Hobby Horse

Marcin Wichary (MAR-cheen ve-HAR-ay) is a brilliant writer, coder, and speaker famous for going deep on everything he does. We discuss his entire history from college through joining Google, to creating the famous playable Pac-Mac google doodle, to joining Medium, and ultimately becoming so obsessed with typewriters and keyboards he took a sabbatical from work to begin writing a book, then he never looked back. The first draft of his book is done and now he's in the editing and publishing phase, hoping to release it next year.

Links:

• Aresluna

Alex Cox is an Apple aficionado, technologist, and staff member of the Cards Against Humanity empire. She's currently working on four different podcasts that cover a wide range of topics but we figured out her recent obsession with smoking/eating weed is something she hadn't talked about before and would make a good subject to chat about for an hour.

Links:

• Alex Cox (@AlexCox) | Twitter

John Roderick is the creator of the band The Long Winters and a prolific podcast host and guest. He grew up in Alaska and sits down to explain every aspect of the state. He is not a man of few words. In our nearly 90 minutes of talking, we cover when to visit, what to do, and where to go, what the culture is like and why it's worth trekking to the most remote places. Don't miss John's tips on how to select and broker a deal with a bush pilot. Also we talk about bears.

Most of the links in this episode are to Google Maps and because Alaska is such a huge, varied place, it makes a lot of sense to click and open them up to know what parts of the region we're talking about at each moment.

Links:

• John Roderick

Erika Hall, the author of the new book Conversational Design, sits down to talk about how she got into doing triathlons and all the work it took to get there.

Links:

• Erika Hall 🌎 (@mulegirl) | Twitter

Jessie and friends bounding as Mouseketeers from The Mickey Mouse Club

Jessie Char is co-founder of the Layers Conference, taking place in San Jose on June 4-6th next month, which brings a bunch of design leaders talking about iOS design during the week of WWDC. Previous she worked on Pacific Helm, an iOS design studio.

Jessie's also way into Disney Parks and is an annual pass holder even though she lives in the Bay Area. She still makes it out to the parks a couple days each month, thanks to short cheap flights and having a cofounder in Long Beach.

During this talk we cover how she fell in love with Disney Parks growing up, how she rediscovered them as an adult, and what she likes to do there on a typical day. We go over our favorite places to eat and share strategies to have a fun time at Disneyland and California Adventure.

Links:

• LAYERS 2018

The four shapes of yo-yos:

A wall rack showing off some of Jeff's 200-300 yo-yos he currently owns:

Jeff Atwood is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites and in 2012 started his company Discourse to build software and services around better forums.

In September of 2017, his son got a yo-yo and Jeff was instantly hooked, playing with yo-yos for the first time since he was a kid in the 1980s, and it quickly became an obsession and a collection with hundreds of yo-yos. Recently he's been sending out gift packs to everyone he knows online and we talk about how he came to yo-yos, what's great about them, and why he's spreading the gospel of yo-yos to anyone who wants to listen and try.

Links:

• Discourse - Civilized Discussion

Erica Baker is a Senior Engineering Manager at Patreon and has spent the last ten plus years tracking down her family tree from every source imaginable, including family, online databases, microfiche, and documents sitting in libraries. Some may look at ancestry and genealogy as a silly hobby, but for Erica, it's about filling out the story not just for her own family but hopefully someday for every other African American family as well.

Links:

• Erica Joy Baker

Cal Henderson is really into shoes, currently owning about 100 different pairs. His criteria is whatever looks cool to him, and he makes a point of wearing all his shoes instead of merely collecting them.

Cal's favorite shoes, special edition of Nike Air Max 97s

Cal's storage solution where he's currently got about 100 pairs of shoes (every cubby is now filled)

Links:

• Cal Henderson on Wikipedia

It was fun to catch up with Jessamyn as we chat about non-librarian or online community things. We went deep into Learned League, the shadowy internet nerd trivia league with what I consider impenetrable rules and traditions.

Links:

• The online home of Jessamyn West

I play Alto's Odyssey and love it, but Jason Kottke really loves the game, so much so he's got one of the highest scores in the world. We go deep on the game for 45 minutes, talking about he got into it, what sets his playing apart, and what role games play in our lives.

Links:

• Alto's Odyssey homepage