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

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On this day in Paris in 1948, the United Nations issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/), a milestone document that sets out the fundamental rights and privileges of all people and all nations. In honor of the anniversary of this document, the panelists of Greater Than Code have come together to share their reading of the document with all of you.

Dec 10, 201912 min

159: Bias in AI with Lauren Maffeo

02:26 - Lauren’s Superpower: Remembering Useful Yet Sentimental Facts About People 03:57 - Lauren’s Professional Background 07:35 - Bias in the Downsides of AI * Automation vs. Augmentation * Meredith Broussard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Broussard) 11:15 - Media and AI/How the Media Affects People’s Perception of AI 14:32 - Concerns of Small and Midsize Businesses Pertaining to AI 18:37 - How to Mitigate Bias in AI 22:23 - Ethics in AI * Loomis v. Wisconsin (https://en.wikipedia.org...

Dec 04, 201959 min

158: Exploring Company Values with Ariel Caplan

01:22 - Ariel’s Superpower: Extreme Irritability * How to Address What is Irritating You 07:30 - Accessibility Needs - Learning What Irritates Others * Disability Simulation in the Workplace * Hot-Keys vs. Mouse Use 16:05 - Rabbinical School * Learning to Ask Complex Questions * Edge Cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_case) 20:30 - Developing Company/Corporate Values * Purpose of Company Values * Revisiting the Values * When to Remove a Value * Wording of Values * Aspirational Values * Th...

Nov 27, 20191 hr 2 min

157: Reinventing Education with Willem Larsen

01:12 - Willem’s Superpower: Meta 02:20 - Accelerated Community Learning * Self-Sustaining Communities 12:45 - Reimagining the Education System * Unschooling * Open-Space (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology) * Systems of Privilege * Jordan Fink @buildsoil (https://twitter.com/buildsoil?lang=en) 24:20 - Stages of Human Life * Age Segregation in School * Storytelling of Culture 41:10 - The Thermodynamics of Emotion Symposium (https://thermodynamicsofemotion.com) 57:01 - Listening ...

Nov 20, 20191 hr 16 min

156: Authenticity in Interviewing with James Edward Gray II

01:30 - James’ Superpower: Spending time chasing his daughter and her robots around. Helping with her robotics club at school. 02:37 - “Just Be Yourself” is Terrible Advice 03:50 - What Are You Trying to Accomplish in the Interview 06:00 - Be Authentic: Which Parts of Yourself to Show Be a Strong Communicator Be an Avid Learner Don’t be a Jerk 07:25 - Turn Your Interviewers into Your Advocates 12:42 - Technical Interviews Saying “I Don’t Know” is OK 16:00 Interviewee as the Interviewer Make Sure...

Nov 13, 20191 hr 3 min

155: Ethical Open Source with Don Goodman-Wilson

01:10 - Don’s Superpower: He is a generalist. He has lots of skills he can bring together in one place. 02:25 - Ethics and Open Source Open Source is Broken (https://medium.com/@degoodmanwilson/open-source-is-broken-d836efbceb4f) OSI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative) How Can we Make Sure Our Code isn’t Weaponized 08:34 - Consequentialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism) vs Contractualism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contractualism) OSI FAQ (https://opensour...

Nov 06, 201955 min

154: Filtering Your Brain with Ambreen Hasan

01:12 - Ambreen’s Non-Technical Superpower: She is Very Good at Zoning People Out Learning necessary information from conversations 03:20 - Ambreen’s Technical Superpower: Any Challenge She is Given She Will Try to Just Do It Comfort with Uncertainty 06:03 - Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset It’s OK to Not Know Everything Using Resources to Your Advantage 08:40 - Ambreen’s Hobbies Outside of Software 10:10 - Thinking About Things in a Molecular Way Taking Chunks at a Time When Learning Something ...

Oct 30, 201945 min

153: Your Favorite Philosopher Is You with Mannah Kallon

01:16 - Mannah’s Superpower: He is Comfortable in His Own Skin Being Yourself 02:17 - Assessing Identity and Evaluating Sense of Self in New Culture What a Philosopher is 03:42 - Quoting Beyoncé and Using the B Word Who Takes Offense? Is Everyone Given the Same Consideration? 06:25 - Moments of Self Doubt When Someone Doesn’t Believe You Simone de Beauvoir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir) Addressing Terms of Identity with Conversation Botham Jean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Oct 23, 201941 min

152: Embracing Mathematics with Philip Wadler

02:35 - Philip’s Superpower: Being Not Afraid of Mathematics 04:07 - Programming Language Foundations in Agda (https://plfa.github.io/) Propositions as Types (https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/propositions-as-types/propositions-as-types.pdf) Isomorphism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism) Software Foundations by Benjamin C. Pierce (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13413455-software-foundations) The Coq Proof Assistant (https://coq.inria.fr/) 15:32 - Using a Proof Assistant ...

Oct 16, 201950 min

Special Edition: Becoming an Elder & the "Stage Two" of Life

There's a point in life, somewhere around the halfway mark, where the reality check hits -- you're going to die. There's a future without you in it. There's a new generation of children growing up, learning their way through the world, and humanity will keep moving forward without you. On one hand, this is depressing. Everyday, we go through the motions. Everyday, we play the game. And suddenly, it all seems so meaningless. The characteristic period of "mid-life crisis" starts with falling into ...

Oct 15, 20195 min

151: Off Meta with Amir Rajan

02:27 - Amir’s Superpower: Sensitivity to Development Pain A Picture of Amir’s Keyboard and Battlestation (https://twitter.com/amirrajan/status/1172565179806224384) Eye Tracker (https://www.tobii.com/) 06:59 - Developer Productivity and Breaking Constraints Magic Leap (https://www.magicleap.com/) 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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch...

Oct 09, 20191 hr 10 min

150: Cultural Transformation with Brian Lonsdorf

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 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1107452643/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1107452643&linkId=b8c8bcf8f27165517d6b53a2b87fedd6) Compositional Thinking Category Theory (https://en.wiki...

Oct 02, 20191 hr 6 min

149: Creating Effective Culture with Jesse James

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 Ma...

Sep 25, 20191 hr 11 min

148: Floober and Cognitive Outsourcing with Jacob Stoebel

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 (https://www.codestream.com/) 47:37 - Storycrafting and Succes...

Sep 18, 201959 min

147: Organizing Organizations with Jennifer Tu

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 (https://medium.com/better-programming/re-structuring-a-growing-team-3ac30d93b637) 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 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1611...

Sep 11, 201952 min

146: Self.conference with Amber Conville

00:50 - Amber’s Superpower: Adaptability 01:48 - Self.conference (https://selfconference.org/) -- Coming again next year in early June! * Background/Origin * Evolution of Diversity * Transparency of Metrics (https://selfconference.org/metrics) * Partnering with Organizations * Focusing on the Detroit Area 10:29 - The Detroit Tech Community * tech[inclusive] (https://www.meetup.com/Tech-Inclusive/) * Detroit Speaker Group (https://www.meetup.com/Detroit-Speakers-in-Tech/) 12:50 - The Future of Se...

Sep 04, 201937 min

145: Balancing Hierarchies and Equity in Organizations with Brandy Foster

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. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/25/8929793/emotion-recognition-analysis-ai-machine-learning-facial-expression-review) Royal Oak police stop Black man for 'looking suspiciously' at white woman (https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2019/08/14/royal-oak-police-stop-black-man-for-looking-suspiciously-at-whit...

Aug 28, 20191 hr 4 min

144: Being Greater Than Code with Jamison Dance

01:53 - Jamison’s Superpower: Moving swiftly between layers. 03:59 - Being An Engineering Manager * Context Switching * lftm (https://github.com/CoralineAda/lftm) * Career Advancement as an Engineer * Title Inflation * Providing Team Members with Growth Opportunities * Psychological Safety (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_safety) * Challenging People with Goals * Comradery via Video Conferencing * Latent Learning 23:44 - Starting the Soft Skills Engineering (https://softskills.audio/...

Aug 21, 201951 min

143: Indigenous Data Sovereignty with Keoni Mahelona

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 (https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/iipj/vol8/iss2/1/?referer=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252F) Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an agenda (Centre for Aborigina...

Aug 14, 20191 hr 8 min

142: Modeling Constraints in Human Systems with Will Larson

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 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1603580557/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1603580557&linkId=2f955f8b81a88700bdf8f1cd379e0c70) 02:30 - Systems Thinking/Theory Stella (https://www.iseesystems.com/store/products/stella-architect.aspx) 0...

Aug 07, 20191 hr 11 min

141: Navigating Blame

02:37 - Interpersonal Neurobiology (https://insightcenter.org/somatics/interpersonal-neurobiology/) and Emotionally Meaningful Experiences + Feelings Working on Software Code Smells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell) 05:42 - Postmortems and Incident Reviews 09:05 - Blaming People / Blamelessness From Safety-I to Safety-II: A White Paper (https://www.england.nhs.uk/signuptosafety/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/10/safety-1-safety-2-whte-papr.pdf) 15:25 - Systems Are Benign: Equalizing Hu...

Jul 31, 201948 min

140: Bounded Perfection with Amitai Schleier

01:29 - Running a Mail Server qmail (https://cr.yp.to/qmail.html) Sendmail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendmail) Postfix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postfix_(software)) Daemon-tools (https://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html) Istio.io (https://istio.io/) 08:49 - Amitai’s Superpower: Squirrel Power! and Orienting Himself in a New Problem Space (And Helping Others to Orient Them in Their Own Problem Spaces) 15:03 - Refactoring 23:15 - Managing Developer Time Global Day of Coderetreat (https://www.co...

Jul 24, 201958 min

139: Conferencing

02:43 - First Conference Experiences 08:31 - The Importance of Networking + Stickers!! 14:56 - Conference Fashion 16:51 - Approaching Speakers After Talks and Tricks to Remembering Names + Faces 18:49 - Speaking At Conferences Handling Anxiety Lightning Talks Toastmasters (https://www.toastmasters.org/) Practice at Company Lunch and Learns and Meetups 31:38 - Conveying Information in a Talk 34:59 - Crafting Proposals, What Selection Committees Look For, and Writing Talks The Purpose of Outlines ...

Jul 18, 201959 min

138: Job Satisfaction

02:13 - What is Job Satisfaction? 03:25 - Predictors of Job Satisfaction Mission Alignment Psychological Safety 14:02 - Evaluating Job Satisfaction: Questions to Ask During Interviews What should I know that I didn’t ask? In six months, how will you know if hiring me was the right choice? 18:02 - Maintaining Positive Company Culture Hire to Forge Signals Meeting Potential Co-Workers 25:14 - Managers: What should you do if you know your team is unhappy? 27:42 - Positive Interactions with Coworker...

Jul 10, 20191 hr 4 min

137: Pairing & Sharing with Llewellyn Falco and Clare Macrae

01:32 - Clare’s Superpower: Collecting and Sharing Useful Information 04:31 - Llewellyn’s Superpower: The Ability to Collaborate with Others 08:01 - Pairing Together: C++ Version of ApprovalTests (https://github.com/approvals/ApprovalTests.cpp) 12:15 - Pairing Retrospectives: What emotions did you feel? MindMup (https://www.mindmup.com/) 16:21 - Kinship Formed Through Working Together 18:55 - Working Asynchronously vs Live Pairing 20:15 - Writing Documentation for Pairing Sessions and Working to...

Jul 03, 20191 hr 9 min

136: Addressing Technical Friction

The Twitter thread: All I can say here is that I try to lead by example. If there’s a clear path to “make the change easy, then make the easy change,” make sure the commit history shows that explicitly, then ask for a code review even if your process doesn’t require it. 1/ https://t.co/VDxDbEQUf3 — Sam Livingston-Gray (@geeksam) June 9, 2019 Sam Livingston-Gray - F̶l̶u̶e̶n̶t̶ Refactoring (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3vflogQCLc) Talk: Sam talks about refactoring a gnarly Rails controll...

Jun 26, 201955 min

135: Intentional Learning with Saron Yitbarek

01:24 - Saron’s Superpower: Being able to figure out what people need + read people. 02:26 - Codeland Conference (http://codelandconf.com/) July 22nd, 2019 in New York City! Episode 026: Codeland, Capitalism, and Creating Inclusive Spaces with Saron Yitbarek (https://www.greaterthancode.com/codeland-capitalism-and-creating-inclusive-spaces) 03:23 - Offering Free Onsite Childcare at Conferences 07:02 - CodeNewbie (https://www.codenewbie.org/) Base.cs Podcast (https://www.codenewbie.org/basecs) Th...

Jun 19, 20191 hr 5 min

134: Building Profiles with Halleemah Nash

01:43 - Halleemah’s Superpower: Cultural Fluency: Operating authentically and being who you are in any space you are in. Code-switching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching) 07:37 - Existing in Other Spaces; Active Listening 10:31 - Building Bridges to Change the Complexion of the Workforce Generation Z (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z) 15:01 - Identifying Potential Talent, Engaging Underrepresented Populations, and Doing Intentional Work to Diversify Relationships 21:17 - Ch...

Jun 12, 201955 min

133: Dark Horses with Chanté Thurmond

01:56 - Chanté’s Superpower: Spotting Talent (Dark Horses) 05:33 - Perceiving Talent/Potential Essentialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism) 09:15 - Confronting Biases and Societal Categorization/Division/Labeling 18:54 - Identity as a Feedback Loop 25:04 - Health and Wellness and Human Potential 27:00 - Privilege vs Potential Actuality, Capability, Potentiality (https://www.iridiumconsulting.co.uk/2011/10/actuality-capability-potentiality/) Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer (https:...

Jun 05, 20191 hr 7 min

132: Distilling the Hailstorm with Claire Lew

02:06 - Claire’s Superpower: The Ability to Distill Things and Catching Pellets 05:21 - Janelle’s Superpower: Seeing the Gifts of Others and Bringing Them to Surface 08:19 - Sam’s Superpower: Being Able to Make Connections Between the Shapes of Things Even if They Don’t Look the Same on the Surface 09:13 - Bad Bosses Panelist Experiences, Symptoms of Poor Leadership and Management Are We Bad Bosses?! Okay Fine Whatever: The Year I Went from Being Afraid of Everything to Only Being Afraid of Most...

May 29, 201943 min