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**Rachel White:** No. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I always ask that question, because a lot of people that I ran into have read it, especially in the tech community. One thing they said in there about learning is that you have to make learning fun. If learning is kind of boring, you don't absorb it the right way. It's that childlike -- when we are ... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, and another thing too... A term that I learned recently from a good friend of mine who's a self-taught chef - autodidact learning, where you learn by doing, is pretty much the only way that I am good at absorbing any kind of information. If I can't visualize exactly how something is working, the... |
\[07:58\] I've been programming for like 15 years; I don't have a CS background and I'm still really terrible at memorizing syntax, or... I don't know anything about any kind of SWORDing - I don't know any of that stuff, but I can probably figure anything out. I always tell people that I'm not a good engineer, and then... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you feel when I say this: "Not an impostor"? |
**Rachel White:** That was something that I struggled with for a really long time because of the situations that I was in, where when I did have the stress of writing code with testing and deadlines that people needed to use, I felt like I wasn't good enough because I wasn't fast enough. I don't really feel that way an... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The reason why I ask that is because for The Changelog, our main show at Changelog (which is our overarching brand) we've come to grips with what we feel makes the show good (my co-host, Jerod, and I) is that we face our impostor syndrome so that our listeners don't have to. So over the last several... |
Earlier, when I was sitting here talking to Thomas and Sam from IBM, I was thinking like "I don't belong here." Not that I'm saying, "Oh, I DO belong here", but I had this level of anxiety in me, thinking "I don't belong here!" And I was just thinking about the idea of people out there that feel like they don't belong.... |
If you're doing it for fun, you can approach it and mess up, and be like "Ha-ha-ha! Whatever..." And the same with the people you're approaching - they don't have to feel like, "Oh man, I gotta be an engineer, I gotta get this right, I gotta have this certain way that defines who I am, or whatever." You can kind of lik... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, and I definitely mess up all the time. I don't think I've ever given a conference talk without having some kind of technical difficulties... But you know what? It doesn't phase me anymore. I just talk through it and make jokes. Especially giving hardware demos at conferences - it always goes wro... |
I gave a hardware talk at Node Interactive EU and I was doing four hardware demos. They all worked, but one of them - I switched to USB cords, and had a lot of serial port issues. I was like, "I don't know what's going on", and I started having a live conversation with someone that was in the front row of the audience ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Anybody else might have just crumbled under the pressure. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, and I'm like, "Oh, whatever... I have to get through this, otherwise we're gonna sit here and stare at each other for 20 minutes." And even yesterday - I'm not giving hardware demos at the moment - I was demo-ing a new bot, and the internet was kind of spotty. It was still working, and surprisin... |
\[12:03\] So during my presentation, after I switched from the PowerPoint slides over to some live coding demonstrations, I needed to get back to my slides, but we were already halfway through, and I couldn't remember that they key command on Windows is Shift+F5 to get to a specific slide... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Of course, why would you remember that? |
**Rachel White:** Well, I tried Alternate, I tried Control and I tried Function+F5 and it all didn't work, so then I just started clicking on every single slide to get back to the 23rd slide... And I was just like, "So, how's everybody doing? This is great..." And then even the workshop after that, the code that I depl... |
I think that mistakes are such a natural part of making something, and I kind of think it's more human to have that happen organically. I know that that stresses out a lot of people, especially when you're putting yourself out there, but I think that if everybody embraced their mistakes, we would be able to feel a lot ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I think a lot of people get hung up on the things they feel like they're not good at, and it sort of paralyzes them, and that doesn't do anybody any good, because they get stuck, they never produce what would have been cool, and then the world doesn't grow from it. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. I think that that fear prevents a lot of people from making awesome stuff. I fall victim to that, too... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We all do. |
**Rachel White:** There's a ton of stuff that I still wanna make that I've been putting off for like two years, just because I'm afraid of starting it and then having to finish it, like video games... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sometimes we don't do what we wanna do because we're scared we'll succeed. We're like, "But if that actually worked, I'd have to do it..." And it's like, "Not today... I'll procrastinate." |
**Rachel White:** That's exactly how my first conference talk happened. I'm really good at writing abstracts, apparently, and I submitted the Robokitty abstract, and I was like, "Well, if it gets accepted, I guess I'll build it." And it got accepted, and then I had to build it, and I was like, "Oh, great... I put mysel... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So tell me about Robokitty. What happened there? |
**Rachel White:** That was my automated cat feeder. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I didn't know what the name was. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, it's called Robokitty. I was sitting at a bar with Jenn Schiffer, and I was like "I think I wanna start talking at conferences", because I spoke at JSFest in 2014, but it wasn't a technical talk; it was a part of DHTML Conf 2000, which was satirical talks, and instead of giving a satirical talk,... |
She encouraged me to just apply, and I did. And now, here we are. I get to torture everyone with all of the fun things I make. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How many talks later are we? |
**Rachel White:** Oh my gosh... Well, over ten, definitely. This year I was invited to speak at Amazon, I spoke at CascadiaFest, DinosaurJS... I was in Europe for two weeks in Stockholm and Amsterdam, and I spoke here... I've lost count. It's been a lot. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Too many to count. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you enjoy that, I assume. |
**Rachel White:** I do, I enjoy doing it. The majority of that was before I took the role of technical evangelist, so it was all in my spare time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:06\] Yeah, and now it's what you do. |
**Rachel White:** I thought I was tired when I was doing it outside of work, and now that it's my job, I'm even more tired. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So let's talk about hardware for a bit... |
**Rachel White:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...which blends into the internet of things, and this new world we're in. I was actually talking to somebody several months ago who was a mechanical engineer. For whatever reason, his job was drying up; he had really good smarts as an engineer, and I was encouraging him like "Hey, you've got the kin... |
**Rachel White:** It's both. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a balance of both? |
**Rachel White:** It's definitely both. An interesting thing... A colleague of mine in New York, who's also a technical evangelist at Microsoft, who was a friend of mine before either of us worked at Microsoft, he comes from that electrical engineering/mechanical engineering -- I'm not sure which one it is... He does a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what he was, from electrical engineering, but he has a mechanical engineering degree. |
**Rachel White:** So his name is Andy Reitano and he makes custom hardware for the NES. He made custom mappers for additional memory, so you can do more stuff with a Nintendo, and now he started learning JavaScript and Node, and made this amazing thing called NESpectre, with another guy, named Zach Johnson. What it is ... |
For example, if somebody's playing Contra, you wait, and they get 25 points and you hit in the browser "change random gun" and one of the players get a random gun while they're playing their own. That's something I love, especially people that don't come from programming backgrounds... They have a completely different ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's what I was trying to tell him, like... "You really should consider this, because..." |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, it's really awesome. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You have a different approach than, I think -- well, on the Changelog, one of the things we ask most guests on that show is their backstory, and more often than not we ask them "What got you into programming? When did you fall in love with it? Where were you at in life?" and more often than not it's... |
It's a T3i, the texas instruments T3i I believe that's what it was called, but I didn't know. Jerod did, Mitchell Hashimoto did, and several guests who came on the show have started out -- it wasn't Mitchell, it was somebody else; I'm mixing up names. Either way... Gaming was this epicenter, a breeding ground of softwa... |
Putting that back to you, do you find that the fun mechanism in what you do is what catches people? What is it that you feel attracts people to software development that may not have otherwise done so, or dig deeper where they may not have thought so? |
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