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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:

121: Emergency Communication with Thai Wood Mar 13, 2019

Show notes

01:26 - Resilience Engineering and Closed-loop Communication

06:55 - Acknowledging Burnout in the Developer Community

09:31 - Professionalization and Formal Training

17:41 - Reliability vs Resilience

20:40 - Resilience in the EMT Context

22:21 - Scene Size-up in Software

25:20 - Thai’s Superpower: The ability to remain calm in emergencies;Tech => EMT => Tech + Missing Seeing People You’re Helping

The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'

32:11 - Incident Response + Studying Incident Response; Normalization of Deviance

40:16 - Asking Questions

Cognitive Interviewing Techniques

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Reflections:

Jessica: Part of resilience is how do you know where to get help? When to ask for help and who to ask.

John: Following up with the cognitive interview idea.

Sam: Being explicit and deliberate about thinking about process and communication as a thing that you can get better at, that you can work on, and that you can talk about.

Check out with the “Working With Other Humans” track that Sam is running at RailsConf 2019 from April 29 - May 1 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Thai: Cognitive interviewing Pokémon. Plus emotions as a state machine.

John’s Hacking Your Emotional API Talk

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: Thai Wood.

Support Greater Than Code

120: Expect The Unexpected with Andy Hunt Mar 06, 2019

Show notes

01:55 - Andy’s Superpower: Explaining blindingly obvious things to people that they don’t see.

The Boiled Frog

08:13 - Iterative Development and Continuous Learning: Becoming Comfortable with Uncertainty

14:23 - Doing Things Differently

The Black Swan Theory

20:41 - Writing and Timeboxing

Conglommora Found (Sequel)

Feedback, Context, and Learning

27:39 - Why should continuous be the goal?

34:24 - Adaptability

39:28 - Making Groups More Effective

45:13 - Andy’s Software Development Journey

Reflections:

Janelle: Shifting from a place of complaining about the constraints of the world, to figuring out strategies for solving these problems and figuring out templates for alternatives: Setting up alternative markets and economic systems that can support alternative ways of working.

Jessica: We can’t predict the future. We can’t know everything. We can’t give an accurate estimate of a number. But we can know something: we can know propensities to some degree, we can estimate in a range, and then we can choose whether to spend time researching to narrow that range.

Avdi: The importance of slack time in teams and organizations.

Andy: Experimentation. Learning. Context. Feedback. Rinse and repeat.

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: Andy Hunt.

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

119: Cultural Brokerage with Bianca Escalante Feb 27, 2019

Show notes

01:55 - Bianca’s Superpower: Being a Cultural Broker

06:36 - Code-Switching and Identity As An Asset

Keynote: Who and What We're Leaving Behind by Bianca Escalante @ RubyConf 2018

Open Source for ...Bad? by Bianca Escalante @ Codeland 2018

12:55 - Normalizing Conversations, Speaking About Race Openly, and the Concept of Distance Travelled

21:17 - Reconciling Failure, Repressing Feelings, and The Importance of Human Connection

34:02 - D&I: Who is responsible?

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

Reflections:

Bianca: Talking openly about the loneliness.

John: Having to develop superpowers as coping strategies.

Jamey: When times are tough, you (sometimes) get to see the best of human connection.

_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: Bianca Escalante.

Sponsored By:

The Transatlantic Cable Podcast : If you like Greater Than Code, you should check out The Transatlantic Cable Podcast from Kaspersky Lab. They condense the most interesting InfoSec and Cybersecurity news in 20 minutes or less! Check it out and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Support Greater Than Code

118: A Piece of Luck with Jessica Kerr Feb 20, 2019

Show notes

01:50 - Jess’s Superpower: Being a Property of a Situation

04:25 - The Interpretation of Luck and the Psychology of Scarcity

08:17 - Physics; Physics and Software

12:06 - Conference Speaking

15:53 - Undervaluing Code

22:13 - Defining ‘Done’ in Software Development

We don’t want to define “done.” In an ongoing system, a symmathesy, there is no “done” except death.
Instead, define “better.” Then you can know you accomplished something.
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) February 6, 2019

Email is like laundry. There is no such thing as "done."
My job is not to do the laundry, it is to keep the laundry moving.
Nor to answer all the email, but to keep some correspondence flowing.
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) February 11, 2019

25:51 - TDD, the notion that “Coding is easy!”, and Resilience to Failure

Smart Kid Syndrome

Pairing with Bunny

42:04 - Learning While Teaching Others Programming

Avdi and Jess stumble through modern web development

JessiTRONica on Twitch

Reflections:

Jamey: Things never being “the end”.

Finite and Infinite Games (print)

Finite and Infinite Games (pdf)

Sam: There might be an ending for you, specifically, but it’s not really an ending for anyone else.

Jacob: Figuring out problems by vocalizing them.

Jessica: Check out recent works from Karl Popper.

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: Jacob Stoebel.

Support Greater Than Code

117: Wholeness and Separation Feb 13, 2019

Show notes

The Personal Iceberg Metaphor:

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Hierarchical Organization of Constructs

Becoming More Fully Human with Virginia Satir

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

116: Healing Organizational Trauma with Matt Stratton Feb 07, 2019

Show notes

Matty’s Talk, Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma @ REdeploy 2018

02:59 – Matt’s Superpower: Taking metaphors and ideas around self-help and turning them into allegories and analogies of how we could be better at technology

The Five Love Languages of DevOps

The Four Agreements of Incident Response

03:58 – What does healing organizational trauma mean?

05:50 – Incident Response Communication

16:00 – Trust, Hyperarousal, and Hypoarousal; Stuck On or Stuck Off

23:32 – Leading By Example, Not Being in a Rush to Solve Problems, Seeking to Understand, and Encouraging Safety

29:23 – Handling Postmortems: How to do them well and how to do them effectively

39:17 – The Hero’s Story vs The Story of the People; Crafting Our Narratives

John Allspaw: In the Center of the Cyclone: Finding Sources of Resilience

Reflections:

Coraline: The metaphors of storytelling.

Matty: Creating a forum of discussion around postmortems.

Janelle: Thinking about Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and how, at the foundation of our mind is essentially a system of shapes that we see the world through, that we reason about through, that we feel emotions through, and that creates the sense of gut.

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: Matt Stratton.

Sponsored By:

The Transatlantic Cable Podcast : If you like Greater Than Code, you should check out The Transatlantic Cable Podcast from Kaspersky Lab. They condense the most interesting InfoSec and Cybersecurity news in 20 minutes or less! Check it out and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Support Greater Than Code

115: Tension Between Opposites with Sam Joseph Jan 30, 2019

Show notes

01:30 – Sam’s Superpower: Persistence

AgileVentures Blog

08:07 – Mindfulness and Relaxation; Nonviolent Communication

Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Shambhala

17:23 – Collaborative Communication and Learning

26:17 – The Tension Between Code/Architectural Beauty and Delivering Working Solutions That Meet End-Users Needs

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

38:49 – Being “Used to Things” and Getting Things Done via Incremental Changes

Technology Strategy: Leaky Boats and Rocket Ships

Reflections:

John: 1) Thinking about relaxation as something you do as opposed to things you don’t do.

2) Learning how communication works and communicate better with other people more authentically.

Jamey: Reading people cues is hard and beating yourself up over missed communication is not productive.

Sam: Sometimes it’s okay to not have emotional energy to make changes.

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 Joseph.

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

114: Theory of Mind with Jean-Francois Cloutier Jan 23, 2019

Show notes

02:41 – JF’s Superpower: Systems Thinking

06:58 – Robots and Elixir

Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind

Rodney Brooks -- Robots, AI, and other stuff

The Brains Blog

17:10 – Reapproaching Robotics, Predictive Processing, and Calibration of Attention

33:26 – Thinking and Talking About Object-Oriented Programming

43:51 – Intuition and Emergent Properties

54:02 – Unpacking Fractals

“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

59:08 – The Ineffability of Smalltalk

Reflections:

Avdi: Trying not to do work, but sometimes finding ways to be pulled into doing work.

Sam: 1) Generating predictions and then correcting your model when those predictions turn out not to be confirmed by sensory data.

2) Object-Oriented Programming should be called Message-Oriented Programming.

3) Computer science as a field really wants to be math and the people who teach computer science want to be mathematicians.

Jessica: Smalltalk feeling like a cathedral where you can get a sense of the architectural beauty.

Eric Evans - Good Design is Imperfect Design

Jean-Francois: Aikido.

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: Jean-Francois Cloutier.

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

113: Privilege as Legacy Code with Amr Jan 16, 2019

Show notes

Amr Abdelwahab - An empathy exercise: contextualising the question of privilege (EuRuKo 2018 Video)

01:53 – Amr’s Superpower: Seeing the bigger picture.

04:24 – It’s Not Just Code

11:18 – Privilege

17:37 – Strategies For People with Privilege Who Are Open to Learning

22:57 – Why Diversity Matters and Avoiding Burnout

27:24 – Biases, Allyship, and Calling Out Others

Implicit Bias Test

Reflections:

John: The metaphor of sexism and racism and cultural baggage being legacy code.

Christina: Listen and learn. Also, pushing organizations to contribute to bigger things, but making sure they understand why they are doing it, and not doing it blindly.

Coraline: We are currently living in an “unnatural state”. Equality is the natural state and we need to return to that.

Amr: The ability to have a politics-free life is a privilege of its own.

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: Amr.

Sponsored By:

The Transatlantic Cable Podcast : If you like Greater Than Code, you should check out The Transatlantic Cable Podcast from Kaspersky Lab. They condense the most interesting InfoSec and Cybersecurity news in 20 minutes or less! Check it out and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Support Greater Than Code

112: Dancing About Vulnerability with Marcel Byrd Jan 09, 2019

Show notes

00:53 – Marcel’s Superpower: An Explosive Relationship with Laughter

01:45 – The Intersection of Public Health and Art

06:36 – Authenticity and Vulnerability; Bringing Your Whole Self While Remaining Professional

14:59 – Reading a Room and Determining Safety for Being Vulnerable & Making it Safe for People Around You While Being Vulnerable

19:41 – The Beauty of Dance

30:58 – Seeing and Being Outside The Box

38:57 – Gaining Confidence While Retaining Humility

Reflections:

Astrid: The feedback loop can’t be, “I’m only going to keep doing this if I’m positively affirmed.”

Coraline: Vulnerability is scalable.

Avdi: Being the person on the dance floor not necessarily nailing their moves perfectly, but that has a big smile on their face regardless.

Jessica: Imagination is paramount to creating a better world.

Marcel: Articulating the importance of art, creativity, and vulnerability.

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: Marcel Byrd.

Support Greater Than Code

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