The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Jewelbots and Getting Kids Coding (Interview)

Episode Date: May 14, 2016

Sara Chipps, the creator of Jewelbots, and George Stocker, the VP of Engineering at Jewelbots joined the show to talk about connected wearables for kids, keeping UX simple, building a business on open source, and influencing young girls through the possibilities of coding.

I'm Sarah Chip. And I'm George Stocker. And you're listening to The Change Log. Welcome back, everyone. This is The Change Log, and I'm your host, Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 203, and today, Jared and I are joined by Sarah Chips, the creator of Jewelbots, a friendship bracelet for the iPhone era, also joined by George Stockips, the creator of Jewelbots, a friendship bracelet for the iPhone era. Also joined by George Stocker, the VP of Engineering. And we talked about connected wearables for kids, keeping UX simple, open source, building your business around open source,

influencing young girls to the possibilities of coding. And our sponsors for today's show are Linode and Rollbar. Our first sponsor of the show is our friends at Linode. And we want to invite every single listener to change show is our friends at Linode and we want to invite every single listener the change law to try out Linode one of the most fastest most efficient SSD cloud servers on the market you'll have no cloud server up and running in seconds you get choice of Linux distro resources no location they got eight data centers all across the world North America Europe

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And Jared, you know that I love kids, right? I do know that. Yes. And more importantly, I love when kids are encouraged by technology. And here's two awesome people joining us. And we've talked, you know, you and I about getting Sarah on the show several times and here she is. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. We're super excited to talk to you all today. So one of the ways we open up the show is sort of a quick introduction.

So we'll start with you, Sarah. And we also have George, your CTO, on the line with us as well, which we'll introduce here in just a second. But tell us who you are, Sarah. How do you introduce yourself to the hacker world? Usually I like to say that I'm Sarah Chips. I am a JavaScript developer. I've been building software for 15 years, and now I'm building a hardware company called JewelBots. JewelBots. And George, you're part of that too, so tell us your story. Well, I've been a software developer for the last 10 years,

first with the Army and then finishing college and then several different industries. And I've jumped around different tech stacks and I've landed in hardware as well, most recently doing firmware for the Jewelbots. Interesting. So I don't think we've ever had anybody on the show,ared that's been a software developer for the army have we that's first right not that i can think of yeah tell us about that george what's uh what's what's the i guess what's that part

of your history yeah so i uh i joined the army uh 17th birthday and then in my senior year of college, we were called up to active duty to go over to Iraq. While I was there, I was injured, came back and spent some time stateside at an army base called Fort Bragg. And at that point in time, there had been no- Airborne. Airborne, right. I wasn't though. But at that time, there was no real infrastructure in place for reserve or National Guard soldiers who were injured. They would typically stay on active duty to get their medical care. Problem was there was no infrastructure in place. So I was there when one of the first units really started cropping up. At the time, they were called medical holdover units. Now they're called wounded warrior units, I think. And they had an access database they used to take care of these soldiers.

And it was a one-table database, and it must have had 400 or 500 columns in it. But they used this database for everything. They used it to track soldiers' care. They used it to track their disability. They used it to generate reports for different agencies. And because I was taking programming in college and my unit knew this, they said, hey, why don't you work in the admin section? We need some help here. And so while I was there, I went about automating lots of different reports and different functions they needed automating so that they could work more effectively. Not what I signed up to do in the army, but I'm kind of glad I was able to be useful during that time.

So I think JewelBot seems like quite a different deal than you were up to previously. Yeah, as I said, I've jumped around industries and I've gradually gone backwards where most people may start at a small company, a startup, and work their way towards the corporate world. I've started at really large companies and have worked my way back to startup. Very cool. And just for the listener's sake, Jewelbots is the world's first programmable friendship bracelet. It's focused on young girls, getting them interested in coding. It's all programmable and open source and built around Arduinos.

And Sarah, I believe this is your brainchild as the founder of the company. But before we get into Jewelbots, can you kind of tell us, you said you've been doing JavaScript and you're active in the New York community. JavaScript stuff. You've also written a lot and done some speaking. Can you give us a bit of your background, how you got into programming, what exposed you to JavaScript and kind of how you got to where you are today? Yeah, so I started programming when I was

about 12. And I discovered it because I was a homeschool kid. And, you know, I was about 12 and I discovered it because I was a thing and ended up getting really involved in my local community of BBSs and dialing into, you know, local communities and helping to host a BBS down the line with a local high school student. So, and then my senior year of high school, I went to high school and I took a C++ class. And it was just one of those situations where I was like, this, you know, this make this is the first thing that's ever made so much sense to me. Like programming, you know, it's finally like this is speaking my language and literally. And I knew then what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I studied computer science at Penn State. And then my first job was at a company called Van Heusen. So it was, uh, my first job was I was, uh, an executive assistant at my second

day of my second day of work, uh, an older woman, or it had to be like the first week I was there, an older woman was came up to me and she's like, you know, you're supposed to be wearing pantyhose, right? We all have to wear pantyhose. This is great. I can't wait to do this for the rest of my life. Um, so anyway anyway so I have are you being serious there of course not right

so I you know I just really tried to um apply to everything and this was a time where everyone was losing their job you know so there wasn't much to go around but I finally found a role working at a help desk uh and that's when I where I got started in technology. So I started there. And then I moved over the applications development department doing focusing on vb.net, visual basic applications. And then after that, got more involved in database administration, and really data warehousing, things like that, and moved over to the world of C Sharp and ASP.NET and became an ASP.NET MVP with Microsoft and then discovered JavaScript. And I think I discovered JavaScript

about the same time that jQuery came out and Firebug had just recently come out as well. And before that, JavaScript was such a pain to work with, but those two inventions really made it a lot easier. So, and then when Node, when people started working with node i mean that was that was amazing because i love back-end development and being able to do but then back-end in the same language makes everything so much easier so um it's kind of a natural progression i i totally remember when firebug really made a big difference when firefox was you know, it's get Firefox.

And it was all about this grassroots movement of making the web better. And, you know, all these new tools came out to, you know, enhance the web development process in the browser. Before that, all you could do is throw an alert in your code and have it pop up. And half the time it would just say object object you know if you could get some sort of information out of the browser was was a huge thing and firebug really i don't know if calling it revolutionary is is overstating that probably not it definitely changed things dramatically for the better yeah yeah definitely it's really awesome so it seems like you probably came to open source by way of javascript is that fair to say Or was there some influence in your life before that?

I came to JavaScript by way by open source by way of dot net. I had some really great mentors while I was doing that and got involved in some open source projects doing that. It's not something that's rampant in the world of.NET, but there's definitely a group of people focused on that. And that was pretty neat. Yeah, you don't hear that very often, especially during that time period. Nowadays, Microsoft has promoted open source so much with the open sourcing of.NET itself. And it seems like that community has really exploded in the last two or three years.

But in the time period that you were talking about, you don't necessarily, I don't, at least in my mind, think of the.NET community in relation to open source. That's interesting. Yeah, no, most people don't. But it was a really big part of kind of my uh maturity as a developer one thing i got to ask you about since we have you here is your twitter twitter bio which is just spectacular uh it says just a girl standing in front of a microprocessor asking it to love her yes i've always loved that one too i don't even have a question i just wanted to i just wanted to say

that out loud and say that's just a great bio i feel like that's like off in my life i'm just like come on just please love me like i just need this to work yeah what what made you come up with that i mean i know it's woody and all is that is that uh does that share more about your personality than we get to see through your code and uh you know just how we know you from the internet i guess yeah i mean i guess so i i i think that i just found myself in another situation where i was coding and just being like begging the system to like work for me and you know it's really always funny when you take a step back and you you decide it's not you it's it's it's the machine right i really like to i i think that's a good perspective when you just keep coming up against a wall prior to jewel bots you also were cto at

flat iron school and you started um girl develop it can you tell us a little bit about those two things. Yeah. So Flatiron School is a great organization that does boot camp, programming boot camp for adults that want to learn how to code. And one thing I really appreciate about what they do is they place all their students in jobs. I think they have a 99% replacement rate, which is huge. And that's what that's, you know, the reason I joined them is because they build programmers and then give them careers, which is really awesome. And they do a lot of good work. So I, it was a great experience to be able to work with them and see what they were doing. And that was kind of a natural progression after building Jewelbop, which is a nonprofit that focuses on teaching adult women how to code. both realized that we had both run into the same scenario, um, where often where we were

the only female in a class full of, of men and, and just being really awkward and nervous when it came to asking questions and never wanting to look like we didn't know something. Um, so that was, um, that was a neat experience, uh, to be able to provide that for a lot of people that turns out really needed it a place where they can feel free to ask stupid questions and not feel weird about it. I'm kind of curious of, um, a little bit more about you and George, your backstory is not so much, you know, how you joined up as a team, but you know, what initially struck you as both of you, like your curiosity with software development. I think you kind of touched on a little bit, Sarah,

but I'm curious of a particular moment, if you can remember it, where, where you felt like this was your thing, that software development was something that you could do and maybe not do based on your Twitter bio. But maybe both of you can share this originating moment where you were like, this is something I can do. I actually like this. This is something for me. For me, I got into computers really young.

My father was a magazine editor. He worked remotely in the 80s for a magazine publisher in New York City. And as such, we had a computer and we had a dial-up modem and all that. And I was the first kid on my block with a local area network. I want to say NetBuly? So long ago. I don't remember. But it was very neat to actually have two

computers talking to each other and to, to be on prodigy, uh, back when it was still in full DOS in the, uh, late mid to late eighties. Um, and so that's when I knew, Hey, I want to do something with computers. I would just tinker with them, you know, learn how to crash them, uh, do various things with them. But I never, I never realized that programming was anything other than magic. That's how I always saw it. I didn't have any mentors that said, hey, this is all you really need to program. You need a text editor and you need a compiler and poof. I never knew that.

And it wasn't until college when I actually took my first programming class where I realized, wow, I can do this. And that's when I finally realized I can fuse my passion for technology with programming. And that's how I became a programmer. The reason why I wanted to ask you both this question, it's good for perspective too, is because this is your business, right? We're going to talk,

talk about jewel bots here in a bit at depth, not only about its purpose, its mission, its goals, but also the technology behind it. And I think it's important to share what got you excited in, in light of you, exciting other people and introducing people into technology.

It's not that that would be just a little anecdote to share before before sarah goes yeah that's great that uh that makes a lot of sense so i think i you know i really i found it because like i said i wanted to to make friends and not because i thought engineering or programming was cool because they weren't then and they're still not cool um but uh i think in i think what i i was never super talented at um school it's not something that i ever really um really excelled in um i was uh yeah it's, I was never super academic. And I remember even the same year that I, I'll never forget this, the same year that I started taking C++ as a class, was a year my chemistry teacher said to me, Sarah, I didn't know it was possible to get a 13 on a homework assignment, but you have proved me wrong for the entire class, which was

not a stellar, not a stellar moment in my life. But it was when I started taking that C++ class, it was the first time I was able to just sit down and be like amazing at something. You know, like just really just felt took it to it like a fish to water where I was like, all of this makes so much sense to me. And I'm really enjoying this. And also, this is a class, which was a pretty neat experience. That's interesting to hear that because I'm sure that there's some parallels into Jewelbots and into your work there. Sarah, you as an originator of the idea, and Jordan, I think your perspective for you as you joined the team,

were you part of the original idea or was this simply your idea, Sarah? Well, I worked on Joel Butts for about a year, a little over a year before anyone got involved or anyone joined up. Okay. Yeah. So this is clearly something that as a brainchild simply from you and, and everyone else is sort of joining your party, so to speak. Yeah. But you know, since people have joined, it's definitely evolved a ton. And it's now kind of, and then that's what's really neat about being part of a team that's growing,

is every time someone joins, their voice gets added to the project, which is very, very cool. Right. We're getting close to our first break here so it's it's a good place to pause uh definitely teeing up the the next segment which is diving deeper into jewel bots and so stick around listeners we're gonna dive deeper in when we come back from this break there's a saying i once heard you may have heard it too it's all bugs have software i don't know where i heard it but it just stuck with me. And one of the most frustrating things about being a software developer is dealing with errors, dealing with bugs. They happen.

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Get the bootstrap plan for free for 90 days. That's basically 300,000 errors tracked totally free. Give Rollbar a try today. Head over to rollbar.com slash changelog. All right, we're back from the break. And Jared, I swear, I wish we can release the breaks to our listeners because I think sometimes we have more fun in the breaks than we do on the show. That's not exactly true, but we have fun in the breaks and y'all missed it.

We're going to try and bring a lot of what we just talked about in the breaks out. Uh, but Sarah, when we talk about jewel bots, you know, we think about just the exposure for children, the exposure for young girls into technology. You said you had worked on this idea for a year by yourself. Take us through the journey. How did this begin for you? What's the origin story for Jewelbots? Yeah, well, I mean, you look, if you talk to, I've talked to a lot of my peers about how they got involved in programming early on and

I think the majority of the time I heard from them you know like when I was a kid I played games and when I grew up I just wanted to make games you know like we've heard that on here a lot yeah exactly like I want to be a game developer when I grow up and then people grow up and they realize

how lucrative it is to develop literally anything else so they're like maybe the game thing, but I'll go to, you know, work as a defense contractor or something. That's a lot more profitable. girls around that age is consumable like technology. Like it's all things they consume and it's all things that they partake in, but they're not encouraged to be creators or to build like we are doing for boys. And so, and no one, I think no one's ever entered this. I mean, now, because people make money right like now building software is pretty lucrative and so i think people are like hey i'm going to do the software things i can make money doing it but like when you're 12 13 like no it's not no one thinks it's cool to be an engineer like to date no one thinks it's cool like i've gone to talk to a lot of

high schools and like tried to hype it up for them. Yeah, it's really hard to do, you know? And so everyone kind of that I know that really loves it and is passionate about the field got into it for some other reason. And so the question, you know, that I found myself asking was, can we create that reason? Can we artificially create a scenario in which we can turn girls on to coding younger um and so the uh the initial idea so like if you look at also if you look at things like minecraft or myspace or neopets those are all situations where kids find something that they love and they teach themselves to code to make it better yeah my daughter's doing that now she loves minecraft and she is

learning things that i didn't even know she would learn without you know my guidance nothing that i'm super awesome but i figured that i would be the one that would open that up for her and you know it's it's these other avenues like jewel bots and like minecraft that's exposing these children to this idea that they can create something and learn to code yeah it's really crazy i know that like all the stuff for minecraft is in java and like who wants to learn java java is the worst i was 19 when i learned java and was like, this is going to ruin my life. Wow. Tell us how you really feel about Java.

It was awful. But so, yeah, like kids are really motivated and really smart. You know, like that's you have to be smart to teach yourself Java. And so it's really given me a lot of faith in the stuff that these kids can do. So the first idea was to make a bracelet that changed color based on your outfit. So you could get up in the morning and put on your bracelet and decide what color it would be. Like if I was wearing blue, my bracelet would be blue, that kind of thing. So we built a prototype of that and brought it to a few schools and after school programs. And across across the board we heard that

that was stupid and the girls would never wear it we're like all right thanks because we just spent months building this but whatever um and uh so we started talking to them about what they do like and what they do enjoy and you know looking at what they are wearing now and just the friendship thing kept coming up over and over again, you know, communicating with my friends, being near my friends, hanging out with my friends, you know, and they're all wearing friendship bracelets already. Because the signaling part of that is really important to them. So we were like, can we build a smart friendship bracelet that you could code? And so that's what we did. So the first version of it wasn't quite that it was a version of it, but not quite

the friendship bracelet or going down the path of here's something that's already in the hands of these young influencers or the young people that you want to influence. It was already there. And you kind of went into, I guess, the environment in which they are already in, obviously school and things like that. And so, hey, you're already sharing these things. You're already doing these things with your friends. Why not make them smarter? Yeah, exactly. If there's anything we've learned from this whole process or that I've learned is that

I have no idea what teenage girls like, you know, like, and so when, whenever we need to make a decision about design or functionality or any of those things, we talk to them first. Wow. So you have a small panel of small children that give you big ideas? Yeah. We've talked to so many different groups and so many different ages. We have an ambassador program where kids can sign up to start getting stuff from Jewelbots in the mail. And, you know, sometimes we pull some of our ambassadors to ask them, you know, what do you like this color, this color, or this design or this design, or what's more fun to you. So that's, that's a really fun part of my job. One aspect that I really like about the friendship bracelet idea is not only

does it help you guys in terms of marketing because it's more fun when your friend has one um but also it kind of speaks to your initial intro into uh software and engineering sarah where you were you know on on bbs's trying to make friends you know like yeah you were you were reaching out socially and using technology to do so, and that blossomed into your career. And so now you're providing really what is a social accessory slash toy. I'm not sure what specific category you guys put it into. Jewelry slash toy that really promotes girls being social together it's like the young sarah would love this thing the young sarah would love this thing exactly yeah and i think i think that's like one

of the reasons why diversity is so important right like we have eight million fitness trackers out there and my theory about the fitness trackers, like the quantified self movement is very much a developer thing. You know, like everyone, like for a long time, really wanted to track everything they eat, every movement they make, report against it, see what they could learn about themselves. And that wasn't an average person thing. That was a very, you know, developer, technical engineer community thing to do. And so when wearables came out, everyone made a fitness tracker. It turns out, you know, fitness trackers have a horrible retention rate. People buy them and don't wear them. And even the people that wear them don't, most of them don't use them. They just want to look like they, you know, I heard a really quick quote from the CEO

of a fitness tracker company that said, people don't wear are wearable because they work out. They wear it because they want to look like they work out. So I think that when you introduce a diverse, you know, diverse people to building companies And maybe even if you'd like to share some of the future or some of your dreams that aren't quite there yet, but soon might be. So help our listeners understand exactly what Jewelbots is, what it does, how it looks. Give us some description. So Jewelbots, as we've said, are programmable friendship bracelets, and they come with a motor, four LEDs, and with a removable plastic charm that goes over the assembly so that you can actually customize what you want your charm to look like if you have a 3D printer or you can buy customized charms from us.

And they work by when you have two friends that are close to each other, you tap on the bracelet and it goes into friend finding mode. And then when both bracelets have done that, then you can actually pair with your friend and choose what your permany tone is or what color your jewel bot should react whenever you two come into each other's presence. And when that happens, when you see each other from there on out, your jewel bot will always light up with whatever color you share with that friend. If you have multiple friends from multiple different color groups around, then your jewel bot will pick the four closest and react with those four different colors and then if you have all of your friends around in a single group that you have on your jewel bot

then it will actually go with a customized animation i've been kind of curious about this aspect of it is it is all the interaction on on the device itself or is is there like, do they need to go over and hop on mom or dad's computer and do some hacking and then sync it via Bluetooth or something like that? How does the programming to device interaction, how does that take place? So the device is meant to be used without needing a cell phone or a computer to interact with it.

So you pick your JewelBots up out of the box. You'll be able to go to other JewelBots and pair with them with uses of the button. To do more advanced things like programming them, yeah, you'll need a computer, but you can also interact with the JewelBot through the app. So we're releasing an iOS and an Android app that allows you to do things like manage your friends

and program custom interactions through the app as well. So they'll be able to actually write some code in the app that goes back onto the device itself? Well, for the app, it'll be limited to things like, you know, show me or when this happens, do this, and we'll have a few basic interactions that we allow you to do through the app. Most of it though, will be through Arduino

and through actual code examples that we'll host on our community site. So I guess when I look at this, I see sort of two camps. You can be the, I hate to say the word user, but you can be someone who uses this thing as the version where you don't have to program and you don't have to, you know, kind of go that route. And the version or the person that picks up and says, wow, I can I can hack this thing. I can make it my own, which I'm not even sure if kids are saying that, Sarah and George, maybe part of your research is finding out whether kids even think or care that they can hack something or change something or create something like that. So how do you, how do you, uh, focus on the divide

there of someone who might just use it, uh, through the app? And is that part of your mission or how do you focus on the people that are wanting to go a little further and actually open up a computer and learn a language and do something interesting with it? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think the answer to that is I think a very big portion of our users won't code the device. And that's okay with us. You know, like we're, it's funny, one thing that we've done, I just wrote a Medium post about this, is we've gone to a lot of different schools to talk to girls in our demographic to learn more about them and when we go to the more affluent schools the private schools where the girls may have a little bit more spending money we see them wearing

the jawbone up or a fitbit or a nike fuel band and in the beginning when i would say when i would yeah and so i would see that and I would, yeah. And so I would see that and I would ask them, Hey, you know, like how many steps have you taken today? Or like, are you like fulfilling your goals? And they would say things like, Oh, I don't know. Or like, Oh, I don't even, I have no idea. And I'd be like, okay. Yeah. And I'd be like, well, why are you wearing that? And they would just be like, it's a wearable. It's cool. I guess, you know, like they don't, none of them care about, you know, like tracking their

steps. They're just, no one's building for them. And so we're so excited to be the ones building for these girls, right? Like building something for them in their interest. So it's, it's like a like a, it seems like maybe then, and maybe this might clarify it, it seems like the coding side of it and the influencing, you know,

exposing that next generation, as you say, of women to the possibilities of technology is the bonus to this. It definitely is. And so it definitely is. And it's finding, making something they love. And first, like our first goal is to make a product that they're, they love. And I think my theory is if we make something that they love and we give them the ability to code it,

that they will. And we'll always be focused on that percentage of conversion, you know, how many of them are coding it. And if, when we release it, a very that percentage of conversion, you know, how many of them are coding it. And if when we release it, a very small percentage of them are coding it, we're going to ask ourselves, what can we do to make this percentage larger? You know, what access do we need to do? But if we can make a product, we can make a product that millions of girls are using and we can convert 15% of those girls into coders. That's a lot of coders that wouldn't have existed before.

Absolutely. So what, what age group is it that is the focus then? Eight to 13 is the ages that we've worked with that we've seen this really resonate with. What happens at 13? Just like I turned 14 and it's not cool anymore or what? So we've, so at 13, that's when they're still in middle school. Um, it's kind of the, uh, when they hit high school, the, um, the few things

happen. So our design in general, we've gotten the feedback. It's aimed at that age group. Um, and when they hit high school, those girls are going for the accessories that I would buy there if you look at the if you look at the sites that they frequent and where they shop these are all things that feature like 35 year old models and you know stuff that you know we stop we shop in the same stores so the older girls I think that think that I, what we've heard, we've heard a lot of interest from older girls, but I think will resonate the most from, you know, middle school age. I like that the strategy of, of providing this great out of the box experience that, you know, realistically probably a majority of your customers will use, but maybe just start off

with and then have this, you know, kind of superpowers built into it. If you're willing to kind of cross that divide that Adam talked about. And my frame of reference, I have a seven year old daughter who's coming up on eight here and I'm watching her. She just got exposed to Minecraft through friends at church and she's very much in that phase of Minecraft where she just wants to play the game um yeah but but she's seen like a couple of the older boys who have mods and stuff doing stuff in minecraft she has no idea how they can do it right they have these great things they've built and so on and so forth and so she's

starting to get the itch of how do I do that also? And I see a very similar path here where some of your more coding requirement features are things like sending SMS, you know, notifying your parents, things that, you know, they're tantalizing and you may, maybe you wear it and you just use it for the friend detection for two years. And then one of your friends sends an SMS on there, right. On their jewel bot. And now you start to, then you have that synapse fire and you say, Ooh, I want to do that.

Yeah. The social proof kind of thing. Your friends influence one another. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think another, like another part of that is there are plenty of educational toys out there. Like if you want to buy an educational toy for your child, they exist and we don't need to build another one of those. You know, parents that care about this and there are a lot of parents that care about this. And there, you know, there are a lot of parents that already know how important this is and they care and they're buying educational toys. And that's a very important part of the community um the thing is though kids kids don't want educational toys right your average kid out there isn't like what can i buy that's

going to teach me your average kid out there is saying what can i get that's going to entertain me right so if we can figure out how to entertain them first and then kind of introduce the programming aspect after that, I think that that will be better for the community. Well, let's talk about a topic then that I can only imagine is the hidden gem here to a degree, is the user experience. I can't even imagine how simple this thing has to be. One, because it's for children. And then two, that a lot of the interaction with friending and these different things that are happening in the social space of meeting their friends has to be very fine-tuned.

So can you share any interesting notions about the user experience there or any new revelations you've had on the user experience of this device and how new revelations you've had on the user experience of this device and how it works? Yeah, I think George would be the best person to talk about this because he is the one that is elbow deep in this every day. Oh boy. Tell us, George. So programming is hard enough as it is. And when you're trying to get young people into programming, you've got to make it as easy as possible.

And so what that means for us is right now we've sent out wearables kits. We're selling wearables kits on our sites. And what we're doing is some of the support questions that are coming in from that will shape what we do when we release Jewelbots to make it easier for people to start programming. Simple things, things that need to be done but haven't really been done yet, like making Arduino tooling easier to deal with, making it easier to install, getting that ramp from, okay, I'm installing this

and now I've shipped my first program to my Jewelbot, making that ramp as low as possible. For the Jewel jewel bot that means that making sure that we have a community site set up where they can talk to each other making sure that we have code examples having good documentation as well as actually having the onboarding experience kind of take them through something really simple and really useful at the same time so So it starts with the app. I can't imagine how hard that is.

It's incredibly hard and it takes, it's not something that we're even, you know, obviously close to having perfected. But, you know, I take notes every day on any little problem that I have. And, you know, that's another, you know's another action item to fix before we release it. So you've got to have, if your users have a Windows computer, then you've got to be able to make sure that they can set up ordering easily on a Windows computer, or a Mac,

or whatever it is they have. And so that means that, you know, going, figuring out what our users use and programming for that. It also means that making sure that I take, you know, the designs or I look at when I'm, you know, writing the APIs or when I'm designing the APIs that they're going to be using, you know,

I take it to someone who has no idea about what programming is. I'm saying, okay, look at this. What does this mean to you? My wife is a teacher and she's got a lot of teacher friends and they all love the idea of Jewelbots. And they keep asking me, when will they be ready? When will they be ready? And in return, I say, hey, can you take a look at this and just try this and tell me how it goes? And that's how I come back with, okay, this word in this API doesn't make any sense to them. It makes sense to me as a programmer, but it's not going to make sense to people who aren't already programmers.

So it requires just a lot of introspection into why is each step the way it is and what steps can we remove and what can we make easier for people. Well, we're bumping up against our second break here, and I can already hear some of our listeners firing up their MUT or their T command line tool to tell us, hey, this is an open source show. This is a technology show. We've covered the history. We've covered the purpose. We've covered the purpose.

We've talked about the features and the user experience. We would like to dig deep on some of the technologies inside of Jewelbots, the open source aspects of it, even the programming languages that you're exposing for these young girls to code with. So we will camp out on those topics after this quick break. For those of you out there who are super fans, We will camp out on those topics after this quick break. access to our members only slack room exclusive discounts from our partners 50% off in the changelog store and of course you support us so we can support open-source hit the changelog.com slash membership to learn more and we appreciate your support

all right we're back talking about jewel bots and we want to look at the open-source side of this in the video you say that it's 100% open source or the whole thing is open source. And of course, we know it's programmable and extendable and that's all great. We also want to kind of hear some of the technologies that are inside it. You mentioned Arduino.

There's an iOS app. There's IDEs. Surely you have some programming language that's exposed to the customers, whether it's just JavaScript or something specific. So that's a wide ranging opportunity there to talk and yeah, share with us, you know, what, what open source is involved and also just kind of the, the underpinnings of Jewelbots. For Jewelbots itself, they are obviously the firmware itself is written in C, not open source yet, but when it's released, the plan is to open source the firmware as well.

We also have an open source app that's written in Ionic, which is a UI framework for Cordova. as part of that to actually talk to the bluetooth on the phones on the ios and on the android phones we uh we wrote a wrapper for uh the bluetooth le plugin uh for credo that we actually open sourced as well um as far as the languages that we'll expose to the user we're going to initially it's going to be same things that you'd see in arduino so c c plus plus uh and then later on as it becomes more mature, definitely want to get JavaScript in there if we can. I was going to say, Sarah, you mentioned that Java is something that kids are now dealing with with regard to Minecraft.

It seems like dealing with C and C++ is even asking more of them to get to the programming side of things. It is, and we'll see how it goes. So I think they're up for it. We've done a couple hackathons to see how they would do in that environment using Arduino and seeing if they could program for Arduino.

And some of the younger ones needed parents. Some of the older ones were able to just fly with it. I mean, the first language i learned was c++ so we'll see if we thought if we find that they do have a problem with it and we aren't converting then we'll look towards doing like a visual programming language where um you know like a drag and drop type interface but i think they're smart enough i think they can do it we'll see so i guess that leads me into a question that maybe we have just avoided so far but you mentioned uh george previously that

with some of the teachers friends of yours they would they want to get their hands on it and i guess we haven't really given a a status of like where jewelbot stands with regards to shipping product or anything like that so just briefly can you you guys tell us where it is as a product? Yeah, so we're going to be doing an alpha shipment later in April where we send out our first units to our customers and test them, get their feedback. These are going to be customers that sign up to be part of a special program because we're going to need a lot of feedback from them. We want to make sure that the bulk of Jewelbots have been thoroughly tested

and we're getting feedback from folks implementing it. And then the rest is going to be shipped over the next few months. We just started the manufacturing process. So signing with the manufacturer this week. Very cool. And when it comes to technology and the Arduino stuff, Sarah, yourself, you know, JavaScript developer, probably web-focused, I'm just assuming from what I know.

And yet you have this idea for a hardware product. Maybe share some of the ways that you went about developing out a hardware product. maybe share some of the ways that you went about developing out a hardware product. That's interesting both to myself and probably to some of our listeners who would love to have, you know, tinkering with Arduinos and robots and whatnot, but maybe haven't had a chance to tackle that particular challenge. Yeah, well, I started hacking on hardware when Nodebox first started being a thing and people started doing JavaScript and Arduino, which is very cool. It's a project built by Rick Waldron, who made version, like a big old Arduino and whatever you could tape to it.

And then you start iterating to make it smaller and faster and something that you could build. So in the beginning, it was me doing it. And now we have the privilege of working with people who have, you know, studied this and have done this in the past and know what they're doing as far as building an actual product. Sarah, you obviously have, and George, you do as well, roots in open source users of it, contributors to it. I'm kind of curious of, as we're on this open source flare here, why, why open source matters so much to the future of jewel bots?

Like why is it important to, you know, open source the, you know, the, I think it was the seed library you'd mentioned George, whenever it's ready, the firmware, yeah, sorry, the firmware available whenever it's ready. Why is that important to open source this stuff? With the, with what we're doing, which is a wearable that kids can learn to code, there's not a lot out there publicly on firmware for open source projects. You have TESOL, but for what we're doing, there's not a lot in public regarding this chip and what you can do and actually real uses of it. So the most selfish reason I have for wanting to open source this is because it'll help give eyes onto what we're doing and make our product better.

And it provides a way of kind of sharing the knowledge of what we've learned. So, you know, spending the last six, eight months on firmware, I've learned a ton. And I know that there's a ton that I don't know. And I hope that, you know, by open sourcing it, get more learned a ton and I know that there's a ton that I don't know. And I hope that, you know, by open sourcing it, get more eyes on it and get more people either interested in it or providing feedback or making it better. And that's something you just don't get if your software is an open source. There's no feedback loop. Oh, Jerry, we've had somebody. Oh, sorry.

Go ahead, Sarah. No, I just wanted to agree and to kind of take it a step further and say I think that the whole, you know, everything we do at Jewelbots, we try to be as transparent as possible with and open sourcing is part of it.

And you see the open source community in software. And even if, you know, taking from George's example, if you compare the innovation of software versus the innovation in firmware in the past 10 years, you'll see that software is light years ahead of firmware because everything is proprietary and people don't share what they learned and and that's the culture and I think that you know and firmware takes so much longer to build because of it um and one thing I've always believed strongly is that if you know we should all be learning from each other and and if someone can take what you've done if someone could be doing what you're doing better than you can, then they probably should. Like we think we're the people that are most qualified to build Jewelbots. But if someone out there, you know, can ignite girls in a better way or can do this better, they should be.

One of the more interesting features, in my opinion, of course, is how you do the Bluetooth stuff out of the box where the JewelBots will detect nearby friends. And it seems that you have some secret sauce there in terms of how that network gets set up and how that Bluetooth functionality works. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think I read in the Wired article that you do have a patent filed around that implementation or something similar.

I'm just curious on your thoughts around that decision and how it jives or doesn't jive with the spirit of open source, so to speak. I know business and open source sometimes butt heads and just curious about your thoughts around the patent. Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. An excellent question that I often ask myself, too. times butt heads and just curious about your thoughts around the patent. Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. Uh, an excellent question that I often ask myself too. Um, the, so one thing that we're doing that, uh, other people aren't is, um, is using devices, uh, for community wearable devices for communication purposes, um, rather than for step tracking or, um, you know, notifications, things like that. And that's something that, you know, came up in our research

with girls is they have to turn their phones off in school. They're not allowed to have them. So we couldn't depend on their phones for communication, which is what devices do now. And so we jumped on the opportunity to start using, you know, the different devices as nodes and to build a mesh network around communication and wearables. And, you know, we immediately jumped on that patent, mostly to protect ourselves from the larger companies that were, you know, that would, you know, shut down someone like us. And also it makes the company more valuable in general, I think. But we're definitely not out to become patent trolls.

So there's definitely a balance that you have to reach there. And I think the reason why we're the first ones doing it actually is the ability to talk to multiple devices both as a um a central uh and a peripheral you know bluetooth devices act as either a central device or a peripheral device where one is sending, uh, sending information and one is receiving commands. Um, and so, uh, the processor that microprocessors are that we're using is one of the first to allow, first of all, a device to be both a central and a peripheral, and also to have conversations with, um, many devices at the same time. Um, so in fact, it's so funny, George and I joke

around a lot about this, because I found about this microprocessor about two years ago, and was so excited, you know, I talked to a salesperson, and so excited about it. And so we decided, this is definitely what we're going to use. Or, you know, at the time, I was like, it was just me then. And I was like, Oh, this is definitely what we have to to use or you know at the time i was like it was just me then and i was like oh this is definitely what we have to use for jewel bots and they just released the library for this particular microprocessor to do it like a few months ago so the salesperson was like this can definitely happen and didn't mention the fact that it was going to take a little while so um so yeah this is something that's fairly recent, which is why we're one of the first to be doing it.

Very cool. That's an interesting point around the patent, Jared. We have had that question that you asked before once on the show and on Twitter, there was some backlash. We won't name names just because it doesn't make any sense to do it here on the show. But just as you mentioned, Jared, patents and open source. But Sarah, i think your your point to protect yourself from other companies who might stop you is a is certainly

a good point to have a patent and also to make your company more valuable because investors they're going to say well can somebody else come in the market and do exactly what you're doing if the answer is yes then you become less valuable yeah exactly yeah exactly. Yeah. I'm, I'm definitely, you know, I go back and forth on my level of open source purism or idealism. Um, I, I tend to lean on the more pragmatic side of saying, you know, we do have proprietary things in business and, um, and we're, we're not required in order to participate in the open source community to make everything that we do open source, you know, GitHub.com, which is one of our favorite open source companies in terms of how much they give back to the community, not just as a host, but, you know, with you know sometimes we think well everything has to be completely open and and patents fly in the face of it but um at the end of the day sometimes they're they're tools that we need to protect ourselves against bigger players and um in order to

continue as a business and then provide more open source you know so yeah i think it'll be good for you guys for the decision jacob thornton has a really good talk around open source guilt uh where he talks about you know the world of open source where like the emotional guilt that you have when you build something you release it out in the world that everyone just berates you to make it better and asks you why you made the decisions you did and And you were just like, man, I just want to make this thing and you guys can have it. Like, come on. Um, so I think there's definitely a balance between like what we released and, you know, and yeah, there's definitely a, there's a, there's a lot to be, there's a lot to be learned.

Yeah. Well, speaking of balance, I kind of have another question that's a little bit upstream from that, but I thought of it as you were mentioning that, you know, many girls cannot have phones at school. And whenever you make a, a product for children, you ought, you, you serve two masters because those children have parents and the children have specific needs and the parents have other needs. And thinking about my own circumstance, you know, with my child, there are things on this that I think are spectacular. And there are other aspects of it that, you know, my wife and I have decided, well, you can't SMS until you're a certain age, or, you know, we don't want you to have a phone, for instance,

until this time. And so you're making a hackable programmable thing for kids. But have you have you thought about parental controls or concerns of the parents with regards to what their daughters can can do with this? I know it says you can do whatever you dream up. Yeah, that may actually turn away some parents. Yeah, I think that we had the awesome experience to get some mentorship from a gentleman that invented Guitar Hero when I first started building for Gantel Boss. And one thing he said to me is that when they designed Guitar Hero, they worked hard to have the wink to the parents because you can't just build for kids. You do have to keep in mind that the parents are involved as well. And so the way they did that with Guitar Hero is they picked classic rock as the music that these kids would be rocking out to. So, you know, this kid would have this new video game, be so excited, love their video game.

And their parents would be in the kitchen, like listening to Led Zeppelin being like, this is awesome, you know? And so for us, that wink to parents is the coding part, is the fact that, you know, we're trying to incentivize girls to code. And this may be the only way that you can incentivize your daughter to, you know, become a creator of technology instead of just a consumer. And, you know, if some parents of technology instead of just a consumer. And, you know, if some parents aren't into that, then that makes sense. You know, like we're not for everyone. We're not, you know, it's hard to build for everyone that's out there. So we'll see.

Yeah, and just to kind of tee one up for you, you do have specific, you've taken, you know, another aspect of of that parental control also privacy and safety and you do have privacy and safety at least you're thinking about that as you're going about building correct yes yeah oh exactly that's a huge part of it george you want to talk a little bit about copa right so uh as part of the process to actually bring uh girls who are able to to learn to code uh had to figure out, okay, what can we, you know, for this community site, when they log into this community site and they want to share recipes or talk about their Jewelbots, you know, what can we do? And COPPA is very stringent about the data that you can collect, the data you can share. So if someone's under 13, you can't collect their data without their parents' consent. You can't let them sign up.

You can't let them share their personal information without that. And because part of the JewelBots experience is to have a gentle onboarding and to have a very good first user experience, we designed the app so that out of the box, there's nothing in the app that requires your personal information. Even if you want to use your contacts, if you want to invite your friends

to be part of your Jewelpots friend group, you don't need to sign in. You don't need to log in. You don't need to give us any information. It's all encrypted, stored on the device, sent to our server encrypted, so no personal information's ever leaked out. For our community site,

we're very strict in kind of what we can let you share if your parents decide that they don't want to allow you to share personal information, we actually have a path for that so that you can still take part on the site. And that's how we're taking it. By default, we're not storing any data that we don't absolutely need to function. And we're not going to make it easy for you to share data either. As a parent, you may not want your kid to share. Well, we are getting close to the tail end of our show.

Typically, we have a little bit more, but we have a hard stop. So we're getting close to our timing. But Sarah, I can't let you go. Give me one minute. You have to tell me who your programming hero is. Jared and I, we've wanted to have you on the show for a while. So we've got to know that before we can let you go. Yeah, I think that's a really good question.

So I can say that Miguel de Caza is definitely my programming hero. He's someone that has always cared a ton about open source, really just been an advocate of it since the beginning, and built a company around Microsoft products and making them more accessible for open source developers that just got purchased by Microsoft. So I think that he's always been a really big advocate for open source.

He's always done what he can to make the community better. And it's really been cool to watch Xamarin getting built and grow into a huge company that just got acquired. So he's definitely my hero. Very cool. And whenever our listeners go to Jewelbonds.com, you're encouraged to sign up for the newsletter

when you do that you'll get told about a certain code to save ten dollars if you pre-order for your child but sarah's offered us a special code just for our listeners which will give you the same ten dollars but it's just a different code so if you go there and you pre-order you can use the code changelog when you pre-order your first jewelbot or your first kit uh so where can people go online to to kind of catch up with jewelbots is it jewelbots.com of course but you've got github you've got twitter where else can people catch up and kind of take a peek at what's happening behind the scenes here yeah the best thing to do is sign up for our newsletter we sent we sent uh frequent uh updates um to our uh to our subscribers um and then you can always catch us on joel bots on twitter and

on facebook and all the same very cool well so i'm sure we can ask you so much more because this is a deep fun topic and i'm sure that uh it's interesting to you because you're doing it. And we love children, obviously. We love encouraging not only children, but specifically women to get more encouraged by technology and to find their passion in it. And we're big supporters of that here at the Cheneyville. So it was a blast having you on the show. We thank you so much for pursuing your dreams and giving back in this way and creating a

company around it and giving back to open source and being so encouraging and so inviting to so many people and what, what this really means. So thank you for coming on the show today and George, thank you for helping Sarah with his dream. It's such an awesome thing you're doing and for your service in the military, we obviously appreciate that as well. Anything else you two want to say before we close out the show?

No, thanks so much for having us. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having us. Awesome. We'll leave it there. Listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. And for now, let's say goodbye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. I'm out.