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Greater Than Code listeners get 30% off for 6 months. Simply mention Greater Than Code when signing up and they'll apply the discount to your account; no credit card required. ARTY: Hi, everyone! This is Episode 204 of Greater Than Code. I am Artemis Star and I'm here with my fabulous cohost, Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to introduce today's guest, Nicole Archambault. She's a Boston-based web developer and education technology entrepreneur. After abandoning a CS major in college, she taught herself to program in 2015 using Treehouse. She still has a long way to go. But most importantly, Nicole made a career changing to an industry that she loves, doing work that she's passionate about, and solving problems that matter. Welcome to our show, Nicole! NICOLE: Thank you so much for having me on. I'm really excited to be here. JACOB: We're going to start with the first question we always ask, which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? NICOLE: I have a couple actually and I think that one is based on the other, that's why I'm thinking of two. One is empathy and the other is community building and I think that they are connected or I know that they are connected because I've really had some great experiences with bringing people together and bringing them together on common terms in a respectful space and that is based on empathy. Taking the time to understand somebody and what their experience is and what they need. So I've been able to create some beautiful spaces for folks, this is what they tell me at least, and I’ve made lots of friends and connections that way. JACOB: So I bet we could dive into that. Where and how do you build communities? Is that as an entrepreneur? NICOLE: It is. [chuckles] I've always kind of been a community builder for the primary reason that I am very different and I'm really leaning into that now. I am on the autism spectrum. I have Asperger's syndrome and a huge part of my experience has been embracing my differences and recognizing that those differences are actually what makes me incredibly powerful. It also is something that has a very strong, attractive point to people who are looking for different spaces, too. I had found for example, that I didn't feel as comfortable just being in some of these tech events, the stuffy happy hours and it just didn't feel very happy. It wasn't joyful. You didn't really get to know people at all. And so, I have always had a penchant for creating my own spaces and I’m not afraid to walk into a room and see nobody there because it doesn't mean necessarily that you're in the wrong room. It means that maybe the other rooms didn't fit. There's probably a gazillion metaphors and analogies you can make here, but the bottom line is that when I see something that I don't like, I devise a plan. I recognize what it is that I want and what's missing and what people want and what's missing. But the most important part is, I've actually been creating them around myself and what I want and then people come to these spaces. They kind of be into, I guess, ask like, “Oh, what's going on over there?” I'll make a ruckus because that's what I do anyway even just by myself and then people be like, “Oh, what's going on over there?” and attract folks. So community building was, like most things that I do, like I was saying, it was never something that I was really greatly intentional about. It's just a part of my natural process in being brave enough to be able to create my own space and curate my own spaces as I see fit and to welcome people, also. It's been told I'm very hospitable. I want to make sure that people feel comfortable and I want to make sure that people feel safe and that there's a culture of trust and trust is very important because if you don't trust people – when I would walk into those rooms and my first thought, the energy of the room wasn't necessarily trust these people, they're healthy and they want to see you do really well, they want to see you succeed. So yeah, bringing all that energy, that positive energy, it's been really integral to be able to do that. I've made some actually really cool spaces. I have one kind of that started as like a social experiment right now and it's pretty amazing. ARTY: I would love to hear about these cool spaces! [laughter] NICOLE: Yeah, absolutely. So this is kind of a funny story and I've been saying that I was kind of going to tell it, whatever. It's a weird COVID era's story. So back when we were put into lockdown, I was kind of a social person before, pre-COVID, but not entirely. It’s just, I would go out and I was used to having options for going out, but for the most part, I would go out by myself. I just people watch, kind of quiet and pensive when I'm out. After we were under lockdown, I really felt immediately like that was going to be an issue. At first, it was like, I think a lot of us were like oh, this being in quarantine and locked down if you're used to working from home, if you're used to being in kind of that type of environment anyway, which I love as well. I love my quiet at home times. So even I fell into the this isn't that bad and after a while, it starts to itch like, you miss people. I recognized that happening for myself, probably around, I want to say April, maybe late April, I kind of feel like it was March, but I think I was still trying to get it off the ground by then. So what I had done is we had Zoom was beginning to pick up like major popularity at that point because we had to use it and so I had kind of thought to myself, what if I just held the Zoom party? I don't want to do a happy hour. I don't like the sound of that. It sounds stuffy. It sounds like what I don't want and funny enough, the first non-happy hour that I had was just this Zoom room. Oh, the first one, I posted the actual link not thinking about Zoom-bombers, I posted it right on Twitter and before I could even get into the room, they had Zoom-bombed it and I was like, “Oh God. Okay. All right, we've got to figure out what we're doing here because I want to do this, but wow.” It turned out, I just had to do some gatekeeping, but the first Zoom party that I had actually was just me for the most part and I think a couple of people had logged on and I had a dance party by myself. I needed to move and have a little bit of enjoyment. So I'm sitting there on camera. A couple of my friends had made me into multiple GIFs because I didn't even realize it was recording. That was the default setting, I guess. I was still pretty new to Zoom and so when I found that the video had actually uploaded, it was like, I looked at myself and I thought she's having fun, like that's fun. So I started just talking about, I'm like, “Here, I had a party the other day. It was just me. I have a good time. This is my energy,” and I tried it again. The next kind of iteration of this whole Zoom party was that I was doing it a few days a week and I’d announce it basically the day of. I'd be like pop-up Zoom party, whatever and I eventually gave it this name, the After Hours Vibe, and I felt even like more ridiculous because I started branding the Zoom call and then I'm making this imagery that became pretty much staple; I just changed the dates on it. So I had this and I'm posting that on Twitter a lot and people are starting to notice and over the weeks, I started to get folks hitting me up on Twitter asking for the link. I would always be like, “DM me” or “Ping me and I will get you the link,” and people would pop in. The first thing that I do when people pop in is just if I've seen them before, “Hi, honey,” like bring people in and I don't see those kinds of spaces. It's very important to me to have a space like that available where it's not like, I don't know, that stuffiness. Over time, this group actually started to grow. It turned into a group of people who came back every week and I was holding them on Saturdays eventually. Once I figured out the idea was sustainable, I just went to Saturdays. So now over time, this has morphed into also a Discord chat because we were talking together and to each other so frequently on Twitter DMs that I decided to create a Discord server and that was just back in, I think, August and I turned it into a community and I was just trying to create a party. Oh, we partied, too, trust me. The partying is not a problem there. There have been many times that we have seen the sunrise, at least on my end being on the East Coast. Oh, Zoom partying, long distance partying, gets really interesting when people are in different time zones, too. I have somebody pop in from Germany and it's morning there. It's just fun seeing where people are, what they're going through and we become like a family. It's so intense at this point that once you see people that often. Then we realized that we wanted to actually talk to each other in between other than just on Saturdays. I love seeing people and they're hilarious like, my sides are splitting constantly over all this. I actually have found a person over time, even that was very interesting to me and we spend a lot of time together and it's just an intense little social situation. I'm really excited to see what it turns into because it is kind of a case study in the age of COVID social life and not just social life, but meaningful, deep relationships between people. On this Discord chat, I even have the channels are funny. There's like 14 of them for people who are just like, “Oh, let's add something for this topic. How about this topic?” We have one for therapy because a whole bunch of us, we're going to therapy and that's not something that you would probably find as a defined area for support and encouragement. It's just a channel as part of the Discord and people have their therapy session and there'll be like, “Oh, we talked about this,” and whatever they want to share about it and then you immediately find we have so much shared trauma. It's ridiculous! But that also means that you can grow together and overcome it together and that type of environment being so encouraging and supportive really is changing lives. That's a huge deal during this time when we need support, we are able to do all of this together. That always sounded so cheesy and cliche to me, like, “Oh, we can do it together.” But in reality, that's a very big deal right now. I don't know what I would do without that support structure and it came from the funniest place, from little social experiment that we don't know, it could be ongoing for a while. We keep talking about after all this stuff, we're going to get like one of those big places down in North Carolina that you stay at a rental house and we're going to party it up for a weekend and some folks have kids, others don’t. We're going to have fun. These are people that are going to be friends for life and that's just one example. I've created communities, I've been doing a freeCodeCamp meetup now for 4 years and I have created other spaces. I'm a Wellesley College graduate so I have my alma mater alum community I kind of dove into, too and was like, “Oh, you guys want a space to talk about workplace related issues?” Again, I don't think people exactly knew how badly they needed it, but it became the second largest Wellesley Facebook group that we had and then it's just a matter of attracting people to you. It's one of my superpowers and you can see in practice, I tell people that story in some form or another, usually not so long form, and they're like, “Wow. Yeah, that's superpower for sure.” Some people just repel others from themselves naturally and no, I want to attract the right people and it turns out I do. JACOB: How do I join? Or are you exclusive? NICOLE: [laughs] No, we are not exclusive at all. You'd be more than welcome to join one this Saturday. My birthday is actually today, so we're going to be probably turning up on Saturday as well and there's just lots of laughs and ridiculousness. I would more than happily share the links with you and anybody else that I met. I invited my hairstylist because she's super sweet and she was like, “That's such a cool idea!” No, it's not exclusive at all. I tell folks if you are respectful of the space and the people in it and you subscribe to love and compassion for people hell yeah, come in there because it's fun. JACOB: I was just thinking about how this is something that if there is a universal feeling related to COVID, it's this. It’s issue of isolation. I'm sure there's people that aren't facing that for whatever reason, but I think it's probably the closest to universal that there is. And I was thinking this is not an easy problem to solve and this isn't just something that someone could just start a Discord server and just hope to scale it and say like, “Well, we can all have friends now.” My guess would be that like you said, you made a community that you would want to be a part of and that authenticity attracted other people. Not everyone could because it sounds like based on how far you're sharing this link, if it didn't attract everyone, you'd have hundreds of thousands of people. NICOLE: Not all of them stay either and people who show up once and then bounce, it is kind of a self-filtering kind of experience. The people who love it stay and they become a part of a bigger thing and an important part. JACOB: People find the community that will fit for them and it sounds like you've done a really good job at finding those people just by being yourself. NICOLE: Yeah. They found me just by being myself and that's definitely a huge point here. I didn't want to be myself for a long time. I mentioned that I am on the spectrum and identity is definitely a huge issue there. Being able to really recognize how difficult it is to make meaningful connections with people unless you lean into being yourself. Because if you don't, it's weird. I mean, they call it masking. I've heard all kinds of terms for things and I became very, very good at it. But it turns out when you're masking hard and just kind of emulating the behaviors of other people and that's a huge part of the autistic experience, too, is really picking up these different masks and these different perspectives and learning to see through it. But it turns out you end up feeling like, I often say, the bed at the party where everybody throws their coats on it. What is underneath all that and being able to remove those layers has been – I wasn't diagnosed until I was 32 years old. 32, you think that you kind of know yourself pretty well in the sense of what you're capable of and what the details are about your life and your existence. But the truth of the matter was, I hadn't even dug into it and that's a common story that I hear from folks who are late diagnosis. I love the word superpower because it is kind of like you're being told that you have superpowers that you might have had an inkling that maybe something was okay, a little bit different. Everything is different in your life, though and you start to get the impression that it's a wrong in some way. And so, now that I'm really starting to embrace those differences, I can be myself and lean into being myself and allow people to come to me and have these things happen organically. When I wasn't recognizing myself and I had no clue who I was because I was existential crisis ville. Someone's like, “Oh, well, plot twist,” and I love analogies and metaphors. I've told folks after a diagnosis, it's like watching a movie and then having this giant plot twist at the end and then you want to go back and go through everything and figure out all the clues that were leading up that you may have missed before because you didn't know what you were looking at exactly. So that whole experience is really an interesting one to folks, too and they seem to be even neurotypical folks, people who aren't on the spectrum, have been really curious about that and it's vulnerable. Vulnerability is huge, too. Being able to be vulnerable and transparent with people is incredibly important to building a healthy community because God knows, we have enough toxic communities in this industry. We really do. Toxic and kind of average and there are some exceptional ones, too and I'm happy to be part of that category, but we aim for less toxicity. The space that I've created is literally the opposite of toxic. I don't even know, it's just healthy. It's incredibly healthy and that is important, too. We have an opportunity to enact some real change by bringing people together and allowing them to learn from one another and build compassion for one another. So I really feel like we should be leaning into that and I hope that this kind of story and model of community building in the age of COVID. It's a big issue. How do we build communities during this time? You feel so isolated and we should be. I’ve been staying my butt at home. I can work remotely. It was a nice summer. I got out in the woods sometimes. But apart from that, I want to do what's right for myself and for other people. So how do you still continue to not only have a social life, but to meet new human beings and form connections with them. Sometimes Twitter just doesn't cut it. Oftentimes, it doesn't. But that's more or less a story and it was just eventually shortened to The Vibe and then by became a verb in the community like it's become a little thing, inside jokes and all. ARTY: So you also said you had a code camp meet up, too. How is that different than your social work? What does that look like? NICOLE: It's not so different from a social meetup. We actually are taking a little bit of a break right now just because I wanted to get in summer, too even though we’re all inside. But yeah, actually I'd started that off of freeCodeCamp. It was originally headed up by Quincy Larson, who is a wonderful person and friend of mine, and he was looking to create this community of people who are using freeCodeCamp to learn. If you're not familiar with freeCodeCamp, it's actually this amazing open source platform that doesn't particularly handhold and that's why I like it because you're going to run into challenges often that you're going to need to overcome and they've expanded their curriculum into so much more than just frontend development, which it was definitely more focused on when I had initially started back when I was teaching myself in 2015. So we have a lot of people who are curious about coding and either hadn't figured out where to start and had seen on meetup.com that there was this freeCodeCamp meetup and I get questions like, “Do I need to know what I'm doing beforehand?” No, you don't. Just enroll in here. I've had plenty of folks where I sit down and wrote their first Hello, World! and they were excited. I don't think anyone's ever mad at that experience, but they were giddy about that and it's really exciting to see that now I've affiliated myself more or less with the freeCodeCamp, but it's expanded to more than that. We play games, coding games together. The last time that we had an in-person meetup, we were playing this game called human resource machine, which is scratch type style game. But it gets a lot more complicated. It's kind of like take this input. We need this output, here's the expected output, do it. Figure out how to get there and it keeps getting more complicated and I had this whole realm of guys. It started out with just me because they're in there doing whatever they do on the internet. [laughs] I was like, “I'm going to go on the other room and play this game on this big screen,” and of course, somebody walks by getting coffee and they're like, “What are you doing?” It's my guy in tech impression. It’s just like, “What are you doing in there?” and I was like, “Oh, I'm just playing this.” I’m like I’m doing this,” and nobody mansplains to me, nobody dares to man-tech-splain to me. But it’s like, “Oh, I think that I could use, what do you think?” I knew damn well how to do it, but I'm like, “What do you think? How do we approach this?” and he's like, “Oh, you do that,” and then of course, somebody else walks by and then everybody starts coming in. That's the way that you attract people and so by the end of it, I have like four people in this from writing out approaches to stuff and up by the screen pointing at things and it's just funny. I'm just sitting there grinning to myself, really and I'm getting into it too, because that's the kind of fun that we should be having. I've been to other freeCodeCamp meetups, they are not all that fun and again, these guys are my friends. They have nothing but respect for me. There's no toxicity. I had folks sign a code of conduct when they came in because it's not just my name, it's freeCodeCamp’s name and that is not what they stand for either. So between those two real ideological, this is a healthy space to be able to learn to code and to be able to help each other and talk. It’s the same deal! We sit there and laugh, we order pizza; it's things like that. A comfortable place to start and people, they keep coming back, they bring friends. [laughs] But that's more or less the gist of the coding community that I do as well. Also, I host a Twitter chat on Tuesday nights. I had just done at 7:00 PM, which is another great way to be able to socialize with your peers and what was last time’s topic, it was portfolio projects. So this is #CodersTeach and so that’s C-O-D-E-R-S-T-E-A-C-H, coders teach. Originally, the idea was anybody who's interested in tech, coding, whatever and also maybe interested in educational, maybe don't want to identify as like an EdTech professional, but they're interested. And it's just turned into kind of like a code newbie type chat, which is another great community and one that I looked up to very much and probably inspired my desire to grow my own. Each week is a different topic. Before then it was “Explain like I’m five” and talking about how those explanations look different and what people would want to learn from in “Explain like I'm five” perspective. So these conversations are really valuable for both, experienced programmers and career programmers to explore their own thoughts and feelings, but also to get perspectives from each other between the professional, experienced developers and the new folks. So there's a lot of learning that goes on people are each other's friends. I add everybody, it’s just, yeah. I just noticed your hat, too as soon as you kind of tilted your head down, Arty. It says “radiate love.” I adore that. That is exactly the message that I'm trying to get across here. [chuckles] ARTY: Exactly, exactly. I've got a cool collection of love hats so. [laughs] NICOLE: Aw, that's so sweet. Yeah, it's a little things like that. We do need to radiate that love out to people. It's a time when it's very difficult to do so. It feels impossible sometimes, but at the end of the day, we are all human beings. Some of us subscribe to some harmful ideological beliefs and some of us are there to care for others and try to keep the opposite or healthier ideological beliefs. But at the end of the day, I believe very much about allowing people to be as they are and to create my own space instead of trying to change those people. Because really, we have no business trying to change other people, first off. But we don't have the power to do so. I have the power to change the world by helping people and the helping people, I can't change the people. They can make changes because of the fact that they've been welcomed into a helpful and supportive space and we've seen that, too. But people grow; I want to be alongside people while they're growing and they're evolving. When you do that, we end up really enjoying and making this industry, the whole industry, a lot better and our friendships and our relationships with other people better and that's the kind of depth of connection that we really all need right now. ARTY: Yes, definitely. I totally agree. This is beautiful, the stories and the types of communities you're building. You mentioned at the beginning, these uncomfortable spaces and walking into a room where everyone is masking and trying to be someone else and trying to fit in, all it does is create this feeling of separation and distancing and that the way that you have to fit in is to put on a mask and instead of being yourself, you have to fit into this mold shape of what people's expectations are. It's the most uncomfortable thing ever and no real connection really takes place in that kind of context and you’ve done the opposite. You started with this super authentic space of just getting up and dancing and having fun, even if it's just you and then one person shows up and another and then letting people be themselves. I love it so much. I'm reading this book now, it’s Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha and I'm like halfway through this book and it's one of the most amazing books I've ever read. It's actually quite relevant right now, too, is this trance we get in of feeling like we're unworthy of being loved and we kind of go down this path where we spend so much time judging ourselves and criticizing ourselves and getting stuck in these loops, always trying to be somewhere else than where we are. And instead of that, shifting to a mindset of radical acceptance and loving yourself and all of yourself, however you are. All the experiences and stuff you end up having in life and feeling, even if it's really painful. You talked about your therapy group and stuff. Being okay, being able to accept that we have these really challenging experiences and then when we realize other people sharing a lot of that trauma and stuff too, then we can connect and realize we're not alone in that and it's okay to feel that way and it's okay to be in pain and we don't have to necessarily resist those experiences. And so, when we start shifting to that mindset of embracing ourselves and working toward wholeness and being able to be our authentic selves and just show up and be present, it enables the opportunity for that connection. NICOLE: Absolutely. You got it right on the head there. It's being able to find that quiet also internally in a very – and it's really interesting that you brought up this really being able to connect some of the Buddhist concepts to our everyday lives. I'm actually noticing, it took me until 35 I turn today, and I am just now starting to ask questions about spirituality and religion. Not naming particular area, but there's so many recurring themes throughout, just like I've gained an appreciation for history as well. People have done this before; they've been here, they've walked here and they're not here anymore. But you find that these recurring themes that are passed down and also, recognized in and of themselves love and compassion and in religion and so much of that concept spills over and it's so interesting being able to really take the important messages. I feel like some people focus on certain messages and others focus on others, and you can see reading a book about how it connects to acceptance and love. You're going to gain so much more that you can contribute to society in a positive manner when you're taking those lessons from it and there's always things that you can pull that are bad from anything, too. There are ideologies in some that might just be downright harmful, but at the end of the day, they all have love attached to them in some form and in most major mindsets at least. Yeah, I'm still exploring and all this stuff so I'm kind of like, “Wait, that's kind of a blanket stuff. But that's been a huge driving force for me in bringing this forward is recognizing that people do talk about love. They talk about it in a way that affects other people and affects the world positively. They've talked about it throughout the generations, as long as we have written history, and that's really fascinating to me as somebody who does struggle sometimes with the spectrum of emotions that humans can encounter. I feel sometimes as somebody who is on the autism spectrum, like a lot of my feelings just, they don't seem to translate well to human terms, the human definitions of emotions. They are much more complex. They're much more deep. They're not quite as black and white. They're not cut and dry. It's definitely a more complex situation and I think that when people who aren't on the spectrum recognize that different definition and experience of love and being welcoming and comforting in a safe haven, that's very important to a lot of folks in general. All these messages everywhere, being able to pull in, recognizing emotion, and being able to see that emotion in other people. It's amazing that even though I do, there's a lot of stigma with folks on the spectrum that we’re kind of like robots and lacking empathy and really, it couldn't be further from the truth. A lot of us go into sociology because you effectively have to study your own kind to be able to learn how to human sometimes. ARTY: Learn how to human. I love that. NICOLE: Yeah. No, we have to learn how to human and it's a lifelong process, but it’s those people who are willing to help us and they're willing to support us and foster. I've had people over the years, take my hand and just say, “It's okay. You're not okay with this space. There are others. You're awesome and let's just find you somewhere else.” Or, “Let’s focus on who you are and let's see if you can bring some people to you.” ARTY: I think that's the beautiful thing I heard you talking about, too is it's difficult to make meaningful connections, you said, unless you lean into being yourself and as opposed to trying to fit yourself into an existing space, you decided to be your authentic self and attract people that fit into that with you. I think that's one of the big keys is leaning into being your authentic self and embracing yourself and all the other things start falling into place once you do that. I've noticed too, when you stop judging yourself and being so critical of yourself, it also removes the need to be judgmental of others and so, a lot of the outward judgment, blaming, and criticism and stuff I’ve realized is usually driven by a lot of inward criticism and self-hate dynamics that are kind of being projected outwardly and that people that are really aggressive outwardly that way, are usually in a lot of pain. When I started realizing that these behaviors are driven by people hurting, I also started to look at it differently. It was like, “Oh, maybe these people that are attacking me in this way, it really has nothing to do with me,” and I started imagining that there's this cardboard me out there and they're attacking the cardboard as opposed to attacking real me. Then I don't have to internalize it and take it so personally and then I can kind of look at the situation from the perspective of what is it that they have a need to cut me down so that they can feel a certain way and that's all about them. It really has nothing to do with me. They're just beating up on my cardboard, right. [chuckles] So when you can kind of separate those things from yourself and then have your own internal sense of yourself as independent of that is that you can be a good friend to yourself and love yourself and be your authentic self anyway, independent of anyone out there that might reject you or tear you down. You can maintain your own self-concept that way. It makes it much easier to be resilient in your own authenticity. NICOLE: Oh, yeah. It is not easy to do loving and accepting your true self sometimes, especially when you're somebody who looks around and a world that is so radically different and people who think so radically different than I do and actually believe that you're normal, [laughs] that you belong in that space. It's a tough one and I'm mostly grateful for the people. The spaces are so important, but these – I kind of use the term pain tornadoes when they came through and it's just their pain that is radiating. As somebody who has experienced so much intergenerational trauma throughout my life. My heritage is African American, Native American and right here, my ethnicity is African American, Native American and those two particular groups of individuals have had some of the toughest experiences in America and that trauma—I've really been reading into epigenetics, the concept of epigenetics and the passing down of stress throughout the years and the way that it can actually reform our genetics. That is a very real thing because being able to overcome that basically at the same time as doing all of this, I've been charged with ending a lot of that trauma and with kind of being close that door and create something healthier. I take that seriously because it's just me, I wanted to create that as a part of my identity. It was very important to me to be able to show people that it is possible to embrace your true self even if in a lot of ways you feel like you hate yourself sometimes. There's nothing wrong with who you are, even if the world will try and make you feel that way and they will be relentless about it. They really will and it's just because of that insecurity. Like you say, it's because they are hurting. I tell people also, I go to therapy primarily because of other people who don't. I'm going there and I went in so many times and just said, “What's wrong with me?” and my therapist would say, “There's nothing wrong with you. Something's wrong with the world right now and a lot of people are feeling that stress.” Something is wrong with the world at large and just keep being you and you're going to be a beacon of light for people who are stressing as well. That's important to me and that's a role that I will take on valiantly. MIDROLL: This podcast is brought to you by An Event Apart. For over 15 years, An Event Apart conferences have been the best way to level up your skills, be inspired by world-class experts, and learn what’s next in web design. An Event Apart is proud to introduce Online Together: Fall Summit, a three-day web design conference coming to a device near you, October 26th through 28th. The Fall Summit features 18 in-depth sessions, each followed by a live, moderated Q&A session with the speaker, plus unique one-on-one conversations with some special guests. 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ARTY: So I would love to hear more about the educational tech entrepreneurship stuff you're doing. Could you tell us a little more about that? NICOLE: Absolutely. So a big part of my personal story is that I initially attempted a computer science degree. I attended Wellesley College back in 2003 and kind of the TLDR, I attempted a computer science degree and I basically fell on my face and before I could flunk out, I switched. I switched to political science and that was a huge point of shame for me like I said, for quite a while because I felt like I had given up. I was at such a point where I was deeply stressed, that it got to the point where I just felt like I didn't belong. I had effectively been convinced that I didn't belong and if you really love something, I tell people you'll come back to it. You will. You'll find your way back to it and sure enough, when I lost my job in customer service back in 2015 and I just said, “What the heck am I going to do now?” I was standing out on that corner outside the building with tears in my eyes and all my bags with my stuff in it in my hands [laughs] and I just was like, “I need a little bit at a time, but I feel like I want to teach myself to code.” It's possible now. I've seen that online. I love doing it. It's grown so much since my LiveJournal and Giga Pet days and what have you. [laughs] You've got to build there and now it's exciting and it's moved forward so much. But the way basically that I ended up in entrepreneurship and working in educational technology is tied into my actual experience from what happened throughout my education and then through my career. The reason is, in addition to being spectrum, I also have a nonverbal learning disability that was not diagnosed until I was 32. So I went in and that was like, “Hi, will somebody take a look at my brain, please and tell me what's wrong with me?” They took me into the brain shop and they were like, “Oh, you’ve got some things here. Can't fix it but we can show you how to work with it.” [laughs] The nonverbal learning disability, basically that means that I have difficulty creating mental models for things that don't have a visible or an easily concepted model in my mind. I can struggle with abstract concepts like algebra, it’s always one of my weak points. Calculus, oh my God, forget it. Obviously, there was a lot in computer science too. I didn't see data structures and actually that was where I dropped out is data structures and algorithms. It's crazy, too because that nonverbal learning disability, it's kind of side by side with spectrum folks often and it looks so weird out in the wild. The other day I was sitting there turning this pillow, actually. I have a square pillow here and I kept turning it and I flipped it over and I'm like, “Wait, why doesn't this look right?” because I'm thinking it was a rectangle, but it wasn't actually a rectangle, it was a perfect square. Oh God and the other day, I was putting together IKEA furniture and one of the tests was spatial awareness as to do reflections—a horizontal, a vertical—that it can actually manifest visually, too. We have difficulty really actually looking at something and figuring out manipulation, space manipulation, what have you. So this is all tied in because my educational troubles were actually what led me to educational technology. I hated books. School was very difficult and distracting for me, but I had to work really hard because I was trying to mask and seem like nothing was wrong and I was very brilliant. So it was picked up early and then kind of nothing was done about it. That's a little heartbreaking because I could have had so many more accommodations that I actually needed; untimed testing and what have you, maybe take-home tests, being able to take breaks during class and not necessarily miss anything, having a class recording. But I didn't get any of that and a lot of those accessibility things would have been really beneficial to me. But nowadays, I started to learn as I was learning to code using initially Treehouse back in 2015 and accepted that customer service had to go. That was not a career I was wanting to grow in at all. Being a professional admin would have been a waste of my gifts. So as I'm learning here, I started looking at these online videos and the online videos were amazing and I was able to learn from them very quickly and easily. I could pause them. I could go back. I could process the information I had just learned. I could turn on subtitles, which are huge for me to be able to visually process; I have subtitles on everything for kind of comprehensive issues. I will come comprehend so much more just having that difference there. All of those features together, they led me to a really cultivated and again, as I'm saying this, I see the trend of like oh, I don't like it, I created my own. I don't see what I want, I create my own and sure enough, going through these courses, I was able to learn so fast and I actually got my first developer job. It was a little bit more full stack. I was working on frontend, but I learned a lot and it was probably after 10 months. I did training and sure enough, it was developer money. I was able to learn on the job and really, I think any developer's dream, especially the new folks, is to be able to make money to learn and make that dev money to be able to show up and learn more. So effectively, my career turned into, once again, creating what I wanted to see and what was missing. Now, two of the huge components that I had missed while I was in that computer science degree, attempting that and kind of wasting my time a little bit, were programmatic problem-solving and autodidactism. In other words, teaching herself. I struggled with being able to actually formulate, understand the problem, and then formulate a solution. I thought it was just writing the code, but when it came time to actually write the code, I was experiencing total blank screen paralysis, which is a concept that I work with a lot of folks on now. Really, I started sharing everything that I know while I was learning as I was learning it, even I wanted to explain how I learned it, and that was hugely attractive to other people. But when it comes down to it, I created courses that I’m mad, I’m big mad. I wish I'd had this stuff. I wish that I'd had somebody to take me aside and actually, nobody I talked to has ever had formal programmatic problem-solving training of any sort and I know it needs to be a prerequisite for every CS degree and it needs to be a prerequisite for every boot camp like it needs to be included in bootcamps, even if it's only one or two days, and then you give it to them to use moving forward. These skills have really, really vastly improved the performance, the information retention and I talk about learning deliberately as well, and being able to keep things in your head as you're drinking from the fire hose, so to speak. So there is so much that we need to learn here and again, I want this experience to be healthy. I had somebody talking to me the other day about how somebody was trying to learn the backend on freeCodeCamp. This is interesting actually because I went straight out and I had a meeting with Quinsy right after we were hanging out and I was like, “Quincy, what do you think on this?” And it's tough because we start out a lot of the time with frontend, that's where people will kind of lead us. But what if you want to work in the backend? What if you want to work with Python? Data? What if you want to do anything that is not the frontend and people were saying, “Oh, folks will get mad and they'll drop off that they're not getting what they need,” and my first thought was, if that's the case, then we need to work on their emotional regulation. Because honestly, dysregulation is going to lead you to make rash decisions like that and think that that is an indicator that you are not good or fit for this or that you're not getting what you need and so screw all this and I give up. Really, if nothing else, the one thing that I have for me throughout all of this is massive amounts of perseverance and grit. I will keep coming back. I'm faced down a lot of the time because oh, let's see, another part of my veritable cornucopia of mental illnesses and neurodivergencies is I also have bipolar II disorder. All of these were kind of diagnosed around the same time because I got into the point where I was like, “Okay, what's going on? I feel like this should be easier for me, like there's something very wrong.” Entrepreneurship takes a lot out of you. Once I started making those courses and then I created a business out of it, I'm actually kind of going through some major remodeling of the way that I help people to make it more comprehensive and something that is more easily accessible and also, more all in one place so that I can help more people in more of a streamlined way. That's how I ended up in educational technology, though in a very roundabout way, but you also see where it's very direct. I created what I had needed and I asked people because I can't read people's minds. Definitely not. It was like, “Is this something that you also need?” and the feedback was overwhelmingly yes. So they had spoken and I want to deliver. I want the person that people learn from to be me and I want to lead them to other healthy instructors that are not out there pushing, “What's keeping you from coding like this?” and it's like um life, a whole lot of things? We don't need that kind of stuff thrown in our faces. There's a lot of reasons why people are not coding like this right now and that was a reference to a tweet with this GitHub and it wasn't even there. So it's like the commit map, the heat map. But that's real, that's the kind of mood that we have around here and I just want to be over here, flinging around healthy content, helping people to regulate those emotions and understand. Me being on my face has really taught me a lot about getting back up. It's every time that I do it, it is. I like to say it's a little bit easier, but it's really not and it's cyclical but you build a lot of determination and grit through it because you can't stay down. So I want to teach people how to do that, too because you need a lot of that resilience and grit when you're teaching yourself to code as well, when you're building a career, any of it, and that's going to help you stay here. We need to have people actually show up and stay and add and create in this industry and I'm glad. I'm so glad that I found my way back to tech one way or another because I really feel deeply that I love this industry so much. When I think about not having tech in my life, it feels like a huge hole that’ll just be there, like there would be a gap. and there was a gap before and now I feel more complete having it. I'm going to protect these spaces. This is massively important to me. It makes me mad every time I see problematic people here because we can do better than that. We really can. We just need the right people to lead by example. JACOB: I was diagnosed with nonverbal learning disorder when I was a kid and believe it or not, you're the first other person I've met who's talked about that diagnosis. I've looked a long time in many places to find out more information and have not found much mostly because my understanding, it has that vague sounding name because not very much is known about it. [chuckles] NICOLE: Pretty new. JACOB: Yeah. Well, yeah. Relatively, right? NICOLE: I think it's even a formal diagnosis in the DSM, actually. JACOB: Yes! NICOLE: Somebody had said that the other day and I was like, “Wow.” Yeah, you're right like, it is really new, but yeah. JACOB: It's like more of a generic, we can't classify you, but we can at least say it's something to do with nonverbal. For me, well, a big part of the issue is I'm always so interested in what's going on up here that trying to spend a lot of time tuning in on what's going on out there is really hard and what's going on out there often is necessary for me to learn the next thing. So I mean, I did freeCodeCamp and I really liked about it is they would say, “Here are your requirements. Here's a project near the requirements and here are a few pointers. We're not going to give you a video and you just follow along and by the end of the video, if you followed along, you'll have the solution. We're going to give you the requirements and we want you to piece them together yourself,” and somehow, that was a much more helpful and motivating solution for me. I do not know why there is not a lot more educational content out there that is focused on here are the user stories that you need to solve until to learn this concept. It's one blog after the next, where it's like okay, type these steps and then at the end, what if I've learned how to copy what someone else did? NICOLE: freeCodeCamp does not handle and I really appreciate that so much about them. Test-driven learning is a really effective method, too. Giving students expected output and telling them get from point A to point B. That works really well with children, too. I was just reading some research recently on that children love coming up with a solution to get from point A to point B and then at some point, as adults, I think we get kind of moneyed by all of it. But yeah, I love that. It’s an asset, truly. Test-driven programmatic learning that way, it's very effective. JACOB: Yeah. I keep thinking this and maybe if I can't find it, then maybe the answer is maybe I need to do this, but I wish there was that same style of learning for people more advanced in their journey. Because I think if it's a really good tool for beginners, you should have that same type of learning environment, no matter how far off you are. I’ve been a developer for 5 years now and I feel like I've hit a wall in things I would like to learn about for that reason. It's like, I would really love it if someone could lay out these are the goals you want to hit, if you want to learn about XYZ in AWS, for example. NICOLE: Yeah, there are a lot of things that I have found that professional developers can learn from this entire process that I've really shared from the programmatic problem-solving. It was on a Front End Happy Hour with some folks, panel of folks recently, which is so much fun and we're talking. Basically, I'm sitting here talking to professional developers in Big Tech and I have virtually no exposure normally to Big Tech, apart from talking to recruiters, because I want to kind of figure out their thoughts on those skills that I have identified and what they would like to see. I really don't have that exposure, but as I'm talking about it, they kind of discuss the steps among themselves. I’ll be like, “I've never actually made that an actual problem-solving step and I probably tend to skip it normally, but yeah, that's really valuable and I would definitely apply that.” Other things like knowing the best way that you learn. People are always claiming that the learning style concept has more or less been debunked, but there's nothing to debunk when you're a person who knows for a fact that you learn better by auditory and visual and tactile stimulation. That's all that matters. It's just that we don't express it. We don't express it in order to get what we need. I forced myself into books, I forced myself in a classroom and that huge distractibility factor for me, too. I always say, I think spectrum grab bag more or less, it's just this pool of symptoms and somebody comes up and they shake up the bag and say, “Go in, grab a handful.” That type of really – I get very easily distracted and so it's the same deal. I need to be in a space where I can really focus and if you're in a classroom, you can't do that. If you're in a massive workspace at a job, you're probably not going to be as productive as you would if you were truly in your own space. These are important accommodations that actually help out other people, too, like employers. If you knew somebody could be more productive if you just gave them a space to be able to be by themselves and focus and trusted that they'll create great things in their own mind when they actually have quiet, these are important things. But I think even experienced developers, new developers don't know how to ask. They don't know what they're asking for, but the experienced developers, what I really suggest some ways in which they can leverage these things that I would normally teach new developers, but that completely still apply to their own lines. You're also going to be learning. It's a continuous process of learning, tech is, and that's part of what makes it so exciting and it's also fun enough, one of the few industries where it's pretty much expected that you're going to get things wrong and it's usually okay. Worst case, there might be money attached to it for a company, but we can break things and unless it's on a huge grand scale with important data or something attached to it like that, for the most part, it's going to be okay. I find that that whole idea of being able to kind of come in and break things, we do kind of lose that innate curiosity, I think at some point or another. But one way that we can really focus in and not only that, but also at the same time, hold onto the information that we're learning is a learning style that I just referred to as learning deliberately. So being able to really focus in on what you're doing as opposed to kind of picking up things here and there and being able to hold on to that knowledge, hopefully permanently and give you something to use. So all of these little skills that I teach folks, even professional experienced developers and programmers have said, “Thanks. That stuff actually is really effective.” Doing test-driven practice on what is it, Exercism, I think is one we used recently that comes with all of the test suites there. So yeah, there's a lot of great tools out there and I'm so proud. This an exciting time and scary, but it's an exciting time to be in educational technology right now. Everybody was thrown into the online learning space very unexpectedly and one of the biggest things, this is going to be a year of moving and shaken, probably another many years of moving and shaking because if one thing happened from it, we got a lot of feedback very quickly. Positive, negative and this is an amazing opportunity to be able to parse that feedback and create a more effective educational environment for a variety of students and that's so important because we see right now, this is life for this moment. Life is making sure that people are getting the education that they need even remotely and not all of that. Teachers are exhausted. Sometimes they're sick, too. They have children to take care of that they can't send to daycare maybe and that's a big deal. So being able to use courses and videos and podcasts. Prerecorded content is huge and I love it because it can reach a wide variety of people as opposed to just you speaking to a small group. That's one of the huge reasons I love making courses because I can teach so many more people than just if I were one-on-one. ARTY: Being able to pioneer this next generation of educational tech and what it looks like in baking in those community aspects, too is so important because it's easy to take an approach to the educational tech space that is very dry and distant and focused on what's the knowledge that needs to be dumped into people's heads kind of thing. It's exactly the opposite of what we should be doing and what we should be doing is exactly this path that you're on with putting the community aspects of things first and building a healthy space where people can pull the information that they're interested in learning and what they're excited about and build the set of skills and their own superpowers that they want to go after in life. I think these disruptions that are happening now, in one way, there's a lot of hard going on right now. On the other side of that, it's an opportunity for us to rethink the way that we want the world to be and taking all that pain from the past, all the multigenerational pain from the past and going all right, if we take that in and accept all the things that have happened and go, “You know what, now it's in our power to rethink all of this, to rethink how we want the world to be that.” Get up and build that. To build a community and start building that together and I think that's so beautiful that you've really taken the initiative to do that, to just take all that pain in and be able to turn it around and create something really positive and beautiful. NICOLE: Oh yeah. I believe very, very strongly in creating things from ashes and letting things grow where quite frankly, they're not supposed to. When I can make a flower grow someplace with infertile soil, that means so much to me because we are a little bit of scorched earth here and it's probably not going to change for the better anytime soon. But we need to continue to not just survive, but I would like to see thrive as humanity right now. It's going to be tough and as you said, it's going to take communities of people because communities are so much more powerful than an individual. Earlier I said having that community to lean on, having teamwork; it's true, you put a whole bunch of people's different skills together and then you look at that big list of skills. That's impressive. You now have a powerhouse that can do all of those things. If you communicate well, like a well-oiled machine kind of, and it's not just parts trying to do whatever they're doing, you bring all these people together without really homogenizing them and letting those individual, those superpowers come out. That is where we can change things. That is really where we can change things. It turns into just a powerful force. It really does in this world. The pandemic gave us a pause in our lives that I don't know if we're going to get again; this is something that is very unique this year. Our lives were put on hold and what people do with that hold, what they do with it really has the propensity to make a big difference right now and I wanted to do good. Other people are just surviving and that's okay, too. We need to be healthy during this time and that's a huge struggle. I struggle with my spoons on days and that's it like, I just don't want to do anything and that has to be okay. A lot of folks are struggling with productivity, guilt that they're not creating or doing as much and it's like, we're in a completely different world right now. You can't take a lot of those past behaviors and those past views and bring them into what is going to be the new world. It's going to be post-pandemic and it means something different. What we're facing does not mean the same thing as it did before we took it for granted. So really reflecting that in our relationships with people and showing appreciation for what we have is what is going to start. I'm huge on gratitude as well. Gratitude is another of those concepts that's really been passed down throughout the ages, is recognizing that which we have and not coming from a place of abundance and not a place of lack and there really is so much, there's so much good here. So I want to bring all the good together and turn us into one big ol’ superpower machine and smash all of the bad things happening right now because that's how it works, honestly. ARTY: I am so inspired by this whole conversation. It's beautiful. MIDROLL: Explore Domain Driven Design is offering hands-on and highly interactive workshops this year. Workshops will take place over the course of the last two weeks in October and the first three weeks in November. Instructors include industry leaders such as Scott Wlaschin, Kacper Gunia, Marijn Huizendveld, Jessica Kerr, Kent Beck, Alberto Brandolini, and Paul Rayner. Why should you attend? No travel! No flight delays, passport control, or security checks. Worried about losing your luggage? Forget about it! Challenge your thinking in an open, sharing, and collaborative environment while accessing the workshops from the comfort of your own home or office. Take breaks as needed. These are strange times we are living in. Use the time you would be traveling to report to colleagues on key lessons and takeaways. Help them to expand the skills you’ve learned from these innovative, remote sessions, and then incorporate them into your organization. Talk to your boss and tell them how you would benefit from attending online workshops from Explore DDD. Relay the cost savings you will benefit from by not traveling this year. Visit http://exploreddd.com/workshops and register today. Use the Code EDDDGTC to get 10% off the price of any of the workshop tickets! ARTY: So we usually end the show with wrapping up with reflections. Jacob, you want to go first? JACOB: Sure. This conversation is having me thinking about, I have not really figured out a way to do—I don't like calling it networking, but whatever word you want to call meeting other people out in my general professional sphere. Now that I can't do that in-person at a meetup or something like that and even then, that has been a challenge for some of the reasons that Nicole talked about. So I've been really curious about how to crack that over Zoom and I'm just really inspired by that. It seems like you're onto something here. NICOLE: Come hang out with us! By all means. JACOB: I would love to. NICOLE: As I said, it's a social experiment. It's funny, you wouldn't believe that a bunch of basically straight—it was kind of like the real world, they just plunked us all down in there and we'll sit there. It'll be funny to see some confessionals and what have you there. We have this whole plan for an actual event. Yeah, check it out for science. [laughs] JACOB: I would love to. NICOLE: Yeah, I was very much the same. Not socializing quite as much, not being able to really form those close connections with certain people and eventually, you realize it's got to happen organically. I’d say, the first thing is always just lean into being yourself. Amazing things happen after that. ARTY: I’d really love to come hang out with you two. That sounds wonderful. NICOLE: Yeah, buddy! [laughter] ARTY: Listening to this whole discussion, you started with your superpower. with community building and empathy and as I'm listening to you talk and the kinds of things that you're doing, the other thing I see in you is this power to transform energy. To take all of this pain in that you see around you, that you experience yourself and as opposed to staying there, you turn it into this beautiful creative energy to build and make things happen and it's all anchored around the authenticity of being yourself. You said it's difficult to make meaningful connections unless you lean into being yourself and I think that's really the superpower in all the community building, in all of the empathy is leaning into being yourself and once you orient there, it also gives you the power to do this transformational magic, too. NICOLE: Yeah. ARTY: Where nothing can hold you down. Girl, you're like superpowered Nicole! I am so inspired by this whole conversation and grateful for the opportunity to meet you. I'm looking forward to hanging out more! NICOLE: Yes! Oh, it's going to be fun. Again, I’d meet you, too and now we're friends as well. We're in the connection like these are my little circles and welcome to my healthy circles. JACOB: So Nicole, what's the best way people can get in touch with you, find out what you're up to, anything like that? NICOLE: I am most frequently on Twitter. I'm kind of trying to get my head around Instagram so maybe I can be on there, too. But Twitter is my main home and you can find me there at lavie_encode and that's L-A, V as in Victor, I-E, underscore, E-N as in Nancy, C-O-D-E and I would be happy if you would follow me. My presence is kind of bizarre, you'll see. But I embrace all parts of my authenticity and that includes weird memes and tax stuff and whatever. [laughs] So welcome to mind space. Please do follow me, though. JACOB: And that's our show. Thanks for joining us. If you want to be a member of our Slack community, you can go to patreon.com/greaterthancode. You can donate any amount and become a part of our community. We're a supportive, friendly, low-traffic community on Slack and we also have a jobs channel where we post job opportunities. If you're in a position where you're not able to donate anything, in particular because you are looking for work right now, you can get in touch with one of the panelists on Twitter or anywhere else and we'll just let you in for nothing, that’s fine. So yeah, see you next week.