Unmotive Show

In season two episode two, we talk with Jake Duckworth in the heart of the Silicon Valley. A pastor from Crossroads Community Church in Palo Alto is a musician and presiding pastor at the church and the technology-based community coworking space that is hosted on church grounds. This episode is about the different ways that the community has grown with it. Jake does talk about Christianity like how he interacts with the people at the coworking space. In addition, we talk about how music is used at Crossroads Community Church.

Ray Stevens III joins us to talk about his music career and many years in the skateboarding industry. Both music and skateboarding are part of modern culture. Ray is a punk-rock musician who has a superbly-refreshing take on music. I don't think I have met someone as easy to get along with as Ray in quite a long time. Perhaps that is why he has so many high-level friends like Steve Cabellero, Tony Alva and Steve Alba who are also skateboarders and musicians. He's played in too many bands to name over the years. His current focus is on the popular bay area band RS2 Solid Sound. Join the party as we talk about beers, skateboarding, friendship, and our all-time heroes.

Many people have avatars or persona's they adopt on different platforms. There are terabytes of content that is made up of media from large organizations, friends to employee's. The trouble with having such a wide array of content is that it may appear there is no connection from one platform to the next. In this episode we will explore the idea of culture and answer the question "how is the internet a representation of our culture and why is it that internet users have been able to make these changes happen?"

Season One was about UX Design, Entrepreneurship and Engineering. We had interviews with people like Chris Marciano, Miguel Coder and Greg Morawietz who are experts in their respective fields of UX Design, programming and security. This season finale episode we answer the question: It has been said that to become an expert at something it can take 10,000 hours of practice. What about when someone seeks to be a good designer and a good programmer, what would make this possible for them?

It is well known that once technical employee's have years of experience in their fields they get promoted to a management position. Some of the skills these new managers need to succeed is the advanced knowledge to oversee an engineering or design department. While other skills that are common to all managers, they may need to work on developing. Arlyne Diamond is a consultant who has helped high level managers and organizations at large increase their management efficiency and operations through a people first approach.

Kash Momodu is a Failure Analysis and Quality Assurance Engineer who worked at FitBit and Square. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from San Francisco State. While the hype is all about Software Engineering and Programming the products we use today would not be possible without a solid Quality Assurance approach. Even the best engineering teams need to have their products tested both before release and after to ensure that there is consistent functioning of all the parts that make up an engineered product.

Ed Ipser is the founder of IpserLab and Coactify. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and has been an an entrepreneur since right out of college. Learning from these founding experiences he has been applying his experience but has also found that building a successful business based on technology often involves elements of market fit that don't solely rely on engineering. He brings up topics revolving around lean startup methodology, Minimum Viable Product, Minimum Lovable Product and design.

In light of Juneteenth we have a special episode with Sani Momoh a social worker in the San Jose Bay Area. We the topic of social injustice with technology as a bridging topic. Not only do we talk about online news media as it relates to social injustice but we include a segment on the micro issues in equality for black people. Sani also answers an interesting question: How would he allocate funds matching the $100,000 million dollar commitment Apple made to the cause to support #blacklivesmatter

Ryan Matthew is a partner and co-founding member of Neuron, a UX Design and strategy consultancy in San Francisco. He has been working remotely for years with Neuron and since operations have moved to fully remote because of the Covid-19 Pandemic he has great insights into the current shelter-in-place order which required many businesses to move employee's to remote work.

UX Designer Andrew Jarecki is a UX designer with over 8 years of experience. Currently, he is a contractor at Visa and we also talk about some career and resume tips to get job seekers going in their search for a UX design position. We skim over some topics in UX design such as design principles and how to apply them. More substantially for todays current events with COVID-19 we conclude with a discussion on remote working during this pandemic.