Greater Than Code

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**Greater Than Code**

For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code.
Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript.
We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)

Latest Episodes:

151: Off Meta with Amir Rajan Oct 09, 2019

Show notes

02:27 - Amir’s Superpower: Sensitivity to Development Pain

A Picture of Amir’s Keyboard and Battlestation

Eye Tracker

06:59 - Developer Productivity and Breaking Constraints

Magic Leap

16:58 - Idea Flow

21:00 - Building an Environment That Enables You

File Watching
Automating Leverage

28:18 - Optimizing Local Maxima

Bret Victor: The Future of Programming

Delta Time

41:01 - Questioning Fundamental Assumptions

Continuity of Design™️
Gradual Stiffening

46:55 - Game Development

Unity

56:05 - Extremeness and Pushing Boundaries: Being a Weirdo/Being an Outlier/Thinking Differently

Off Meta, Super Smash Brothers Melee Gods

Meta and Off Meta

DragonRuby Game Toolkit Sandbox

Reflections:

Jess: “A pin on my upkeeps.”

Avdi: Meta and off meta.

John: Continuity of design.

Rein: Continuity and discreteness.

Janelle: Process-oriented thinking.

Amir: Being consistent with philosophies.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Amir Rajan.

Sponsored By:

PagerDuty: This episode is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future. From digital disruptors to Fortune 500 companies, over 12,000 businesses rely on PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them from happening again. We’re like the central nervous system for a company’s digital operations. We can analyze digital signals from virtually any software enabled system, and help you intelligently pinpoint issues like outages, as well as capitalize on opportunities, while empowering teams to take the right, real time action. To see how companies like GE, Vodafone, Box and American Eagle Outfitters rely on PagerDuty to continuously improve their digital operations visit PagerDuty.com.

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150: Cultural Transformation with Brian Lonsdorf Oct 02, 2019

Show notes

01:34 - Brian’s Superpower: Communicating and Listening

02:36 - The Role of Empathy in Teaching/Communicating

Process Empathy
Empathetic Report

04:11 - Learning and Teaching Functional Programming

Lawful Composition

Thinking Functionally with Haskell

Compositional Thinking
Category Theory

11:13 - Compositional Programming in JavaScript

16:02 - Problems That Can Be Solved by Learning Functional Programming

Livable Code by Sarah Mei

Scalable program architectures

25:03 - Category Theory

Categories for the Working Mathematician

Reading Papers
Finding Applications for Concepts

32:41 - Machine Learning and AI

Generative AI
L-Systems

Do be do be do

53:54 - Discrete Representations of Continuous Phenomena

56:17 - Making Teaching Fun, Engaging, and Interesting

Learning as a Conversation

Reflections:

Brian: Looking into L-systems further and thinking in terms of ranges.

Rein: Dimensionality is imperative.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Brian Lonsdorf.

Sponsored By:

PagerDuty: This episode is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future. From digital disruptors to Fortune 500 companies, over 12,000 businesses rely on PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them from happening again. We’re like the central nervous system for a company’s digital operations. We can analyze digital signals from virtually any software enabled system, and help you intelligently pinpoint issues like outages, as well as capitalize on opportunities, while empowering teams to take the right, real time action. To see how companies like GE, Vodafone, Box and American Eagle Outfitters rely on PagerDuty to continuously improve their digital operations visit PagerDuty.com.

Support Greater Than Code

149: Creating Effective Culture with Jesse James Sep 25, 2019

Show notes

01:49 - Jesse’s Superpower: Empathy by Learning to be Empathetic

Taking a Step Back
Mental Triggers
Neurodiversity and Empathy

07:51 - Culture

What is culture?
Culture Fit
Creating/Building/Forcing Culture
Culture as a Descriptor
Affecting Culture
Culture as an Ongoing Process
Agile Methodologies for Culture
Culture Facilitators
Improving Heuristics
Meta Heuristics
Cultures Evolve Rapidly
Alienation
Survival Rules
Problematic Performance Reviews
Derision of Management
Manager Contribution

Reflections:

Jacob: Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block: Community isn’t defined ahead of time. They define themselves.

Rein: The more important aspect of any organization is the structure of the relationships between the people in that organization, including and especially, power relationships.

Jesse: Personally taking effort in taking effort in finding third-party resources and sharing them with others.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Jesse James.

Sponsored By:

PagerDuty: This episode is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future. From digital disruptors to Fortune 500 companies, over 12,000 businesses rely on PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them from happening again. We’re like the central nervous system for a company’s digital operations. We can analyze digital signals from virtually any software enabled system, and help you intelligently pinpoint issues like outages, as well as capitalize on opportunities, while empowering teams to take the right, real time action. To see how companies like GE, Vodafone, Box and American Eagle Outfitters rely on PagerDuty to continuously improve their digital operations visit PagerDuty.com.

Support Greater Than Code

148: Floober and Cognitive Outsourcing with Jacob Stoebel Sep 18, 2019

Show notes

00:43 - Jacob’s Superpower: Being Obsessive Re: Specificity; Allergic to Ambiguity on Teams

02:09 - Talking About Neurodiversity in Workspaces

Self-diagnosis
“Masking”
Jacob’s Background and Intro to Software Development

13:49 - Driving Desire to Learn About Things

22:04 - Automating Boring Work

Personal Automation
Cognitive Outsourcing

34:41 - “Floober Feature”

36:07 - Passing On Strategies and Data Organization

CodeStream

47:37 - Storycrafting and Succession Planning

Reflections:

Jessica: Consult a human when you don’t know, but often from the context of what directory you’re in and what branch you’re on the computer CAN figure it out.

Chanté: Sociotechnical systems and thinking about personal automation.

Jacob: What can I do to better organize to be a positive legacy?

Arty: What are the ingredients to light your spark and your fire about software?

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Support Greater Than Code

147: Organizing Organizations with Jennifer Tu Sep 11, 2019

Show notes

00:52 - Jennifer’s Superpower: Seeing Inefficiencies in Processes

02:56 - Coaching Clients to Reorganize Their Organizations Due to Growth

Jean Hsu: Re-structuring a growing team

Communicating Change and Values
Encouraging Thoughtfulness
Asking Questions + Questions as a Form of Communication

Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer

Jennifer’s Podcast: Storytime with Managers

25:24 - Deleting Old Code; Being Emotional Over Code

30:34 - Avoiding Non-Consensual Teaching and Assumptions

40:50 - Learning Sucks

Fixed Vs Growth Mindset

Reflections:

John: Questions and what they reveal about the question-asker.

Jacob: Hiring for a growth mindset could be difficult.

Jamey: The people who have the most control over the situation are also the people who are going to have the least anxiety.

Jennifer: Learning to ask better questions isn’t something that you can do easily in a vacuum.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Jennifer Tu.

Support Greater Than Code

146: Self.conference with Amber Conville Sep 04, 2019

Show notes

00:50 - Amber’s Superpower: Adaptability

01:48 - Self.conference -- Coming again next year in early June!

Background/Origin
Evolution of Diversity
Transparency of Metrics
Partnering with Organizations
Focusing on the Detroit Area

10:29 - The Detroit Tech Community

12:50 - The Future of Self.

Self.learn
Self.work
Conf Conf

14:35 - title of conf - An Upcoming Musical Conference!

Aisha Blake

15:48 - Navigating the Conference Organization World

Advice
Cost

19:41 - Attending the Conference

Sponsor Support

23:13 - Human Potential + Emerging Technology + The Future of Work + Radical Inclusion

The Darkest Horse (Chanté’s Podcast)

26:56 - Conference Highlights

ahmed jalloh: Coding out the Clink
The Sense of Community

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Amber Conville.

Support Greater Than Code

145: Balancing Hierarchies and Equity in Organizations with Brandy Foster Aug 28, 2019

Show notes

01:17 - Brandy’s Superpower: Adaptability

02:22 - Codes of Ethics

Facial Recognition Technology
Fear Detection Software / Emotion Recognition
AI "emotion recognition" can't be trusted.
Royal Oak police stop Black man for 'looking suspiciously' at white woman
The Fear Response to African Americans: A Summary of an fMRI Study on Amygdala Activation and Race

11:09 - The Role of Diversity and Inclusion in Solving These Problems

Unintended Consequences
The diversity and inclusion revolution: Eight powerful truths
The Truth About Diverse Teams

24:18 - Balancing Hierarchies and Equity in Organizations

The Spoken Value System Vs The Lived Value System
Doing Meaningful Work / Showing Appreciation
Founder and Executive Support
Ethical HR
Owning Up To Mistakes
Treating Trauma of the System

50:27 - Racism and Unlearning

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Reflections:

Jamey: If you know there’s spots on your team with missing demographics, seek out those people.

John: The culture of a company comes from the top.

Rein: Helping teams work better together.

Brandy: Improving manager boards to ensure that there is accountability when moving people up in hierarchical organizations.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Brandy Foster.

Sponsored By:

CodeNewbie: The CodeNewbie Podcast is all about stories from folks on their coding journey. They talk to new developers, experienced developers and everyone in between about how they got started learning to code, how they navigate their technical careers, and they also do deep dives into technical topics in a newbie-friendly way. Check out their podcast at www.codenewbie.org/podcast.

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144: Being Greater Than Code with Jamison Dance Aug 21, 2019

Show notes

01:53 - Jamison’s Superpower: Moving swiftly between layers.

03:59 - Being An Engineering Manager

Context Switching
- lftm
Career Advancement as an Engineer
Title Inflation
Providing Team Members with Growth Opportunities
- Psychological Safety
- Challenging People with Goals
- Comradery via Video Conferencing
- Latent Learning

23:44 - Starting the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast

My Brother, My Brother and Me Podcast

Engaging with People of All Backgrounds All Over The World
The Emphasis of Soft Skills

35:42 - The Evolution of Tech Culture and Bootcamp Practices

39:54 - Conference Organization

Balancing Technical and Interpersonal Talks
Making Connections and Friendships
Encouraging Speaker Choice

Reflections:

Jamison: Zone of Proximal Development.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Jamison Dance.

Sponsored By:

Hanselminutes: Hi friends!…that’s what Scott Hanselman says whenever he starts a talk or a podcast. He’s done over 650 episodes of his Hanselminutes podcast that he calls “Fresh Air for Developers.” It’s a tight 30 min technology chat show that shares the same values that we do here at Greater than Code. There’s a HUGE library of guests for you to catch up on and a new high quality show every Thursday afternoon with a fresh face you may not have seen on other shows!

Support Greater Than Code

143: Indigenous Data Sovereignty with Keoni Mahelona Aug 14, 2019

Show notes

01:20 - Keoni’s Background and Superpower: Building things quickly.

03:57 - Respect for Indiginous Cultures + Community + People

08:55 - Ownership of Data

14:52 - Learning Māori

18:59 - Indigenous Data Sovereignty

Data as a Strategic Resource: Self-determination, Governance, and the Data Challenge for Indigenous Nations in the United States

Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an agenda (Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR)) (Volume 38)

31:16 - History: The U.S. Occupation of The Kingdom of Hawaii

36:58 - Creating a License to Protect Data Sovereignty

41:45 - Sharing Data Responsibly

47:37 - Building and Having A Sense of Community

54:38 - Mauna Kea Protests; Cultural Fit

Reflections:

Rein: If we want to organize successfully in our communities, shared culture and deep connection of people enables solidarity.

Amy: Look back through history for examples of groups of people sharing skills and industry knowledge.

Keoni: Go to and experience Mauna Kea if you have the chance. Also, connecting to community. What enables to do the right thing? What is the right thing? Do the right thing.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guests: Amy Newell and Keoni Mahelona.

Support Greater Than Code

142: Modeling Constraints in Human Systems with Will Larson Aug 07, 2019

Show notes

00:48 - Will’s Superpower: 1) The ability to take something complicated and to find simple ways to think about it that work most of the time. 2) A rigorous love of structure.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

02:30 - Systems Thinking/Theory

Stella

08:48 - How do you know when to stop modeling?

10:12 - How do you figure out what your team’s rate of change is?

Organizational Changes
Process Changes
Changes to the Software Systems You’re Managing

Virginia Satir’s Change Model

19:30 - Focusing Attention

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

20:31 - Impacting Systems

24:47 - Patterns of Dysfunction

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded

32:13 - Sharing Ideas and Contributing with Systems Thinking

The Portal Podcast

38:59 - Having Adaptive Capacity

44:30 - Taking Bets (Risks): Cheap vs Expensive

48:10 - Systems Having Properties and Behaviors and Building Useful Missing Tools

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Reflections:

Jessica: The difference in reasoning about properties vs reasoning about behavior.

Will: It’s easy to look at yourself sometimes as the lone practitioner trying to pull the industry forward. But, it’s exciting to have conversations like these to know there are other people out there trying to do the same thing.

Arty: Systems thinking as a way to think about how to optimize the quality of decisions.

Rein: A problem is a reduction of the system. One of the most important skills for a systems thinker and a problem solver is the ability for form a problem with a complete understanding of the complete mess that we’re choosing to not think about right now.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Will Larson.

Support Greater Than Code

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