The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Open source at Microsoft, inclusion, diversity, and OSCON (Interview)

Episode Date: April 28, 2017

Scott Hanselman joined today's show produced in partnership with our friends at OSCON. Scott is a Program Chair of OSCON, host of the podcast Hanselminutes, and advocate for open source inside of Microsoft and the Azure Cloud team. We talked about the oldest software he wrote that's still in production, the shift inside Microsoft to open source and why, as well as ways to make inclusion and diversity a priority in your communities.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. Hi, this is Scott Hanselman, and this is the Changelog. Welcome back, everyone. This is The Change Log, and I'm your host, Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 249, and today we have an awesome show for you produced in partnership with our friends at OzCon, one of the largest open source conferences out there. Use our code changeloghallpass, all one word. Once again, changeloghallpass. That's going to get you a free expo hall pass, get you access to the hallway track, the exhibitors, and a bunch of other fun stuff. And by the way, Jared and I will be there in the Expo Hall, so check us out at booth 231.

Our guest today is Scott Hanselman, program chair of OzCon, host of the podcast Hansel Minutes, and advocate for open source inside Microsoft and the Azure Cloud team. We talked about the oldest software he wrote that's still in production, the shift inside Microsoft and the Azure cloud team. We talked about the oldest software he wrote that's still in production, the shift inside Microsoft to open source and why, as well as ways to make inclusion and diversity a priority in your communities. Our sponsors today are Linode, Hired, and Datadog. First sponsor of the show is our friends at Linode.

We host everything we do on linode servers head to linode.com slash changelog get one of the fastest most efficient ssd cloud servers ssd storage 40 gigabit network intel e5 processors use the code changelog 2017 20 bucks in credit head to linode.com slash changelog and now on to the show all right we're back we got another episode for you this time in partnership with our friends running oscon talking to scott hanselman jared what is up man scott's up scott's up and waiting in the wings scott hanselman of course of hansel minutes uh works at Microsoft. You've probably heard him, read him, perhaps even spoken with him. Scott, thanks so much for joining us on

the Change Log. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. People read you, Scott? Like tarot card readers or what? I've had a blog for many, many years. So apparently if you blog mediocrely for a decade or two people will eventually recognize you how far back 2002 15 years at least 15 to 17 years and the whole time about tech uh well i mean about tech about diabetes about hobbies about 3d printing about raising children about travel about all that kind of stuff, everything about life. But I would say primarily tech. What's been the thing that has kept you going through the blogging year, so to speak?

Well, a lot of people started blogging in order to build a brand. That is the wrong reason to blog. I blogged because I don't like emailing people. Like you all are very nice and it's nice to hang out and meet and stuff, but I don't, I wouldn't say we're friends. We're friendly. Right. Right. So let's say after the show, one of you emails me like a really amazing question and I'm like, yeah, Scott, you know, great having a show. Hey, I have this question, deep question. And then I'm like, wow, great question. I would love to answer you,

but I don't know you that well. And I'm really not going to give you the gift of 5,000 of my keystrokes. I've only got so many keystrokes left before I die. So I'm going to put those literally anywhere but email. So I would put them in a blog post or a wiki or, you know, maybe God forbid SharePoint, but somewhere where I could put them where there was a URL. And then I'd send you the link to the URL. So in every interaction in life, I would basically think of my blog as being a FAQ or FAQ. And anytime I did something interesting or anything, anytime I wanted to Google myself later, I would blog about it. And if you do that twice a week for 20 years, people will eventually find you organically. That's kind of a long-winded answer, but I think it makes the real point

that you shouldn't be emailing people. Yeah, I've emailed several people and I've actually heard that exact thing where basically if you're answering somebody or somebody asks you a question and it's long winded, basically make a version that's a bit more generic to the world

and put it there versus, and then that way you can point a hundred or thousands basically, if you're Scott or you. Well, no, even like, this is the thing. Sometimes people say, well, I won't, I won't do, I won't do a blog because only two or three people email it. Well, but imagine if you got four through two, three, four times more email done, that's what blogging will do. If two or three people visit your blog, those are two, three, four, a thousand keystrokes multiplied by the number of people who visit that you didn't have to type. So I think of X page views a month as being literally millions of keystrokes that I saved.

And I live beyond my my scaling ability. I like the idea of the keystrokes left in your life because, I mean, you hear breaths, you hear days, you hear whatever. Well, I made a website. It's more hacker for sure to say keystrokes. I made a website. Maybe you can go right now to keysleft.com and put in how old you are and put in how many keys you type. And it'll tell you how many books you have left, how many programs, how many love letters, how many tweets, and how many emails to your boss. So then maybe you can prioritize the things you want to spend time on. Sounds terrible. I mean, I think it's empowering. It's empowering to take, you can take every keystroke that I hit.

And I'm going to feel like I'm that much closer to death. You know, like I feel like I'm literally dying as I'm piping. Well, and the best way you are dying, but you're dying when you're breathing, you're just not counting it. But if you go to keysleft.com and just look at it, it will count down. So you're actually seeing keystrokes that you're not typing disappearing from your life right now. And how is this empowering? Well, if it doesn't get you blogging, then it'll certainly make you think every time you send that email. I don't send emails more than a couple of sentences. This email or blogging topic wasn't exactly on our docket, but going a little deeper into it.

How many people out there have enough ideas to blog about? Like, don't you think at some point saturation will start to happen? And it's just like, you're just another blogger. You're just sharing more ideas. Do you feel like that? Do you feel like everybody can make a difference? I don't think that people should let their self-esteem get tangled into their blogging. You know, we all have imposter syndrome, or at least I do.

We all have the sense of, well, everyone's said everything about Angular, right? Like, I know that there's a bunch technologies that are out there and the people that experience them gives you an unlimited amount of potential blog posts about here was my experience with Angular. I'm not an Angular expert, but my experience as a newbie learning Angular is valid. So I accept that I have, I am learning Angular. I'm not an expert. And it's totally reasonable for me to write a blog post that compares Angular and Ember and say, here was my experience.

And if you present it in such a way that, you know, if the trolls come at you, you go, hey, I'm just learning. This is four hours on a weekend looking at Angular and Ember. That is always a valid viewpoint. So I, as a former computer science professor, I very much write kind of like 100, 200 level content from the point of view of someone who's learning because I'm not a professional. I'm just an amateur that's been around for 25 years. Yeah.

What about, what's the, what do you say to the argument about signal versus noise? you don't know it when you're writing, but it, or maybe not a good writer that, you know, we have this mass of data that we're all pumping out new things every day and people are trying to find answers and, you know, experiences and things that help them along their way. And at a certain point, are we just adding more noise? Can you, can you actually determine what is signal noise as you're writing it? I don't think that you can. And I think that right now we do have a bit of a monoculture in that Google is the lens by which most people look at the Internet. But PageRank has mostly worked other than W3Schools.com. It pretty much provides valid. change. Uh, I don't know. Uh, I don't, I don't think it is invalid to say that the cream will eventually rise to the top. So regardless, if, if it is only me, like sometimes I will Google for stuff. Uh, and of course I Google with Bing, uh, to, uh, and I'll add the Hanselman at the end of the, of the thing. Cause I know I blogged about it once. Right. So like I work on.net, I want to

do some angular. So I'll Google.net angular Hanselman because I want to about it once. Right. So like I work on.NET, I want to do some Angular. So I'll Google.NET Angular Hanselman because I want to limit it to my own blog. And I'll go, oh, there's that time that I blogged about that. And then I'll copy paste the commands or whatever I need. So there's value in simply using it as an online journal for stuff about yourself. You might want to Google later. Yeah. One particular post that you wrote back in 2011 resonated with many. In fact, you alluded to it here when you said that, you know, when you mentioned imposter syndrome and you even linking up, I believe in a nav of your website. So it must be pretty important to you called I'm a phony. Are you, which is all about it a lot on The Change Log and all the different shows that we do. It seems like, and I know that it's empowering to hear somebody like Scott Hanselman say that he's a phony, but why do you consider yourself a phony? Because in many people's eyes, you're legit. You're the real deal, and we're the phonies. I think the point of that post and the point of the kind of the general narrative around imposter syndrome is that we want to get more people from more backgrounds into technology.

And so many people have this sense of I'm not supposed to be here. And when I was coming up in tech, I used to work in banking and we would go to all of these fancy business meeting with fancy people who had VP in their title. And I remember one time I had to go to England to talk to a bunch of vice presidents of English banks. So it was like, they get plus two charisma just for being English. Then they've got like, uh, you know, suits on and stuff. And I mentioned to my, my VP before we were going to go, I don't own a suit. And you know, that was, I felt, I felt othered. I felt separate. I felt like it was like, that wasn't my world. I'm not, I don't drink wine. I don't golf. I don't know those things. So then I find myself at a hotel after we got and presented to the banks and

they're all sitting around smoking cigars and drinking wine and talking about golf. And I was not adulting very well. You know what I'm saying? Like I'm still struggling to adult. Um, and that feeling of being othered and being separate is magnified so much more when you're not just like, you know, straight white guy. If I had just kept my mouth shut and said, yes, you know, par, par Cuban cigar. I don't know. I don't know. I don't play, I don't sports ball. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Birdie. Right. Exactly. If I just shut my mouth shut, I would have fit in. Right. But so many people are afraid to open their mouths. If I just simply accept though, that I'd had a right to be there and I had, you know, it's okay for me to be there, even though I'm not 100% fully prepared. Saying that out loud is a way of kind of like

naming it and claiming it and letting other people know that it's okay to do that. Like, let me give you another example. If you don't mind, I was at a conference recently called Codeland in New York, which is a really great conference. It's focused entirely on code newbies. It's run by the Code Newbies organization. You should check them out online. And one young woman spoke to me on the side. We were having a conversation about, you know,

feeling comfortable in a place. And she was saying how she didn't feel, like, welcomed in tech and da-da-da-da, dah. And how this conference is making her feel very special, even though she had imposter syndrome. And I just wasn't thinking, I just casually said, well, you know, welcome. Like we are, we, the tech community on behalf of the tech community, welcome. Like you found your tribe and we're here for you. And she kind of started to tear up and said, you know, I've been in this community, but no one's ever actually formally welcomed me to it. And it was symbolic. It was a throwaway statement, but at the same time, it also gives one a sense of like, well, this is my people. Like the way I do tech is okay.

So backing and popping up the stack to the original question about like declaring to the universe that, Hey, I'm a phony. Sure. I mean, look, I've been in this business for many years now. Does my degree from 20 years ago matter that much today? You know, not really, you know, like there's nothing you can do to go and say you belong. So I've just decided to stop being a professional and I'll just be an amateur who is an avid learner. I'd much rather be an enthusiastic and kind amateur who is learning and improving than to declare, I am an expert software engineer and all things, you know? So yeah, I'm a phony. I'm a little bit in over my head at all times, but that's where you grow. I feel like the exact same way, because like back in the day,

you used to hear from anybody, hey, you'll learn every day of your life. You learn something new every day, right? So if you're that person, then you're never truly an expert because you're constantly learning. Yep. And there are going to be people who will listen

and there'll be people who've replied to that post and said, you know, you're full of crap, you know, come on, I know what I'm doing. I worked hard to get here and I'm not a phony. And that's totally valid if that's their experience. But I would argue that there is probably the plurality of people who feel this way and we should make sure that they feel welcome too. So if you're not a phony, awesome, congratulations, you've made it. But I'm still occasionally feeling like I'm not, I don't belong. And whether, whether it's because of adulting or whether it's because I'm at an

Erlang conference and I don't know what Erlang is or whatever we need, we as, we as tech, tech leaders, or at least as loud people, maybe we're not tech leaders, but we have podcasts, uh, need to make people feel that they are welcome and that they are not othered. That's exactly why we created ChangeLog Community. ChangeLog.com slash community. You got a bunch of interesting things there about what we're doing, but was the whole you're not welcome here. Like, and I'm going to quote some copy we have on this page because I wrote it when

I wrote it. It kind of brought a hacker tear to my eye and it says, everyone is welcome. You are not an imposter. No matter where you're at on your hacker path, this community is a safe place for you to hang your hat and call home. All you have to do is take the first step. And like, for us, it was like, that's the welcome mat. Like we want people to feel welcomed in this community. And that to me is like, you need that invitation. You need that welcome mat to, to, to sort of take that first step.

Excellent. Well, good for you for doing that. Yeah, it's hard to see from the inside to know that's something that, because it's kind of sound like it surprised you when she began to tear up a little bit. And perhaps to you, it seemed like, like you said, a small interaction. But to see that effect on somebody, that emotional effect, it's harder to see that that's needed once you're already on the inside. So it's super valuable to see that that's needed once you're already on the inside. Um, so it's super valuable to see that happening. Important for us not to get too comfortable either. Yeah. Yeah. That actually leads me to what I was going to say, because, you know, here,

you've been in the tech community for so long, uh, a tech leader, as you said, or perhaps a loud person, you've have a career in coding and yet you still, what, what today in 2017, you mentioned Erlang offhand, what trips your imposter syndrome even now? What puts you out of your comfort zone? Well, just a couple of days ago, I tweeted, I was at a conference in Philly called Philly Emerging Tech, which was a really very well done conference. And I would think that it skewed a little advanced,

so maybe more of a two, 300 level, even 400 level. And someone had suggested that I go see this amazing talk about free monads, F-R-E-E, monads. And I sat there for a while and they were typing and the person clearly knew their stuff and they were very charming and very dynamic speakers. So the gentleman did a great job. But about 10 minutes in, I finally just turned to the lady to my right. And I said, what language is this? Cause I didn't even know what he was programming in. And she said it was Scala. And he was using words like, you know, nondescriptive functoid functor, but that, and I sat there, I just stare, I just gave up. So then I tweeted, I still don't know what a monad is. And that tweet got like 500 retweets and like turned out to a whole conversation. And the conversations were basically two, the replies were twofold.

It was either, oh, it's just a non-descriptive functoid of a whatever. It's easy, you know, you know, and the other people were like, yeah, and I've been in software 20 years and I still don't know what a monad is. So the people were comforted by that. So I think it's important for us to, if you hear an acronym in a meeting and you have the ability and the privilege to go and ask, maybe other people in the room would like to know what that acronym is too. So you can lend your privilege to people by saying, what is that TLA? Oh, three letter acronym. Cool. Thanks.

Did you ever go figure out what a monad is? I kind of get it there was a really cool cartoon i saw about like boxing and unboxing values and stuff so um as john as my friend john skeet says uh there's a moment every once in a while for 60 seconds where i can hold it and then i lose it so i know it's in there and one day i'll have a dream about it and i'll wake up and know it but for now I don't really need it. Yeah, I'm in the same camp as you. I think I've had it explained to me a half a dozen times in different ways, whether by cartoon or, you know, example code or paragraph or even audio form.

And I always walk away thinking, OK, I get it. And then 20 minutes later, I have no idea what a monad is again. Yep. One day, one day, just like the Electoral College will understand it. And maybe. So let's go back a little bit. Tell us a little bit about, you've been in it for a long time. One question I like to ask people because software is so ephemeral nowadays is, is I like to think about software that endures the test of time. And so one question I like to ask people, especially in the industry, as long as you have, what is the oldest piece of software that you wrote that is still in production use today?

And by production, I mean it's still valuable and being put to use. It's still executed. It's not to be like a production system. Well, the oldest. I was going to go. I'm going farther and farther and farther back. I wrote in 1995, seven? No, even earlier. 94, 95, I wrote an application for the Palm Pilot called Glucopilot.

Glucose and Palm Pilot. That is a diabetes, it's a handheld diabetes management system. The first portable blood sugar management system. I wrote it in C++ in Code Warrior, in MetroWorks Code Warrior, and I still get email from people who use that application. So that would be 22 years.

I worked before Microsoft as a chief architect of a company called Carillion. They got bought by Checkfree, they got bought by Fiserv. I worked on the retail online banking front end for that, which is used in something like 25% of the US retail online banking. So that's something that was 15 years ago. 10 years ago, I worked on DOS blog with Omar Shaheen and, and, uh, Kim Clemens Vasters.

And I know it's being used cause it runs my blog and that's, you know, 13 plus 13 plus years. So I would say 22 odd years, maybe I did another couple of apps before that, but they were windows 3.1 and it's unlikely that they're still used. But the Palm pilot one, I know for a fact is still being run. That's excellent. Yeah. Talk about using your keystrokesilot one, I know for a fact, is still being run. That's excellent. Yeah. Talk about using your keystrokes well.

That's a good question, though. Yeah. That was one of the better answers. A lot of people will, it'll either be something that they're still using, like for myself, I have software that's probably 10 years old-ish that it's still in production, used by me,

but not by anybody running the PalmPilot. Ooh, I got an even better one. I got an even better one. I got an even better one. Babysmash.com. Babysmash. Babysmash.com. When my 11-year-old was not 11, I made an application to teach him his letters

where you smash the keyboard and it puts the letters up. And then if the kid accidentally types a word, all the letters jump out of the way and then they spell each other out and they like read the word. So it's like lights and colors and singing and shapes and stuff. I wrote that just sitting on the couch while we were watching Lifetime or something.

That is absolutely, and he's now 11 and that app is actively being used and is on GitHub. It makes sense if you watch some Lifetime while you wrote this. Cause well, you know, I told her I was doing, I was only doing work, but it wasn't, it wasn't my work that's super cool i mean like because especially if it's maybe not a machine you are willing to let a kid break but like kids love uh early access to technology like my my just past one year old 13 month old

and he loves nothing like if he sees my iPhone, he's going to play with it. And he can't do anything because he can't get past this. You got to get Baby Smash because Baby Smash, the thing about Baby Smash that was so fun about it was that I implemented multi-monitor support. So you can let the kids like smash on your three or four monitor setup. So I've got all these great videos that people, people send me videos and clips all the time.

I've got hundreds of them of their kids on like these amazing like multi-monitor flight simulator type things where the kids like you know doing some really important computing and they've got like baby smash on all the monitors filling filling it with shapes and colors and stuff it's all animated and juicy it's way before iphones and ipads existed yeah we need to bring this back to... Well, we don't have to bring it back, right? Because the babies are now... Fresh babies are coming every day.

Well, what I mean is new platforms are... Oh, yeah. So it's been ported, actually. There's iPhone ports and Android ports. Somebody's got an Xbox One. They're out there. It's all open source. That's the joy.

And now that my kid is too old to care, he'll actually probably... Actually, that's a good point. I realized that he the joy and now that my kid is too old to care he'll actually probably actually that's a good point i realized that he's old enough now that he could actually maintain it so the kid that used to grow up 11 12 years later and now maintain the software so i have to get on that yeah absolutely so when you say open source does that mean it's also on github open source or just open source okay no it's on github everything's on github oh okay yeah because when source forge started, we moved it over to GitHub. Makes sense. Well, we are up to our first break. Let's take that.

And when we come back, we'll dive a bit more into conferences and what you're doing with OzCon and a bunch of fun other stuff that we have such great plans to talk about. So we'll take this break. Be right back. Hey, friends. I'm dropping the background music on this break because I want you to completely focus on what I'm about to tell you. I want to tell you about our friends at Hired. We've been hearing lots of great things about them and their process to help developers

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Once again, Hired.com slash changelog. And now back to the show. All right, we are back with Scott Hanselman. And Scott, you have a long storied history inside and outside of Microsoft. One thing I'd love to hear from you

is how you manage your time a little bit because you have this full time career with Microsoft. You also have all this extra stuff that you've been doing. But we'd like to see where you're coming from

as an employee of Microsoft, having all these things on the side and kind of what's your peer view into the software ecosystem? That is a broad question. Almost completely open ended. OK, so I take the best path for it. I've worked at Microsoft for now like eight years or so. But, you know, I because I work in Portland, I don't work in Seattle.

I like to joke that I'm outside the Redmond reality distortion field. And that's not necessarily meant as a dig to my coworkers, but just more of a, it allows me to be slightly more in the community. Like there's lots of different people at Microsoft. It's a very big company with a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds.

But there are some people who kind of go to work and they go home and they go to work again and they're always in Redmond, Washington, and they're not, they don't have time, they're working. They don't have time to go to conferences, they don't have time to talk to developers. So they can get a little bit of a group think. So one of the things that I try to add to it is,

you know, a little, just a little external perspective. And I've since built a team and I've got Maria in New York and John in San Diego and Jeff in Philly. So we are all outside Seattle, all in different communities, all trying to give a perspective on, you know, how we ought to do things. And I went to Microsoft to do open source and open source things. And through a cast of, a cast of thousands and lots and lots of support, you know, working from within, from the lower levels and kind of pushing it up with support from management,

we were able to open source a ton of stuff. That has been possible through bosses that would, you know, we have reasonably flexible work hours. They don't mind me blogging on the side. I told them when I came there that the podcast was mine and it was going to continue. So, you know, all of those things need to be made possible by the first level and second level bosses. You can usually get away with a lot of stuff if a VP doesn't know what's happening, right? So some of this stuff was very much like change from within.

And then once it got visible, the VPs started to go, oh, okay, well, that's, is that good? Is that bad? And then they educate themselves about open source. And then we had support from the highest VPs. And now fast forward a couple of years, people who were mid managers or VPs now. So then those of us at the low end now have what we call executive air support. So Scott Guthrie, who's our VP, who was like just a regular Joe when I got there, now supports open source fully and does everything that he can to make us successful. So has your podcast been around advocating open source then? Yeah, well, my

podcast has always been about open source, about useful software and about inclusion. The focus of the podcast lately is it tries to be like NPR, where I have this theory where there's people going on commutes around a half an hour. My show is only a half an hour long and they want to stay up on the latest tech or the latest whatever. And this show gives them an insight into tech that they are not working on. So let's say that you're just like an average Joe or Jane who's going to work at Aflac or some company that does text boxes over data. And you're doing text boxes over data for years,

it's very easy to not know what React is or Angular or Redux or whatever, or like Jenkins came and went. All that kind of stuff just sound like words. And you're like, well, you know, I wish I had time to go to a meetup, but I got to make this software. My show tries to give them that insight into new tech, new perspectives and new ideas from people they haven't like ordinarily heard of people who aren't on the conference speaking service, uh, conference speaking circuit. Right. Just like when you turn on like fresh air on NPR and you're like,

Oh, it's that guy from that thing that I'm kind of vaguely familiar with. And then after half an hour, you're like, wow, you know, Chris Pratt's going places. I didn't know he was beyond just community.

Right. Yeah. That's one of the things I love about audio. One of the reasons why we do this show as well. And I'm a podcast junkie in terms of listeners. I listen to podcasts a lot as a way of augmenting my keeping up, my education. And what it really does is it provides breadth of knowledge, as opposed to books or sometimes blog posts or diving real deep and

getting depth of knowledge, which actually helps with imposter syndrome, by the way. You feel like less of an imposter when you at least understand that acronym or that concept at a layman's level. And audio as a passive medium, one that I can do while mowing the lawn or working out or driving, like you said, that commute, is an excellent way of just getting more breadth. And so I think podcasts you know, podcasts like yours

and hopefully like ours as well is a real value to people keeping up and not falling behind. We're also remote people too. So I think, Scott, you know, you're providing a show basically for people who can't get to meetups or can't get into community. That also is the same thing for those who are remote, like Jared's in Omaha.

I'm in Houston. I could easily go down into Houston and go to meetups and hang out with some people. I know some people in Houston and it's pretty easy to tap in, but it's, you know, I got family, we're doing things and I don't have the time to do it.

So not just those who are like constantly working, but those who just don't have access they're just far away or even in a different country like we have listeners that tweet and email us in different languages like the ones i can't even read so it's like you know i mean so our reach is far more than just our you know because i'm in the u.s or because we're in the u.s our u.s borders like it's it's not even like Canada and Mexico. It's far beyond that. It's Japan.

It's South America. It's important to remember that, and these are, for many people who are listening, these are like, duh, kind of statements. So bear with me. But it's important to remember that there, as three kind of Americans on the podcast here, there's a whole class of people out there that have absolutely no interest in coming here, and they're gonna live happy and fulfilled and wonderful lives.

So let us not presume that what we say is necessarily gospel or provides a whole lot of value, but it's exciting to find out when you're being heard. There's a lot of great friends in Iran that listen to my show, so it's always exciting to see how they do software and how their teams work. Absolutely, and it's always exciting to see how they do software and how their teams work. Absolutely. And it's always exciting and somewhat fearful when you see a tweet from that's in Chinese or Japanese and you, you hope it's good. And so you click on the translate button and the

translation doesn't quite get you there, but you're thinking, I think this is a positive thing. You're in that situation. Yeah, definitely. I've translated, translated a couple of recently and I'm like, wow, okay. That was really nice. Even if it was not. Well, I reply. I reply in broken in broken Google Translate. And they often appreciate the effort. And I appreciate this. I remember doing this. This is pre like recent stuff. But back when I was really trying to be an advocate for those who are writing CSS. And I wanted them to learn SAS. I was like all over Twitter and Twitter was the proving platform for starting the SAS way.com, which turned into a community run blog on GitHub, all that good stuff. But I was like relentless about tweeting people and I would just be watching the SAS keywords.

Right. And it would be in different languages and I'd translate it. And then I'd write what I want to say and translate it back. And then I respond to them i just like hoping that it that google was right and they didn't make me see anything mean because like i was that relentless and i was doing something very similar and it was they were like wow somebody actually is like advocating for people to learn this new thing and it was just a very pure and kind of like childlike uh approach towards you know joy wise approaching this,

you know, reaching out to people and being inviting, you know, this is pretty cool. That's good. I never even considered responding back in their language using translate. I guess I assumed that would be like offensive or I could potentially offend, but I'm glad you've gotten good results.

Maybe I won't give that a shot. I think that is neat. Let's, let's step back to where we were. We're a little bit off, navel-gazing a little bit. My fault, not yours. But we were talking about Microsoft and open source and this changing shift.

So, you know, we cover the open source community and, you know, unless we're not doing our job very well, we've covered this change, this shift towards an investment in open source coming from Microsoft over the last few years. And I find it very interesting that it seems like from, maybe not from the higher levels, but from the lower levels,

you were instrumental in pushing that forward. Can you expand some more on that? Because you touched on it, but just the recent history of Microsoft's open sourcing of almost all the things at this point. The idea was to start with the ASP.NET framework, which is kind of like the Rails part of Ruby on Rails. It's the string concatenation part, I like to say.

Everyone likes to think that their web framework is so sophisticated and amazing, but ultimately you're just putting angle brackets and curly braces together into strings. Right. You know, so it's the, it's the Django, it's the Rails, it's the Express. That's kind of a non, non-committal thing to open source, right? You're not giving away everything. You're saying, here's our, you know, here's our sauce,

but we're not going to show you everything that's happening in the kitchen. In doing that, though, we built up a community of people who were excited to go and improve that. And then we, by making that not just open source, which is step zero, but also making, doing take backs. So actually taking pull requests, taking commits that started to build up this community. And then we slowly kind of worked our way down the stack until now the entire stack all the way into the compilers and the libraries and the jitter and the garbage collector are all open source, where you could even if you wanted to take a Raspberry Pi and build the whole thing on ARM or on some other platform and be somewhat successful. We've got a number of customers who've

actually got embedded NoSQL databases written entirely in open source C sharp running on a Raspberry Pi in, in a fleet of them, you know, in a big cluster of pies that would not have been possible had we not kind of slowly piece by piece proven the, the proven the model. It's pushing this rock uphill, you know, until it eventually rolls down the other side and then hopefully doesn't kill anybody. What were the convincing arguments, like the things that worked? Because obviously there were probably along the way there are things that don't convince the higher ups.

I believe you said you had what you call an executive air. What was that term? Executive air cover. Executive air support. That's the idea that like, you know, we're going in. We're all the grunts we need air cover so it's like i'm going to do so i'm going to do something stupid i want to make sure that i have a boss who that when some other boss some other general on another battlefield says wait a second this is

not compliant with our whatever's that your vice president or your boss says that's a you know a good idea so like for, for example, at my last company, I had executive air cover 15 years ago when I introduced continuous integration into our pipeline, right? Like that was not a thing. We were using a program called cruise control.net. That was like, you know, a build server, you know, introducing unit testing and a build server into a bank is a big deal. And in doing that, you could ruffle a lot of feathers and upset a lot of people having executive buy-in or at least have executive air cover so that when someone gets mad or

someone's cheese gets moved, the boss can say, well, yeah, you know, we needed to move your cheese. It was getting old. So what were the arguments? Here's the perspective I'm trying to get, because from where I'm standing, where Adam's standing, we're very much on the indie side, very small. Open source has been in our blood, so to speak, for many years. And so we don't see it from the inside of corporations, but we're speaking with many corporations where they're now embracing it. In fact, there's inner source and kind of things moving towards getting an office

even open source corporations to open source offices to open source their things. And so Microsoft being, you know, previously notoriously proprietary, right. On that side of the fence, this change is very uplifting. And it's like it seems like there's other people who could be trying to convince inside their corporation that open sourcing things is a good idea. So that's why I say, what are the convincing things? You have to know why someone is motivated to do their job and what their job is. If you, as an engineer, go and talk to someone with an MBA and try to explain to them why open source is important to you, that does not tell them why it's important. You have to be empathetic and put

yourself into their shoes. So for a business person or an MBA type, you might go and have to say, you know, we need to do open source because we are losing deals because it's not open source, or we need to use open source because the community perceives us as being closed and the temperature has changed in the community such that closed source is no longer cool. You might want to then go to an engineering manager and say, we need to use open source because we don't have enough people and there's more innovation in the community than there is internally. Or you go to that engineering manager and you say, we are not the smartest people in the room and it is hubris for us to continue to believe we are the smartest people

in the room. Let's get expertise. We can't hire that expertise. Let's use the open source community. So you're going around saying open source is important, but you're changing your story based on what the story that the others want to hear. And specifically, I don't know if you can get this specific, and I guess the past might be a little bit too far back, but I guess what were the convincing arguments in your cases? You're implying that my advanced age prevents my memory? Yes. Yes.

I'm being ageist right now. I'm assuming you're older than me, and I'm using it against you. No, I'm just saying that maybe I'm asking a question that goes too far back for you to remember the details of the specific arguments that you use in specific cases. But I think your generalized answer is probably better. Those general answers are pretty specific. But it also gets to, and this is entirely my opinion. So if you're a journalist, be aware, my opinion.

This gets to the larger Microsoft strategy, which is what I like to say is running your for loop in the cloud. Right. Microsoft wants to sell you stuff. Anytime, anywhere. Anytime, anywhere. It used to be, hey, buy Windows. Hey, buy Xbox. Hey, buy Office.

And if you don't want Windows, well, let me tell you why Windows is better. Now it's we've got this great cloud and you want to run Python or Erlang or PHP or whatever makes you happy. We're going to run it best in Azure. You want to run, you know, you love Ruby and Rails. Cool. I just did a blog post where I was on Windows running Rails on Bash on real Ubuntu, like not a VM, Ubuntu runs on Windows now, and then fired up Rails entirely on Ubuntu and then pushed it up into Azure and did it all in Visual Studio Code. So like in five years, we've blinked and then reality is now a hybrid and Microsoft's fine with it all.

You know, you use some pieces, use, you know, you like it, don't like it, fine. I don't care. I have an iPhone, but it's also got Word and Excel on it. You know what I mean? Right, yeah. So that's a whole other kind of idea, but it's not a radical shift in the sense of, hey, we have Office. That's good. Hey,

we're good at code. That's cool. All we're doing is saying all comers are welcome. So this gets back to the initial thing that we talked about 40 minutes ago, which is how do you make things as inclusive and welcoming to everyone, whether it be language, programming language or your personal language or whatever. Open source is the way then? I think open source is certainly a gateway drug. Yeah. I was actually, one more note on this subject.

I was talking to Gaurav Seth, program manager of ChakraCore and Chakra and TypeScript on a different show called Spotlight. I was actually at Node Interactive having this conversation face-to-face and his demeanor changed so much when I asked him the question basically of like, so you're an 11-year veteran at Microsoft and he's describing this shift of proprietors as Jared mentioned to open source

this new Microsoft we're all seeing. And I asked him the question, I forget exactly what it was but you can see the sheer joy as an engineer, because he's been an engineer in Microsoft the whole time. Not a manager, not an executive, not a VP, a doer. Not like those people don't work, but just using the analogy there. But he was excited.

He was like, oh, he's like, I'm never leaving. And it was almost like he was like, he could have been thinking about leaving, but now this new Microsoft is like, got him so excited that he's able to do things in, in the community. As you even mentioned earlier, Scott, like that he wasn't ever able to be doing before.

And you can see a complete demeanor change and a visual change of his body language. When I asked him that question and his, his happiness came out, you know, it was like, it was like, yes, I can finally do things I wanted to do. Absolutely. That's exactly true. And I think that people are starting to realize also that

there is like evil companies and then there are simply kind of unorganized companies. I've never been in a meeting where someone is like steepled their fingers and God, yes, yes. I think that doesn't happen at Microsoft, right? Like we might screw up and do something like we might put out a tone deaf ad or, or accidentally make,

you know, try to write something and do a not invented here syndrome. But that's just because we're big and unorganized and 130,000 people or whatever. But as far as like pure evil, I haven't seen it. It seems like it's not like Uber level of evil. But as far as like pure evil, I haven't seen it. It seems like. It's not like Uber level of evil.

I was going to say. Yeah. We might go with a couple examples. I would also just kind of describe the way from the outsider's perspective that this change of Microsoft seems like, in a good way, kind of like a cold, you know, where like one part of Microsoft caught the cold

and they're sneezing on folks. And now everybody's kind of like getting this open source bug. And maybe that's what we're kind of seeing. That is a weird, very weird analogy, but I'm going to, I'm going to go ahead and take that. Um,

another idea, I'm going to take your analogy and bring it back to, if you're familiar with who Seth Godin is. Yeah. Uh, he had a concept called the, well, he had a concept called the idea virus.

So if you, that's one word, if you Google for that, uh, that's kind of exactly what you described. Yeah. It's like, oh wow, that looks good. I want to do that too. That might be why I use that analogy.

Cause it is kind of weird. It's a Seth, but go ahead and just sneezers, attracting sneezers, same, same book, probably similar chapter, whatever. Probably. Uh, well, what I want to, how I like to think about it, which to me is exciting, is being, in my mind, I was anti-Microsoft

for a long time. No offense, Scott, but it was. No, I don't care. I mean, that's more Microsoft for me.

I know you don't, but I just felt like compelled to say that anyways. And so when I started hearing the inkling in the news of like, this is happening, that is happening, my cynic is like, this is a facade.

This is a, you know, they're trying to get us to like them again. We'll never like them. Or, you know, just that person inside me that I don't like very much. Things of it that way. And what's uplifting and that I'm happy to hear over the, it's been a few years is, is that it has been more like the thing that happened from the inside out. And it adds, like Adam said, a cold that has, you know, caught on and now everybody's sneezing. I don't understand these analogies, but the whole company is sick now and we're happy about it. I don't get it. Um,

but yeah, it's not a very real thing that has spread and And that's such a benefit for the whole community. It's awesome. I wrote a blog post a while back called Microsoft Killed My Pappy. And for those of you who may be listening, you're like, what's a pappy? Your pappy is like your grandpappy. Like Microsoft killed my pappy and I'll never forgive him. Right. Well, it's like I've met 23- 23 year olds that seem to claim the sense of

generational pain around microsoft being evil and it's like you weren't even born during the you know the the browser wars i fought in the browser wars young man uh and it's like i appreciate that you i appreciate that you hate microsoft but like yeah they do some dumb stuff with patents yeah there's the whole android back and forth thing. But like, I think Microsoft has pretty much claimed its space as not even remotely in the top three evil companies, you know, like we know what the other companies are doing. I think Microsoft, again, I get back to the big, it's a big company and it's not that organized all the time, but I tell you, I have personally met, hung out with Satya, super nice person,

wants to do the right thing. It's possible to have a great company that's an open source company that also makes money and serves both the user and the shareholder. And if it one day, if it's not, I will quit. And I've said this before, if Microsoft or my team does something that I can't get behind or I'm not okay with, I'll leave. I have no problem doing that. I think that's a good stopping point. On the other side of the break, we're going to talk about getting people together in meet space. Yes, conferences.

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gonna do it okay you can you can bring us back in scott you want to bring us in? And we're back for the third act of the changelog. Okay, maybe I shouldn't do it. Too much? Too Frasier? No, please go ahead. Well, we're in. This is it. You brought us back in.

That's a nightmare. Okay. So sorry. We're rolling with it. Let's talk about conferences. You've just recently been at a couple, and we're all going to be at oscon in austin next month in may in fact uh we have a special promo code for that by the way listeners if you want to come meet us at oscon we will be there scott will be there uh use code changelog

hall pass to experience the highlights of oscon with an expo hall pass for free is that right adam that's totally free yeah 100 free that's quite the hookup yeah oscon.com click register click the expo hall pass and when you get asked for a coupon code just pop in changelog all pass all in word and you get it for free and they can tweet that too can't they tweet it share it blog it you know podcast it whatever it takes podcast it we'll be out there in the expo hall and in fact uh we have free t-shirts for every changelog community member until t-shirts run out we have free stickers for everyone so make sure you stop by and say hi to us but that's enough of uh oscon specific stuff let's talk about conferences in general scott you seem to have opinions about what makes a good conference, what makes a bad conference. And secretly, although we're on the air here,

Adam and I have been talking about conferences and maybe throwing one in the not-too-distant future. So give us some tips and share with everybody what makes a good conference a bad conference. Well, I think that having a conference that knows who its audience is and also knows what level it should come in as is important. You know, certainly a conference that is aiming at 300 level, 400 level deep technical talks as if it were, you know, the last year of computer science class of, you know, a four year degree or a six year degree is one kind of conference. While a, you know, beginners getting together as a kind of conference, while a conference about feelings and about soft skills. Like there was one called OS fields recently, that was pretty good. Um, you know who your audience is, but then, um, I think it's, while this may not be the right place because we're presumably three straight white guys on a

Skype, the difference between diversity and inclusion, which I think is an important topic is worth pointing out. You don't want to try to build a team of Power Rangers. That's just pie chart diversity where it's like, yeah, we have like one Chinese girl and one black guy. You can't have two because it's the Power Rangers. You got to just, right? Right. That's wrong. very well-meaning, very kind gentlemen decide to go and start a podcast and then start asking like,

you know, your couple of friends of color, Hey, do you know anyone cool who can speak at our conference? That's kind of the wrong way to go about it. You should start, you know, if you haven't already, you know, diversifying the people that you listen to, the people that you follow and exploring. There's a whole ton of people who are not on the conference circuit, but they're building amazing stuff. Invite them. Say, hey, I really dig what you're doing. Come on. Come and talk with us.

You know, work with them. The conference I just came back from called Codeland was unique because the organizer, Saran, actually coached and worked with each presenter, even myself. Some people were a first-time presenter some people were a 20 year presenter she worked with them for hours coaching making sure the message lands right you couldn't tell who was a pro presenter and who wasn't they had people from the new york public library they had people from um from industry they had people from government they had the cto of new york city like all these different people. And it was the most consistent, clean conference I've ever seen put together. And that's because you don't just invite people and have them show up and then do their standard shtick. And you don't just about picking a team of good-looking Power Rangers. It's different perspectives.

It's different ages. It's different. Yeah, you laugh, but it's true, right? This is not Nickelodeon, right? No, I agree. This is not the sweet life of Zack and Cody. Yeah, it's a very apt way of describing it. It tickles me the way that you say that, like a Power Ranger, because it's an effective way of saying that yeah and i think that trying to go

and say well we've got 38 women that's success that's not how it's done ask people talk to people but invite people because their stuff is cool and like if you look at my podcast the it's a very inclusive podcast because i am reaching out kind of like across the aisle and inviting people like we think you're great. Let's hear from you. And if they are from an underrepresented group, then we, the three white guys on Skype, are lending our privilege. We are lending our privilege to them to lift up their voices. And then many of my podcast guests have gone on to do speaking and books and keynotes of their own.

And, you know, I'm happy to just have been a tiny, tiny ramp to lift their voices up. And that's how you put together an inclusive conference, not by asking your black friend if they know anyone. So where's the place for the demographic breakdowns? Because it seems like there's value there, but is it only perhaps in retrospectives when you can kind of gauge how you did perhaps? I mean, we have corporations that are releasing diversity numbers and, you know, we hold them to certain bars and we look at that and say, oh, it's on an upward shift.

And so that's a good thing. And we can all agree that's a good thing, but is it a cart before the horse? I think that's quite before the horse. I like to think about it in terms of if I look at the wall of faces of people who are, who are speaking at the conference, does it look like a party I'd like to go to? Does it look like my friends? Does it look like America? Does it look like the world? You know what I'm saying? Like when we were at the conference in Codeland or even OSCON last year, which had some amazing inclusivity numbers, if you looked at it, it looked like America. Like. You know what I mean? It looked like a bunch of people that live here. And the fact is that we all look different. And people are differently abled and people are different ages. So it's not just about colors and

making a nice united colors of Benetton looking ad where everyone's cute. It's about different voices. And if you look at the, the, the wall and you say, yeah, look at that. That's kind of like, that's aspirational. That's, that's representative. That's success, you know? And to give another example, I don't speak, I won't speak on a panel. If it's all dudes, someone will invite me. I'll say, okay, great. Who's on the panel. I go really six guys. And you couldn't find one woman to talk about data science. Like, let me give you the names of 58 women that are doing amazing work in data science. Let's get some voices out there. Right. Or you say, wow, everyone on the entire panel is 45. Hey, I know some cool data scientists that are in their early twenties. They're doing

some amazing work. And the only way that you're able to know those names is by diversifying the people that you follow and by reading different papers, different blogs and different podcasts. I hope I don't sound too preachy, but I just think that that we the white guys need to do better. And the way that we can do that is by changing our our headspace around this and trying to think about inclusiveness and not diversity. You kind of gave a call to action for those listening basically saying if you don't have go find right if you if you if you're if you look around you look left look right and it's not inclusive it's not diverse go find them how do they go and find i mean maybe it seems just like an easy answer but how do you go find people that are not in your normal circles

or you know i'm not seeing normal it's really hard to dance around these words, but like, how do you go out and find diversity? You know, where do you go look for it? Well, it's pretty easy. Just look in the mirror and then look in the mirror and then follow people who aren't that right. So if you are like, you know how your Facebook page after the elections and stuff becomes this weird, let me just, let's pretend that there was a world where you use Facebook. If, if, if you have a feed that fate, that feed has been tailored, you've taught Facebook how to treat you. So you're going to say a political statement and everyone else will be like, yeah, F yeah. Like political statement. And it's like, yeah, I agree.

I'm so glad you agree too. Well that's not because your political statement is right. That's just because you've curated a feed of people that think like you. My buddy, Anil Dash, who is the CEO of Fog Creek, had this experiment he did where for a year, he would only retweet women. This is an experiment, and I'm not saying necessarily it's a good thing or a bad thing. It is simply an experiment. What he did is he has half a million followers on Twitter. So he's got a significant size, and he says,

well, here are some underrepresented voices. I will lend my privilege and I will lift up their voices, so as an experiment, I will only retweet them. You know, men might say, oh, that really sucks. I really don't think that a nils retweet was really the thing that made your business fail. So take a breath. You know, it's okay that he did that.

I think it's a great idea. And in doing that, you're mad about that. You got too much time. I'm mad about that. Worry about other stuff. So that's a great experiment because it allowed, it forced him to go and go looking for people doing amazing work, but he could find those great women and those great people of color doing cool work and then look at their follower lists. If you meet a really cool, uh, woman or person of color or someone who's not like you in data science, I'm just using that as an example, look at their list of followers. They will have either consciously or unconsciously created a list of their own followers, which are people in their

field that make them feel welcome. Then follow those people. Twitter is a river. That's a great answer on how to do that. Cause I mean the thing, I mean, I need it, but then at the same time, there's lots of people listening to the show who think great advice, Scott, how do I do that? You know? Yep. Absolutely. And the, the, the, the no-no is don't call your one friend and ask them if they know anybody. It is not their job. It's always sunny in Philadelphia. I don't know. I don't have to go and watch that because it's just it's important to know that it's not your black friend's job to help you find more black friends. And it's not their job to help you diversify your conference, nor is it their job to make you feel better about yourself. I actually think it's episode one of season one. So it's pretty easy to get there. At least episode two.

It's I will check that out. Yeah. It's usually a pretty uncomfortable show. Yeah. Well, that's the whole premise is like they touch on the uncomfortable basically. it's just like we are right now i'm sure there's a bunch of listeners right now they're like wow that took a turn yeah it's important and you got to think about it no i mean it sure doesn't think it sucked i mean i think it is it can be uncomfortable i don't think this is uncomfortable it can be uncomfortable i am not uncomfortable nor am i dancing around

my words you'll notice no no i mean you know, I feel strongly about this because here's the deal. It doesn't threaten me. Your success doesn't threaten me. Your success lifts us all up. And that's, that's kind of my whole thing is let's bring more people in. Let's, and let's not convert them to our way of thinking. Like, let's not have a monoculture, right? If you have a new person on the team, don't use words like culture fit. That's coded language. They make them feel like, well, they've not seen office space, so they're not our kind of people. You know, what do we do? We make them watch office space, right? Well, what do they want to watch? What do they listen to? Like, what do they do? Let's, let's widen it. So then my, my, my, my shows, my music, my things will,

will be, my, um, prospects will be broadened by their perspective. Yeah, absolutely. And then you have to make them watch Office Space. Yeah, I was going to say, now I'm getting awkward because I'm definitely going to ask them to watch Office Space. Everyone that's required to watch Office Space. Required reading, here you go. Have fun.

Well, Scott, this was a blast, man. It was great to meet with you, catch up with you, kind of hear a bit about your past, talk a lot about microsoft and where it's going and then obviously this uh comfortable slash uncomfortable conversation here at the end about a much needed discussed topic so thank you for sharing i appreciate that and and and again remember you heard it on a show with three white guys so maybe this isn't the show. Maybe I didn't do it right. Go and diversify your podcast. Wouldn't you agree with that? As podcast junkies, there's a lot of great podcasts out there from so many different people.

Maybe try listening to one from different people and see what their perspective is as well. Yeah, absolutely. And my show. Listen to my show, friends of ChangeLog. What's the URL? HanselMinutes.com if you go and google for scott scroll past scott toilet paper and you'll find me right there nice thanks again scott bye all right that wraps up this episode of the changelog join the community

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