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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:

092: A11y Ally with Rob DeLuca Aug 08, 2018

Show notes

01:09 – Rob’s Superpower: Ambition

05:00 – Designing and Testing for Accessibility

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standards

Your Emotional API

16:36 – Hard Problems and “Squishy Problems”

19:49 – Rob’s Getting Involved with and Caring About Accessibility Story

31:03 – The Accessibility World on the Web has an Accessible Problem

38:04 – Moving From a Developer Role to a Business-y Role Within a Company

Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott (Book)

Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss (Talk)

“We are investing in Rob the person, not Rob the developer.” ~ Brandon Hays

Reflections:

John: Thinking about people problems as engineering problems.

Jessica: The Frontside as a human company that cares about the people in it.

Rob: The Human API.

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: Rob DeLuca.

Support Greater Than Code

091: Solving Puzzles and Productive Failure with Kim Vanderspek Aug 01, 2018

Show notes

02:03 – Kim’s Superpower: Being able to solve puzzles and problems and teaching others to do the same.

05:39 – Speaking and Teaching Math

11:44 – Using Technology to Visualize Math: Quilting, Sewing, Playdough, Boxes

13:53 – Incorporating Programming Into Math Classes

16:01 – Specialization and Efficiency

23:38 – The Cinderella Dress in Action

27:06 – Talking About Process, Mistakes, and Failures

34:56 –Teaching Problem Solving and Failure

39:08 – Perseverance Over Content

Reflections:

Coraline: Show your work.

Sam: The value of perspective.

Jessica: To be perfect, it has to be repeatable for particular people in a particular context.

John: Obstacles parallelisms. Fail first, learn from the failure, get better. But planning for that is integral.

Kim: Productive failure, trial and error, and doing beautiful things.

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: Kim Vanderspek.

Support Greater Than Code

090: The Journey with Chelsea Troy Jul 25, 2018

Show notes

02:03 – Chelsea’s Superpower: Pushing through and enduring discomfort to accomplish things

06:24 – The Act of Writing and Reflection: Journaling as a Tool for Learning; Commit Tracing

14:27 – Getting and Dealing with Feedback

17:44 – Measuring Participation in Meetings

Why are there always technical problems in remote meetings?

Why do remote meetings suck so much? (caucus checklist)

How do we make remote meetings not suck? (follow-up post)

23:51 – Implementing Structure in Meetings

Valerie Aurora: Meeting Skills

31:58 – Cultivating Questions Kindly Without Assumption or Judgement

No Feigning Surprise: The Recurse Center User’s Manual

xkcd: Ten Thousand

39:03 – The Problem with Claiming “Self-Taught”

“The common industry accepted term to describe how I learned programming is “self-taught” but I’ve always found that so strange, considering all of the resources and communities that have helped me along the way.” – Jacob Stoebel

Reflections:

Jamey: Extending empathy to other people.

Chelsea: The story of where things come from and the people they come from can make them both much more interesting and much more accessible.

Coraline: The value of history.

Sam: One of the best ways to understand a tool is to understand the context that existed before the tool existed.

The nature of a caucus penalizes people for listening.

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: Chelsea Troy.

Support Greater Than Code

089: Something Something Agile with Noel Rappin Jul 18, 2018

Show notes

Greater Than Code Episode 001: Taking Payments on the Web with Noel Rappin

02:58 – Noel’s Superpower: Extrapolating and Explaining Consequences of Tech Decisions to Others

06:24 – Cultural Patterns of How Organizations Develop Software; Should this process be standardized?

16:07 – Agile Adoption: Pros and Cons

The Leprechauns of Software Engineering: How folklore turns into fact and what to do about it by Laurent Bossavit

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

26:40 – Making Decisions Without No Scientific Evidence

32:05 – Metaphors for Software Engineering and Legitimizing the Profession

38:33 – Trust-Driven Development

44:12 – Decision Making Among Teams

Reflections:

Rein: We are working with systems that we can’t fully define and the idea that we’re acting on systems that we’re a part of. Therefore, it changes the observer effect.

Jessica: Getting the ships to all go in the same direction.

Coraline: The understanding of our place in a given context.

Noel: Aligning process, values, culture, and goals, and doing that to make teams work better.

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: Noel Rappin.

Support Greater Than Code

088: The Safety 2 Dance with Steven Shorrock Jul 11, 2018

Show notes

01:46 – Steven’s Superpower: Being a Super-Recognizer and Empathy

Steven Shorrock on the myth of human error (Courtney Nash & O’Reilly Radar)

04:21 – Steven’s Occupational History, Background, and Mission: System Performance and Human Wellbeing

08:19 – Critical Incident Stress Management

10:40 – Social Capital, Bonds Within Groups, and Connectors

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)

Appreciative Inquiry

ABCD: Gifts, Skills, Passions

29:37 – Cognitive Empathy vs Emotional Empathy, and Creating Serendipity

36:33 – Safety-I and Safety-II

55:11 – Work-As-Imagined & Work-As-Done; Work-As-Prescribed, Work-As-Disclosed

Reflections:

John: ABCD and thinking about ways to incorporate into everyday life.

Jamey: People who are connectors vs networkers vs gappers; differences are subtle but there.

Jessica: When you start at a small company, you know everyone in the organization; so then as the company grows, you continue to know someone in every part of the organization.

In people’s assets there are gifts, skills, and passion, and we tend to hire only for skills, which is also the only one of these things that is easy to change.

Steven: What do the people closest to you say your gifts are?

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: Steven Shorrock.

Support Greater Than Code

087: The Jazz of Empathy with Chad Fowler Jul 03, 2018

Show notes

02:17 – Chad’s Superpower: Empathy!

07:47 – Using Introspection For a Means to Recover from and Deal with Bipolar Disorder

10:51 – Modeling Yourself

16:35 – The Importance of Self-Care

19:22 – Practicing Empathy and Compassion

The Compassionate Coder

Your most important skill: Empathy

36:25 – Expressing Your Unique Voice

40:34 – Merit-based Rewards Systems

The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto

OKR: Objectives and Key Results

55:11 – Management and Leadership

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet

Goodhart’s Law

Reflections:

Coraline: Freeing yourself from “supposed to”.

John: Focusing on self as a gateway to understanding other people.

Jessica: Our duty in the world in order to help other people emotionally is to take care of ourselves.

Rein: Cybernetics of Human Learning and Performance by Gordon Pask

Chad: Running internal dialogues that you have with yourself constantly through a bunch of other people who are thinking about the same things.

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: Chad Fowler.

Support Greater Than Code

086: Culture Is A Community Growing Together with Jesse Oliver Sanford Jun 27, 2018

Show notes

01:18 – Oliver’s Superpower: The Ability to Read

01:54 – Cognitive Science and Emotional Cognition

George Lakehoff

Restylane Injections

The effects of BOTOX injections on emotional experience.

11:24 – How People Think When They Code and the Intersection Between Mind and Body

fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)

15:38 – The Importance of Cultural Capital

14:42 – Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: All About Flow & Positive Psychology

Flow Genome Project

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

21:33 – Ritual in Developer and Engineer Culture

29:24 – Achieving Flow During Pair Programming / Hedonic Balance

Dr. John Gottman: Bids for Connection

42:29 – Emotional Intelligence and Progress

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy by Bruno Latour

57:00 – Culture. What is Culture?

*More from Oliver: *

Debunking Three Myths About How We Think When We Code

Reflections:

Sam: One’s ability to solve problems as a technical person depends as much on one’s social network and social skills as it does on technical knowledge.

Jamey: You can affect things about yourself by being mindful of facts about your body.

John: Teams and effectiveness: People you work with are important.

Rein: In the future, we’ll realize that the code we wrote was a very small and unimportant artifact of what we’re doing as communities and cultures.

Oliver: Engaging with others who think about these things and who realize how high the stakes are.

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: Jesse Oliver Sanford.

Support Greater Than Code

085: BOOK CLUB! Technically Wrong with Sara Wachter-Boettcher Jun 20, 2018

Show notes

Buy the book! Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

01:02 – Sara’s Superpower: Communication and Connecting the Dots

03:43 – The Process of Writing, Editing, and Communicating the Book

06:17 – A Summary of Technically Wrong

11:13 – The Harms and Risk of Data Sharing on Social Media

14:42 – Bias and Algorithms

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

23:50 – Machine Learning and Image Recognition

28:48 – Ethics Training and Responsibility

RubyConf 2017: Finding Responsibility by Caleb Thompson

35:45 – Paternalizm / Parochialism

Reflections:

Astrid: How we can get people to start making changes based off what we basically know.

John: Stress cases: Thinking about the ideal user and what are the qualities of other users that may be affected by the way something is presented?

Jamey: The importance of having cultures in tech and workplaces that are not homogenized.

Sara: We don’t get better at anything if we don’t talk about it and practice it.

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: Sara Wachter-Boettcher.

Support Greater Than Code

084: Federation Is Bad with Aurynn Shaw Jun 13, 2018

Show notes

01:30 – Federation and Your Internet Identity

Stayin’ Alive in Technology: Who Are You? Coraline Ada Ehmke and Identity on the Internet

05:59 – Flaws of Federated Identity

10:18 – Onboarding

Eternal September

28:51 – All Technology is Political & Speech At All Costs

The Californian Ideology

15:45 – Mastodon Vs. Twitter and The Social Cost of Running an Instance

21:56 – When People React: Internet Backlash and Defensiveness

The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto

30:58 – Service Lock-in

37:48 – Losing Your Identity: The Failure of witches.town

39:32 – Creating Sub/Micro Federations/Communities

Metcalfe’s Law

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: Aurynn Shaw.

Support Greater Than Code

083: Programming As An Identity with Tim Chevalier Jun 06, 2018

Show notes

01:10 – Tim’s Superpower: Keeping Himself From Laughing / Improv

04:19 – Tim’s Journey as a Programmer

09:12 – The Collision of Values Within the Programming Industry and The Meaning and Measurement of “Intelligence”

22:39 – Using Programming to Satisfy Emotional Needs and Form Identity

37:30 – Merit and Identity as a Zero-Sum Game

40:49 – The Struggle of Giving Up / Embracing Labels

49:34 – Collectively Creating an Emotionally Healthy Atmosphere Within the Software Industry

Reflections:

Coraline: What are the countervalues that go against meritocracy?

The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto

Jessica: Read Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.

John: The emotional need for people to belong to various groups and things we can do to help people get into healthier spaces.

Tim: Listen to Darkness on the Edge of Town by Bruce Springsteen. Also, how to talk about the inner struggle people have to belong in a positive way.

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: Tim Chevalier.

Support Greater Than Code

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