The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Biases in AI, helping veterans get jobs in software, open science (Interview)

Episode Date: August 1, 2018

Adam and Jerod are on location at OSCON and talk with Camille Eddy about recognizing biases in AI, Jerome Hardaway about the work he’s doing to prepare veterans for jobs in software, and Abby Cobunoc Mayes about the work she’s doing at Mozilla for open science.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at fastly.com. We move fast and fix things here at Changelog because of Rollbar. Check them out at rollbar.com. And we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to linode.com slash changelog. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Rollbar. How important is it for you to catch errors before your users do? What if you could resolve those errors in minutes and then deploy with confidence? That's exactly what Rollbar enables for software teams. One of the most frustrating things we all deal with is errors. Most teams either A, rely on their users to report errors,

or B, use log files and lists of errors to debug problems. That's such a waste of time. Instantly know what's broken and why with Rollbar. Reduce time wasted debugging and automatically capture errors alongside rich diagnostic data to help you defeat impactful errors. You can integrate Rollbar into your existing workflow. It integrates with your source code repository and deployment system to give you deep insights into exactly what changes caused each error. Give Rollbar a try today at no cost to you. Hey everybody, welcome back to The Change Log, a podcast featuring the hackers, leaders, and innovators in software development.

I'm Tim Smith, Senior Producer around these parts. Today we bring you a special episode with three great conversations Adam and Jared had at OzCon. They talk with Camille Eddy about recognizing biases in AI, Jerome Hardaway about the work he's doing to prepare veterans for jobs in software. And Abby Kubanak-Mayes about the work she's doing at Mozilla for open science. So we're joined by Camille Eddy with Girl STEM Stars. Camille, you opened up OzCon this morning talking about cultural bias in AI, how we recognize it, how we deal with it. Just give us a quick synopsis, a rerun.

Don't go over the whole thing of your keynote, what you're here to talk about. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Happy to be here. And this morning I got to talk a little bit about how we reflect on our own biases and how that is propagated into the technology that we produce. The importance of recognizing that AI has made mistakes in the past based on those biases, based on things it can't possibly know not to do, like faux pas, like categorizing black people as gorillas. That's a really bad thing, right? Really bad, right?

Yeah. So talking about those as mistakes in the past, biases, but that we can't fix them without reflecting on those. And then different things like explainable AI is seeking to come in and understand why algorithms make decisions that they make. And the importance of having more technology like that prevalent in the future of machine learning and AI in general. We'll definitely dive into those. Let's hear a little bit about your story, how you came to be keynoting at OSCON. Right. Yeah. So I have been able, a really fortunate student, really, to be able to go about and do a lot of different things. So I started in Idaho. That's where I'm getting my bachelor's degree. And when I was in Idaho, I, of course,

dealt with a lot of biases. I'm African-American, so one of the very few black people there. And it changed my story a little bit and how I dealt with the people around me and also what kind of opportunities I got. So as soon as I kind of came into that understanding that, you know, life isn't the same, you know, no matter how much you want it to be, and we all have our own biases, I started thinking about that more and I was given the opportunity to actually talk about my experience from that talk like one champion in one place at my school um someone invited me to go to san francisco and talk okay and that's where the

talk kind of involved that was about a year ago maybe over a year ago um and uh so then i just kept going because i have a mantra as a student and my mantra is there's three rules you say yes to every new opportunity you don't do anything twice and then you always make your accomplishments visible and so through that I said yes to speaking in San Francisco

though I've never been in San Francisco I was okay with that and then I also make sure I keep it changing so now I'm at Ascon which is just how it happened. What was the last one again? The last one? The last point?

Oh, make my accomplishments visible. Make them visible. Well, I'm happy and sad about this mantra. I'm happy because you said yes to us. Yeah. But I'm sad because now this is the last time we're going to talk to you. That's right. You can't do that twice.

We just have to talk about something else next time. I was going to disagree as well because I was like, you know, you have to come back. Yeah. You have to come back. I can do something else. Okay. So you'll break that rule. That's else next time. I was going to disagree as well because I was like, you know, you have to come back. Yeah. You have to come back. I can do something else. Okay, so you'll break that rule. That's the loose rule. That's right.

Well, I'll come back and – New conversation. Yeah, new conversation with y'all. New conversation. Okay, gotcha. Interesting. So one thing that you mentioned this morning is about how representation matters and how you saw – well, just tell the story about the African-American astronaut.

Sure. So when I was 12, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do because that's what 12-year-American astronaut. Sure. So when I was 12, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do because that's what 12-year-olds do. And I was homeschooled and my mom gave us a lesson at some point about Mae Jemison, who's the first female astronaut for NASA.

And I thought that was dope. But when she gave me the lesson of the first black female astronaut at NASA, Mae Jemison, that's when I connected and said, oh, I actually identify with her, and I want to be an astronaut. Right. So having that representation with someone who directly and strongly identifies with me made a difference in my choices. So from there, my mom was like, okay, so you're going to have to do your own research.

What do you have to do to become an astronaut? And that's where I saw that to become an astronaut, you have to be a scientist, a doctor, or an engineer. And I chose engineering because I felt like that fit the best. And I eventually ended up at Idaho, and I got some informational lessons, like in high school. Did space camp, which is really cool. And I was like, I'm really into this. Right. And that's how I settled on engineering.

Cool. So that brought you to engineering. Is the dream alive, the astronaut dream, or is it just you settled into engineering? Yeah, no. So the thing about becoming an astronaut is you can't become an astronaut when you're, like, 20 because you have to become the best in your field. So I feel like I'm on the way to becoming an astronaut, but it's not going to happen until I'm, like, way older. So, yeah, I'm young 20s now.

Can you reflect maybe on some experiences you've had where representation was there and not there for you? And like, so how you felt when representation wasn't present? How did you feel about maybe exploring a role or being invited? Sure. Maybe the flip side of both of those. Yeah. So the thing about people like Mae Jemison, who's the first black female astronaut, she

did a first, right? And so in Idaho, I did a first as well. So, like, I was the first black female student to lead my students' NASA research team. But one of the things that was different there is I had a lot of amazing mentors. Other people who did first, like Barbara Morgan was my mentor while I was in Idaho. She's the first female teacher to space. She was a former astronaut as well. But I didn't have any other black females to be, like, my mentors.

People who had gone before me and said, oh, I see how your journey is being different than everyone else around you. And this is why and this is how you deal with it. So I was able to push through that, right? I was a NASAa research first research student um did undergraduate research led the team which was again a first um and uh it was hard in a way that like it's hard to have certain conversations with people you know you get in those icky conversations about you know i don't understand why you just blew up at me in the middle of the room and didn't see the fact that you didn't blow up at anybody else,

but it was when I spoke that you blew up. Little things like that that are just, like, more cultural that you wouldn't necessarily question. But they add up over time. But it adds up over time. Also, yeah, adding up in a way, way it's like there are other questions like where do you come from what country are you from things that other you that they don't realize and they don't also don't realize that it happens to me like 10 times a day so it's like yeah you might

think you're the first one to ask me this but i get this all the time right so uh just paying attention to little things that other you and understanding my relation to that. And then when I came and did some internships out of the state, I did find black female mentors. And they helped me just kind of realize, like, I'm not the only one. I'm not crazy. And that there are other ways to, like, help encourage the conversation. Not being crazy is pretty important. Yeah.

It's really important for your sanity. I'm always looking for somebody to validate my feelings to some degree. Like, am I crazy? I asked Jared this all the time. Dude, am I crazy? Yep. Yeah, I don't always say no. Well, let's get back to the topic at hand, which is the culture of bias or biases in general in AI. This is something that we've discussed a handful of times because we focus on these things for practical AI.

But machine learning specifically, because you're training a computer by example, right? Here is a set of data. I've heard them described, machine learning is actual. I've heard it described as a bag of bias. Like you're basically taking everything that you gather and say, here, learn this, and then I'm going to reuse the results that you're learning based on,

and so it perpetuates a history. It's very perspective-driven, right? Right. What you feed it is a perspective. It's very perspective-driven, right? Right. What you feed it is a perspective. Right. It's essentially its own bubble, so to speak. So I guess the question becomes, like, how do we fight that? How do we deal with that?

Like, what's your take on that topic? So I think part of the problem is there's humans in the loop, right? So we're basically helping AI codify our experiences and then represent that again. Right. But sometimes what happens, like we as humans, we have feedback all the time. We'll butt up against something, say something wrong, and then we're like, oh, that was wrong. I need to correct that.

But AI and machine learning doesn't always have that feedback in the loop. So it's really important to figure out a way, and there are different ways to do it, to provide feedback. I know Microsoft and Facebook have come out with their own bias toolkits for their artificial intelligence that they said that was very important to them to add. The other thing I like to talk about is explainable AI or XAI, which seeks to understand why an algorithm makes decisions it makes. So instead of having AI be a black box, it becomes more transparent. And so another place to go look in the web for ideas around understanding why the biases exist and how to look at them is to look at the idea of transparency in AI. I see. So that means displaying to the end user why, like, let's say

recommendation engines for an example, because that's one place that we see machine learning applied a lot. You know, why this particular thing is being recommended to me by Amazon, because it's based on a model, and it will actually just say based on this, this and this. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, or let's do another one, too. That's a good example. So another similar example is Facebook. Why do I see what's in my Facebook feed? Is it because someone liked it? Is it because someone I know commented on it? Is it because I've liked on this thing before?

Is it because somewhere back in the day I liked this particular page and maybe I want to unlike it? Or is it because it's based on my geographic location? Google also does this. They have like 21 or more different points that they look at when you do a search. They say, where are you located? What have you searched before? What kind of things have you bought?

What are these tags and where are they coming from? That's a good. And it's not just the end user that needs to know this. It's also the developer, right? So I think Facebook is a really good example of this again. Because the developers have some of those tools and information. They just don't let us see it which you know is up to them yeah but to release some more of those tools that have more transparency i think would help bring us along a little bit more from an energy perspective i can

say that i can trust ai more if i know the transparency point of it like if i know why you're telling me this is important to me that i can confirm whether that's true or not and help it even shape its future recommendations for me. Because if it's inaccurate, I want it to know. Yeah. Right? And so if everybody can somehow influence that, are you advocating for that?

Or how do we shape those kinds of biases in that case? Yeah. I think one other thing to think about is this conversation has been happening for a long time. It's just now coming into prevalence, right? Right. And this is kind of what happens when you engineer products in a box, basically. Like when you engineer in one lab.

In a research lab. Yeah, when you engineer in a research lab. With perfect conditions. And one set of scientists or engineers are like, oh, this is great. This works for us. This helps our narrative. We, our lives can work well with this. So that's another point that I make in my talk is

not only have we not been having everyone in the room when we're developing it, we don't have a lot of users in the room, different users, like to test this product. And then on top of that, the whole world isn't online yet. Like there's a large groups of population of human beings in other parts of the world that don't have the access to the internet that we have. And if we're making all these decisions based off press products or conversations we're seeing online,

we actually are missing a big part of that conversation because people, not everyone's online. So it's, yeah, so it's's about being transparent being able to see those ideas and being able to control it but then also about continuing to get that conversation pushed deeper ingrained into our processes of how we develop our technology who's in control this transparency like who are the gatekeepers of the the black box being transparent it's literally every single person that walks into a startup that founds a company, like the non-technical founders too, like they're all involved in those conversations. It's not, we're developing, especially we're at an open source conference, right? We're developing

these things and building on top of it, on top of it. And we're creating the legacy technology of the future. So literally these should be the conversations we're having the first time we put up an idea on the whiteboard. Like, okay, who's not at the table? Who do we see not represented? It's really the individual people. I mean, Larry Page, Sergey, even Tim O'Reilly, they were all individuals at one point looking at their business models, looking at their ideas. And so it's on that level. If you seek or aspire to be any type of entrepreneur, leader, manager, just someone in the room engineering a piece of code, you should be having this conversation or thinking about it or getting more people to talk about it with you.

So what's the practical way to make it transparent then? It could be at the table, but how do you actually implement transparency? So a couple of different things. You have the expandable AI, so looking at making sure that you're making it visible to other people. Right. So reversing or what would it be called? Just turning it inside out your development process. So we're watching Facebook do this now. Right.

We're watching them see like this ad is paid for by. That's a really good example. Really small, but it's moving in the right direction. Another version would be like when I go on my Twitter, I look at my Twitter analytics. I can see who's liking my post, who's commenting on it, and also the impression footprint that it has. So maybe open that up a little bit more, just a a little bit more like past just the idea of impressions i think i think to get that done you have to be able to convince the people who are making the product or the business decisions or be one of those people that this is valuable this is worth their effort and um so that starts with conversations that starts with grassroots efforts and also reflection that we haven't done it yet We haven't done half of the work that's necessary yet.

Not just to define the problem, but to create products, especially out-of-the-box products, right? They're not existing yet, except for those couple of toolkits that I mentioned that don't necessarily serve all of the ideas I'm talking about from Microsoft and Facebook. We haven't been talking about this in an actionable way long enough. And so and really at the end of the day, I'm a mechanical engineer. Right.

I'm here to like help dip people's toes in the waters. And hopefully as you start talking about more, there's really cool books like the algorithms of oppression. That's really lays it out. It lays out that case use about like why it would be helpful to your business model to do it. Yeah. And then also just more conversations with people who are using it and not finding a great experience. One great example, I go back to this all the time, is Instagram ads specifically. And the visceral reaction that Instagram users have had to those ads, so much so that people believe that Instagram slash Facebook is listening to their conversations

because the ads are getting good enough to where they will suggest something to you that you don't think you've Google searched. You don't think you put it in Amazon. You think you were just talking about it with your friend or your significant another. And all of a sudden they're advertising it to you and you have no idea why. And so people are convinced that Facebook is listening to them, like actually turning on the microphone. In fact, there was a great reply all episode all about that, about whether or not it's actually happening. And it's not, they're not doing that, but they're applying AI and different other fuzzy techniques in order to make their ads so good. They're getting very, very well targeted that it

creeps you out because you don't know how they came to that distinction. Now, if I go to Instagram's head of marketing and say, you know, your ads are actually making people despise you and your advertisers because they're so creepy. But if you were transparent about how you came to those conclusions, right? If here's your ad and I think, ooh, how do they know I even needed to paste? We listened to your conversation. Right? Yeah, we got this because we're listening to you. No, if they actually said, this ad is based on these things that we know about you,

then I would look at that and say, oh, okay, that all makes sense. That's my point. I could appreciate you serving me in that way. Like, if it was actually, like, I should be interested in that, but it might also creep me out, like, stop knowing that stuff about me.

Right, maybe you can opt out. But my point is, like, that's the business case in that particular sense. It's like, your ads will be more effective with the transparency added because they're actually being counteractive in their current form. Yeah, I think so too. I think the transparency piece is a huge component. I mean, Netflix

does this somewhat well. We recommended this because you watched X. Because you liked this or because you watched it. So they just gave me one title, but I know who was in it, you know, what the subject matter was, what genre of movie was it, you know, what was its PG rating, was it R, PG-13, whatever. I can deduce all those things myself and do my own research because I got at least the

one thing they tracked me on to recommend this. That's why you never let your kids watch on your profile. That's true. Because they'll watch one episode of a cartoon and then Netflix will be like, oh, you must love cartoons. And then all the recommendations are like kids shows. What's also interesting is the use of just an IP address and not a profile. Because there's things that happen in a household

or behind one single IP that doesn't reflect every person behind that IP. That's true. So I may go and search Overstock or some brand for a new couch or some sort of decoration, and it may be a present for my wife. And now she may know because she's getting advertised from her favorite brands or something like that. It's kind of revealing.

So I want my secrets to be my secrets so I can reveal them on my own terms. You know what I mean? The way you could probably attack that directly is to start looking at recommender engines. That's, I think it's what it's called, recommender algorithms and being like, okay, this recommender algorithm, I'm going to go back to see what its training model looks like, go back and read the papers. And then I'm going to like present a really specific argument to whoever made that. Is there a case where the recommender engine as you say is deemed

somewhat proprietary considering maybe the thought leadership of like here's what we can connect to make assumptions yeah um think of facebook as a big recommender engine that stuff is definitely proprietary that's why we can't see it that's part of the problem that's the wall there is it's proprietary um We can't tell you. We don't want to tell you. And therefore, you don't have the levers. So if it was built on a more open source platform, then we probably would be able to go in there and finagle with it. But we got to.

So in that case, we have to switch it, make it inside out and say, hey, now we really do want these. Make the business case to the people. Caller, scream, shout, pull hair, do all those things. Open source for the win. Yes. So tell us what's next for you. Where are you headed next? Well, my main goal is to finish school so I can get out.

I love learning, but I don't like academics. So I'm really excited to finish. What's the distinction there? Yeah, the distinction is being in the real world. I mean, I took a gap year in the middle of my academics just because I felt like I needed it. And it has taught me a lot about where engineering is going, where machine learning is going. And even being at this conference, you know, I was able to do that because I was on the break and I was getting involved and being aware of the conversations being had. So, I don't know.

I feel like I'm probably trying to grow up too early. But, yeah, I'm definitely trying to get out of school soon. And then other than that, I've been writing a lot and just making community and finding stakeholders or stakeholders slash champions is what I should say. Champions, people who are also on the same path and talking. So I'm just trying to create conversations. And I think that's really important. What was some of the things you did on your gap year to kind of feed into that insight? Okay. Yeah. Cause I'm sure there's somebody listening and thinking, Hey, I should probably do that. What should I do? So I volunteered a lot. For example, Girl Sim Stars was one of the places I volunteered. I'm on their board, and I help organize groups of girls from like six or seven girls between middle school and high school ages,

and they went on tech days at companies. And I would bring them to Google, and we'd have a whole tech day, and they'd learn about coding. Some of them, it was the first time they had ever coded. Similarly, I did a cybersecurity camp just last weekend at Berkeley, where it was also for middle school to high school kids. Spent 20 hours a day with them. Maybe not with them, but getting them ready, getting the materials ready, teaching them cybersecurity for the first time.

They heard from cybersecurity professionals as well as women in cybersecurity. So doing a lot of, but in that time, you know, the people you bring in and talk to these kids are the people I'm networking with, you know, I'm rubbing elbows with some really cool people. And then also just learning more. So right now I'm working on autonomous cars, which is completely different from the other robots I was doing in the past. So learning about a whole new system of technology and being aware of how it's coming into the conversation and the importance there, because that's a whole other big conversation. Yeah. Immersion is just really helpful, which I can't necessarily do in academics because you're doing a lot of different. Well, you're immersed in academics.

Yeah. Immersed in academics is not really what I want to be. So I'm really looking forward to finishing up and getting back to being immersed in these other really cool technologies that are popping up. So if you have any young girls out there listening to the show or anybody that would benefit from STEM, Girl STEM Stars, is that it? Yeah. What's the first step to getting involved, either as a mentor or somebody to actually attend? Sure. Yeah, and this goes for not just Girl Stem Stars, but if you're interested in any type of organizing or volunteering across the country,

just send me a ping on Twitter at N-I-K-K-Y-M-I-L-L, Nikki Mill. And then, yeah, and girlstemstars.org is also open. But, yeah, if you really want to volunteer, we could totally use you. And yeah, just come down and send me a ping. Nice. Cool. This was a blast. Thanks, Camille.

Thank you, Camille. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. or 10,000, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so teams can build, deploy, and scale cloud apps faster and more efficiently. Join the ranks of Docker, GitLab, Slack, HashiCorp, WeWork, Fastly, and more. Enjoy simple, predictable pricing. Sign up, deploy your app in seconds. Head to do.co slash changelog, and our listeners get a free $100 credit to spend in your first 60 days. Try it free.

Once again, head to do.co.changelog. So, Drum, you do some pretty cool stuff for veterans, man. Roger that. Well, thank you. I don't know if I do cool things for veterans. I feel like it's important work, but thanks nonetheless. So what exactly do you do? What we do is at Vetsu Code, we teach veterans how to program. We do this remotely, 100% remote, and we focus solely on open source technologies. So React, JavaScript, Node.js, those are the

main points of education while going deep dive in computer science fundamentals. So is this while they're still in active duty? Are they in National Guard, Reserves? What's their engagement currently with the military? We usually don't care. We focus on the type of, like, we look for the type of veteran that's looking for a job. So the average veteran that comes to our program is within a year from leaving service or within six months of being out. And by doing that, we can, you know, focus on people who are more serious

versus those who are, you know, maybe looking for a hobby. Because, you know, I'm spending 14, well, practically 26 weeks out of my life educating. So I want to make sure that people who are getting the fruits of this labor are serious about it. Yeah, legit. I was just thinking, having ETS myself out of the military at one point, all the process they have, you know, as you leave, all the different briefings you got to do and just all the ceremony involved in exiting the military in an honorable status, that that would be a great time to mention,

hey, there's VET2 code. And as you exit, as you look to new opportunities, there's this opportunity for you. In my opinion, I'm not an expert. I think it's well before that like if you look at how the current especially when in the tech hiring process and the current stacks and situations we're in you need to be thinking if you're going to actually look at technology as a viable sector to transition in you need to be focusing within that like six months to a year before you get out simply off the fact that fact that it'll take you three or four months just in building relationships and making sure your portfolio is right, your GitHub is correct,

you're building relationships in your community based upon where you want to live, where you want to move. You've dwindled down all of the recruiter suit that you're going to get and find actually the good two or three recruiters that you're actually going to focus on knowing your strengths and your weaknesses and building that relationship with them so i would argue a year to six months before you hit that transition button it's a tough position in any soldier life regardless of like what they did in their service it could have been a three or four engagement they could have been deployed they could have just been on a base either Either way, transitioning out of and back into civilian life once you've been through the process of being in the military is an experience nonetheless.

Yes, it's hard. It doesn't matter if you did four years or 20 years. That transition from that community to back into civilian life is shocking, to say the least. Is this a free program for veterans? How does it work? What's the cost? We don't charge. We don't charge veterans a dime.

It's all about finding the veterans that have the most promise. Usually, the average veteran that comes to our program, they're stuck. They have been trying to learn how to code. They've hit a brick wall. There's so much stuff on the Internet, they don't know which direction to go. And that's our job. We not only point them in the right directions, we provide a curriculum for them to go through. As they get more advanced, we supply a mentor.

And these are the processes that we do. And then we start helping them with the process of prepping for a job. Helping with, like, interview prep, resume, looking at your portfolio, looking at your GitHub, looking at your LinkedIn, looking at how you present yourself when it comes to your resume. All of these things that come into play. And we make sure that everybody who's telling you advice, they've walked that road. Like, you know, I'm at CBS, our primary CTO. He is at, he's at USAA. And then we have our CDO who, he's at USA Today.

And these guys, you know, we're all people at big companies. So we take that time and like, yo, this is what you need to do. This is what we're seeing. This is how we would change like this. You know, always giving that feedback loop. Yeah. What's the lifespan of that relationship? It varies on average.

It is, we do 14 weeks. So I would say at least half a year to a year, veterans are staying in contact. We have some veterans that they, since 2014, they are always in contact. They're forever fans. It's really weird. If you help them get a job, I mean. Yeah, and it's really cool because it's my way of finding the type of community that, creating the type of community. I you know, creating the type of community I want.

I like people who are goofy and serious. Like, I like the work hard, play hard type. Like, you know, we're going to finish this project, but, you know, I want to play Cars Humanity after this, too. Like, we have a hard deadline for Cars Humanity. Let's go. So, like, that is, you know, these are the type of veterans that, you know, I find. Yeah. How do you, you mentioned, like, finding the ones that are serious.

Yeah. How do you judge that? How do you formalize that? Copy that. We have a three-prong process, one from two to three. Primary phase is we put everybody in the Facebook group. We have the pre-work on GitHub so they can look at the pre-work on the README and go through this. Until they finish that pre-work, they don't get an interview.

Those who complete the pre-work, then they get an interview. Their first phase interview is always with me. I want to make sure everybody that wants to be in Vets Who Code and has done their prerequisites talks to me face-to-face. Like, you know, let's go ahead and, you know, zoom it up, chat. And so I can get a feel for you and tell you this is why we do it. I want to find – I treat programming like people treat boxing. If you could do anything else and make money, you should do it because, like, programming is a forever job.

You're never going to stop learning. You're never going to know it all. Like, you're going to be the stupidest person in the room at least once a week. So if you have an ego, you might not like this. You might, you know, if you, if you're one of those guys that think, you know, they're like a college type, you know, you're going to go to college, get this degree, and then you're going to stop. This isn't for you. Like, this is not your, like, this is not your bag. So, like, that's the first thing. Then after that, we have a technical interview with another person. That way there's no bias.

So I don't handle all the interview phases either. Sure. I have a technical phase where Noel, he goes through their GitHub. He starts asking questions. He starts asking and seeing where they're at and where they are on the technical things, what things they've done outside of us because we're always sharing other things. That's the real gotcha. We want to see if you're hungry.

Like I said, if you're programming like boxing, you have to be hungry for it. You have to want it. That's an analogy I've never heard. As a person that's been in the military, boxed, and does programming, like boxing is my spare time thing to relieve stress. Like that, I see the parallels all the time. Like, you know, you have to be hungry. You have to want it.

You have to show up every day. There's never a day that if you, oh, I've achieved it all. Because there's always somebody right behind you who's going to know just as much as you. Absolutely. Like programming and boxing is literally the same. You can't. Complacency kills. That's a military word there for you.

Complacency kills. Yeah, for sure. It's an interesting focus actually on veterans i mean what do you what do you see i guess maybe you're kind of biased because you've been through the military but i'm thinking like how this might be for non-military to military you know the mindset of the person that changed there can you can you maybe describe maybe some of the mindset of a roger someone who's been through the military sort of the country well through the training. Yes.

First and foremost, I am not one of those veterans that had a technical job in the military. I was security forces. I carried an M4 carbine and a 9mm to work every day. Nothing about a computer in my job at all. So that's the first thing I let people know. You're talking to one of those veterans that didn't fit the criteria. Secondly, everything that we do in the military these days are a lot of procedures that you guys do, that we do on the tech side. They're just different names. You guys have agile.

We have, in the military, there's rapid deployment procedures. You guys, we have components. We have fire teams. A fire team is nothing but a component of an entire squad. Sure. So, like, these are are like, these are practices that are already ingrained in the military that is also ingrained in software. Uh, you're the process of being able to like read boring, dry death by PowerPoint style documentation. That is

the first thing you learn in the military is how to, you know, death by PowerPoint. Oh my goodness, this is a thousand pages of useless junk that I'm going to be tested on. Like, oh, programming. Just like that. 1,000 pages of useless junk. Programming. Well, to get ranked, you do have to study some interesting things. You've got to go before boards.

You've got to come presented. But it comes with knowledge, and that knowledge is gained by you, not by somebody handing it to you. You've got to want it. It's part of the boxing thing. You've got to chase it. Same way with the military. On-the-job training um learning by doing that's how you learn in the military yeah all right basic yeah ojt you go through basic then you turn around and then you

go to your training school and then they send you to your base then your base teaches you how to do it the way they want to do so you come in with a base set of skills to meet their metric meet the requirement then they're like all right you keep you keep this, keep this, keep this, throw this away, keep this, keep this, don't like that, keep this, we might keep that. And then that same way when you go to your first company, oh, you know, you do this, do this, do that, that's cool, do this, I don't like that, we're not going to do it that way. And, you know, pretty much that's how you start being in like the first week of your software job. Like look at things you have, see what they like, tell you where they're going to fire, tell you where they're going to add, and then move on.

So you're, how do I say this? What hooked you about software? I mean, you also like boxing, but the way you're describing these things, they're very harsh, hard, difficult. I like it because it's harsh and hard and difficult. That's the best part. I like, I mean challenge i guess daniel camara says it best he's a current ufc like lightweight and heavy light heavyweight and

heavyweight champion he says embrace the suck and that's like something from like you hear like on the wrestling mats like ncaa like all these guys d1 guys they say that embrace the suck and that's what it is like i'm embracing the suck of software for the reward that it gives. Like, you know, being able to have the type of lifestyle I want, be able to meet crazy cool people. There are people that I know today that, like, four years ago, I was, like, in awe of. Like, I've turned my heroes into my peers.

That is cray. Like, you know, there's nothing. You can't put a price on that type of experience and that's you know that's what helps me get up at zero four thirty in the morning and you know start getting focusing on making myself a better person yeah embrace the sucker reminds me of a saying or a distinction that i've heard lots of times is like there's good suck and there's bad suck right and like this is the good suck and that's when you got to embrace it like yeah this is hard this is harsh this is this sucks yeah but you know what's at the end of the road is good and so there's other stuff that sucks that's just like just get that out of your

life and that's what like the strength of military like if you've ever deployed you know you've never heard like you know hurry up and wait you've been in that world where oh you're waiting for six hours and somebody comes out like hey we gotta we've got to hurry up and knock this out. I'm like, really? We've got to move in 15 minutes? We have to move 40 people in 15 minutes. We've been here six hours. You didn't say anything to us.

But now it's 15 minutes. We have to move everybody. Okay, that's cool. Embracing the suck. That is like military life. You ever been on a deployment? It's like, yeah, you have to embrace the suck. Like, all right, it sucks.

It's 120 degrees out here. And everybody hates us. But, you know, I'm going to go home soon. So we're just going to embrace the suck like alright it sucks it's 120 degrees out here and everybody hates us but you know I'm going to go home soon so we're just going to embrace the suck and then move on I've heard another one too

it's good training anytime you've done something you're like that was terrible why do we do that good training just get over it good training

yeah it was training that's right that's something we were saying recently about decisions that we've made with Change Logger and business and it's like you go down a path and you realize it's the wrong path

and maybe you're six months down the road and you're like well we gotta go back to where we were and it's like well that sucked that was a waste of time money and effort and then we always say well now we know education yeah right it's just good education we haven't learned that otherwise that's good training it's good training I like that

it's good training good training one thing I like I like that. That's good training. Good training. One thing I like about this is I'm learning lots of cool sayings. I have a million militarisms. Give me some other ones. Come on. I don't know. I don't know what PG was. It's in the moment.

Keep it family friendly. Keep it family friendly. Like I said, I'm trying to keep it. You share me the other ones later. Yeah. See, now I'm brain farting them. It happens in the moment. Like, oh, there ones later. Yeah. See, now I'm brain farting them. It happens in the moment. They're like, oh, there you go.

Bang. Let's talk about maybe those active duty military men and women who are out there serving our country or they're transitioned out and they're looking for that opportunity. They're listening to this podcast or somebody who knows one is listening to this podcast. How do they reach out? What's the first step? Well, the first step is always go through Vets Who Code. We have our application form on there.

And then once you apply, pretty much I always email them, ask them to have a Facebook group. Some people just go straight to the Facebook group, but I'll always email them personally and say, hey, do you have Facebook? Here's our Facebook group. Join it so we can start the application process with you. They're in there with the pre-work,

and they're talking to other veterans. It's a way to make sure that everybody has a fair metric that we can at least start off of. And not only that, it's a way for them to meet other people who are interested in this stuff. It's better to embrace the suck with a group of people

than to embrace it by yourself. Misery loves company. That's why everybody misses the military days. Oh, those were the good old days. No, they weren't. But you made some good friends because... They were the best worst days. Yeah, they're like, no, that was...

Sounds like high school. Yeah, so they were terrible. It's like freshman year in high school. Right. That's how your entire military career is, like freshman year in high school. Everybody wants to kick your butt. It's like, it's awful.

It's awful. And you get out and you're like, remember how good that was? Man, I miss those days. I miss those days. Oh, man. So how many people have you put through this program? Right now, we've done over 100 people,

gotten jobs in 14 states. We've had people who are working here. People are working in Seattle. We actually just had a veteran start it two weeks ago in Microsoft. So that was pretty cool. Awesome. It's a big deal like this is our first

cohort that we've gotten 100 success rate ask what your placement rate is usually it's around 95 97 but that's because we're very we're hyper focused yeah very hyper focused and you know the way i look at it like listen you're not paying for this so and i have the real world experience so listen to me so i can help you or don't listen to me and don't be around. Hit the road. Yeah. Don't waste my time. People don't really like that style, but I'm like, I'm doing this because I remember every day

how hard it was for the transition. So I'm here to make your transition easy so you don't have to go through what I went through. Was there somebody there for you? No. to make your transition easy so you don't have to go through what I went through. Was there somebody there for you? No, the transition process when I got out of the military was trash on top of trash on top of trash. Isolating, I would say. My experience was isolating. Yeah, well, the military transitions

to help you get you off their books, the military transition isn't about you acclimating to civilian society. It's like, all right, well, you don't want to be a part of our team anymore? Bye. I don't know. He's also straight up, bye Felicia type move. I just kind of like that.

Like, okay. Okay, what do you do? So you have to figure out these things. So weird, too, going back to civilian life, man. Yeah, it is. Because, yes, a whole dichotomy. That's a whole podcast. That's going to get into that. What about the placements, people?

If you've got people listening to this podcast that are places where they're looking for good programmers, how do they reach out? Is there a direct connection? There's a contact form on VesuCo. You can just fill that out. Everything goes into our chat ops. My phone is buzzing right now because people are hitting me up. Pretty much in real time on, like, Slack, and they're applying.

So, basically what happens is, you know, you go to the contact form, you fill it out, I'll reach out to you, and we'll start conversations. We've had, like... Well, I mean, for those... Companies, right? The companies, yeah. Same deal? Same deal. Same deal.

So, like, we start the conversation because I want to make sure you're a good fit. We've had companies come in, and then they're like, yeah, we love what you're doing. We have colleagues who have hired your people. Would you mind doing Java? And I'm like, no. You don't understand how hard it is if I'm not actually there in front of that veteran to be able to get their machine prepped to do Java and, you know, JavaScript as well. I'm like, that is, you know,

you have to control the install fest. That's why we chose JavaScript. You know, the ease of use of being able to get that veteran from being, you know, not having a dev environment to having a dev environment is, like, super easy in JavaScript versus, you know, more advanced, oh, not more, more stable languages.

So it's like, okay, it's very difficult to do that. So let's work on this and then as they get interested, they'll be able to have this base of knowledge that they can build on it. We had a veteran right now just, he last week started his first day at work at JP Morgan as Angular and Java Spring Boot developer.

We don't teach Angular, we don't teach Java Spring Boot, but he was able to get that job because of the deep knowledge base he got with us and then being able to go and venture out on his spare time outside of class with java and i was like all right that's awesome i don't care what you do as long as you're programming like cool keep building never stop dudes like so yeah you know which is another thing that programming has in common with boxing you stop for a week and you pick it back up you will fill it

gotta do it every day anything else to share Jerome? follow Vets Who Code on Twitter if you're looking for any good React developers any good JavaScript engineers reach out to us I am always looking for people who like to hire good people cool, it was good seeing you, man. Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you. So I have some pretty awesome news to share. We are now partnered with Algolia. If you've ever searched Hacker News, Teespring, Medium, Twitch, or even Product Hunt, then you've experienced the results of Algolia's search API. And as we expand our content, we knew that one day we'd have to either roll our own search solution on top of Postgres, or we could partner up with Algolia. And I'm happy to report that phase one of our search is now powered by Algolia. We're able to fine-tune our indexing, gain insights from search patterns and analytics.

We can create custom query rules to influence ranking behavior, as well as improve our search experience by adding synonyms and alternative corrections to queries. Sure, we could build search ourselves, but that would mean we would be busy doing that instead of shipping shows like you're listening to right now. Huge thanks to our friends at Algolia for working with us. Check the show notes for a link to get started for free or learn more by heading to algolia.com. And by GoCD. GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server built by ThoughtWorks.

Check them out at gocd.org or on GitHub at github.com slash gocd. GoCD provides continuous delivery out of the box with its built-in pipelines, advanced traceability, and value stream visualization. With GoCD, you can easily model, orchestrate, and visualize complex workflows from end to end with no problem. They support Kubernetes and modern infrastructure with Elastic on-demand agents and cloud deployments. To learn more about GoCD, visit gocd.org slash changelog. It's free to use, and they have professional support and enterprise add-ons available from ThoughtWorks. Once again, gocd.org slash changelog. All right, so we're joined by Abby Kupanak-Mays, working open practice lead at the Mozilla Foundation.

That's a mouthful. I'm sorry, yes. Yes, it is. Sounds like an important thing. Tell us what that means. Yeah, it means I care a lot about how to work open, working openly, and about how to do that past just open source. So doing that in open science projects with the Pacific Tech, with government. Are you writing curriculum? How do you do that openly?

So just helping people do that. Okay. So it's not just open source, but it includes open source. It does include open source, and my background is coming from open source. Okay. But also open science. Yeah. Documentation.

Okay. How did you get into that, and how did you end up at Mozilla doing this work? Yeah. Documentation. Okay. Where'd you get, how'd you get into that, you know, and how'd you end up at Mozilla doing this work? Yeah. Um, I actually have a background in bioinformatics, which is computer science applied to biology. Um, so I was writing software for scientists at this cancer research Institute. And the longer I was in academia, the more often you notice how people maybe fudge their data a little bit or hide their data sets. Like to come up with certain results? Yeah, just so that they can get that really cool result so that it gets published in Nature.

And that's just how you get forward in science. That stinks. It does. And that's when I really got into open science. Because it's like, well, we really should be doing this so we can have the best innovations, so we can help more people. Okay. Yeah.

What percentage of closed science or non-open science, when you experience this, just give me somewhere to look at, like 20% of people doing this, 60%? Is it pervasive? So the lab I was in, I should clarify that. They were great. They did not do this. Okay.

But you hear about it a lot. And with collaborators, they'd be really scared about getting scooped. So they'd hide their data as much as they could. Or maybe just play around with the p-value to just see what you can do to make that result show the story that you want, where the data itself doesn't really do that. So there's a really interesting study. Sounds like a statistician. Yeah, a little bit.

That's important, though, because in history you have Einstein who's remembered, but then the person who actually had some theory of relativity before Einstein doesn't get the same credit because Einstein was the one who was... Well, a lot of times you'll have dual invention, one person is just like the one who gets all the credit. So it makes sense to be secretive to some degree with your data and your research. Yeah, it does. Secret is okay, but tweaking it to fit your results. Okay, that's where it's all.

Let's not go there. Right. I think one of my former colleagues, Greg Wilson, he mined a lot of these research papers and looked at what the p-value was, and there was a huge spike like right before what we consider significant in research. So a lot of people just got their p-value just right below that, the statistical significance. What's the p-value again?

It's the statistical significance of the results, so it shows that there is correlation there. Gotcha. Right. It's key. It's p. It's p. Okay. So you said p is key. Open. Yeah, so that's when I got really interested in open source,

because my lab was really writing open source software for these researchers. But then open science generally, I was like, yeah, this is really important. A lot of people are really scared about, like, there's something wrong with the research system if a lot of people are just hiding their data. So then Mozilla Science started. So that's why I joined Mozilla. And since then, my role has shifted to that's why I joined Mozilla. And since then, my role has shifted to be less about just the open science.

I still do quite a bit of open science, but that working open across everyone. Tell us a little bit about Mozilla because intellectually, I know Mozilla does a lot of stuff. But instinctively, I think Firefox, and then that's pretty much where my brain stops. So tell us, I mean, Mozilla Science is not a thing I've heard of. Tell us some of the other stuff Mozilla's into and how your work affects everything. Yeah, yeah. So at Mozilla, our mission is to ensure that the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. And we do that through products like Firefox, but also through movement building and working with different communities. So Mozilla Science is one of those communities that they're working with.

But also, like, with government, Civic Tech, working with that. And a lot of it's, yeah, we've released this internet health report. So it's like what is hurting and what's helping the internet. So we look at things like how open is the internet? How private and secure are we on there? How inclusive is it? What's web literacy like? Who can actually make a change on the line?

Yeah, so we do a lot of things like that. And then there's the Mozilla Festival every year in London in October. MozFest. That's right. Oh, yeah. That's where it's at. Yeah, it's pretty great. So it's all of that put together. So all these different communities who really rely on the internet and really want to make sure that it stays healthy and they're there to really, yeah, meet about that, brainstorm, make cool things. It's sort of the underpinning of the mozilla brand too to be open yeah right yeah yeah so i mean you're kind of like on the core mission of mozilla at large yeah and i think like our with our main goal is like internet health but then how we're doing that is through openness so either building

products openly or by like rallying the community to build something open yeah what does your day-to-day look like when you're trying to educate you know lead mentor build a movement what does that look like in a tactical sense it's a lot of uh emails very hard work a lot of emails but also a lot of video calls i spend a lot of time just meeting with people online a lot of big conference calls for trainings so what kind of people you meet with um online, a lot of big conference calls for trainings. So what kind of people are you meeting with? All sorts of people. So I run Mozilla Open Leaders, which is this mentorship and training program around how to work open.

So people come with their projects, whether it's an open science project or an open data project or some civic tech project. And so I meet with a lot of people who are running cool open projects from all these different fields and just tell them, like, this is how you work open properly. Not that I know everything. So what does that look like, working open properly? Yeah, working open properly. I think a lot of people forget to, like, strategize around how to work open or plan to do this. So a big thing at Mozilla now is open by design instead of open by default. So I think because open is, like, part of our DNA at Mozilla, we often forget why we do things openly. So by default, everything's just online, but then it's not, it's not making that impact we really want. So I think if you're doing

open well at the beginning, you're thinking about like, who do you want to work with? How are you going to engage them? Like what's the value exchange going to be? How are you going to bring them from being a user to a contributor to maybe a project lead? Like thinking all these pathways through and then writing the documentation to make sure that they know how that all happens and providing like that support to people and mentoring them as they go through your project. So that's a broader view. It's different for each project, what that looks like. Yeah. But yeah. Interesting. So take one of your projects, maybe even, you know, the open leadership. I'm not sure how your projects break out.

Yeah, yeah. And then describe to us how that was designed to have a specific goal or a specific end in mind. Yeah. So this work started when I was part of Mozilla Science. And what we were trying to do, we just put a bunch of developers who were interested in science and put them in touch with a bunch of scientists. But then we realized that scientists weren't great at working open. They'd have their projects and they're like, oh, I don't need you yet. Just wait.

Probably like cultural, not clashes, but just differences. So then I started writing these little guidebooks. It's like, here's how you can open your work a little bit so that you can benefit from all these developers that want to help you, that care about science. then we realized like these guides are really helpful for just anyone running an open project so we started doing that um also my husband at the time he was running this startup accelerator in toronto and the way he modeled it was like a three-month thing um i just took a lot of the ideas there so we start yeah we meet with them at the beginning we have them set goals and figure out what they're going to do over those

three months we work with them regularly and uh yeah so it was modeled after startup accelerator this mentorship program is it working i think so yeah and what really excites me about this program is that, so I designed this so that people can come back and become a mentor after they've gone through it. So about 50% of the people that have gone through have come back and mentored other people. So we're showing people how to work open in a way that they get really excited and want to help other people do that.

So that's what I think is the essence of building a movement. Building a movement. Yeah. Is a lot of this inside Mozilla only, or is it sort of like Mozilla and external? The people in the program are from everywhere. Okay. Yeah. It's Mozilla only.

It's running it right now, but I'm trying to... Actually, we're partnering with a few people so that they can run their own versions in their organization, or maybe in their language, or in their city. So we've done that a few times, but I'm trying to make it more forkable so that people can just run this program wherever they are. So is that like a face-to-face thing? Or is it, you mentioned you do a lot of video calls and a lot of emails and stuff. Is any of this distributed or is it all sort of co-located? So the first iteration we had was a two-day event where we ran the training at the beginning, and then we just followed up with mentorship afterwards. Then we realized, oh, we could do this all online,

where we just meet every week online, do a little bit of training. Then alternate weeks, you do one-on-one mentorship. You mentioned guides as well. Are those guides open at all or available to people? Yes. There's the Open Leadership Training Series. It's on GitHub. You can edit it.

You can remix it. Yeah. Nice. How weird would it be if she said no to that question? It would have been really weird. That would have been very awkward. Actually, they're proprietary offline. You have to purchase them.

Underneath the pillow. No PRs here. So what are you doing here at OSCON? What are you trying to talk about? I mean, obviously open stuff, but is there specific? Because this is about open source specifically, so we're software people. Yeah. What's your message here and who are you talking to? Yeah, this is my first year at OSCON, so it's really exciting.

I gave a talk yesterday on open as a competitive advantage, and that was really about that open by design, instead of open by default. So what choices can you make to be really strategic about what you open? And are you opening something for to increase your adoption by giving away for free, or are you opening something for um yeah for to increase

your adoption by giving away for free or are you trying to lower your operating costs or are you yeah there's different reasons why you can open different parts look at those reasons is there ever a a decision uh workflow wherein it's like you know what don't open this or is it or is open always better in your opinion i don't think open's always better and i've worked some of the people through the mentorship program they're a bigger organization and just telling them to make everything open is a little bit too much so like how can you start like what are little things you can do to start opening things up and it might be just like getting ideas from your community like what features do you want us to do

and let them people suggest them and vote on it. I think Lego does something like that, where you can suggest which kit you want. Right. Yeah. So it's like a tiny way you can open it. Get people involved. When you say advantage, it makes me think of a growth hack of some sort. Like, you're doing it as a hack to an alternative way,

and somehow you're going to get better benefits from, you know, as an advantage, so to speak. Can you speak to that? Yeah. Like the advantages of being open? Yeah, yeah. The hacking of it, like the growth hack part of it, like how you would be better off that way, the growth potential? Yeah, and I think there's a lot of advantages to working open,

but I think by working open and letting people see what you're doing and inviting people to join in, you can, well, with science, you get the best ideas, you get the best innovation that way. And it's not just one person trying to figure out how to solve this problem, but you have hundreds of people trying to solve it. Yeah. Unless you get trust, like de facto trust. Yeah. And people see how it was done. And if they can see all the data there, then they know that you didn't tweak it and that you didn't hide parts of it. So it's, that's a huge advantage. Yeah, and just that buy-in from that community.

Also that goodwill is usually pretty nice. We see that with a lot of infrastructure companies that are open source, but they're also startups or small businesses or big businesses. And we always ask them, why are you open source? What's the point for you or where are you coming from? And a lot of the times it's about trust because they just think this is table stakes. We run a thing where you expect. You don't have to trust that we're doing things with your stuff. You can see what we're doing with your stuff.

And so on the data side, it makes a lot of sense of like, my research is legit. Here's everything. Yeah. Or if there's a problem, like there it is in line 37. Help me fix it. With software companies, a lot of times the advantage is we don't have to prove to anybody that we're trustworthy we still have to to a certain degree but here's our proof right here it's right there out in the open just another

example or even just listening to people i think that's an interaction like a nice open interaction that can build trust even if they can't see or if they already trust what you're building. But knowing that you're hearing what they're saying and making changes, I think that's really important. In regards to building a movement or starting a movement, a lot of people, and I've had this in the past, open source things or, you know, write openly or publish openly into the void. And so they want interaction, they want other people's ideas, they want contributors, they want all these things and yet

there's a disconnect or sometimes there's just too much noise and you can't get your voice heard. So with Mozilla, you guys have a loud voice in the community and so it's probably established that these things are going to have interaction and stuff. But if you're just starting from square one, do you have to advise people on how to build

that movement, how to kickstart the interactions? Yeah, definitely. And I think something that people forget to do is really have that concise mission or concise vision around what they're doing so people can understand it right away. We do try to amplify, like you said, we do have a big platform. So we do try to amplify, like you said, we do have a big platform. So we do try to amplify everyone that we trust that's coming through the program to help give them that head start. But if they're not, like if they have a really confusing mission statement that people don't get, it's going to be a bit harder for them to gather that community. So we try to, we do a couple exercises around like solidifying what you're doing and your messaging there. But

then also once you start getting a couple people interested, how do you keep that momentum going? How do you follow up with them and really find out why they came so that you can give them the kind of value that they want coming out of this? Is it, did they come because they want to learn JavaScript? Yeah. Then help make that a great learning experience for them. Or did they come because they really want to help take down the browser monopoly, then really give them that opportunity back to Firefox? Yeah. That's a movement right there. Yeah, yeah. You're also part of the Journal for Open Source, is that right?

Yeah, the Journal for Open Source Software. What is that about? Yeah, so it's in academia, a lot of times if you write open source software, write software for science, you can't cite the software directly. You have to write a paper about your software, get that published, and then you get more citations. And then you can make the argument that you need more funding for your software. And it's a little roundabout. So the Journal for Open Source Software makes it really easy for you to publish a paper on your software.

So they just take the readme. And then we have a review process, which is similar to just like, are you following best practices with your software? And then it generates this paper that's all online and it mints it with a DOI, this digital object identifier, so that people can cite it in their real academic papers. And then you can say, oh, look,

these 10 people published about my paper, used my paper, or not my paper, my software, to do their analysis. I need funding. So it makes it a little easier to make software and science more sustainable. And it's a little hack between, because right now you can't cite software directly. So it's just like adding that little step. Well, that's what I'm saying. It almost seems like it would be more useful for papers.

Yeah. But it's for software, that little step. Well, that's what I was saying. It almost seems like it would be more useful for papers. Yeah. But it's for software, open source software. Yeah. So I think you can sort of sort site software directly, but not everyone thinks that's a good idea. We're trying to make that happen. Yeah. So is that like a, you say it's kind of a hack. Is it a first step or is it an end goal?

It seems like the kind of thing that would be generally useful for all sorts of research. Yeah, yeah. I think the end goal would be you like the kind of thing that would be generally useful for all sorts of research. Yeah, yeah. I think the end goal would be you can just cite software directly. So you can get a DOI for your software. Okay. So you could cite it. Just a lot of publications out there are like, that's not a real paper. So this is just a way to make software a little bit more visible.

Okay. Yeah. So citations are super important in academia. Yes. That is how you move forward in your career. That's your street cred right there. I've been cited. They agree. So concurations are super important in academia. Yes. That is how you move forward in your career. That's your street cred right there. I've been cited. They agree.

It's a concur. What's that? It's a concur. I've been cited. Yeah, like I concur. I agree with you. Although sometimes people cite it because they disagree. It's more like notoriety than it is.

Like we used your research. Right. It's similar like PageRank, how it works with links. The more times you're linked, the more influential you are. Sometimes they're agreeing and disagreeing, but you're obviously

you're a part of that conversation. Yeah, I didn't consider the disagree part of that, but yeah, definitely. It just shows that you have some influence of whether it's negative or positive

as to be seen by the reader. It's like how many stars do you have on GitHub? No, let's not start there. Yeah, Arvin Smith started the Journal of Open Source Software. I hope I did a good job explaining what that was. I'm sorry, Arvin Smith started the Journal of Open Source Software. I hope I did a good job explaining what that was.

I'm sorry, Arvin. I think you did. I got it. But we do know Arvin. We've had him on RFC. So I was somewhat familiar with this. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't.

Not at all. Brand new today. That's where he works now. I didn't know that either. Learned something new every day. Miss you, bro. Good to see you. What's up, Arvin? Shout out. The last time I talked to him, he was traveling everywhere. I didn't know that either. Miss you, bro. Good to see you.

What's up, Marvin? Shout out. The last time I talked to him, he was traveling everywhere. He was like a vagabond with the family. We interviewed him from a, was it a bus? No, it was an RV. Parked outside of a Starbucks in Canada somewhere. That's right. That's not surprising.

That was fun. It was pretty wild. Cool. Abby, anything else you'd like to talk about? I think that was, yeah, that was good. Nothing comes to mind. Anything else? Nothing from me.

All right. Well, thanks for all the work that you're doing. It's a real pleasure being here. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Abby. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to this special episode of The Changelog. On location at OzCon, thank you to our sponsors,

Rollbar, Digital Ocean, Algolia, and GoCD. Our bandwidth is provided by Fastly. Thank you. slash changelog. This episode is edited and mixed by me, Tim Smith. The music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. You can find more shows just like this one on changelog.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week.