Greater Than Code

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.

Does anything really matter? Who am I? What do I live for?

On the other side of these questions, something magical happens.

The finiteness of Life is also what gives it meaning. Every breath is something to cherish. Every joyful memory is a gift. And right now, in this moment, we have the opportunity to live and be, whoever it is we want to be.

Who are your heroes? Who do you admire?

What character do you want to play?

How can you use your special gifts to lift the people around you?

Like a cacoon-shattering phase change, a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, we become an Elder, a steward, and a leader that works on behalf of the children of our future.

This audio clip is a conversation between Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team & Arty Starr about the journey of becoming an Elder, and why Arty decided to change her name.

If you want a bit more backstory, you can also check out this thread:

this is great stuff! Artemis is a badass.

Support Greater Than Code

02:27 - Amir’s Superpower: Sensitivity to Development Pain

A Picture of Amir’s Keyboard and Battlestation

Eye Tracker

06:59 - Developer Productivity and Breaking Constraints

Magic Leap

16:58 - Idea Flow

21:00 - Building an Environment That Enables You

28:18 - Optimizing Local Maxima

Bret Victor: The Future of Programming

41:01 - Questioning Fundamental Assumptions

46:55 - Game Development

Unity

56:05 - Extremeness and Pushing Boundaries: Being a Weirdo/Being an Outlier/Thinking Differently

Off Meta, Super Smash Brothers Melee Gods

Meta and Off Meta

DragonRuby Game Toolkit Sandbox

Reflections:

Jess: “A pin on my upkeeps.”

Avdi: Meta and off meta.

John: Continuity of design.

Rein: Continuity and discreteness.

Janelle: Process-oriented thinking.

Amir: Being consistent with philosophies.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Amir Rajan.

Sponsored By:

• PagerDuty: This episode is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future.

Support Greater Than Code

01:34 - Brian’s Superpower: Communicating and Listening

02:36 - The Role of Empathy in Teaching/Communicating

04:11 - Learning and Teaching Functional Programming

Thinking Functionally with Haskell

11:13 - Compositional Programming in JavaScript

16:02 - Problems That Can Be Solved by Learning Functional Programming

Livable Code by Sarah Mei

Scalable program architectures

25:03 - Category Theory

Categories for the Working Mathematician

32:41 - Machine Learning and AI

Do be do be do

53:54 - Discrete Representations of Continuous Phenomena

56:17 - Making Teaching Fun, Engaging, and Interesting

Reflections:

Brian: Looking into L-systems further and thinking in terms of ranges.

Rein: Dimensionality is imperative.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Brian Lonsdorf.

Sponsored By:

• PagerDuty: This episode is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future.

Support Greater Than Code

01:49 - Jesse’s Superpower: Empathy by Learning to be Empathetic

07:51 - Culture

Reflections:

Jacob: Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block: Community isn’t defined ahead of time. They define themselves.

Rein: The more important aspect of any organization is the structure of the relationships between the people in that organization, including and especially, power relationships.

Jesse: Personally taking effort in taking effort in finding third-party resources and sharing them with others.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Jesse James.

Sponsored By:

• PagerDuty: This episode is brought to you by PagerDuty. In an always-on world, teams trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers every time. With PagerDuty, teams spend less time reacting to incidents and more time building for the future.

Support Greater Than Code

00:43 - Jacob’s Superpower: Being Obsessive Re: Specificity; Allergic to Ambiguity on Teams

02:09 - Talking About Neurodiversity in Workspaces

13:49 - Driving Desire to Learn About Things

22:04 - Automating Boring Work

34:41 - “Floober Feature”

36:07 - Passing On Strategies and Data Organization

CodeStream

47:37 - Storycrafting and Succession Planning

Reflections:

Jessica: Consult a human when you don’t know, but often from the context of what directory you’re in and what branch you’re on the computer CAN figure it out.

Chanté: Sociotechnical systems and thinking about personal automation.

Jacob: What can I do to better organize to be a positive legacy?

Arty: What are the ingredients to light your spark and your fire about software?

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Support Greater Than Code

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

Communicating Change and Values

Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer

Jennifer’s Podcast: Storytime with Managers

25:24 - Deleting Old Code; Being Emotional Over Code

30:34 - Avoiding Non-Consensual Teaching and Assumptions

40:50 - Learning Sucks

Fixed Vs Growth Mindset

Reflections:

John: Questions and what they reveal about the question-asker.

Jacob: Hiring for a growth mindset could be difficult.

Jamey: The people who have the most control over the situation are also the people who are going to have the least anxiety.

Jennifer: Learning to ask better questions isn’t something that you can do easily in a vacuum.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Jennifer Tu.

Support Greater Than Code

00:50 - Amber’s Superpower: Adaptability

01:48 - Self.conference -- Coming again next year in early June!

10:29 - The Detroit Tech Community

12:50 - The Future of Self.

14:35 - title of conf - An Upcoming Musical Conference!

15:48 - Navigating the Conference Organization World

19:41 - Attending the Conference

23:13 - Human Potential + Emerging Technology + The Future of Work + Radical Inclusion

26:56 - Conference Highlights

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Amber Conville.

Support Greater Than Code

01:17 - Brandy’s Superpower: Adaptability

02:22 - Codes of Ethics

11:09 - The Role of Diversity and Inclusion in Solving These Problems

24:18 - Balancing Hierarchies and Equity in Organizations

50:27 - Racism and Unlearning

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Reflections:

Jamey: If you know there’s spots on your team with missing demographics, seek out those people.

John: The culture of a company comes from the top.

Rein: Helping teams work better together.

Brandy: Improving manager boards to ensure that there is accountability when moving people up in hierarchical organizations.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Brandy Foster.

Sponsored By:

• CodeNewbie: The CodeNewbie Podcast is all about stories from folks on their coding journey. They talk to new developers, experienced developers and everyone in between about how they got started learning to code, how they navigate their technical careers, and they also do deep dives into technical topics in a newbie-friendly way. Check out their podcast at www.codenewbie.org/podcast.

Support Greater Than Code

01:53 - Jamison’s Superpower: Moving swiftly between layers.

03:59 - Being An Engineering Manager

23:44 - Starting the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast

My Brother, My Brother and Me Podcast

35:42 - The Evolution of Tech Culture and Bootcamp Practices

39:54 - Conference Organization

Reflections:

Jamison: Zone of Proximal Development.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guest: Jamison Dance.

Sponsored By:

• Hanselminutes: Hi friends!…that’s what Scott Hanselman says whenever he starts a talk or a podcast. He’s done over 650 episodes of his Hanselminutes podcast that he calls “Fresh Air for Developers.” It’s a tight 30 min technology chat show that shares the same values that we do here at Greater than Code. There’s a HUGE library of guests for you to catch up on and a new high quality show every Thursday afternoon with a fresh face you may not have seen on other shows!

Support Greater Than Code

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

Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an agenda (Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR)) (Volume 38)

31:16 - History: The U.S. Occupation of The Kingdom of Hawaii

36:58 - Creating a License to Protect Data Sovereignty

41:45 - Sharing Data Responsibly

47:37 - Building and Having A Sense of Community

54:38 - Mauna Kea Protests; Cultural Fit

Reflections:

Rein: If we want to organize successfully in our communities, shared culture and deep connection of people enables solidarity.

Amy: Look back through history for examples of groups of people sharing skills and industry knowledge.

Keoni: Go to and experience Mauna Kea if you have the chance. Also, connecting to community. What enables to do the right thing? What is the right thing? Do the right thing.

This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit 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. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.

Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!

Special Guests: Amy Newell and Keoni Mahelona.

Support Greater Than Code