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Greater Than Code — Software How-To
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:

131: Poo-Covered Rocks with Cat Swetel May 22, 2019

Show notes

01:40 - Cat’s Superpower: Knowing What Other People’s Superpowers Are (before they do!)

03:32 - Managing a Platform with Ancient Value

07:54 - Telling Stories Within Code: History Matters

10:11 - Cat’s Journey from Finance to Tech

13:47 - Exploring Systems

17:24 - Wardley Mapping

31:52 - The Penguin Story: Looking For Poo-Covered Rocks

37:53 - The Power of Observation and Reflection

Reflections:

John: Maintaining the history of an application.

Jessica: So much of the world is what we can’t see. There is value in those poo-covered rocks!

Avdi: When you see a bunch of people trying to get somewhere that you don’t understand, look for the poo-covered rock.

Cat: What would it look like if we had a platform bard?

Janelle: Scheduling specific time to stop, reflect, and observe as teams.

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: Cat Swetel.

Sponsored By:

Charles Schwab: This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab – a modern financial services firm that stands apart from the industry, where you can go as far as your ambition and unique talents take you to create a career worth owning. To learn more about technology career opportunities with Schwab – visit Schwabjobs.com.

Support Greater Than Code

130: Acceptance is the First Step with Britni Alexander May 15, 2019

Show notes

01:54 - Britni’s Superpower: Resilience; Also: Failure as an Opportunity, Wallowing, and Acceptance

Is failure a “No, but…” or “Yes, and…” ?
Acknowledging Emotions

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

10:55 - Building Support Networks and Spiritual Communities

13:16 - Facing Work Problems and Failures

16:11 - Lies Developers Tell

Who is a programmer?
What it’s like to be a programmer.
What is or isn’t the right way to write code.
Programming is easy/hard.
Interpersonal skills aren’t important.
Measuring success by output lines of code.
Once you have x numbers of experience…
You have to love the code.

Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity

Reflections:

Sam: Resilience and not wallowing.

Coraline: How we respond to failures and the impact it can have on other people.

Britni: Naming acceptance as a step of resilience.

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: Britni Alexander.

Sponsored By:

Charles Schwab: This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab – a modern financial services firm that stands apart from the industry, where you can go as far as your ambition and unique talents take you to create a career worth owning. To learn more about technology career opportunities with Schwab – visit Schwabjobs.com.

Support Greater Than Code

129: Bringing The Fun with Lori Olson May 08, 2019

Show notes

Use the coupon code GREATER20OFF to get 20% off on any WNDX School course in May!

01:23 - Lori’s Superpower: Mapping

03:56 - “Positive Mania” and Getting Into Game Programming

Dragon Ruby Game Toolkit

07:42 - Fun, Learning New Stuff, and Abandoning Old Stuff

The WNDX Group Inc

12:42 - Cultural Differences Between Programming Language Communities

23:18 - Thoughts on Platformification

27:44 - Maintenance; The Evolution of Home Automation

X10 Home Automation

32:13 - Mentoring Novices and Beginners

Canada Learning Code

“Suckin’ at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” -- Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)

37:34 - Creating Tutorials for the WNDX School and Getting People Excited About Programming Via Game Programming

Since this interview: A Dark Room pulled from Switch eShop for including code editor :’(

Reflections:

Jamey: “When I’m learning something new, I’m starting at the beginning, and it’s hard for me too.”

Janelle: Bringing the fun back to the corporate world.

Lori: We have to bring the fun to the job ourselves.

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: Lori Olson.

Support Greater Than Code

128: Finding and Cultivating Community Leaders with Ben Pollard May 01, 2019

Show notes

00:48 - Ben’s Superpower: Making Arancini and Reading A Lot of Books

02:00 - Starting Local Welcome and Helping Refugees

Death of Alan Kurdi

09:37 - Humanization, Cognitive Biases, and Heuristics

Contact Hypothesis

Social Constructionism

Social Conformity - Brain Games

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky

21:25 - Empathy and Compassion; Humans Thriving Together

The Compassionate Mind Foundation

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

The 36 Questions That Lead to Love

31:26 - Measuring Success

Conversion
Financial Resilience
Social Contact Hours
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Language Ability

41:56 - Getting People to Connect with Refugees in a Personal Way

Lump of Labour Fallacy

“We come together through our sameness and we grow through our differences.” ~ Virginia Satir

Reflections:

Rein: The idea of communicative praxis.

The Self after Postmodernity by Calvin O. Schrag

Sam: The commodification of trust.

Also, The Tyranny of Structureless: In any organization there are both explicit and implicit power structures. Changing the implicit ones.

Ben: Having a safe space to reflect and have conversations.

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: Ben Pollard.

Support Greater Than Code

127: Hope and Suffering with Amy Newell Apr 24, 2019

Show notes

01:47 - Amy’s Superpower: Sustaining hope and faith in the face of what feels like no hope and no faith.

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E. P. Seligman

07:40 - Amy’s talk on “Suffering in the Workplace”: Genesis and Overview

13:40 - Living a Valuable Life vs a Happy Life

Examining Causes
Feeling The Pain
Relieving Suffering by Seeking a Mindset of Innovation

24:02 - Bringing Your “Whole Self” to the Workplace; Alleviating Suffering in the Workplace

41:15 - Changing Culture in Organizations

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

54:40 - Bipolar Disorder

Reflections:

Jessica: A framework for dealing with suffering. A separation of concerns between observing feelings and deciding what to do about them.

Janelle: By supporting people, we can end up with a better, healthier, and more productive organization.

Avdi: Kindness in the workplace and power structures.

Rein: How do you convince people to care about other people?

Also, work implies suffering. The obligation to reduce suffering is shared -- but not equally.

Amy: Disparities amongst different types of engineers and between engineering and other departments in tech companies.

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: Amy Newell.

Support Greater Than Code

126: Asking Powerful Questions with Suzan Bond Apr 17, 2019

Show notes

01:04 - Suzan’s Superpower: Asking Powerful Questions

The Compassionate Coder

07:30 - Blending Technology and Coaching

10:32 - Blending Technology and Humans; Working Distributed/Remotely

15:32 - Creating Organizational Divides (Intentional and Unintentional)

20:24 - Company Cultures That Lend Themselves Well to Remote Work

Theory X and Theory Y (Douglas McGregor)

25:19 - Autocratic vs Autonomy

26:23 - Becoming a Coach and Learning Coaching Skills

30:46 - Listening to Yourself and Intuition

“Good decisions get better; bad decisions get worse.”

33:28 - Management vs Leadership / Developing Leadership Skills: Deliberation and Introspection

Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages

Reflections:

Coraline: Powerful questions. Coaching by asking powerful questions.

Suzan: The word “autonomy”.

John: Asking questions to illicit insight, movement, and motivation.

Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter by Will Wise

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: Suzan Bond.

Support Greater Than Code

125: Everything is Communication with Sam Aaron Apr 10, 2019

Show notes

01:42 - Sam’s Superpower: Staring at the same problem for days -- Patience and Delayed Gratification

03:42 - Effective Communication: What is fluid?

08:54 - Logging

Open Sound Control

12:55 - Sonic Pi

Jeff Rose (@rosejn)

22:41 - Fixed Tempo, Clocks, and Time

35:38 - Live Coding and Performance

40:58 - Teaching Kids and “Promoting Cheating”

49:21 - The Difference Between Music and Code

58:44 - Sam’s Latest Performance Experience

Reflections:

Jessica: Checking for understanding.

Avdi: The remix culture piece of this conversation.

Janelle: Everything is conversation.

Sam: Thinking about programming rhythmically.

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: Sam Aaron.

Support Greater Than Code

124: Navigating Neurodiversity with Helen Needham Apr 03, 2019

Show notes

01:45 - Helen’s Superpower: Taking Abstract Information Seeing Things Others Don’t See

05:26 - Decoding People: Asking Contextual Questions and Listening For Motivation

11:52 - The Intersection of Empathy and Neurodiversity

15:14 - Being Deliberate as a Survival/Coping Skill

16:41 - Being Different, Understanding Yourself, and Discovering Your Unique Capabilities

23:22 - Interfacing with the Neurodivergent Community and Actively and Openly Talking About Neurodiversity

30:55 - Paying Attention to EQ: Emotional Intelligence

37:01 - Becoming Self-Aware

Helen Needham: My guide to working with me (an autistic adult)

41:05 - MeDecoded: Personal stories from the Neurodivergent & allies, in the pursuit of decoding Neurodiversity

Reflections:

Jamey: Possibly implementing how to work with guides at their workplace.

Jessica: Making a deliberate process out of decoding people.

Avdi: It’s not about changing who you are, it’s about working with the world while you still are who you are.

Janelle: Owning your own special skills and talents and taking in the hurricane.

Helen: The importance of support and understanding. The world needs more silent heroes.

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: Helen Needham.

Support Greater Than Code

123: BOOK CLUB! Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Mar 27, 2019

Show notes

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig

05:21 - Persig’s Two Paradigms: Classical and Romantic

11:50 - What is beautiful?

15:49 - Quality

33:44 - Emotional Motivation

41:13 - Balancing Objective and Subjective Measures of Quality

Reflections:

Janelle: A shared definition of quality and creating bridges.

Bryan: When you recognize you have two different categories of measures of quality, the team starts to need guardrails to push the group towards just a couple of agreed upon things.

John: Taking the different value systems, and fusing them together in some degree that can help unify groups into single directions and sets of values.

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: Bryan Karlovitz.

Sponsored By:

DevRelate.io: Are you truly involved in the developer communities you work in and sell to? Are you seeing the value in the events you are a part of? DevRelate.io can help! Developer and Community Relations as a Service: we speak developer! Learn more at DevRelate.io or email us at info@devrelate.io!

Support Greater Than Code

122: Surfing with Michael "GeePaw" Hill Mar 20, 2019

Show notes

01:45 - Autopoiesis, Smell, and Passing

Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living

Thud!: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett

11:15 - The Channels in Your Head (Noise)

12:15 - GeePaw’s Superpower: Having an enormous capacity for doubt -- especially self-doubt; The Cost of Certainty

18:25 - Doubt vs Narrowing

Déformation Professionnelle

23:31 - Refactoring; Easiest, Nearest, Owie, First

25:53 - Defining “Better” and “Done”

30:55 - Thin vs Thick Culture

42:34 - FACT: Geeks Are Paid Extremely Well -- Why are we still not happy?

48:02 - Occupational Game Playing

The System You Are Building
The Game of Your Team
The Game of Your Career
The Game of Living

Reflections:

Jessica: When you act, you then see what happens.

Sam: Any metric can be gamed and will be gamed.

The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' by Sidney Dekker

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

Special Guest: Michael "GeePaw" Hill.

Sponsored By:

DevRelate.io: Are you truly involved in the developer communities you work in and sell to? Are you seeing the value in the events you are a part of? DevRelate.io can help! Developer and Community Relations as a Service: we speak developer! Learn more at DevRelate.io or email us at info@devrelate.io!

Support Greater Than Code

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