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I noticed the teams would kind of bifurcate. They'd have the hardware people and the software people, and the hardware people would be assembling the robots, and the software people would be like, "Hey, can you hurry up, so I can write some code?" And a lot of the work that we want to try to do is to make it so that it... |
\[32:05\] If you were designing a circuit from scratch, it is the equivalent in hardware of writing your own crypto algorithm in software. You probably shouldn't be doing it. And if you should, you already know. So our approach is really quite the opposite, to make it as easy as possible. Even the simplest things that ... |
The Internet of Things as a term is not one that I'm especially fond of... The term 'hacker', it's been adopted by popular culture - like the term 'drone', for that matter - so I have to go along with it, but it's a very, very powerful set of technologies to instrument the real world. So who's going to be the beneficia... |
Well, if it's a traditional closed source, siloed sort of world, it's not going to be the people who are being instrumented. So if we want -- you know, very much like Douglas Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed, well the stakes just went up by several orders of magnitude, because now you literally can't hide, because t... |
We've tried to make it possible with Gobot for developers to actually use Gobot to build commercial things and sell them, because open source is not about a bunch of companies just not having to pay for things. That doesn't work. That's how maintainers get burnt out, feel taken advantage of, become resentful, retire fr... |
We're very lucky at Hybrid Group because we get to do a lot of open source development that we're paid to do. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Contributing to open source is difficult too, because even just as consumers, people's natural instinct is to file an issue, rather than a pull request. Often times the reason for that is they feel like they're not qualified enough - they don't know enough about the project or maybe the language to... |
**Ron Evans:** I think that's really valid. The "I'm not worthy/I'm not good enough" - not realizing that every single observation is worthy of being noted, especially the initial experiences of things that we are all already so schooled in that we don't think about them. It could be something as simple as when you hav... |
\[36:09\] We've seen all this when we know how to read schematics and wiring diagrams, but if you're just getting started and you don't know that, "Oh wait, you mean the colors mean something?" It's still just the same wire, but we use the colors to represent a significance so that we can actually understand what's goi... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Well, it's similar to the software world, it's an idiom, right? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I was gonna say that, yeah. |
**Ron Evans:** Exactly. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** The idiom of hardware. |
**Ron Evans:** Exactly, and so very intelligent people are suddenly either in the field positioned in the corner because they suddenly feel like, "I'm not smart now... I was smart earlier today, and now I'm not smart anymore because I couldn't make this wiring work." |
The alternative to that is if we can be more compassionate towards that experience by addressing it and encouraging people. The emperor's new clothes effect, if you will... Pointing out that "Oh, I believe there may be something wrong with the Getting Started guide." "Oh wow, the Getting Started Guide - where is that? ... |
If anything we wanna do with Gobot, it's to try to encourage more people to have that fearless explorer's mind, because we really don't know what the next great ideas are. That's what they're supposed to come up with. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I retweeted somebody a couple of days ago too, and it really kind of resonated with me. It basically said something about like if you're writing documentation or a tutorial or something, to banish the words *easy* and *simple* from that, because it's not easy or simple if you've never done anything... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Those words are immediate triggers for *impostor syndrome*. |
**Ron Evans:** I'm going to review our documents, because I am very guilty of this. I thought that I was graciously inviting people by trying to make the way seem easier, but if I'm having the opposite effect then it's my responsibility as a maintainer to try to do something about it, and of course that just means edit... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I guess it's difficult, because when you use verbiage like that you can say something's easy to make people feel confident that they can jump in. But the other side of it is the negative factor if you struggle with it. If I read something and it says, "Oh, this is easy" and then it's not easy for m... |
**Ron Evans:** \[39:59\] Yeah, remember the "In a Nutshell" series of books? I had a bunch of them. The one that was like five or six inches thick was Linux In a Nutshell. You know, just five or six hundred pages of stuff you gotta know; just the bare minimum... \[laughter\] If you don't find that intimidating, you're ... |
I've seen recently the confessional tweets that people... I didn't do it - not because I was against it or anything, just because I didn't actually get around... I thought it was really interesting that people felt the need to confess. Some of them were humble brags and some of them were more legitimate acknowledgement... |
Mastery is "Hm, it could be A, it could be B, sometimes it could be C... Or it could be something else entirely." Mastery indicates a certain uncertainty and a willingness to approach solving the problem wherever it happens to lead. But you have to have confidence for that, and you never get that confidence if you keep... |
Programming is a very intellectually demanding occupation, and if you've never had a sense of burnout or any type of need for dealing with your mental health as a part of being a programmer, don't worry, you will. It's coming. |
If you've a professional athlete and you are asked to be in a game, you have trainers and nutritionists and doctors... They are making sure that you are fit, and if you have an injury they check you out. We as programmers are expected to perform essentially at an olympic cognitive level every day, and typically "Here's... |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's interesting, because the tech world for me -- I don't think I've ever felt so much gratification and so much exhaustion all at the same time. You can be so excited about the stuff that you're learning and the stuff you're doing, and like you said, you can also experience those lows where you d... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Not only does the software not compile, but somehow you're supposed to do 16 weeks of coding before Friday. |
**Ron Evans:** The whole trick to a happier life is your code works on Friday afternoon and you stop coding for the weekend. If you can achieve that... But of course, you're like, "Oh no, I have to mess with some other code on the weekend, just because I need the constant emotional peaks and valleys of this... Because ... |
My kids have told me, "Dad, you're addicted to coding." And I say, "I can stop anytime I want. I'm gonna stop for just five more minutes as soon as I finish this thing." \[laughter\] |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Just ten more lines of code... |
**Ron Evans:** I swear, I could stop anytime I want... Just one more hit -- I mean, line of code. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's a puzzle, it truly is. "I'm gonna figure this out!" |
**Ron Evans:** So it's definitely something that we have to learn more about as far as the human part of code, and it's the only part that matters. You know, I'm a humanist; I work with technology as means to an end, towards a happier human being. The point is not the technology, it's what it does for us. We really can... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[44:10\] Absolutely. I wanted to ask you, Ron, what are the more popular uses for Gobot, as far as you can tell? |
**Ron Evans:** Well, on the one hand you have the makers - the people who are hackers, who want to put together some individual, bespoke solution to a particular problem they have. You could maybe go buy a cheaper, prefabricated version of your garage door opening system, but then you would lack the satisfaction of hav... |
But then the other side that's really interesting is if you're going to build a connected device product, you don't have a lot of options as far as -- I think we kind of talked about that earlier... You only have a certain number of options as far as languages and technologies. You've got the rugged, traditional approa... |
The way that we can tell when a project transitions over from maker weekend to professional is when pull requests are coming in during the week, and they include things like, "I gotta get this done for my boss by the weekend." You know, those kinds of dead giveaways that, "Hm, this is not just a maker project." We don'... |
Hybrid Group is able to afford to do these things because of course, like all good frameworks, we've extracted it out of the work that we've done actually creating hardware products for companies, some of which have shipped, some of which have not. So really that's the part where the exciting part of the future is. It'... |
We manifest that today by way of commercial products. That is the place where we're really excited about Go and Gobot - bringing it to the industrial strength... You know, we would say that Gobot is for professional, hardware-oriented developers who want to build a real product. That's really what for us is the ultimat... |
\[47:53\] I may have attributed the quote wrong, I may have even made the whole thing up, but I view open source the same reason. It's not so that nobody has to pay anything and gets it all cheap -- for what purpose? So we can just make extra money? Yes, perhaps... But also for more intrinsic solving of big problems an... |
Ultimately, that perhaps becomes the most valuable thing in human society. I don't know. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Now, I have some questions about the future of Gobot, but first let's take our second sponsor break. Our second sponsor for today is The Ultimate Go Training Series. |
**Break:** \[48:48\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Alright, and we are back, talking to Ron Evans from Gobot. Brian, you were mentioning that you have an anecdote as well... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah. Ron, you mentioned that there were two types of projects: the bigger, foundational projects, and then the fun "I threw something together for the weekend kind of things." This one that I saw last time I was out in San Francisco, it really hit peak hacker for me; it was a small programming comp... |
For me, that was the peak of complete hackerness - using that to engineer a social problem with the Raspberry Pi and Gobot. |
**Ron Evans:** In a reasonably non-interruptive way that actually corresponded to the needs of their office. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Right. |
**Ron Evans:** That's beautiful. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Now let's talk about the future of Gobot. What's coming down the pipe for you, aside from the thing that you can't tell us about for GopherCon? What's the future look like? Is there anything you're excited about, is there anything you particularly wanna work on to expand Gobot into new areas? |
**Ron Evans:** Gobot continues to evolve. We pushed really hard for the 1.0 release right before the holidays at the end of last year. One reason was we really wanted to give people a more solid experience for those who choose to use that time of the year (vacation time) to work on individual projects or self-knowledge... |
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