CoRecursive: Coding Stories - Story: Krystal's Story

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Chasing Your Curiosity and Continuous Learning Things are easier to learn when you are passionate about something. A lot of great careers are built on curiosity and obsession including Krystal Maughan our guest for today's episode. Krystal will share her journey as she chased her curiosity in programming wherever it led her. "Everybody has that moment when everything's shiny, you know when it's new and you walk on to campus like Google or whatever. Like the first time, I went to Google IO and I just thought it was like, this is insane." "If you like to learn things, I think that's a gift. I think that's not something that everybody has."  "I think that seeing programming in different ways and seeing that it could be this kind of fun thing that you could break apart and find different ways of executing."  Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Krystal's Blog Her GSOC Project Interview with Krystal Full Timeline of Krystal's Journey

What was it like when you first started coding? For me, it was super addictive. Crystal Mon caught the coding bug and she couldn't shake it. That interest pivoted her life towards being a developer until she finally pivoted again and left it all behind. One thing, like, how do I ask this? One thing I don't get, okay, so, you know, for a while you were you were scrambling i guess um and

then and then so you got a job at apple like they pay a lot of money yeah like they hand out stock with lunch as far as i know yeah like like what but then you left like like you know people talk about getting like a job at like fang companies yeah I'm pretty sure they're one of the A's. Yes. Everybody goes through this thing where everybody has that moment when everything's shiny. Hello and welcome to Co-Recursive. I'm Adam Gordon-Bell. Today is Crystal's story. It's a story of working jobs you don't like while taking night classes in Java and C++. A story of making friends at tech meetups. It's also really a story about career growth and about following your curiosity.

You know, if something interests you, just chasing after it, even if it means putting everything at risk. We start in 2004. Crystal has moved from Trinidad. She's enrolled in film school in New York, and she learns to read HTML source code. And she does it, strangely enough, to help her overcome homesickness. So in Trinidad, we have this huge festival every year called Carnival. It's kind of like Mardi Gras, but more awesome. I was kind of involved around the whole theater and lighting thing.

A lot of the gigs are around that time. And it's just this massive festival. So that's part of our culture, the whole Carnival thing. And so for Carnival season, imagine all these Caribbean people are stuck in this snowy depressing um place and they know that back in their home country they're they're people in bikinis you know you know having fun so it around carnival time you kind of get this um i think if you grew up in that culture you something about you just knows it's carnival time and your friends keep posting pictures and reminding you and it's really annoying so um i think one of the ways we dealt with that was by listening to it was that um i don't know if it's still around but it

was it used to be called music media had both reggae and like dancehall reggae and dancehall reggae and soca. And so this website would have every year when the artists brought out music, they would upload it. So you'd hear all the popular tunes for that year, for the carnival season. From around October, the musicians will release, oh, I just released a new track. And it's people, these songs have hundreds

of thousands of views because my brother is a programmer by the way i don't know if i mentioned that um but he taught me in college um how to view source and so you were on music media and you're listening to your the latest dancehall drop and then your your brother's like what did he say like hit view source and edit this and yeah he said so he was showing me he said if he's hit view source he said you see he's like oh see there's the music um source right there and he pointed out and said dot mp3 or whatever and so i kind of learned that how to look you you know, at the pages, find the music and download them. And I don't have them anymore.

But my old, because that laptop, I think, crashed. But I had so many, so much stolen music. And it was terrible quality, of course, because it's kind of compressed. But it was good enough for me in college to have access to that music. After college, Crystal and her laptop of bootleg music head to L.A. good enough for me in college to have access to that music. After college, Crystal and her laptop of bootleg music head to LA. She gets a job at a place doing lighting for film, but she ends up being relegated to a desk job. She gets a bit bored, starts taking night classes in a computer college.

Then at a meetup, she really finds her new passion. So after the getting into programming and deciding that I loved it, I found Haskell. Strangely, I was looking for meetups in the Los Angeles area, and I found the Santa Monica Haskell group and the Papers We Love group. I didn't study computer science. I want to learn about computer science papers and who the famous people in computer science are. So I started attending that. So a bunch of Haskell people showed up. And one of them, his name is Gary Fixler. He turned to me and he said, would you like to come to our Haskell meetup tomorrow?

And I said, what's Haskell? And he said, oh, it's the same time same place and i showed up and i left that meetup just kind of overwhelmed by how happy i was and how cool it was i mean i feel like you kind of you can't you didn't you jumped over it there like at some point you were like coding is awesome or this is fun like maybe you weren't like uh i'm gonna do this for a living but you're like oh my god this is i hate this oh wait i got it working i love this i was taking the classes and i was taking java but i think the moment that i i joined that haskell group and i kind of saw this new i was like this is programming, this is so weird.

Something about it, and I think the community was so playful. I think there's something about functional programming that it's like you're playing with code or the rules of what code should be. But I thought, as somebody who didn't come from that background, I thought it was really interesting. And then reading the whole subculture, like you read about Peter Norvig. When was graduating we just started to have programming but it was um like basic I know I know my brother did more java type stuff and that was not compelling to me at all

I think I took one or two java classes when I was doing the night school classes, but I just, it's just something about it. I just, I just didn't enjoy it. And I thought that if I had come through that path with that expectation of this is what computer science is, it would have never been, I would have never stuck with it. But I think that seeing programming in different ways and seeing that it could be this kind of fun thing that you could break apart and find different ways of executing. is a certain language. And then seeing different things like Lisp and just seeing, oh, this is crazy. Like this is programming. You can do this. It's very compelling.

So, okay. So you go to the Haskell meetup and then what happens? You go home, you install, like what's the steps? You install Haskell and you do one plus one and you yell? I just, so I guess after the first Haskell meetup, I just had all these questions.

Like I was, so I was going home on the bus. I was taking the Metro back home. And there was just all these cool things because everybody in that group. So one of the things, like if you go to a typical programming group, and I kind of have a huge problem with this. If you go to a programming meetup and you are interested in, say, like Scala or whatever, then I'm not picking on languages,

but I'm just making a point. A lot of the, the meetup can end up being this thing where all the people that are interested in Spark or like big data, you know, or you go to, you go to a Java meetup and they're all interested in Gradle or you go to, you know, so it's, it's very, um, tightly defined. And the Haskell group that I went to was the first one where there was one person interested in graphics in Haskell and there was another person interested in ontology in Haskell. And there was another person interested in, um, GUIs in Haskell or, um, making video games or, um, you know, all kinds of things. So everybody in that group was interested in functional programming as a means to do something that they loved,

more so than, oh, there's this language and you use it to do X and that's all that's possible. That's all we kind of think. This is the abstraction through which we think of the language being useful. The way I came to Haskell through that meetup was not like that at all. There was a guy making the editor to help you to do different languages.

So you could start coding from any language, essentially. And they had Alexis who was working on Hackit. So you had all these different people who were interested in doing different things with the languages i think maybe if languages were kind of um presented that way it's it's appealing because you don't necessarily want to learn a language um just to learn the specific subset of what it can do you just want to learn as a tool for building something and what did you want to build like what was your oh i used to do a lot of the code wars stuff like the i so i used to love code wars the website with the puzzles and i

think i used a lot of when i was learning I liked the idea that you could solve puzzles with code. So I think I was really drawn towards that. Yeah. And I would just do like several of them every day. At your work? Yeah. Yeah. I shouldn't be saying.

No, no. Yeah. So I was always in this kind of state of conflict where people were telling me, oh, you should just learn JavaScript. They said, you just get a job. But Haskell is just fascinating to me. And then I started looking,

I think not so much building things, but trying to understand why things in Haskell worked the way they did. I think that was an interesting problem. So if we're going through the Cold War stuff, trying to figure out why, if this is why, if this is how this works in Java and C++ and Python, why doesn't it work this way in Haskell? Like what is wrong with this language that it doesn't it work this way in Haskell? Like what, what is wrong with this

language that it doesn't work like all the other, um, languages. And so I went through this whole phase where I installed a bunch of different things, you know, like Julia, um, small talk prologue. And I just kind of played around them and tried to see like why they were different from each other. So you're at, you're at your lighting place. Um, and you have like a,

do you have like a browser tab open to like code wars? And then it's like, it's like find the, the longest, the biggest element in a list or something. And you're like working away and then somebody comes by and you switch the tab over. Oh yeah. It was, I mean, it was pretty terrible because, um, and some people may not like this because

it's kind of, it is kind of unethical, but anyways, but, um, there was a metal shop behind me as well. We were all in this building. And so I had to deal with customers right behind a metal shop. So, you know, I'd be speaking to someone and then you'd hear the grinders and it was pretty insane. So it's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of one of those places where people were working, but not really. And so it, I mean, sometimes it did cause conflict, but my supervisor was nice enough to say well if she's considering that we're not busy all the time um if she's getting her work done we don't really care and then my desk started filling

up with like lisp books and um and i actually met a camera guy who used to study programming so this is the other direction um and he saw a Lisp book on my desk and he said, Lisp. And I said, yeah, I know I'm taking a class and we're doing C++. And he told me, he said, I stood out for a living. So if you ever need any help with your C++ homework, I can help you. So, um, I don't know, like, that's awesome. Yeah. That's great. What were you like, what were your motivations? Like, were you like what were your motivations like were you thinking like i'm going to like were you thinking like i'm gonna i don't know get into this professionally or this is just fun or so i left the world of film for a really strange reason um because i did have a wave where i was doing working on movie sets and lighting plays and all of this stuff and i just kind of got

bored and i wanted more and i think that that led me down that path so mentally by the time i had um gotten to that stage of being curious about code um i had long left that whole idea of hey i want to work in movies whatever when um but i honestly never planned any of that. I was just doing it for the fun. I just thought it was really cool. And I thought, I don't know how it just ended up the way it did. I just kind of enjoyed hanging out with these people and I'd gotten kind of bored doing the work that I was doing. In other words, her job was not exciting, so she found something fun to

learn. This is, I think, the story of my career as well. It wasn't night school classes or Haskell meetups for me, just embracing side projects and ultimately that leading to my next career move. For Crystal, getting laid off forced her next career move. And that move was to land a software testing job and apply to the 2018 Google Summer of Code program. Google Summer of Code is where Google sponsors students to work on an open source project along with mentors. Crystal applied with Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Smith as her mentors. She's going to mention GHC as well. That is the compiler for Haskell.

So the job where I was doing all my homework and I got laid off from that job because they were not making any money. so i was applying for jobs but i also didn't have a job since i was still going to school i was considered a student and i knew that they had a computer lab so i would it that opened at 8 a.m so i would just go there for 8 a.m and then just work on high school as much as i could during the day and set up applications and i would just like go through books and like write simple stuff i still i mean super beginner i'm not experienced with haskell or anything and um so a lot of schools

have food pantries like for students who don't food. And I was thinking of signing up for one, but I was okay for food. But I would, so I would check out like free food on campus and just spend the day there. And then started doing interviews at my school. And while I was going through the interview process with a company, it took about two weeks with the company that I eventually got the manual testing job at just to pay my bills. I got an email from, I opened my email in the computer lab at school, which is completely not secure. And it said, congratulations, your proposal has been accepted. And the first thing I thought was, i have money for summer and i was super excited because i saw i saw gabe's name on there and i saw chris's name in there and and i thought this is too good to be true um so

like one thing i'm interested in is kind of like when you did the Google summer of code, like what was it like when you, um, cause it's, it's somewhat of like a transition to like being like a professional developer. Yeah.

How was it? Was it hard? Um, so we had sessions from, let me see, like six to nine sometimes. And so he would spend like hours or like an entire hour on like five lines. I think that's like a Google thing. I don't know.

It's just like, I mean, it's insane to go from like, you know, community college level C++ that you could like copy out of a book or find on the internet kind of thing copy and paste that's from stackoverflow to um that meant that level the quality of mentorship between gabe and chris it's just it was just outstanding like i think that's been one of the better experiences i've ever had like didn't you ever like didn't you ever get upset like and be like this is this is bullshit like we're an hour in on my five lines of code yeah sometimes i usually do the sighing thing when i get upset like yeah yeah but um and i feel like initially it's like twofold right like

they're kind of annoyed because they're like, why, why Crystal? And I'm kind of annoyed because I'm like, this is ridiculous. But, um, it was really like, they're really fun. Both of them are actually like really, um, really fun mentors in general. So I think that kind of, um, made the experience really great. And on the back of my head, I also knew that it was, it's an incredible opportunity because both of them have extensive experience and they also write really clean code. And so when you read their code,

you, what they, you can read and know exactly what it means and it's it's just well written very clean and um just proper formatting and that's because i guess both both company cultures that they um between their both places that they work have uh standards of really high um quality code yeah so um i kind of knew in the back of my head even though you know some of it was rough that i was getting a really good experience oh i do remember this one time when I told them that I'd gotten a job and Gabe was saying that, oh, you know, you could apply some of the things you learned, even though was really kind of a fun um you know experience for me and we tried to we all tried to make um the best of the situation but one of the things that i was struggling with is that i had limited funding so um i had a i really thought i could do google summer of code with a $20 laptop that i got off of ebay and um it became like literally $20 like

yeah it was more like $29 but i found it on ebay i used to troll eBay a lot. And I found this laptop once and I was like, oh, this is so cool. It's only $29. I have to have it. So I bought this laptop and I installed Ubuntu 14.04 on it with a USB. And I would use it. And I thought, oh, well, if I have to install, if I have to have Linux, I guess, I think my other machine was a Windows machine, like a Dell. When this machine, I thought, well,

I'm going to use this Linux machine for my Google Summer of Code because this is all I can afford right now. And this is all I have. And when he said, okay, love, the first thing we could do during our first meeting is try to make the build, get the build up and running. And so the first thing I did was it failed because it was 32-bit. My machine was $29. And apparently it wasn't in the list of builds to install GHDS and all that stuff if it was a 32-bit.

So they had to update. That was the first pull request. Oh, okay. And we opened up issues and then fix it. And then, okay, great. Now it is building. But then it took like a day and i remember at one point in time chris cursing this is ridiculous he's like i will buy you i will he said first you're trying to get me

one of his friends to get me a laptop and get a laptop to me physically and then he said no it's okay i'll just buy i'll just buy you a laptop and i got a lot i don't know what it is like if it's like a google thing or whatever but it appeared we spoke about it in the morning it appeared in the afternoon on my tour like i don't know magic pony google stuff i don't know um and so i started working on it but then um as i was working on that it that one also failed over time because i think we miss we underestimated how much how intensive ghcgs is so i think the screen eventually gave way on that one and then um nadia from the helium she has a thing called helium grants where she she it's like 700 people applied and um i wrote i remember i wrote an application because they

were talking about what are we going to do about this computer issue like this is taking days to build and they were talking about i didn't know yet that he was going to tell me he would buy me a laptop so i applied for this Helium Grant thing. It just kind of floated in my periphery. And I said, okay, I'm going to apply. And I wrote this application telling her that my solution for Google Summer of Code pair coding together with my mentor would be to stick a video camera from one computer to another with duct tape

is that true you were using one computer's webcam to show the other screen well i had a we had a lot of issues too with the um because we're trying to screen share and pair program uh and I think and run GHCJS. So the $29 computer was failing. First of all, Hangouts was not as great as we thought it would be. And she emailed me and she said, you've gotten one of the 11 grants that we were giving this year, which is like, I think she gave like $1,000

with no strings attached. And when the Helium grant came along, like, I think she gave like a thousand dollars with no strings attached. And when the helium grant came along, well, I had a discussion with Gabe because I said, should I tell her that I, I'd just gotten the computer they gave me. And I said, should I tell her that I have a computer

and that she could give the grant to somebody else who wants it, who deserves it? And he said, he said, you should just do the right thing and just be honest with her and it's up to her to decide what to do and so i told her and she said um i think you're deserving of the grant

you can do whatever you want with the money and like a weekly turn my laptop broke so well you got your 29 worth it's just strange how like back there's a certain kind of mentality that um people don't think of if you're learning to code and i've noticed like even in my school most people here have macs so and a lot of professors think that oh you know like everybody uses a mac and i can't help you if you don't have a mac or whatever. And, but I went through this whole process of not being able to have those things. And so I'm really sensitive to trying to find ways to make things work regardless of,

and Gabe has been, Gabe has really, they thought it was cool that I had this $29 laptop. They're like, oh, this is, they're like, oh, we love little machines like that. And so it's really nice that they didn't snob me for saying like, oh, why didn't you? Because everybody, like in Silicon Valley, when you join a company, the first thing they do is give you like a brand new Mac or whatever to use. And so that's kind of trippy, you know,

like coming from having like a flip phone and a $20 laptop. After Google Summer of Code, Crystal's still doing QA at a software company, but she's looking around to see what else is out there. So I remember when I, so I was working at the manual testing job so the there was a group of a group of us it was so much fun like that we had a lot of um younger interns a lot of us go to school and

working their part-time like 29 hours a week and it was i had these friends that I would go out to Denny's for lunch with at that group. And late at night, we'd order pizza, but the building would close at seven. So we had this whole strategy where one person would go collect the pizza and the other person would keep in the office and um wait for the person to call so that they could call the elevator because elevator would only go down after certain time and we had this whole thing and like one time we thought we're going to be stuck in the elevator with the pizza because um the person in the office was not answering hadn't called the elevator yet in the midst of this fun crystal gets contacted by a recruiter from apple about a software job and this is the guy who was my recruiter is probably the best recruiter i've ever had

i i just he's so nice and super thoughtful and um i spoke with him and he kept i was kind of weighted out by the fact that he kept going through the process with me because i thought okay they're going to tell me at some point in time i'm rejected they cc'd me and told me that they were interested originally for full time like they were interested in bringing me on full time but i was interested in an internship so i didn't hear from them for about a month. And then I got another email and they said, well, we think, would you be interested in interviewing for this internship? And I said, okay.

And the recruiter kept acting like he was engaged, but I thought, you know, he's completely going to hire like some, I don't know, like Ivy League, whatever person. Because I was in community college and working at a manual testing job like i'm the furthest away from um and so um i did like a like two initial and the two rounds of the interviews and then they said they want to speak with me so he kept asking me like what date i want to start and and that's a good sign crystal you know you never know because he's like oh he's like would

you like this opportunity like if it were to happen like i knew he was kind of buying time and so i was googling while i was working a testing job i was secretly also googling what does it mean when they tell you that um they have like next steps or whatever you know like what does that mean in code you know i know the whole trick about like what if um if they email you it's usually a rejection if they phone if they call you it's usually um to accept you kind of thing um so he said he wanted to speak with me. And he said, oh, the manager chose you. And I was like,

are you serious? I kept saying, are you serious? And then after he ended the call and he was telling me all this stuff and asking me what time. Well, they figured out and I found out later on that it was because he was trying to get the paperwork in order. So he called me and he told me and he said, you know, you can tell tell your parents and I called them and my and in turn that and my dad said the

same thing he's like are you serious and so um this is the first time that having a green card that I was able to actually send in a letter of resignation. And I told them, I remember from my exit interview, they said, why are you leaving? And I said, for another job. And then the person interviewing me said, what's the company name? And I told them, and she's like, oh, you should have put it on the exit survey.

I mean, everybody was just really happy for me. And so we were really close knit. So Crystal started at Apple and she loved it. If she was most people, this would be the end of her story. But Crystal left Apple for grad school to do a PhD in programming languages and data privacy. She left the Bay area for Vermont. This really surprised me. One thing like, how do do I ask this one thing I don't get okay so you know for a while you were you were scrambling I guess um and then and then so you got a job at Apple like they pay a lot of money yeah like they hand out stock with lunch as far as I know yeah like like what but then you left like yeah um you left to go to grad school like like you know people talk about getting like a job at

like fang companies yeah I'm pretty sure they're one of the a's like what yes um I, so I was going through this thing with my manager and trying to figure out like what I could, because everybody goes through this thing where, um, and there's a guy at the, um, the manual testing job that I did. Um, he was a senior employee there and he used to work for Microsoft. And he said, when I was leaving, he said, wow, you sound just like how I was when I was going off to Microsoft.

And I understand now what he means by that, which is that everybody has that moment when everything's like shiny, you know, when it's new and you walk onto campus at like google or whatever like the first time i went to google io and i just thought it was like this is insane or um uh like the google la campus like the first time i went to google la and you know you go there and you're like oh there's this climbing wall and you know all this stuff and there's like free food and we do this and you know all this stuff for you so i think i definitely had i ate a lot

when i was like i just was like i was i was so limited in terms of what i could do before and i'm just gonna like eat as much as possible and have a blast i have like a pet theory right so so like i think that you like you know you were into film but then you got interested in coding um and you know all the way to apple and then um but i think that maybe what you really like is like learning things yes that. That's very true. So it's like, you can, you know, you are, now you learned, you learned how to work as a, as a software developer to a certain extent. Right. And you're like, what's the next thing to learn?

That's true. That's a very good observation. I think that's, that's certainly and I think that's, that ties into my experience that I used to hang out monthly with the jpl um nasa scientists they had like a the drink the german jpl group where they just speak german and drink and eat german sausages um i don't know how you get like you're like oh yeah I used to just hang out with the people from NASA and we would eat sausages no I don't know what that means so there's this bar

in Altarina it's called Altarina Alehouse and a lot of NASA scientists hang out there and one of my mentors works at JPL so he would bring me there and we would all hang out and it was really fun. And you just have German sausages, even though I'm vegetarian and drink beer, German beer, and they speak in German.

But I think that seeing how like their intuition about things, because a lot of those people had advanced degrees um so i i really that really resonated with me you know what do you think it would be like if more people were like you um and maybe being more bold at like following like learning or following your interests would things be different i think everybody would just be like 80 or something like people people get frustrated with me because i um i get bored it reminds me of my brother where in uh he was in our primary school or his primary school was separated we had like boards so you have a board and a class next to you and you could see diagonally into the class ahead of you and um his teacher discovered when he was little that he

was learning material in the class diagonally which is a year ahead because he was bored so i think that um so that happens a lot for me where I could get sidetracked because I just don't think something's as interesting one thing I did get out of the artists especially those who switched from art to tech

or from creative the creatives to tech is that they're they're bolder they're more they're bolder they're more courageous courageous in terms of taking risks and i wish that more engineers could like i think that's what you know if like even from like trinidad like being able to just find somebody's email and have the guts to email them and say, hey, I'm this kid.

I want to know more about how you got to where you are going to. I think people can be a little bit bolder and not accept, a lot of software engineers kind of accept things as the way they are. I think that I'm like a serial learner, I guess. Maybe I'm always chasing shiny things. Do you have any advice for people out there who like yourself or maybe like myself, you know, just really like to learn new things?

I think intuition, if you like to learn things, I think that's a, I think that's a gift. I think that's not something that everybody has. My dad calls it a curse because it means that sometimes you might see things or be fascinated with things that other people think they think it's a useless thing to learn. I mean, not everybody is obsessed or necessarily wants to be a programmer because they want, they love learning things. And that's understandable. And I wish that, I think that the world would, I don't know.

I don't think that you should have too many of those people because they might be anarchy in the world. But I think it's a wonderful thing I think people like you and our Slack, that group and all the other people that I've met along the way have made everything people who love to learn

kind of find each other they've made it possible for people like me to be a part of the community I like people who are a little bit rebellious or people who are a little bit rebellious or people who are kind of oddballs because they do kind of make you think about things differently or just kind of,

basically they don't accept things as they are on surface level. So I think, I don't know, I think it's worth pursuing. I don't see anything wrong with people who like to learn. Have you ever been asked about a five-year plan? Myself, I don't view my career as executing on some sort of five-year plan. I don't even have one. I just get obsessed with something and kind of follow that interest. I think there's something about being passionate

that makes learning even hard things seem easy. I think a lot of great careers are built on curiosity and obsession, including Crystal's. All right, that was the show. I met Crystal through the Slack channel for the podcast. She has a thousand interesting stories. I couldn't fit them all in. If you jump on her Slack channel, she's always there.

She's the one with the Skeletor profile. We have a Friday thread about what did you accomplish this week? And the answers are super eclectic. Today, there was a discussion about the math of origami, as well as people just sharing fun side projects, which reminds me of one question I think I should end on. Can you read your message today from the Slack thing? Oh, oh, oh, sure. So the question is, what did you accomplish or build or learn this week? Um, yeah. Okay, what did you accomplish or build or learn this week?

And I said, I volunteered for iclr which i did do i did two rounds for two different conferences of reviewing work for acceptance and i'm finishing up the last round for one conference this weekend which is correct so i attended two recruiting events one part two is happening today, which I just finished. I did an exam. I worked on research. I found out I was one of 20 people chosen for a mentorship as a mentee program with someone in my research field of interest.

It's a three month thing. And I write an article at the end that gets published and join this amazing community. I applied for two grants and caught my first discord bought pokemon lol it sounds like a busy week all right crystal thank you again uh for your time let me hit stop here