Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 154. My name is Shawn Tiber. I'm a coder who teaches, and my Kelly Schuster-Paredes: name's Kelly Schuster Paredes, and I'm a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: And this week we're talking about what it means to be techie. We're joined by Amelia Hugh Ross, who's a good friend of mine already after just meeting her in December at Amazon's Re Invent conference. I introduced Kelly and Amelia, and I understand they hit it off famously too. So I'm really excited for the conversation and want to say welcome, Amelia. Amelia Hough-Ross: Thank you so much, Sean. And thank you so much, Kelly. I know I've been really looking forward to hanging out with both of you, so. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So, yeah, we'll just have to tag Chris Williams and see what he missed out on. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yes, we need to do that for sure. Sean Tibor: He's like Beetlejuice. If you say Chris Williams three times, he'll show up on the show. I know. Amelia Hough-Ross: And I was actually just preparing for his virtual brown bag. So that is in my future in March. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So very nice, fun show. Sean Tibor: I think he's got me on the schedule for sometime later this year. It's a great show and I really like what he's doing there for IT professionals and techie and I guess, non techie people, depending on how this conversation goes. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yes. Sean Tibor: Excellent. Well, before we get in, why don't we start with the wins of the week? So, Amelia, we're going to have you go first as our guest and share something good that's happened inside or outside of the classroom this week. Amelia Hough-Ross: Thank you so very much. So my win for the week is actually making sure that my kids made it to all of their activities this week. So I have two boys and one does a lot of type taekwondo, and the other one is studying Chinese at night. So they made it to all of those activities. Plus, my oldest also competed in a piano competition yesterday and did very well. So I am excited that they have done as well as they have. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Nice. Sean and I are not. I was gonna say, not new to that situation either. We both have two kids and we schlep them around everywhere, so it's always a good thing when you don't miss something. Sean Tibor: I was only late, like four times this week with dropping, getting the kids somewhere, so should be fine since that Kelly Schuster-Paredes: wasn't your wind of the week. Sean Tibor: No, that will not be my win. Kelly, why don't you go next? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Sure. So this is quarter three for us at school, and in my new role, I'VE been doing a lot of trainings and this quarter has been insane. We bumped up the trainings and last week I did a Canva AI training, which I wasn't really excited about because I was like, everyone knows how to use canva. But I picked all the stuff that was like abstracted away and it turned out to be a really fun training. And it was quite interesting because I had a lot of kinder and first grade teachers who had never gone to any of my trainings and they came and they were telling everyone. So it's always fun when I get more new people, I think. Last week I had 60 people in my trainings over the two campuses. So that was really good. And then tomorrow I do another training of teaching in the world of AI and becoming like, what does it mean to make AI assessments? Because everyone says, don't make AI assess or don't make assignments that AI can do. But I'm switching it and saying, well, let's see, let's push that boundaries and see how we can still do that productive struggle that we always have with computer science or math and those aha moments while using AI. And that's like the real hard thing is making sure that the kids are always still learning while using AI. And so it will be a hit or miss tomorrow. I'll share it on our next episode. Sean Tibor: Maybe I love those too, because sometimes when the lesson doesn't go well or the training session doesn't go well, you as a teacher learn more from that than when it goes perfect. Because sometimes it's easier to find what went wrong than it is to diagnose and pull apart what went right. So I'm curious to see how it goes tomorrow. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Hopefully good, but hopefully good. Hopefully good. We'll see how that goes. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah, I'm sending positive vibes your way. I think it's going to be great. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Good, because I just did the presentation Sean Tibor: tonight just in time. Development. It's totally fine. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's a techie skill, by the way. Sean Tibor: Yep. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So go ahead. What are we going to do today? We're going to talk about what does techie really mean? Sean Tibor: Well, hold on. I got. Oh, wait, Sean, I got one. Oh, wait, wait, Sean, I have. I. I have big news for techie people. Big, huge. Been waiting for this for over a decade. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, my gosh. Wow. Sean Tibor: I have fiber Internet at my house finally. Amelia Hough-Ross: Oh, congratulations. Sean Tibor: It is something like I have been, I wouldn't say obsessed over, but probably everyone else in my family would say I'm obsessed over it. I've Been looking forward to this for a long time because I run a lot of Home lab Docker apps out of my house. And having good quality high speed fiber is something I've been looking forward to a long time. And they've been putting it in all over my town, except for in my neighborhood. And they do it neighborhood by neighborhood. About three months ago, I saw little survey flags go up for all of the underground utilities and everything. I started to get excited and then people started digging holes. I got more excited and then the trucks showed up. I got it installed last week. It is magnificent. And I couldn't be happier. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Is it a game changer because they. Yeah, yeah. Because I don't have that. I still have this horrible cable when every time they cut down the palm trees it gets knocked off. Sean Tibor: Well, I spend a lot of time thinking about these things now because one of the parts of my new job is running all the networks for a very large company. And so had to do a crash course in how networks actually work and what's important. One of the things that people don't always think about because they don't market it this way, but the marketing is always gigabit and it's all about how much data you can push through the pipe. But one of the other metrics that's really important is the latency. So how quickly that data can get to the next hop. And with the cable Internet, that was somewhere around 20 or 30 milliseconds to get to the next hop. So 21,000ths of a second. With fiber it's 3. So it's still fractions of a second. But all of that adds up because every packet of data you send gets there five times faster than it did before. And over the course of a lot of web requests or downloading things, that adds up. And it feels a lot snappier than it used to be. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I bet the kids really love their robots games. Sean Tibor: I'm sure. I'm sure they do. You still have to worry about who's on the other end of the pipe. But dad is totally geeked out about this and I'm happy about it. It was half the cost of the cable service in the neighborhood. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You're selling it. I'm going to have to get on it. Sean Tibor: Yep. Amelia Hough-Ross: No, it is really good. I. I think it's really ironic that in my neighborhood, when they put it in, the biggest complaints from everybody were that they'd ripped up their yards. Sean Tibor: Yep. Amelia Hough-Ross: They didn't. They weren't excited about it. They were just upset that the yards had been ripped up. And I was like, I think you guys are missing the really good outcome here that you have. Sean Tibor: I mean digging holes is one thing. When they were putting in my mother in law's neighborhood, they went through her sewer line from her house. So she didn't have toilets for three days until that could get repaired. So I think that's legitimate complaint, you know. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah, yeah. Sean Tibor: Yep. Amelia Hough-Ross: That's fun. Sean Tibor: Well, I've been looking forward to it a very long time. It's now here. It's amazing. Highly recommend. If anybody wants to send in listener comments and gush over fiber, I would be happy to respond and engage. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Always, always learning new things from you. I'll have to, I'll have to pick your brain on that some more then. Yeah, well, maybe when I get my at home job like the two of you. Sean Tibor: There you go. There you go. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yes. Sean Tibor: Well, cool. So let's get into it first. Let's start Emelia with a proper introduction. Let's get a bit of background about you before we get into our topic. You and I met at Re Invent and you are the data dancer, which I think I have the stickers. I love the stickers. I owe Kelly one of them at but introduce our listeners to who you are and what you're working on and what role you play in the tech community. Amelia Hough-Ross: Absolutely. Thank you so very much. Yeah. So I am a trained computer scientist focused on a master's in business and have been doing technical, product and project management for a very long time. Most recently, I'm now working for a nonprofit as a version of their chief data officer. So I'm, I'm learning a lot about the difference between true large scale technology companies and nonprofits. And it's been a lot of fun of late. I've only been doing this latest role for about six months, but it's been a great opportunity to learn and a great opportunity to mentor a lot of these folks who are really at a turning point for the organization to really step into a lot of current modern technology. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: When we were meeting on Wednesday, I was really interested in the fact that you've done a lot of neat things along the way. And you started off as wanting to be a techie animatronics person, Is that right? Amelia Hough-Ross: Yes, yes. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And then you got into data and cloud, which I thought was really interesting. It was something that like triggered the fact that you were just constantly learning throughout your life. How has that really helped you with this new role? Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah, so I love that is true and I love Working with teachers. And I love working in educational settings. And it's very funny because I'm married to a professor, so he does curriculum and instruction. And we've had many interesting conversations around how people learn and how people learn math and how they handle STEM fields. Well, I grew up with an arts background, was very interested in dance, got really interested in animatronics and special effects for film. We had a really good family friend who was in the business in Hollywood. And, like, one of my goals was to meet him and. And, you know, I'd never met him in person. And I just reached out to him my senior year of high school when I was doing this independent study all about robotics, animatronics. And I said, hey, are you doing anything this year that would be interesting? And he was like, yeah, I'm going to be in Denmark filming an opportunity with Lars von Trier and Bjork and Catherine Deneuve. And I was like, can I meet you there? And he was like, I've never met you. You're 18. I mean, sure, I guess so. So at 18, I flew internationally to Denmark, my first time doing that alone, and hung out in Copenhagen on the Zentropa production studios for about two weeks and watched them prepare their dancers and learn about their technology that they were using to film this. It was the first time that they were filming with 100 different cameras. So there was a lot of focus on how that was going to work, how they were going to set the scenes, how the dancers were going to look. And so it was. It was fascinating. So, yeah, I wanted to do that and pursued sort of mechanical engineering slash computer science in college and just got really burnt out on the math, physics, signals and systems and was like, I don't know if true mechanical engineering is going to work out for me, but I took a computer programming class, aced it, loved it, and said, all right, this is my major, this is what I'm going to do. I had no idea at the time what, what that would mean for me other than I really went to college to learn a skill. I got the computer science skill. And it's been life changing, really, because it's helped me with everything that I've done. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It was interesting because when we were talking, I was like, oh, well, you Code Python. You're like, a little enough. But it seemed like everything, everything you do stemmed from this whole curiosity of if I could kind of thing. Amelia Hough-Ross: Absolutely. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I think that's one of those skills that you're supposed to be able to teach. Creativity and critical Thinking, but to instill curiosity in someone is something that I think we struggle with as teachers of getting them to think about why this happens or what can I do to embrace that. I would say the same thing though, with your, with maybe your interns, Sean, trying to get them to ask why something happens. Sean Tibor: Yeah, that's one of the biggest things that I see, and this is where we have to change in education, is that so much of education is designed around checking a box. I've completed the assignment, I've solved the problem, I got it correct. And it turns into this very linear sort of way of thinking where it's like, okay, I've finished everything that I needed to finish, especially I think in STEM fields. But if you look at the humanities, the humanities are very much about grading by a rubric. And what's the quality of what you've written, how is it supported, how is it assembled? The craftsmanship of the work product fits nicely with STEM fields of study as well. But getting people to get out of that checking the box mentality and saying, I finished the assignment and turn it into what's the value of the learning? What's the actual thing that I learned and took away from this and the insight that I gathered from it? When you see people make that leap and they realize that's the true value of why they're learning something, suddenly they seem to be unleashed and they become that self starter as a learner because they become curious, to use your word, they become curious about what's next and what more can I learn and why does this happen when it's structured that way rather than that linear, checking the box sort of completionist mentality. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I've been in this tech world for what now? What is it, eight years? Sean Tibor: Eight years? Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Eight years. Don't you feel that the people that are always techie are the ones that are curious, they're the ones that are breaking things. I was listening and I forget where I was. We were talking about something. I was with a whole bunch of tech people and they're like, oh, I remember my first time, I was breaking apart my radio and I was, oh, yeah, I was at the, at the Innovation convention in Tampa and all these techie people, you would have loved this. We met at Disney. Person who did the head in the box, he was really cool. But they are all, every single one of these techie people who are not coders started off because they wanted to know how hardware worked or how circuits worked or why some stuff broke. And I think that you can tell a person that's going to be capable of coding or a person that's going to be capable to do what you and Sean do because of that curiosity factor. Amelia Hough-Ross: I don't know. Yeah, I love so much that you're bringing that up. I didn't really consider myself a curious person, but looking back there, there are so many examples now that kind of highlight it. But it wasn't until like my 30s that I met someone who said, you are so curious. I'd never had anybody say that to me as a young person. But based on your story just now, Kelly, I remember, like fourth grade and my school had bought three different LEGO Mindstorm kits. And. And they were like, up, hidden away and nobody was using them. And I remember going to my teacher and saying, I love Legos. Can I. Can I check that out? What is that? It was the programmable brick. And I built a vending machine because I thought it looked great. And then it was all about learning how to program it so that it would do a routine and like spit out LEGO bricks as if it were a real vending machine. I would stay after school. I was all alone. My teachers were like, we don't know what this is. We can't really help you, but good luck. I've played around with that thing and messed around with it as much as I could. I was definitely afraid of, like actually breaking things, though. So I always love talking to people who are all about breaking things because it was just resources were really tight for. For me at that time. So to break something and then to not be able to fix it had pretty significant ramifications. And so I was like, I'm gonna play with this until I don't break it, but maybe can't go on any further. I always forget about that story and then kind of remember it at very important times when I'm talking to people and I'm like, oh, yeah, this was the path that I was probably meant to go on. It just wasn't self evident for a while. Sean Tibor: Well, and think about how different your life would have been if they said no. Right? Amelia Hough-Ross: Exactly. No, no, you can't play with those. Sean Tibor: Right? Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah, totally. Yeah, exactly. It would have been totally different. Sean Tibor: The other thing that I really like about that story too is that it's the curiosity paired with persistence as well. That willingness to keep going and keep trying. Things like curiosity is sometimes wasted when you give up too easily or you say, oh, I've had enough of this. I have to go do something else, or I don't have enough time to focus on it. So it's also one of the challenges, especially for adolescents now, where everything is so programmed and there's so much content in their day and there's so much stimulation all the time. To have time where they can just focus on one thing and do just that is really important. But it's hard to find these days, for sure. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yes. Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: When I texted Sean and I was like, oh, I want to have this conversation about what is techie enough? Sean, you said, oh, this is great, because this is something that comes up all the time. And I started thinking about this on a realm of imposter syndrome and techie. I'm now in the role of AI because I know Python and I ask questions and I read a lot. I don't know if I'm very organized, but I do document a lot of things everywhere, especially on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn is crazy because that's like my documentation. But I was having this conversation with somebody at my work and I was like, I don't know how to do things a lot of the times, but I know a lot about them. To be able to tell somebody how to do it and that I felt that was something that kind of fit into your role that you were explaining to me about. What was it you asked? Oh, for cleaning the data. Yeah, Talk about a little bit about that, because I thought that was interesting. Amelia Hough-Ross: Oh, sure. Yeah. I had this fantastic opportunity to work at a national lab and they had a bunch of. Of tickets that came in from help desk tickets. Basically, this was two years ago, and large language models had kind of just started to really come into the mainstream. People were actively using them and claiming that they were doing great. It was like Claude 2.0. So that was the one that I started playing with. I was like, okay, well, I'm working for someone who's new to my team and they were trying to identify what our customers wanted. I said, we have all of these customer requests that came in through these JIRA tickets. It would be amazing if I could just mine that data for information. I could find out what is the most popular question that people are asking. I could find out how many people are asking it. This is exactly what a large language model should let me be able to do. So I said, well, I'm going to figure out how to communicate with the ticketing system and use an API to talk to it and pull all the data out and I'm going to look at the data and I'm hopefully not going to look at it. For very long because I want to just feed it to this large language model. I remember saying, I don't want to really know anything about the data. I just want the large language model to do all this work for me. And little did I know that I was actually going to scour all these 4000 Jira tickets and find very interesting use cases in order to then use prompt engineering for the large language model. Because I didn't like the results that I was getting when I was trying to query the data. And the reason I didn't like those results is because the data was a mess. It had, in addition to just regular English language, it had gone through an email system. So there were all of these tags, mime types and style sheets and all of this stuff that had come through with the regular text. I said, gosh, you know, I really need to dust off all my regex. It had been a long time. And I said, well, maybe I don't have to do this. I've got some amazing people at this national lab who are data scientists. I was like, could you help me? This is exactly what I want to do. I know I need regular expressions to do this. It's going to take me a while to code it up. Is this something you could do in like five minutes? And they're like, oh, yeah, totally. So an hour later, through a little bit of collaboration, this person was like, yeah, here's the script. You can modify it, but it's pretty much going to do what you need. And I ran all my data through that script and it was great. And I was able to continue on with my, my use case and troubleshooting it by asking that question, by working with somebody. I learned a lot to understand how this is being done today With Pandas and different libraries and Python and all these different data frames. It was just one more thing to kind of put in my toolbox. Cause also through that process, I understood the complexity and how long it should take to, to do this. I found that that's really helpful now as I'm advancing in my career, I've got a lot of people who are like, I don't know what I'm doing or I don't know how long this is supposed to take. I can engage with them in those conversations and say, well, based on my experience, it might take this long. This is the type of complexity you're going to run into. So maybe it's not as easy as you think it is. So yeah, I just really appreciated that experience. You can also today probably figure it out using Copilot or some Claude Model or ChatGPT. Yeah. At the time those things were not as robust as they are now. Sean Tibor: So I guess there's also the ability to say, what's the most efficient way to do this? Right. Invoking a large language model to strip out repetitive text is probably not the most efficient way to do that. Like a regex is much, much faster and doesn't require tokens. Right, Exactly. Knowing what to use and where is also interesting. What I'm realizing more and more is I'm using the large language model to generate the efficient code that I'm going to use over and over and over again. So my hot loop is the code, but I'm using the large language model to generate that and make it more efficient. Amelia Hough-Ross: Right, Yep. Sean Tibor: So I guess my question is, do you consider yourself to be a techie person, a techie professional? Amelia Hough-Ross: I used to and I definitely do now. I had this interesting experience in my career at the national labs where people were. They kind of had these characteristics of people then. You either fit the characteristic or you didn't. A techie person was someone who didn't want to talk a lot, didn't want to advance their career, wanted to just sit in code and was deemed, I don't know, special or technical enough. That's what a lot of the feedback was. And it was like, well, you're not technical enough. I sort of let that slide for a while because I was like, well, they just don't know me. They're not, they must not know my background. And it's been very interesting having worked on both the east coast and the west coast, because one of the things that I've noticed is that when you're on the west coast, you, you have all of those tech companies that are very well known. And on the east coast and the Midwest. I worked for Progressive Insurance, which was touted as a hardcore technology company, but nobody on the west coast knows that. So when I show up on the west coast after working for this insurance company, people were like, what, what you. Who did you work for? Well, that's not a cool place. Like, you must not know all the cool stuff we're doing. And I said, talk to me about your A B testing and what you're doing. They were like, oh, well, we just started that. And I was like, well, I've been doing that for three years. Right, well, so I guess I'm not completely useless here as a technologist. It was just kind of eye opening to. Just to start dealing with that again, and to have the assumption that if you can speak well, if you present well, that you're not technical. So that's been something that I had to face in my career, and it took me too long. I guess. If people are listening, I would say it's really important to start asking people those important questions of, well, what do you mean by technical? I should have asked that question like a year earlier than I did, because when I started asking that question, it really floored those people who kind of had these stereotypes of who you were, what you would do. They started to say, oh, well, I guess I don't know. I said, look, I may not be somebody that programs all day, every day. I said, but I can read code, I can write code. I may not be as quick as some other people, but I can also talk to people and help them do code reviews and other things. I think that means I'm pretty technical. So it took a while, though, to have that conversation because I didn't really understand how it was being used as a way to not engage with me around technical discussions. It was a great opportunity for me to take a pause, stop and talk to people and say, well, what do you really mean by that? Because it's no longer fitting how I would view someone as technical. I said, technology is also changing now so quickly that I would almost argue that nobody is technical enough at this point. I think everybody's technical. Everybody is very capable of technical understanding. It's going to take, like you said earlier, continuous education and learning at this point, especially in the IT field, to figure out what the future of this new world is going to be, especially with generative artificial intelligence and sort of what the new jobs of the future are going to be. Sean Tibor: So, Callie, I have the same question for you, because I'm curious now, having known you over the last eight years, do you consider yourself to be a techie person or a technical person? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I think I am very technical, but I like to say that I'm more of like a project manager techie person. I code a lot less now, but figuring stuff out with AI or even with the robots, I have just that reachy mini, darn Richie mini that won't work at school. But I'm constantly trying to do technical things. Sean Tibor: Things. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And the amount of knowledge I have about cybersecurity, which amazes me just because of all the talks I've had with privacy and cybersecurity, has made me more technical. But if somebody said, hey, can you be an IT director? I would still have that Imposter syndrome. Even though I totally could do it, I would probably still say, oh, I'm not really sure I can be a tech director because I'm not a techie person. So it's a double edged sword where I feel I know a lot, but it's the fact of. I think it's the cold calling on the technical concepts. For example, if someone says and quizzes me on an interview and I have to go through and answer tech questions without a conversation, I would probably fail. But if I was in the midst of a conversation, you know how I get when someone's talking all of a sudden, oh, Kelly just thought of something crazy. But that's what happens when I'm talking to tech people and I've solved a couple of problems around and people were quite surprised that I came up with the idea. And even this tech person from a company that we had a meeting with looked at me when I said a solution. She's like, that's a brilliant idea. See, I can be a project manager, I can work in the tech field. My boss was just grinning because she was shocked that I had solved the problem for the person that was supposed to be solving the problem for us. Yeah. In that sense, long winded. Yes, Technical. I'm techie enough. Yeah, I know you are. Sean Tibor: Well. But is techie a relative label? Techie relative to what? You have to establish a ground truth for the area that you're in as well. Amelia, to your point. Yeah. You're not as techie at people at the national labs. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah, right. No, I did not get a PhD in molecular biology. I'm not studying the paths that fires take in order to identify when critical infrastructure is going to be impacted. So, yes, this opportunity in my career really taught me was also just everybody is technical just in their own way. So it is really relative to. I mean, I have a very old 2003 Volkswagen Jetta and I took the dash apart and couldn't take the steering wheel apart because that would mess with the airbag. So that freaked me out. But I took it apart and was able to put it back together. I think about, you know, I'm not necessarily as technical as the person who works with cars all day every day. But there are levels of technical. And so I try to be very much aware when people and even in my current company are like, well, so and so is not as technical. I always now have this knee jerk reaction of like, wait, let's ground ourselves in what that means. Sean Tibor: The other thing that has been interesting for me Especially as I'm going through a lot of the career progression and transformation lately is there's also a distinction between being technical and being effective. There are people that I've met along the way that are highly technical but aren't very effective. They may be pursuing the wrong goals or they may not be able to have the practicality needed to be able to truly solve a problem because maybe they haven't defined it well. Kelly, to your point, one of the reasons they were surprised was that they didn't expect to get such an effective solution out of you that you could do something that was going to truly solve the problem. Maybe that was the surprising part for them was it was an effective solution and it was also technical at the same time. Here's something that happens for people when they see that or when they experience that resets their expectations. They expected something from you and you blew them away and suddenly they've had to reform and reevaluate their assessment of you. Those moments are really important for ourselves as well. To have that moment of satisfaction. Yeah, I did something that people didn't expect from me. It's that opportunity where you get in that moment to redefine yourself in someone else's eyes. The way that you handle that moment and the way you do it is tremendously effective at shaping your future relationship with them for sure. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And maybe this is a question I have, but having this generalist kind of focus, or lack of focus I should say, is a skill in itself. For example, I feel like the people who are very techy, who are very good at that one thing, tend to have that blind spot on where they can't see the big ideas or the big picture or the systems that work around it. Maybe that's what we're coming to now in this mutation of a world we're going in with AI and being able to be information at our fingertips, but asking the right questions with that information or being able to apply it in a generalist kind of view so that you can actually connect everything that's wrong might be the skill that most of our students are actually going to need more of. That generalist feel of not an expert in one thing, but worldly enough in a lot of things Sean Tibor: like the world. The term well rounded comes to mind. The importance of being well rounded. I remember when I was in university like the first two years or all of those Gen ed classes that you need to take to round out or to be a well rounded student and being at a very technical university, the number of people that Complain about why do I have to take an English class? Why do I have to take a history class? Why do I have to take fine arts or science or whatever? I'm here to write code and kick ass, and I don't want to waste time on any of these things. And then you start to realize that the completeness of a person is what really helps them have the potential for not just a good career, but a good life, for sure. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Didn't they make doctors start taking classes like that? So humanities classes, because the doctors were so techie in their doctor world that they weren't very personable. Sean Tibor: That's that sign that I sent you from the University of Utah. The humanities department was, science can teach you how to clone a dinosaur. The humanities can teach you why that may not be a good idea. Amelia Hough-Ross: Oh, I love that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Amelia Hough-Ross: What is it that Jeff Goldblum, when he was playing that character from Jurassic park, like, you didn't stop to think if you should. Sean Tibor: I think about that quote way more than it probably deserves. Amelia Hough-Ross: I know. Think about it a lot. It is also one of those things where because I have such a varied background, I'll talk to certain people and they'll see it as a negative and I'll talk to other people and they'll be super excited about it and they'll have all kinds of ideas. And I find myself at work right now where I'm actually starting up sort of a monthly innovation conversation because we have so many people used to doing things a certain way. And I was like, well, let's just talk about how to do it completely differently and do a lot of what if scenarios. What if you were to do this and what if you were looking at your research this way and what if it's just not anything that anyone has been there to do for them? Because so much has been tactically focused and they've only had certain technologies to be able to help support them. So they haven't even had the opportunity to think outside the box or think about a completely different way of doing things. So it's really interesting when you're in a company where that is the norm to then go to a company where that is a completely brand new concept and trying to figure out how to help people with that mindset shift. It's a great, great opportunity and great problem to solve. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: So I had quote from this conference in Tampa and they said it's hard to think outside of the box when you don't know what's inside of the box. That is the technical for Me, that is a very good definition of what it is to be technical. So you don't necessarily have to be fixing everything in that box, but you know what's inside so you're able to think outside of that box. That's going to be key. Those people who are curious and know enough about what's inside of the box and are able to communicate and are able to adapt are the people that are going to be the best techies going forward. Sean Tibor: Would you rather be the most technical person in your organization or the least technical person? Amelia Hough-Ross: Well, that's a hard one. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I feel like you don't have a lot of worries when you're the least technical. Just push a button. Sean Tibor: Trying to keep up is a real fear. When you feel like everyone is way more technical than you are and you have to try to keep up with that. But that's hard. I've been there. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I would actually have a life. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah, there's no good answer to that question. Because if you're the most technical person, you're always having to also learn all of that new stuff just at a different rate and pace than the person who's the least technical. But if you're the least technical, then just to your point there, Sean, a decision to choose to keep up versus the decision to just sit there and hang out. Which sometimes the people that hang out also have really interesting perspectives. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: They do. I've just read. It's funny because Sean will get a kick out of this. I just read two fiction books, which is abnormal for me. And I did that over the month of January, between January and February and the whole time after when I finished, I was like, oh my gosh. It just wasted. And I said this to an English teacher. I just wasted a week of my life. She says, why? I go, because I got nothing out of it. I got nothing that's going to be useful in my job. About. About this sci fi. It was like a. Not a sci fi romance or something. And they were laughing at me, but it's about the language. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try to find something. Try to find something that is connected. And the amount of people that were happy that I read a fiction book because every single book I have in here is some techie book or self help techie book as well. What do I have right here? Architects of Intelligence. Like really that? Yeah, it's one of those books where you can only read like two pages at a time because it's very boring. Sean Tibor: But it's information we use is Dense, Kelly. It's very dense. Amelia Hough-Ross: Okay. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I don't want to say it's bad. I like it. I'm just saying, yes, it is very dense. It is a lot to process at night, but it's good because it's in little stories. So you get to read all these little stories and it's perfect. But having read those fiction books, I felt that I'm going to be behind. That's what it is when you're a techie person. If I am not reading these books or I'm not picking up something at night that is going to aid in my knowledge for my role, then I'm missing out. I'm going to be in trouble. So I guess that is the benefit of not trying to be too techie. That goes into your imposter syndrome kind of thing. Sean Tibor: The other thing that I've encountered recently, too, is people who are almost proud not to be techie. They've labeled themselves in a way, limited themselves. They've said, oh, I'm not very technical. We work in it. I'm assuming you have some sort of technical skills. Maybe some of them are not as current as they used to be, but they're still there. A lot of the concepts are there. But I'm curious about why people downplay their technical skills when they don't have to, what that does for them. Because I feel like that's a. It is a limiter. Right? It almost is a way for them to say, maybe playing into their own imposter syndrome. I'm not very technical. I can't. Amelia Hough-Ross: You. Sean Tibor: I'll have to rely on other people to figure this out for me. But yet those are the same people who are trying to make decisions about AI and cloud and technology. And so it's a weird sort of balancing act that I don't understand and I'm trying to grasp is what does it mean to be not technical, but making technical decisions or decisions that affect the technical direction that we're going to take? Not sure how to influence that or change that or even if I can or should. But I find that to be an interesting thing that's happening now more and more. Kelly, you and I saw this all the time when we were teaching. So many teachers were like, I'm not technical. Oh, I can't figure this out and I can't do these things. Well, you've got a smart board in your classroom, you're doing assignments online, you're doing all these things that need to be done, and you're somehow navigating that and figuring it out. So it's not that you're not technical. It's just maybe you're, like, feeling a little bit of invulnerability or inferiority because the world is changing so fast, and I don't know how. How to help those people necessarily. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's like that. Go ahead, Amelia. Amelia Hough-Ross: Oh, well, I was just gonna say what you brought up for me was this experience that my husband has had because he taught high school math, and he is now a college professor and teaches teachers how to teach math. And whenever he met people and he said, oh, I'm a math teacher, depending on the person, they would say, well, I hated math. And for him, as a math teacher, it was just somewhat jarring. But also, like, I just told you that I'm a math teacher, and you told me you hate that subject. So how do we move forward in the conversation? I wonder if it's come down to, like, historically, you were viewed as either one type of person or another type of person. I've started reading this book called how to Winter, which is fascinating because it's looking at how people view the seasons and. And how people hate winter and what it was like for this woman to actually live in the northernmost point in Norway for the winter and how those people are incredibly happy, sort of how they approach winter. It would be really interesting if we had a society that approached maybe technology or mathematics not as a deficit focus, but as a. As a. Like, this is something that excites us, and we want to be better at it. So it's just where I'm at in the. At the moment with this book and with thinking about those things of how people want to have a deficit discourse of something that they're not good at. And it probably also comes into this imposter syndrome of, like, we're not taught to say how proud we are of the things that we do very well. Sean Tibor: Right? Amelia Hough-Ross: Well, there's a lot of that. Sean Tibor: The other thing that brings up for me is math is a very broad subject. There's. As far as a domain of study, there is definitely a lot of math that I didn't like. Like, there were math classes. I was just like, I hate this. I can't figure it out. It doesn't work for me. And then there'd be math classes. I'm like, oh, this is amazing. I'm loving this. Like, I love geometry. Like, I love doing geometric proofs. I loved. And it's been so satisfying whenever I do designs for 3D printing, and it's all geometry. And you're just like using all of those concepts. That old adage of, like, when are we ever going to use this? Now I'm using it like, it's really cool that I get to use this. Stats was the other one that I loved. It's really interesting when people put themselves in that box that they've created for themselves that says, oh, I had some bad experiences with math, so I hate math. Whereas maybe there's some part of math that they would actually really love that they just didn't have the right teacher for, or they didn't have a good way of using that or appreciating it. Technical fields across STEM are probably the same way where if you find something that you really like and you find value in and you get something out of it, it's like, yeah, I really like this. And I can be very technical in this space. But so much of the time they're putting. They're drawing this box around it and saying, I'm not good at technology. I'm going to put myself in that box. And there's nothing that you can do to change that. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This all made me think of productive struggle and not productive struggle. So our kids that hated coding were the kids that would sit there and bang their head on trying to get something to code. And it kept getting. It was. Kept breaking or they kept getting error. I think about that person that wasn't able to see the aha moment or that good, good feeling from seeing a code work. Those are the people that are like, I hate coding or I hate math or because I struggled. I really, really studied a lot and I still failed my test. And I think maybe it goes along with the sort of. That two things. They didn't get the dopamine hit, they got it wrong and they failed. Right. They got that big red X on their paper. So I don't have anything to love for it. And every time I struggle and work hard, I just get a bad grade. And I think that goes along with a lot of the coding thing. I was just talking to this kid, he's a senior now, and he goes, I hate to tell you this, but I really didn't like coding. I was like, that's okay. I really didn't like coding eight years ago. So I get it. But how cool would it be if. And I started talking to him about having a class or doing this and working with AI and all this other things. He's like, oh, you should do that in high school. I would totally take that class. I was like, yeah, just because it wasn't a right or wrong or a work and a not work. It was a more of a theoretical kind of investigation stage that maybe is what keeps people saying that they are techie or not math people or not computer people. The amount of parents I hear, well, I'm not a very computer person or I'm not a math person, so I can't help them. I was like, you'll never help them because those words just came out. So you've already killed their dopamine and already told them that it's a failure that's gonna happen. So I think that's part of the thing of having that. I got this. And you might need a cheerleader. Like Sean was my cheerleader for the first time year or so. You got this. You got this in order to become a techie or a math person. Sean Tibor: That's it. It's a. Yeah. I was gonna say I'm not a golfer. I don't play golf. Not my thing. I took a golf class in college. I have to fill out a couple credits. Be a good thing, maybe that if there's a company golf outing, I can go, and I'm not gonna look totally ridiculous. But think about that first time you teach someone or someone's playing golf. If you give them a bucket of a hundred balls and they swing through all of those, none of them connect. They top every ball. It dribbles off to the side. It goes sideways. Nothing happens. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah. Sean Tibor: They're going to look at that experience and go, this was awful. I hate golf. Golf is terrible. It sucks. But if they get one good drive out of that bucket of balls, if they connect with it once and it just goes soaring off into the distance, and they have that rush of, I did that. And it. It connected for me, they're going to give it more. They're going to come back for a second bucket of balls and a third bucket of balls, and pretty soon they're going to be doing pretty well. The role of teachers in this, of course, is to have someone who's like, don't do that thing that you're doing that's causing you to miss all these. Try this, do this. Guide them through it so they get that connection with the ball and they feel that rush that Kelly was talking about. Sometimes, though, as adults, we lose that because we. We don't even give ourselves 100 tries. We give ourselves two, and we're like, oh, well, I missed on both of them. I'm terrible at golf. I can't do this. It may be the same thing with technology. Well, we're too old to learn this like it's. The world has moved on. I tried opening my email and it didn't go well because I couldn't remember my password. So I'm not technical. I'm going to give up. That's also key here is, like, the difference between viewing yourself as technical and not technical is getting those successes and getting those wins and getting it to connect, even just once, where something really cool happens that you weren't expecting to work, and suddenly it works beyond your expectations. I think that's what leads people on that technical path. And I met a lot of people that they're not educated in computer science. They had a totally different major or no major at all, or they went to a boot camp or whatever. But if they got that moment, that led them down the path of being technical and saying, oh, I can do this, and I am, and it becomes that, like, state of mind more than anything else. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: For sure. Amelia Hough-Ross: Yeah. And that cheerleader comment is so important. And I think that we're not having as many cheerleaders as maybe we used to have. I've definitely noticed that it's much easier to say, you know, about somebody's work, that it's not up to whatever level you would be expecting. But the harder part is figuring out, how do I help them or how do I teach them or how do I support them to get to that next level. That's the harder thing to address. It's easy to be like, oh, that person's just hopeless, and let's move on. But it's much harder to believe that someone has that greatness in them and help them achieve it and help them earn it. Sean Tibor: Because that's the other thing. I was Kelly's cheerleader. I wasn't doing it for her. That wasn't her Sherpa carrying it forward for her. Amelia Hough-Ross: Right, Exactly. Sean Tibor: You also need someone who has the wisdom to understand that the struggle is the critical, critical part of the learning and that you're helping to make the struggle focused and directed, but you're not there to remove the struggle entirely. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Oh, and you just circled my whole presentation back together for tomorrow. It is about the project of struggle Sean Tibor: with AI you gotta go back and refine some slides now. Amelia Hough-Ross: No, it's perfect. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm just gonna push record and let Sean, with his great voice, tell everybody it's about that. Amelia Hough-Ross: That's his trust. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This has been really. Can't even talk. Let's make sure that gets it. This has been really fun. And we're coming to an end. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Amazing how quickly the time flies. Amelia, this has been really wonderful to talk with you, and I've been looking forward to this conversation since Kelly told me about it earlier this weekend. And I was like, this is such a great and timely topic about what it means to be technical, especially as the world is changing around us. So thank you for joining us and sharing your ideas and insights. Amelia Hough-Ross: Absolutely. Thank you both so very much for the opportunity. It's always great to chat with folks and see where we're headed. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I think I'm convincing. Maybe Amelia come into Pycon or no. Amelia Hough-Ross: She's like, yes. Are you? Yes. I'm seriously looking into it. Yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Excellent. It's on for the Ed Summits on Thursday, May 14, so for any of the CS educators, and hopefully we get this episode out early enough for you to submit your proposals. But, yeah, I'm excited. I can't wait. I'm going out to California. My youngest son is flying with me and he's going to go spend the weekend with his aunts. And she's already told him about going to what, Disney World? Disneyland. Sean Tibor: Disneyland, I think. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Right, Disneyland, whatever. Amelia Hough-Ross: Disneyland. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I don't know any of them, so. Disneyland and Dave and Busters. And he's so excited. And he's skipping two days of school. Sean Tibor: What could be better than that? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: My oldest does not get to go because he has to take his CSAP principles. Amelia Hough-Ross: Oh, yeah, yeah. You can't really skip out on that. Unfortunately. No. Sean Tibor: Sadly, I will be helping from afar this year. My wife and I have both been traveling a lot for work lately, and she got that weekend first and has to go travel. So I will be holding down the fort here and helping from afar. Kelly's going to do a beautiful job of running the Education Summit this year, and it's going to be a lot of fun, and I will be sad to miss it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You will be missed. I don't know. Now I have to do all the talking. Sean Tibor: You'll be fine. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'll be fine. I'll be techie enough. Sean Tibor: Kelly, any other announcements this week? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's it. Amelia Hough-Ross: That's it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Just Pycon coming up in May. Sean Tibor: All right, well, then, one last thank you to Amelia and we'll wrap up here. So for teaching. Amelia Hough-Ross: Thank you. Sean Tibor: So for teaching Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This is Sean and this is Kelly signing off. Amelia Hough-Ross: Sam.