Embedded - 378: Pair-enting Programming

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Nitya Narasimhan (@nitya) spoke with us about visualizing learning, visual storytelling, sketchnotes, and finding a job that satisfies. Nitya’s sketchnotes are all available on the @sketchthedocs Twitter stream that includes links to the hi-res drawing, a time-lapse of the drawing being created, and a blog post describing the information in more detail. The hi-res images are also on github, or if you have fast internet to download them all: cloud-skills.dev.  If you’d like to create your own visual notes, sketchthedocs.dev has resources for talks and books you might find helpful. More talks can be found from #VisualieIT 2020. In July (links are not live until July 1, 2021), Microsoft and Nitya will be celebrating IoT with JulyOT including an introduction for beginners. Nitya’s personal site is nitya.dev

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, alongside Christopher White. We all learn differently. We all have different goals in life. It's kind of odd that we're going to talk about cartooning on a show that has no visual. We're going to talk about all of these things with Nitya Narsiman. Hi, Nitya. Welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm having an amazing time being here. We are excited to talk to you. But first, I want to ask you for a short introduction, as though you were on a panel at a software conference. Absolutely. Hi, everyone. My name is Nityya Narasimhan. I'm currently a senior cloud

advocate on the developer relations team at Microsoft. But kind of going reverse, I'm a PhD in computer engineering with an emphasis on fault tolerance. I spent over a decade in the mobile and computing research space at Motorola. And over the past decade or so, I've worked mostly in mobile and web development and in community and technology advocacy, which is currently my role at Microsoft. Okay, then the next thing we want to do is lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And we may or may not ask you for more information. I believe I'm doing this on my own today. No, you just have to at least ask the first question. Okay. What's your favorite dinosaur? Do you mean a cartoon character or a real one? It has to be the T-Rex. Okay.

How do you learn best? Video, reading, audio, hands-on projects? Hands-on projects, and I have to write everything down. What describes you best? Scient scientist, engineer, or educator? Oh, that's a tough one. I would call myself scientist, engineer, but an aspiring educator. That's kind of where I'm going towards. Should I have added artist in there as well? I actually think it's good as it is.

I want people to start seeing artistry as engineering. I think Maker would have been a good one, though. Do you like to complete one project or start a dozen? Oh, my God. Is the question who would I like to? I start a dozen every single time. I'm the one who buys domain names. I'm so sorry.

If you could teach a college course, what would it be? I think I want to teach creative problem solving. How do you kind of do or think through analogy and things like that? Yes. Favorite fictional robot? R2-D2. You gave me so much time on this. I have to be like, yes, true to my roots.

Do you have a tip everyone should know? I think the biggest thing is not to listen to other people and trust your instincts when it comes to life. When it comes to learning, I think the only tip I have is practice. Whether it's like sketchnoting or whether it's engineering, it's always hard the first time. Just keep going. Just keep going, going, going, and one day you'll be the best. I want to talk about your career because it wasn't quite linear. It wasn't how we often think of CS careers. You have a PhD in computer engineering. What was your thesis about? My thesis, ah, that's a good one. So this will actually date me, but my thesis was in transparent fault tolerance for distributed Java systems.

And at that time, Java RMI was relatively new, like the whole Java space was very nascent. And so my thesis looked at how you could use interception to transparently hook under the RMI system and try to replicate and keep distributed Java systems consistent and reliable. What does RMI mean? Ah, Java RMI. RMI is Remote Method Invocation. So it was at that time their distributed communication protocol. Okay, so you went to college, you went to grad school, you got a PhD, you became an amazing member of technical staff at Motorola,

you did some patents, VP of Engineering at a startup. This all sounds pretty normal, a really nice trajectory, independent consulting. And then now you're an advocate for Microsoft. That seems backwards. How did you get from there to here? I don't mean to, I mean... Oh, no, no, no. It's a totally valid question. And it's, I think, I'll put it in, there are two reasons, to be quite honest. One of them came from the environment I was in at the time. And I'll tell you a little bit about that. And the other one stands about five foot four and is 12 years old. So the two of them were actually my motivating

factors. So first of all, when I finished my PhD, my advisors actually took the work we were doing into a startup. So I actually got to have a little bit of experience early on in the startup space. So I've always loved kind of being at the advanced side of, you know, trying out rapid prototyping, new technologies, etc. It's been one of the uniform things across my career. I went to Motorola and I spent over a decade in research. So again, there my focus started in distributed systems, but it switched to mobile and I fell in love with mobile. But then I think, and it's about approximately 12 years ago that I moved to New York. So my other half works for IBM. So I moved to New York and became a remote worker. And this is kind of where my story in advocacy starts, because when I became a remote worker, now people are beginning to understand why that's a challenge. But at that time, it was not necessarily the easiest thing. No one is

taking for granted to work a little extra, right? But I chose to be a remote worker because I had, you know, I was one of those late parents, like I had my one and only son very late in life, and I decided I want to give him time. So I decided to be the telecommuter and we moved to New York. So my partner would be the kind of work in the office person. Until then, we were the reverse. He was telecommuting and I was the office person. And so when I came here, what happened is I really missed having people around. It's very hard to kind of engage when you can't have these water cooler conversations and bounce things off of people. And it's then that I discovered community. So I started going to New York, going and doing talks.

And long story short, over the next maybe five to six years, I really got engaged with community and technology advocacy. I was an adjunct faculty at the local engineering college. I was doing a lot of work teaching people how to use the technologies we were building. And so when the point came where someone actually offered to pay me for that stuff, that's kind of what I loved. And I was really missing, like, I can't tell you how, in some sense, it was isolating to like be a remote worker, but also Motorola at the time had kind of like, you know, they're going into different companies. So I think the last year I was there, they were acquired by Google and then they split into different parts, et cetera. And that's kind of when I switched into consulting and I started doing more community work. And at some point I was like, I really

love the community advocacy work because it let me do two things that I really love. One, it let me stay on the cutting edge of technology. I was going every year to the conferences and learning what's coming up next, dabbling in stuff and teaching people how to use it. And then I would also have a consulting business where I could take this and say, hey, I can build you something with this latest and greatest technology. Here's a prototype, right? That kind of stuff. But then the other side is it gave me that kind of community that I was missing. And so develop relations became an extension of that.

I get to learn and play with gadgets, which I love. I get to go out and amplify things to community and help people make sense of technology. And like one mission statement I set for myself, which has been true throughout my life, is I really like to help people translate awareness of technology into some kind of actionable impact. It could be on their career or it could be on software. It really doesn't matter. And I think that I stayed true to it. And yes, the 12-year-old comes into the picture because Microsoft is like, my team is completely remote. We're all distributed. We all work out of various places. I wanted the flexibility at this time in my life. I don't regret it at all. It's hard to find something that makes you happy. I mean, it's not going to be given to you on a

platter. You have to figure it out and it's hard. How did you go from being an advocate informally to Microsoft saying, yes, we want you to do that and not any of the other jobs you could have done? I think actually developer advocacy is a growing space now. So to a large extent, there's been different ways that people think about developer advocates and what they represent because the industry has gone through so many changes. So there are certain companies, I think Google's part of that, Microsoft's part of that, where developer advocacy actually sits under the engineering org. And we kind of are the interface between the product group and the community, right? So we represent product groups to the community and we represent the community to the product groups. We're advocating for each side.

So when I joined, and this is like maybe two, two and a half years ago, almost three, they were just about to build up the, like, I think the developer relations team at Microsoft was fairly young. And when I joined, one of the things that I joined for is like, there were a stellar, I mean, like such amazing people that I knew who were educators in the community who were part of the advocacy team. And I was like, well, this is something special. Speaking from Microsoft's perspective perspective as to why they kind of saw the need for this, I think we're all beginning to realize that it's one thing to build technology

and throw it over the wall and say, if you build it, they will come. But developer advocacy is really about proactively helping that customer get the best out of the technology and helping you focus on the things that they need, right? So what I've been seeing, and I had to learn this too, because I'll be quite honest, I'm not from developer advocacy.

I don't think any advocate I know came into this as an advocate. Most of them came into it from engineering, right? But they all came into it because they have one really shared passion, which is they like to tell and teach people how to do stuff. So to me, I thought that the value proposition for me personally was, I like companies that have two things going for them. They need to have an interesting culture. And I had read this book from Satya and I was like, wait, Microsoft? Like, honestly, I digress a bit, but my PhD was on a Solaris UltraSpark, right?

I was one of those open source sun or die kind of people. I would never, if you'd asked me, will you land up in Microsoft? I've been like, what? But what stuck out to me was that there was this cultural chip that I'd never thought possible. I'm not seeing it in front of my eyes. The second thing is it was actually, to me, the perfect time. And I say this because I was in Motorola. I never thought I would have that kind of an opportunity again. I was in Motorola when the mobile revolution was just beginning. Like I was there when the Razr was being done. You know, we worked on, like I worked on one of the earliest, literally like like, a kind of, like, a PCB interface to a kind of a computer where we're trying to do Wi-Fi on a phone, right? That's the level we were at. And I'm seeing the same thing in the cloud space.

And I feel like Microsoft, I'm here to learn. I'm here to, like, work with a whole bunch of technologies. And the culture and the people were interesting. From Microsoft's perspective, I think they also began to realize that in order to get adoption at a scale, right, you've got to go out beyond enterprise. You've got to go out into the communities and get to get people to understand what you're doing differently. So I don't know if that answers your question, but those are the two things that kind of attracted me. One is there is a cultural shift that I saw. And then I think cloud as a whole is going to become a dominant force. And

I wanted to be part of like one of the platforms that was growing really fast. And you've taken a particular approach to how you do the advocacy. And part of that is learning new things so that you have the beginner mindset as other people are learning, but also transmitting the information in an interesting way. Could you tell us about that? Yes, absolutely. So you're like now going to hear me talk your ear off because I think we're referring to my whole kind of love affair

with visual storytelling. So it actually started, believe it or not, by accident. So you need to kind of go back a few years. So visual storytelling is the name I use for it. And it's kind of at the core, it's about doodling and sketchnoting and kind of creating illustrative content that helps you explain technology in various ways. But strangely enough, my origin story for that was self-care, which then morphed into something that became a huge asset, I think, for advocacy.

So when I talk about visual storytelling, you may have heard of visual note-taking or sketchnoting. A lot of people do it now. And it's about distilling down information that's kind of in text form or listening to someone at a conference and being able to write down notes, but being able to write down notes with visual elements to it, right? And it has been proven that humans, we just intrinsically absorb information from visuals.

We're just good at it. And more so, we are more likely to remember things and detect patterns and connect to things we already know when you're given visual information. In my case, my visual note-taking, I've always learned by writing notes since I was a kid, because for some reason, that's the only way I could remember things. I didn't think it was anything particular, but I just, that's what I did. But then early kind of like, or maybe in the first decade of this century, I used to go to a lot

of developer conferences and I didn't know a lot of people. So I would feel really overwhelmed because there weren't that many women in tech in all of the developer events. So I used to kind of like sit down and just focus on my notes, right? I would be like writing notes and I went there to learn. Like I was literally going to a conference to learn something new, get overwhelmed. So I was like, okay, I'm going to start sketchnoting stuff. And there was a whole bunch of folks who were sketchnoting that I learned from. So it was a self-care strategy to not let myself get overwhelmed.

But then something interesting happened. Every time I shared one of those sketchnotes, people would come up and be like, oh my God, that's exactly what I thought. This is so gorgeous, blah, blah, blah. So it solved two problems. Like I didn't know people and now I knew people. And second is while I was there, I would remember every single thing that happened. And apparently the way I distilled things helped other people learn.

So that's where that started. But in Microsoft, it kind of snowballed or it became a thing at Microsoft Build. So Microsoft Build in 2019, Microsoft Build is our signature conference. And as you all know, the pandemic struck, right? So these big conferences are usually held in physical venues. And a decision had to be made. Are we going to go physical? Or I mean, are we going to cancel? Or are we going to try to do virtual?

And they made a decision to go virtual with very limited time, right? So they decided we're going to have a whole bunch of sessions and said, do you want to do one sketchnoting? I said, sure. That was such a turning point for me because I think about a thousand people signed up for my session. Maybe about 200 or so showed up live. Many more watched it later. But what was interesting to me is

I was teaching people just to do simple sketchnotes and people who came there and said, I can draw would end up sharing their sketchnote of my talk. And it was ridiculous. It was like, oh my God, that's when I felt this is a mode of communication we need to encourage because it had two things that were super valuable. One, when somebody sketchnotes something, you understand what they understood from what you said, not what you told them. So from an advocacy perspective, it's a great way to understand how much of what I meant to say is what my audience perceived. So when they sketchnote something, that's great. From my

perspective, I would actually release a sketchnote of my own talk. And it turned out to be like the perfect takeaway message because people would be like, I came to your talk and now I have this little souvenir, but you know what? It's given me a snapshot and I remember what you said. And people still come back to me and be like, oh, I remember you were sketchnoting this at that event. So that's kind of where it started. But then in 2021, and I'm going to stop here because you might have questions. In 2021, I made it an intentional thing. I'm in the mobile advocacy team under what's called Fusion Devs. And the person, the manager in my team said, hey, show me how you can make this something of a cross-cutting value proposition across advocacy.

How are the ways in which we can use doodling to support some of our initiatives? And that's kind of where it started. So I'll tell you more about it, but I've talked a lot already. I think some of our longtime listeners are going, wait a minute, she's about to say narwhal and Bayesian and snow white and stocks and all of the things that I've gotten to do sketches on. But I don't do it the same way. I tend to come up with an idea, think about it, pencil it, and then eventually ink it. You do these live. Do you ever go back and redo them? Oh my God, absolutely. And I often tell people that both of them are valuable. So when I, I literally think of it as two kinds of sketchnotes, that is the live sketchnoting.

And then there are visual guides that I put out that are done in my own time, right? The live sketchnoting is really about connection. It's about distilling down what you've heard and putting it out there as quickly as you can. Now, if you do it on physical paper and pen, which is what I did for the longest time, you can't change it.

But what you do is you learn to fix things that you make mistakes on. So friends of mine used to teach me this. Like if you write down something wrong, just doodle over it, draw something over it that hides it, incorporate it into design. Nobody ever knows, right? But more importantly, what it catches is that visceral feeling of this is what my takeaway message was, right? And it's super important because of two things. It connects you to that subset of the audience that thinks the exact same way. Like two people can listen to the same talk and walk away with different messages. So when you share

your sketchnote, it may not be perfect, but the fact that there are keywords, the fact that the illustrations mean someone is going to be like, you're seeing what I see, and they connect with you. The second thing is speakers loved it. Because A, it gave them effectively a cheat sheet that they would just retweet to share their own information. And so that was simple. So I kind of learned to live with poor handwriting, meaning that I would just put stuff out there and be like, this is what I saw. Then later on, when I switched to a digital, like an iPad, I can always erase it. There can, there's literally, you know, time-lapse replays where you can see that I would have allocated so much space to doing a sketchnote. And then the speaker keeps going and I'm like, I have no space. And suddenly on the fly, halfway through,

you can see the canvas suddenly like doubles in size, right? You do what you can. But I think the gist of what I want to say here is it's never about the, it's not about art. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's about the ideas and what you're taking. What's the message that you are able to digest, synthesize, and then share so that people who may not have seen it would be like, oh, wait, that was a nuance I missed. This is important, right? And I think that's the most valuable thing about the live sketchnoting part. But yeah, I do a lot more stuff these days that is kind of offline, which has equal value.

And the most important thing everyone will tell you is practice, practice, practice. So I'm literally right now redoing a sketchnote story that I'd made for someone. And I'm looking at it and one year down the line, oh my God, my quality is like 100x better because I've been sketchnoting now on the same software for a year.

So yeah. Yeah, practice. It's important, especially with drawing. Yes. How much of it is drawing versus just taking notes? I mean, in engineering classes, you end up having to do little drawings so that you can show which way the forces are going as you're taking notes.

How is this different? It depends on your purpose. So when I started, I actually kind of now break it into two different facets to this. One I call learn to sketch, which is you're just learning to sketch to be you're the audience for your notes sketch, which is you're just learning to sketch to be, you're the audience for your notes, right? So you're just learning to sketch enough that you

can distill information into a single sheet. And in that context, text is great, but what pictures do for you is help you reduce something into a small image versus having to line three lines of text. It's almost like your visual vocabulary shorthand, right? So there's that part of it. But then the reverse, which I call sketch to learn, is where you're building up these kinds of visual guides, like the poster size sketch notes that summarize an entire tutorial or an entire documents page. And in that case, the value is really to create a consistent visual vocabulary. My analogy to this is like road signs, right? Once you start, the first time you see a new road sign,

you have no clue what it is, but then you see it again and again. And even if you never have seen it before, you'll kind of start juxtapositioning it with the other text around it and start making links in your head that if I see this color and this shape, there's always going to be a sign

about this kind of caution. And pretty much after a while, you don't look for the text, you just look for the color. So to me, the bigger picture here is the text is important initially to capture the messaging of what you want. You slowly want to build up a visual vocabulary because of two reasons. One, you're going to have to reduce a whole bunch of content, a 45-minute talk, a 10-page tutorial into one sheet of paper. You can't afford to write everything down. Second is reading text. The brain is not wired to read text really fast, but it's super wired to see patterns through imagery. So if you can start figuring out that certain concepts are going to repeat again and

again and again, then reduce them to some kind of icon that you can quickly draw. In fact, most sketchnoters will have cheat sheets for their domain of interest. So if I want to talk about cloud, like over a period of time, I can just rapidly draw clouds, houses, phones, desktops, you know, the most important visual vocabulary items for a cloud computing environment. I can just draw in like seconds faster than it would take me to write down. Here is what cloud computing means. Right. So I think that that is there. But to me, the most important thing is definitely the visual storytelling connections. And I'll say one more thing and then I'll kind of stop. It turned out that we make emotional connections to imagery.

And so two of the things that I try to build on beyond note-taking, this might help answer the question. Sketch noting is visual note-taking, so a lot of text. But then above that, my second and third steps are one, something called anthropomorphism, which is really bringing characters into your stories. And third is visual metaphors, like come up with stories that you build. So it's not about the text, it's about giving people a concept that they can live off of. I love metaphors and analogies because it lets somebody go from feeling like they don't understand to feeling like they kind of do if they just work a little harder. And that barrier of, I'm never going to get this to, I kind of see where you're going.

It's so hard to overcome. And I agree that the visual part is very important. But how do you sketch note something that you don't know already? I mean, those patterns, it's hard to know ahead of time what's going to be important. Do you have any advice for that? Yes. So there are two paths you can take. If you're starting out as a sketchnoter, and I know a lot of people who are graphic recorders, that's the entire industry where they're paid to go to conferences and just like literally build out sketchnotes live, who may not know the specific deep dive meanings behind keywords, but they know how to understand the importance of something and capture it really quickly. So if you're in that mode, what you really want to

build up are skills for summarization, right? Like, okay, if I'm hearing someone say five, six different sentences, how do I distill it down into one? And the key there is repetition. So the one thing, like if you don't understand the technology that you're working with or the topic that you're sketchnoting, look for the repetitions because good speakers know that they have a message to send and they will use that phrase 10 times. So really sharpen your ear out for repetitions. And when you see the repetitions, you want to say that is a takeaway message.

I'm going to quote it and put it down. For the rest of it, summarizations. And the biggest hint here is don't try to capture everything. In fact, my biggest advice to people when they start sketchnoting is make sure you pay attention to the start of the talk and make sure you pay attention to the start of the talk and make sure you pay attention to the end. If you miss out on the middle, that's okay,

because most good speakers will set out the problem up front and you want to make sure you get the problem right. They will set out the takeaway and summary at the end and you want to make sure you get that right. So leave space for that. Everything in the middle is a journey there, right? So you kind of want to figure out what are the big pit stops on this journey, but if I don't get all the details right, that's fine. But now let's go to the other side. What if you are a kind of like a, not necessarily a subject matter expert, but you're a domain practitioner. And that's the space where I find myself. Cloud computing. It's so huge that I'm going to meet new technologies every day. I don't know everything about everything in cloud computing, but I've been around in the industry long enough.

And this is where metaphors and analogies play a big role because all I need to do is go to a person who is an expert in the place and say, I'm reading this. And this sounds to me like this other concept I heard of when I was working with that other stack. Are they similar? And you know, sure enough, they will be because humans, I know I'm going to be kind of totally massacred for this. We're not really that innovative, right? Like we are tending to recycle ideas in new contexts. Most innovation is seeing a problem being solved in one arena and applying to another and kind of like being able to distill that down. So that's my kind of two tips.

One is if you're familiar with the space, look for the analogies, find ways to connect the things you already know, and then you'll find ways to explain things you don't. But if you're not, then focus on what the speaker is emphasizing. Take two to three key messages. They will repeat it. They will tell you what their motivations are. Listen to them. And when you listen,

you're able to pick out the things that are important and that's all you need to capture. How much of this, when I was studying, it took me a long time to learn to take good notes and it was a big realization for me that, oh, if I take good notes in the moment, I remember stuff even if I don't notes in the moment, I remember stuff, even if I don't refer to the notes, maybe that often afterward, how much of it is

getting stuff down in such a way that you're connecting with the speaker and you're, you're getting stuff in your mind at the time and how much of it is for later referral and making sure that you can kind of understand what you wrote. That is true. So that depends on what your audience is. So when I go to a conference, I was actually just writing the notes for me, right? So it was a lot of the shorthand was similar to what I wanted to read. And so it was really about capturing the things I didn't know. So if the person is explaining, I don't know, if they're explaining total ordering, I'm like, I know this stuff. I'll just write down T.O and move on

because I know what that means. I don't need to capture everything. But then if they bring in like a new cryptographic hash, right, like some algorithm that I had, then I'm going to pay attention and expand on that. So in a sense, when I'm taking notes for myself, they are not a summarization per se of the speaker. They are more kind of a synthesis

or like a magnifying lens on the things that I wanted to capture to learn. And so in those cases, I tend to kind of like write down more keywords than long sentences. It's like, oh, I need to go find out more about this, this, and this. Or if they said a phrase, right, write that down, go and like fix it later, but that's all it is. The reverse is when I'm actually going to go, and I keep using visual guides as an example, because I do this for like many of the documentation and tutorials we build. In that case, it's slightly different. I actually want to pick beginner level language and beginner level concepts. So even if the speaker is going into something really detailed,

it's better to summarize the detailed thing in one image and put a link to say, okay, we'll get to that later. But keep the initial visual guide really simple because when you're building it for an audience other than you, you have no idea what the audience's level of expertise is. So you have to go for the lowest common denominator. When you're building it for yourself, you're building off of your own knowledge. You know what you know. So you don't have to write everything down. I don't know if that makes sense. It totally does. And you do have to decide which you're doing. When I started selling my notes in college, I started doing a much better job of taking notes because I hadn't been writing down the stuff I knew. How much has that changed for you? Have you changed

your visual language or as you do for yourself versus what you do for others? Or is it just a matter of expanding the information? Oh, absolutely. If you look at it, and I actually have like a whole folder of all my sketchnotes. If you look at my earliest ones, they were literally going to be text, meaning that the visuals were also like, you know, fonts and kind of like bubble lettering and things like that, that brought attention to stuff and colors to kind of put layouts and containers around things that were related. But I didn't have many visual elements in the sense that I wasn't really good at drawing all the icons. So I would try to copy a few of them or fill them in later, but it was really

focused on the text. The biggest change I have seen in myself is nowadays I really question, like I tend to have, first of all, I tend to have more stick figures in my sketchnotes, a lot more stick figures. And to the extent possible, I try to see if I can distill it into conversations rather than content. So if someone is saying, here is how you would solve the problem, right? And they're kind of walking through multiple steps. My old way would have been to say, let me put a bulleted list. I'll make it look like a writing pad with three bullets in it. I'm going to write each of them in there, right? That would be the old way. I'll still do that now if I'm rushed for time, but I'm intentionally trying to move into now, you will find two

little characters, just little round heads with tiny beaky noses, bubbles coming out of the head. One is saying, hey, I have this problem. The other one is saying, how can I help? And what happens with this is, in a sense, it's another challenge for me. If you think it's difficult to reduce down sentences to put inside one area of a sheet of paper, it's even more difficult to reduce it into the size of a bubble for a speech bubble, right? So now you really have to ask yourself, what exactly is this particular kind of section answering for me and how do I distill it? So that has been one giant change that I've seen in myself. The second change, believe it or not, is to see how you can explain it. Like, you know, they always say explain like I'm five. I have a handy guinea pig here who's 12. I bring him into all my stuff when I talk online, but it turns out that we

underestimate how sharp kids are. So my thing comes across as if I'm explaining it to him, how would I explain it? And I say that because that becomes a thing where you cut away a lot of the subconscious context you tend to put into conversations when you think you're talking to another engineer. Right. So when you're writing these sketchnotes and you're thinking, oh, it's another engineer, you're going to use acronyms. Oh, my God, Microsoft and acronyms. Okay. You're going to use acronyms a lot.

Bad. Right. You're going to try to use things that, you know, you also want to impress people. So you might use the really kind of long, winded vocabulary and terminology just to make it sound like this is a, you know, an engineering. Mind you, I came from research. It was our bread and butter to write articles that were really, really like, you know, multi-syllable words. So it took me a long time to get into this mindset where I had to use simple language, the simpler, the better. And so, yeah, that was my thing is,

how do I distill it not as content, but as conversations? And then the second thing is, does what I build in here, is it something that anyone, including my 12-year-old, can read and get something out of? And I think that has to be the value proposition. It's not trying to impress you. It's like you walked away learning something. And it could be just one fact, right?

That's fine. But that'll make the change. Some classes, conference talks are, let's just say it, boring. Is this a way to stay engaged? Or do you not manage to stay engaged when you're sketchnoting if the talk is just not working for you? This is a great question. You have no idea. There's so many nuances, layers to this, but I'm going to answer it in two ways. If you think of it from the perspective of me being in the audience, it's actually really, really good for me. I say this because I mentioned to you

that I started sketchnoting as a self-care routine, right? Sketchnoting hugely increases your focus. Once you start sketchnoting, you'll find you subconsciously listen. Like, you know, in all these conferences, we are like, so there's so many distractions, so many things going on. You've been listening to talk after talk after talk. Your mind is just like decision fatigue is hitting in.

But when you sketchnote, there's something about the creative side of your brain being engaged that keeps you alert and you're writing things down. And the interesting thing is most of the sketchnotes I've done, I never go back and look at them. Like once I've done them and I've seen them,

they're in my head. And if someone comes and asks me, what did this person talk about? Like I can mentally kind of go through a Rolodex of images and be like, you know what? I think they talked about this. I distinctly remember drawing it, right? So I think that from my perspective, as I went there to learn and listen, huge value. From the perspective of the speaker, though, I sometimes worry that it might come across as rude. You know what I mean? That they're speaking to you.

And as a speaker, I've been on stage. There is something about making eye contact and seeing people nodding as you speak, right? Something in those kinds of human connection that really help you explain things better. And I know this because now that we're doing everything virtually, it's much harder. Yes, yes, yes. You don't know. You're like, are people falling asleep on the outside? We don't know. Please unmute your microphone so I know that my jokes land.

I know. I often, I mean, I swear to God, I really was saying all these hangouts and teams and all of these, they need to have the ability for us to upload memes of ourselves with different gestures. So that rather than me being online all the time, I just press this thing saying I'm laughing out loud. And there's a little two-second clip of me just laughing. But to the point there, my thing here is that I used to think that the speakers are going to feel like it's rude. Is it a rude rude thing but then I realized that not really because if you share your stuff afterwards they realize that my god this person paid attention to every single thing and I will tell you this for a fact I encourage a lot of people to sketchnote and share

especially if they're young coming into the industry I have yet to see a single time in my entire life where a sketchnote I've shared has had negative feedback ever because there's something incredible about the amount of love people give you even if I mean like seriously some of these are inkblots I'm not even kidding like I can't read what I've written 10 days after the fact right but it's not it's about the fact that people find it ridiculously useful. They are thrilled to bits that like, they come in, they have a lot more to say. To them, you're like, literally you're the journalist in the stands who's written an article about them, right?

And you got a lot of stuff that you captured in real time. And the difference is the article kind of got published seconds after you finished saying thank you. And that is incredible because it drives engagement around their talk. So to me, there is no wrong way, none at all. The one thing I would say is I think the thing that I may miss is actually engaging with the people around me,

which in retrospect, you know, I think there are ways to get around that. Yeah. I mean, as you said, being able to publish, tweet, Instagram, however the conference is talking, your sketchnote means that more people are going to talk to you, which as somebody who does have some problems going, just interrupting people and saying, hi, I'm Alicia. And then I run away to the bathroom or whatever. This gives you something, this gives you a profile that people start to notice. And that's not always important, but for somebody who is trying to get a little bit more visibility, maybe they're looking for a job or whatever, this seems like a really good way to get somebody to notice them. One thousand percent. So there are two things I want to point out. One is we are in the middle of what's called a content creator economy, right?

Like the YouTubes and the TikToks and the Twitches. Like people are creating content like never before, especially during the pandemic, right? You're coming up with, and that means because we have this creator economy, there are so many tools, there are so many videos and tutorials that will help you really become good at your game. So from the perspective of not just becoming visible in your own domain, but potentially even having a side hustle, like a lot of sketchnoters, I don't do this, although people have offered it to me, right? But I kind, do you take commissions? Because there is something, and you have to see that if you go to the at sketch, the docs and you check it out, there's something really engaging

about seeing like this giant, like colorful imagery and then realizing it's telling a story, right? So there is an entire set of people for whom this is a valuable industry just as a side hustle, right? But then there is for the people who come into tech, that's where I think it's about the attention economy. The attention economy meaning that we are all like on social media.

I'm, for example, one of those who, I have no idea how people manage all their identities on social media. It just seems like too much, right? But that's a lot of tweets going by. So you're at a conference and there are 5,000 people at the conference. They're all tweeting about this talk, same talk, right? How on earth are you going to get noticed? Well, publish a sketchnote. I will guarantee it will stand out. Why? Because algorithms boost things that have media over things that are pure text. People in general like imagery because,

like I've mentioned before, we gather information faster from a visual than we do from text. Rather than take 10 minutes to read your 10-bullet thread, if I see your one image with the 10 bullets written in it, I will absorb it faster. And then the third thing is if you actually go to see Sketch the Docs or if you've even seen some of my tweets, when I do digital sketchnotes, you can play these time-lapse replays, which is like 30 seconds of video that shows you how the thing was created. And what I found is that invariably people will stop. They will stop on that tweet till they watch the whole thing. It's like, we all want to know how the story ends. Like, you know, it's human nature. We're like, wait, something's happening. I just need to be here until it's done. And so as an engagement, like an awareness and engagement tool,

it's very powerful. But I'll be honest and say that over the past maybe two to three months, my focus has shifted slightly. And I've started seeing it primarily as how do we use this to help people learn? And that's a completely new kettle of fish. There's so many new challenges in that space. When you think about it as how can I use this to help people learn? That's a hard problem. It was a hard problem. I worked on some in college with my thesis. And then when I went to leapfrog and made children's toys, it suddenly became very clear to me that how people learn is not necessarily how people teach. And those magic people who get it, who really understand how people learn, that's so powerful. And it's something you can try to learn. I mean, I read about how people, you know, cognitive psychology books so that I can be better at presenting material.

But you have to think about it. It isn't going to come naturally. How did you learn how to sketchnote? I mean, is this something you've always done, a visual note-taking that just kind of grew and grew and grew? Or did you sit down with a book and say, oh, I should try that? Ah, so I will, I think in one sense, we have something similar. You mentioned that in college you used to do notes and kind of sell them, right? So back when I was in university, I was that person who sat through, I was the dull person who was in every class. I never skipped class ever. So I was hugely popular because everyone else could take off, knowing fully well

that Nithya will have the notes for the entire quarter's worth, right? And in fact, I didn't find out till later that people in India, it was called Xeroxing. It was like that, you know, the way we say, we use manufacturer names as verbs. Xeroxing means like you made a photocopy. People had literally made photocopies of my experimental records and were selling them in the bookstores. I did not know this. But my point is that I always took notes because I found out later I have to write to learn. I find it very difficult to just kind of see things on a screen and read, read, read text. I have to write it down and it seems to like help me remember it, right? So I always did that.

But my notes were never visual. They were literally notes, like the same way all of us take notes when we study. This kind of intentionally making it more visual, using metaphors, using colors, having the structure came about when I started getting into these developer communities. And huge shout out to, I'm going to shout out to two different communities. One's called Let's Sketch Tech. Definitely check them out. They have a conference. Whole number of women and, in fact, technologists. I wouldn't just say women. Any technologist who's creative and looks at sketchnoting, a lot of them contribute, talks. They're in that community. Great one. Second is

folks like Corey Ladislaw, Chuki Chan, and a couple of others who, when I started down the path, they were the ones trying to make structure around it. They were like, oh, there are things like layouts, and you have to think about fonts, and you have to think about... I had no vocabulary for these things. Biggest person I ever learned from was Denise Yu. She has a two-hour workshop. And I think that was to me the fundamental kind of point, like inflection point, if you will. But I realized, wait, what I was just doing as notes for the fun of it, if I can take some trouble and do it in a structured, repetitive way, it'll have value to others, right? So kind of like things like learn how to do navigation,

like make sure there are cues for people because the biggest difference between sketchnoting for yourself and sketchnoting for others is you have context that you know, others don't. So how do you like make that hidden context visible in a way that they can follow your train of thought, right? So these are all the people I listened to. And then there are of course,

like the Mike Rohde has a sketchnoting handbook. And then there is a wonderful TED Talk by Sunny Brown. And she wrote a book called Doodle Revolution that I really loved. So all of those were inspirations. But I think, to me, at least this year, and kind of like the way I've kept raising the bar on what I want to do has been about experimentation, like trying something new using that. So I kind of think of sketchnoting as a toolkit. Like I call it a visual storytelling toolkit because you learn all these things, but anyone can learn to draw stuff and learn to put fonts and kind of create boxes. But once you've got that, how are you using that, right? Are you using it just to create notes? Are you using it to teach people? And that's kind of what I started doing this year. And I'll give you an example. I think I've shown you this as well.

Game-based learning is a thing. Puzzle-based learning is a thing. So I use the same toolkit, not just sketchnotes, but I kind of do these visual puzzles to try to explain complex ideas. So like a single term, if I were to tell you this is what this term means, you won't remember it. But if I make it into a Pictionary style puzzle, where you have to guess

what it is, use a Rebus puzzle, whatever, right? You will remember it forever. And because you've understood it with a different context, you'll now be able to attach other things to it and build on that knowledge, right? So I think that that's where I'm heading towards. I don't know if that makes sense. It kind of does. I've seen some of your puzzles. And because you have to work for the knowledge a little bit, in a fun way, work in a fun way, yes, it sticks. Can you give us an example? Yes, you preempted me. So I will, this is my favorite example. And I think I might even have told you about this. I've done a lot of them, but there are a couple I'm going to give you. I work in the mobile advocacy team, which means I work with mobile devices. And Microsoft has a new

device called the Surface Duo. It's a dual screen device, right? So I wanted to write this, I wanted to make a kind of visual joke or riddle where you had to guess what this product was. If you've never heard of it, how do I teach you what's good about it without telling you what it is, right? So basically the puzzle shows a big phone walking next to a little baby phone. And the little baby phone is talking to the big phone and saying, mom, when I grow up, am I going to be a phone or a tablet? And the mom says, you can be anything you want to be. Why not be both? And literally, that's a Surface Duo. It's like a foldable phone or a foldable device. So if you fold it and it's one screen, it feels like the form factor of phone. If you open it, it's a tablet, right?

So I'm like, I'm telling you what the value of it without telling you, do you know what I mean? So that's kind of what I mean. And now you, for the rest of your life, you'm telling you what the value of it without telling you. Do you know what I mean? So that's kind of what I mean. And now you, for the rest of your life, you're going to remember the joke because it's like such an inspiration. Like mom says, you can be whatever you want to be, right? So that was one of my favorites. The other one that I think I told you about is I always have a hard time wrapping my mind around quantum computing.

And I'm like, what exactly is it? This whole notion that you can, like, you know, quantum particles can be in any number of states. And when you observe them, they kind of get frozen into one state that you're measuring, but otherwise they're in any number of infinite states, right? So that to me was really hard. Like, it just doesn't gel in my head. So I think the puzzle for me was this kind of like this character is lying on a psychiatrist's couch and he's telling the psychiatrist, oh, you know, I don't, I'm so confused. I don't know who I am anymore. Like it's, I seem to have so many different sides to

me. And the psychiatrist saying, no, no, no. Now that I've observed you, there's only one of you. Right. And I'm like, oh, being a qubit can be so confusing. Right. And to me that that was such a joke, but it like immediately every one of us, it resonates with us, right? We are all kind of constantly in the state of like, I'm a multifaceted person, but you only see me through this particular lens, right? I'm like, yes, we're all qubits. So I think there's humor. It also makes it something that, to me, which is very important, is tech, in some sense, has had a lot of gatekeeping.

And I think doing something like this makes it feel welcoming and friendly. Like, you know what? There's always a simpler explanation to everything. Don't think you have to be like, you know, a rocket scientist. There are little ideas that will appeal to you that you can understand if you kind of look at it through that lens. And that's the idea behind the visual storytelling. Okay. You have something coming up that is related to embedded systems in July.

Could you tell us about it? Oh, it would be my pleasure. So thank you so much. This is actually something called JulyOT. So I'm on the developer advocacy team at Microsoft. And we have an IoT, it's an Internet of Things focused advocacy team. And someone just said, wait, JulyOT, right? Like, we have to make this all about IoT in July. So it's all of July, They've run content and articles and a lot of things. So if you go to aka.ms slash July OT, so J-U-L-Y-O-T, you can find out everything about it. It'll

kickstart in July. But the reason I'm bringing it up here is there's actually two linkages to the visual storytelling site that I'm hoping may inspire folks listening to this, if you're in the embedded systems space, to go out and do something. So in the Jalai.io space, we have content on that site, which is really for professional developers. So you can go learn about IoT at the edge, IoT in the cloud systems, integration data, all that stuff, and even kind of get resources to get certified. But what I'm looking at from that space is really, can we kind of use IoT with AI machine learning models that can be deployed in edge devices to do stuff for visual storytelling and accessibility? So I'm literally training a machine learning model with my sketchnotes so it can recognize them and then have a little

Raspberry Pi with a camera module so that anywhere out in the real world, if you spot one of my sketchnotes, it can actually detect it and then give you an audio transcript of what that's saying to solve the accessibility problem. So that's a project I'm working on. And then the other thing is the IoT curriculum. So it's aka.ms slash IoT hyphen beginners. And the advocacy team is putting together a 24 lesson, all project driven going to love it. It's completely, it's a Raspberry, you have Raspberry Pi or an Arduino, or you can do it completely on a virtual device. It's a way for you to walk through

all the different uses of IoT. And yeah, I'd love, love, love to have people check out. I'm doing sketchnotes for the curriculum. So check them out. Tell me if those visual guides helped you.

Or if you're interested in this kind of, how can I train an IoT device with machine learning models to detect visual stories around it? I'd love to talk to you as well. I know we have a lot of people doing machine learning in the edge of the world, which is not always easy. Can you tell us anything about the projects? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In fact, the fact that you mentioned it's not always easy. So I'm going to be doing some humble bragging, or maybe I should just call it putting pressure on my 12-year-old,

because if I quote him, then he has to do it. Yeah, machine learning, I think we're increasingly seeing more what we call low-code, no-code tools that help you build machine learning models without having to be a data scientist. So at Microsoft Build, Limor Fried of Adafruit had actually shown this kit. And what it does is it combines something called Lobe.ai, which is a service from Microsoft, with a Raspberry Pi camera module, Python code, whole nine yards.

And what she was showing was the ability to train a model using Lobe.ai, which is a piece of software you can install locally on your device. All you do is you give it a whole bunch of examples of photos representing a particular label, and it figures out how to detect that in the wild. So I'll tell you an example in just a minute. But once you've got that model, Lobe.ai lets you export that model out either for TensorFlow Lite or for any one of those

kind of machine learning frameworks that you want. You can export it out. One of the examples, which is on the Adafruit site, has an end-to-end how to create a model, deploy it on a Raspberry Pi, use Python to actually code it to detect this. And I think the demo she does is recognizing pastries and printing a receipt. But my point is there's hardware available, software available, whole nine yards. What I'm doing is actually, I've been working with my 12-year-old and that's what I mean by saying it is that easy. I'm using it to train lobe.ai with my sketchnotes. So it's much harder than you think. That's a whole new ballgame. But I'll tell you the example of what my 12-year-old who,

you know, the saying goes that if you want someone to solve a problem, give it to the laziest person, they'll find the shortcut. Hey, I resemble it. I hit a nerve, it looks like. So let me put it this way. We had, you know, pandemic purchase-wise, we bought one of those Nespresso machines and there's like piles and piles of pots. And they all come in different colors. And so every time,

it's my 12-year-old's job to unpack the carton of pods and put them away. And so every time I need coffee, I'll be like, hey, what pod is this? Because I have no idea which carton it came out of, and I'm too lazy to go read it. So when I told him about lobe.in, he said, come up with an idea of something you want to do. He was like, I'm too lazy to go read it. So when I told him about lobe.air and said, come up with an idea of something you want to do, he was like, I'm going to train it to tell you what the pod is so you don't bother me anymore. And so there's a link to on my Twitter page to where he really tried to do this. And it did train it, meaning like he had three different pods. The only problem is that I'm fairly convinced that it trained it on the color because he only took three pods. There were three different colors, but it recognizes them.

So now I'm challenging him saying, get me two different flavors, which have the same color pod and make it work. That's a little harder. But my point is he was able to do the whole thing end to end, get the model trained, kind of repeat it until the accuracy went up and then show me a demo of it working within the space of an hour or two. Very easy. And what I'm actually getting to do, and I'm hoping this will inspire other parents to do this, I call it parenting programming, not pair programming. I hope I didn't encourage you to try. Hey, moms are funnier. Okay, no, I won't say that. But what I, what I'm, and you can tell me if it's a good idea or not. What I want him to do is he's into math. And so he found this Martin Gardner set of books, really amazing puzzles in math. Like his dad got him the entire series off of eBay. So there we go. Thank you for whoever decided you didn't want them anymore because we got a whole lot.

But one of them was tangrams. You know, as kids, we were all doing tangrams, right? So in this, he kind of showed him different objects you can make with tangrams. And then there are sites online that'll give you as many shapes as you want. So his next challenge in July, and I'm hoping to work with him,

is we want to make a game where the model, I mean, sorry, we use Lobe.ai to train it on all the different shapes that are available. And then in real time, if you give any kid the different pieces of a tanogram, it's able to time the minute they've got one of those shapes. So like every time we come, it'll be a game where they're, see how long you take to make these 10 shapes and the kids have to make it and the camera is just watching. And the minute the kid has the shape, right, it immediately buzzes and says, you're done, go to the next one, right? And it's a very trivial thing to think about, but it's actually more complex because you want to be able to take different orientations. You want to take different light conditions, different backgrounds. You don't know where it's being played.

I want to actually have him take this whole thing, put it on a tiny module, and then figure out how to jerry-rig Spectacle so we can have it on the specs itself. So I don't know. We'll play with it. But the idea is practical problems that kids will love. And I think, yeah, that's what we're going to work on. So that'll kind of combine or get two ideas in his head that it's easy to train offline,

and then deploying it on kind of an Internet of Things device lets you deploy it in the real world. So that's kind of where we're going towards. I wonder if anybody out there is saying, hey, can I be your kid for a couple of weeks? Oh, please. You have no idea, but yeah. So the sketchnotes you have, you've got some interesting ones about sustainability in software and one about computer vision.

How do I get the high quality images? So two ways to go about it. The Twitter handle called Sketch the Docs. every time I publish one, I usually put them there and they will have a link to the high-risk sketchnote, as well as like a time-lapse and a resource you can go to to learn more. I also have a site called cloud-skills.dev. However, warning, that is a GitHub open source repository with all the sketchnotes. I made it open source. Anyone can take them, use it for whatever, and just not for profit. So I've actually had people take my sketchnotes and write their own articles on them and publish it. And it's totally fine with me, just no profit.

You can go to that site. The only difference is it's literally a site hosting all the sketchnotes. Each of them could be like 13 meg. So if you are on a low bandwidth connection, don't go to cloudskills.dev, go to the GitHub repo for it. So you can cherry pick the ones you want to download. I'm actually going to probably redo the site. So I'll have thumbnails instead. But for now, you can find all the hires ones there. The easier way is to go to Twitter and check out the specific link you want. And do you mind if I make a poster for my office? Oh, no, absolutely not. In fact, I will offer to make you one for your podcast if you show me all your episodes. I wanted to do one. In fact, actually, if you go to the site, do you know Aisha Blake?

No, I'm trying to remember, she's working in, darn, I'm blanking on it, but she basically has a Twitch stream where she talks to a lot of people about different technologies. We also had a conference called Global Diversity CFP Day, and she ran an entire day of talks, totally voluntarily, right? She organized it. And that conference was to help people take the first steps into public speaking. So as part of that, she did a talk on live streaming, like how to get set up to do live streaming on Twitch. So I did her entire talk. I sketchnoted it.

And then as a surprise, I basically printed it into a lampshade and sent it to her. So now every time she turns it on, like literally she's casting a light on her own live streaming talk. And I just love that. Right. So, yeah, we'll talk. I got to send you something. We will talk. I will send you something that you can have for sure.

I'm looking forward to it. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with before we close up the show? I think I just want to say two things. One is, this is something I really feel has fueled a lot of the things I do. Representation matters. So I want to really give a shout out to all the women, underrepresented minorities in engineering. If you're a junior, beginner, all of you, right? Like, stay. That's going to be my thing. Use all these tools, skill yourself up. We are in a content economy where it doesn't matter what your resources are, you can make a reputation online. So my first ask is, make sure you have a brand online and make sure you build your own value. Don't tie it to someone else. And the second thing is a shout out to every teacher.

I just, that's going to be my last thing is like huge shout out to our teachers. I cannot say enough to how amazing they have been through this pandemic. And a lot of what I think about in sketchnoting, I think if we look at our teachers and how they creatively teach kids how to learn these things, we can learn from them as well. And that's pretty much it. Our guest has been Dr. Nitya Narasimhan, visual storyteller and senior cloud advocate at Microsoft. Thanks, Nitya.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Sophie for suggesting Nitya. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at Embedded FM or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. I don't have a quote to leave you with. I have a little drawing challenge.

Draw a cat. It doesn't matter how good it is. It doesn't matter how bad it is, but make him say something or her that is for your job. You know, whether it's E equals MC squared or whether it's the cat explaining how to do your code, just take a minute to draw. Maybe five.