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so that intro made me really happy because I'm Ethiopian and in America I
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tell everyone to say as Syrah at bar because they can't really say my name and that's the right way to say my name
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that was the authentic way to say my name so thank you thank you so much that
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feels wonderful so I'm here visiting all the way from San Diego California really really excited to be here I think our
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flight was about 25 hours so this is really special and I'm really excited to be here thank you all so much for having me I am Serrano I am so sorry
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I'm sat on and I'm the founder of code newbie the most supportive community of programmers and people learning to code
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and today I'm going to tell you a story three years ago I was interviewed on my
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very first podcast show of hands if you've heard of the Ruby rogues Oh what
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are you wonderful so the Ruby rogues is a show that's been on for many many years it's a panel based interview show
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and I was on episode 159 and it was called hacking education and the idea
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was to tell my story of how I learned to code how I got started and so I'm
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telling my story and I'm explaining how I used to be in startups then I taught myself to code then I went to a boot
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camp that I worked as a developer and in the process of telling that story I mentioned in passing how I feel very
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privileged and this panel is made of four white men and I look like this I
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turn into a cartoon when I do podcast so when I said this one of the panelists David Brady said it's so interesting
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that we have a guest who's at four or five levels of intersectionality who's just claimed to be privileged and that
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comment stuck with me and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where people get their
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success from and how they become developers how they become speakers and I have my own podcast now called the
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codon B podcast you should totally subscribe and we've done over 150 episodes over the past two and a half
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years and we interview people who are just getting started and we interview people who've been programming for twenty thirty forty years and are very
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very experienced and the goal of this show is to ask people the question how did luck how did privilege play a part
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in your own story where did you learn to code do you have a computer science degree did you teach yourself what what
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is that journey like I also produce my own conference call code land if you're looking for an
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excuse to visit New York City there you go we have one happening next year it's our second conference and it's a lot of that
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same technical storytelling taking people at very different levels of expertise from different backgrounds and
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asking them how did you get here how did you become so successful what is your story about and a big part of it is
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really understanding that journey better so what I found so interesting about David's comment to me was that when he
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thinks about privilege he thought specifically about race and gender which usually means he's thinking about racism
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and sexism which are very important issues in many industries but definitely in tech there are a lot of examples
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where these are still problems and one example that has always stuck with me is the story of Jesse frazzle who's an
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amazing developer absolutely very very technical great speaker amazing community leader and she used to work at
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docker now she works at Microsoft and she being a very public figure in the
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container community especially would receive so many death and rape threats that the company hired private
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detectives to protect her that's huge she wrote a blog post that said ever
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since I started speaking at conferences in the trimming open-source projects I've been endlessly harassed I've gotten
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hundreds of private messages and IRC and emails about sex rape and death threats people emailing me saying they jerked
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off to my conference talk video you're welcome by the way is mild in comparison to sending photoshopped pictures of me
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covered in blood I wish I could do my job something I very obviously loved doing without any of this bullcrap
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however that seems impossible at this point she finally tweeted when she left
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she said I lost something I loved so much and a small piece of my soul standing up for myself and I just don't
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know if it was worth it and that's really sad that is really really sad it sucks for her but it also sucks for the
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rest of us because we lose people like her all the time so when you think about
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privilege the way I think about it is the ability to engage in that type of behavior or pretend that it doesn't
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exist because it doesn't affect me so what does this mean it means that
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there are tons of capable passionate hard-working people who want nothing
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more than to be part of this industry and contribute to all of us but they are being denied the opportunity or slowly
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pushed out because for reasons that have nothing to do with their technical abilities and we all have to pay the
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price for that but there's good news we are getting better at addressing these issues and I want to highlight a few
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people who've done some really good stuff in this trying to solve this problem one is Coraline a 2mp show of hands if
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you've heard of Coraline a couple you okay great well after today you will all know more about this awesome woman she
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created the contributor covenant which is a code of conduct for open source project it basically says let's all be nice to
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each other the short version of it and it has been adopted by Ruby jams by
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r-spec by a bunch of different open source projects and it has really started the conversation on yes we all
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need to obviously be technical to do open source but we should also pay attention to how we treat each other
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another example that I really like is Tracy Chow and she wrote a blog post
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called where are the numbers and so in the US there's this huge conference for women in tech called the Grace Hopper
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conference happens every year and when she attended in 2013 she noticed that
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everyone keeps talking about this problem but there were no numbers there was no data to support any of it and so
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she said we see visually anecdotally this problem but if we don't measure it if we don't have a number to point to
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that how will we know if things are getting better or worse so she started collecting data it was very simple she
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started a Google spreadsheet and she invited companies to contribute and to offer their own demographic information
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about their employees and she ended up getting over 200 maybe 300 different companies to volunteer their their
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information and eventually I think maybe if years after that Facebook and Google and a bunch of the really big
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corporations were finally pressured into releasing their own numbers as well and so she really started a data-based a
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number based conversation on gender problems and then my last example which is one of
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my favorite ones is by a woman named Isis who was an engineer at one login and she was one of four engineers who
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were selected to be part of a recruiting marketing campaign and so her and three other engineers there were photos of
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them and ads all over the the subway system and you know on walls and such and one person took a picture of one of
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those ads and in the comments mentioned how she didn't really look like an engineer and this did not make Isis
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happy and so she started a social media campaign with the hashtag I look like an engineer and she invited women from all
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different backgrounds all over the world and different industries to to take a photo of themselves use the hashtag and
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show that there isn't a way to look like an engineer you either are you aren't based on your technical skills so going
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back to David's concept of privilege and his comment to me it makes sense that he
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focused on race and gender especially when he looked at me because that's really how we talk about privilege in
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tech but I don't like that definition because I'm a woman I'm a person of color and I'm drowning
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in privilege one of the big questions we get in the code newbie community is how
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do I get a job as a programmer I've been learning on my own for months sometimes years how do I break in how do I get
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that first job and the most common answer we get shouldn't surprise you it is contribute to open source it's easy
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you can do it all you need is internet access some knowledge you can do it on
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your own time you don't have to ask anyone's permission it's a really really great way to demonstrate your abilities
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and get your first job but what does it really take to contribute to open source
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the first thing is code you have to know how to code one of the popular pieces of
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advice we give to newbies is we say you know if you're nervous about your first pull request fix a typo or add to
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documentation or add to the readme you know remove some whitespace things like that and these things are helpful and
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they're a really great way to begin your open source journey but an employer is not going to hire you because you fix a
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lot of typos right you have to actually submit really valuable and so the first thing is you have to
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know how to code well enough to make a significant contribution the second thing is you have to be able to
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communicate I'm always surprised when I talk to open-source maintainer x' and they tell me how much of their time they
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spent not just building things but just talking to people between code reviews between responding to people being mean
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to them on Twitter to them trying to get more people involved to responding to
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issues there's a lot of communication that needs to happen so the stronger you are in your communication skills the
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better off you'll be in that first open source contribution and the third thing is time we talk about open source as if
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it's free and it is kind of free in terms of money but it's definitely not free in terms of time and if we think
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about the journey between that first open source contribution where you fix a typo all the way up to getting a really
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important PR emerged that's a lot of time that has to pass for you to make that significant contribution the fourth
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one is probably pretty obvious you need a computer or at least access to a computer and the last one is internet
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hopefully high-speed Internet so you can contribute often and make that a regular part of your routine so if we think
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about open source as a class that you take in college these five are like the
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prerequisites before you even make a contribution you have to have these things before you walk in the door so
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how do we get here how do we get to a place where we can code we can communicate we've got time without a computer we've
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got internet how did I get here let's talk about privilege I was born in
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Ethiopia I come from an upper-middle class household in the United States my parents are both pharmacists and we
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lived the American dream by the book my father came when I to the state's when I was about 1 and then my mother and I
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followed him when I was almost three years old we started in a really really crappy one-bedroom apartment and a
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not-so-great part of Washington DC and then in middle school we moved to a much nicer four bedroom townhouse and one of
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the richest counties in the United States and then in high school we moved to a five bedroom single-family beautiful home in one of the richest
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parts of the richest County in the United I didn't earn any of that they gave that
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to me so what happens when your parents have good jobs and provide that type of
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stability there's a study done in 2014 by the national bureau of economic research that says called where is the
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land of opportunity the geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States so if we look here we can see on
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the x-axis we have the parent household income and on the y-axis we have the mean child household income and we see a
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correlation where the more money the parent makes the more money the child is likely to make when they become an adult
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and we see it kind of evens off at about a quarter million dollars but I think that a quarter million dollars you're
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probably okay so how does this affect the likelihood of going to college we
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have another awesome graph for you we have on the x-axis the parent income rank on the right the college quality
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rank and on the Left the parent the percent attending college at ages 18 to 21 and here we see a very similar
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correlation the more the parent makes the higher likelihood it is that the
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child goes to college in that age and the better quality the college is likely to be and for me what that meant is I
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went to a really really great public school and I got to go there for free I didn't have to pay tuition I don't have
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to go to private school to do that and in my school because it was in such a great part of the United States I had a
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system of people who had very high academic standards we were peer pressured not into doing drugs or
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partying but to making sure we got top grades and making sure that we got into the best colleges that was the pressure that I faced when I was in in-school
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college was not an option it was an expectation when I met people as an
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adult who decided not to go to college I thought you could do that didn't know didn't know that was an option and all
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of these positive side effects were made possible not by anything I did or worked for but by what my parents did and
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worked next let's talk about computer and internet access I had my first computer
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with internet at age 9 I didn't know what to do with it so I played a lot of Oregon Trail which is a really really
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terrible game and my mother forced me to learn how to touch type and I don't know
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how she knew that that would be such an important skill but I spent a lot of time with Mavis Beacon who taught me a
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lot about typing and patience in middle school in high school I had an access to
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an amazing computer lab where we had the latest technology although the best computers we had Macs everywhere we had
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the Adobe Creative Suite I learned how to edit audio and video and all these things at 13 raise your hand if you know
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what an internet desert is you guys are gonna do so much learning today so
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internet desert is a section where you do not have access to wired broadband
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and what that means is that you don't have access to internet speeds that are fast enough to do pretty basic
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things like uploading a photo or doing a video chat and I work from home so I spend a lot of time doing meetings on
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video chat so if I didn't have high-speed Internet I'd be in a lot of trouble there are 11 million people in the US who don't have access to wired
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broadband now if we look at where these people live we will notice something very interesting a 2016 FCC report
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called the broadband progress report said that on average the proportion of the population without internet access
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is highest in counties with the lowest median household income the lowest population density the highest rural
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population rate and the highest poverty rate and you can see that half of these factors have to do directly with money
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with income if we look at this on the worldwide scale we'll see that as of 2015 only forty six
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point four percent of the world's population has access internet which means that more than half of the people
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in the world cannot make a pull request that's a lot of people so let's talk about higher education I
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graduate from college with two degrees in English and psychology which I use every single day and if we look at the
00:15:17.330
okay here we go I guess they didn't like higher education so if we look at how
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higher education correlates with income and unemployment we have this wonderful
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convenient graph right here and we can see that the higher your degree the more money you're likely to make unless you
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have a doctoral degree I don't know what's up with the PhD group they're not doing as well as the others but we see
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that correlation and we see the inverse with unemployment so the higher your degree the less likely you are to be
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unemployed unless you have a PhD
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Oh so besides the financial benefits of
00:16:04.839
having a degree let's talk about some of the other benefits now in the United States for a four-year degree the first
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two years are generally spent doing general studies which is very liberal arts heavy which means there's a lot of
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written papers or projects presentations things like that which means that at the end of those two years you walk out with
00:16:22.449
some very strong communication skills whether you like it or not and as we mentioned communication skills are super
00:16:28.269
important for that open source prerequisite list next category helped I
00:16:34.889
don't think too much about my health I've got all my limbs my senses everything generally works most of the
00:16:40.810
time but not everyone has the benefits of being fully able-bodied if we look at
00:16:46.449
the number of people who are functionally deaf we have 1 million in the u.s. 360 million in the world
00:16:51.720
legally blind 1.3 million in the u.s. 39 million in the world color blind is much
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more common we have one in 12 men and one in 200 women and being able bodied is not something that I've personally
00:17:05.470
earned and I don't have to worry about a lot of these issues but if you do have to worry what does that look like I
00:17:12.220
think the obvious one especially for us as developers is accessibility I can't use the app that I want to use you know
00:17:19.569
this website doesn't work for me things like that but another really big one is financial impact there's the problem
00:17:25.569
just medical bills but there's also lost wages if you have to take time off there's a huge stressor that happens
00:17:32.080
just from the the money aspect and the last one and this is one that I didn't
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appreciate until I had a really close friend who had a lot of medical issues is the emotional stress it is really
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really frustrating and heartbreaking and depressing to be stuck inside a body that won't let you do all the things
00:17:50.530
that you want to do and be the person you want to be let's talk about money my parents paid
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for my education I sound like a brat tonight ah which to me is probably my biggest achievement because getting your
00:18:05.620
immigrant parents to pay for your English degree is very impressive so I graduated debt-free
00:18:11.500
now student debt especially in the u.s. is pretty common so how big of a deal is this really if we look at numbers
00:18:17.890
student debt in the u.s. we have 40 million people with 1.2 trillion u.s. dollars worth of student debt which
00:18:24.970
comes out to about 30,000 per person that's a lot that's a lot of money if we
00:18:30.340
compare it to other types of debt we'll see that with the exception of a mortgage more people more money we owe
00:18:36.970
more money in student loans than in the other category and this happened pretty recently this happened as of 2010 but
00:18:43.690
what impact does this have if everybody has student debt then does it really matter yes yes it does there was a
00:18:50.260
survey where 52% of people strongly agreed or someone agreed with the statement my need to pay student loan
00:18:56.230
debt is hampering my ability to further my career and this is something that I saw personally firsthand I had many
00:19:02.320
friends who had to take the first job they could get out of college whether or not it was something they were interested in whether it was in a fuel
00:19:08.920
but they studied in it really didn't matter they had bills to pay and they had to start earning income as soon as
00:19:14.050
possible for me the biggest thing is that I didn't have to get a job I could
00:19:21.220
take a two-week gig and hopefully it turned into a full-time job I could take an internship I didn't really pay a lot
00:19:26.680
but maybe it'll lead to something bigger I could take a few months off to explore and find myself I could take a lot of
00:19:32.950
chances I could build a career and this means that many years later I could take
00:19:38.830
a chance and I could learn to code and switch fields entirely yes exactly so back to that question how
00:19:47.830
did I get here how do I get to a place where I can code I have strong communication skills I have internet I
00:19:53.290
have computers I have financial stability to spend time on unpaid work like contributing open-source I'm really
00:20:00.310
really lucky and I think a lot of you are really lucky to and people hate hearing that because we want to believe
00:20:06.340
that we worked really hard and we did it by the skin of our teeth and I used to be one of those people and I would tell
00:20:11.770
my husband all the time he's sitting right there by they reach again there's an husband there you go I always tell
00:20:19.540
I'm not gonna do that and then I do it I used to tell my husband all the time I say I'm not lucky I worked really hard
00:20:25.060
and here you go sure but you're also a little lucky and so I thought about that
00:20:31.210
and I started doing a lot of research I read all these articles also known as tweets and I found that there's this
00:20:39.610
tension between luck and hard work because all the celebrities the really famous successful people will tell you
00:20:45.850
you got to work really hard to get to where you are and no one really wanted to admit that luck had a part of it as
00:20:50.890
well and I work hard too but here's the thing a year ago I used to work at Microsoft
00:20:56.260
and ran a program called tech jobs Academy and the program was a technical training opportunity for unemployed and
00:21:02.590
underemployed New Yorkers and the idea was to take people who were really passionate really excited I just never
00:21:07.600
got an opportunity and to train them and give them a chance to start careers in tech and so I had a classroom full of 25
00:21:15.370
people who were all very bright and really hard-working and weren't necessarily as successful as a lot of
00:21:21.490
the developers that I know I had one graduate and protect in particular who was raising four kids on her own and she
00:21:28.000
been wanting to get into tech for years and she would read one book at a time and go to the library whenever she had a
00:21:33.130
moment and take a course when it was available and slowly but surely was working her way up and developing her
00:21:39.490
technical skills so by the time that I went to Microsoft at 11 a.m. and rolled in all comfortable she'd already raised
00:21:46.060
and clothed four people so can't just be about hard work I'm lucky
00:21:52.150
that I didn't have to worry about money or my health or where my next meal was coming from
00:21:57.190
I had the exposure and the stability and the support early on in life so that
00:22:02.770
later as an adult I could focus on my work I was lucky first so that I can
00:22:09.010
work hard later and that's okay it's totally okay to admit that luck
00:22:14.380
played some role in your success so what do we do what do we do with this information what do we do with our luck
00:22:20.730
we tend to solve problems that we personally experienced has anyone seen
00:22:26.320
shark tank yes yeah laughter I think so have you've seen one episode of shark
00:22:31.780
tank you've seen every episode of shark thing because it's the same story it all goes something like this I love
00:22:39.010
to paint I love painting with paintbrushes when I paint the paint gets on the paintbrushes and then the paint
00:22:45.520
dries and then I can't use the paintbrush anymore so I built this cover to cover the paintbrush so my paint stays wet and I
00:22:53.020
can paint whatever I want can I have a million dollars and that is an actual product that did get a ton of
00:22:58.840
money and it's all like that it's all people entrepreneurs who say I have this problem this is really painful for me
00:23:05.560
I assume that other people also have this problem can you give me money so that I can solve it and it makes sense
00:23:11.680
because we understand the problems we experience we can empathize with them we probably have a circle of friends who
00:23:17.770
get together every Friday and drink and complain about how terrible these problems are but if we only solve the
00:23:24.130
problems that we personally experienced we leave everyone else behind so one
00:23:29.410
thing we can do is we can expand our problem pool the more problems that we
00:23:34.720
can understand that we're exposed to the better we are able to share that luck and spread some of that around and there
00:23:41.710
are few ways to do this number one is to follow people who are not like you and it's really easy to do this on Twitter
00:23:48.160
Twitter gets a lot of hate for saying that you you're kind of in your own bubble but it's also really easy to
00:23:53.290
escape that bubble follow people who don't speak the same language who don't live in the same crunch who don't code in the same languages
00:23:59.860
that you do follow the people who look differently who believe different things half the people I follow on Twitter I don't even like them but I know that if
00:24:07.630
I have them in my feed on a regular basis that it exposes me to ideas that I don't have and reminds me that my
00:24:14.080
opinion is not necessarily the most important opinion in the room the second one that I love is to volunteer it's
00:24:20.950
really easy to read articles and say oh it really sucks for that person in that place at that time but it's very
00:24:26.050
different when you can sit next to someone and volunteer and help them and give them your time you get to know them
00:24:31.600
not just as a statistic but as a real person and empathize with them on a real level and the last one is to amplify
00:24:38.260
voices I mentioned three people at the very beginning of this talk who are doing really powerful things to make our industry a little bit better it's really
00:24:45.400
easy to just retweet them the next time you have a conference invite them to speak if you have a job opening
00:24:50.470
recommend them they're really easy small ways that you can support these people
00:24:55.600
who are taking on that burden of making it a better place for all of us so expand your pool share your luck now as
00:25:03.940
we talk about luck and privilege this might sound a bit like diversity I hate
00:25:09.670
the word diversity it emphasizes our differences it draws lines between us it
00:25:16.360
assumes that there is a normal and there's an other and if we just get enough of the others in the room then
00:25:22.360
we're diverse we're doing great it's too easy to half-ass I prefer inclusion because inclusion
00:25:29.530
requires you to always ask yourself who am i leaving out whose voice whose story
00:25:35.680
is not being heard whose perspective are we not considering inclusion is a worthy
00:25:41.350
and elusive goal it demands that we care that we empathize it will outlast the
00:25:47.170
latest diversity trend it cannot be captured and it's easy to talk about women in tech
00:25:53.260
and the truly pathetic number of people of color in our industry but I worry that if we just focus on those two
00:25:59.470
things we forget everyone else we forget about the single moms the dads working three shifts to make ends meet
00:26:05.620
the people who wait for hours in line at the library to get access to a computer for just 30 minutes that day when we
00:26:12.490
make it our mission to include more voices and perspectives in tech to not just build for others but to build with
00:26:19.240
others we're all better off and we can all be a little more lucky thank you so
00:26:33.890
thank you so much Tyrone that was really really amazing really love share you okay can I ask you one thing sighs
00:26:40.440
question about your book club oh yeah yeah would you would you care to mention that sure so I also do another podcast
00:26:47.100
one of my really good friends yet another call the Ruby book club podcast
00:26:52.380
and so for one hour each week we read a section of a ruby book and then we discuss it online so it's our way of
00:26:58.470
making sure that we actually you know we we have programming books and we tell ourselves we're gonna read them and we never really do so this is our way of
00:27:04.260
making sure that we read them so we read I think we're on our fourth book we're reading ruby under a microscope by Pat
00:27:10.020
Shaughnessy and it's I think we're halfway through it's really really good so definitely heard you to check that it's a tough book yeah any questions on
00:27:19.920
the talk or I'll just you know Cerrone general please thing I understand this
00:27:25.050
talk was probably originally put together maybe with the u.s. audience in mind from America and replaced that
00:27:30.720
until very recently was part of the internet desert now literally from the opening slide I
00:27:37.690
anticipated the thrust of the talk because I feel like this is a conversation I also have with people all
00:27:43.570
the time I grew up on food stamps in a town of 200 people in Maine and also had
00:27:48.759
every single thing fall my way go out me to get a higher education what in in
00:27:57.839
urban environments the avenues for people to get into tech are very
00:28:03.549
different than they are in rural environments have you seen efforts or organizations that have been successful
00:28:10.029
and clearly top-down solutions not coming any kind of students given the climate in America are there
00:28:15.489
organizations that succeed in the bottom off and what are the key concepts behind
00:28:20.739
those organizations that make them successful yeah oh that's a really good question there's one organization I can think of
00:28:26.049
that's us-based called tech hire and it is an initiative that is part of the nonprofit called opportunity at work and
00:28:33.009
they've actually made a very concerted effort to focus on rural programs that's a problem that I get as well I get
00:28:38.320
people who say I want to start a coding to be meetup but there's not a lot of sponsors in my area there's not a lot of
00:28:43.419
literally places to meet and it's really hard to support those locations and tech hire has really really tried to build a
00:28:50.440
community in places that aren't necessarily tech hubs and to connect them with the resources they have so
00:28:56.200
from my understanding they try to focus on or try to connect they try to first create a community so finding local
00:29:02.229
leaders finding out what are the tech employers there what are the universities there what are the places that might sponsor and support and they
00:29:08.859
try to do I want to say it's like monthly phone calls I don't know if they specifically I think they do some
00:29:14.709
financial support as well but a lot of it is just figuring out what are the resources that exist and how can we
00:29:20.709
check in and funnel other in-kind donations from other areas into that
00:29:26.049
location so that's definitely one that's making a lot of work in that that's a really good question us focused
00:29:34.600
any other questions or even just opinions on like how we are lucky here
00:29:39.620
in Malaysia
00:29:50.390
which I guess is not
00:29:55.670
I would like to have more conversations like this with my team home or what what angle and
00:30:01.490
you know try because I had spoken to my
00:30:07.520
about me and what needs to be pursued actively as opposed
00:30:13.960
uniquely person s technology privilege the recording
00:30:19.400
so you just your meritocracy that's see ya good question so that one I think
00:30:29.580
it's important to find moments where maybe there is an underlying privilege
00:30:35.970
that people don't think about so for example if you have a job application right looking at a droplet instead of
00:30:42.270
saying you know do I have all my criteria thinking is there anything in here that might turn somebody off if I
00:30:48.000
were a woman and I read this is there anything that might turn me off if I'm us-based and I'm not hiring from a
00:30:53.549
us-based audience there's something here that might turn me off if I am adults that's one thing the huge as well as
00:30:58.710
ageism is huge in tech I get a ton of people in our community who are much older trying to break into tech and they
00:31:03.990
say like no one will give me an internship or an apprentice in apprenticeship because I'm they think I'm too old to do a good job so if I
00:31:09.809
read that job description is there something here that for someone who is 50 and getting started might turn them
00:31:15.360
off so I think that finding opportunities like job descriptions for
00:31:20.549
me that's because I run a conference one thing that I do is I read I look at the CFP process and I try to ask myself if
00:31:27.600
I'm a first time speakers there's something here that would scare me if I'm you know a person of color is
00:31:32.880
something here that might kind of be coded and the certain language that I I may not think about so what I try to do
00:31:37.950
is I kind of I keep a running list of all the people who are not like me and I say to myself if I am this person what
00:31:44.610
might be uncomfortable what might turn me off that I may not see and then making sure to have people from those
00:31:51.120
communities look at it - so to give you another example my conference code land one thing that I didn't realize that I
00:31:57.299
did until after it was too late was I didn't do a good job of catering to parents I'm not a parent I don't have
00:32:02.880
kids most of my friends don't have kids so I didn't think about what does this conference look like for someone who has
00:32:08.010
a child and wants to bring their child to the conference and so what I'm gonna do this year is I'm gonna make sure that my programming community is made of
00:32:14.460
people who have parents and I'm gonna ask them explicitly as a mom as a dad is there anything here that looks a little
00:32:20.190
funny to you so finding those opportunities and saying who may be uncomfortable who who may be turned off
00:32:25.470
and seeing how you can adjust for that does that help yeah that really does
00:32:31.629
help one last question before come on I
00:32:38.889
know some of you by name I'll start calling out Alex
00:32:53.350
how to identify and work your vice oh that's a good one um I think that I'm
00:33:00.370
trying to think from my personal experience okay so with the conference again there were definitely a list of
00:33:07.710
groups of people that I know that I did not think about because I don't either I
00:33:12.880
don't identify as that or I don't know people in my circle as that so for me listening to people's feedback was
00:33:19.120
important and I think making sure so this is think I think that with feedback a lot of times we say if you have
00:33:24.280
feedback come find me that's not helpful no one's gonna go out of their way to give you feedback so for our conference what we did was before
00:33:30.700
anyone was allowed to leave on the last day I gave everyone a physical you know
00:33:35.980
a scorecard was ten questions score out it from one to ten and I gave everyone a card and I did like raffle prizes to
00:33:42.520
make sure people actually filled it out and I learned a lot from that I read every single one I put her in a spreadsheet it was spent ridiculous
00:33:49.270
amount of hours going through every single thing and saying oh my goodness I totally didn't think about this I didn't think about the fact that if you have a
00:33:55.179
conference for we race in New York City so we at a conference that started I think it was at eight o'clock which
00:34:00.730
meant that people had to book a hotel the night before but if we had started at 10 o'clock they could have driven
00:34:06.309
that morning which would have saved them a lot of money right like that's something I totally didn't think about until someone said so so I think that
00:34:11.710
making sure you have consistent you're consistently asking for feedback and making it very very very easy even if
00:34:18.609
it's more work for you really easy for them is the best way I think the other thing is you know when I mentioned like
00:34:24.250
expanding your problem pool finding people who are not like you I'm always looking at my community and thinking
00:34:29.260
what biases do I see so for my podcast I'm very much in the Ruby community
00:34:34.330
all my friends Ruby is we were very Ruby heavy for the first like 50 episodes and I and I looked at my podcast and I
00:34:40.119
thought oh crap these are all Rubeus like I'm leaving out all the other programming languages I can't do that so
00:34:45.129
kind of reexamining and seeing like are there any patterns here are there things that everyone has you know that's that's the same and
00:34:52.120
if it is why is that is that because my friends are all this type of person is it because my work is this type of
00:34:57.850
person and then like always asking yourself that question and then finding ways to introduce variety into your life
00:35:10.790
two new features 131 and - bye
00:35:16.610
works in water movement then you answer the correction and you have a bias feature so you can work
00:35:23.130
with them yes QA Oh or someone more likely
00:35:35.300
Tracy we great thank you so much we really
