Greater Than Code - podcast cover

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)

Episodes

131: Poo-Covered Rocks with Cat Swetel

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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map) 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:...

May 22, 201953 min

130: Acceptance is the First Step with Britni Alexander

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 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385249373/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0385249373&linkId=bdd64cd816f350b9da893433109e34c1) 10:55 - Building Support Networks and Spiritual Communities 13:16 - Facing Work Problems and Fail...

May 15, 201953 min

129: Bringing The Fun with Lori Olson

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 (https://dragonruby.itch.io/) Galaga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaga) 07:42 - Fun, Learning New Stuff, and Abandoning Old Stuff The WNDX Group Inc (https://www.wndx.com/) 12:42 - Cultural Differences Between Programming Language Communities 23:18 - Thoughts on Platformification Kubernetes (ht...

May 08, 201957 min

128: Finding and Cultivating Community Leaders with Ben Pollard

00:48 - Ben’s Superpower: Making Arancini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arancini) and Reading A Lot of Books 02:00 - Starting Local Welcome (https://www.localwelcome.org/) and Helping Refugees Death of Alan Kurdi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alan_Kurdi) 09:37 - Humanization, Cognitive Biases, and Heuristics Contact Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_hypothesis) Social Constructionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism) Social Conformity - Brain Games...

May 01, 201959 min

127: Hope and Suffering with Amy Newell

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 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400078393/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1400078393&linkId=ff6561c5b085aff3ea8027c0a0ce9cf2) 07:40 - Amy’s talk on “Suffering in the Workplace”: Genesis and Overview 13:40 - Living a Valuable Life vs a Happy Life Examin...

Apr 24, 20191 hr 7 min

126: Asking Powerful Questions with Suzan Bond

01:04 - Suzan’s Superpower: Asking Powerful Questions The Compassionate Coder (https://compassionatecoder.com/) 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) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y) 25:19 - Autocratic vs Autonomy 26:23 - Becomi...

Apr 17, 201953 min

125: Everything is Communication with Sam Aaron

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 Honeycomb (https://www.honeycomb.io/) Open Sound Control (http://opensoundcontrol.org/) 12:55 - Sonic Pi (https://sonic-pi.net/) Raspberry Pi (https://www.raspberrypi.org/) Jeff Rose (@rosejn) (https://twitter.com/rosejn) overtone (https://github.com/rosejn/overtone) 22:41 - Fixed Tempo, Clocks, and Time 35:38 - Live Coding and Perfo...

Apr 10, 20191 hr 9 min

124: Navigating Neurodiversity with Helen Needham

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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 A...

Apr 03, 201952 min

123: BOOK CLUB! Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060589469/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0060589469&linkId=0fccb8a5811c09d35f439ba3e559bc29) 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 cre...

Mar 27, 20191 hr 1 min

122: Surfing with Michael "GeePaw" Hill

01:45 - Autopoiesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis), Smell, and Passing Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9027710163/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=9027710163&linkId=e65685ed3da6564ab707b3dc29f25f5f) Thud!: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062334980/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&c...

Mar 20, 20191 hr 6 min

121: Emergency Communication with Thai Wood

01:26 - Resilience Engineering and Closed-loop Communication 06:55 - Acknowledging Burnout in the Developer Community 09:31 - Professionalization and Formal Training Nancy Leveson (http://sunnyday.mit.edu/) 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' (https://www...

Mar 13, 201955 min

120: Expect The Unexpected with Andy Hunt

01:55 - Andy’s Superpower: Explaining blindingly obvious things to people that they don’t see. The Boiled Frog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog) 08:13 - Iterative Development and Continuous Learning: Becoming Comfortable with Uncertainty 14:23 - Doing Things Differently The Black Swan Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory) 20:41 - Writing and Timeboxing Conglommora (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075T7TNH8/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creativ...

Mar 06, 20191 hr 7 min

119: Cultural Brokerage with Bianca Escalante

01:55 - Bianca’s Superpower: Being a Cultural Broker 06:36 - Code-Switching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching) and Identity As An Asset Keynote: Who and What We're Leaving Behind by Bianca Escalante @ RubyConf 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2TdaLwTnKk) Open Source for ...Bad? by Bianca Escalante @ Codeland 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8H7zfQ_rA4) 12:55 - Normalizing Conversations, Speaking About Race Openly, and the Concept of Distance Travelled 21:17 - Reconciling ...

Feb 27, 20191 hr 7 min

118: A Piece of Luck with Jessica Kerr

01:50 - Jess’s Superpower: Being a Property of a Situation Karl Popper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper) 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. &mdash...

Feb 20, 20191 hr 6 min

117: Wholeness and Separation

Virginia Satir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Satir) The Personal Iceberg Metaphor: Google Image Result for https://laveldanaylor.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/iceberg-ljn1.jpg null Hierarchical Organization of Constructs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_therapy#Hierarchical_organization_of_constructs) Becoming More Fully Human with Virginia Satir (http://www.intuitionnetwork.org/txt/satir2.htm)...

Feb 13, 201942 min

116: Healing Organizational Trauma with Matt Stratton

Matty’s Talk, Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma @ REdeploy 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ITD-l8fuo) 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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGCfwvjHKGI) The Four Agreements of Incident Response (https://noti.st/mattstratton/F827sZ) 03:58 – What does healing organizational trauma ...

Feb 07, 201942 min

115: Tension Between Opposites with Sam Joseph

01:30 – Sam’s Superpower: Persistence AgileVentures Blog (https://nonprofits.agileventures.org/blog/) 08:07 – Mindfulness and Relaxation; Nonviolent Communication Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Shambhala (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/161180583X/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=161180583X&linkId=e07f8a3564afa6fa389e061585e6fdda) 17:23 – Collaborative Communication and Learning 26:17 – The Tension B...

Jan 30, 20191 hr

114: Theory of Mind with Jean-Francois Cloutier

02:41 – JF’s Superpower: Systems Thinking 06:58 – Robots and Elixir (https://elixir-lang.org/) Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind (http://www.acad.bg/ebook/ml/Society%20of%20Mind.pdf) Inside Out (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/) Rodney Brooks -- Robots, AI, and other stuff (https://rodneybrooks.com/) The Brains Blog (http://philosophyofbrains.com/) 17:10 – Reapproaching Robotics, Predictive Processing, and Calibration of Attention 33:26 – Thinking and Talking About Object-Oriented Programming...

Jan 23, 20191 hr 17 min

113: Privilege as Legacy Code with Amr

Amr Abdelwahab - An empathy exercise: contextualising the question of privilege (EuRuKo 2018 Video) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqmGYvFwAQ) 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 (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html) Reflections:...

Jan 16, 201946 min

112: Dancing About Vulnerability with Marcel Byrd

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 loo...

Jan 09, 201948 min

111: Thermodynamics of Emotion with Thomas Perry

01:30 – Tom’s Superpower: Hot Toddies, Eccentricity, and Talking to Animals! 04:42 – Observing Animal vs Humans Behavior and Organizational Restructuring Participant Observation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participant_observation) 10:25 – Looking For Genuine Change, Empowering Workers, and the Conflation of the terms Boss and Manager The Toyota Way (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071392319/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0071392319...

Jan 02, 20191 hr 10 min

110: Human Incident Response with Courtney Eckhardt

RubyConf 2018 - Retrospectives for Humans by Courtney Eckhardt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7R7V5wC0wA) 01:16 – Courtney’s Superpower: Explaining things. 06:50 – Incident Response: How we talk to people how are are affected by incidents Other Great Incident Response GTC Episodes! * 088: The Safety 2 Dance with Steven Shorrock (https://www.greaterthancode.com/2018/07/11/088-the-safety-2-dance-with-steven-shorrock/) * 096: Resilience Engineering with John Allspaw (http://www.greaterthancode.c...

Dec 19, 20181 hr

109: Tech Fashion Part 2 with Jaya Iyer of Svaha

01:11 – Jaya’s Superpower: Changing situations for the better. 02:54 – What does it take to change things? 99 Percent Invisible - Pockets: Articles of Interest #3 (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/pockets-articles-of-interest-3/) 06:37 – The Lack of Science and Technology-Themed Clothing (Especially for Children) 08:30 – How Personal of a Choice Clothing Is -- The Importance of Expressing Yourself and Shattering Stereotypes and Social Norms 25:07 – Breaking Existing Customer Feedback Syste...

Dec 12, 201853 min

108: Tech Fashion Part 1 with Kayte Malik of Dress Code

00:57 – Kayte’s Superpower: Taking Something That Doesn’t Exist & Making It Real 02:12 – Having Confidence 06:45 – Paying Closer Attention to Your Accomplishments lftm (https://github.com/CoralineAda/lftm) 08:30 – Dress Code at a Tactical Level 11:43 – The Intersection of Fashion and Coding 10 Cloverfield Lane (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179933/) 15:52 – Wearable Technology and Biotechnology 17:09 – Creation and Paving The Way For Women in Tech 23:17 – In-Home Coding Parties/Pop Up Shops 26:3...

Dec 05, 201846 min

Special Edition: Ruby Together – LIVE! from RubyConf 2018

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.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 (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way ...

Dec 03, 201840 min

107: The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship Program

The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship/Guide Program (https://rubyconf.org/scholarships) 02:13 – Superpowers: Flying, Changing Diapers, and Empathy! 03:21 – Scholars’ Favorite Parts of the Conference 06:58 – Conferencing as an Introvert: Having Conference Buddies! 08:06 – Meeting New People 10:15 – Challenges of Conferencing 11:55 – Navigating Conference Parties and the General Hubbub 17:35 – Overcoming Pressure 21:09 – Lightning Talks 26:31 – Live Mob Programming Event 30:07 – Advice For Futu...

Nov 28, 201842 min

106: Taking Up Space with Laurie Barth

01:20 – Laurie’s Superpower: Being a Timesuck Impostor Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome) 08:44 – Interviewing and Hiring Developers Effectively 12:24 – Creating False Negatives: Turning Down Candidates Prematurely 18:11 – Interviewing: Working With Existing Codebases and Asking Questions About Values RailsConf 2018: The Code-Free Developer Interview by Pete Holiday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3XRE0HvzJ8) 22:59 – How ^^ Advice Pertains to Different Sized Companies 2...

Nov 21, 201859 min

105: Code Switching with Maurice Cherry

01:49 – Maurice’s Superpower: Extreme Empathy Function Podcast w/ Anil Dash (https://glitch.com/culture/function/) 04:06 – Code Switching 13:21 – Creating and Fostering Safe Conference Environments 19:34 – Overcoming Feelings of Discomfort 22:16 – Human Decisions in Software: Why We Should Care 31:57 – Trust: How We’ve Lost It and How Should We Re-establish It? A Developer Relations Bill of Rights (https://medium.com/glitch/a-developer-relations-bill-of-rights-21381920e273) AngelList (https://an...

Nov 14, 20181 hr 7 min

104: Jellyfish Signaling with Sam Livingston-Gray

01:33 – Is Sam a Jellyfish? 03:14 – Sam’s Superpower: Making Connections Between Weird Things 05:17 – Driving Evolution 08:19 – “Fitness Landscape” and “Fitness Function” aiweirdness.com (http://aiweirdness.com/) 21:17 – How Humans Make Decisions Sam Livingston-Gray: Cognitive Shortcuts: Models, Visualizations, Metaphors, and Other Lies (http://confreaks.tv/videos/railsconf2014-cognitive-shortcuts-models-visualizations-metaphors-and-other-lies) Saccade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) Bli...

Nov 07, 20181 hr 3 min

103: The Org You Were Born Into with Marcus Blankenship

01:12 – Marcus’ Superpower: Helping Engineers Become Good Bosses 02:30 – Bosses Who Don’t Wanna Boss: Ending Up in Management The Peter Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) 10:37 – Are there people who just aren’t cut out for management or leadership? 14:20 – Applying Rationality to Organizations 20:23 – Alignment Not Agreement 24:52 – Is there a safe way to try and fail at management? Trying on Hats Ruby For Good (https://rubyforgood.org/) 31:16 – What does “BOSS” mean? Out...

Oct 31, 20181 hr 8 min