The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - From zero to thought leader in 6 months (Interview)

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

We’re talking with Emma Bostian about going from zero to thought leader in 6 months. We talk about the nuances of UX including the differences between an UX Designer and a UX Engineer, we touch on ���the great divide”, and we talk about Coding Coach — the open source project and community that Emma and others are building to connect software developers and mentors all over the world.

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with ease with the DigitalOcean platform. Learn more and get started for free with a $100 credit at do.co.changelog. Again, do.co slash changelog. All right, welcome back, everyone. This is the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at ChangeLog. On today's show, we're talking with Emma Vedekind about going from zero to thought leader in six months. We talk about the nuances of user experience, including the differences between UX designer and UX engineer. There's a difference. We touch on the great divide

and we also talk about Coding Coach, the open source project and community that Emma and others are building to connect software developers and mentors all over the world. Emma, let's start off with you, an American living in Germany. This is a prominent aspect of your life, as we know, because it's on your Twitter bio. So very important stuff. Tell us a little about yourself and what you're doing over there in Germany. Yeah, so it's funny because I always confuse people, especially my colleagues when I break out,

like an American accent on meetings. I'm like, I thought you were, are you German? He's like, your English is really good. And I was like, well, you know, thanks. Like I've been practicing for 26 years, so I would hope it's good. No, so I grew up in upstate New York. I like did the whole college thing in Albany. And after I graduated, I moved on down

to Austin, which is never a place I saw myself living because we all think like cowboys and whatnot. But I ended up loving Austin and I was there for three years. I worked at IBM, had a great time. And that's kind of where I met my husband. He was this German guy working, living in Germany, like full-blooded german i have to like kind of explicitly state that because people assume that like we met in texas or like he's also an american and i'm like no no like he was in germany like we did long distance um and long distance isn't that enjoyable i don't know if y'all are aware of that but yeah no it's not fun so i was like you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna move and so I just sold everything and I flew my cats over here and I found a job.

And it's been over a year now. Was that a scary move or was it exciting or all of the above? Did it take you to build up some confidence or are you just like, heck, let's do it? Not at all. I am the most indecisive human, I think, on this entire universe. But this was the one thing I never questioned. It was like, you know what? I'm going to move to Europe.

And I think that we were fortunate because a lot of people in our situation like have to have a conversation of like who wants to move internationally. But for me, I was like, no, yeah, I'm moving to Europe. I want to travel. I want to, you know, ingest other cultures. So it was really easy.

The hardest part was job hunting. A lot of companies didn't want to invest in a foreigner because it's expensive. You have to help with the visa process and potentially relocating someone. So I was very fortunate that LogMeIn wanted to take a chance on me, and they actually helped me with the visa process as well as relocation. Where is LogMeIn based out of? They're actually headquartered in Boston. So they're an American company, and we've got offices in San Francisco, Santa Barbara.

We have offices also in Dublin and a couple in Germany, Munich and Dresden. So yeah, it's actually quite funny, like having so many American colleagues, but me being over here, I always get that question like, well, why do you live there? So yeah, it's, I mean, it's nice being at an American company too, because like if I ever wanted to move back to the U.S., I think I would have that option. What was that conversation like getting them to be cool with the whole visa and move process? Was it a big deal? Was it, you know, early in the conversation? I was kind of curious. I've never had that kind of conversation before. Like with the employer? Yeah. Like to get them to say, yeah, we'll take a risk on you to move you to Germany. That's no big deal. Like how did you broach that conversation? Yeah, I think because I had a solid reason for moving, right? I wasn't just looking for

a European adventure. I was looking to move to be with someone I plan to spend my life with. And so I had a little bit more of a reason to spread roots there. And I think that was a little bit more reassuring for them as well. So I was just very honest about it. And I said, you know, my fiance lives there. I'm looking to stay here for the indefinite future. People always ask me, like, oh, like, how long are you staying here for? I'm like, like, forever. Like, I don't plan to leave. I would say it was a pretty easy conversation. You know, it didn't work out with some employers simply for the fact that it was kind of a lot for them to invest. And that's, you know, it is what it is. I don't blame them for that.

So Emma, we got you on the show in a bit of a i guess maybe some serendipity because you happen to find us uh listening to the the conversation adam had with eric kennedy all about design advice for developers and you tweeted about it and at the moment that you tweeted something like this show's great i'm gonna download like a thousand of your episodes i was actually on dev 2 reading an article that you had written at the time and i was like yeah and i was actually on dev 2 reading an article that you had written at the time and i was like yeah and i was like that's when i responded back i'm like well we gotta we gotta get you on the show because uh you're doing lots of awesome work as well it's like we both swiped right at the same time that's so exactly oh my gosh group hug yay

oh no i'm very fortunate to be here i i've thoroughly enjoyed, you know, kind of the setup for your podcast. I love how it's a casual conversation and it seems that everyone's very authentic and everyone on here is very knowledgeable. So I'm flattered. Well, you're definitely well-deserved. A lot of the stuff you put out there has helped a ton of people. And that's kind of the thrust of what we'd love to talk about with you is your writing, your teaching, code coaching, mentoring, etc. One of the things you wrote

recently, and you're relatively new to Twitter, but you're very good at Twitter. So we can talk about that as well. You write technical stuff that is used by many of the Red Jacks cheat sheet you did recently was massively beloved and useful for many people. So we're just interested to hear about your writing, why you write, how you write, so on and so forth. Yeah, definitely. So let's see, why do I write? I write because there's a plethora of knowledge out there and I need to acquire as much of it as I can. Not that I need to, I would like to acquire as much of it as I can. And I'm the kind of person who always has to write things down and reference them. So I take blogging, my approach is I write about the things that I'm currently learning

in the hopes that they can also help others. Like I refer back to my blogs all the time for references. And it's funny because I wrote the RegEx cheat sheet because I needed like a cheat sheet or a reference to go back to. And people just assume that now I'm like a RegEx expert. I'm like, no, no, no. Like I still don't understand it. This is just, you know, something for me to go back to.

And misery loves company. So all of us hate regex or don't understand it. And thus, I think that's kind of why it caught on so much. But yeah, like how do I blog? It's kind of twofold. The first is you can plan out the topics. Like sometimes I'll tweet out polls and be like, you know, what does everyone want to read about and i generally find that i have a harder time writing those ones

because they're pre-planned most of the time what happens is i get this like burst of energy and i just sit down and like bang one out really fast um and kind of don't like reread my stuff which can get me in trouble yeah i get these like like spurts of uh inspiration and i generally take you know an hour or so and i just publish them quite immediately so one of the things that i've noticed watching your twitter feed as a as a smart vocal woman in our industry is you you have a lot of trolls or it seems like you have a lot of trolls and i'm wondering if you know some of these not so thought out posts are just like you know off the keyboard into the ether has helped with that or do you have a lot of well actually is happening so it was more prevalent I would say like the last

couple of months but I've noticed recently things have kind of died down for me a little bit in terms of trolling or like you know unsolicited messages. I will say there are other very smart, capable women out there who have it a lot worse off than I do. So I am very fortunate currently where I'm at. I do get some well actuallys and I try to view them as coming from a good place where people really just want to educate or whatnot. But occasionally, you know, they can come off a little bit malicious. I just generally try to put myself in their position with anything that comes with hate, right? So if I post something and get some negativity, I try not to let that affect me personally, like from the get go, it can be hard.

But you can take that one of two ways, like you can let that, you know, upset you, or you can take that one of two ways like you can let that you know upset you or you can take that and say well is there some truth in what they're saying and i often find that seeing things from another point of view really changes how i think about things and the and the way that i post so sounds like an incredibly healthy way of looking at it yeah it's hard though it takes practice because um you know the internet is is a great thing, but it's also a mentally taxing thing. And you have to kind of pick and choose your battles, but also use it for good and not for evil. Some of that, I think, is the refining process as well of writing and not just writing for yourself, even if you are the immediate adverse audience. But writing for others and publishing is that you have to detach yourself

to a certain degree from your writing even though you can't because it's your thoughts right you're putting your thoughts on paper digital paper and then you're putting them out there to be considered judged etc and sometimes you can learn sometimes you're right all along but it's kind of like the trial by cauldron right like you put something through a fire and if it comes out pure then it was valuable if it burns up it wasn't so good in the first place but it can hurt right the fire is hot and yeah it doesn't always feel nice yeah and i think that i'm pretty self-aware and i i encourage feedback and and uh constructive criticism i don't agree with criticism to purposefully like shame someone, right? Like if you're going to provide criticism, do it in a healthy way that

everyone can benefit from. That's a hard lesson I've had to learn because my growth on Twitter specifically was quite exponential. It happened pretty quickly. And so I kind of had to learn to deal with this kind of these kind of situations overnight. And it was hard. Did you have specific goals when you started Twitter, or when you started writing more prolifically? I know you write because that's how you learn and you're, you know, a lot of it's reference for yourself. But do you look out five years and say, I'm trying to accomplish a long term goal? Or is it more, I'm just doing it because I enjoy it and I get these benefits? Yeah.

So I have always loved writing to begin with. So I actually almost declared a writing minor in school. It's something I've always loved. And I think that stems from the fact that I read a lot. I digest books like it's water. I've always had a veracity for reading. And so I think writing is kind of complementary to that and when I start when I got back on Twitter I would say it was August of last year and it was

due to the fact that I was blogging I wasn't blogging consistently but I was blogging and people had apparently started sharing some of my articles on Twitter and I had a Twitter account but it was pretty uh archaic at that point. I hadn't even logged in since college. And the stuff that I tweeted back then, I don't even want to read. But my colleague was like, yeah, people are sharing your stuff. Why don't you get back on so that they can actually tag you in these things? And I was like, you know what?

That's a good idea. So my primary goal was never to gain followers, nothing like that. It was to interact with the community and hear what they had to say about my writing. That was the first goal. The second goal was to be more consistent with my content that I produce. Because when you're consistent, not necessarily meaning like I blog every Tuesday, but in the sense that like, you know, you have a backlog of content, whether that's blogs, videos, you know know what have you um and you produce like at least you know every week two weeks whatever um those were my two goals and I think from that

you know my growth was part luck but part um consistency to some extent you mentioned books I saw that you also blogged about which books will improve your career on dev too I was a fan of a couple that I've read and a couple that I haven't. So I have to check them out. But one in particular, the power of habit is actually a position of a future show we're doing called brain science. That's sort of digging back and building back the layers of human behavior as it relates to brains and as it relates to science, obviously. And just how do we use what we know about the brain to become better? What do you think about that book in particular? And maybe a couple others you've recommended.

I loved that book. That was like top three nonfiction books I've ever read. I love nonfiction books that teach you something, but in like an anecdotal way. So they interject these little stories about history and like the learnings that people have pulled out of their experiences. I find those to be the most easily digestible and they resonate the most with me. So that was a really great one because it allowed me to really rethink the way that I work and kind of alter my behavior to maximize my productivity. Like people are always like, how do you do so much? I'm like, it's a habit that you get into. And I guess at

that point, it's subconscious. I love the whole idea of like understanding the brain and i took a few psychology courses when i was in high school and i loved it like i was terrible at it i did terribly but like i loved the the theory behind it and if you liked that i would highly recommend the culture map i cannot recommend this book enough this is probably like the number one uh non-fiction i've ever read because it discusses um cultures and how people communicate. So it has a lot of psychology basis, but it really helps you, especially if you're working globally with different teams or, you know, even interacting on social media, like understanding the way that people communicate to each other. And I think, you know, it'll improve all of your communications

with everyone in your life. It's interesting that perspective too, because a lot with the brain and what we know as individuals is about experiences. And so if you're using the lens of the culture map, which means the world at large, we all have different experiences that manufacture our, you know, what's known as our mind. You know, your mind isn't observable. It's the inner workings of the parts of the brain, you know. mind isn't observable it's the it's the inner workings of the parts of the brain you know right it just sort of enlightens you to the fact that everyone has a different perspective and it's not that it's wrong or right it's just not the same and i think that goes back to dealing with the trolls or some of the hate you might

receive because what i might perceive to be hate um other cultures might perceive to be just constructive criticism right so it talks a lot about these high and low context cultures so in america we're very used to wrapping constructive criticism in a compliment or i'm using these i forget what the term is but like words that make it seem not as bad so like maybe or just a little bit right so if i here's an example so if someone gave up like three different presentations and i went up to them after and I was like, you know, I really liked the first two presentations. The third one was maybe, you know, just a little bit too long, but you know, the others were really good. Like in America, that's how you would give feedback, right? We don't like to hear very direct negative criticism versus in Germany. And I've noticed this even before I read this book, and I couldn't figure out why, they give very direct feedback because they perceive that to be, you know, the most productive way to share thoughts with someone. And so there would be no beating around the bush there. But then you look at cultures in Asia and they're on a whole different spectrum because

they don't give negative feedback. From what I understand, they only give positive feedback about the things that they enjoyed and they just omit anything negative. So you have to read between the lines there. It's a little bit higher context. Very interesting. And I would say that that helps me in my writing and that helps me digest some of the conversations or comments I get online because, you know, people communicate differently. And what I might perceive to be negative might not be the meaning behind the statements. So the first question you get from negativity might be where you're from. Because then you can at least contextually place them.

Oh, you're in a place where you're a bit more direct or a bit more rude just by culture, not by purpose or malice. Yeah. And I wouldn't even necessarily call it rude right like so there have been instances on like dev too where i'll write a blog and someone will leave a comment that i perceive to be rude and i'll write back you know like i appreciate your comment like you could have been a little bit more respectful about it and they'll reply and say what did i say that wasn't respectful that was not definitely not my intent and so i wouldn't i wouldn't so like what i perceive as rude they just perceive as as natural communication for feedback.

So I try to see all these interactions through rose-colored glasses. And obviously, there are instances where people are just malicious. But understanding the way that people think and communicate definitely helps you differentiate. I can tell you're a UX designer based on your book list, though. Why is that? Well, I mean, it's all about understanding human behavior, right? That's pretty much what user experience is about. It's about desiring a pleasant or a, you know, efficient workflow, whatever.

And you care about, you know, things like behavioral economics and, you know, just little interesting tidbits that seem to just simply be, you might just think she's a designer or he's a designer. Well, meanwhile, they really care about these nuanced details that almost no one else pays attention to. Yeah. And I, this whole UX engineering role is so new, right? And, and I had like this personality, like identity crisis almost because I am an engineer and I really love

everything technical. I'm classically trained in that. However, I always felt this like longing to do more creative work, more like psychological or design oriented work. I just never had formal training. I really got into design when I was working at IBM on the design team. I was working with researchers and UX engineers, or I'm sorry and UX designers and visual designers. And I picked up a lot of knowledge there. And it really got me thinking like, why is this not a represented field? And recently I've noticed it's becoming a little bit more popular. You'll see places like Google and Airbnb and Spotify have these physical UX engineering roles for people like me who are caught in the middle between engineering and design. So having that conscious knowledge of what's best for your users. And I was talking

with April Wenzel earlier today. She is the owner of Compassionate Coding. And one of the things she talks about is how can we be more empathetic towards our users, right? Like we have all of these requirements that come from product management and whatnot but i often see in companies that they prioritize um like uh different features just because they want to keep up with their competitors they want to have like parity feature parity and i'm sitting here thinking like this is the wrong way to approach these things because and this comes from the the start with y book from Simon Sinek, which is another one I definitely recommend. But when companies don't have a strong foundation of why they're doing something, and they focus on the what.

So if the what is, I want to beat our competitor, and they're not thinking about, well, why? Like, no, the why should be, I want to have the best product to make our users' lives enjoyable. It's harder to succeed when you don't start with why. You have to have that foundation. So definitely putting yourself in the shoes of your users is going to enable you to create the best product for the community. I didn't notice that the, sorry about that. I'm a past UX designer myself, so skip the engineer part of your role there. But what is the bigger difference between a designer or an engineer in this case?

So UX being placed before both of those. Yeah. So people often read my title and they assume that I'm a designer, which is fine because, you know, it's a common mistake. It's not a very known label. And to be honest, I hate labels because I feel like they categorize people into buckets where it's not a very known uh label and to be honest i hate labels because i feel like they categorize people into buckets where it's not black and white right like we talk about this concept of like a t-shaped person who has one really deep knowledge set so my deep knowledge is front-end development um i have a computer science degree so i'm i i did a little bit back in in college i learned java and database and whatnot. But my passion lies in front end dev and

my deepest experiences there. However, I also have branches off into UX design. And I think that we as a as an industry are having this large identity crisis of people who they get caught up in this imposter syndrome, because they maybe are like me, right? And they get caught up in this imposter syndrome because they maybe are like me right and they're caught between design and development and and they're they enjoy both and they're good at both but there's no real role defined yet and so like my role day-to-day is building design systems which is part design but i focus on the component library side so building robust components with react and typescript and all of that. So yeah, I would love to stop like boxing people into these roles, which I think are more HR labels in a sense,

because obviously you have to pay people and on scales. I don't know, there are just there are so many titles in this industry. And it's like, it's so easy to make assumptions about people like, oh, he's a designer, he doesn't have any you know coding experience all the designers on my team for the most part can code in html and css and the first day i realized that like i was i was working with a visual designer and he wanted to build an animation library i was like heck yeah like animations love it let's do it and he was showing me this prototype i'm like oh my gosh like how did you build this and he goes well i wrote the code for it i'm like what and he was like yeah it was a developer before and then i moved into like a visual or ux designer position well we see designer in someone's title or we see ux in someone's title and we assume that

they can't code and i hate that kind of like gatekeeping mentality of like well you know if you're not a software engineer if you're not a software developer like you do you're not good at coding like you can't code, right? I'm like, oh my gosh, I hate that. Yeah. It seems like based on what you said there is that you're really good with developing the right kind of tools for designers to allow developers to do their best. So design systems, it's something that makes the dev experience better to implement great designs for design teams and so on and so forth. It's kind of twofold.

So that's definitely one facet of that, right? It makes everyone's life easier if your components that you're incorporating are already accessible, responsive, whatnot. That takes a lot of pressure off the engineers to do the heavy lifting for every single component they need. But the second part is, at the end of the day, we're not delivering a library. We're delivering a consistent experience cross-platform that's accessible to everyone. And I think that's the real benefit of having a design system in place is your users, regardless of who they are or their circumstances, all have a great experience across all of your platforms.

And that's the benefit that you really should be getting out of these kind of design systems. So I'm very fortunate to be in a position where I can enable that and facilitate that. Well, it's almost like I kind of come up into some of this when I met Chris Epstein, one of the fellows behind SAS and Compass. And I didn't really understand it at the time, but I was like, wow, like here's somebody who really thoroughly understands design, thoroughly understands who really thoroughly understands design thoroughly understands programming thoroughly understands these things that really enable me as a designer at the time to need certain kind of systems to build these things but didn't have the tooling in place at the time so it's like you you know you kind of allow the design side to dream and

you know all this stuff and the engineering side the freedom to implement freely what they design and vice versa to get the best output for a positive user experience right yeah definitely i think we need to do better working across this divide and i think that's what this role that i'm in now the cux engineering position allows is to bridge the gap between engineering and design because they go hand in hand, they're complementary, but often they're so siloed from each other and that causes discrepancies in your UI. Is the silos because of the you are a designer,

you can't code stigma? I think subconsciously that might have something to do with it because we all have subconscious biases and I would love to change those subconscious biases. But I think part of that comes from, we all like to pretend we practice agile and yet we fall into agile fall. We're like, we get these, we get these requirements from product management. Like, okay, we've got a story. And the typical engineer mindset is, well, I'm not going to start coding this until we've got a high fidelity design. And so it's the, becomes this like linear waterfall

handoff still. So there's no real time collaboration going on in a high fidelity design. And so it becomes this like linear waterfall handoff still. So there's no real time collaboration going on in a lot of companies. And I think that's the biggest problem. I had to check with it because I'd never actually heard Agile fall before. Jared, have you heard that before? No, I've probably done it, but I've never heard it. I had to laugh out loud on that one. I was like, I never heard it before.

That's amazing. I mean, that's unfortunately what happens in most companies. They just, Agile's hard. It's all the rave right now. It's in the same category with blockchain and Bitcoin and all those buzzwords, right? Really? No, no, no. I'm saying in terms of buzzwords.

It's a very popular thing to say your company does Agile and has Scrum. But very few people execute that correctly, and I think that leads to Agile fall. We all have good intentions. We feel when we say Agile. Right. And then we attempt, and then for some reason somebody, somehow, some way, some org messes it up, and

it becomes Agile fall, which I've never heard of before. I think that's, isn't Agile fall what comes after Agile summer? Whammy. Ooh, dad jokes. That's the wrong podcast that day. Trying to light things back up. Hey, quick cross promotion.

If you like this conversation about the front end divide, we've done two, I think, pretty good episodes of JS Party on this, the deep dive into the divide in the front end space and why it's why it is there what we can do about it etc etc js party 61 here from suze hinton k ball and nick neesey and then also js party 67 with chris coyer who wrote the great divide blog post as well as suze again and myself we'll link those up in the show notes if you you like this conversation, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly for you. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application, which allows for ease of operations, easily upgrade and maintain GoCD using Helm, scale your build infrastructure elastically with a new Elastic agent that uses Kubernetes conventions to dynamically scale GoCD agents. GoCD also has first-class integration with docker registries, easily compose, track, and visualize deployments on Kubernetes. Learn more and get started at gocd.org slash kubernetes. Again, gocd.org slash kubernetes. Kubernetes. So we put a tweet out asking folks, what should we ask Emma? And shout out to UK

geek girl, BCS, who said, ask Emma if the idea for Coding Coach was based on her own experiences. So happy to answer that for you. But first, we got to hear about what Coding Coach is and the background there. And then we can find out if it was based on your experiences. So take it from there. What is Coding Coach? Sure. So Coding Coach is an open source platform whose goal is to connect mentors with mentees all over the globe and to do it for free. So that's the basis of it. And currently it's very early in its production

because we haven't set up a database. So it's literally just like a very superficial way to... It's like a database essentially at the moment. We're building the full platform. But absolutely it was based on my personal experiences because when I was at IBM I started in enterprise storage systems so coming out of college I had a computer science degree and I had primarily learned Java and then quickly I had to switch to front-end before I started my first role I was actually hired as a back-end dev and then I got put on front end. And I was like, oh, that sounds cool. Like making websites. Nice. HTML is easy. And then I got to work and it was

like, oh, I was so overwhelmed for the majority of a year. And so I worked on that for a year and a half or so. And then I moved on to a a design team and this was great because I got to be a little bit more autonomous with my tech choices so I chose to learn Vue and use that to build like you know websites for quantum computing which was super cool except I didn't have a mentor like I was the only dev on my team and I had no one I had asked someone at work who I had who I look up to in the industry if he would be my team and I had no one. I had asked someone at work who I look up to in the industry if he would be my mentor. And that was my first real experience with mentorship. And it turned out really well. And it was something I was always passionate about. I was like, well, we need to make this available for everyone so people don't get stuck in this rut

like I did. And I actually held a workshop at IBM and I had a small little cross-functional team of volunteers. Jason Langsdorff was one of them. People are always surprised. We actually worked together at IBM. He was originally on my small team for this mentorship thing. We had a workshop where we worked with some executive women at IBM and then sadly nothing came of it. It just wasn't the right timing for me. I think I was kind of stuck in this limbo at IBM where I couldn't get a promotion because there wasn't enough funding. And I was kind of down on myself about that.

And so I kind of just let that like go dormant for a little while. And then I was in the Berlin airport back in September. And I was like, OK okay i had maybe maybe a thousand followers on twitter and i just tweeted him like would anyone be interested in building this open source mentorship application and i got like an overwhelming amount of yeses and so i immediately bought a domain i liked the alliteration of coding coach because believe it or not all the domain names with the word mentor in it are pretty much taken or you'd have to sell like, you know, a kid need to buy it. And so I bought a domain.

I opened a Slack organization and I started some Google Docs and then it really took off from there. Very cool. So what's the process you let's say you want to be a mentor and you don't have anybody to mentor? Codingcoach.io, as you said, you just go there and put your name on a piece of paper that says hey i'd like to mentor how does it work yeah so um for people who want to become mentors um first of all i was like pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who will donate their time for free to mentor someone um i thought it would be a little bit harder to get people interested in doing that but it wasn't and so um what you can do is you can go to our github repository we've

got a coding coach organization with a repository called find a mentor and if you go in there we've got a really robust readme so um currently our mentors are based out of a package json file um not ideal but we're working on getting our database set up at the moment. And our community has created this really cool CLI tool. So you just like you run it and you said you say add new mentor and you fill out the prompts. Really well done. I'm really impressed by it. And at the end, it opens a pull request for you. So that's the process to become a mentor.

And currently, we don't have a vetting process. So we wanted to get as many people on this platform to begin with. We didn't want any barriers to entry, which, you know, people are like, well, how can you justify guidance in a certain area. And so for this first iteration, there's really no vetting process. But you know, in the future, like when we have our full platform built, we'll revisit that idea. Because you know, I don't really want any barriers to entry for someone to be a mentor, right? I don't want to have like this gatekeeping thing. But instead, maybe what we'll do is add like a review process where the mentees of that person can go and recommend them or leave reviews to encourage other people to, you know, to go to them for a specific skill. I wish I had read this guide

beforehand because I'm so in the dark about it. What are some of the details from it? So we have different guidelines for mentees and mentors. Typically in this type of relationship, while you can learn from each other, so it should be a symbiotic relationship, the mentee is really responsible for producing the majority of the content for the meetings, right? So firstly, a mentorship can be weekly, it can be bi-weekly, monthly, ad hoc, whatever fits your needs. It's all dependent upon your goals the mentee should have in theory defined i would say three to five tangible goals um that they want to improve so i get a lot of messages from people who are saying hey will you be my mentor and that's that's the

message and i'm like okay hey like i'm happy to help you but like what skills are you looking to improve and sometimes they say you know i want to be a better friend in dev. I've gotten people also that are like, I want to be great at Node.js. And I'm like, well, first of all, I don't know Node.js. So like, it's in your best interest to go find someone who's an expert in that field. Because like, I really wouldn't be beneficial to you. But if they want to, you know, if they come to me and it's very vague, I always ask them for like three to five tangible goals that they can check off.

And I find personally the best types of mentorship have to do with building something. So my first mentorship at IBM was, OK, well, you don't have a portfolio. So let's use building your portfolio as a way to build up your skill set with Vue.js. And so that I found was the most beneficial where each week I would have checklist items to say, okay, I need to get the navigation done this week, make it collapsible and responsive and all that stuff. And then we'd do a live code review together. And that would be really useful for me.

But some people also just need to get better at technical interviewing, right? It's a skill we need to work on. And so another way to do it is like mock interviewing with a mentor. But really it's a skill we need to to work on and so another way to do it is like mock interviewing with a mentor but really it's all on the mentee to make sure that they have those tangible goals outlined and that they're prepared to like do the majority of the work to make sure those meetings are you know used to their full potential what's the process for a to find the mentor is there can a mentor have several mentees is there is there any constraints at all

i know you said there's really no barriers to entry so maybe there's no constraints either yeah so um the way that we have it set up now is you can go to mentors.codingcoach.io and we've got some filters on there so you can filter by geographic location um language is spoken is one we will have added very soon you can filter by technology or language that you want to learn and then from there you just go and you look through the mentor list and we've got this little contact section at the bottom with their preferred method of contact whether that's email twitter slack and they just reach directly out to them and we're in the process of adding this getting started

guide to our page because at the moment it's just like a static page and there's there's no real call to action so we're definitely there's a an issue open on github to improve that but ideally in our full platform um we would have like this matchmaking thing right like we were joking about tinder at the beginning of this but really this this all started with like Tinder for mentorships, right? Like I want, I know what I want out of a mentorship. I want someone perhaps who's a female, who's maybe not in the technical side, but maybe more on the design side.

And I want them to be in my time zone. And I input that criteria and it'll generate some matches for me that, you know, with an algorithm and then what you develop will match what you're looking for. So that's the ultimate goal is essentially Tinder for mentorships. And ideally, we would provide a communication platform through our site. But yeah, currently, it's just we wanted to get this MVP out here so people could start finding someone, right? We didn't want to keep putting it off and putting it off.

No, we'll get a database out there for people to use while we're building our full platform i like what you said too though about the guide and the fact that there's or someone reaching out to you saying hey can i can you be my mentor and you're like well in what way providing the framework for a mentor and a mentee on how to be good at both you know as a mentee what should you bring to the table what should be some of your desires and kind of help them articulate that? Because connecting people to other people is not exactly dramatically hard. There's obviously some difficulties in there, but the hard part is how to get them to mingle well. Yeah, and I think I would love to facilitate that process. So, you know, we want to make it easier for people.

So one of the ways we can do that is before they contact a mentee through our fully fledged platform, when that is delivered, perhaps we kind of force them to enter three to five goals before they start that conversation. Because that takes the pressure of having to remember all of these things before contacting them. And that way, when the mentor receives this invitation they they know what they're getting into uh we also wanted to take the pressure off of ending a mentorship or rejecting mentorship because this is like a really weird area right like how do you maintain a connection with someone without burning a bridge and so i've added some of that into the guidelines like how do you approach that conversation but we want to make it really easy within our platform for either party to say you know what this isn't working for me anymore and I don't want to waste anyone's time.

I appreciated what, you know, what we've done together, but I think it's best if we just go our separate ways for now with the caveat that maybe we revisit this someday. That is so hard. I've had to do that in different scenarios before. And that conversation is so hard.

Wow. Well, it's like breaking up with someone, right? But it's not someone that you're very close to. So it's like breaking up with someone right but it's not someone that you're very close to so it's like it's hard for both people and you want to take that pressure it's not me it's you yeah yeah it's me but i mean they go through life cycles right like some some mentorships just like relationships in your life whether that's friendships or

you know romantic relationships they'll go through phases where you grow and then perhaps you've outgrown the life cycle. And there's nothing wrong with that. And I don't think we should be ashamed to say those things. We just need help formulating that. So obviously, free is great. But why do you think that this kind of platform needs to be free or should be free? Man, I have so many reasons. But primarily, you know, people don't necessarily get to choose their circumstances. Like I was very privileged in the way that I grew up and where I currently am. And I do not take that for granted, but there are some people who are not in the same place that I'm at, or they don't have the same access to resources. And that breaks my heart because this is something

that they have to work harder to achieve than I do. And why is that fair? So I wanted to make this something that anyone can go to to get help. Like we shouldn't have to, you know, lay awake at night wondering how we're going to get help on this project that we need to get delivered or, you know, potentially get fired. You know, just like there are certain things in life that I feel like should be available to everyone. And this is definitely one of them. Well, certainly, I think if you break down a mentor for what it is, it's a person who is giving advice and guiding. And I'm curious if you subscribe to Laura Hogan by any chance.

I don't. So Laura Hogan is former VPE at, I think it was Etsy, if I recall correctly. And she runs a wherewithal and she gives some amazing advice on mentorship. And in particular, this other flip side of that, which is sponsorship. And so she says the secret sauce, the magical mode is sponsor mode. And basically sponsor mode is feeling on the hook to get someone to the next level. So rather than just simply being the person who is willing to give advice and give some guidance, maybe not so much long-term invested. The sponsor part of it, because she's big on coaching, sponsorship, and mentorship, is the secret sauce, so to speak.

I love that. I think that's really cool. But I think we've got to be careful too because some people don't do well with pressure like that and others thrive under it and given that this is kind of like a free platform our mentors have no like monetary um incentive yes thank you uh they don't have those incentives like it would be harder i think to get sponsors specifically on my platform however i wouldn't rule it out because our community is just flourished with so many giving people. And I think too, part of it is people feel good when they do acts of service like this, right? That's one of the things about doing charity work or

donating things is it makes you feel good, right? So I think that's part of where this comes from. And additionally, it can look good to your employer or to help you get promotions uh if you are labeled as a mentor perhaps a sponsor so it's definitely a really cool uh cool concept that i would love to learn more about i think there's an opportunity to for progress like any relationship and that's the turn that's sort of the scenario we're applying here is this is a relationship. And just like you'd mentioned, discontinuing it is just like breaking up. And every relationship has a level of progress, layers to it. And each new layer, a new level of trust is added. So maybe eventually someone can self-nominate them to be someone's sponsor.

And it's not. I was thinking beyond MVP at this point. Right. And that's me. I'm a dreamer. I dream. I so am as well. To quote's me. I'm a dreamer. I dream. I so am as well. To quote Pink Panther, I'm a dreamer who dreams.

I don't know if you recall that. You're the trainer who trains. I missed that one, but I appreciate you dreaming. Well, Steve Martin, Pink Panther, the very first one, not the second one. You're the trainer who trains. If you're listening to this and you're laughing, you know why. I liked the Agile Fall joke better. Oh, yes.

Shots fired. Shots fired. Sorry. I'm a little sassy. No, I love it. It's great. I like that I'm winning. That's what I like about it.

Jared is winning. He's always winning. I'm curious to get back on track here with, because I got a question. I just can't stop thinking about it. Is what has been the feedback loop so far, you know, from the mentors and the mentees, what kind of feedback do you have to share? It's a great question. We, in all honesty are not great at capturing this feedback.

We really should be better about it. One thing I did try to do was reach out to individuals and try to do this like developer spotlight type of thing on medium. We've got a publication on there and, and really ask them like how, you know, what are your goals? Like what do you, are you a developer by day or are you learning this on the side? And what are your goals and how has Coding Coach really helped you? I love learning that way and having those one-on-one talks with people. But we really hope to gain better feedback moving forward.

It's just really hard when, you know, I feel like I'm wearing so many hats at the moment that I've got a few really, really key people in the organization who drive the development of this. I've got Mosh, I think his last name is Fu, but I could be pronouncing that incorrectly. Mosh is great. He is a developer at Wix. And he, this Coding Coach Alpha idea that we have live today was his idea. And I wouldn't be there without him. And then Chris Valvilla is another one. He works at Envision as an engineer. And he's driving the fully-fledged platform. And so they take a lot of responsibility onto them. But I've fallen short on the capturing

feedback part. And it's definitely a discussion in our Slack them. But I've fallen short on the capturing feedback part. And it's definitely a discussion in our Slack organization. I would say for the most part, we get a lot of feedback through Twitter, as well as in our Slack org. But for the most part, it seems really positive. I mean, I haven't seen anyone. The only negative thing that's come out of it is it can be a little overwhelming when you get so many messages. And I have been on that end myself where I get a lot of emails and I feel bad because it's ironic, right? Like I created this mentorship platform and I'm a horrible mentor at the moment because I'm so busy that I feel bad I can't devote so much time to everyone. If you have suggestions on how to capture feedback, I would love to hear

them because that's something I still am a little bit unsure about yeah i'm always down that's what my my favorite thing uh about some of the things i do here besides just talking to a microphone is to really kind of hear different challenges and different problems and help people find unique ways around them because different perspectives always provide different paths and nothing i love more than like just dream it with somebody. And it's even cooler when you're not in the hope to do the work, you know, because you can give some really good advice and be like, and it's your work to do,

which is at the current state though is, is the path to connecting with someone. Is it going to mentors.codingcoach.io and clicking on their email, their GitHub or their Twitter and personally reaching out? Or is there a platform level thing that's enabling these connections? No, it's very primal at this point.

You just directly reach out to the person. And I've seen so many messages, even through Twitter, people will tag some of the mentors they see and be like, hey, will you mentor me? And everyone's very quick to be like, yeah, absolutely. Send me a message. It's such a welcoming environment. And I have never seen such positivity that I am so humbled by that because I don't feel like, I hate to say this is my brainchild, right? Because I feel like I was just a catalyst to help. The community is building it. I will open issues and people will jump on them.

They're the ones building it. This was just me facilitating that. And so it's really great to see. I love it. I think I said it before. I'll say it again. I think this needs to be in place. I think connections.

I love the fact that it is free, that it is accessible to anyone. I have some concerns about sustainability. But hey, that's what you always have whenever something's free. Like, how do you manage it long-term and it not be a burden or a bear on somebody? But those are good challenges to have, right? I mean, in the end, you have, you know,

potentially great people being connected and better software developers and engineers coming out to their end and potentially even deeper friendships. Well, I should mention now they do have a Patreon. Oh, yes. Yeah, we do. And I always feel guilty.

I shouldn't feel guilty about having one, but just know that the money on there is going to be reinvested in the organization. So it's not something I would ever personally take as a cut i will say we do have some long-term goals i had a conversation with chris felt like a little while back about potentially doing like court not courses but like live group mentorship around a subject matter so like perhaps we'll do like react hooks mentoring session where it's it's more of like a teacher thing but it's very personal like you know you can ask questions and and get some live help but in a small group of like three to five and that's

the kind of thing we could potentially think about monetizing anything that's really content oriented we can think about that i want to keep the one-on-one mentorships free to a certain extent right like i want to be able to have anyone come and get you know a mentor and i've thought about different ways to monetize it um but for the for the immediate moment i want to get our platform up and in a good state before i consider you know taking that to the next level it sounds like you can see some future in this where it could be potentially your full-time thing i would love that um not that i don't love my job like i really really love my job. I love my teammates. I get a lot of value out of that, but I'm always the kind of person that I feel like I always work 10 times harder when it's my project or like it's something that I

built from the ground up. I think there's so much more reward in that. And I think almost everyone would agree. And so, yeah, I've always loved the idea of working for myself someday. check them out at rollbar.com slash changelog. Resolve your errors in minutes and deploy with confidence. Catch your errors in your software before your users do. And if you're not using Rollbar yet or you haven't tried it yet, they want to give you $100 to donate to open source via Open Collective. And all you got to do is go to rollbar.com slash changelog, sign up, integrate Rollbar into your app. And once you do that, they'll give you $100 to donate to open source.

Once again, robert.com slash changelog. As I mentioned before, we put out a request on Twitter. We like to answer community questions. We like community feedback, by the way. If you have feedback for the show, of course, Twitter is a good place for it. We also have a dedicated place now on ChangeLog.com. Each episode has a discussion. All guests and hosts are on that discussion.

So if you have questions for Emma or for us, or if we forgot to say something that we should have said, please add your comments there we appreciate them that being said we do want to answer a few of the questions that were asked on twitter so let's start here this is from uh shreesh bahat oh i got that right shreesh is the name shreesh bahat is the handle uh wants to know about the life in a in the day of a ux engineer so i assume that means your day job at log me in what's your day look like so the best part about switching to the design team is i have substantially less meetings so my days are typically a lot freer so typically

i come in depends on the day but sometimes they give us free breakfast like i might start out with like a coffee chat with my colleague and get some free breakfast, which is usually pastries, which I should probably stop eating. And then probably around nine, I sit down and it depends what my goals are for the day. So the past week, I've just been taking online tutorials. I need to brush up on some skills because I have a lot of skills that I need to deepen specifically like Webpack and deeper React knowledge. So that's what I was doing the last week. But normally I would work on building a component library or perhaps updating some documentation. And later in the day, we might have a touch point with my small design team to discuss

like my status and where I'm at and and if we need to update any priorities but in general the days are pretty free and it's nice that I get the chance to really make my own schedule that align with our goals here's a follow-up question from Shreesh as well we were talking about coding coach previously they say what is your coaching style at Coding Coach? Yeah. Got a style? I would say I'm personally a little bit more asynchronous because I have so many commitments to things. I don't have a ton of time to sit down and devote like 30 minutes or an hour to physically talking to someone through like GoToMeeting or Skype or whatnot. So typically my mentorship style is asynchronous where I say send me a list of your goals and then we kind of revisit it from or like revisit

our plan from there. So some people just need access to resources like need help finding tutorials to watch and blogs to read. Some people I generally I haven't gotten anything other than that but were I to get someone who needs a little bit more help, like developing a project or maybe tweaking a design, I would do what I had mentioned earlier with my, my previous mentorship experience, maybe create a project, right? Like build your portfolio.

So, and do that in phases. So step one is design it. And step two would be, all right, let's build all the HTML for it. Then let's add some CSS and then add some JavaScript if necessary. So that would be

my ideal mentorship style. My mentorship style is usually I just roll my eyes and I say RTFM and then I hang up with the call. What does that mean?

RTFM? That means read the effing manual. Oh my gosh. I don't understand all these acronyms. It's not a nice response. No.

It's not very nice and I don't do that. I'm just these acronyms. It's not a nice response. No. It's not very nice. And I don't do that. I'm just. And Jared doesn't recommend it either. It's kind of like. Does you guys remember Nick Burns? Your company's computer guy. Do you guys remember that from Saturday Night Live?

Gosh no. No. Jimmy Fallon played a stereotypical IT computer guy. And then everybody else played. You know. know typical business people sitting in their cubicles and they you know their computer doesn't work right and they always call him over and they they're trying to use like i i put the thing in the excel spreadsheet and i just don't like they're trying to ask him nicely to help them with their computer and he's just

insufferable and it's like move and he like pushes them out of the way okay does it all remember them the move set it off for me i do recall yeah move he pushes them out of the way sits down like types real fast and it's fixed the word the worst mentor ever yes yes yes speaking of that it sounds like maybe that's accessibility related to some degree oh good segue so sharice's second question is how do you design while keeping accessibility in mind for all your users so i have to admit that i'm i'm all for ally except for i'm so far from it lately that i don't know the best places to to step in and provide accessibility yeah i i love accessibility and i would say i have pretty good knowledge on the subject but when i physically

design things i always some for some reason lean towards colors that are like are not accessible. Like I love low contrast for some reason. So every time I make a design, I'm like, oh, it looks great. Like, let's build it. And someone's like, well, that's not accessible. Well, actually, that's not accessible. I'm like, I know you're right, but like I don't want to believe it. I struggle with color contrast and font ratios specifically because your users need a specific base pixel size

in order to be able to legitimately read these things. When you're designing something from the design side, not the coding side, but when you're physically designing something, you've got to make sure that your text is legible. You really shouldn't have primary text that's less than 16 pixels. I think that's the new standard. It's either 16 or 14. I can't remember any like secondary content like footer notes or things like that can be a little bit smaller, like 12, I believe. But make sure that your font is readable, that it's not too crazy looking because I've seen some crazy fonts

that just, you know, sans serif is in general the best, most easily readable font. And in terms of color contrast, make sure that, you know, don't forget your hover and focus states because, you know, like one big thing that I see devs do all the time is they remove the browser outline on focus, like tabbing. I do that every time. I do it too, and I shouldn't do it. But if I'm a user and I look at a web page that's been tabbed through, I should instantly be able to tell where the cursor is.

And that's a big problem I see in a lot of sites. But it looks so ugly. I know. It ruins the design. That's what I say to myself inside when I remove it. I'm like, I know this isn't right, but this is why. And it gives me reason. I know.

It's not okay. I don't condone it, but I also do that myself. I just make sure to replace it with something that looks a little bit better and is clearly obvious. It's hard, though. And I always try to use semantic HTML for screen reader purposes. But again, that can be pretty difficult when you're making custom components. And it can be hard to remember all the different aria attributes you should be adding is there anything like a an accessibility linter or anything where you can sort of like run it through this thing it's like oh you are or are not accessible obviously there's probably something

similar but lighthouse has an accessibility yeah i was gonna say lighthouse yeah they're generally quite good and if you're using something like gatsby for static sites for React, they are amazing with their Lighthouse, like, what's the word, like their accessibility. Scores, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, like, using tools like that generally set you off in the right direction from the get-go. But, yeah, I would run your site through Lighthouse and see how it does. on performance and they're focused on just things that are sort of like the checklist that everybody should eventually learn when they become more and more professional at their jobs in design in particular is just like hey you shouldn't have to think about accessibility you should but not to

the degree that gatsby can help you through lighthouse or lighthouse itself right like hitting the easy button yeah yeah like you know we're lazy right jeremy want the easy button i just want that easy button like i know, we're lazy, right, Jared? We want the easy button. I just want that easy button. Like I want myself to be accessible, but I don't want to work hard at it. That's right. RTF Accessibility M, I guess. All right. Let's move on to the next one. This is from Donna Amos.

Donna C. Amos 88 is the handle. What are steps that you would recommend for taking for learning UX design if you're just starting out? Great question. So Sarah Drasner put out a course on front-end masters called Design for Developers. I highly recommend everyone reads that. Oh my gosh. Or, you know, watches it, whatever is your preference. That's a really great place to start because it gives you the fundamentals without going, it's not too overwhelming. I think the course is maybe about four hours. That's a great place to start because it gives you the fundamentals without going it's not too overwhelming i think the course is maybe about four hours that's a great place to start i will admit that there's kind of a lack in content surrounding this area i've seen a couple good blogs on medium um basic

design tips for engineers but in general there's kind of this like hole in the industry like where we talk about bridging this divide well where, where's the content, right? How do you actually get started? This is something that we need. So I would recommend that video. I know for an in-masters, this is subscription and not everyone has access to that. So I would check on Medium, although they're now putting a lot of their content behind paywalls, so that might also not be an option.

Don't get a start on Medium. Adam, I will range. I know, I know. I know. Well, there's got to be an awesome UX design list or something like that we can point to, Jared, at some point. I'm sure I know. I know. Well, there's got to be an awesome UX design list or something like that we can point to, Jared, at some point. I'm sure there is. There's an awesome something. Awesome-star on GitHub.

Everything has one. I've also started, I created this repo on GitHub called Design Inspiration that you can go star. It's literally like a community list of design resources. So like icons, graphics, inspiration in terms of animation, cool portfolios, color swatches. It's all divided up by content there.

So I would recommend you check that out if you're looking for some tools or inspiration. We might be a little late in the game to ask this question, but I'm curious to know what you think UX design is. Because I think some people ask that question, not so much that Donna's asking it in this light. It's just that I, for myself, when I was first getting involved in it, I was actually doing a lot of it. Then I realized, oh, I'm a UX designer. So what are some of the things you think UX designers do? What are some of the practices they do? Versus just say, remove UX and just have designer. Yeah, this is like a weird area with labels again there's a there's a divide there right but yeah what is the divide is it a great divide i think that uh anyone who considers himself a designer has to some extent some visual skills and some ux skills and by ux i mean

the ability to empathize with users and understand again human psychology psychology to a certain extent. So one example of this is I saw a conference talk that was really cool, and it had described whether we should do buttons with square corners or with rounded corners. And they actually found that buttons with square corners were more call to action, like they had a higher call to action, and users' eyes immediately gravitated towards that. I think they measured it by how fast they moved the mouse to the button and they found that square edges were a lot more prominent than the rounded because there's more pixel value to the squares. So that's kind of the area that I would say user experience engineers can

flourish in is, is understanding how users interact with websites and being able to design the structure and the architecture of a site and do like these user experience graphs, right? You see a lot of, I'm not sure what they're called, information architecture graphs, where you can see like, it's literally a graph of how a site is laid out and all the flows that the user will go through to interact with it. That's really where I think UX is differentiated from visual because I would say if we're comparing design with engineering, front-end engineering, I would assimilate like UX engineer, or I'm sorry, a UX designer to HTML and a visual designer is more like CSS. So there are some crossover,

but I would say UX designer is more like psychology and theory based, I would say. Gotcha. Okay, last one. And this might be asked and answered during the first segment, but I'll throw it out there anyway. Lasha Crickley asks or says they would love to hear you about appealing to developers, growing an audience, having an impact on people's lives. Yeah, this is funny because like I don't consider myself like anyone super knowledgeable or experienced in this industry. I think I produce a lot of relatable content and I think that's what draws people is, you know, I don't claim to know everything. I am also in the same position as a

lot of people with this learning journey. And we don't talk enough about the relatable moments that we have, like imposter syndrome or, you know, trying to fix a build for five hours and then your whole day is wasted. I don't BS these things because they're real life and everyone struggles with them. So I think being authentic is one of the biggest things that will help you grow. If you're just putting out content or tweeting things that you think people want to hear, it just won't resonate with the community. So I would say be authentic. Again, be present. So interact with people. That's a big thing as well. I always try to respond to every message I receive. And I would say in general, just try to be positive because people go to the internet as a way to escape whatever they're doing in their daily lives, whether that's maybe

they're bored or maybe they're just not in a good place mentally. And they go to the internet to escape. And I think positive more positivity we can put into the community the the more attraction that you'll get i'm certainly a fan of the positive side of things i think far too often do we sort of negate we kind of gravitate towards negativity um i forget what was the example earlier jerry you were talking about something how everything was positive um um, the response and, and that's the way you gotta be. Like,

I think that's sort of our MO as well. We try to, well, there's so many negative things to sort of camp out on. We try our best to, to shine a spotlight on the things that are positive, even in negative situations. Cause there's always some good return,

even from negative situations. It just takes, it takes some patience and and whatnot to see it because it's not always very clear yeah absolutely i'd like to turn any you know what i would call a negative situation into a positive experience if possible but it takes uh it takes practice it's definitely not easy well that's the lightning round at you thanks so much for joining us hey any final thoughts or words from you or shout outs before we call it a show? I don't think so.

I think I really enjoyed my time here. I'm glad that our date ended up well. And I'm excited to hear more about this podcast that you guys are going to be producing about, what did you call it? Brain? Brain science. Adam, tell them a little brain science more tell her some more okay so i thought i wasn't sure if brain science would be a good title for it because

it's literally called brain science but i thought well because we have computer science it would be somewhat punny and tongue-in-cheek that we'd call the show brain science because you have computer science and i thought well hey you know our audiences are merely software developers and and the curious and so i thought well let's just call it brain science and you consider computer brain yeah exactly that'd be the other option did i consider computer brain yeah no okay if i did it was a joke that sounds that sounds terrible that sounds terrible if you have a show out there called Computer Brain, you should stop. The flip side of that

though is as well is that if you are looking for a podcast on brain science and you search for that, we'll be top of the list. We'll be right there. I have very high expectations for this and I really hope that you incorporate rapping in some context into this podcast.

For rapping, you're going to have to come to JS Party. We'll hook you up with the raps. We will rap the show eventually. If you want a JavaScript rap, you can find me. Oh, don't think we're not going to ask you to come on JS Party and rap because we definitely are going to. It's done. The email's in the can. If I can create a rap about WebSphere application server, I can create a rap about JavaScript.

So we're all good. Okay. The gauntlet's been thrown. I love it. I love it. Well, Emma, thank you so much for spending time with us. It's really been a lot of fun talking through UX and accessibility and mentorship.

And we may have mentioned it to some degree, but we'd love to do whatever we can to support, you know, this whole thing you're doing. It's amazing. We think it needs to be there. So whatever we can do to be a positive source of support for you, we'll be there. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really had a great time talking to you both. All right. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the ChangeLog. Hey, guess what? We have discussions on every single episode now. So head to changelog.com and discuss this episode. And if you want to help us grow this show, reach more listeners and influence more developers, do us a favor and give us a rating or review in iTunes or Apple podcasts. If you use Overcast, give us a star. If you tweet, tweet a link. If you make lists of your favorite podcasts, include us in it. Of course, thank you to our sponsors, DigitalOcean, GoCD, and Rollbar. Also, thanks to Fastly, our bandwidth partner, Rollbar, our monitoring service, and Linode, our cloud server of choice.

This episode is hosted by myself, Adam Stachowiak, and Jared Santo. And our music is done by Breakmaster Cylinder. If you want to hear more episodes like this, subscribe to our master feed at changelog.com slash master, or go into your podcast app and search for changelog master. You'll find it. Thank you for tuning in this week. We'll see you again soon. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. You have won again. Yes. That's why you listen all the way to the end of the shows, because we give you previews of what's coming up.

And as you may have guessed, we have another preview of our upcoming show called Brain Science. This podcast is for the curious to explore the inner workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, how about formation, mental health, and the human condition. This show is hosted by myself, Adam Stachowiak, and my good friend, Mariel Reese, a doctor in clinical psychology. It's brain science applied, not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to better our lives? Here we go. My wife and I, we've learned this, this concept of goodwill, right? Yeah. I can take your feedback or your criticisms in a different light if I know that you have

goodwill for me, meaning that you're not trying to harm me, that you are for me, not against me. And sometimes change, as we all know, is painful and can be painful. So sometimes the necessary feedback and or criticism that can influence that

change can also be painful, but I can accept it differently. If I know that she or they, or whomever is in the scenario with me has goodwill for me. Whereas if you know that they're not for you, then you obviously take it a whole different way. And that's an okay thing. But we often are in relationship with people that are giving us crucial feedback and we need to have that kind of that lens. Like it was significant in our marriage to understand, hey, I know there are times when you give me feedback, I am not happy about it, but I know you have goodwill for me. So therefore I calm down, I listen, I take that in and I process it, whatever, but I take it in a different way because I know that she's for me and not

against me. Yep. One of the key things when it comes to change is a sense of openness and even relationally, like of going, I need to be able to see how somebody else responds or how they're feeling as based on their perspective of what they're going through and not just my perspective of their perspective. And so this goodwill is like, I believe that we're on the same side and that you're not trying to make it harder for me.

But so I can understand if I were sitting where you were sitting, had the background that you had, why you would have taken it in that way. And then I can provide an opportunity to clarify or create more connection, even when it doesn't feel good. And I honestly think this is so much of what's missing in people's relationships. If I look at relational interactions through the notion of conditioning, wherein I get a sort of hit of dopamine, feel good feelings, because I went to a person, I had a conversation that didn't necessarily feel good, but there was openness on both parties to hear one another's perspective, that it actually then reinforces

like, oh, when I go and I have this exchange with people, I feel better. So now I'm going to go and engage with other people and get the feedback, even if I might not like the feedback, because now I'm buffered and I'm not alone in this and somebody else sees my world. That's a preview of Brain Science. If you love where we're going with this, send us an email to get on the list to be notified the very moment this show gets released. Email us at editors at changelog.com. In the subject line, put in all caps, BRAIN SCIENCE with a couple bangs if you're really excited. You can also subscribe to our master feed to get all of our shows in one single feed. Head to changelog.com slash master or search in your podcast app for ChangeLog Master.

You'll find it. Subscribe, get all of our shows and even those that only hit the master feed. Again, changelog.com slash master. Thank you.