Greater Than Code

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

  00:44 - Pandemic Life * Politics * Healthcare * Society * Work 13:58 - Jay, Happiness, and Fulfillment * Personal Development and Self-Discovery * Brené Brown (https://brenebrown.com/) * Glennon Doyle (https://momastery.com/) * Elizabeth Gilbert (https://www.elizabethgilbert.com/) * Nihilism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism) * Manifestation * Gratitude & Daily Journaling * Morning Pages (https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/) * EarlyWords (https://earlywords.io) 29:09 - Witchcraft & Magic * Intention and Ritual * Terry Pratchett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett) * Franz Anton Mesmer (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Anton-Mesmer) * The Placebo Effect (https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/what-is-the-placebo-effect) * Zenify Stress Relief Drink (https://zenifydrinks.com/) * 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 (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. 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.

  --------  

  46:20

  --------

  46:20
• 276: Caring Deeply About Humans – Diversify The Medical Community with Jenna Charlton

  01:09 - Jenna’s Superpower: Being Super Human: Deeply rooted in what is human in tech * The User is Everything 04:30 - Keeping Focus on the User * Building For Themself * Bother(!!) Users * Walking A Mile In Your Users Shoes - Jamey Hampton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-zYKo8f7nM) 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 (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. 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.

  --------  

  55:50

  --------

  55:50
• 275: Making Change Happen – Why Not You? with Nyota Gordon

  01:47 - Nyota’s Superpower: To hear and pull out people’s ideas to make them more clear, actionable, and profitable! * Acknowledging The Unspoken * Getting Checked 07:15 - Boundaries and Harmony 10:35 - News & Social Media * Addiction * Filtering * Bias 18:54 - The Impact of AI 23:00 - Anyone Can Be A Freelance Journalist; How Change Happens * Chelsea Cirruzzo’s Guide to Freelance Journalism (https://docs.google.com/document/d/18rwpMH_VpK8LUcO61czV2SzzXPVmcVhmUigf1_a7xbc/edit) * Casey’s GGWash Article About Ranked Choice Voting (https://ggwash.org/view/79582/what-exactly-is-ranked-choice-voting-anyway) * First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy | Derek Sivers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ) 40:13 - The Intersection of Cybersecurity and Employee Wellness: Resiliency * @selfcare_tech (https://twitter.com/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 (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. 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.

  --------  

  52:55

  --------

  52:55
• 274: Managing People Versus Servers with Arpit Mohan

  02:03 - Arpit’s Superpower: Tenacity * Tenacious D (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law) * Somathesis – Collective Problem Solving: Music, Science, Software - Jessica Kerr (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VHsrz0kfc) * 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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VHsrz0kfc) Mandy: Tenacity. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. 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.

  --------  

  42:25

  --------

  42:25
• 273: Motorcycling Adventures with Kerri Miller

  02:28 - Kerri’s Superpower: Having an Iron Butt * The Iron Butt Association (https://www.ironbutt.org/) 06:39 - On The Road Entertainment * FM Radio * Country Music * Community/Local Radio * Roadside Attractions * The World Largest Ball of Twine (http://www.kansastravel.org/balloftwine.htm) * Mystery Spot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Spot) * Mystery Spot Polka (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYHiGQiAPhI) 15:11 - Souvenir Collection & Photography * Fireweed Ice Cream (https://www.wildscoops.com/post/2018/08/28/botany-of-ice-cream-fireweed-chamerion-angustifolium) * Clubvan (https://www.google.com/search?q=clubvan&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwjCk7zdiJn2AhXIFFkFHfvjC-kQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=clubvan&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIHCCMQ7wMQJzIHCCMQ7wMQJzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgYIABAFEB4yBggAEAoQGDIECAAQGDIGCAAQChAYMgYIABAKEBgyBggAEAoQGFCMB1iMB2CUDGgAcAB4AIABS4gBjQGSAQEymAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWfAAQE&sclient=img&ei=rNsXYsKNB8ip5NoP-8evyA4&bih=748&biw=906) * Lighthouses * National Parks 25:42 - Working On The Road 27:37 - Rallies, Competitive Scavenger Hunts * Traveling Salesman Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem) 30:40 - Tracking, Tooling, Databases * Penny Machine Locations (http://209.221.138.252/AreaList.aspx) * Penny Costs 1.76 Cents to Make in 2020 (https://www.coinnews.net/2021/02/23/penny-costs-1-76-cents-to-make-in-2020-nickel-costs-7-42-cents-us-mint-realizes-549-9m-in-seigniorage/#:~:text=Penny%20Costs%201.76%20Cents%20to%20Make%20in%202020%2C%20Nickel%20Costs,Realizes%20%24549.9M%20in%20Seigniorage&text=The%20cost%20for%20manufacturing%20U.S.,in%20its%202020%20Annual%20Report) 35:36 - Community Interaction; Sampling Local Specialties * Cinnamon Rolls * Salem Sue, World’s Largest Holstein (https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2716) 38:40 - Recording Adventures * Kerri’s Blog: Motozor (http://motozor.com/) * Stationary & Sassy (https://anchor.fm/stationary-and-sassy) (Jamey’s Podcast) 41:46 - Focus / Music * Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com/) * Steely Dan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steely_Dan) * Neil Peart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 (https://www.greaterthancode.com/story-time) This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. 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.

  --------  

  59:09

  --------

  59:09

Więcej Biznes podcastów

Trendy w podcaście Biznes

O Greater Than Code

Greater Than Code: Podcasty w grupie