't help, but lose sight of the value of just incremental improvement. If I can just help restore relationship between two people on a team. I had one client years and years ago, [laughs] they were also undergoing a pretty big transition and they brought me in a – I think that what they thought they were hiring me for was to be a test-driven development coach to teach them that particular practice of TDD. They got, instead on day one, there was a room of 30 interdisciplinary cross-functional teams—some developers, some non-developers, and stuff—and I could just tell that they were like, it was a big epic rewrite from a Perl codebase that, I think they were moving to no JS and Angular as well as a chewing of cloud infrastructure at the same time, as well as Agile software practices at the same time. They were overwhelmed, they've seen this fail before, they felt a ton of pressure from the business, and they didn't even really understand, I don't think, the future business model. Even if they were successful, it wasn't clear this was going to solve systemic problems for the company. And I'm like, “Well, I can teach you all TDD. [laughs] But instead what my commitment to you all will be is that six months from now, you'll either have been successful and learned all of these things and built the thing as the business has asked you to do and then the business takes off, or I will have helped equip you with skills and ways of thinking about this industry and our work that will set you up to get much better jobs next time.” Again, the company didn't totally come together. It didn't take off like a rocket ship. The team was successful in the rewrite, which doesn't happen very often. But then you saw almost a diaspora of dozens of highly skilled people—and this was in Central Ohio—who then went to venture backed startups, some went to big, established enterprise-y kind of companies, some left the region and went elsewhere. That turned into, if I had to count, probably eight, nine additional Test Double clients [laughs] down the road where they came in and they could spot in a minute, this is a way that an outside perspective, who is here to help us at a moment of tremendous need, can move the needle just a little bit. By setting expectations realistically, being humane about it, and focused on what's best for the people involved because at the end of the day, all companies are is collections of humans. That was, I guess, more my orientation. CHELSEA: So Justin, I'm interested in your thoughts on this. I appreciate what you just shared. I worked at Pivotal Labs for a while—original labs when it was sort of a generalist’s enablement. JUSTIN: Sure. CHELSEA: Very heavy on that kind of thing. One of the things that we ran into relatively frequently was similar to what you've just described wherein one of two things would happen. Either the clients were successful and there was a vastly improved, I guess, software delivery culture among the people that we were working with, or if that didn't work out, then there were individuals who took to it very well and had gained variety of skills that allowed them to go elsewhere. It happened enough times that then we would have to establish trust with potential new clients around this whole additional access, which was effectively, is this going to cause a diaspora of all of these engineers, designers, and PMs that I've managed to scrape together for this project? Do you find Test Double ever facing that, or how do you address either beforehand if product owners are aware of it, or after it happens, how do you address that with clients? JUSTIN: That's a fantastic question. Pivotal Labs was one of the companies that we looked at. We started Test Double 10 years ago. I was at the time, just starting to speak at user groups and conferences and I spent a lot of time with the people at the Boulder office at Pivotal Labs. Great people. I really appreciated the focus and the rigor and in fact, made to answer a question earlier about process, or abstraction about like, “Hey, boil it down for me.” Pivotal Labs sold a very branded, very discreet process for like, this is the way to build software and, in a sense, some of the decisions that we made when we started Test Double were a response against that. Just to say we trust the people closest to the work to make the right decisions based on tremendous experience and skills. Frankly, as we get bigger and more successful, having some somebody like me at the top of an organization who only talks at the beginning of a client relationship, which is the moment that we know the least and I've got the least amount of context, for me to go and say, “Well, this is the way that we got a test,” or whatever it is would just be ineffective and inappropriate. So to answer your question, Chelsea. Fortunately, our brand power, isn't nearly as strong as Pivotal Labs so no client has ever come to us in advance with that as a question to say, “Hey, I'm worried that you're going to train our people in this particular methodology and then they're going to leave for higher paying jobs,” or something. That's never come up in advance. In fact, one of the things that we talk a lot about is that because our consultants join client engineering teams to work with them inside of their own process, using their own tools, and their own system is we just try to be model citizens of somebody on that team. We trust our clients like, “Whatever your process is, it's apparently working for you. So let's just try it and if we have ideas for how to make that better, we will listen, we'll write them down.” But then only once we've built trust and rapport with the people on that team, will we start to share, “Hey, I've got a rainy-day list of a few things that you might want to try.” What that's actually done is has a detoxifying effect where from a context of high trust, the incongruity, the distrust, the kind of backchannel frustrations that our people pick up on because we're kind of “in the trenches” with our client folks, we're able to have multiple pathways into that client organization to help make it a better place to work. We got one of the best poll quotes that I've ever seen on our website recently. One of our clients is Betterment. They're a great financial management firm in New York where it's kind of an autopilot savings vehicle. The director of engineering, Katelyn, there said that she saw on the teams where testable people were deployed, attrition actually went down and I think it's because we help those teams to perform better. An old friend of mine named Leon Gersing, he used to have a thing he’d say. He'd said, “You can either change where you work, or you can change where you work.” Meaning you can either make the place that you're at better, or you can go find gainful employment elsewhere and we're in the make the place where people work better business, wherever possible as a first avenue. MAE: You're reminding me of a book that I'm reading right now called What Got You Here Isn't Going to Get You There. Are you all familiar with it? JUSTIN: I was so proud of my wife, because she asked for that on Audible earlier this week because I'm the person with the Audible credit and I'm like, “Oh, this is quoted in business leadership contexts left and right and all over the place. So it'll give us a touchstone to talk about.” MAE: Yeah. Well, the TLDR is so much of especially management focused and leadership focused thought is about things that you should do and this book is probably along your lines, Justin of giving the counterintuitive answer. This is here's 20 things that you might want to consider not doing and then replace it with the good behavior because that is such a stretch in real life to actually do that. It's how about you just pick a couple of these that you're a repeat offender and just stop. Just try to not do it. That's the main first thing and I've found that, a refreshing take on how to think about how to guide in ways that are building more trust and offering more safety. So definitely recommend that book. I don't know that it came out of this book, but the person who recommended it to me, my VP Scott Turnquist, who is amazing, shared that there are really four categories of things that can help build trust and it's definitely all done incrementally. So picking up on that word you said earlier, Justin, too. But the four kind of axes are credibility, reliability, intimacy, and selfless motivation. If you can demonstrate those recurringly, that is how to establish and/or course correct into a state of increased trust. So anyway, that was partly why my original statement was like, do you have this down? Because I've heard some things lately that I've been thinking about. JUSTIN: I really appreciate your perspective there and it makes me feel better because one of my commitments in life is to never write a book. But if I were to write a book, I'd probably have to come up with a tidy quadrant, a Harvard Business Review two by two, or something like that to I guess, support the good work at the people at CliffsNotes and Blinkist to boil down years’ worth of work into a 13-minute podcast. I think that the advice as you expressed, it is completely valid and there's one thing that I think is a core ingredient to trust. Trust of ourselves, trust of people that we work with directly, and then trust of leadership and the people who run the organizations that we're a part of. The hardest, in my opinion, is authenticity. If you're not, I think you said credible. If you combine credible, intimacy, vulnerability, those are really useful words to prompt what I mean when I say authenticity. If I'm talking to somebody and I can lock eyes with them and I believe that what they're saying is what they actually feel and it's their true self and they believe it, then all sorts of other background processes in my head of trying to read the tea leaves of what's going on here, all the passive analysis I might do to try to understand what's the subtext that this person's operating from. That's just the form of kind of armor, or a guard that it depletes my cognitive ability to talk to the person. Authenticity is a signal that we pick up on as humans and this is why it's a miracle that we have video chat in this era and it's why I really relish one-on-one in-person interactions when I can have them. Authenticity is a signal that I can drop that guard a little bit. It's that I can really look and really listen to what the person's saying and take it at face value. The problem with just saying, “Oh, okay, well just be authentic. Just be your true self,” is that that is useless advice and way more likely to trigger somebody's defenses, or their self-doubt. When I think about authenticity in the context of a team, or an organization is that the people who are maybe not in a position of power, people who report up the chain, if they don't come across as authentic to their leaders, the leaders should not look at that as a failing of the person, but as a failure of their ability to figure out how to promote and draw out authenticity from the people who report to them. Maybe they don't have safety in the room to speak their true mind. Maybe they feel like the things that make them different from the other people that they work with are a liability, or a risk and so, they can't really bring their true self to work. It's the leader's job, when they spot inauthenticity, rather than go on a hunt like a political backchannels to try to figure out why is this person lying. What's under here? Figuring out what is it about the person's context, the environment, kind of the system that they are operating in. What could possibly be an explanation for why I can't develop an authentic connection with this person? And until you run out of every single possible explanation in that investigation, including self-reflection of what is it that I'm individually doing and how I communicate to this person that's getting in the way. Only then is it really useful to start thinking about maybe this person's not a good actor, maybe they're being duplicitous, or something. Because once you've hit that button, it is really hard to go back. So when we talk about authenticity, we often talk about the individual's responsibility to present it, to be it. If you can fake authenticity, then you can do anything, right? That is advice. It's fine. I hope that everyone feels the safety. Like I'm a cishet white dude who's pretty powerful in my little corner of the small pond. I have no problem just spouting off and being my true self and so, I should just tell other people to do that too. That's not fair. I think that what is better advice for people who are maybe not in positions of power is to be really good at detecting authenticity. When you detect authenticity and people are making their true selves known to you and you're feeling a connection with them, whether they're peers, or managers, spend more time with them, invest into those relationships, and use those people as anchors of trust. So that when you're failing to make that connection elsewhere, when you have doubts about others in the organization, you can have more points of perspective on how to best address it. MAE: I read an article yesterday that says, “Laziness Doesn't Exist.” That's the title of it and it essentially says that that same thing of what's the context in which this is happening. People don't procrastinate for fun. In fact, it usually takes more work and starting from a place of what shoes are you in, but I especially love the in what way am I impacting that person's ability to be themselves? Also, I must have said the word authenticity, because this list is credibility, reliability, intimacy, selfless motivation, but authenticity and credibility in all of these things do also have to do with the thing that I loved you bringing up about identity, power politics, and what happens and your environment is not allowing you to be credible. So another way in which people can as good peers, mentors, managers, and above can do is in what way am I bolstering these people's credibility? So always flipping it back to how are we the perp [laughs] and that's very similar to social justice, racial justice. The more we see how we are perpetuating and disenfranchising, regardless of our identity, that's where there's some hope for the humans in my mind. CHELSEA: Yeah. One of the things that I appreciate that you've both brought up, Justin and Mae, is the degree to which power gradients play a role in the way that we deal with these things. There are demographic power gradients with regard to race, with regard to gender. There are also power gradients with regards to our position in the company, with regard to technical privilege, with regard to our level of skill, with regard to the size of our network. We also, I think live in this individualist culture that has a tendency to place the responsibility on individuals to do what they can to resolve. For example, what you were saying, Justin, about how we effectively coach people to just be authentic. Maybe that coaching works fine in some context, but that's a subset of the context in which we're asking people to apply it and asking individuals to resolve this from the bottom up sometimes as opposed to looking for the systemic reasons why this is a thing that has to be solved in the first place. I'm curious as to whether you have thoughts on what a person can do, who finds themselves in a position of power, in a position of leadership in a company, for example, to address those sorts of questions with other folks who are working there. JUSTIN: I think one thing that can be helpful – and I realize your question is about what can a leader do. One thing that can be helpful is for those leaders to empathize and put themselves in the shoes of people who might not have the same privileges as you described and what would it take to—I'm waiting outside my area of expertise here—would be to think about what are the things that are in a given person's sphere of direct control, what isn't, what am I setting up, and what am I communicating in terms of expectations that I have of them? An example that came up a lot in our industry was the number of drink up events in tech in the early 2010s where there was sort of an assumption that everyone likes alcohol and when people in public drink alcohol, good things happen, which turns out isn't true, but it can also be the case. There are invisible expectations that we communicate because I'm a big fan of granting people autonomy to solve problems in their own way, to approach work the way that they feel is best. Our company has been remote from day one and a big part of that was we want people in control of everything from where they work to their home network, to the computers that they use. Because when I had that control pulled away from me in the role as developer, it just sapped my motivation, my drive, my engagement, my sense of control over the stuff that's right in front of me. When I now in a role of influence over other people, whenever I speak, I have to think about the negative space of what are the expectations that I might be conveying that are not explicit. I need to be careful of even expressing something like hobbies, or shows that I like, or stuff – especially in this remote world, we want to develop connectedness. But a challenge that I keep running into is that our ability to find mutual connection with people about stuff other than work, it rides the line really closely of communicating some other allegiance, or affiliation whether that's we talk about sports a lot because that's an obvious one, but even just interest in hobbies. So I find myself – and I realize Chelsea, I'm doing a really poor job, I think of answering the question as you asked it. I find myself only really able to even grapple with like what can leaders do to set the tone for the kind of environment that's going to be inclusive and safe for other people by really digging in, empathizing with, calling up, and dredging up what their own experience was when they were not in a position of power. If I have a secondary superpower, is I had a real rough start to my career. I was in really, really, really rough client environments that were super hostile. I had a C-level executive at a Fortune 500 company scream at me until his face was red in a room one-on-one with a closed door on a regular basis. The sorts of stuff that developed callus on me, that I look back at a lot of those experiences and I'm like, “I learned a bunch.” It's supercharged my career as an individual because it strengthened me. So the challenge that I have is what can I take from those really, really harsh experiences and translate them for people who are coming up in a way that they don't have to go through the same trials and tribulations, but that they can take away from it the lessons that I learned. And for me, it's all about not just safety for the sake of safety, but safety by which myself and others can convey the useful growth that people want to see in themselves, their skills, and their abilities that isn't diluted. That can convey the truth, the difficulty, and the challenge and how hard – Programming is really, really hard for me and I've been doing it for a long time. A lot of stuff about this is just not easy. The relationships are not easy. Like you're going to run into situations where there's massive differences between where people stand on stuff and what those perspectives look like. Navigating that is hard enough without adding a whole layer of toxicity and hostile work environment. So what's a way to promote that learning environment without just totally insulating somebody from reality. That's been, I think a challenge and attention that I see a lot of other like-minded leaders in tech trying to figure out how to create. MAE: You reminded me of a meme that someone shared with me that says, “What doesn't kill you can just regulate your nervous system, trap itself in your body, steal your sense of self, make you wish it did.” I don't know what makes you stronger means, but let's stop glorifying trauma as a life lesson we've been blessed with. [chuckles] Definitely along the same lines. JUSTIN: Yeah. Relatable. MAE: There's a thing, too about putting oneself in another's shoes and this is a place where I'm someone that can read people really well, but that makes that tricky. Because I start to trust my sense of it and I have a similar architecture going if I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. So what's the read between the lines thing. But without a lot of exposure to a lot of very different people, and most people have not had a lot of exposure to a lot of different people, when they put themselves in the other person's shoes, they come up with a different conclusion. So I will feel hurt by people who do things that were I to put myself in their shoes would not have done that to me, or if they did, it's because of X, Y, Z about who they are, or what they think, or what is their whole context and environment. All of that is there's a tactic that we use at True Link Financial called “don't cross the net.” So you say and claim the story I tell myself about that is dot, dot. When leaders, who haven't had a lot of exposure to a lot of different people and a lot of different ideas, try to empathize and find themselves limited in that, there are other options which include one of the things you said earlier. Making it so that people can say the things on their mind so whether, or not that's persons being their authentic self this is a whole another level, but creating a place where we expect that we're all messing up and that it's okay to talk about uncomfortable things is one of my real soapboxes. It's totally okay. Yes, we are all racist. We are all sexist. We are all homophobic. There is no way to not be as a result of being in the culture we're in. We could do things to mitigate it. We can do things to name it. But if we just start from yes, we're all failing. This for me, it lowers the stakes because so many people feel that if someone brings up, “Hey, that's kind of sexist,” or “This is not supporting me in this way,” or “My credibility is not being seen because of this.” In the absence of already, yo, we're going to talk about some negative stuff sometimes, that's an introduction of negativity to the “positive, happy rainbow unicorn workplace” that you were talking about before. So one of my hopes and dreams is that we get some clouds to rain on the land to allow things to actually grow [chuckles] and this includes, yo, we are not perfect. And we are definitely doing things we don't intend all the time. JACOB: That made me think about authenticity again, because sopen about imperfection. I'm a neurodiverse person so I probably am autistic. If someone were to say to me at work, “We really want you to bring your authentic self,” probably the thing I would think is you don't want that person, [laughs] or at least without getting to know me a lot better. There's a concept called masking where it's basically, there are behaviors and traits that are exhibited by neurotypical people that just come naturally to them. By learning the hard way, I've sort of learned to do them, even if they don't feel natural at all like making eye contact, smiling at people when talking, things like that. So I think that complicates authenticity for me, which is that I'm intentionally not hiding, but choosing what parts of myself to show and what parts I just don't want to bring to work. [laughs] I don't have a clean answer for that, or a solution to that, but I think that just complicates things for me. JUSTIN: I thank you so much for sharing that and I think it's a really important perspective to bring, which is I talked earlier about sure, plenty of people's true, authentic selves, even if they were to bring them, they might be in a job, or in a space, or in a team where that wouldn't be understood as such, or appreciated, or literally safe. It's hard to tell people, “Hey, you should feel safe” when the truth when spoken would be an unsafe thing. That would be setting people up for risk, for danger, and it would be a seed of distrust, which is what we're all here to talk about avoiding. So I really appreciate you sharing that. When I talked about empathy earlier, Mae, in my brain, all that really comes through it is the E-M part of that word, like the root for emotion. I never really have been able to assume that I can get somebody's context, their perspective, and the moment that they're in into my brain well enough to role play and do a re-dramatization in black and white, sepia tones and slow motion, like this is what Justin would do if he was here. That's one reason why we trust people at our company to just do the work, because we know that they're going to have such a richer amount of data and context than we'll ever have. But one thing that I'm grateful for is that I've been able to experience what I feel like is a pretty broad range of emotion. [laughs] I'm a real emotionally volatile person. I go super high highs, super low lows and I'm just like, it's how I've been. I can't help it. So when I'm empathizing with people, I'm just trying to get in the mindset of how do they likely feel right now so that I can understand and try to do a better job, meeting them where they are. A big part of that is learning there are differences and so Jacob, of course, it’s like if I worked with you, I understand that it might not be productive to bring all of yourself to work all the time. But I would hope to develop a trusting relationship with you where you can share enough so that I can know what are the boundaries that are going to be productive for you, productive for me so that we can make a connection and it's something – To make this a little bit more personal. I don't know where my career is going to go next. I founded Test Double with my partner, Todd. I was only 26 years old and we've been doing this for 10 years now. 2 years ago, we embarked on a journey of transferring a 100% of the equity of the company to our employees. So we're on an employee stock ownership plan now, it's ESOP, or any of the stuff, it is complicated because it's well regulated. We have to have outside auditors, a valuation firm, we have a third-party trustee to make sure that our people and the value of the company is transferred appropriately, treated right, and managed well. So it's naturally raised, especially in my circle of friends and family who realize that, this means that there's not an end date, but there's a moment at which I can start thinking about what my life is going to be next. The people who knew me when I was 25, 26, who look at me now, it's not that I've changed radically, or my identities are radically different, or anything. It's like, I am a very different kind of person than I was at 26, than I was at 20 before I got into this industry. I have changed in healthy ways and in maladaptive ones and in response to maybe drama and stress such that the ideal retirement that I would've imagined earlier in my life looks a lot different now where I've just kind of become habituated. I'm a really, really different person than I used to be and I'm grateful for that in almost every way. I feel like I've grown a lot as a person, but the thing about me that I really look at as an area of change is that I just work too much. [chuckles] I'm online all the time. I'm very focused on – I've optimized productivity so much that it's become ingrained in me. I understand that whatever I do next, or even if it's just changing my role inside my company, I need to find a way to create more space for slower paced asynchronous thought and learning how to, in the context of a career, not just bring your true self – I'm kind of curious Chelsea, Mae, and Jacob's perspectives. That true self might be changing [laughs] intentionally. There's a directionality and the growth isn't just learning new skills necessarily, but it might be changing core things about ourselves that will alter the dynamic of the relationships that we bring to work. CHELSEA: Yeah. I have two thoughts on that, that I can share. The first is the extent to which bringing my true self is a productive thing to do at work. So for example, my career prior to tech, I did a variety of different things to make ends meet, really a wide variety of things. I graduated directly into one of the bigger recessions. I won't tell you the exact one, because I don't feel like being aged right now, but [chuckles] it wouldn't take too much research to figure it out. I was trained to do a government job that was not hiring for the next 18 months at a minimum. I needed to figure out what to do and was trying to make ends meet. In my first year of employment, I got laid off/my job ended/something like that on four separate occasions in my first year of work and that resulted in, I do not trust when managers tell me that everything is fine. I have not ever effectively and that is something that I don't foreground that in work discussions for a variety of reasons. I don't want to scare other people. I don't want them to think I know something that they don't know about what's going to happen because I don't usually. When managers tell me, “Oh, everything's great, we're doing great,” all that kind of stuff, I just don't listen. I don't. My decisions do not take that's statement into account and I find that that's the kind of thing that I think about when I'm asked to bring my whole self, my authentic self to a place is that there are things that just sort of similar to what Jacob is saying. I'm like, “Trust me, trust me on this you don't want that.” So that's kind of the first thought in that realm. The second thought that I have around this is the degree to which work should really encompass enough of our lives to require, or demand our authenticity. So I had a variety of full-time jobs in tech and then I quit one of those full-time jobs and I was an independent consultant for a while bolstered chiefly, and I was lucky for this, by folks who had read my blog and then folks who had worked with me when I was at Pivotal. So the consulting effect of people knowing what it's like to work with you is real. That experience felt very different from a full-time position insofar as at the external validation of my work was naturally distributed in a way that it's not in a full-time position and I found that distribution is extremely comforting. Such that even though I now have a full-time job, I also continue client work, I continue teaching, and I continue writing and doing workshops and those kinds of things. This is not the chief reason that I do that, but one of the nice things about it is the diversification of investment in the feedback that I'm receiving and validation that I'm receiving. In order to do that, I have an amount of energy that I put to each of the things in my life and part of it is work, of course. But another reason that I think it works for me is that I no longer have to expect all of my career fulfillment from any one position, from any one employer, from any one place, which has worked out very well because I think that we pedal this notion implicitly that you bring your whole self to work and in return, work provides for your whole career fulfillment. But most places really kind of can't and it's not because they're terrible places to work. It's just because the goals of a company are not actually to fulfill the employees, they’re just not. That's not the way that that works. So it has allowed me and I think would allow others to approach the role that a given employment situation plays in their life, from what I think is a more realistic perspective that ends up helping keep me more satisfied in any given work relationship. But it doesn't necessitate that I – I guess, for lack of a better term, it limits the degree of emotional investment that I have in any one thing, because I'm not expecting all of my fulfillment out of any one thing. But I think that to say that explicitly sometimes runs at best, orthogonal and at worst, maybe contraindicates a lot of what we talk about when we talk about bringing our whole selves to work and looking for those personal connections at work. I think there is pragmatic limit past which we maybe impose more guilt than we need to on ourselves for not doing that. JUSTIN: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think Mae used the phrase “lower the stakes” earlier and I think that one of the problems with authenticity, the phrase “bring your whole self-trust” is that the stakes are super high because it seems like these are bullion contracts between parties. For example, you said that you don't trust managers. If I was filling out a form, like a personality inventory, or something, it's like, “Do you trust managers?” I'd say no and I think 90% of people would say no. It’s sort of the economy right now. I think the economy approval rating of is the economy good, or bad is at 23%. But individuals are saying at roughly 60% levels, that they are individually doing okay in this economy. I would say the same. Like, do I trust my manager? Oh, hell yeah. I completely trust my manager right now. And to lower the stakes even further, when I've been talking about trust, it's not so much about where do I find fulfillment, or who what's my identity, or who am I being, it's about a snap orientation. It's the most immediate sphere. “Oh man, this PostgreSQL query is really slow and I can't figure it out.” Is my snap reaction, or my orientation to think, “I believe in myself enough to dig into this to figure it out”, or is it doubt myself and just kind of get lost in a sea of a thousand Stack Overflow tabs and just slowly lose my whole evening? When in a team, maybe working with them and we were in planning, or something, or maybe we're in a higher stake, let's say, a code review session and somebody makes a comment about something that I did. Is my snap reaction to doubt their motivations and think “Ah, they're just trying to passive aggressively shoehorn in their favorite architecture here,” or this is politics and gamesmanship, or is my snap reaction is to be like, “Nope, let's try to interpret the words that they're saying as literal words and take it on its face”? Like I said, I'm a highly emotionally volatile person, the weather vane shifts with me all the time and sometimes I can control it and sometimes I can just merely observe it. But the awareness of the out has been really helpful to understand [chuckles] when I hear a leader say something about the company, my reaction is I think that they've got ulterior motives and that they are probably not speaking in literal truth. If that's my snap reaction, I'm just trying to communicate that as that's a potential blind spot. Because I have a long rut of past companies that I worked for that had mission statements and vision statements that were kind of bullshit and that no one really believed in, that were just in a bronze plaque on a wall, or whatever. That's baggage that I carry. I just have to acknowledge that baggage and try to move forward. The best I can do is just be present in every moment that I'm in and to understand when I have a snap reaction, am I oriented towards what might lead me to a good outcome, or a bad one? MAE: Holy moly, so many amazing things have been shared today and Jacob, especially kudos to you for walking us into a deeper level of authenticity. Love it. Thank you. I'm, to answer some of your questions, Justin very similar to Chelsea in that tech was not my first rodeo. I didn't become a programmer until I was 37 years old and I am now 45. I'm totally fine with aging myself. Prior to tech, I did put a lot more of my identity in my job and I would usually do that job pretty much all of the hours possible and I've always worked for mission driven organizations. A lot of the things that we're talking about as far as job fulfillment and whether, or not it's a good environment, or if it's a toxic environment, there's a lot of privilege in what we're talking. My parents were paper mill workers and it was not pretty. They had me when they were 19, so they didn't have another option. That was the highest paying gig in our region and they had no education. So it was never an option to even change that. So I am someone who wants to put my whole self into what I do. It's a very working-class mode and gaining identity through what it is I'm able to do. It's also a pretty capitalist [laughs] mentality that I work to move around. But as a manager, when I am a manager, or in management, or managing managers, I'm never encouraging this everybody needs to bring their whole self to work. Although, I had this really instructive experience where one person truly did not want to have any of their self at work, that they truly only wanted to talk about work at work. We're not a family, nicely nice. I don't want to crochet together, or whatever. That is the most challenged I've ever been as a manager because my natural things are always to figure out what people need and want, and then amalgamate that across the group and see how we can do some utilitarian math and get it so that people are being encouraged in ways they would like, they are not being disadvantaged, and they have space to say when that's happening. But even still, I'm always going with the let's be buddies plan and it's not for everyone. So figuring out how to not have all of your eggs in any basket, no matter how many hours the job is, is definitely a tactic that has been successful for me. But what happens is I then am involved in so many things [chuckles] in all of the moments of life. So I still do that, but I do it by working more, which isn't necessarily the best option. The thing about the mission that I just wanted to pivot for a second and say is, we are no longer in a world where we allow failure. This is a little bit back to my earlier soapbox. The energetic reality is whatever anybody's mission statement is, that is the thing they are going to fail at, like the seamstress never has the best hemmed clothes. So when we write off anyone, or any company based their flawed attempt at the mission, we're discounting that flaws exist, [chuckles] contradictions exist. It's about where are we orienting and are we incrementally moving toward that, or away from it and not in this moment, are we this thing that we have declared because it's more of a path is how I see it than the declaration of success. JUSTIN: Yeah. Thank you so much for that, too. Because I think that one thing we didn't touch on is the universe – and we're talking a Greater Than Code podcast so it's software industry adjacent at least. The universe of people who got to stay home during this whole pandemic. The universe of people who are “knowledge workers”, or “white collar”, especially if you look at the population of the world, is vanishingly small. There was a season in my life where I was the person that you just described managing, where I just viewed myself as I was burnt out. I always wanted to be a mercenary. I had this mindset of I show up at work. “You want some great code? I'll sling you some great code.” Like I was a short-order cook for story points and feature development and that was the terms, right? I didn't want to bring my feelings to work. I didn't want to make friends with people because then God forbid, it would be harder to leave. I didn't have that available to me as a capacity at that time, but I went long enough and I realized it's not that I was missing something, or not being fed in some way by not having this emotional need filled at work. It was that I was failing to acknowledge when you say privilege, the literal privilege, that I get to wake up in the morning and think for a job [laughs] and the impact that I can have when I apply all of the skills, capabilities, and background asynchronous thoughts that are not literally in my job description. When I can bring those things to bear, I'm going to have a much, much bigger impact because what am I except for one person thinking and staring at a matted piece of glass all day, but somebody who is in a small community, or a group of a bunch of people who are in the same mode. So when I'm in a meeting, I can just be the mercenary jerk who's just like, “Hey, I'm just doing this,” and feeling like that's an emotionally neutral thing. When in fact, that negativity can be in an emotional contagion that could affect other work negatively, or and I'm not exactly – My friends who know me, I'm a stick in a mud, I'm a curmudgeon, I'm super negative. I complain constantly and I have taken it upon myself to strive to be a net increase in joy in the people that I talk to and that I interact with at work. Because it is a resource that is draining all of us all day long on its own and it needs to be filled up somehow. I have the capacity right now to take it upon myself to try to fill that tank up for the people that I interact with. So I want to touch on that because I just think it's super lucky that I get to work on a computer and talk out of a screen all day long. If I didn't have that, we wouldn't be having this conversation, I suppose, but I'm just here to make the most of it, I guess. MAE: I love that. And you reminded me of Sandi Metz’s closer, Lucky You. JACOB: Tell us about it. MAE: She gave the closing talk a couple years ago and it's called Lucky You and it goes through how did we all come to be sitting in this room right now and what about redlining? What about the districting? What about all of these things that led to us to experience being here as lucky? I know you weren't saying it in that way, Justin, but it reminded me of that piece, too, which is relevant, but the talk is completely amazing and I definitely recommend it. JUSTIN: I think I mentioned it once before. The thing that brought me and our marketing director, Cathy, to think that this would be a great forum to talk a little bit about trust at work is that we're about out to – and I think that actually the day that this podcast publishes is the day that we're going to publish a new conference talk that I've prepared called How to Trust Again and we're going to post it to Test Double’s YouTube channel. So we might not have a direct link for the show notes necessarily, but it'll probably be at the top of that as well as the top of our blog when the show goes live. I hope that anyone [laughs] who enjoyed this conversation will also enjoy the kind of high paced, frenetic, lots of keynote slide style that I bring to communicating about a lot of these topics while still understanding that it's just like n equals one. I'm sharing my experience and hopefully, as food for thought to maybe help you look back at your own experience and understand what connects from my experiences, my perspectives, and my context that might be useful and I hope that you'll find something.Special Guest: Justin Searls.Sponsored By:Test Double: 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/greaterSupport Greater Than Code

00:51 - Nikema’s Superpower: Connecting To People Through Authenticity & Vulnerability Background in Dancing The Ailey School Shift to Tech Having Babies ADHD Diagnosis (Neurodivergence) Masking 28:02 - Seeing People For Their Whole Selves; Facilitating Safe Spaces Nikema’s Founder Journey Remote Work & Homeschooling Pop Schools School Can Be Damaging to Children The Purpose of School Self-Directive Education 51:38 - Impostor Syndrome Isn’t Natural; The Tech Underclass Bias & Discrimination Equity & Accessibility Reflections: Damien: Connecting through authenticity. Arty: Even when you’re scared, stand up and speak. Chanté: Our youth is our future. Nikema: Making real connections with other people. 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: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 269 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Chanté Martínez Thurmond. CHANTÉ: Hello, everyone, and I'm here with our fabulous friend and co-host, Damien Burke. DAMIEN: Hi, and we are here with our guest, today, Nikema Prophet. Nikema Prophet is a software developer and a community builder based in California. Her current projects are a book to be released in 2022 and hosting conversations on Twitter that highlight Black and neural diversion perspectives in the tech industry. Welcome to the show, Nikema. NIKEMA: Thank you for having me. DAMIEN: What is your superpower and how does you acquire it? NIKEMA: My superpower is connecting to people through authenticity. I acquired it by practicing standing up and speaking—speaking from my heart in front of others—and I had to overcome very painful, debilitating shyness to do that. CHANTÉ: I love that you started with that because Nikema, it doesn't seem like you're shy and I think even on your Twitter account, you're louder on Twitter than you are in person. I find your presence to be really lovely and a voice that our community so very much needs. When I found out you were going to be on the show, I got excited and did my research and did all the things we normally do and found a whole bunch of stuff about you. But before we get into those exciting parts, I am a person who loves to orient people to who you actually are to bring you into the room and just tell us a little bit more like, who are you besides the titles? Where are you living? Where are you from? The things that you do for joy, and if your job is one of those things, tell us about those. So just curious, who you are and then we can get into the things that you're doing now. NIKEMA: I really do need to sit down at some point and write down the story that I want to tell about myself because I tend to make it very long. So I'm going to try to keep it brief. [chuckles] But I am Nikema Prophet. I was born and raised in Sacramento, California. So I'm definitely a California girl. Sacramento is the capital city, but it's not super exciting [chuckles] as a place to grow up. There's a lot of government jobs. People say, “Get that state job, get those benefits, you're good.” Government jobs, healthcare, a lot of that. But I grew up and probably starting when I was a preteen, like 12, 13, I decided that I wanted to be a professional dancer. So that was my life goal. No plan B. I'm going to be a dancer. I'm going to get out of this small town and I'm going to go dance, which is funny because I did say that I am very shy [laughs] so I always struggled with being self-conscious and I never felt like I was really dancing full out, as we say. I always felt like I was holding back, but I think looking back it was the dance that saved me in a way. It gave me something to look forward to. It got me moving. Also, my parents were really cool about this, looking back on it, because we didn't have money for daily dance classes, or anything like that. They allowed me to go to schools that had arts program. So there were some magnet schools, or something like that that had these art programs. So actually, through elementary school, I was in the so-called gifted and talented program, which is a term that I really dislike [chuckles] because even at the time, it felt like it was segregation. [chuckles] It felt like it was money kind of rerouted to mostly white kids. The way that my program worked, it was we were our own class in a school that had gifted classes and regular classes. So it was very segregated, like we were in our own class, we would go from grade to grade with mostly the same kid, and my class was mostly white kids. I was always one of less than a handful of Black children in the classroom and the surrounding school, the so-called regular kids, were not that demographic. They were busing in the GATE kids to go to this school. So I left the GATE program in middle school to go to a school that had an arts program. I'm a December baby so I was kind of always older than most of the kids, because my birthday was, I don't know where the cutoff was, but if you weren't 5 by a certain day, then you would go the next year to kindergarten, or something like that. So I was always kind of older. I went to this school, left the gate program because I wanted to dance and ended up having just 1 year of middle school because I had one semester of 7th grade, then one semester of 8th grade because I had already had like those gifted classes. The classes were too easy once I got to the regular program. So I decided back then and my parents supported me in going to these schools where I could dance and I could take daily classes for free. I said that I think it saved me because it was regular physical activity. I always struggled with depression and I was even starting to be medicated for it in high school and thinking back, if I didn't have that dance practice, I think I'd probably be in much worse shape than I was and it wasn't good. [laughs] So I think now as an adult, I'm grateful that I did have that one thing that I was holding onto, which was like, I'm going to go dance. Also, it was that one thing where I kind of had to force myself to, even if it wasn't full out, even if it wasn't what I felt was my best effort, it was still performance. It was still putting yourself out there and I still deep down inside knew that I wanted the attention of other people. I didn't want to be hidden and yeah, I didn't want to be hidden away. I wanted to be noticed. I do look back at that as dance is what saved me in my adolescence [chuckles] because I was a bit troubled. So I did have a major accomplishment when after high school, I was accepted to two dance programs. One was Cal Arts in California, California Institute of the Arts, and the other was The Ailey School in New York. Of course, I took The Ailey School because it's Ailey. I don't know if there are dance people who are listening to this, but Alvin Ailey was a very influential Black choreographer and the company, the Alvin Ailey dance company is amazing. So I was super excited to number one, get out of Sacramento and go to where the real dancers are like New York and Ailey School. I actually graduated high school early, too. I graduated in January of that year. I didn't even attend my graduation because I hated school so much. Took the rest of that year off and I went to that summer program at The Ailey School, the Summer Dance Intensive. That was cool. I'd never been around so many Black dancers in my life. So many people of color. It was so amazing to me to be in a ballet class and almost everyone was Black. That was not my experience in Sacramento. And then I was going to start the regular semester in school in that fall and that was fall of 2001 and in fall of 2001, 9/11 happened in New York. So that rocked my world. I was living in New Jersey at the time and getting to school became very difficult and I eventually dropped out. I didn't even finish that first semester of dance school and at the time, I kind of thought, “I'm not giving up on my dream. This is just too hard, but I'm going to go back to dancing. I'll keep it up. I'll dance outside of school.” And I tried that for a while, but it's really hard to do that just on your own without the support, the structure, and the financial aid because it was a post-secondary program. I took out loans and things like that to attend. So doing that all on your own is pretty hard and that was pretty much the beginning of the end as far as dance was concerned. After leaving The Ailey School, I never danced full-time again. I came back to it like taking classes here, or there, but I never went back to full-time professional dance career aspirations. So that was a turning point in my life. I didn't want to leave New York. So I tried to struggle through it, tried to make it there. [laughs] Didn't actually work. I haven't talked to anything about my tech background, but that was always in the background. Like my no plan, B plan was to be a professional dancer, but I also always really loved computers. We had a computer in the house when I was in elementary school, which looking back that was a privilege. Most people didn't. I think we had internet, AOL. [chuckles] I remember those discs they would send in the mail, we had that. CHANTÉ: [chuckles] I remember those, too. Those were fun. [laughs] NIKEMA: Yeah. I was in a Twitter Space yesterday and Gen Z folks were in there and they were like, “Yo, you used to dial to the internet?” Like, “You actually made a phone call to connect to the internet?” And then – [overtalk] DAMIEN: I still remember the sound. NIKEMA: Yeah, and then they were like – two of them were talking and they were like, “Girl, Google it, it's crazy.” [laughs] So it's wild to think we used to measure internet in hours and if you had 10 hours and that was up, then you were off the internet. So I thought that was – [overtalk] CHANTÉ: I remember before somebody would, at your house, they would pick up the phone and then disrupt the connection. NIKEMA: Oh, oh, right, right, right. Or you have the one phone line for calls and internet so you can't. Yeah. So it was just funny, the generational difference of always knowing high speed broadband and all that. It's like, we measured this in hours [laughs] and we had to dial a number to get on. So we had a computer and internet access when I was pretty young and I would make webpages and stuff back then. Even through middle school and high school, I would take computer classes, but that was not the thing I wanted to do as a career and I was also looking at it more from a visual arts perspective, because I'm also a visual artist. Back when I was making webpages, I think the class I was in was web design and I think back then, my web design class in high school was on the colorful IMAX. I think it was the first version of IMAX. So it was web design and back then when I was looking at careers where I could use those skills, I thought it was graphic designer. I didn't know anything about a web developer. I don't even know if they were calling it that back then, but I thought graphic designers were the people who made websites. But I also took a programming class in high school, which was in the math department. So I always had an interest and even in New York, when I left dance school, I wanted to major in computer science, which I turns out, I didn't have the math prerequisites to even get into that major. I ended at pre-calculus. That's all to say that while I wanted to be a dancer and that was my only goal, I always had an interest in tech and I always had an interest in programming. I used to make my own websites back when we did have that home computer and the dial-up internet. So it was always something that in the background I enjoyed doing. It wasn't I want to do this as a career because I was going to be a dancer. So 9/11 was one of those life changing moments and then the next one came. While living in New York, I got pregnant. I was actually in school when I got pregnant and life in New York was kind of almost stabilizing because I had a job as a pharmacy tech. I was in school. My parents—here's another privilege alert. My parents had bought me a co-op, something like a condo. I don't think they call it that out here; I never heard the term until I got to New York. I had a co-op studio apartment where I could walk to my classes at Brooklyn College. Things were starting to stabilize and then I got pregnant and I decided okay, I'm pregnant and I'm going to have this baby. So that was another life-changing moment and I was pregnant for a while [laughs] and I decided that I needed to go home. I needed to go be where my loved ones were and I needed that support from my family. So left the apartment vacant [laughs] and went home and while I was pregnant, I started my web developer certificate at the junior college because I was like, “Okay, the dance thing is probably not going to happen and I'm going to have to support a baby now. This is a career that I could do and I could be a mother and I can work from home.” My child was born in 2007 so I was thinking about remote work in 2007 and almost banking on it, like this is what I'm going to do. I was enrolled in that web developer program, which was something like a 1-year certificate. You could do the associate’s degree, if you wanted to. But I didn't, I did the certificate and it took me 4, or 5 years to complete that certificate, that 1 year certificate because I was primarily a mom. I had a baby in 2007 and then I had a baby in 2008. So for several years, it was chaos and two babies and I don't know. I almost want to say it was almost – I don't know what it's like to have twins, but I felt like it was probably worse to have one a year apart because it's like they're both babies, but they're at slightly different developmental levels and you just have just all babies. [laughs] CHANTÉ: I can relate, Nikema because I do have twin boys and it is really hard. Like you're describing here, I had to be with my family and I needed to take time off to be a mom first and it was really humbling. I have a sibling who I’m really close with in age and my mom always says, “I don't know what was worse: having the two of you so close in age, or you having twins.” [laughs] So it's debatable. I don't know. But either way, it is very tough. NIKEMA: Yeah. So I was depending on – and that's part of why it took so long because I was a mom and online classes were not as widely available as they are in 2022 back in 2007. I just took all the online classes I could and the ones that weren't online were hybrids so it was a few hours. My mom would watch the kids, or something while I go to school for a couple hours a week. There was a lot of privilege in my story, but there's also a lot of struggle [chuckles] because I was not diagnosed with ADHD until last year [chuckles] and that's not something that you just catch. It's been with me my whole life. Having to go through school, go through jobs, and all these things with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, it makes the late diagnosis bittersweet. Because you've built up this idea of yourself and oh gosh, I'm going to start crying. But you built up this idea of yourself and it's always been hard, but you didn't know that it wasn't supposed to be that hard, you know? CHANTÉ: Right. NIKEMA: So I'm going to – [overtalk] CHANTÉ: I can relate, too. I'm another late ADHD diagnosed person. I was in my early 20s, but it was like, are you kidding me that I have been unnoticed by all these adults? That no wonder I was struggling to do my homework and get it turned in, literally doing 50 versions of the homework. [chuckles] Staying up until 2 o'clock in the morning as a kid to do you my homework and always struggling with feeling like I wasn't perfect. Just, I can really relate and understand, too and I think the tears are welcomed because I know it to be true about our listeners, that folks in our community identify with neurodivergence and where you feel society tells you, it's like this bad thing, it's a label, and it's shaming, but I also feel it could be very liberating. And once you know what is going on in the background of your [laughs] of your life, you can make connections and start to really get into your brilliance. So just want to say thank you for being so honest. NIKEMA: That's my superpower, right? It's a double-edged sword because I can't turn it off. Actually, okay, so superpower. Another jump. [laughs] I was in some program and they asked what's your mutant superpower, which is that superpower that you can't turn off, I guess. That's probably not the best way to it, but it's a double-edged sword because it's like, I am vulnerable and I am authentic and I can't turn it off. [laughs] So it's pretty much what you see is what you get. Fake until you make it never was good advice for me, because I can't like, if I’m trying to present myself in a way that doesn't align with what I think is true, it just doesn't work. It's going to come off really strange, but I've learned to embrace the tears because I used to fight it so hard. [chuckles] That was also recently that I learned that tears have a function, like you're releasing some endorphins and [laughs] there's an actual physiological reason why it's okay to cry and it's actually helpful. But I used to fight it so hard and I would be so because I couldn't control it and I would just cry in front of everybody and that's why it's a mutant superpower. So it's like, it's not all good. [laughs] There's some downsides to it. DAMIEN: So I can speak from the other side of that. As a person who, for decades, successfully repressed my emotions and feelings, it's not better on that side. [laughter] And so, the mutant superpower that you can't turn off is a thing that I am actively learning currently and [laughs] it's not easy and it is very, very useful. NIKEMA: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, though. I did also learn that this is how I connect with people, which is weird. I learned that people appreciate it when you're authentic and raw. I always thought that was so weird. I'm like, “I am such a mess and you're thanking me [laughs] for this.” Like, “Why?” So the ADHD being late diagnosed, I relate to everything that Chanté said. I was always a perfectionist, I was always a procrastinator, and it's like, I would do excellent work, but it would all be done the day before it was due and it would kill me to get it done. Now as an adult and knowing what executive dysfunction is, I'm like, “Oh, okay. I didn't start because I couldn't start [chuckles] and it wasn't my fault.” There's so much kind of shame that you can build up when you're thinking that I should be able to do these things that I can't do. Why can't I do these things and I don't like the high functioning label, but I know it's one that people know. But people who are masking their symptoms in a way, which I think gets girls turn out to end up masking because they're not identified. They weren't looking for that. I've said to people before, there was no way in the 80s and 90s, they were going to look at this quiet Black girl and say, “She has ADHD.” No way. No way anybody would've identified that. Girls tend to end up masking. So people are looking at you from the outside and thinking, “This is a so-called normal child.” [laughs] CHANTÉ: [inaudible]. NIKEMA: Oh, yeah. That's another thing, other people's expectations of you. If you're capable of doing harder schoolwork and all of these things, why aren't you capable of just getting started on this assignment? Like you can do it, are you just not trying hard enough? So you start to kind of internalize that judgment of I should be able to do this and that's why an adult, it's so painful to look back at all of those years where it's like I really wasn't getting what I needed. I wasn't getting the support I needed. I wasn't getting the recognition of what's going on that I needed and you think it didn't have to be this hard and it's not supposed to be this hard right now. I think I'm also a bit teary because I'm currently undermedicated [laughs] and I'm dealing with that. Even if I can tell myself it's not supposed to be this hard, it's hard to believe that I do deserve that grace, I do deserve to have the support that I need, and that it's okay when you come up against things that you're physically unable to do, because I don't think we think enough of mental struggles as physical struggles, too. But the brain is part of the body, right? We could go on about – see, my brain goes all over the place. Now I'm thinking about, [chuckles] how our health insurance works and how I'm paying hundreds of outside of my health coverage to get therapy and how I'm paying thousands of dollars outside of my health coverage to get my teeth taken care of. Teeth are part of the body, right? Isn't your brain part of your body? [laughter] Why is that not covered? Modern dentistry again, it's a gift, but it's out of pocket for [chuckles] most of us, if we want to say things like, “The treatments that could save your teeth are cosmetic and not covered for the poorest of people.” That makes me so angry. [laughs] I'm liking that this is a demonstration of an ADHD mind at work because I'm all over the place. CHANTÉ: I like it. I welcome it. [laughs] It's completely fine. ARTY: One thing I'm thinking just listening to this and you talking about authenticity, masking, this pressure in society to wear a mask. In a world that becomes increasingly more fake, propagandized, and all of these things where people become almost not real to us, that seeing you being yourself, being in tune with what's going on with you, with your struggles, being will to cry, being willing to stand up and say what you really feel, and stand up for what you believe in. It's refreshing in a way that you look around where everything kind of becomes not real and you stand out as a beacon of light just by being in alignment with yourself and other people connecting with you. You give them permission to take their own masks off. You give them permission to admit their own struggles. Because we all have struggles, right? We all have these things that are hard for us, but it's easy to fall under that same pressure of having to wear a mask all the time. You being in tune with your authenticity is so powerful in terms of the weight that you influence the world and there's no reason you need to change. You just keep on being your beautiful self. 
CHANTÉ: Yes! [laughs] DAMIEN: Yes. NIKEMA: Man. Now I'm crying again, but thank you so much for that. It took so much to step out into the world and say, “Here I am, this is me,” because like I said, I was so shy. I would get butterflies every time I had to raise my hand in class and I would cry. [chuckles] Like I said, when I would do any kind of public speaking, I would be sweating, shaking, crying. It has been a hard road DAMIEN: And in a world are emotions are forgotten, making them visible and feeling them and allowing people to see them is a revolutionary act like when you do that, you are setting a path. You're blazing a path for people to follow, to get us to a place where there isn't so. It's not because it's not like people don't have emotions. It's not like you're the only one feeling things. It's just that other people don't have the courage to be seen, to not hide it. NIKEMA: I want to thank you for bringing that up because it reminded me of something that I used to say, which is for Black women, we're not seen as soft. [chuckles]] We're not seen as being in need of comforting and protecting. So I used to say that I'm radically soft [chuckles] and again, it's the mutant superpower. Sometimes I wish I could turn it off and just not let it all out. [chuckles] But I do appreciate what Arty said about giving other people permission to be themselves because I've been running a lot of Twitter Spaces lately and I always feel so honored with people say, “Yeah, this is my first time speaking in a space.” Because to me, that means that I have facilitated a safe space for people and I always celebrate them and I always just feel so honored when people are willing to step up and be seen that way because I know how hard it is. But being radically soft, maybe I should put that back in my bio [chuckles] because – [overtalk] CHANTÉ: I love that. Yes. NIKEMA: Yeah. CHANTÉ: I love that and I can relate, too. I like where you were going with the whole conversation, which I think is worth noting and talking about a minute because I grew up – Nikema, I'm half Black, I'm half Mexican. My mom's an immigrant. So on both sides of my family, I always felt like there was no time to be sensitive, soft, and to be in my feelings. I actually got called out a lot as a kid because I was very emotional and I was like, “I just thought I was highly empathetic and intuitive and what the hell's wrong with y'all?” [laughs] But it was something that I got made fun of and ridiculed for and eventually, tried to suppress, which I felt really impacted my image of myself and what I felt like I should be projecting into the world. And ultimately, my self-confidence to the point where, like you said, you hit a breaking point because I was masking all the time and trying to basically posture myself to be something. I was highly gifted and talented and was in these advanced classes, just like you, and it's interesting. I never thought anything about technology. I loved it just like you're describing it and I find myself interwoven into the community, not a technologist, but somebody who's recruiting and focusing on the culture and the talent of those organizations. So one of the things that as I was reading about you and just hoping that we can weave into the conversation is your approach to seeing people for their whole selves. I really appreciated when I read that about you and saw that you had been taking effort, once you got into technology, to build it seemed like a community, or spaces where you were going to allow people to show up and be their full selves, which in my mind and from my point of view, I'm assuming that's like okay, then if we're going to do that, we need to know who you are, the unique identities and intersectionalities that you bring to the conversation, or to the space. I'm just curious if we could go down that path a little bit, because I want to know how you've turned these, I put in air quotes, “adversities” into a power, into something that's really great. So tell us about that. How you've used all this stuff about yourself and your experiences thus far to do what you're doing right now, which is you've built a few different products and I'll let you talk about that in technology. NIKEMA: I will talk a little bit about my founder journey, I guess, because I did start a company. This was also a part of my coming out because even through college I was always overlooked and pushed aside by stronger personalities. Whenever I had a group project, it was just always a bad time [chuckles] because I never felt insecure about my skills, or my ability to contribute. But I did have a problem with like standing up and like making sure that my contribution was included. So I finished my web developer certificate and I was like, “I'm going to go get a job now,” and I was again, thinking I can get a job as a developer and I can work from home. I could still take care of my babies; still take care of my kids and I could do this job from home. Back then, remote work was not widely available like that. It was almost more of a perk [chuckles] and reserved for more senior people, people who had more career experience than someone who had just be coming in from junior college. But still, that's what I thought I was going to do. I'm going to work from home. I was having a hard time finding that kind of job [chuckles] and I was also feeling like I didn't get enough practical hands-on experience in my program. So I started going into the community. I started going to meetups. I volunteered for some nonprofits helping kids, teaching kids tech classes. I joined a startup weekend and I joined this startup weekend as a developer because I'm like, “I'm going to practice these skills. I need to get hands-on skills to get a job.” Didn't actually get to do any development work. But this was important because I'd never taken that much time away from my kids before and I took a whole weekend to build a startup. That's what the point of startup weekend was to start with an idea and build a product and pitch it. My team won, which was like, wow. The entrepreneur switch turned on in my brain, it was like, “Oh, my contributions matter, my work matters, and I can start solving these problems that I care about because no one else seems to be working on them.” And when that happened okay yeah, we won. Very quickly after we won, the person who came up with the idea for our startup decided that she was CEO. She also decided that she was going to fire the rest of the team, take our prizes, and go off and build a startup for real with a friend of hers and I was like, “That's not going to happen.” [chuckles] I was so angry. I was like, “This is the first weekend I took away from my kids. This was the first time I felt like my work was being recognized and that my work mattered and you're going to try to take that from me? Hell no.” Like, “No, that's not going to happen.” I could go on about that story. I don't really want to, but I will say that I alerted the organizers of the startup weekend. We ended up being disqualified, but that was also my origin story as a founder. So I decided to go and try to build something to solve my problems and my company that I ended up forming is called PopSchools. It's still a company. I'm still paying taxes on it. That started my founder journey. My company was eventually called PopSchools and in the first iterations, it was like a school alternative, an alternative school. I was homeschooling my kids at the time. Didn't really feel like they were getting the best experience out of that and I didn't want to put them back in school because I didn't feel like they were getting a good experience in regular school either. At first, it was a school alternative program. Then the later iterations, were a co-working space that is family friendly and age inclusive. So students would be first class citizen in this co-working space. They would have a homeschooling program and an afterschool program for kids who weren't homeschooling and also, a workspace for parents. So kids are taken care of, kids are doing their thing in a rich environment that is accommodating to them, and parents also have a place to do their remote work because I'm still on this remote work thing. I don't want to go sit in an office. That was a later iteration. Then I kind of played with, well, I had ideas about education, school choice, and all of those things. But also, I learned over time that if you are not financially stable, or somewhat financially well off, you don't really have school choice. You could have the best programs in the world, but not everybody is able to homeschool and not everybody was able to give up the services that they're going to get by having their kids in public school. It's really interesting that I felt very vindicated when this pandemic hit, because I'm like, “All of you people who did not understand what I was doing [chuckles] a couple years ago, were just kind of like, ‘Oh yeah, sucks to be you’ when it came to the options for school and homeschooling,” and how homeschooling was not the experience that I thought it should be. All those people who didn't understand got firsthand experience and what it's like to have to homeschool [laughs] and what it's like to not have that support in place for a family that's not in a public school. So I felt vindicated because I'm like, “Now you all understand, you understand what I've been going through,” and I kind of feel like it's a good time to pick up [laughs] that project. Because like I said, a lot of people understand why there's a need for it now and a lot of people also found that school can be damaging this to some kids. Some people found that their kids were better when they didn't have to go to school. They were better mentally. They felt safer. I've heard things about the racial trauma. A lot of schools that are – the school to prison pipeline is a thing I don't want to get into that, but some schools are great and a lot of schools look just like prisons. So being home was a relief for some of these kids. DAMIEN: I want to repeat something you said: school can be damaging for children and that there's a trope in this country of children hate going to school, right? Like, “Oh, they're pretending to be sick to not go to school. They’re ditching school. They don't want to be at school.” So the question is why. Nobody stops to ask why are we doing this to our children, putting them environments that they don't want to be in? What harm is that causing? Why don't they want to be in these environments and why are we not asking those questions? CHANTÉ: Yes. The question I've been grappling with, and I feel like this is appropriate group of folks to talk to and pose the questions, what is the purpose of school? Is the purpose of school to be childcare because we live in an industrialized society that demands adults to be awake [chuckles] and at work, at their attention at desk at dawn and then to dusk? Is that the purpose of school to be a holding place for those children and/or is it to allow for children to have a social and emotional experience with one another, to learn how to be friends, to learn about people who are their neighbors, and then to build a community? Is it to prepare children for a job that they're going to take in this industrialized world? And if our industrialized world is changing because of the applications of technology and where we're going with the future of work, do they need to be at school all those hours, or is there a new version of what education should look like? I think I'm just really frustrated, Nikema because I could really appreciate you saying now people understand. I felt the same way because I was a person who had to stay home with my kids for a while and not have an income. I so much dreamed and longed of a place where I could take my children that was healthy, welcoming, supportive communal while I was working for a few hours to hustle, or do whatever and it could possibly be a stimulating, positive, welcoming, loving experience for my children. But there wasn't one that existed. So I do think timing is everything. Maybe this is the right time to resurrect those efforts. But I love the question of what is the purpose of school and maybe we don't get to answer that question today, but I think it's worth just pinning and asking to you and to the listeners today. NIKEMA: I love that because that was exactly what I was pitching [chuckles] back when I was trying to be the WeWork of homeschooling [chuckles] and I could also get into VC, tech startups, and my beats with that because I was watching, I was like, “These white men have very ordinary ideas. They're not really reimagining anything, but they are being funded in the millions.” And I could see – I like to call out that tech claims to be tech leaders and VCs claim to be data-driven. But if we're all data driven, I can look and see that as a Black woman, my chances of being venture funded at the level that I would need to be are slim to none. My chances are slim to none. Black people as a whole get a fraction of a percent of all venture capital. So why should I put out this energy to pitch my ideas and ask for funding when chances are, I won't get the funding that I need going down that road? But that was exactly what I was pitching and back then, I would try to get people to imagine if your kids weren't in school, where would they be? Okay, home [chuckles] is an option, but you quickly find out if you start homeschooling after being in school, the world is not set up for children. Children are not welcome everywhere and you might think, “Okay, well, what about the library?” The library is the library. It's not a place for children to be children so much, like you're supposed to be quiet. [laughs] They have children areas. It's not a place where you could be instead of being at school. You could go to a park. You could do that, but it's a park. So if you think about it, if school didn't exist, where in the world, where in your world are kids going to be accommodated? There aren't really places to go and so, that's why I was like, “Homeschooling is very exclusive.” It's not something everybody can do and there are a lot of subgroups and not even subgroups, but maybe the dominating narrative of what a homeschooler is that I did not align with. I don't want to be aligned with religious fundamentalists. I don't want to be aligned with child abusers and people who want to keep their kids home because they want to shelter them from the world and they want to teach them their own worldview. I don't want to be aligned with that. It probably is a good time to look at this again and it's sad in a way because when I needed it the most is when I was really trying to go hard [chuckles] to start this and get backing for it. But my kids are old now. They're teens now and it was really that age group when they were 7, 8, 9, pre-teen where it's like, where do these kids go if they're not in school? What can they do? Because I don't necessarily want to put them in just classes. I want them to have a rich experience and back then, I was really into self-directed education. So I was like, “If it's not a class, if it's not school, there's literally nothing.” [laughs] There's nothing they could do, but go play at the park, or hang out in the library for a few hours, or stay home. So PopSchools was very homeschool, alternative school and it always had that aspect of like, “I need a place where I can go with my kids [chuckles] and I could do my work.” We had some things happen where even outside of being in school, my kids still weren't safe. [chuckles] So I was like, “I need to be somewhere where I know my kids are safe,” but I didn't have any money. I had less than $0 all the time [chuckles] and it's not really a position to start a business from. I did have a network and I did meet some great people in tech, VC, and all that and they were like, “Nikema, go get a job.” [chuckles] Like, “You need to get yourself stable, take care of your needs, and then once you're okay, then you can start working on that business. You can start putting your energy, time, and money into building the business that you want to build.” So I did that. I went out and got a job. There's a lot of extra to story, too that I don't want to get into. But I think it was 2019 when I started this public Twitter job campaign where I was like, “Watch me get this job.” I think I was documenting my job search, documenting my interviews, and counting my rejections and I did finally get a group of offers in, I think it was 2019. Two were for solve engineering. One was for a community manager role. I took the community manager role because I was very much wanting to be in tech and in community. I don't want to be heads down in code because like I said, my superpower is connecting to people. So it's probably not the best use of if we're talking about, like Chanté said, the whole person [laughs] to sit me in front of a computer to code. I want to be in the community with people. So I took that community manager role—it was also the highest base pay out of all my offers—and I connected with the hiring manager. So that was my choice and that was the last offer to come through. I took that and I worked there for a year. I just left in October of 2021. I was there for a year and a couple months and oh, I skipped over a lot. But talking about the whole person and I feel very strongly about equity and inclusion, I will say in tech, but specifically for people who are career switchers and so-called non-traditional technologists. I care a lot about that because I see things from this unique perspective, because I have experience as a student, I have experience as a founder, I have experience as just a parent, a single parent, someone coming from not a lot of money. I have this unique way of seeing things and I can see very clearly when things are set up to exploit people and it pisses me off. It makes me angry and I had to learn how to that energy towards something productive. Because just throwing it out there and trying to scream into the void, it seems like no one's hearing you and it seems like the things that you're calling out are just being ignored. That's a waste of energy. So I had to learn how to direct it and I started directing it by helping individuals and again, by showing up. Showing up and speaking, even if nobody's listening. I told myself, “When you're in these rooms with people that you admire and people who are influential, stand up and say something because nobody else has that perspective. Nobody else is going to say what you're going to say.” And it's not even possible. It's not possible for someone to speak your perspective and I had to learn that you need perspective is valuable. There's a quote, and I really need to find out who said it first, [chuckles] but it's, “You're an expert in your own experience,” and I latched onto that because there's a lot of – it's another one of my pet peeves is this imposter syndrome thing. But there's a lot of people who are being made to feel like they're always going to be – I call it the tech underclass. You're always going to be lesser [chuckles] than the people who have degrees, or the people who've been in this for years, and the people who are already in the industry. Here you are coming from your non-traditional background and you're always going to be lesser than those folks, and you are going to have imposter syndrome, get used to it. So I latched onto that idea of I'm an expert in my own experience and my experience is value. Bringing that up and speaking it out is adding value. It is doing a service and it's a service that nobody else can do. That's when I started kind of committing to myself that even if I'm scared, I'm going to stand up and speak. I'm going to let people know that I was in the room. But I do want to talk about imposter syndrome. So my beef with imposter syndrome is not that it's not a thing. I'm sure it is, [chuckles] but I feel like it's being thrust upon us. I feel like people are saying, “You're a woman in tech. You're a person of color in tech. You have no degree and you're trying to get into tech and you're going to feel like a fraud,” and I don't feel like a fraud. Why are you introducing that to me? I feel like another part that bugs me about it is that it's shifting the blame onto the individual for some actual, rational reactions to a hostile environment. If you're telling me, “Hey, it's natural, it's normal, it's okay to feel like you don't belong here,” you're kind of saying it's a me thing, but it shouldn't be natural and okay for me to feel like I don't belong here. Like, why is this environment not including me? I'm actually reacting to people pushing me out of this space, discriminating against me, and showing their bias against me. So what's wrong with me for noticing that? What's wrong with me for feeling that? Why aren't we talking about the folks that are making this an unwelcome place? That are making people feel bad? Who are saying out loud, “We don't want you here”? It's putting the attention in the wrong place. Instead of saying, “It should not be okay, that should not be a normal thing to feel like you're not good enough and you don't belong.” I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. This is how I think of it. The actual definition is you are capable and skilled, but you feel like you're a fraud and someone's going to find you out. I don't think that should be normalized and encouraged, and I feel like it is being normalized and encouraged that it's normal to feel like you don't belong here. DAMIEN: Yeah, it's rampant and it's something that a lot of people go through. The question is why? What is it about those environments that's causing that and why is it some people experience it and some people don't? I've seen the opposite of imposter syndrome. It is mindboggling. ARTY: Well, there's this general first principle of whatever we focus on and grows and when we have these concepts, like imposter syndrome, that we learn about as these psychological concepts that then we internalize into ourself. Does that end up amplifying the experience of like if now I'm thinking about, “Oh, I have imposter syndrome and now I'm having all these feelings where I feel this certain way, too.” Do we end up amplifying those things even more by creating that frame and then as you said, normalizing it? It's like, “Oh, it's totally okay that you feel that way. You're supposed to feel that way. That's a normal thing.” Then we end up not dealing with the fundamental problems that we're actually creating these sort of tech, underclass, second class boundaries with the way we sort of create our group collective and we are pushing people out and then normalizing the fact that they feel unincluded. I totally agree. It's putting attention on the wrong aspect of things such that as opposed to focusing on the things that are potentially corrective, that might improve the inclusivity of the culture and us thinking about how we're creating mental groups and how we can create more inclusive mental groups, instead we're normalizing the exclusion. NIKEMA: Yeah. I almost titled my book, The Underclass, [chuckles] and I decided against that because again, I want to be positive [chuckles] and I'm probably still going to say some of the same things that I plan to say in that book. But this whole thing about – and this is part of the rage [laughs] that I have to redirect is because I went through a coding bootcamp that cost $30,000, up to $30,000 of potential future income for a lot of the students that attended that school and I saw the messages coming from the leadership and the people who were really gathering these people up and funneling them into bootcamps. First off, I saw a lot of just wrong, [ chuckles] like wrong advice being given out and I saw a lot of cultural incompetency because a lot of these bootcamps are run by white men and a lot of the students are not that. So I'm like, “Here I am with this perspective, I'm a founder, I've talked to investors, I've been a student. I know how to code.” [chuckles] From that perspective of, I have a viewpoint that most students don't. So I'm seeing absolute wrong advice being given out. Like when we're talking about looking for that first job, your first job at tech, you're so-called breaking into tech, which I hate that term. We're not breaking in, let us in. [chuckles] Why should we have to break in? DAMIEN: Open the door. NIKEMA: Yeah. There are so many jobs that are not being filled. Why? Why are we gatekeeping? But wrong advice, like, “It's a numbers game. You might have to do hundreds of applications.” That's giving people wrong advice [chuckles] and it's giving people advice that you yourself never did. I know for a fact. These are people who have strong networks – Oh, most egregious wrong advice. Part of the problem is these people were better marketers than people who could run a school. But there was a thread on Twitter. I remember seeing it. It was a young Black woman. She was graduating high school, she was going to college, and I think trying to decide about what college to go to and someone comes into this thread and recommends Lambda School to her and I'm like, “Absolutely fucking not. How could you?” Like, “How could you?” [chuckles] Like, “How could you tell a Black woman with all of this going for herself, who's going to be on a path to like –” I don't know. I'm just saying you're suggesting something very low value and especially low value to a Black woman because the people who ran that school did not have the cultural competency to give advice to anyone other than white men, I'd say. Maybe abled white men. [laughs] I don't know, but just wrong advice. A lot of anti-intellectualism anti-degrees like, “Oh, this is better than a degree education.” Absolutely not. Credentials matter more for people of color, for people who are minoritized in tech. Your certificate from an unaccredited school means absolutely nothing compared to a degree in computer science. So it's rage-inducing for me to see that people are being exploited and pointed towards these programs that are not going to do what they're advertised to do for them and they're not even capable of knowing that they're giving the wrong advice. I opted out of career services when I was in a bootcamp because I saw the kind of advice they were giving and that's part of my, I guess, I'm going to call it activism today is I really want people to know what's really up. I want them to not devalue themselves and not allow others to devalue them. Because these people who know good and well what's up, they know good and well how things work, are leading them astray and they're leading them into jobs that are going to underpay them and they're not going to be satisfying and they are misleading. Misleading in what it takes to get to where we're all trying to go. I would just like to say to whoever's listening to this and you're maybe getting into tech, don't be discouraged, but also, do your due diligence. Before you start agreeing to pay anything that's tens of thousands of dollars, even thousands of dollars, see who these people are, see what the outcomes are, and talk to the students who have gone through that program. Talk to the students who weren't successful. Talk to the ones who were successful because a lot of these success stories are skewed. When I went to bootcamp, it was better than free for me. I never had an income share agreement. I had a scholarship. I had a stipend. So I was actually getting paid to attend. I always like to say that you could take my story and make it look like a bootcamp success story, but you would not be seeing the 20 years before that when I started to learn how to code. You could tell that story in a way that doesn't show that part. You could say, “Nikema was this single mom with no job who joined Lambda school did 15 weeks, then got a six-figure job the next year.” That would be true, [chuckles] but that would not be a Lambda success story. That is, Nikema worked her ass off [chuckles] for decades before Lambda was even thought of to get to where she is today and I feel like that story is left out. CHANTÉ: Nikema, that is such an amazing point to make and I want to run the balance of the time we have left, but I just want to say – I think we have a few minutes to get into reflections, but I just want to say before we do that, that having conversations about diversity and inclusion in tech doesn’t means really nothing to me. We need to have conversations about equity and accessibility because equity is actually what you're kind of describing here. We have to be able to see the whole person and this is why sometimes it's important to call out the institutional and systemic racism that's widely pervasive in the industry and beyond that is happening all over our country, all over our world. and it is such, I hope a deeper conversation that needs to be had. I'm here for it if you want to come back, or we can continue the conversation on Twitter Spaces, or something. I'm there for that, invite me. But there's a lot here and I really appreciate you giving that advice because we do need to have open, honest, authentic conversations show who you really are. I'm looking forward to getting folks' reaction, but I really want to move us into reflection, if that's okay, just to respect everyone's time. NIKEMA: That's okay with me. CHANTÉ: Anybody want to go first? Anybody, Arty, Damien, you have a reflection? DAMIEN: I can go first. Really, the thing I'm going to be taking away from this—and Nikema, thank you so much for joining us here—is that connecting through authenticity and the power of that. It's not the first time I've heard words of that nature, or that idea, but getting to witness it in-person has been a really powerful experience and that's going to be something that sticks with me for a while. So thank you. ARTY: Yeah, I think you gave a very good demonstration of your superpower here, though of just being yourself, standing up, and saying what you believe and what you think and stuff. I can even see how those things just affected me and affected people in this room and being able to connect with you so that we could have a very real conversation. I think the thing that I'm going to be taking away from this conversation is you talked about even when you're scared, you stand up and speak and you're going to let people know that you're in the room and that you are an expert in your own experience and nobody else has your unique perspective. I feel like that's something that all of us have so much power in ourselves to stand up and speak in our own authenticity for our own experiences and be in the room. Even when we're scared, to go after and do it anyway because by doing so, too it gives other people permission to do the same. It creates opportunity for other people to take their mask off and create space for them to be themselves and for them to stand up. It's kind of like a chain reaction that happens. So if we can all start to do that and all start to create space for people to do that, that's the kind of stuff that one person at a time changes the world. CHANTÉ: Thank you for those. I'm really appreciating, Nikema your authenticity and your rawness. I think it's beautiful. It just really resonated with me. So I felt like I was listening to a version of myself, just listening to your story. What I think I wrote down, the aspiration that you had about children and making sure that they feel like where in our world are they first class citizens. That really stuck out to me because I think that our youth is our future and I'm really committed in this portion of my life to building and doing whatever I can to make sure we build a future that is inclusive, equitable, and accessible to everyone. I think we’ve got to lean in and look at our youth and I hope that they're learning from some of our – not necessarily failures, but some of our places in our lives as adults where we fall short of kind of build world that's fair and awesome. So I really want to take that and do something with it and I'm really inspired. Thank you. NIKEMA: Thank you for letting me speak like, I can go on and on, so. [chuckles] I appreciate it. CHANTÉ: Thank you. Do you have any reflections before we close off the conversation? NIKEMA: Yeah, just last thing. I just wanted to say thank you again and I really appreciate and I have come to enjoy my story. It’s because of the things you told and it’s because I recognize that it is how I connect with others and that is the good side of the mutant superpower is that I do get to make real connections with other people. DAMIEN: Thank you. Thank you so much for being here.Support Greater Than Code

01:56 - Episode Intro: Who is Casey Watts? Happy and Effective 02:25 - “Gay” vs “Queer” Cultural vs Sexual Black vs black Deaf vs deaf 06:11 - Pronoun Usage & Normalization Greater Than Code Episode 266: Words Carry Power – Approaching Inclusive Language with Kate Marshall Spectrum of Allyship Ambiguous “They/Them” 16:36 - Asking Questions & Sharing Ring Theory Don’t Assume Take Workshops Find Support Set Boundaries Overgeneralization Do Your Own Research – Google Incognito 28:16 - Effective Allyship Reactive vs Proactive Parenting Calling Out Rude Behavior – “Rude!” Overcoming Discomfort; Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable Recognizing Past Mistakes: Being Reflective Stratejoy Celebrate Progress Apologize and Move On Microaggressions: Prevention & Recovery happyandeffective.com/updates Reflections: Mannah: The people on this show are all willing to start and have conversations. Casey: I will make mistakes. I will find more support. Mandy: Reflection is always a work in progress. It’s never done. Keep doing the work. People are always evolving and changing. 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. CASEY: Hello, and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 268. I'm Casey, and I'm here with co-host, Mannah. MANNAH: How's it going? I'm Mannah and I'm here with Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hey, everybody. It’s Mandy and today, I'm excited because we are doing a panelist only episode. So our host and panelist, beloved Casey Watts, is going to take us through Casey did a LGBTQ panel for Women Who Code Philly a couple weeks ago and it went really great. He offered to do a show to talk about the subject in more depth on the show. So we're here to do that today. So without further ado, why don't you give us a little intro, Casey? CASEY: Sure. I'm going to start by talking about who I am a little bit and why I'm comfortable talking about this kind of stuff. My name's Casey, I'm a gay man, or a queer man. We can get into the difference between gay and queer [chuckles] in the episode. I live in D.C. and I really like my community groups that I'm in to be super inclusive, inclusive of people of all kinds of backgrounds and all the letters in LGBTQIA especially. MANDY: That's awesome. So right there, you just gave us an in. Can we get into the difference between gay and queer? CASEY: Yeah. I love it. People lately use the term “queer” as an umbrella term that represents all the letters in LGBTQIA especially younger people are comfortable with that term, but it is reclaimed. Older people, it used to be a slur and so, like my cousin, for example, who's older than me hesitates to use the word queer on me because she knows that it used to be used to hurt people. But queer people like this as an umbrella term now because it is just saying we're not the norm in gender identity, or sexual, romantic orientation, that kind of stuff. We're not the norm. We're something else. Don't assume that we're the norm and then it's not describing all the little nuances of it. It's just like the umbrella term. So I'm definitely queer and I'm gay. Another distinction that I really like to make and that's cultural versus specifically what the term means. So I'm gay and that I'm attracted to other men, but I don't hang out at gay bars and watch RuPaul's Drag Race like the mainstream gay man does in media and in life. I know a lot of people who love that I'm not comfortable there. I don't like it. I think drag queens are fun I guess, but they're also really catty and mean and I don't like that, and I don't want that to rub off on me personally. Instead, I hang out in groups like the queer marching band which has a ton of lesbian women, bisexual, biromantic people, asexual people, intersex people, and trans people and has all the letters in LGBTQIA and I love that inclusive community. That's the kind of group I like to be in. Some of the gay men there talk about RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it's like a minority of that large group. I love being in the super inclusive cultures. So I'm culturally queer, but I'm sexually romantically gay. So depending on what we're talking about, the one is more important than the other. I have a story for this. Before the pandemic, I got a haircut at a gay barber shop. It's gay because D.C. has a lot of gay people and there's a gym above the barber shop that's pretty explicitly gay. They cater to gay people. They have rainbows everywhere. I got my hair cut and this woman just kept making RuPaul’s Drag Race references to me that I didn't get, I don't get it. I don't know what she's saying, but I know the shape of it and I told her I don't like that and I'm not interested in it. Please stop. She didn't because she was assuming I'm culturally gay, like most of her clientele and it was really annoying and she wasn't seeing me, or listening to what I was saying and I was not seen. But she's right I was gay, but I'm not gay culturally in that way. Does that make sense? That's kind of a complex idea to throw out at the beginning of the episode here. A lot of people take some time to get your head around the cultural versus sexual terms. MANNAH: Yeah. That is interesting especially because with so many identities, I guess that’s true for every identity where there's a cultural element and then there's some other thing. For instance, I’m a Black man and no matter where I hang out, or what I’m interested in, I’ll always be a Black man, but there is associated with both masculinity and specifically, Black masculinity. CASEY: Yeah, and I like the – lately, I've been seeing lowercase B black to mean a description of your skin color and uppercase B Black to mean a description of the culture and I like that distinction a lot. It's visual. Deaf people have been using that for years. My aunt’s deaf so my family has a deaf culture. I'm a little bit deaf culture myself just by proxy, but I'm not deaf. I'm capital D Deaf culturally in amount. Her daughter, who she raised, my deaf aunt, is culturally Deaf way, way more than the average person, but not fully because she's not deaf herself. So there's all spectrum here of cultural to experiencing the phenomenon and I was happy to see, on Twitter at least, a lot of people are reclaiming capital B black. And for me, it's capital Q Queer and lowercase G gay. That's how I distinguish into my head—culturally queer and I'm sexually gay. MANNAH: So one of the things, I've been thinking about this since our intro and for those of you listening, our intro is scripted and as simple as it was like, “Hey, my name is Mannah,” and passing it off to Mandy. Generally, when I introduce myself – I just started a new job. I introduced myself with my pronouns, he/him, because I think it's more inclusive and I want to model that behavior and make sure that people around me are comfortable if they want to share their pronouns. I do think that this is championed by the queer community and as a member of that community, I'd just love to hear your take on people being more explicit with that aspect of their identity. CASEY: I love the segment. Pronouns is a huge, huge topic in this space lately especially. I like to start from here, especially with older audiences that we used to have mister and miss in our signatures and in the way we address letters and emails, and that's gone away. So including pronouns is a lot like just saying mister, or miss, but we've dropped the formality. I'm glad to be gone with the formality, but we still need to know which pronouns to use and it's nice to have that upfront. I like and appreciate it. I try to include pronouns when I remember it and when I'm in spaces where that's a norm. I like to follow that for sure every time there. But I'm not always the first person to introduce it. Like if I was giving a talk and there were 30 older white men in the audience who've never heard of this idea, I might not start with he/him because I want to meet them where they're at and bring them to the point where they get it. So I'm not always a frontrunner of this idea, but I love to support it, I love to push it forward, and help people understand it and get on board. It's like there's different stages of allyship, I guess you could say and I really like helping people get from a further backstage to a middle stage because I don't think enough people are in that space and there are plenty of people getting people who are in the middle stage to the more proactive stage. Like, “We should use pronouns!” You hear that all the time in spaces I'm in. It's possible I can get pushback for that kind of thing, like even meeting people where they're at, and that frustrates because I want to be effective. I don't want to just signal that I'm very progressive and doing the right things. I want to actually be effective. I give workshops on this kind of thing, too. That's where we're coming from for the today's talk. MANDY: I think on the last show, it might have been Kate Marshall who said that normalizing pronouns is really important to do, but not just when there's an obvious person in the room who you're not sure. Maybe we even started off on the wrong foot on the show by not saying, “Hi, I'm Mandy, my pronouns are she and her.” Just adding that in to normalize it would be a really good step, I think. CASEY: Yeah, love it. Here's where I like to come with my role. Say, “Plus one, I love that idea. Let's do it now.” I like to activate the idea once it's in the room, but it takes someone brave to bring it up in the first place and it's a different amount of social energy, maybe in a different head space you have to be in to be that first person. But being the second is also very important and I like to help people understand that, too. If you're the second person, that's still being helpful. Maybe you can become the first person in some groups, but I want to celebrate that you're the second person even. That's great. Yeah, I think that's a good change we could do. MANNAH: You mentioned allyship and I think that that is why am so proactive in introducing myself with pronouns because I do present as a traditional man. Well, maybe not traditional, but I present as a man and I have the ability to deal with some of that pushback. We talk about superpowers on the show. I feel like one of my superpowers is I am willing to engage in those conversations, even if they are difficult. CASEY: Mm hm. MANNAH: So I can use my powers for good by starting that conversation perhaps, or starting to build that norm. Whether, or not I am doing it for anyone in particular, it is important for me to do it wherever we are. So I think that just wherever we can make spaces more inclusive with the way we can conduct ourselves and our language, it's important. CASEY: I have a framework to share that's kind of related to that. So there's a spectrum of allyship—that's my title for it anyway—that goes from an active detractor all the way over to an active supporter of an idea. In this case, the active supporter would be getting pronouns to happen in a space where they're not happening. And then in the middle, maybe you're neutral, not doing anything. In the middle on either side, there's a passive – like you're not doing anything, but you kind of support the idea. You're kind of against the idea, but you're not taking any action. And then on the active part, there's even a split between and being proactive and reactive. So for pronouns, I guess the way I'm self-describing here is I'm a reactive pronoun person. For better, or worse, that's where I'm at on that spectrum and that's where I like to help move things along. So I can talk to people who are more maybe passively against the idea because I'm not so far on the right. I like to use the spectrum for another purpose, which is moving people from one space to the next is valuable and often invisible. If you can get someone to be loudly against pronouns to just be quiet, that's a step forward. You've persuaded them a little bit to go in that direction, or if they’re there to neutral, or neutral to passively supportive, but quiet about it. A lot of this kind of progress with people who aren't active supporters is invisible and that can be really frustrating for people; it feels like you're not making any progress. So for people who are allies and want to be allies, there's a step forward you can do for yourself, which is getting yourself from being reactive to being proactive. But you're not just helping the people in the room, but helping people who could be in the room, or might be in the future. Reactive to proactive. MANDY: I've been doing that a lot with just actually referring to everybody as they/them no matter if I already know how they present, or not. That, to me, is just the most inclusive way to refer to people in general. CASEY: Yeah, that's generally a safe practice, but there are people who don't want to be called they/them. MANDY: Hmm. CASEY: For example, I have some friends who… Let's imagine a trans man who wants to be considered he/him, they are very invested in this and they want the – If you keep calling them, they/them, even if they correct you, “He/him is my pronouns,” then they're going to be upset about that, pf course. But it is a safe, starting point because the ambiguous they is just generally, it’s good grammar, the APA endorses it even. You're allowed to use they when it's ambiguous by grammar rules. But if you know someone's pronouns and it isn't they/them, it's generally better to use those because they prefer it. MANDY: Yeah. That's what I meant. If somebody says to me, “I would prefer you call me she/her, he/him.: But when I'm first, like if I'm even talking to say my dad and I'm talking about work, I would be like, “I have a friend, they did this.” CASEY: Yeah. That's ambiguous day and that's perfectly appropriate there. MANDY: Yeah. But as far as like addressing somebody on a regular basis who wants to be referred to as one, or the other, I have no problem doing that. I've just been training myself to use ambiguous terms because I see and I think it's wonderful. My daughter's 12 and almost all of her friends are non-binary. So when I meet them, or I'm talking about her friends for me, it's just more, I don't want to say easy. I don't want to make it sound like I'm doing it, like taking the easy way out, but I'll just be like, do the they/them stuff to have the conversation and then once I find out more, we can transfer over to the he/him, she/her as I'm corrected, or being asked to do one, or the other. CASEY: Right, right. It's definitely safer to assume you don't know than to assume someone's gender based on how they looked, for sure and the ambiguous they is perfect for that. Even for people who use they/them as pronouns, there's a switch in my head at least—you probably feel it, too—from ambiguous to specific. Like now I know they/them is their pronouns. MANDY: Yeah. I've had no problem. When my daughter has brought new people over, who I know are non-binary, I will say to them even if I already know, because she's told me, I'll be like, “What pronouns do you prefer?” And every single time these are 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, they're like, “Thank you for asking.” CASEY: Yeah. MANDY: Because a lot of times, I feel it's not very accepted yet. So when I hear, or when they hear me say, “How would you like me to refer to you?” They smile so big. CASEY: Yeah, you’re treating them like the individual person they are. MANDY: Exactly, and they're like, “Thank you,” and now I'm known as the cool mom. [laughs] CASEY: Ah. Great. [laughs] Yeah. If I could snap my fingers and change a behavior of mine, that would be one. I would consider everyone's pronouns unknown until they tell me and it also varies by context. I don't even want to trust secondhand. Like if Mandy, you said he for Mannah before I met him, I wouldn't assume that's his pronouns. If maybe you are assuming, or maybe you heard it from someone and they were assuming, or maybe based on context, it's different. I want to hear it from the person, ideally. MANDY: Yes. CASEY: I also don't necessarily want to go around asking for pronouns actively all the time. I'd rather us offer them upfront, or have them in our usernames, or something so it's less verbiage in the air about it. I like it to be normalized. We don't have to think about it. That's a dream state. But for now, I'd rather ask people directly than assume anything. But it's a hard habit because I've been trained from school and everything, since a young age, to assume someone’s gender and not to use they at first. That's what we've been trained and I love this trend of untraining that. Ambiguous they is accepted and we should start with that. MANDY: I love seeing people proactively put pronouns in their Zoom profiles, or their Zoom names and at conferences, I love the conferences having badges, or stickers. CASEY: Yeah. MANDY: I love that. CASEY: It's helpful. MANNAH: I want to change directions slightly and go back to something you said about the spectrum and how we move people – I don't remember the exact words you used, the two polar opposites. CASEY: Yeah. MANNAH: But how to move people towards a more inclusive mindset, let's say and wherever you are on that spectrum, you might not know how to move forward and the way to kind of deal with that, you might have questions. I just want to hear from you how you would like to be approached with questions around how do you feel about pronouns, or whatever it might be relating to your culture, or your, I guess, I'm going to say sexual identity. CASEY: Yeah. MANNAH: People are unsure how can they approach you with questions in a way that's respectful and a way that will allow them to learn more about you? CASEY: Good question. I feel like you're reading my mind a bit here. I want to start with another framework that you might have heard of. It's the circles of grief Ring Theory. Like if someone just lost their parent, then you need to pour support into that person who's closest to them and if you're outside like a more distant family member, or a friend, pour support in and then the grief gets stumped out. That's the framework, generally. So there's a lot of rings. People who are closer to it are affected more directly and people who are outside are affected more indirectly. That applies to asking people personal things, too. So I'm directly affected by being queer and I've been discriminated against and people have said bad things to me before. To ask me about it and to bring up those feelings could harm me in some way so you can't just assume everybody's comfortable talking about their experience. Like, “Tell me about how you feel about your dead mother.” It wouldn't be sensitive either because they're experiencing the pain directly, but sometimes people do want to talk about that and they're comfortable, they processed it, and they want to help spread the word. So I'm one of those people; you can ask me anything. Even if you don't know me, you can DM me on Twitter. Anyone listening, ask me a question about queer things. I'll point you to a resource, or answer it myself. I'm offering because I'm comfortable at this point. But a lot of people aren't and, in that case, you could ask if someone's comfortable, that's not a bad idea, or you could ask people who are in further circles out. Like you don't need to ask a queer person about queer experiences if you can read about it in an article online, or watch a documentary, or talk to friends who have other queer friends and they know some things about it. It's not as good as secondhand experience hearing from someone with firsthand experience, but you're causing less harm by making the ideas come up again. So you have a range of ways you can find out more about what it's like to be queer and I encourage you to think about all the different ways you can learn about a thing. You don't have to depend on the person who has [chuckles] this negative experience to do it. Another way you can learn more is by doing workshops, like the ones that I facilitate. So I was thrilled to have a good audience at Women Who Code Philly, actively asking question and learning things, and that's a space where you're supposed to ask questions and learn. I've heard of some people have peers they can talk to like peer support; people you can go to, to ask questions like that. Like my cousin asks me questions sometimes about her kids and that's like peers. Some companies actually have support groups like a weekly, or monthly meeting for people in the company to ask these questions that they have [laughs] and they don't know where to ask them and they can all learn from it. I've seen in some Slacks, there's a Diversity 101 channel in one of the Slacks I'm in people can ask questions like when would you, or would you not use this word? That's a space dedicated to asking questions like that and if someone like me wants to go in and contribute, I can answer questions there, but I don't have to. I know I'm welcome to, and I know I'm not pressured to, and that's a great middle ground and that's a lot of options. You’ve got to figure out what works for you, who you have around, who you can offer the support to, and who you can ask for the support from. Both directions. MANDY: It's great to have someone like you offering to do that and take on because it is of emotional labor and sometimes when people are curious, I know for me as being bisexual, some people are just like trying to – they're asking out of curiosity, but it's more like, “Give me the dirty details,” or something like that. CASEY: Yeah. MANDY: Sometimes it's like, “We just want to know because I don't – so I want to know what it's like for you,” and I'm like, “I'm not going to share just because –” right now, I am in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. Normally, if I was in a single state, a lot of people just try to ask questions that sometimes can be, I find it more inappropriate and they want to know because they're interested in the salacious details, or something like that. CASEY: Right. MANDY: That rubs me the wrong way and I can usually tell when somebody is asking, because they're genuine, or not. CASEY: There's a big difference between asking to get to know you as a person in the context you're in with the background you have versus asking for salacious gossip. [laughs] MANDY: Yeah. CASEY: And the one is much more kind than the other. It sounds like you've done a good job setting boundaries in these situations saying, “That's not appropriate. I'm not answering that. Sorry about it,” or something like that. MANNAH: Not sorry. CASEY: Not sorry. MANDY: Well, in the same token, it's something that bothers me, too because I feel like a lot of times, I just don't even tell people that I'm bisexual. CASEY: Yeah. MANDY: Because it's easier to not answer the questions because once you open that can of worms, then everybody comes at you and wants to know this and wants to know details. “Have you ever done this?” Or, “Have you ever done that?” It rubs me the wrong way again. CASEY: Right. MANDY: So sometimes I feel almost resentful. I feel resentful that I can't be my full self because it causes people to just ask and the whole conversation, or the whole time I spend with them is focused on this one thing and it's like for me, it's just not a big deal. CASEY: Right, right, right. Like on my Twitter profile—I like to use this as an example—I list out like 10, 15 things about myself on my Twitter profile and there is one little rainbow flag emoji in there at the end and I'd rather you talk about any of the other things probably. I'm willing to share that I'm queer and rainbow I affiliate with, but so much more to me, [chuckles] I'd rather you learn about me before that. MANDY: Yeah. CASEY: But it's the newest, novelist thing to those people who don't otherwise get exposed to it. They fixate on it sometimes and that, they might not realize, can be harmful. It can hurt people like you. It does hurt people. [chuckles] MANDY: It absolutely does. It makes me uncomfortable. So it's not an aspect that I talk about much, especially living in rural/suburban Pennsylvania. It's something that I just kind of, aside from my internet friends and tech community, that a lot of people still don't know about me. CASEY: Right. I can imagine not wanting to share. I used to not share my sexuality either in a lot of contexts and still when I go somewhere like the south, if I go to a place that has more bigotry around, I'm not holding my partner's hand there. I might get attacked even, that happens still in certain environments, they don't get it. Okay, I want to acknowledge that people asking these questions might have good intentions and they're making a mistake and I want to explain what I think the mistake is. MANDY: Yes. CASEY: People want to be treated as individuals, but you can go too far in that extreme and treat someone like an individual and ignore their background. Like it doesn't matter that you've been queer. It doesn't matter that you're Black. It doesn't matter, I'm just going to treat you like an individual. Ignoring all this background is its own kind of overgeneralization in a way is ignoring that background and context. And then there's another way you can do an exaggeration, which is only focusing on that background in context and ignoring the person's individual traits and their individual experiences. The best thing to do is to treat them like an individual who has this context and background putting them both together. So maybe these people are trying to understand you better by understanding this context. Maybe—I'm being very generous— [chuckles] some of these people are probably not this, but some people honestly want to know more about your context to understand you and that's thoughtful. They're just going about it in a way that's not the most helpful, or kind to you and I appreciate those people. But then there are other people who want to use the background and context to overgeneralize and just treat you as a member of this group, a token member, and that is a problem, too. So it's like two ingredients and if you put them together, that's the best and a lot of people focus on one, or the other too much. The individual experience versus the group background context experience. MANNAH: Yeah. That was really well put. I do think that as I said earlier, I'm someone who is very willing to have these. However, the downside of that is that becomes who you're and instead of the entire human being and the other – to take it a step further, some people are uncomfortable with that identity, or uncomfortable thinking about those things. Think about the discrimination that you might face and rather than confront it, or address it, they would rather just not deal with you, or limit their interact. CASEY: Right, yeah. MANNAH: So this is not a question for Casey, this is just something to the group. How can we navigate that and wanting to being willing to share of ourselves, but recognizing that there is some social backlash that can come from that? CASEY: I think my number one thing I want allies to understand is they can support each other in being allies and it can take work to be comfortable talking to each other, to support each other. You don't have to just depend on the queer people to learn queer about things. If one of you learns and one ally learns, they can teach another ally the concept, or the idea, or share how to navigate it. I did a Twitter poll for this, actually. Not a huge sample size, but still. A lot of people only have 1 to 3 people they can talk to about things like this. That's very few and they might not cover all the different situations. So that's my number one thing to help people navigate it is get so support, find support, be support for other people and you'll get support in return for that, too. That's your homework. Everyone, write this down. Find 10 people you can talk to about inclusivity related topics, 10 people. MANDY: And Google exists for a reason. So always, when things come up, I like to Google and I've gotten push back about that several times. “Well, I don't want to put that stuff into my search engine because then all of a sudden, I start getting gay targeted ads,” or something. CASEY: That's true. That's a real concern. [overtalk] MANDY: And I’m, “It’s not –” Well, hello, incognito mode. CASEY: Right. MANDY: Thank you, everyone. That's a thing. Use it. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah, and you don't have to feel icky using incognito mode. You can use it because you don't want to ads tracking you. MANDY: Exactly. CASEY: Some people use it for everything. They never use the regular browser mode because they don't want the tracking. It's work to learn things about other people and so, that's why I like to focus on the support part. If you get support from people, maybe you can both be looking up stuff and sharing articles with each other, and that's really multiplying the effects here. MANDY: Absolutely. MANNAH: So we started homework for allies. I think now it might be a good time to talk about what makes good ally. We talked a little bit about how it can feel voyeuristic. Mandy, you talked about how people asking questions can sometimes feel a little picky and we talked about some better ways to asking questions. But are there any other ways that either both, all of us would like to see people be more effective ally? CASEY: Yeah. I want to call back to an earlier point. I want to see more people switch from being reactive to being proactive. To being the first voice. Me included, honestly. Whenever you can get away with it and whatever helps you be proactive, do those things, which might be the support thing I keep talking about. Getting support to be more proactive, becoming accountable to people. If you're already an ally, I'm assuming you're being reactively supportive some of the times. A lot of the people I talk to, who consider themselves allies, would agree, but taking that next step. And there's a different spectrum for each issue, like pronouns is one. Pronouns being shared in meetings. How proactive, or reactive are you for that? I don't even know. There are thousands of things [chuckles] that you can do to become more proactive. MANDY: I would like to say for allies, teaching our children love and not hate. I see a lot of nastiness coming from children and that comes from parents. It's really sad to see sometimes the amount of people who don't – they just spew hate and they're like, “I'm not referring to this person as a pronoun.” Like, “They/them, no. They're a this, or they're –” It saddens me to no end when you are around children to model nasty behavior and I think if you are not the person doing that yourself and you're around it, and you see somebody say something and say, “That's not okay, don't. Do you understand how you sound? Do you understand what you're saying? Do you understand that you're having an effect on everyone around you by giving your nasty opinions and that kind of thing?” CASEY: Yeah. I've got a one word, one liner thing that I like to pull out and I'm proud every time I say it. “Rude,” and I can walk away. It can happen in the grocery store. Someone can say something. It doesn't matter the nuance, what's going on and how I might explain it to them in fuller language. I can at least pull that one word out, rude, and walk away and they are called out for it. I'm proud whenever I can call someone out. MANDY: Yeah. CASEY: I don't always do it, though. The stakes can seem high and it takes practice. So this is homework, too. If you see someone and saying something hurtful to another person, it's your responsibility if you dare claim this to defend the other person and call the person rude, or however you would say the same thing. Say something. MANDY: Yeah, say something. MANNAH: I think that that can be really hard for allies. CASEY: Yeah. MANNAH: And if I had one piece of advice for allies, it would be that sometimes allyship is uncomfortable and that is something that you have to navigate. You can't pick and choose when you're going to… Well, that's not true. There's some discretion, but recognize that being a part-time ally, or a tourist in that space has an effect on people and not confronting your own insecurities, or your own feelings limits your effectiveness in allyship. CASEY: Yeah. It can be a deep question to ask yourself what made me hesitate that one time and what can I do to not hesitate helping next time? You can journal about it. You can talk to friends about it. You can think about it. Doing something more than thinking is definitely more helpful, though. Thinking alone is not the most powerful tool you have to change your own behavior. Yeah, it is uncomfortable. One thing that helps me speak up is instead of focusing on my discomfort, which is natural and I do it, for sure, I try to focus on the discomfort of the other person, or the person directly affected by this and I really want to help that person feel seen, protected, heard, defended. If you think about how they're feeling even more, that's very motivating for me and honestly, it helps in some ways that I am a queer man, that I have been discriminated against and people have been hateful toward me that I can relate when other people get similar experiences. If you haven't had experiences like that, it might be hard to rally up the empathy for it. But I'm sure you have something like that in your background, or if not, you know people who've been affected and that can be fuel for you, too. People you care about telling you stories like this and it is uncomfortable. [chuckles] Getting comfortable with that discomfort is critical here. MANNAH: One of the things that is very uncomfortable is, I think that as we go through life, we all grow is being reflective on the times when maybe we’re not inclusive, or maybe were insensitive. At least being able to those situations, I feel like is a great first step. CASEY: Mm hm. MANNAH: Saying, “Hey, I said this about this group of people,” or “I use this word.” Maybe you didn't fully know what it meant and recognized the impact at the time, but being able to go back and be reflective about your behavior, I feel like is a very important skill to help become a more well-rounded individual. CASEY: Yeah. Agreed. And it's a practice. You have to do it. The more you do it, the easier it gets to process these and learn from them. It's a habit also, so any of the books that talk about learning habits, you can apply to this kind of problem, too. Like a weekly calendar event, or talking to a friend once a month and this is a topic that comes up. I don’t know, there are a ton of ways you can try to make this habit, grow and stick for yourself, and it varies by person what's effective. But if you don't put it into your schedule, if you don't make room and space for it, it's really easy to skip doing it, too. MANDY: Yeah. It's amazing to look back. Even myself, I'm not the same person. I was 10, 15 years ago. I'm sure. Even as being a bisexual person that back in high school, I called something gay at one point just referring to, “Oh, that's gay.” CASEY: Yeah. MANDY: I’m sure I – [overtalk] CASEY: I’m sure I did it, too. MANDY: I'm sure I've said that. Knowing that I'm not that person anymore, recognizing that, and looking back at how much I've grown really helps me to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't always woke on this subject. We do a lot of growing over our lives. I'm in my 30s now and I've done so much growing and to look back on the person who I used to be versus the person I am now, I get very proud of how far I've come. Even though it can suck to look back at maybe a specific instance that you always remember and you're like, “Oh my God, that's so cringy. I can't believe I did that.” Having those moments to be like, “Well, you know what, that might have happened in 2003, but this is 2022 and look how far you've come.” CASEY: Love it! Yeah, growth. MANDY: Like that just makes me feel so good. CASEY: Yeah. We need the growth mindset. MANDY: And having discussions like this is what has gotten me to this place. Entering tech. I entered tech 12 years ago. I know this because my daughter's 12 and I always like, I'm like, “Okay so when my daughter was born, I got into tech. That's when I started actually becoming a decent person.” [laughs] So I measure a lot of my timeline by my daughter's age and it's just amazing to go back and see how much you've grown. Honestly, you should – another piece of homework, if you can just sit back and think about who you were before and who you are now and reflect on that a bit. MANNAH: We talked about normalizing pronouns, but I think it's also important to normalize sharing that story that you just told. I know I had a similar story where wherever I am on the wokeness scale, I was definitely much less so a couple years ago. I just did not have the same – I did not have enough experiences. I did not think about things in the same way. I did not challenge myself to be empathetic as much as I do now. It is a process and we're all somewhere on that journey. Who you are, like you said, 10 years ago is not necessarily who you are now. If it is, I don't know. I hope I'm not the same person in 10 years. I hope I'm always growing. So to make sure to share with others that it is a process and you don't wake up one day being woke. It is something that takes work and a skill that is developed. MANDY: Oh, you definitely have to do the work. Every year, I do a program. It's an actually a wonderful program. It's called Stratejoy. I can put the link in the show notes. But every year there's this woman who you sit down, you take stock of the last year and she asks a lot of deep questions. You journal them, you write them down, and then you think about what do I want to see? What can I improve? What do I want to do? How can I do so? And then we have quarterly calls throughout the year and really sit down, write it down, talk about it, and reflect on it because it is work. A lot of people make fun of people who read self-help books and I love fiction books just as much as the next person, I want to get away and read before bed at the end of the night, too. But it's really important for me to read books that make me feel uncomfortable, or make me learn, or make me think. I read a lot of books on race. So You Want to Talk About Race was one I read and it had a profound effect on me to read that book and take stock of myself and my own actions. It can be hard sometimes and it can cause anxiety. But I think in order to grow as a person, that's where you need to be vulnerable and you need to say, “No, I'm not perfect. I've done this thing wrong in the past and I don't know this, so I'm going to do what I can to educate myself.” CASEY: Another thing I hear a lot is some people say, “You should not celebrate any progress you make. You should always just feel bad and work harder forever.” Do you ever hear that kind of sentiment? Not in those words. MANDY: Yeah. CASEY: But if you ever say, “I learned a thing and I'm proud of it, here's what I learned,” there's someone on the internet who's going to tell you, “You are terrible and wrong and should do even better. Forget any progress you've made. You're not perfect yet,” and that is so frustrating to me. So here's something I'd like to see from more woke allies is less language policing, more celebrating of people who make progress. A lot of it's invisible, like we talked about on the spectrum. I do like when people get called out for making mistakes, like there's an opportunity for learning and growth, but you don't have to shame people in public, make them feel really bad about it, and embarrassed in front of the whole company. You could maybe do it privately and send a message to the companies talking about the policy in general like, “Don't use this word, don't do this thing.” You can do it very tactfully and you can be very effective. You don't have to just be PC police to the extreme. But if you are PC police to the extreme, I'm glad you’re doing something. That's good. But you can be more effective. Please think about how you can be really effective, that's my request for all my woke friends. It can go overboard. It can definitely go overboard, being a language police. MANDY: Yeah, and it can make people who are trying to quit. CASEY: Right. That's a huge risk. I want to give all this a caveat, though, because if – here's an example from a friend's company. There was a presentation and there ended up being a slide with Blackface on it, which if you don't know is a terrible, awful thing that makes Black people feel really bad and it makes the person showing it seem like they are malicious, or oblivious and it shouldn't happen. And then we were wondering like, “What should someone have done in that situation?” Call it out, for sure and move on publicly is a good call there to protect any Black people in the room feel like they're being protected and heard, but not necessarily shaming the person and giving them a 5-minute lecture during that. You can be effective at getting the person not to do it again in private later calling it out to defend the people in the room. Protecting is goal number one for me, but what can you do to change the company culture effectively is a piece that I see a lot of people skipping. If you are just 5 minutes yelling at a person that might make them shut down, you're not being your most effective. So it's a hard walk to balance protecting people, calling people out, and changing the culture. But it's possible and it's work. I guess, it's really two things you're balancing, protecting the person, making them feel part of the group included and cared for versus changing the culture of the group and of the individual. We want both outcomes, ideally. But if I had to pick one, I'm going to pick protecting the person first and then the larger change can happen afterwards. MANDY: Yeah. And if you do mess up, which I've done. I've accidentally misgendered somebody and I felt terrible. All night, I kept apologizing to this person and finally, this person took me aside and said, “You're making it worse by keeping apologizing. Let it go.” CASEY: Yeah. MANDY: So also, not rehashing and banging your head against the wall multiple, multiple times. Apologize and move on. MANNAH: Yeah. If your apology is sincere, then you shouldn't need to repeat it multiple times. Make sure that the person you're apologizing to hears it and make whatever amend need be made. But I do think if you over apologizing, it's more for you so you feel better than it is more for the person that you potentially offended. CASEY: Right and I don't expect you to know that without having thought about it like you are right now. Take this moment and think about it deeper. This is intriguing to you. It is natural to want to apologize forever, but it is also harmful and you can do better than that. I offer a lot of workshops in this vein. Like there's one called Bystander to Upstander. There's another LGBTQIA inclusion where I go through a whole bunch of charts and graphs. There's one called preventing and recovering from microaggressions where you can practice making a mistake and recovering from it in a group. The practice is the key here, like really making a mistake and recovering from it, getting that the muscles, the reactions, the things you say to people, it does take work to get that to be a practice. Even if you already agree you want to, it's hard to put it into practice a lot of the time. I give workshops, including these, for community groups a couple times a month and if you want to get updates on that, that's at happyandeffective.com/updates. Also, I do these for companies so if you think your company would benefit from having these kinds of discussions, feel free to reach out to Happy and Effective, too. That's my company. MANNAH: Well, with that, I think it'd be a great time to move to reflections. What do y'all think? I think this whole episode has been one big reflection to be quite honest, but does anybody want to share anything in particular that has stood out to them throughout the hour we've just spent together? MANNAH: I'm happy to kick it off. I think that we've made some really good suggestions around how people can create more through their own actions. Create more inclusive environments. I do want to say that these are not things that are kind of stone. There are a lot of ways. Everybody's an individual, every situation is different, and I don't want to be prescriptive in saying you have to do certain things. I do want to say that when I'm speaking, this is my experience and these are things that I think can help. So please don't take what I say to be gospel. They are suggestions and if you disagree with them, then I'm happy to have that conversation. But recognize that the people speaking on this panel don't necessarily have the answers, but they are people who are willing to start this conversation. CASEY: The thing I want people to take away is—and you can repeat after me, everyone—I will make mistakes. Good, good. I heard it. I will find more support. Awesome. You're great. Okay. You're on the right path for this now. Mandy, over to you. MANDY: This is not something that you do once and you're done. This kind of reflection and this kind of work is always going to be a work in progress until the day you're no longer here. It's not something you can read a book and be like, “Okay, I did that. I'm good now. I know things.” It's constantly changing and evolving and you need to do the work. You need to have empathy for others and realize that everybody is constantly changing and just because somebody isn’t one ting one day, they might be something the other day. I tell my daughter all the time because she’s very unsure about who is she and I’m like, “You don’t have to know right now. Just because you think you’re this, or you’re this right now, in 2 years, you might feel differently and you might be this.” So people are always evolving, always changing, and that doesn’t just go for how you present either your gender identity, or sexual identity but it also just goes for who you are. I always try to grow as a person and the work is never done. CASEY: No one has all the answers, no one knows everything, and anyone who says they do is lying because it’s going to change. It will change. MANDY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mannah and Casey for having this conversation today. I know it’s uncomfortable, I know it’s a hard thing to talk about, and I’m so grateful that you both showed up to have it. If we want to continue these conversations, I invite anybody who’s listening to reach out to us. If you’d like to come on the show to talk about it, reach out to us. We have a Slack channel that we can have private conversations in. You can find that at Patreon.com/greaterthancode and donate as little as a dollar to get in. We do that so we keep the trolls out and if you cannot afford a dollar, please DM any one of us and we will get you in there for free. So with that, thank you again for listening and we will see you all next week.Sponsored By:Test Double: 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! 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