The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Building Bridges (Interview)

Episode Date: May 29, 2015

Sarah Allen, cofounder of RailsBridge and Bridge Foundry, joined the show to talk about the incredible ability to make something with software, leading and teaching a community, teaching programming to kids, programming is a life skill, and more.

Welcome back everyone, this is the changelog and I'm your host Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 157 and on today's show we're joined by a special guest host, Beverly Nelson. You've seen Beverly around the blog. She has done some awesome stuff in the learning section. A more recent article for her is Get Resources for Visual Learners. If you haven't seen that post, check the show notes for it.

We're also joined by Sarah Allen. Sarah is most known for her work to diversify Ruby with RailsBridge. She co-founded that in 2009 and also Bridge Foundry. But we dive deep into Sarah's history of programming, such wealth of knowledge. Loved having Sarah on the show.

We have three awesome sponsors for the show, CodeShip, TopTout, and DigitalOcean. CodeShip is our first sponsor. They're a hosted continuous delivery service focusing on speed, security, and customizability. It's all about helping you and your team focus on your code while automating your delivery workflows. You can set up continuous integration in a matter of seconds and automatically deploy your code when your tests have passed. CodeShip supports your GitHub and your Bitbucket projects, so no worries there. You can get started today with CodeShip's free plan.

Should you decide to go with a premium plan, you can save 20% off any plan you choose for three months by using this code, the ChangeLogPodcast. Use that code and get 20% off any plan you choose for three months. Head to CodeShip.com slash the changelog to get started. Tell them we sent you and now on to the show. Hey everybody, Adam here from the changelog. I'm joined today by Sarah Allen and Beverly Nelson. Sarah, you've been lining up this call for a while, Beverly.

You helped line it up. Just some quick introductions from my side. Beverly, you work on the ChangeLog team, writing and now being on the podcast. And Sarah, you and Beverly work together outside of this stuff, actually, with BridgeFounders, something you founded to help move tech learning moving forward. So welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here. And I guess, Sarah, let's start with you with some quick introductions.

So for those who may not know who you are, how do you introduce yourself? Well, I've been in the software industry for over 20 years, most of the time as an individual contributor developer, also as a technical leader. And early in my career, I did a little bit of UI design. And now I lead a product team working for the United States federal government at a group called 18F. I have to say that I do not speak for the federal government. And with that disclaimer, I'm speaking in my personal capacity. I am a leader of Bridge Foundry, the leader of Bridge Foundry,

which is an organization that started out as Rails Bridge, which I co-founded with Sarah May and the Open Workshops Project. And then a few years ago, we refactored the organization and created Bridge Foundry, which is dedicated to all the different technologies. And in my other hat that I wear is I have a startup company that I work on on the side called Mightyverse.

So many things, wow. Lots of things. Serial innovators, what I read somewhere about you, that seems to be true, right? Yeah, that's the name I came up with because people always call themselves serial entrepreneurs and I like making things. And sometimes they're companies

and sometimes they're open source projects or sometimes they're other things. And so Beverly, you helped line up this call. Good friends with Sarah, work with her, with Bridge Foundry. We work together at Pure Charity. So that's obviously nothing that's hidden. You've worked with me on the Change Log. One of your posts recently was a very big post, get resources for visual learners.

You love teaching. So I don't know if I did your intro for you, but it could be to a degree. That sums it up. I would say definitely. I'm a Ruby developer, and I just have a tremendous passion for learning and making information accessible, especially for those who may be in an area that's not diverse enough to have technology easily accessible. And so it's a personal gain of my personal mission just to really expose that to as many people as possible and give them the opportunities that I was given. So I feel like this call isn't exactly just about your efforts collectively, the two of you together around diversity, not so much just for women, but also for all walks of life, all races of life, the underrepresented, but also about the work you're doing in open source. And Sarah, I'm really interested about your history in software development.

You've been around for a while. I'm not saying you're old. I'm 36. But I've got some history and you've got some history. So I'm really curious to go back in your past a bit. Can we go back in your past to maybe, you know, some fun times, I guess. When did this all begin for you? Well, I started programming when I was 12.

Oh, OK. My mom brought home an Apple II. She'd been laid off from teaching and decided that she was going to sell computers which is a huge departure for her and she really wanted to learn about them and I was very lucky that I had school off the day after it arrived and at that time Apple IIs came with a manual

that told you how to open it and get started and then it came up with a second book that taught you basic. So I just went through the book and typed stuff into the command line and learned how to make the computer do things. And I think it's a very sad thing that nowadays it's very inaccessible to get started coding. I think it's a great thing that computers are more accessible for people who don't want to code, but now you have to install all this stuff onto your computer just to write code, and I think that's pretty unfortunate.

Yeah, I guess so. So what's the kind of marrying that against the setup to develop Ruby, I guess, on a Mac? Is that what you mean? Yeah, I mean, anything. We have these graphical user experiences and, um, you have to install special editions to get to the terminal on a Mac. Um, and often it's just hard to get started in the early days of Apple and Macintosh. There were things like HyperCard. There was BASIC.

There were all these things that were built in that allowed people to kind of access the underbelly computers seems to be less accessible than it was, you know, in the early days. So I guess you have a pretty awesome handle, right? Ultrasaurus. And you've even gone as far on your site to explain what an Ultrasaurus is. But for those who don't want to go to that URL and read your awesome copy about what an Ultrasaurus is, which I totally enjoyed, what is an Ultrasaurus? Can you tell us now? It's a very large dinosaur. So I'm not sure that I was, I didn't give it a lot of forethought when I came up with this handle because I'm not sure that I should have picked being a very large dinosaur when it comes to working in tech because there are biases against people who are older. But I did, when I first, I needed to have a domain name that was unique,

and my son was four and a half years old at the time and going through this major dinosaur phase, and the Ultrasaurus I had recently learned about, so I picked that as a domain name, and then I was experimenting with a bunch of what are now called social networks but at the day we you know sort of called themselves you know sort of consumer computer assisted collaborative work i think was what people called it or something like that and so i would need sarah is a common name and sarah allen actually is a common name so i would put ultrasaurus as the name for all these different

things that i was experimenting with um realizing only later that that would then become my actual name on the internet it's crazy though right like it I guess I'm gonna say back in the day because I chose the same thing back in the day I was adamstack.com I never was my full name because my last name is nine letters and as soon as you see nine letters you're like, I can't pronounce your name. So I was just Adam Stacks. And so you kind of choose your handle to a degree. But nowadays it's a bit more explicit, right?

When you join the web, basically, social, anything, anytime you make a presence on the web, you're asked, what is your username? And so sometimes people have several. Sometimes people have aliases because they're like catfish or whatever. But some of us are pretty explicit about who we are, and we kind of state that out there. So you sort of did it accidentally to a degree. Yeah. And now, of course, it's very convenient because as long as i'm relatively early in this whatever it is i usually altasaurus is a unique name so let's talk a bit about uh i guess past the apple 2 past

basic at what point did it become real for you you know like you're a kid you were 12 but at what point were you like i i want to do this for a living. I like this stuff. I could do something with it. At what point did that happen for you? It wasn't until after I graduated from college. I'd actually gotten a computer science degree and co-founded a company before I decided that this was actually what I wanted to do. How's that happen? Well, I went to Brown University and I was kind of really interested in studying language, but I ended up wanting to get a visual arts degree. And I was really interested in studio art, but I didn't think that that was...

If I was paying all this money for college, I should do something practical. So I studied computer science as a backup because I figured I could always get a job programming. And then I decided not to do art full-time because I wanted not to compromise my art. And I had this theory that if I was a programmer by day that I would have time to do art, which I did probably for one year of my career. But as I think we all know, it can be a little all-consuming to be a programmer.

Yes. So a bunch of my friends who graduated a half a year before me were starting this company. We called it the Company of Science and Art, which was a very good fit for me. And I joined the founding team of this company, and still we were building software, but I didn't think that this was what I was going to do with my life. And then it was only I was answering a tech support call, because we all took turns playing know playing tech support um there were only eight of us at the company and this is probably like a year later and um there somebody

had bought our software and had a question about like what what it could do and i had helped write the manual i was very proud of myself and i said oh you just turn to page 34 and you can see right there that it does whatever. And the guy said, wow, I didn't know computers could do that. And he said, I just bought this software as a lark. I thought maybe it would be helpful, but I was not convinced that this was even possible. And I was really struck by that because it was something like, you know, our software, you could, then it did audio and, like, synchronized graphics and audio off CD-ROM, and this was, like, connecting

something like Macromine Director to play our audio and video triggered from something mechanical. So nowadays, like that's mom and apple pie. Everybody realizes that, you know, the Internet of Things, you can connect things and sensors to computers. But even then, I knew that that was possible. It never occurred to me that there was anybody who was literate, who would have a computer, who would not realize that this was possible, right? That just maybe it was, you know, took a bunch of work to make it, to make the connections

happen, and maybe it wasn't practical, like maybe it wasn't worth the expense of doing it, but it was certainly possible. And that there was somebody who thought that maybe it wasn't possible. And then I thought of all the things that I can think of that I know are possible. Like I just know it because of all the things that I know. And then I can imagine these things that other people can't imagine because they don't think they're possible.

Blows your mind. Yeah. So I just started at a relatively young age thinking about all the things that I knew were possible that other people could. Maybe they didn't have access to those, like even those ideas. And maybe it was my responsibility or opportunity to make some of those things. And we just, we ship a weekly email called Change Law Weekly. And this isn't a plug for that, but it's awesome. You should sign up for it. We just shipped this latest issue, and I'm going to it right now because I was really excited to put this one post in there in particular, and it was about is coding the new literacy. And that's actually the one it was – that's actually the title of it.

And it was a Mother Jones post, but it was from back in the day, and I'm glad they didn't have it time stamped well enough so that when people get there, you can judge it based on its date. Because it was such a great article about how – I think what you're talking about, and correct me if I'm wrong, but being that coding is a new literacy, when you understand how the phone in your pocket works and you can make something for it it like it changes your life because you could never do that before right and even further back you couldn't even imagine that something could do you know the aha moment where you're mentioning where you're on that customer service call like how could you not know that's possible i know it's possible why can't you know it's possible and it's just it's so mind- blowing to see the gap there between those who know what's possible and those who don't and the literacy gap in between. And look how close Sarah came to not having that at all.

You know, what if her mom didn't start selling computers? What if she had decided not to go ahead and go forward with programming? You know, those things. And even for me, I had a similar circumstance where I was introduced to programming at a very young age. And I think back, that was a catalyst moment for me. What if that had never been shown to me? Would I have been a completely different person? And it's turned out to be, you know, absolutely essential and something that I enjoy so much and enjoy sharing with others. But it was because somebody exposed it to me and let me see what programming was all about and let me see the possibilities of being able to create. And so definitely having that opportunity.

I hate that it was a chance for many people in the past. And I think there's a real initiative to change that. Yeah, I agree. I think that I think everybody should learn to code for the same reasons that I think everybody should understand photosynthesis. You know, like it's not like I use everybody should understand photosynthesis. You know, like, it's not like I use this in my daily life. Like, I don't really use chemistry or maybe you could argue that I use physics because, you know, gravity makes a difference in my life. But there's so many things that I learned in grade school that just helped me make decisions about the world. You

know, they helped me understand global warming and they helped me understand why, you know, I think I should pay taxes for certain things that, you know, protect our, you know, that I think there should be laws that protect our environment. And it may help me reason about the world. And I think coding is like one of those things. I don't think everybody needs to be a software developer, but everybody should be able to have these tools. That's what I tell so many people, too. I meet people who are very, you know, either one, intellectual naturally or educated. And I'm like, you would be a really awesome program.

I could just tell based on how you think. And it's not so much that, hey, you should go and program for a living, but it'd be kind of neat to sit down and learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as a start potentially. And just like, just understand, like you said before, what's possible. You know, I think that people don't really grasp that, and I wish more people got it. Yeah, I agree. I also think that I like you. Sometimes I meet people, and you can kind of see how their brain works, and you're like, wow, I have an instinct that you'd be good at this and like it. But I also think that it's really hard to tell who's going to be good at programming based on other characteristics. I have this theory that if you took 100 people, that there would always be a certain percentage of them who are good at coding.

Like, I don't know whether it's 20% or 50% or 80%, but it's not 100%. And I think it has a lot to do with whether people love it. There's like this crazy gratification that some of us get when you're like, wow, it works. Oh my gosh. It's like magic. And not everybody has that amazing thrill when it works. But I think there's some percentage of people, right, for whom they have that. It's exciting. It's fun. It, like, clicks through your brain in a certain way. And it has nothing to do with whether you're good at math. It has nothing to do with any particular attribute that I've ever been able to see.

It's just that some people love it and have that, like, special spark of this is what they, you know, it all makes sense to them. And, you know, and I think that so many people are just not even exposed to it that you would just never know it. And that's what's so fun about these weekend workshops we do, that people learn it and some people they just end up like, okay, well, I have this skill that i didn't have before and that's good um and then other people it changes their whole world i'm

gonna take a break here in a minute or so to to cover a sponsor but before we do that i want to ask you one question and then dive deep into what you're doing at bridge foundry and the question is since you mentioned it, the love moment with programming, at what point can you remember? When did you fall in love with it? And you're like, I'm never leaving this. This is my thing. This is what I'm doing. What was that moment for you? Well, I think it's interesting because I always loved doing it, but I didn't value it. And I think that I always felt when I was a kid and programming that it was like doing a crossword puzzle. Or like those, I used to always love those blacksmith puzzles where they're physical puzzles and you try to get the, you try to kind of unhook the loops from each other. But it never occurred to me that I could or should spend my day job doing something that was so fun. And I believe that like kind of I was inculcated and maybe it was just how things

were in the 80s. Like if you were going to do something meaningfully with your life, that that wasn't necessarily something that could be as so joyful. And so I assumed that it was something that I would just have to do in my spare time, periodically, just for entertainment. And that I couldn't connect it to something that would be actually meaningful in the world, which I think was terribly short-sighted because, of course, computers can, even then, could affect pretty positive change in the world.

But I wasn't really exposed to that. I wasn't exposed to how powerful computers could be solving real important problems. That was, for whatever reason, that wasn't something that I was exposed to until, you know, I was in my 20s. I guess on that note, let's take a quick break. We'll hear from one of our awesome sponsors making this show possible. And when we get back, we're going to talk about Bridge Foundry. So we'll be right back.

You've heard me talk about Top Towel several times on this podcast but today is different i've got a special treat for you i went out and spoke with a listener who a year ago had never heard of top towel he listened to the show just like you're doing right here right now today and heard us talk about top towel and what they're all about and he decided to get in touch and now he's living the dream as a freelance software developer with TopTile. His name is Daniel Elzon. And I sat down and I talked with him. I said, hey, what is it that you love most about TopTile?

Take a listen. Well, for me, the thing about TopTile, which I thought would be very hard for me personally as I transitioned to a more consulting role, was the way I would have access to new clients and what quality those would be. So I found that I've had access to awesome clients through TopTal and it hasn't been that hard to find because they have a lot of choice. And even more than that, there's enough choice and I can actually be a little selective about what kinds of things I want to be working on. So I use that as a way to sort of hone my skills

and go towards the technologies I think are worth investing in for the future. So whether it's including new front-end frameworks or doing a little DevOps work on the side, I usually am able to find clients who have the needs of the things I want to get better at. So that's been truly useful. All right. That was Daniel LaZon, a listener of The Change Log and also a freelance software developer with TopTal. If you want to follow in Daniel's footsteps, go to TopTal.com slash developers.

That's T-O-P-T-A-L dot com slash developers to learn more about what TopTal is all about and tell them the changelog sent you. All right, we're back. Bridge Foundry. I'm excited about this because I've heard so much from Beverly about the work you guys do. There's, we had Sarah May on the show, episode 146. So for those listening, we'll have that link in the show notes, but it's easy to type in changelog.com slash 146. We talked about, particularly in that show, we talked about Minding the Gap. We also talked about

a little bit of Bridge Foundry, but also Rails Bridge and this outreach and this education and serving the underrepresented. Where should we begin the conversation around Bridge Foundry? Well, maybe begin with the core workshops that, you know, that's really the thing that took off and has made this organization grow. We had this insight that when we started, it was about really overcoming gender diversity in the Ruby community. And that, you know, very simple insight that maybe if we wanted women to, more women in our community, we should teach them the technology that we're using. had done a lot of reading on the statistics and knew that in proprietary software, in corporations,

typically you see about 20 to 25 percent women programmers. In open source, you see 2 to 3 percent women programmers or women contributors of any kind. It's kind of even worse than, you know, not just having women programmers, but now women in the community. But if you do the math, and I knew sort of roughly how many Ruby programmers there were, it was likely, and probably still is today, that there are more women programmers in the Bay Area than there are Ruby programmers. So I figured, hey, if we could just convert some of them, it would be easy to get 50-50. Easy, I say in quotes, to have 50-50 women and men in the Ruby community.

And if you start with a small community, you can do really powerful things. So we started with this idea, well, let's just teach women. And Sarah was really passionate about teaching people who couldn't code and so I said okay you teach that class I'll teach the women programmers because I feel like I'm going to get to a quicker outcome

of actually having women peers if I start with women Java developers or women C sharp developers or whatever and we thought it would be really hard to find women to take this workshop that we had dreamed up. And we spent like three weeks trying to figure out where we were going to post this.

And we both tweeted about it, and she posted on this mailing list called San Francisco Women of the Web. And in less than 24 hours, we had a wait list. Wow. And back, I mean, you guys might remember, this was, I think, 2007. And it was common for people to say, oh, maybe women don't want to code. You know, this is this arcane thing.

And it just might be that there are fewer women who are interested. And the fact that we had these workshops, and we had them every other month, and there was always a wait list. And in San Francisco, we've just consistently had 20 to 60-person wait lists for these events that we've been having for like seven years. It's unbelievable. So really, in just a few months, people stopped saying that demand was a problem. And it really transformed how people thought about, you know, the problems with diversity. But, and it really changed how, you know, kind of I felt as a woman in the field I would just routinely be in these groups with 50 women

coding and some of them were amazing technologists who just didn't happen to know Rails and it was really fun and really transformative for me personally as well as for the community. And if you hear Sarah May talk, she gave this great presentation in December of that year where we were both keeping stats of the Ruby meetups. And they went from 3% women to 18% women in less than six months. So tell me something, Sarah, about how you made the jump to, because this is something that people have asked me, not only how you made the jump from doing just Rails to Bridge Foundry is now offering, and you can probably name them.

I know we've got the mobile bridge. I know we've got most recently an Angular, I believe. But how did that go from just one particular technology to others? And then I'm curious about how people, if they say, I want to do this, for example, I want to bring a new technology to my area, you know, what would I, what would I do? What are the next steps for that? That's a great question. Actually, from the get-go, we, it was sort of controversial that we, we called it Rails Bridge because we, one of the other projects that we started at the time, I was teaching Ruby to kids, elementary school students, but we decided to call it Rails Bridge because it really grew out of people in the Rails

community that wanted to change things. And we didn't think of it from the get-go as only about Rails. The reason we picked Rails for the workshops is not only that was the most of what Sarah and I were doing, but it was very hot at the time to be doing Rails. And it's not like now there's been a lot of kind of learn-to-code marketing. President Obama has mentioned this a lot, and we've had a lot of new organizations really promote the value of learning to code, but that was not at all true when we started. So it was really important to latch onto something that had its own momentum.

But what we did very intentionally is we made all of the materials open source. And we said, hey, anybody can take these materials, do what you want. And the only guideline we set is that in order to call it a RailsBridge workshop, it has to be free and it has to be targeted at outreaching to some community that's underrepresented in tech, which turns out to be like the majority of people in the world. So it's not that hard. But what we saw is all of these spinoff groups. So there were like three different Python groups.

There was PyStar. There was the Boston Python Workshops, which is very popular. And they did a great job in reaching out to the Python community and actually created, I think the individuals who did that had transformative effects in affecting conference speakers and a lot of different ripple effects that were very exciting to see. And we actually have a funny story because I did a workshop in Cambridge, I think in our first year, but it didn't really catch on in the Boston Ruby community until after the Boston Python workshops.

And then they were so inspired by seeing the Boston Python workshops that we ended up with a Boston Ruby community that's very, very strong. And so really from the beginning, we had a vision of it being any technology. But I think because we had Rails in the name, people who were coming from a different technology that was substantively different than Rails felt like they needed to create their own separate organization. And so we saw that happening, and we really saw that there was this potential

for really sharing what I call the meta stuff, the how to make a workshop and the teaching guidelines and this sort of viral workshop phenomenon is something that transcends the technology. So a few years ago, we decided to create Bridge Foundry, which is really just a renaming of the umbrella organization that we'd always envisioned to house things that were not just Rails, and then renaming Rails Bridge to be just the workshop component of it that was focused on the Rails workshops. And we're still in the midst of that refactor because we still do front-end workshops that are under Rails Bridge and, you know, things like that. We're still sorting things out. But it's pretty easy to create a new

bridge. We have Closure Bridge really took off in the last year. That's Closure with a J, which is really exciting to have a functional language join the family because I feel like if you learn a functional language and an object-oriented language and a web application framework, you kind of have a bunch of the key components that you need to be a powerful software developer today. And then with mobile bridge, I think that also kind of rounds out the family where people are learning native code and device code with Java and Objective-C.

So to start a new bridge, you just email hello at bridgefoundry.org. We're working on having the guidelines be posted, but the best way to get a sense of how it works is to go to one of these bridge workshops, wherever you are. And if you want to check one out, you can go to bridgetroll.org and um most of the um different technologies post their workshops there

and um and the process is pretty easy basically we'll have a conversation about like do you really understand like the what we're trying to do here because it's most of it's written down but it's written down in a lot of different places and we're working on ways to make that kind of the, the documentation be more comprehensive. So a lot of it is transmitted through kind of the oral tradition about talking about the mission and do you understand it? And are you going to move things forward in this direction? And if we, if we're aligned in philosophy, then, um, you then fork, um,

one of the different, um, organizations on GitHub and, um, angular bridge did this most recently by just forking the mobile bridge materials. And, um, we have a very collaborative process. We like the GitHub issues mechanism for sharing openly. And so even though I think it's, I don't love calling workshops issues. Yes. I wish they were stories. You know, I wish we were using, I wish GitHub would change their nomenclature. Not only for workshops. I've heard that before, for sure.

But also for open source projects. Everything isn't an issue. But anyhow, we use that, and it's very easy to tag people, and it's completely transparent, so anybody can come join the organizing team for a workshop. And I think that's a breakthrough that Rachel Myers innovated and then all of the different bridges are starting to use those techniques, which I think is really exciting. And that's been super helpful for me as well because I actually was tagged on something for a Rails bridge that was regionally close to me, but not necessarily in my state or even in my town. But it was something that I could provide assistance on. And because everything is transparent, it's not stuck in someone's email box. So this collaboration

is, you know, it's truly a community helping to organize these workshops. And something else that I think is really nice is all the curriculum is open source. So people can contribute to it and they can, I've seen lots of Railsbridge forks in the past for the curriculum there. And so I think that's been really helpful to see that. And something else I was going to ask you to share, Sarah, is that this is really a culmination of the stone soup illustration that you've shared on your blog before, because we're all bringing what we have as a talent and essentially to really better the community and to teach them. Do you mind sharing how that's really manifested with the stone soup illustration?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like often putting a workshop together is like that. It's very intimidating. I mean, to put on an event, especially because most of our volunteers are developers. They're individual contributors who know how to write code and they're inspired to share what they know. but most of them have not put on an event or approached a company about donating space or, you know, God forbid, asked for somebody for money for sponsoring something. And so each of these things seems a big, big hurdle. And often all we need is somebody to say, okay, I will organize it. And then it's much easier for somebody to help than it is for somebody to do. And I think this was best illustrated by

somebody, I got a tweet one day from, I can't remember who was first, whether it was Leanna Leahy or Mary Tolbert from Boston, who said, hey, how do we have a RailsBridge workshop in Boston? This was the very first one that actually took place in Cambridge. And I said, well, my family's there. If you organize a workshop, then I'll come teach. And based on that, you know, I was like, I'll bring a rock. Let's make soup. You know, we found TAs, space, all of the things came together, and every single person who was involved, some people did an awful lot of work,

but it's that impetus. Somebody has to say, okay, I will step up. I will bring the first space space or i will be the first teacher i will um you know in the case of a new bridge i will write some pot like lunch or something like that you know it's like everybody brings something and everybody eats exactly many hands make light work yes yes for sure well that's neat um i guess another question I have for you is your passion for the underrepresented. Not only gender-based or race-based, but even down to children. You love kids.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it comes from— Who doesn't love kids, right? Who doesn't love kids? Well, some people don't. I have a child. I have a boy child, which is also comes from one. Like, I didn't want to do things just for girls because I would never want to do something that he couldn't be a part of. And I also see how there's true.

I by no means ever want to diminish anyone's enthusiasm for doing this great work. But if you have a boy child, there's actually fewer things these days to bring them to, to get them enthusiastic about technology, because there's a lot of girls only programs now. But there are, you know, there are fewer programs that are inclusive of boys, which is kind of an odd thing. Because, I mean, only 10 years ago, all the things were not, even if they weren't targeted at boys, they feel that way if it's going to be mostly boys. So I think we just need to be balanced in our approach and make it so that these opportunities are available for everyone. And I'm also very painfully aware that a lot of the work we do is really available to people who are quite well off. You know, again, not to diminish the fact that there is very real sexism in the world,

and there are a lot of women who, you know, maybe they have a lot of resources, but they still can't find a job because of barriers in the workplace. But then there are people who have the aptitude for this work, and they don't have a laptop, can't come to a workshop. And when we were doing the very first year of RailsBridge, I was really struck by, like, is this the work that I want to be doing with my life? Like, teaching coding to, you know, people of privilege.

And a very good friend of mine, David Bogarts, who I know from high school, said to me, well, maybe what you're doing is you're first doing this work in the community that you know, the people that you are most like and most have access to. And then if you're successful and, you know, you make this transformative, you will then have a whole lot of volunteers who can then take this further. And it's very, very exciting to start seeing that now. There's a volunteer here in San Francisco, Michelle Glouser, who's looking at, you know, are there places in San Francisco, and we've identified a few of them, that are teaching, like, Word and Excel and PowerPoint to people who don't have computers. And maybe there's an opportunity for partnership there. Maybe we could teach coding classes in their labs because I think that we have to go beyond just teaching people to write words on computers. I think there's just such an opportunity

to broaden our group of makers to all the people in the world. And if we don't do that, we will not solve the problems that we need to solve to fix the planet we're on, or all the damage we're doing to the planet we're on, I should say. I'm reminded of that every day. I don't know about you, but I watch Vice News on HBO every once in a while, and they had this episode recently about this myth called global warming. I'm not sure which side of the fence you stand on, but it seems so scientifically clear and so

visibly clear that we have some serious issues, and they may or not be able to be solved by us by reducing carbon emissions and things like that, but there is a problem, and there is something but there is a problem and there is something to be to be solved there and yet people can still turn a blind eye to this changing earth we're on and still do crazy stuff uh you know adjacent to that was a topic in india and how they have really poor sewage system and they have how they have public defecation like it's crazy how there's such severe conditions in the world. And we're just, you know, I guess bubbled.

People say privileged. And I'm almost, I'm weary of that because I know I'm privileged. But at the same time, there's some things in my past. Because I'm white. I'm a male. But I grew up poor. I should not be here where I'm at today. And if I told you my story,

you'd cry. But I got a crazy story and it wasn't privileged my whole life even though I'm white and I'm a male. And I feel like we're in these bubbles.

It's like you said, touch the people you can that you have most access to and once you've proven the concept or proven your ability, move on to or have a ton of volunteers

to go to the next step. Yeah, I'm really glad you said that because and thank you for kind of sharing a little bit of your personal story, because I mean, that's one of the things that I'm always so moved by the people who attend these workshops. One of the things that we always do is provide coffee in the morning and snacks and lunch. And we have an after party where the volunteers get drink tickets and everybody goes out and socializes. And that's really, I've always thought that was important because it keeps people there in this social environment. But after one workshop, we got this feedback of somebody who said that they would not have been able to afford to eat except that the food was provided.

And so it was very, it was incredible to them because it was such an equalizer. Whereas normally, you know, if they go, they either have to not eat or you know everybody else goes out to eat and they can't join and um i i remember writing this blog post post called the psychology of abundance and i think that's so important for creating a great learning environment is not feeling you know this desperate feeling of like, of scarcity, right? I think that that inhibits our creativity. And for to just for one day, to give everybody that feeling of, there's food here for me, there are people here for me, I've got all the things. And the only thing that I have to overcome is that very challenging gap from what I don't know to what I do know.

And I get the same everything as everybody else for this one day. And I think that that's just such a precious thing. I wish everybody in the world had that. Yeah. I think that something that is really tremendous about the workshops is that it really is an equalizer. And one of the things that's really great about the whole Stone Soup concept and everybody in your area giving what you can or doing what you can for your local region, you know,

for example, Sarah can't do anything in Florida. She can, but she's not in proximity to Florida. I'm here. This is a circle that I can impact. I'm not in San Francisco. I can't impact her circle, but she can. And one of the things that I do like is that because we're connected by the internet, because we have these workshops, because we have GitHub, she's also helped me to be more sensitive to really the people that we look up to and the heroes that we have. And Sarah, you wrote a post about being an ally. I don't know if you recall that, that started out about talking about being privileged and

things like that. I would love it if you'd share more about your experience and just focusing on even diversifying your heroes and looking to different people, even in different sectors, because I think that's tremendous. It really helps us to grow. I like that post, by the way. It was really good. Yeah, it's a great post, isn't it?

Thanks. That actually came out of Martin Luther King Day. And every year for Mightyverse for the last, I don't know, three or four years, we do we've been taking the I have a dream speech and translating it into another language and doing recordings of different voices. And, you know, as we all know, the past year has been a rough year for race in America. It has just come. I mean, I have just such empathy for people who have a different experience of me and who don't feel safe in their own cities um you know and as a woman i've you know there's certainly a lot of places

that i don't feel safe but um it's just it can't be compared to being a black person in america and um there was a number of articles the two weeks before mart Luther King Day about the Santa classification of Dr. Martin Luther King, and that he's like somehow, you know, safe, black hero. And it's, and that there's only certain speeches, and parts of speeches that are retold. And that, you know, the I Have a Dream speech that has been, at least in some people's thinking, appropriated by white America. And then I was like, oh, no, I'm doing this whole thing around I Have a Dream. And I felt it was really important to write about this other perspective. um and i think that i have this voice which can be heard by white people easier than um than you know other voices i think we're

we all get a chance to be change agents and i think that's sort of the role you play because somebody just said there was that you have, paraphrasing because it's kind of broke my mind, but that you have access to white people's minds, I guess. How did you say it? Well, I think that I can be heard. You can be heard. Okay. That's, yeah.

I don't remember exactly how I said it, but that I think that I am of a culture. And even though that in some ways I'm in a marginalized community in my wider community. I'm a woman. I have certain attributes. I'm now a little older. I'm a mom. Like, these are things that, you know, not everybody who is a software engineer think highly of. But at the same time, as I'm marginalized in some circles, in other circles, I'm given undue weight and undue respect. Not undue, but uneven. You know, I got a computer science degree. I went to an Ivy League school. I started

programming when I was 12. You know, like these are all these attributes that some people, I think, are overvalued, right? It's not that I don't think they should be valued. It's just that I think people who taught themselves to code when they're 25 should be as respected as somebody who went through four years of a CS degree. And so we need, we need to just take advantage of the, you know, the, the platforms that we have to, as you say, make change. Sarah, the one thing I'm noticing, though, is that you allow the things that marginalize you

to describe you, not define you, right? Like you're not boxed in by them. They're part of who you are. They don't make up who you are. They're not your identity. Yeah, I think it's, I mean mean it took me a long time to get to that space um and i think that it's it for a long time i um i worried about um that i was being like too female a little quiet voice little shy voice for a long time. And that I really tried to change who I was and how I behaved so that I would not be,

have my ideas boxed in by how people perceived me. And then I think certainly growing up and being a parent and being a mom, I've grown to really cherish, you know, these different parts of me. And luckily was able to seek out people who celebrate the, you know, how we're all different from each other. And that that, and largely through the work of RailsBridge and Bridge Foundry, had a chance to meet and interact with this completely different community that is hundreds of thousands of people inside the software community that actually values the things that I value. And I used to think that it was 0.001% or something.

It was so rare for me to interact with people who shared my values that I thought that it was too much for me to expect that I could work with these people, that I felt like I had to hide my values under a bushel. But it's not that way. And I think that's very exciting. That's a good time to take a pause real quick and hear from a sponsor. Our last sponsor for the show here. We'll break for a minute, come back.

Beverly's got a pressing question for you that I'm excited to hear about. So when we get back, Beverly will take over. So just a sec. I have yet to meet a single person who doesn't love DigitalOcean. If you've tried DigitalOcean,

you know how awesome it is. And here at the Changelog, everything we have runs on blazing fast SSD cloud servers from DigitalOcean. And I want you to use the code CHANGELOG

when you sign up today to get a free month. Run a server with 1 gig of RAM and 30 gigs of SSD drive space totally for free on DigitalOcean. Use the code CHANGELOG. Again, that code is CHANGELOG. Use that when you sign up for a new account. Head to DigitalOcean.com to sign up and tell them that Changelog sent you. All right, we're back.

Beverly, what do you have on your side over there? The primary question is, so I've really benefited from hearing a lot of your experience. So if you are talking to somebody who is in an area who maybe they're not in San Francisco, maybe they're in a smaller area, North Carolina or something like that, and they hear this and they're inspired to impact their area or to make sure that software is more available and they don't want it to be by chance, what are the things that you would suggest that they do where they are?

What is an action step that they could take today to start making themselves available to other people or to serve their community or to make information accessible where they are? Well, I think that wherever anybody is, there's opportunity to volunteer and reach out and teach what you know. So if you don't, if you're excited about this and there's things you don't know and you want to learn, there's a lot of great online resources. But I'm a huge fan of connecting in person with your local community. I think that those ties can be very, very powerful. So there's a lot of different groups doing this kind of work, but I would also encourage you to, you know, don't be afraid to start things. I think just look out at your local meetups.

Go out there and check out all the different things happening in your community and the things happening online. And look for the opportunities to meet like-minded people. And get yourself a support system too you know I think that that's really important that um that there's a balance and one of the things that I've found for myself and I've seen in other people is that by doing this work it gives back and if you're feeling drained by it, then I think you need to strike a balance where you're also getting support and you're finding a way where you can strike that

balance where you're getting enriched by the work that you do as well as doing it. And I think too, we sometimes have this vision of, oh, I've got to have a workshop with 50 people, or I've got to have a workshop with 30 people or something like that. And it's really not true because one of the things that I remember reading about your teaching kids, RailsBridge, that was one of the first things when I started teaching kids that I looked to as a resource because now I teach a monthly tech club for homeschoolers. And we've used some of that material and some of the ideas that you expressed a long time ago in that in those posts and things and something that people need to realize is they could have a you

know coffee table meetup in fact the first rails bridge workshop it actually probably wasn't an officially sanctioned workshop but literally there were three of us around a kitchen table and i said let's go through the curriculum together because you know they wanted to get started they couldn't go for and and there was no minimum i, it wasn't an official workshop, but you don't have to have this formal thing. The lovely thing about open source is that the curriculum is available and you can impact your community. And you've been such a good example of that, of just starting, just doing something and, you know, just being free to go ahead and try something different and impact your community that way. Yeah. I would also underscore that there, there need be no official sanction.

Correct. If it's free, if you're doing it in your community, um, and you're teaching others, it's a, you know, you can, um, use all the materials and do the work and, um, it's a wonderful thing. And, um, and yeah, and I started teaching kids just, you know, my kids' elementary school and doing things small scale first. The other thing that's great about teaching kids, and I would highly recommend, is I taught, I practiced the lessons with my kid and two of his friends. And then I let them be TAs. And kids, getting kids to teach kids, I think is the most amazing thing because they will learn so much through teaching

and giving them that responsibility is I think the best thing that you can give to them. And they have no fear. That was something that you shared with me after we had our RailsBridge team. And my kind of post-notes debrief as I was going through it was like, they were willing to experiment and try in ways that the adults were not. And we had an entirely, it was under 18.

It was roughly 7th to 12th graders who did the RailsBridge workshop. And it was amazing. It was amazing to see. And then they would help each other. And then they would teach each other a little bit. It was really, really amazing to see that. Kids, kids are so awesome. So Sarah, I've been, it was sort of last minute too, as I'm prepping the notes to,

to prepare for this call is thinking, you know, what would be a profound question to ask you in addition to some of our awesome closing questions we'll ask you as well, but what's a good profound question that I could ask you that would get something futuristic to get you to hypothesize about the future or what isn't there that should be there? And the question is, what's missing in software that you wish was there that either you're actively trying to add or hope to one day be able to add? Software, community, not just tech-wise, but just in this space we're in, open source, things you're involved in.

Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think there's like a few different angles on it. I think the biggest thing that's missing in the world today is great places to work. I have been really fortunate in working with really amazing teams, and largely because I sought them out. I think that there's a lot of people who, I talk to women all the time, who are leaving the workforce. Not the workforce, just leaving computing. They've decided they, or they're coming back through the workshops, right? So I think that the biggest thing that we need is workplaces where people respect each other, regardless of what they look like or their backgrounds or how they came to be computer programmers.

And I think we need this everywhere, right? opportunity in tech to fix it because the entry points are so low in terms of not having to have a formalized background to get into it. It still takes a lot of hard work to get into it, but I think we have a tremendous opportunity to transform the workplace into a place where people actually respect each other regardless of their background. So that's the biggest thing that is not missing, but not as ubiquitous as I think it should be. And then the other thing which I think ties into the entry point is that I think that every computer and every device should come with software that lets you hack it. I think that it should not be, it shouldn't require you to install extra stuff

to write simple code that controls your computer or your device. Does that mean that you're pro-Android and anti-Apple? Well, I'm a big fan of Apple's software and hardware, but it is, I think Steve Wozniak had a great influence on the early Mac and early Apple. And I think that something's been lost there. So iOS must upset you then to a degree because it does take a computer and extra software to do anything with it. You can't do much from the actual device. Well, it's bigger than that it was actually against their terms of service to develop any app that allowed the end user to code until like a year or two ago

so apple creates policies that makes it harder for third-party developers to make us accessible. And, you know, that's changing, but it needs to change more. So for those who are longtime listeners of the show know that we have a few questions we'd like to ask at the end of the show. We're going to ask two today. We're not going to do several of them. But one, I want to ask you in particular that sort of contrasts against something you might say in response to your On Being an Ally post when you said name your heroes. And you said seriously make a list of your top ten if they were mostly one race, class, or gender.

Find some more heroes. And we have a question we like to ask people, which is who's your programming hero? I guess we can open that up to be any hero, but I'd like to see if you can name 10. Well, I'll name six. Actually, I don't know all of their names. But my programming heroes are the women who programmed the ENIAC. So in 1945, there were two engineers who created one of the first, maybe the first digital computer, which was the ENIAC. And it was built to solve these parabolic equations to, I think they were, to do the trajectory of the ballistics for

World War II. Before the computer, they had women who they would hire who were math majors. They recruited to use slide rules to create these books of

you would have the angle that the gun was pointed and what kind of munition it was and, like, the wind speed and these different inputs. And then it would say, like, how they would set up these, you know, the guns in order to point the artillery at the enemy. And actually, in the early 1900s, they would call these women who would do math computers. There's a great book called If Computers Were Human, or When Computers Were Human, sorry. Anyhow, they took six of the best computers, and they told them that they had a new assignment for them. And they gave them the wiring diagrams, the schematics of the computer and of the new machine.

And they said that they needed to figure out how to wire up the inputs and outputs in order to make it do the same calculations that they had been doing with slide rules. And these six women were the very first programmers. And I was just looking up Kay McNulty and Gene Jennings invented the subroutine, which was like, oh, we won't have to plug in these wires to make these connections. As many times we could reuse this little bit of logic. And, you know, and they invented loops and all of these, you know, sort of very common programming structures today that they were doing programming by like connecting, you know, wires to sockets. And I think those are my heroes. They were doing things that were actually hard. And then after, you know, when all this stuff became public, they were not even mentioned in any of the articles.

That's not cool. That's not cool. That's not cool. What's very exciting is 50 years later, Kathy Kleiman did a whole lot of research and surfaced these stories. And in the last 10 years, there's been a number of articles about this amazing work that these women did. And I just love to hear about the early days of, you know, women and men when they were, you know, inventing things and creating things that now we take for granted. So we have one other question that we wanted to ask to Sarah, and that is, and I know a little

bit of this because I'm already involved somewhat with Bridge Foundry, but even if you're not somebody who's going to TA, you don't necessarily have a technology that you want to put forward and you want to go ahead and share. What would you say is a good call to arms for Bridge Foundry, or if somebody wants to step in and help, and maybe they're a designer, or maybe they're just a community innovator. Like I have a friend who's really great at just planning parties, and so she's really good at helping with workshops because she's good at the logistics. What would you say to someone like that or some things that they should see about contributing to or ways that they might be able to help their community, even if they're not a programmer and they aren't starting a new workshop or creating curriculum? Well, I think that there's, we need all the things, right? That people who can organize logistics and organize events

are precious and amazing people. And there's, it turns out that we've had an easier time finding teachers and TAs than the other skills. And maybe it's because, you know, we're finding people who are like us and that's always easier, but, um, you know, and, or maybe we just not getting out, getting the word out effectively, but, um, but the people who know, who are willing to step up and, you know, do the logistics side of things and put up events. And, um,

and the other thing is i think people who are willing to write the stories who are willing to show up at an event and take photos and write a blog post i believe that if more people even just knew what was happening with all of these workshops and the programmers teaching programmers, and people becoming new programmers every weekend, that that would transform the world as much as our doing the work itself. Definitely. Because a lot of it is just like we started talking about at the beginning. Knowing it's possible, knowing it's an option is half the battle.

And making it accessible to everybody. That's really the end goal. Yeah. Making it, you know, I mean, like I look at these, I think about these, you know, sort of young musicians who you hear these amazing young people, you know, from all walks of life, right, who are coming out of, you know, poverty or different backgrounds where maybe they wouldn't think of being a programmer. And they're so creative. I think those are the people who should be, like, making mobile apps. And I'd like, you know, I think it has to be reaching everybody. Well, that's certainly true for sure.

Well, it's been a pleasure having you on the show finally, Sarah. Very excited about what you're working on. Very awesome for you to give us your time today to sort of dive deep, not only into some of your passions, but also to share some of your backstory about who you are and what makes Ultrasaurus Ultrasaurus. I've been very curious about who you are and where you've come from so I appreciate being privileged enough to sit here and have this conversation with you

and Beverly thank you so much for making this possible too just kind of aligning the stars with us and Sarah and just sharing what you do sharing the ways that you work with Bridge Foundry in your area is there anything else you want to cover before we tail off? you work with Bridge Foundry in your area. Is there anything else you want to cover before we tail off? Because if not, I'm going to go through our rundown of going out, and that'll be it. Well, I think just one more plug. We would love to have more open source contributors to Bridge Troll, which is our open source registration system. We would love designers and developers, people who want to write up stories of how it's used

or screencasts for new organizers. So whatever part of the software development process that you might be excited to contribute with, go to GitHub. In the Rails Bridge organization, there's a bridge troll repo and lots of instructions about how to get started. And join our Google group, and we'd love to have you. Awesome. Yeah, we talked about that a little bit on Sarah's show.

She mentioned the same thing. So you guys are in sync on promoting contributions to that. So we'll link it up in the show notes for sure. Because that's what we do around here, right? Excellent. So just for those who are listening, what did I say this episode number was? 157.

So this is episode 157. Go to changelog.com slash 157. Everything we talked about, heroes and all will be in there. We'll do all the digging for you. Don't worry about wrecking your car because you're trying to type down a URL. It's not going to happen. Don't do that.

Just go to our show notes and you'll be taken care of. Thanks to all the listeners for listening to the show. Thanks to our sponsors, CodeShip, TopTile, and DigitalOcean for being awesome and supporting the show. Next week we have an awesome show as well. Every week is an awesome show single page apps with Henrik and I haven't practiced pronouncing his last name but I think it's Jorteg or it's Horteg

I haven't asked but if anybody here knows correct me please but other than that I think that's the end of the show so let's say goodbye everybody bye bye thank you so much thank you so much thank you you