The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - ANTHOLOGY – Hacker stories from OSCON and All Things Open (Interview)

Episode Date: February 10, 2017

Karen Sandler, Rachel Nabors, and Jono Bacon joined the show by way of some great conversations at OSCON in London, UK and All Things Open in Raleigh, NC. We talked about free software, web animation and motion in user interfaces, and how open source communities organize.

Bandwidth for changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com Welcome back, everyone. This is The Change Log, and I'm your host, Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 238, and today is an anthology show backed by popular demand. Jared and I spent the tail end of last year traveling the world. Jared went to OzCon in London. I went to All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina. And we came back with so many great stories from the community. And today, we're sharing three of those stories with you. First up is Karen Sandler, known for her work as the executive director of the Software freedom conservancy second is rachel neighbors rachel is known for her passion and expertise in web animation and last up is jonah

bacon known for his work guiding and leading open source communities we have three sponsors today our friends at go cd roll bar and also top towel first sponsor is GoCD. Head to gocd.io slash changelog to learn more about this open source continuous delivery server. GoCD lets you model complex workflows, promote trusted artifacts, see how your workflow really works, deploy any version anytime,

run and grok your tests, compare builds, take advantage of plugins and more. Once again, head to gocd.io slash changelog to learn more. And now on to the show. We are on the expo floor at Ascon EU, and it looks so serious here at the changelog table. It does. There's a lot going on.

This booth, there's tons of things going on, but there are really serious microphones and serious equipment. And this man has a serious look on his face. It's a serious business. He's doing some real journalism. Wow. Thank you, I guess.

I feel serious. I feel serious too. Your talk this morning made me feel very serious. You know, I kind of thought it was maybe a more light, more, more light. You could have been more gloomy if you wanted to. Oh yeah. I edited it to be more lighthearted. Well, you did take out all the pictures of like sadness and put in penguins. I did fuzzy baby penguins. They're adorable. Yeah. It makes you feel better about like all the terrible things. That was, I like that part. I actually got to make it up for it.

I missed yesterday's opening session. I missed them too because setting up the expo floor, we had to be here. But this morning I was lucky enough to see those, so I very much enjoyed it. Why don't you say where you're coming from and then give just the synopsis of what you talked about. Sure.

So for people who don't know, I'm the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. What I am known for is that I have a heart condition. I guess I'm not known for the heart condition. You will be soon. I will be soon. So I literally have a big heart. It's called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

Which is a great play on words. Totally. Wait, what's it called? Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. That's a big word. It's a big word for a big heart. Yeah. Yeah.

So we have a saying around the changelog is you saw a hacker to the heart, and you're one-upping us by actually having like you kind of hacked your heart. I want to be able to hack my heart. Yeah. But I can't. Because the software in my defibrillator is proprietary software. And I know these devices have been hacked, so they've been shown to be vulnerable. Really?

And yet we don't have any power to edit the source code and fix the problems that are there. Yeah. So one thing you said this morning is that you really, really, really love software. I'm really, really into free software. Yeah. Yeah.

Tell us about that. I mean, you've given us the hard part and you can't access the source code on your own, the Fribulator. I can't. And so because of because of the i became really passionate about free software because of that and so uh as a result i have uh really made an effort to use only free and open source software everywhere else where i

possibly can so i run replicant on my phone um which is in like a free software it's a freer version of like cyanogen mod it's like a free uh android okay um's a freer version of like CyanogenMod. It's like a free Android. Okay. And what's cool about it is that, or one of the cool things about it, if you are like me and think this is cool, I'm so dorky. Tell me and then I'll let you know if I do.

It disables the proprietary bits. So only one of the cameras has been reverse engineered. So I only have one camera on my phone. It's new. I was, I just switched from the G1 to the S3. So I'm like kind of entering modern telephony a little bit. Um, I don't, uh, it doesn't have any, uh, GPS capability. So I still have to ask for directions. So you're causing yourself like real pain in order to stick with the principle. I am. And it's worth it because this way I can understand where the pain is for starters. And I can explain to people where we're compromising fundamentally as a society because where we don't have access to our source code, where we can't review it, we are fundamentally unsafe.

And we are powerless to improve our situation. Before you got the defibrillator, I can't even say that word. How professional am I? The defibrillator? Defibrillator. Defibrill situation. Before you got the defibrillator, I can't even say that word. How professional am I? The defibrillator? Defibrillator. Before that... You can say ICD. Before you got the ICD, I can say that. Thank you. Or pacemaker defibrillator.

I'll stick with ICD. Acronyms scare people. They just make me sound smart. So before you got the ICD, you weren't this passionate about it before? I thought open source was cool. It was just cool? Just cool.

Just another, like, I think that's a night show is cool. Was that that level of like, well, that's cool. Yeah, you know, I would say that a really long time ago when I was in college, I'll say it in the 90s I installed a Linux lab in my my university's like you know computer center because you needed a computer center

at the time you did absolutely yes and I remember thinking this Linux thing is so cool it's too bad it won't go anywhere

oh oh I was a visionary yeah so you're not a prophet we got that established and then I I went to law school and Oh. I was a visionary. Yeah. So you're not a prophet. We've got that established. And then I went to law school.

You're a lawyer. I'm a lawyer. So anytime you give advice on the internet, you can't say I-A-N-A-L. No, we have our own acronyms. What is that? I-A-A-L. I am a lawyer. But T-I-N-L-A.

This is not legal advice. Yes. Good one. This is fun. I still don't know what ICD means, but okay. So you have your own. Implanted cardioverter.

You have spent a lot of money for that acronym and a lot of time at least. Yeah. Oh, becoming a lawyer. Yeah. I went to Columbia Law School. That is expensive. So do you still, you are a lawyer. I'm a lawyer. I

play one on TV. And you do give legal advice, but you only do it for bono. Not to you. Tell it to me. Not right now. If I can join the Software Freedom Conservancy, maybe you will. So at Software Freedom Conservancy, I am the executive director. So I'm primarily in a non-legal role. And we do have a general counsel named Tony Seabro, who is really, really great. So you have a lawyer. We have a lawyer, and we have pro bono lawyers as well who volunteer with us. But I personally, I find that it's,

I've actually never talked about this much, but I find that it's very confusing to be trying to act in a legal and non-legal capacity at the same time. When you think about legal issues, it's hard to assess risk. It's hard to make good decisions about what an organization should do if you also have to think about the legal. Can you set it aside, though?

You can, but it's much better to have somebody else tell you these are all the concerns because you're somewhat biased. If you're in the non-legal capacity and you're making the business decisions, and in our case, our nonprofit mission decisions, you might want to be able to do something so badly that you just don't, you're not looking quite so fairly at the law. And as much as we like to think of ourselves as just passionate, totally rational people, these biases sneak in in very, very subtle ways. And so I find that I'm a better executive director when I have another, when I have a lawyer who is...

Because you let them do the lawyer work and you can kind of turn that part of your brain off. Exactly. And there's plenty of non-legal work for me to do. But I still am a lawyer. I teach classes for lawyers as well. And I only do pro bono legal work. So I volunteer for the Free Software Foundation

and the GNOME Foundation. Okay. Very cool. Do you mind if I ask any personal questions at all? I'm not going to like it. No, no, go for it. Seems like you have a personal... I put it out there because when I started out

working on the legal issues around the medical devices issue, I tried to not talk about personally having a heart condition and make it not about my defibrillator. I felt very uncomfortable talking publicly about having a heart condition and make it not about my defibrillator. I felt very uncomfortable talking publicly about having a heart condition. And then what I found was that after I published the article, Killed by Code, which was like kind of an academic style article, I tried to put links on like the patient forums and stuff so that I wanted people to understand that this was an issue and that to ask their doctors about free and open, like ask their doctors about free and open source software.

That's a hard stuff. And I was really naive about it. Right. But I got attacked roundly on these forums because people said, you're trying to scare us. You don't know what it's like to live with a heart condition. I see. And my doctor is helping me and is telling me that I need this device.

And I don't even know what to do with this information about the software on it. Right, but you did know, but you hadn't told everybody that you knew. Right, exactly. So I didn't say I had a heart, but then I realized that I had to explain that I had a heart condition. And what I found is that explaining to people why free and open source software matters is so much easier when I start explaining that I have a heart condition and my life relies on this software. Right.

Because people understand then how critical software is for our society. And it's a very short walk from medical devices to cars, in which we entrust our lives, and from cars to voting machines. And basically to our financial markets and to everything we rely on. And when we live in an internet of things where everything talks to everything else, we don't even know what our life and society critical software is anymore. Right. That makes sense. I mean, I think I can see where you're regarded about that, but I think you do a much better, I mean, we just met yesterday, right? But I can empathize with your situation and I can see the real, uh, ramifications. Uh, and why,

cause it also makes you a little vulnerable because you feel bad for me that I have a heart condition. Uh, slightly, I guess slightly, but it puts it in real terms. It's like, it puts it in real personal terms. You might know somebody who has a medical device or has a medical condition. It puts a face on it, which makes it easier to understand. Yeah. So I think that's a good strategy at least in terms of like relating your cause you know because uh you you are on the principled side of like refusing to use anything that does not it's not completely free and open source right yeah i mean i will be totally honest with you it is impossible to live in the real

world today and be completely pure. Right. And anyone who tells you that they are completely pure either has somebody else doing a lot of their normal life tasks for them. For example, if I want to book an airline ticket, I need to use proprietary JavaScript a lot of the time. Right. Right? Like to use my bank account access. And I try to avoid these things.

I can say to you, I won't talk to you using Skype, and I can make a point of it, and it's easy. But at some point during the regular course of everyday living... Things that you have to. Yeah, and the choices that you have to make. Like, is it... Yes, it would take, like, over three hours for me to go to the bank, wait on the line, do the things that I need to do when it will take me 10 minutes online.

It doesn't make any sense. And you have to make some decisions. So, I agree 100%. The personal question I would have, I believe you're married, correct? Yes. So, what does your husband think about that principle? Because it affects your life, like you said, you don't have GPS. I'm sure there's plenty of other things.

My God, he's so irritated at me. That's what I wanted to know. He likes that I'm principled. So what I was saying about, like everybody has to use some proprietary software and they have to draw a line. Everyone has to compromise a little bit if they're living in the real world.

And all I ask is that people make that choice thoughtfully so that you think about what free software you use and what proprietary software you use and you find the right balance for you. And then mention that you would prefer, you know, strive towards more freedom because it's good for everyone. And so he's on board with that. And he's very supportive.

He's a musician. So his compromise area has to be different because a lot of the software that you have to use in order to function professionally as a musician is proprietary. There are not alternatives in certain cases. Exactly. But I would say he humors me a lot because he runs CyanogenMod on his phone, but not replicant. He's not as hardcore. No, but it does really irritate him because sometimes the, uh, the compromises I make where I'm willing to sacrifice my own, my own convenience, inconvenience is him too. And so sometimes I have to call him because I am lost while,

you know, like if I'm, I don't have a car cause I live in New York, but when I'm driving sometimes, like for conferences, when I'm on the road, I'll get lost and I won't be able to look at my phone to know where I'm going. And so I'll call him and he'll be really irritated. But I work with Bradley Kuhn, who used to be executive director of the Free Software Foundation. And he's our president and distinguished technologist and also our bookkeeper. That's a lot of titles. It really is. So I usually call him first because we call each other when we're lost. I see.

Because you're in the same boat. And he's not quite as annoyed as your husband might be. No, no, no. Sometimes I'll call my mom. What does she think of it? Oh, she thinks I'm totally crazy. She does. She's like, you're a lawyer and you're technical.

And you're a programmer. You have an engineering degree. And why are you not making a lot of money working for a for-profit company? Like, come on. What is wrong with you? But I think actually... You have a degree from Columbia. Yeah.

And I was a cross-border securities lawyer for a while, too, at a law firm. And so I now make about a third of what i made starting out from school yeah and so she thinks that i'm totally crazy like that but on the other hand i think she understands that i'm i'm working towards an important societal issue and while she now understands more about it than she ever did before i think uh you know i i i think that i i think she's coming around. I think it's hard for her, it's hard for anyone to understand about free and open source software. And, you know, and I think that it's like, now that I've been doing it for, I guess, about 10 years, she's starting to get it.

So, from a practical perspective, you know, just playing the naysayer to a certain degree, with regard to getting free and open source software to be everywhere, years and years of proprietary software, there's mountains and mountains of code, running devices and things, and maybe this is a fatalistic point of view, but has the train left the station? Can you put the toothpaste back into the bottle, or is it too late? Are you fighting a battle that you can't actually win? I think it's the wrong analogy. What's interesting is that I think that the meme that seems to be going around,

that people keep saying, and I think Corey even said it in his keynote today, is that open source is one. Open source is everywhere. Open source is in everything. And therefore, open source is one. And source is everywhere. Open source is in everything. And therefore, open source is one. And I don't think that's really true. I think that open source is at the core of a lot of things. It's at the lower levels. It's in everything.

But in some ways, we have less freedom than we did before because now everything is wrapped in a proprietary wrapper. And you don't have access to the actual products that you have with the uh prevalence of of non-copylefted licenses it means that uh that there's more that can be locked down and proprietary and that means that we as consumers we as individuals we as hackers and we from a societal perspective have a lot less ability to do anything about the software that we have when there are problems. And so, you know, to the extent, I think that there's some movement in really good directions. Like recently,

a medical device manufacturer disclosed the fact that there was a vulnerability of their own volition, right? And announced their plans to fix it. And I think that Joe... Where'd that come from? Actually, it was Johnson & Johnson, and they worked with Jay Radcliffe, who's a guy I worked with. I applied for a DMCA exception for medical devices.

Mm-hmm. And I think that security experts roundly agree that free and open-source software is safer over time and is going to be less vulnerable to attack. And so I think companies are starting security experts roundly agree that free and open source software is safer over time and is going to be less vulnerable to attack. So I think companies are starting to kind of wise up to the fact that security through obscurity doesn't work and that they might be liable if there are all these studies that show that this is the case and they've done nothing about it.

Tell me about your work with the Software Freedom Conservancy. What do you guys do? So we're a nonprofit umbrella for about 40 free software projects. Like, tons of projects. Name names. Skit, Sambo, Wine, Inkscape, Selenium, QEMU, PHP My Admin. Oh, we're also the home for Outreachy,

which is the internship program for women and other underrepresented groups in free software. And we also are perhaps best known for the work that we probably spend the least amount of our time and resources on, but gets the most press, the GPL compliance project for Linux kernel developers. Okay, tell me about that. That gets the most press, so let's give it some more press here. Okay. It's, you know, so for Linux kernel developers who ideologically work on the Linux kernel

under the copyleft license of the GPL have been frustrated to see how much the license is violated in industry. And so they come to us and ask us to enforce the licenses with companies. And so we do that. Most of our coalition is anonymous, but we do have some members. I forget. It's like six and ten developers who have been public about their identity. One of those developers is Christoph Helwig. And after four years of trying to get compliance from VMware, last year Christoph filed a lawsuit

against VMware that we're funding. Okay. Basically to get them to comply with the GPL. Is that just going through the process right now? Yep. So we went through the bottom court decision where the court basically threw the case out on a technicality. And so now it's on appeal. Fun. Yeah, it's the legal process.

It's really annoying and really interesting to experience another legal system. So Christoph's lawyer is Till Yeager, who is an excellent, excellent lawyer. And what's funny is that a number of lawyers that are not connected to the case have said that it's that the decision reads, you know, German lawyers have said that the decision reads like the court was just trying to get rid of the decision, like they were trying to get not have to decide. And one of the German lawyers that has said this actually published a memo about it in which he said that he believes that the decision violates, uh, Kristoff's constitutional rights. So we'll see what happens on appeal. Kristoff is, has announced that he's appealing and we've announced that we'll continue to fund it. Cool. Very interesting. Um, let's talk about the projects that you are under your umbrella. First, let's talk about what services you provide for them, and then we'll talk about

some more. Yeah, so the way that Conservancy works, there are a bunch of different physical sponsors in our space, and they all have kind of different niches. The way that we work is that their projects are a part of us. Once they join us, it's as if we are their foundation. Some physical sponsorships

like organizations like Software in the Public Interest, SPI, their projects have a loose affiliation with them. It's kind of like a grant-making style relationship where, for us, our projects are part of us, which means that there are some advantages to it. So we sign legal agreements on behalf of our projects. So when our projects have conferences, we're the ones organizing the conferences. When they get donations, the donations come through us.

We help developers travel to conferences by reimbursing their travel. We help with their trademarks. The kernel developers aren't the only ones who want their license enforced, and so we do that for our member projects who want it as well. We help with licensing generally,

any kind of legal questions that our projects may have, because they're us, our projects are us. So our lawyers are their lawyers. And we help all around. We help with fundraising. And we also hire developers to work on our projects. Lots of things. So many things. We are a tiny organization. You must be busy. Yeah. We just hired a new guy, Brett Smith, who used to work at the FSF and in between was a developer and manager at Curoverse, which is kind of an interesting company. But he's just started working for us.

So we are now four full-time people. But sometimes when I go and I talk to people who know it, they do what we do. They're like, where's the rest of your staff? Yeah, where's everybody else? Like, they're shocked to hear that we're less than 10 people. Let's talk about,

so you mentioned some of your projects, Wine, Samba, Git, Linux Kernel. Linux Kernel. Or Linux Kernel's not. You're just providing the legal. To some kernel developers. Okay, some kernel developers. Yeah.

Homebrew's one that I love. Homebrew. That's a newer one, right? PHP, my admin. Mm, some kernel developers. Yeah. Homebrew is one that I love. Homebrew. That's a newer one, right? PHP, my admin. Mm-hmm. Selenium. How do they become, you know, part of your umbrella? How does that happen?

Yeah. What's the criteria in the process? So you can email apply at sfconservancy.org to join, and we have an application. And then we have a really awesome evaluations committee which is made up of free and open source software luminaries Deb Nicholson who I just saw walk by is on our evaluations committee but we've got a whole

they're all famous people and they basically look and make sure that it's a good fit for Conservancy we look to see if the project is mature enough if it's not controlled by a single company, things like that. Okay. And we welcome new applications.

We have a bit of a queue for members for joining, but we slowly get through it. Is the idea to have a bundle and that's your set and then you're done? Or is it grow until you support all of the... What's the thoughts on where it's going to go? Well, we just like to grow thoughtfully. And so we want to provide our services to, or provide what we do to as many free software projects as it makes sense to do so and who fit with our,

you know, fit, are a good fit for us. So for example, the Bro Network Security Monitor recently joined. Bro? Bro. Bro, it's been their name for 20 years. Really? Yep.

So it predates Brogrammer. Yeah, I was going to say, they're not hopping on that thing, are they? They asked me to keynote their conference this year. Yeah. And so when I was tweeting about it, I used the hashtag Better Kind of Bro. Better Kind of Bro. Yeah. And they're called Bro because with any kind of network security software, the flip side is that it could easily be turned into surveillance software.

So bro is a reference to Big Brother. Ah, Big Bro. And so their logo is an I. Hmm. And the idea is that as they develop it, they need to always keep in mind the flip side of their work. Right. Yeah, that's definitely a thing to keep in mind for sure. Closing up, final thoughts.

If you had a single message to developers, whether it has to do with the foundation or the conservancy or not, what would you say? Either a call to action or like, this is your message to the world. Okay, I'll say two things. Okay. Oh, I said just one. You said just one, but I'm saying two. You can cut me off if you want.

You can edit it out, but now everyone will know there were two. That's true. Dang it. You just backed me into a corner. Okay, I'll give you two, but not three. Okay, so the main thing is that I believe that we as people in the free and open source software community, people who are users, anyone who would be listening to the changelog, are all people who understand the value

of free and open source software for a whole host of reasons. Either you're using it because of its utility, you see the advantages of open source, whatever it is, there is an ideological component to why you care about free and open source software, why you want to use it.

It's better in a number of ways. And I think that we have been hesitant to talk about it in ideological terms and afraid overall to talk about freedom because we're afraid of being like a crazy lunatic who is completely disproportionate about what we think is right in the world. We're afraid to be marginalized as an extremist. And the problem is that because of that, we've been, because of that,

I believe that the ideology around license choices and everything has been eroded. And I mean that including why people choose permissive licenses now. I think that people default to the Apache license because they think that that's what will sell. And I think that that has caused this problem of open source being in everywhere and in everything, but us having less freedom than ever before. And what we're starting to come up on is our, are those societal problems that, uh, that we won't be able to fix. We won't be able to fix our bugs. We won't be able to,

we won't have control of our technology and control of our software as a general, uh, you know, as a, as a, as a general societal thing, unless we include more free and open source software. And from an ethical perspective, I think that we are obligated as hackers to think about these issues and to try to include them when we think about the business cases for the software that we're creating. And I don't care really what license choice people choose at the end of the day.

I really don't, provided that it creates free and open source software. So think about, my call to action is really just think about the importance of freedom and think about the kind of world that you want to live in and create for the future, because the path we're on is amazing. We're going to have self-driving cars very, very soon. Everything will be networked and everything will be talking to each other. Everything will be an instrument of surveillance and everything will be critical. And I want to live in a world where we have control, not some third party, not some company, not some government, not something else, somebody else.

So that's the main thing. The second thing is please become a conservancy supporter. There you go. Go to sfconservancy.org and sign up as a supporter. And it's $120, $10 a month, which is just foregoing a lunch out once a month. And it makes a huge difference to us. We'll send you a T-shirt and everything. Awesome.

Karen, thanks so much for sitting down with me. This was a great conversation. Thanks for having me. A lot of fun. All right. That was Jared Santo at OzCon talking to Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. She has a big heart, literally. Her heart condition requires a pacemaker, but she can't access the source code that runs it. And that's just wrong. Next up, I talked to Rachel Neighbors at All Things Open. We talked about repeatable business models, the state of web animation and where we're heading, the cognitive science behind motion in user interfaces, some great places to start adding motion and animation to your

interfaces, and what we might expect to see with animation and motion in Microsoft Edge. Before this next segment, I want to mention our friends at Rollbar. I talked to Brian Ruse, CEO and co-founder of Rollbar. He shares what Rollbar is, the problem it solves, and why you should use it. Take a listen. How do you build software faster? Like, how do you build better software faster? And there are tons and tons of aspects to that. And Ruby is like, you have a better language, you can have better frameworks that help you be more expressive and more productive. So the flip side of that is after you've built something that works, or at least mostly works, how do you go about getting it from working to in production and actually working?

How do you cover the edge cases? How do you find things you missed? How do you iterate on it quickly? And that's kind of where what we're trying to do comes in. So we're trying to say, after you shift your software, you're not done. You know there's still work to do. And we want to help make that process of maintaining and polishing and keeping things running smoothly be really, really, really easy. So developers spend roughly half their time debugging, right? So anything we can do to make that process better is going to have a huge impact. All right.

That was Brian Rue, CEO and co-founder of Rollbar, sharing exactly why it fits, why it works for you and your team. Head to rollbar.com slash changelog. Get the bootstrap plan for free for 90 days. Tell them what changelog sent you. And now let's get back to the show. Tell me your name. Tell me what you do. Give me a snapshot of who you are. Oh, that's cruel. Cruel or cool? Cruel. You're like, just tell me who you are. And that's hard. It's too hard to explain? No, it's hard because everybody's got this job title, this thing that they wear, and it identifies them.

And I've always had trouble. I'm always the odd duckling. What do you do? I can't tell you all the hats I wear. Yeah, so why don't I tell you where I am now? Why don't I tell you where I am now? I'm Rachel Neighbors. I'm the founder of the Animation Network Slack channel at slack.animationnetwork.com. It's where everybody goes to talk about web animations on the internet and sometimes we talk about UI animations on native. Native people are welcome too. We love you. You've been using it longer than we have. And I also, I'm the curator of webanimationweekly.com,

the newsletter. Super awesome. I've done a lot of work with web animation, motion design, and user interfaces. I've written a lot about it. Just finished documenting the web animations API on Mozilla's developer network. So you can read all about it under the Web Animations API there. It's awesome.

Made super cool demos for it. I've been doing my own thing with Web Animation for the last three years in Portland, Oregon, which has been awesome. Absolutely awesome. But one of the problems I run into is sometimes you really love something and it doesn't love you back quite enough to make it a full-time job, right? Like, I love web animation. I love CSS animation. I love all the things that we can do, all the specs that we need to make, and all the work that browsers are doing. And I needed to make that a real job because that doesn't really translate into consulting work the way you'd hope it would. So anyway, I've got some big life changes in store.

I just accepted an offer for Microsoft's Edge developer team, which I'm going to be starting on November 7th. So now I get to do this official-like. And now when I get stranded in Manila, because they shut down the airport for the APEC summit, I won't be alone in out-of-pocket change and having to figure out where I'm going to spend the next week. It's nice. Sometimes it's nice to have that corporate wing to snuggle under while you're doing the good work. So I'm sure your road to get to that offer has been a long road, right? It wasn't a road I was purposely following. I just remember that three years ago, I was doing so much with animation. I was talking about it. I was traveling. I was finally getting my legs under me and feeling

like I was actually making a difference. It's amazing. Before I did web development, I did comics. I made comics for a living. For teenage girls. I did this as a teenager. And I had an interesting thing where I realized that comics weren't going to pay the bills, and I had to go get a real job, and I ended up using all the skills I was using to promote comics on the web to become a developer. Long story, but the point is, life comes and goes in these cycles, where the thing that you love leads to the thing that you do, but not quite in the way that you thought you would. And I would get these emails from girls saying, your comic changed my life. You got me through a hard time in my life. And now, only three years after I started, you know, traveling the world,

talking about animations and doing great things with them. I'm getting emails from people who say, you know, thank you for all your work. I saw your recorded talk from three years ago. It got me into animation. I can't get enough of it. Even people I look up to and I link to almost weekly in the newsletter have confided. It's like, yeah, you were my inspiration to get started. I'm like, really? You have more Twitter followers than I do now.

How did that happen? It's only, what the heck? It's a booming yeah, you were my inspiration to get started. I'm like, really? You have more Twitter followers than I do now. How did that happen? What the heck? It's a booming place to be, and I'm just so happy to see this space grow. And it's kind of nice that it's all working out. I'm really happy. It's good when things you work so hard to get to, especially when they passion eventually work out. Is there anything in particular, I think, over your trip that, I guess, to where you're at now that was like pivotal things you've done, like any life lessons that you had to deal with that's like some wisdom or advice you can share?

I got a lot, but you don't have alcohol and this is public. So I'll go with the ones that are safe to share. First of all, if you do at one point in your life decide I'm going to go all in and just try to do something I love for a living be warned that you need to find some kind of a repeatable business plan to make money off of it or you could end up in an abusive relationship with the thing that you love. I had this problem with comics. Not so much with web animation, because web animation is awesome, and you can pretty much scoot by on the occasional speaker fee and consulting gig. But with comics, I was working 60 hours a week, and I was not making enough to make ends meet.

When I had a medical emergency, it was like, oh, I've got to find a new line of work. This is not going to work. I was walking that knife's edge all along and didn't really know it. So I saw it again with web animation. I did a lot of wonderful projects. I did devtoolschallenger.com last year with Mozilla. I worked on the Salesforce Lightning Design Systems motion portion, which if you're thinking about adding motion design to your style guides or your product, you should definitely go check out Salesforce's Lightning Design System. Their implementation of animation is pretty top-notch.

And a lot of other really nice, just it's a really good example of style guide and a pattern guide. It's beautiful. So yeah, I did all these different things, but none of them were repeatable. And while that's great for a person who loves to learn, like myself, loving learning, loving doing new and unusual things, that's sort of not how you do it as an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur finds a system that makes money and then repeats it over and over

again. I kind of hate repeating stuff. I hate repeating myself. When I make a workshop and I record it and I put it up, when I put it up for sale, I do it because I don't want to give the workshop anymore. I just want to point people at the workshop and be like, okay, if you want to learn how to do that, you can go here. I don't, I don't want to talk about it anymore. There's nothing more for me to learn here. I have, I have learned it. I am done. Right. So it's just important to keep in mind, it can be really tempting to just run off and do whatever you please. But you may find yourself in a place where if you like learning more than you like businessing, that you don't really have a repeatable business plan. This might not be such a big issue if you're a person who likes doing

something that's very lucrative like database analysis. A lot of people are going to find work even if they're changing what they're interested in. But if you're in something very niche, like you like to build HTML5 games or you love CSS animations, you might find that that repeatable business is a little harder to nail down. So it's a good idea to look out for that before you start working for yourself. What was your repeatable business model? Did you find one? No, but to be honest, when I started working for myself, I believe what I said to myself was,

I really want to keep doing this. I don't like doing what I'm doing here in-house. I want to do this. And maybe if I keep doing it enough and enough people watch, someday someone will come to me and say, Rachel, you should do that with us. And then I'll do it with them. And that's pretty much what happened. It just took three years. And I've been having a lot of fun along the way. Now, the repeatable business I did find, which was only toward the tail end, was, hey, when something becomes popular enough, like animation, then you can sell the

expertise that you have accumulated in the form of online workshops, seminars, training sessions, etc., which is a whole other kind of hustle and requires all kinds of things like business development and building websites with markety words that you may not like building. And if you don't like doing something, it's nice if you've got some cash saved so you can pay someone else to do the thing that you don't like doing. Right. Like I personally, I cringe every time I have to use marketer speak. But if you don't offer people a value proposition, they've got no reason to give you money. There is no such thing as meritocracy when you're trying to make money. You have to come forward and slam people in the face with here is why you should give me money. And if you press this button, you can do that. Right. Talk about the state of web animation then. I mean, since you have such an accumulated knowledge, talk about where we're at,

what's going on with web animation, where are we leading to? We're leading to a very exciting place. One of the reasons why, I don't know, I don't think I could have gone in-house for anybody but the Edge team. It's really changing the way the web is built. We've always thought of the web, well, excluding that bout of flash fun that we had. Right. We've always thought about the web as kind of a static document thing. Even HTML is a document. It's in the tags. It's right there, document. Right. We think of it as kind of

like glorified microfiche, a way of storing words with the odd picture, maybe some audio or video here and there. But mostly we think of it as a way of storing words and arranging the words to make them look interesting. We don't really think about the web, or at least we didn't until recently, as a user interface or an app or something like a tool that we can use to do things. It's been kind of interesting watching frameworks like React and Angular kind of turning the ship on that. I've been enjoying watching motion creeping in around the edges. And part of that is due to, part of that is definitely due to native apps challenging the state of the web.

You'll hear it when you go to conferences like Chrome Dev Summit about how, you know, the web has to stay competitive with native so that it's not completely abandoned and everyone isn't just like turning on facebook as soon as they turn their phones on so that they're actually going to wikipedia that they're actually going to your personal blog site that they're still accessing this this non-walled garden and this this thicket of information out there where anybody can be an author and anybody can share things or design things or come up with some new invention. It all starts in the web before it goes native. And the web has to be able to compete. And let's face it, native does some things better than the web does. For instance, like going offline, having animated user interfaces.

Animated user interfaces, by the way, are really good for users. They're fun. Well, they can be fun, but they also can be very accessible for young and old people because of the way they tap into the human visual processing system. That's something I talk about an awful lot,

and I've just finished two workshops talking about that, so I probably don't want to go on about it too much. But let's just say that animation does serve a practical purpose. It does offload cognitive load from the main thread of your human processing unit, as it were, to the visual cortex. Basically lets you stay on task by not making you think about what just happened on the page when it changes. I mean, the computer is showing you what just happened. Being obvious, basically. Yeah. Because of the animation, because of the motion, it's obvious something's changed, so your mind has to think less.

Right. And there's a definite in art, and even more importantly, there's a science to how you do that. So a lot of people are going to do it poorly. I don't want to use the word wrong, because that sounds so mean. Right. But there's going to be a learning process while everybody's nailing this down. The great thing about how we are starting to use animation on the web now is unlike in native, unlike in gaming, we are actually documenting, and unlike in software system development, which never releases its findings anywhere.

The web, we have a tendency to share our findings. If somebody finds a paper that shows that there's a better way to animate something, we're going to write an entire article about it and share it with the whole community. That's what I love about seeing animation coming into its own on the web. It's going to be its own thing. And it will change the way all websites look like in the future forever. So for someone out there who's thinking, geez, I've known about web animations. I've wanted to do more of them on my site. I want that button to grow when somebody clicks it. What are some obvious hit lists that you go down with or you get asked about? What are some good hit lists of

animations you recommend or places to start? That's a good question. So first of all, there's my newsletter, webanimationweekly.com. But there's also a UIanimationweekly.com that's put out by Val Head. That's totally worth looking at. Currently, there's not one place that you go for all the animation goodness. But if you follow these two newsletters and dig through their archives, you're going to get some great leads.

I know that sounds like a really simple answer, but it is that simple. What I'm asking for, though, is specific examples. Let's say, like, if I've got a menu, rather than just simply clicking it and it appears, help me understand some interesting visual ways that are just like no-brainers that people should be doing more often that help entice and enhance the user interface. Do those things like you mentioned, cognitive load on the user's brain, thinking about the next step.

What are some easy ones they can do, like specific to animations, not so much resources? All right. So I'm definitely, when we talk about UI animations, user interface animations, I'm more practical over pretty. It's one of the things that I think developers tend to think about design and also animation is, you know, that it's just there to make things look pretty. But let's talk about utilitarian animation here. I'm not going to tell you how to make it delightful or pretty. I'm going to tell you how to make it look good when you have pneumonia and you're on your laptops or your touchscreen, iPad, and you're just bapping around and you have no idea what's going on. True story. So you got a menu that comes on and off the screen,

right? You interact with something and boom, there's a menu there, right? So let's talk about what happens there. Your brain, when it's just jump cutting on and off, jump cut is a term from film. It means when the camera just immediately cuts to a different position. There's no panning. The camera's not physically moving. It's just you're looking at one person's face and now you're looking at another person's face. And you've got to infer that you're looking in another direction now. So when the human eye sees something change on the screen, it does a little magic trick where it goes,

ah, the screen hasn't changed. It does a quick check of the screen, sees that nothing changed, but this one bit of information is still there. So it infers that whatever action you took prior to that new thing being there must have caused it and that there was some in-between state. Maybe if it's right below the thing you clicked,

then it must have dropped down from the thing that you clicked. Or if it's filling up the whole page, it's like a modal that has expanded, and if you get rid of it, the page will return. Now, think about how you could use animation to keep the brain from having to do all those checks and make all those suppositions and run that extra route. What you could do is you could have that drop down physically like, you know, drop down moving, or you could have it fade in. And there's this thing called vestibular disorders.

That's when a person... What's it called? A vestibular disorder. Okay. A certain number of the population is afflicted by these, wherein movement on a screen will cause them to feel a certain amount of nausea or discomfort, maybe a headache. Some people, it's utterly debilitating. So if you have a lot of motion, a lot of blinking things, a lot of moving things on your page, it can cause them to really not want to use your website. For these users, you probably want to limit yourself

to things like fades or color changes, stuff that doesn't move too much. It could never really go wrong with an opacity change, is what I like to think. Right. Because these are less triggering for people with vestibular disorders. If you have a large user base and you really want to use motion to connect two disparate things to each other, which there are use cases where using motion to connect two things makes a lot more sense than a fade,

then you're probably going to want to test on people or offer them the option to turn animations off on your page. I'm actually looking forward to a day when browsers have a reduced motion option the same way iOS does. That's interesting. I never thought about... Because we as developers, we as people who make the web, we think, as you said earlier, we think visually, we think you're going to advise people on a utilitarian way.

It was more like form versus function, I think was what you were saying. I'm going to tell you how to do it, not so much how to make it pretty, I think was some of the words you used. And I really thought about if I want to put animations or motion into the things I'm doing on my web interface, whether I should offer the option to not for those people who have that condition. It's something that we're going to have to think about more and more in the future. But you should remember that most apps on iOS also do not offer people options to do this.

So if you're concerned... Don't worry that much? Well, I'm saying you should worry, but it's one of those things where you have to decide how much you worry for your users. Right. That's something you're going to have to take on yourself. Accessibility is a big deal in the web right now, and I'm totally 100% behind it. But you can make things 100% perfect everywhere.

It runs great without JavaScript, perfectly accessible, dot, you know, dot the I's, cross the T's, works for people with every single kind of colorblindness that there is. You can spend a lot of time doing all of that, but some of your users may not have those problems, and that might be a wasted effort. It really comes down to having a conversation with your users. The more users you have, the more you've got to take in these things to be concerned with them.

And you have to remember that sometimes, if you're not taking accessibility into account, you're limiting your user base just by omission. Yeah. So you mentioned you took a new position. You accepted the offer with Microsoft to work on the Edge team. Oh, yeah. Dream with us a little bit. Pontificate where you might go, what might happen, what's going to happen with this new change for you specifically, but also web animation. What do you see happening from this?

I can't say much about where I see animation going at Edge yet, because I haven't gotten my boots on the ground yet. And also, even if I had, I'm not sure what I would be able to talk about yet. So you understand. But let's see. I will be moving to Seattle from Portland, going to miss Portland like crazy, but I'm also going to be surrounded by super smart people who are actually building rendering engines, which is very exciting for me because rendering engines are, well, they're, they're a lot of fun. Every browser has one and every browser has its own quirks. They're like individual workhorses with their own attitudes and their own problems.

And you got to go and know how to work with each of them. So I'm looking forward to getting my hands in there and seeing what it's like and learning from those people. I don't think a lot is going to change with what I personally do, except I won't be taking on consulting clients. I'll still be going to conferences. I'll still be reaching out to people, I'll still be writing docs, I'll still be working at the W3C, working on specs that let people use animations in good ways. We could use some complex timing functions so we can export from After Effects and have a perfect curve in our motion functions. But that's really hard to do right now because of the way CSS animation timing curves line up

or don't line up with the way After Effects maps motion. And there's got to be some ideal format there. That's a challenge that needs to be solved. There's work with motion paths right now, which have been renamed offset paths. I'd like to work a little bit more with those two. I don't want to rename them, but I'm sure they're going to be renamed again because offset path isn't quite clear what that does. That's what I meant. Yeah, it's not clear what it's doing. Exactly. But at the same time, it doesn't always use things that are moving.

So calling it a motion path when you can have static elements on it seems a bit misleading, doesn't it? Right. So the idea was to call it an offset because that way it could be set off from its original position. Yeah. Yeah. And it could be moving or not moving. Dan C. Wilson is a great person to follow when it comes to motion paths. I just saw him give a talk on this topic. I'm just going to call them motion paths because you know what they mean. I just saw him give a great talk on this topic at CSS DevConf. It was amazing. CSS DevConf in San Antonio. So many people from the Slack

channel showed up there. I think three, four, four of us, maybe five, gave talks. And they weren't all about web animation. Two of us did not. Sarah Jasner spoke about creativity and programming. And, oh, no, I think it was, I think, was it Eli? Yes, Eli Fitch talked about perceived performance. Unfortunately, the portion of his talk that had to do with animation was lost during a home break-in. Scary story. We won't get onto it on your podcast.

This is not a scary podcast, but I do wish that those slides had not been lost to the world. It would have been great stuff. Well, one thing I'm definitely happy about is having someone like you, as passionate as you are, leading the charge for this stuff because we need people like you to care so much about this, to want to work so closely with people who are developing rendering engines, to improve them and make them better, and ultimately educate us all on better ways to use web animations and how to document them and all those good things. Is there anything else you want to share with the audience that I haven't asked you? Well, I won't be giving as many workshops in the future as I have been,

so I guess it's timely that I am launching my own little CSS animations and transitions workshop, which I believe you can get to at racialneighbors.com slash css-animations-course. I think it is course. But that's the only thing I have to announce at this time. Really looking forward to getting back home. I'm taking a train there after all things open. I'm going to be getting on a little train. That's a long trip.

It is. It's like three days across the top of the United States. Wow. Any stops along the way? No, not really. Just a straight-on train ride? I think I'm going to stop off in Washington, D.C. to see a friend, and then I'm going to do my lifelong dream of a train ride across the United

States, and then it's back to work as usual at Microsoft. Well, thank you so much, Rachel, for stopping by and speaking at this awesome conference and giving so much back to this awesome community. Thank you so much, Rachel, for stopping by and speaking at this awesome conference and giving so much back to this awesome community. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Adam, and thank you for producing this podcast.

All right. That was Rachel Neighbors talking about all things web animation. Learn more about Rachel at RachelNeighbors.com. Next up is Jono Bacon. I talked to Jono at All Things Open about his talk, building a community exoskeleton and how open source communities organize. Before this next segment, I want to mention our friends at TopTile, longtime supporters of the changelog.

If you've ever had to quickly scale your team, you know how hard it is. You have to go through all this hassle of writing job descriptions, adding them to your website, or maybe you have to hire somebody just to go out there and find the candidates for you. That's a lot of work, a ton of work that you don't have to do

if you call my friends at TopTile. They do all the work for you to find the right candidates for your positions. Plus, because they have a very rigorous screening process to identify the best, you know you're only getting qualified candidates for your open positions head to top top.com to learn more that's t-o-p-t-a-l.com tell them adam from the changelog sent you if you'd like a more personal introduction email me adam at changelog.com and now back to the show uh i'm john o'bacon i'm originally english but I live in America now. I live in California, in the East Bay. In the East Bay. And like a lot of people in this industry, you know, a certain amount of travel, which is always fun.

So home changes from time to time. So home is wherever you are, basically. Home is, yeah, where sometimes a hotel, but most of the time, thankfully, in my actual house in America. So we know you, at least to my knowledge. I know of you about community. Yeah. I first heard of you when you were employed at GitHub around community there. You gave a talk today around the exoskeleton.

Was it today or was it yesterday? Yesterday. Earlier on. I'll just say you gave a talk here at All Things Open about, I believe it's called community exoskeleton was it today or was it yesterday yesterday yesterday earlier on um i'll just say you gave a talk here at all things open about uh i believe it's called community exoskeleton yeah what's the talk name was it that's right i got it up here yeah building a community exoskeleton so so you're essentially it's like scaffolding basically for for a community yeah i mean the to me you know community has been my passion since I first heard about Linux and open source back in 1998. And the thing that switched on in my head was, this is how we make the world a better place.

The way in which we innovate, the way in which we help people to live happier lives is, as human beings, we want to be connected to people and we want to do things that have meaning, generally. And without sounding like Tony Robbins, the pathway to a happier existence is living a life of dignity. And to live a life of dignity, you need to feel some self-worth. And to have self-worth, you need to have access to make a difference. In some capacity. For some people, it's Elon Musk. It's changing the whole world. For some people, it's making a difference in their family

or in their local community. So that's been my passion. And it's a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to figure out like how do we help groups of people to work well together and uh the community exoskeleton essentially is is a a metaphor for like you know if you're going to build an iron man costume for helping someone to be successful in a technology community what are the bits that you want to build into that? And how do we do that? So the talk is really more about, like,

how do you go about building a community in a predictable way and delivering good results? Take us back to when you got excited about community, when that became a passion for you. Where were you at? What were you doing? What happened in your life that made you think, like, community is my thing. I'm good at building community,

I'm good at getting people excited about community. What was that for you? I remember it like it was yesterday. You know, I was 18 years old, I was living at home with my parents. My brother Simon, who got me into computers when I was a kid, came back, he'd been in the US for a couple of months, he came back,

and I was whinging about Windows, and said you need don't use that mickey mouse operating system you should use linux so i you know and back then linux was a bit involved shall we say so i went and bought this book i was working in a bookshop um part-time and i bought a book and had a cd in the back and installed this version of Slackware. And, you know, he installed it for me, and then wrote the login details for, he removed Windows from my machine. Like, this was hardcore, like, training camp kind of get going. He wrote the login details on a Post-it note,

and then immediately left, and I was just stuck with Linux on my machine and this book. And the technology was a little overwhelming for me me because I wasn't particularly technical back then. But I read the first chapter of this book, and it said there's people all over the world, and they work together electronically on the Internet to build this operating system. And for me, the idea of electronic collaboration was in itself fascinating because there wasn't really much of an Internet back there in a general setting. What year was this 1998 okay so like i was you know i was i was uh 18 ish 19 going on 19 i was

right yeah it's 18 19 right that time for how are you i was i was like 18 yeah okay were you born in 79 yeah yeah same here same age what month september march really i got to be about just a little bit just a little bit okay good. Just a little bit. Two good-looking guys with similar benefits. There you go. So, yeah, so it was, and I read this chapter. Not much of an internet back then. Not much of an internet. Like, I was getting online with BBSs and stuff like that.

And for me, being in England, it was restricted because we had to pay per minute. Like, over here, you had free local phone calls. But back then, you had to pay 10 pence a minute. But I read this chapter, and, you know, I was a long-haired kid in central in in southern england at the time i didn't feel like i had much of an impact in the world but i was always there was something in me that just resonated with this notion of people working together and it it's a it's a such a cliche to say that a light bulb went off but it really really did. And from that moment forth, I was just captivated by it. And what I loved about it was as a kid, I didn't feel like I could have much of an impact in the world.

But back then, you know, I started organizing a website for Linux users in the UK. And I joined an open source project and exhibited at a conference. And I started meeting really cool people. And it was just, it was awesome, you know? It was what it should be for kids getting started in technology. I feel so fortunate that I was able to experience that, whereas some others obviously haven't. So break down this exoskeleton. In a nutshell, the way I look at it is all communities can be broken into two types. I call them read and write. So read community is where you get together to consume something. So that might be Lord of the Rings, Taylor Swift, you know, Megadeth, whatever

it might be. And that's people who just get together because they have a common interest. And those communities are relatively straightforward to build because people just need the resources to spend time with each other to communicate and to consume. And yeah, and a level of content. Yeah, okay. And the expectations with those communities are relatively simple. You then get write communities where people get together because they want to build something together. And open source is the example of that, or Wikipedia, or OpenStreetMap. And they're way more complicated because there's all kinds of expectations

around how decisions are made and how we collaborate and how trust is distributed and all this kind of stuff. So my basic philosophy is, first of all, pick which community you are. And then what you need to do is do some, and all this kind of stuff. So my basic philosophy is, first of all, pick which community you are. And then what you need to do is do some, essentially build a user persona around the kind of people you want to bring in. For most communities, for example, open source

communities, you may have personas around developers or translators or advocates or whatever else. And then for each. So roles or types of people. Yeah, each role. Then think about the persona. So how do these people consume? What motivates them? What are the fears that they have? And then that paints a on-ramp, which is what are the things you need to do to make your first contribution?

So for example, in open source, there's typically six things that you need to do. You need to discover that you can actually help. Like you need to have permission from the project to actually come and do something. Then you need to set up your tool chain, learn the skills to participate, find something to work on, get help,

and feel appreciated once you've done that first thing. It's amazing how many projects don't get that right, where people get stuck at stage two. I had a bit of a rant in my session earlier on. If you're asking people to go through these complicated lists of instructions to setting up your tools and building the project and stuff like that, you've already failed.

Because there's only so much attention in the world, and you're trying to capture someone's attention away from PlayStations and TV and whatever else. You have to get this stuff right. So setting up your tool chain should take minutes, not that long. And I like to think about that with every step of the on-ramp. And then what happens is when they've made that first contribution, I think there's three broad groupings in a community. You've got new people, regulars,

and then leaders. And you want people to transition between those states. So when you're new, you want to focus more on like mentoring and incentivizing people to start. But for people who are regularly participating, that's more of a circular workflow like you know the the you know understanding context discussing with other members of the community knowing what to work on and then you know write code write tests submit pull requests continuous integration deployment all that kind of stuff that circular workflow is repeated over and over again in communities for regulars and you want to make

sure that bits of it don't feel frustrating like when a little barb sticks out like if it's irritating to submit a pull request then people get frustrated and they move on so the workflow is critical there and the way we move people through those through those three different segments is by essentially engaging with them in different ways and then incentivizing them so like the way in which you engage new people is lots of personal support and help. But the way in which you engage your leaders is very different. You want those people to feel like

they can play an active role in making decisions and helping other people and things like that. And the exoskeleton essentially is how do we put those pieces in place? But what's really important is that underneath that, the basement of all of that kind of model, is the psychology of how people operate. Like we're animals and we forget that. Some people are more animals than us.

And there's just like, we're irrational in really predictable ways. So it's important that we understand the psychology of people because that's the skeleton on which we build all of this community stuff on top. So what is it that you do nowadays? I guess you do contracting. How are you currently impacting the community? Are you consulting at large? How are you playing out?

You have this great idea, which sounds awesome, and I think it's great. How do you help people implement it? Are you for hire? Yeah, so I'm basically a consultant. So I set up a consultancy practice about five, six months ago, something like that. And, uh, I'd been, I'd already been consulting for years on the site, uh, like here and there. And frankly, this is going to sound really egotistical. It's not meant to, as I wrote a book on community called the art of community. It was mainly people who read the book and said, could you help us build a community?

And that's how it came in. But I always had limited time, particularly having a family, like limited time. Yeah, of course. So I thought, you know what? Let's see if we can do this full time. And so what I tend to do is work with companies and help them to build out a community strategy and then to help them execute that strategy. The execution piece varies

because some companies want me to build it out for them and some companies want me to hire someone and then train them or some companies want somebody me to build it out for them and some companies want me to hire someone and then train them or some companies want somebody else to build it. Right. Because, you know, like, you don't necessarily want to pay consultant fees for where you could pay a community manager

for the execution piece. I'm really enjoying it because I love the diversity. I've always, throughout my career, I've always loved to just work with companies and help projects as well. So, you know, where I've worked at GitHub or Canonical or XPRIZE or elsewhere, you've always been focused on one organization and that's cool. But now I get to work with, you know, Huawei and Microsoft,

the Creative Commons, Data.World, HackerOne, GitLab, you know, you know, big influence. Yeah. And I enjoy it because it's a strategic, you know, the relationship when you're a consultant is different to the relationship when you're an employee because you're being brought in for the very specific focus that you have as a consultant. So as an employee, often you have to affect change in a bottom-up kind of way, whereas a consultant, you have permission in many ways to just be blunt about the way in which you're doing things. You don't hire a consultant just to be told what you want to hear.

You can call the shots a bit more. You have a bit more control because you can walk out. Yeah. For the most part. Right. And it's challenging, but it's fun. And one of the main reasons why I wanted to do it was I want to learn every detail of how this stuff works. Like I want to, my primary goal in life is to really understand every nuance of how we build communities and then to translate that information into reusable information that

other people can use. Not just selling that as like, not just doing that as a consultant, but you know, speaking at conferences or writing books or talking on podcasts or whatever it means. Because I think this is how we make the world a better place. So on the documentation side of things, how do you document some of your ideas? Do you have any upcoming books, any course plans? How can people tap into, aside from hearing you at a talk or at a conference or on a podcast like this, how can people tap into some of the,

or even without having to hire you, how can they asynchronously pull knowledge out of you or right leverage some of the things some of your experiences so yeah another one of the reasons why i wanted to consult was was to focus more of my time on on doing exactly that so like you know i wrote the art of community and it's it's published by o'reilly but it's you know it was important to me when we when we talked about that book to make it available under the Creative Commons so people who can't afford to go out and buy it can utilize it. So people can go and download that as well. I do a lot of speaking at conferences,

but also I'm writing a lot more on my blog as well. So like writing pieces about different elements of this. So for example, I wrote a piece on, you know, some interesting research has found that if you over-reward your community members, you get worse performance. Like, so we usually think, oh, you know, when they get to this level, we'll give them hoodies and then we'll send them laptops. You can actually get to a point where people stop performing. They're so focused on getting the rewards that they get freaked out

and they don't actually do very good work. So like I wrote a little piece on that. And so my blog is johnerbacon.org and I'm just writing more and more content there. I am working on another book right now, which I'm looking forward to getting cracking on. You got a working title? Not yet. Not yet. Is it about community? Yeah.

Yeah. It's a trick question. Who'd have thunk it, eh? And yeah, and for me, like a lot of it is just like building relationships and having questions and having conversations with people. Like the thing that kind of sucks about being a consultant is you don't, I don't want to give off the vibe that you can only talk to me if you're paying me. Right. Like it's a way of earning money for me, but what's way more important is getting the ideas out there. Once it gets past a certain point, that's when it's paid. Right.

Or something like that. Yeah, I mean, right now, I think a big chunk of my time is completely unpaid because there's so many projects that I'd like to play a helpful role in, and I don't want them to pay me. I want to have an impact. I want to be able to get off this rock and say, I made a tangible difference in this, pay me. I want to have an impact. I want to be able to get off this rock and say, like, I made a tangible difference in this. And, you know, I don't want the only people who can play

a role in that as people with, you know, fat wallets. So what do you think about a conference like this? All things open. Is this your first time here? Is this have you been here before? I came for the first time last year. OK. And I was absolutely blown away. Todd Lewis, who is the main organizer, him and I have become friends over the last year okay and I was absolutely blown away Todd Lewis who is the main organizer him and I've become friends over the last year and I said to him talk similar kind of point like I love what you're doing I love the personality of the conference it's like it's a tech conference but it's got a little bit of character a little bit more than some others I said to him like

just let me know if I can help with anything. And we've stayed in touch. So, like, for example, you know, this year... Those guys are banging something over there. Someone's... Yeah. That sounds like a good time. They're disabled. Deconstructing something over there.

Right. Keep it down. Keep it down. So, like, yeah, so this year, you know, I was emceeing the keynotes and doing some talks and stuff like that. So you were the emcee? Yeah. See, I was stuck here.

You've been working, man. I'm in this booth the whole time talking to people. This whole conference, this has been my conference experience right here. No, I've just been... The good thing is I've been talking to a lot of cool people from this conference, both speakers and attendees, and I'm blown away just like you are. It's awesome, isn't it? I didn't come last year, but I came this year.

Someone else said they compare it to the U.S.'s FOSDEM. It's got that kind of vibe, for example, around open source, and I think it's a cool community. I've met so many Changelog fans come by. They're like, hey, I love Changelog. High five. They just kind of keep walking by, and I'm talking to people or whatever. It's great. You've got a great spot here as well, yeah.

You know, it's been a good spot. I like it. We're actually closing down. It's like the end of the show. There is no one else here besides the disablers, the deconstructors, and we're closing it down. Yeah, it's interesting because there's a conference, OSCON, that O'Reilly put on,

which I'm a big fan of being on at OSCON. We'll be there in Austin. Oh, you're going there? We'll be there in Austin. Nice, I'll be there as well. We'll be doing something just like this. Sweet. Well, there's OSCON, and then there's another conference which happens in L.A. every year called Scale. That's like our Linux expert.

Have you been there? No. You should check that out. It's cool. And a buddy of mine, Alon Rabinovich, who's one of the greatest people in open source. He runs that with obviously a lot of other people. He gets very angry when I tell people that he does it because he's like, no, it's a team effort. It's more, it's me.

It's right, but it's like, take the credit, dude. But all things open to me is like, it's as if OSCON and scale made out. You know, it's got the business value of an OSCON, but it's got that, like, community-centric. I mean, there's business value at scale as well, but scale is known for its, like, community spirit. And I love that. And also, it's different. Like, it's out in Raleigh.

It's not another thing in San Francisco or Austin. Right. You've got to travel to get there. Yeah. I like it. I like this town. Yeah, I mean, I had to travel to get here too. Houston. I've met so many locals, though, too. A lot of people from Raleigh come to this conference.

Nice people. Yeah, great. I think there was about 2,500 people here, too, which was a good turnout for a conference, which means that the community is certainly growing and thriving, which is a good thing for this conference. And it's up every year. Like, I came for the first time. This is the fourth year of all things open, and thriving, which is a good thing for this conference. And it's up every year. Like, I came for the first time.

This is the fourth year of all things open. And, like, last year I think there was about 1,500 people. This year it's 2,400 people. Like, it's growing. Wow. And, yeah, Todd and the team do a really tremendous job. And I feel honored that I could play a role, a small role in it this year. Cool.

I'll be here whether I'm speaking or not speaking next year for sure. So what have I not asked you that to the audience listening? Advice, anecdote, closing thoughts. What do you want to shut down with? That's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I don't really have much of an agenda. I think what you do is cool.

And I, you know, thank you for inviting me on. I love what you do. I think you're a good guy. And I, you know, thank you for inviting me on. I love what you do. I think you're a good guy. And what you're saying, like, about the potential with what you're doing, I think there's loads of potential, right? I mean, podcasting is interesting. You know, I do a podcast with some friends, Bad Voltage, and ours is kind of like lashed together,

kind of some friends switching microphones on. It's not like a big professional operation by any stretch. But I know there's a lot of work in doing this kind of like lashed together, kind of some friends switching microphones on. It's not like a big professional operation by any stretch. But I know there's a lot of work in doing this kind of stuff well. But there's so much potential. I think particularly as people are wanting to consume media in more personal ways, in smaller ways, like more and more people that I know, for example, just getting into YouTube, not because of YouTube, just because it's different to getting television on cable.

And it's cool. You get really detailed, really focused content that's fun to listen to. You get to focus on the niche that you thrive in. And on the personal side, I love this because we're sitting here face-to-face in an empty conference hall basically now. Earlier, it's much, much more traffic. Everybody was still here. But we're closing down the shop. But this is a face-to-face conversation. Yeah.

You know, it just so happens that we take this and publish it so that everybody else can listen to it, too. Yeah. And, you know, we did it for all things open because the interesting thing here is, like, our new tagline is Hacker to the Heart. Right. We sat down basically in a bunker for two days, took away our phones, took away our computers, no internet connection. And Jared, myself, my wife, and Jake and the team from Elevate, which is our branding company that worked with us to get to where we're at right now, branding-wise, we sat down and we said, okay, so who are we? Brand Intensive for two days straight, basically.

Two eight-hour days, nothing but finding out who we are. And the reason why I tell this story is because we got to the point where we're like the essential the essence of who we are is about people much much like you'll find with absolutely with your message of community and how you you know what you do is it's all about people it's all about relationships it's all about people's stories it's not just about the software sure that's a huge component of it yeah but it's more so about the people in the community. I'll tell you what, I'll give you one example that's lived with me for years that I

think perfectly, in my mind at least, encapsulates the impact of building community effectively or that it can have on someone's life. When I used to work at Canonical, the people who make Ubuntu, and I was there yeah I was there for like just under eight years and it was an absolute blast and shortly after I joined um I get an email from this kid based out in Africa somewhere I forget exactly which country in Africa in in the continent it was and he basically said he was like I think he was like 12 or 13 years old and he spent he lived in a village, a rural village. And he spent his entire week, you know, doing chores around the village and basically earning money.

He didn't have a computer. And what he'd do is he'd then use the money, basically earn his money. And then at the weekend on a Saturday, he'd walk three hours to his local town, take that money, buy an hour's worth of internet access, and contribute to Ubuntu. What? And I just thought to myself, when I got that email, I was like, my job in Canonical in Ubuntu is to help that kid get the best hour of his life, but my job more

widely in our industry is to help everybody empower kids like that to get the best out of their hours and it was just like it was just such a visible demonstration of of of when you when you can connect somebody's passion with a way in which they can make a contribution effectively and they can feel part of something i mean just look at wikipedia look at open source look at linux it's it's amazing and we haven't even scratched the surface of figuring this stuff out yet. That's what blows my mind. It's a good time to be alive. We're going to do some stuff.

Absolutely. Absolutely. The one thing I'll close with on that piece there was getting to the heart of it. That's where our tail end came from, is getting to the heart. And that's what this conference is about. That's what this series is about, is about helping tell the stories from this community. So getting to hear this piece from you, hear your passions for community, and help you share with everyone else how to build that exoskeleton for their community. Yeah.

And I'm so glad that you're here to share that message. Likewise. And the book coming up and the blog series that you're writing and all the consulting you're doing. I appreciate your work in the community, man. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on. Thank you, Jono. Hey, thanks, bro. Appreciate it. All right, that wraps up our anthology show from OzCon and All Things Open. I hope you

enjoyed the conversations Jared and I were able to have at these great conferences. I know Jared and I definitely did. Talking with people face-to-face is so awesome, and being in the trenches with fellow community members is where we like to be. If you're listening to this and you run a conference, get in touch. We'd love to help you share the stories from your conference. Email us, editors at changelog.com. And thanks again to our friends at OzCon and All Things Open for working with us, and our friends at ThoughtWorks who run GoCD, Rollbar, and also Top Top for sponsoring this show. Our theme music was created by Breakmaster Cylinder. And last but not least, thanks to Fastly, our bandwidth partner. If you're impressed by how fast you can download our shows, it's

because of Fastly. Head to Fastly.com, tell them Changelog sent you, and thanks for listening. Thank you.