PRE-ROLL: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. DAMIEN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 218. My name is Damien Burke and I’m here with Laurie. LAURIE: Hi, I’m Laurie Barth and I’m excited to be joined by our other panelist, Casey Watts. CASEY: Hi, I’m Casey Watts! I’m excited to be here with our guest today, Isa Herico-Velasco. Isa is an international woman of mystery and an all-around good gal. She is a software engineer, but not classically trained. She currently works at the Internet Archive, primarily running point for one of their oldest web products: BookReader. Her main work challenge is to move past maintaining the 12-year-old code and get to new features that can be easily developed. She lives in San Francisco with her partner and child, and they are committed to helping rebuild their city as the pandemic continues its devastating march across the U.S. Through all of this, Isa tries to find the magic and miracle in everything she sees and does. Welcome, Isa to Greater Than Code. ISA: Hey! Thanks for having me y’all. Pleasure to be here. DAMIEN: Thank you for being here. CASEY: Our first question for you, the first question we ask on every podcast, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ISA: Yes. Oh my God, that's such a great question. I really think that my superpower is being a bridge. I say that because I find myself in a lot of intersections and some of them are quite polarized. I do my best to help move the conversation forward, move the dialogue forward, so we can actually get some progress in whatever I'm doing. DAMIEN: That sounds really lovely. There are so many of those bridges, looking at your bio, that I want to talk about, but let's start with the ones you want to talk about. Is there any particular areas that you're connecting that are most important to you or most salient? ISA: In this climate, Damien, I feel like everything is on fire. Everything is priority one. How do we mitigate that? So I really don't have anything that's super burning in my heart that I wanted to start off with. I can start off with maybe myself, my bio. Let’s start there. I was raised in San Francisco, but I was born on the Island of Negros. It's part of the island chain of the Republic of the Philippines and I am the daughter of a public defender and a basketball player. So both of my parents are actually people of the people; they naturally win the hearts and minds of others and I just want to do the same here. Moving to America is usually like you move to America for a better life, but for me, I don't think I ever did move to America for a better life. I think I just moved to America to follow my family, but we were already good in our little island, little province of Bacolod city, Negros. So I'm still trying to kind of digest my immigrant experience and see where I can be most impactful in both of my communities, San Francisco and the Island of Negros in the Philippines. Part of that has brought me to working with RailsBridge and Bridge Foundry and I've just found friends that are aligned with helping others and doing better for the community and that's where I want to live; I want to live in this place. The age that I'm at now, I'm moving into a generational shift where my generation are becoming leaders. I see that in my family structure, I see that in my community structure and it's still very murky to me so I'm just also trying to find ways that I can move into that position with grace. CASEY: That was a great answer. It resonates with me a lot being a bridge. I just noticed that the groups you volunteer with have bridge in their name, RailsBridge or Bridge Foundry, and I think that's no surprise. ISA: Thanks. DAMIEN: I just noticed how cool the name, Bridge Foundry, is. ISA: Yeah, Bridge Foundry is really cool. It came from the whole movement of RailsBridge. I don't know if y'all have heard of RailsBridge before. Have y'all ever heard of RailsBridge before? DAMIEN: Yes. But we’d love to hear you talk about it. ISA: Okay, cool. So RailsBridge is 100% volunteer-run open source project that provides technical training to those that are often underrepresented in the tech sphere. It started off with two Sarah, Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen, and they just kept finding themselves as the primary two non-men in the Ruby conference space and they were like, “Well, let's change this, let's move the needle.” So they started making these workshops and it just caught on fire. It started in 2009, but 2011, it was really going to the point where there was a RailsBridge in South Africa, Berlin, across the world, Mexico and RailsBridge is actually also the catalyst for everything you see now that's DIY programming, from boot camps all the way to the courses that you can take online for free. RailsBridge was actually, it’s not the first, but it's definitely a catalyst for all the things like my contemporaries in that space is Alaina from Women Who Code, RailsGirls came from that and all these things, but Rails is just one piece of technology. There are more bridges that came out of that: ScalaBridge, ElixirBridge, MobileBridge, ClojureBridge, GoBridge. What happened was we saw and identified that we needed to create a support structure to help all of these volunteer run workshops and organizations and so, Bridge Foundry came about and Bridge Foundry is the umbrella organization for all of these bridges that helps not just organize, but now because of Bridge Foundry, any donations can be tax deductible through our 501(c)(3) and all of that. We've really formalized at the top, but still give the power of self-organization to the other bridges for them to do their thing. Each one is its own unique place, that's why it's the Bridge Foundry. Oh, and we're hiring! We’re hiring a CEO for Bridge Foundry. This is a big deal because we got enough money to hire somebody with a big vision. So if you're interested in helping move this amazing organization, that started in 2009 to the next era, to help diversify the thought space of tech and the idea of inclusion, let me know. We’re looking for you! CASEY: That's so exciting. I think I learned about RailsBridge back in 2010 when I was teaching programming and this was one of the best resources that I could find to get people set up and running. It’sso cool that it's scaled up over the last decade. ISA: Yes, and we're still going strong. ElixirBridge is actually one of the bigger movements currently now. Elixir, Go, and Clojure, I think are the big hitters of our Bridges in recent times. Oh, and everything is open source, too so curriculum, everything. We help people get bootstrap and it's not even just to teach newbies how to code; people that are seasoned engineers that want to learn new languages are also part of our ecosystem. LAURIE: Yeah. I don't know any of the languages you've mentioned. I just hear about them so this is interesting for me. I'm like, “I don't know Rails, I don't know Clojure.” I do know someone who is involved in ClojureBridge, which is cool. ISA: It is. LAURIE: Yeah. It's a whole world of stuff that there's so many languages; you can never know like 2% of them. [chuckles] CASEY: A lot of them don't feel accessible. I don't know how I can just go and learn Clojure real quick? I guess, I can buy a book or do an online tutorial, but to have a community, like a Bridge group, to support you is huge. People to ask questions to, people to hit the same bumps with as you're learning; I don't know the value is immeasurable it to really lower the barrier of entry to these technologies. ISA: I agree. I couldn't even have said it any better. DAMIEN: I'm really glad you said that, Casey because that's something I tend to overlook: the value of a community when learning. Like you said, I would not have known how to learn Clojure like that. I don't know. I'd write some Clojure programs, [chuckles] which is what I would do and not even think about having that infrastructure as a Bridge is to connect me to Clojure, with that community. So that's wonderful. CASEY: Yeah, it makes sense. You wouldn't think to jump at one of those because they don't exist for a lot of things. A lot of stuff you want to learn, you can't just jump into a group like a Bridge group to learn it. So we're lucky we have it. LAURIE: I think community learning is such an interesting topic if we want to dive into that more. ISA: Yeah, absolutely. Especially in these times; in these times we’re all distributed now. Many engineers are working from home, kids are schooling from home; finding community is more important than ever IMO. LAURIE: I guess, one of my questions for community learning is obviously, we are so distributed, but we're also dealing with people who are on very different schedules and people who are maybe able to devote varying amounts of free time to this practice. So how do you keep groups moving together or don't you? What does that look like? ISA: For RailsBridge, traditionally, the workshops are two days. We commandeer a start-up office and we bootstrap people's computers the night before and then the next day, we just do 8 hours of training and things are changing right now. The great thing is, is that we have our Slack channels, our Google Groups and our curriculum is free for anyone to use. So you can actually do it at any time and if you're stuck, you can hit us up on GitHub or the Google Group or things of that nature. I think we're still trying to find our way through this new world where we can no longer meet in person. DAMIEN: When Laurie brought up people being on different schedules, that's something that's near and dear to my heart because basically, I don't want to work with anybody's schedule and so, I tend to focus highly on asynchronous communication. Also because I'm a words person, I like words. Whereas, I'd always thought of community building as being a synchronous thing. We’re here in conversation. It helps for the same space. What you described, RailsBridge has both of those as part of the community, all the Bridges, probably. They have the in-person lectures, they have the 8 hours together, but then they also have hit us up on the Slack or hit us up on GitHub. ISA: Yeah, absolutely and I think it's just a sign of our times people are reaching out, we have to reach back and vice versa; always keep that door open. I'm really excited to see how we can innovate community building in this new world where we can never see each other again in person. [laughter] I’m just kidding. Hopefully, it could be we can get past whatever this giant pandemic thing, but now I'm here for it. I'm here for the asynchronicity. I'm here for giving what I can when I can and that's the beauty, that's just the magic of RailsBridge. If you have 2 hours, you can just go add a little something to the curriculum, do a little something, whatever you want to do, we will accept your contribution. It's open source; we'll accept your contribution however you can give it. LAURIE: Do you find that past participants in something like RailsBridge end up being teachers for future participants and that as people move along in their journey, they're able to help in those larger communities? I guess, one of the things you mentioned, like how can we do this better asynchronously is, I think Google Groups is really cool, but one of the things I've seen work really well for lifetime question asking, asynchronous, and all that kind of thing is Discord because it's a place where so many people—now it has threading too—but whoever is there and present in the conversation at the time can pitch in, but you don't feel like you need to catch up on everything that's happened for the past weeks that you haven't been on there. I think one of the challenges that I've always had when I come into communities is feeling like I always need to be present in the community or else, I don't have the context to contribute. Discord moves so fast that for me personally, it's always forced me to sort of let that go and be like, “Okay, I'm here right now. I can participate right now and when I'm not here, it's okay if I'm not part of the conversation.” It’s almost like a real, live moving in and out of a room situation. I don't know, that's sort of a random offshoot, but it's interesting to think about how people grow and if they stick around in a community, they can start to be some of the leaders, the mentors, and the helpers. ISA: Yes! You really hit it on the nail there because one of the reasons why RailsBridge has lasted so long and all these Bridges have lasted so long is because we do actually cultivate a leadership pipeline through our volunteers. Even the people that are learning our volunteers. We're not just teaching you; everyone is contributing back into the fold. So for me, let's go back to when I used to be a student because I was not a primary volunteer at first. I was a student and then in order to get to the next workshop, a newbie had to go teach the other newbies to the next workshop, the things that they learned and it's just like these little bits of pieces. Whatever nugget of knowledge that you have around this topic, you can go teach the next person that and you don't have to have any more than that because hopefully, someone else will be there to do that as well. So we’ve cultivated this small leadership pipeline with not so much responsibility where people feel so trapped and they feel like they cannot move into a different, I don't even want to say move up because it's more lateral. Everything is lateral. Everything is flat. A student can be a teacher, the next workshop and then go back to being a student and that's how actually we've created such a sustainable ecosystem is because we're not just teaching down, we’re all learning from each other and everything is quite flat in organizational structure. DAMIEN: That's so beautiful. Reminds me of a joke from an old 80s sitcom. The kid comes in and is like, “I'm tired of school, I'm quitting school.” Said, “You can't quit school. You're in the fifth grade. What are you going to do? What kind of job are you going to get?” “I'll teach fourth grade.” But apparently, that sort of thing can work. So then my question is, I'm an engineer, how do you do that intentionally on purpose? How do you create a system where it's community and teaching and learning is going? ISA: All of these things, they are still very up in the air. But one of the things is, were just transparent about it. We were like, if we don't have a teacher for next time, there won't be a workshop. So what you're going do? What are we going to do? What are you going to do? There's no guilt or anything to it, it's just we ask what we need and who can fill them will be able to fill them and I think that's what helps the most like, “Ah, we need someone to help with bootstrapping.” So this one person takes 2 hours of their day to help people bootstrap their environments on their laptops and then that's it, that's all they do. Now, they can go and have a drink or all these things. But we ask. Closed mouths don't get fed so we ask and we're transparent and we try to make goals reachable and we also support. So say, we need another organizer and workshop organizer, and anyone can do it because we have docs and a cookbook to create a workshop and we also have just other people who are genuinely ready to answer. I love the suggestion of a Discord because I really love that like real-time events stream there where you can just disassociate and disconnect from whatever happened before. So thank you for that. I'm going to bring that up. DAMIEN: It’s a fabulous answer. Being transparent about what you need and you open your mouth and ask for it. The best answers are simple and obvious in retrospect, I couldn't have come up with that. [laughter] CASEY: Another theme I heard was many hands make light work. If you only ask them to do a small amount of work, they don't mind it seems, that sounds right to me. ISA: Absolutely. Just like Greater Than Code, I really love the way you all scaled your panelists and all of that so not one person is stuck and beholden to making the thing run and it's still like we're people, we can't automate people to a certain extent. So I really appreciate [laughs] these little patterns that I'm seeing now that are reflective of the type of work we've been doing as well. DAMIEN: So there’s something I really want to talk about and we're not naturally getting there so I'm just going to jump. Pivoting from rock and roll to software engineering. How does one do that? How did you do that? ISA: Oh, I don't even know how I did it! But, let's try to break it down. Music and software have always been my two things to go to as a kid. I've been on AOL since 1992, you know what I mean? Nobody was paying for internet, but I had all these AOL disks and whenever I got a virus, I had to figure it out and reset my computer before my Mama knew, things like that just was always part of my life and music has always been a part of my life, too. I'm not a musician outside of high school band, but you don't have to be a musician to be music. I did a lot of things. I actually had a small music store in my twenties to fund my college. I had a little music business selling mixtapes in New York City in Times Square on 34th Street, on 14th Street all the way down and that helped me understand the relationship building I needed to learn in my twenties because you figure it out in your twenties. So that happened and then from there, I started getting commissions to create people's websites. “Do my website, do this, do that” for small businesses and that kept my tech ball rolling. So when I came back to SF, the tech industry was so far beyond all the WordPresses that I could make. It was like, how do I make this jump up into the real game of tech as an engineer while still making my ends meet? I found that music was my thing and indie music and SF is still real. I got a job at the Rosebud Booking Agency. Let me just give you a little thin; they put a real dent in American music. My boss, Mike Kappus, he managed John Lee Hooker, knows Howlin’ Wolf, all of the greats had to connect with Rosebud and to have that connection there was great because I learned all about the backend of the music business, all the paper pushing of the music business. When it came time for me to jump into my career as a software engineer, I literally found the app we wanted to make to replace what I did in music booking. I found the music booking app that needed my expertise in music booking and I traded that for some experience in Java, in full stack development. That's how I pivoted myself into software engineering. I used what I knew; I found the app that they were trying to make to monetize what I knew and to automate what I knew and voila, I became a software engineer for music booking agency called Gigwell. Shout out to Glade Luco, he’s an amazing developer and let me hang out. But that's how I did it; I just took what I knew and I found the app for it and I went to work for that app. CASEY: That's so cool. That's ingenious. How did you find this app? ISA: AngelList. [laughs] AngelList, that’s where all the startups register themselves when they need a thing or two. So just trying to also keep the things I love connected; music and tech. SF MusicTech conference was big around that time as well. Just anything can be made an app. Right, that's the joke. DAMIEN: No, I love it because there's an old joke about well, writing and dance and I believe it's true about software, too. You can't write about writing. You can, but there's very little cost for that. There's no cost for dancing about dancing. Software that's about software is mostly some of it's really great, but it's not what we need most so you have to combine it with something else and so, combining it with something you love sounds like a really great path. ISA: Yeah. Thanks and that's my suggestion to anybody trying to move into tech is to use what you know and find the people that need what you know and barter and trade what you need, because really, that's all we have are the resources that we carry and the resources that we share. LAURIE: I was just going to say, I think that's a really important point because a lot of people coming into tech, especially underrepresented people, are career changers. You're not necessarily going to differentiate yourself by being the fiftieth person who knows XYZ technology who's applying to the same job, but you end up differentiating yourselves by the skills that you have from your previous career, that someone who's brand new to the industry, brand new to any industry, just doesn't have. Someone who came right out of college doesn't have that perspective, doesn't have that context, hasn't worked in a 9 to 5 job environment before, that sort of thing. So whatever skillset you bring, whether it's “I have deep knowledge of retail,” or “I know how to juggle things from working in fast food,” or “I have managed,” or “I have an eye for design because I was in some sort of aesthetics place;” that is the thing that's going to make you stand out amongst that sea of people, if you're a career changer. I feel like we get really bogged down in interviews and conversations with what tech do you know. But most of the time, the thing that makes you good for a specific job has nothing to do with the tech they're using and everything to do with the context of the domain that you're working on that makes a difference. CASEY: Isa, what's a specific example of something that your unique background help with at that company? ISA: Oh, yes. Man, I love Gigwell, I just want to preface that. Gigwell is so dope because they are doing something, they're creating easy way for artists and managers to book their talent and the really unique thing that I knew was booking talent. Gigwell is comprised of DJs, too like Glade, the primary engineer, he's a DJ. But the demographic and audience that they were targeting were agencies and they didn't have that agency experience that I had, they didn't cycle through contract changes that I did, or they didn't have taped relationships with other vendors that booking agencies have. So they were missing pieces. They knew what they wanted, but they were just missing the little tactical pieces that needed to be glued together and for me to be there was to provide insights into that type of world while I was also coding in Java for the first time in my life, which was like, wow and Angular, I don't even know like, who does Angular now? I'm on Web Components now, though. I'm on team Web Components, if anybody else on team Web Components. Yes! DAMIEN: Yeah. So you had expertise in talent booking and that expertise is super valuable for people building software related to talent booking and this is so important because like Laurie said, the domain is the more important part of building software. Building software, I think the actual activity is understanding and codifying the domain. So it's much more important to have expertise on the domain than expertise in whatever silly tech stuff you're using. I also want to point out that if you have been in the workforce for twelve months, you have expertise in something and there are engineering teams that need that expertise. I worked at McDonald's for probably three months and there are things that there are people writing tech that needs to know those things. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter where you're doing it. If you've been in the workforce for twelve months, if you've been alive for 25 years, you have expertise in something and everything relates to tech somehow and so, there’s some way that you can contribute quite greatly to a tech team. ISA: Yeah! Thank you, Damien, for summarizing all of that. Goodness, I really appreciate that. DAMIEN: Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that was wonderful. CASEY: Imposter syndrome is a big theme and I know Isa, you've grappled with it before. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? ISA: Oh yeah, I love that. This year was a year I shed it all away; I shed all my technical imposter syndrome away. Part of being a Bridge sometimes makes you want to negotiate all of the things and this year was the year that I didn't negotiate some of my principles; engineering, my design, or my architectural choices. This year was the year that I stopped. Even though as a Bridge for me as a woman even, I've always had to negotiate everything that I've gotten, period, full stop. At the Internet Archive, what I love about it is that the organizational structure in engineering is quite flat. So the most experienced, the most fantastic, the most smart people that I work with are quite humble and have allowed me to be the expert in my little domain and because of that, I've gained a lot of confidence to stick up for my guns, stick up for my technical guns. It's very empowering and I'm glad that I've had a chance to actually be part of a supportive system, enough to be proud of my work, to the point where some things you just can't negotiate with me. Shout out to everybody who's helped me along the way with that, because really and also, I'm not a classically trained engineer so there may be some stigma there that I internalize that I no longer have because I've been allowed to be the domain expert in my little silo, my little tech silo I work. CASEY: I'm seeing a theme in your life, Isa. When you're getting support here, it feels great and you're empowered and you can do more things and you want to give support to people through the Bridge groups and get help them feel empowered and get started. That's beautiful. ISA: Thank you! DAMIEN: So since you brought up the Internet Archive, I'm going to take that as permission to ask about something more technical where you have experience and domain expertise and I don’t. [laughter] Are you working with a codebase that’s old enough to drink? [30:17] ISA: Yes! [laughs] DAMIEN: What’s that like? ISA: It's a wild ride. God, I love it. I love our monolith. It's a giant, giant monolith, maybe 10 gigabytes on our bad days. On our good days, I say too much more about that. But one of the analogies that I love about – yes, exactly Casey, 10 gigabytes of code. CASEY: 10 gigabytes of code? I can't imagine what it looks like. How can a human read it? LAURIE: How can your IDE process it? [laughter] No IntelliSense view! DAMIEN: [inaudible 00:30:58] get there? ISA: Yeah. I don't know anything about it, but the thing builds for me well and there's all these processes, these homegrown internet processes, that have been already established before I've gotten there so everything kind of works pretty well-ish. But for me, I have a couple of analogies when I work on that codebase. One is that it's a big fluffy beast that you feed from time to time and then it lets you warm yourself up and it purrs. [laughs] I don't know if you all watched The Last Airbender and there's this kid, his name is Aang. He has a big, giant wooly flying beast. DAMIEN: Sky bison. ISA: Yes, sky bison! [inaudible 00:31:46] in it, you know what I mean? [laughs] So there is that part of it. Also too, this codebase has so many little ecosystems and villages in it. So for me, it's like I'll watch Beauty and the Beast. Have y'all seen Disney's Beauty and the Beast? When Belle goes in and starts singing her “little town, full of quiet people,” and then she starts naming all the people that make the village run? Just like that, there's a baker over there cooking up some dev ops, [laughs] there's all these other people working in it to create this ecosystem and that's how I negotiate through that giant behemoth is if I'm in a place where I don't know, let me go ask the butcher just so he can cut me up some bones to fill my API requests. [laughs] I really think it's the people that make the code and to be part of something that has such a strong legacy and that is continuously built to outlast us is one of my favorite things about working at the Archive. I'm just a steward there and I have to do my best to get this code in shape before my story ship ends and I will fight for it because I know that the patterns, I create now will outlast me. DAMIEN: Yeah, a village and an ecosystem. We think of us classically trained engineers, we think of engineering like he designed something and he builds it like a skyscraper and it's got all of these plans and structures. My business partner likes to talk about code as being grown as a gardening metaphor, but this is bigger than the garden, it's like a small nation. ISA: [laughs] Yeah, kind of. 10 gigabytes of a small nation. [laughs] We cultivate our internet from the ground up. This is some real homegrown internet from networking all the way up to my little lab components at the top and then everything in between, everything sidecar in between is built to help archive humanity. DAMIEN: And it lives and it operates as culture and communities. ISA: Yeah. Absolutely, 100% because we're also trying to capture communities, right? The whole country of Aruba put their library up on the Internet Archive during the pandemic and now we have the largest collection of books written in a native language called Papiamento on the internet for anyone to learn. DAMIEN: Wow. ISA: Things like that. I just think we're just trying to mirror what we see in people and the humanity—I keep saying the word humanity like it’s some ad cliché, but it is what it is. This is the most unprecedented time in our lives and the internet is more important than ever. How do we keep it from being homogenized? How do we keep it funky like it was in the 90s? I want to keep it funky! So how do I help with that? DAMIEN: This is so amazing. Do you feel like this is a bit of Conway's law in action? Conway's law, I'm going to define it, especially because I might be using the wrong term, is the idea that a software code base replicates the organization of the people that created it. So in this case, with the Internet Archive being first of all, a community of itself, people that are very much in community, and secondly, in public as a cause of that, because they're very much about community, culture, and human community and culture, they reflect that and so, then the code base also reflects that. ISA: Hell yeah. You cannot separate the people from the written work. Code is prose is poetry is all, is now. Our business decisions are representative of now, but also, representative of the future. One of the things that really shook with me this year was—I'm just going to say it—was Brewster is our head guy at the Internet Archive. That's his thing. He's our main librarian there, he's their top leader and it's really inspiring for me to listen to him speak because he's also an engineer and a librarian. One of the things that he said to all of us was how do we scale for time, continue to scale for time. You’re just not scaling for incoming requests you're scaling for time, literally and I think that position, that mental position, allows us more flexibility to think and be true to our technical choices and fight for them, too. It's no cakewalk; I have a team and we're all highly opinionated. So how can we distill all of the goodness from everybody in order to get to where we need to be? DAMIEN: I also love that that's the criteria you use for making your technical decisions. It's like, will this outlast me? ISA: Yeah. It's the best. It's the most comforting of all of my fences. Will this outlast me and how can we make sure it does? Like the BookReader, some of this code is over 12 years old and it's still running and it's running strong and it had to do things in a UI that wasn't available and now we have more hands to move it out of jQuery 1.10 into the new world of dynamic imports and browser native API, APIs, et cetera so we can get to holodecks. I'm trying to get the holodecks. We're closer to Star Trek holodeck than we were last year. [laughs] CASEY: Yeah, that's a vision and to capture all of human culture and history so that we can have good holodeck when we get them. ISA: Yeah. All that metadata, structure it. Structure it well, y'all! [laughs] DAMIEN: I can't help but think about how the Internet Archive, you mentioned the guy in charge of the librarian and it's a librarian project; it's very much about the organization. Growing up, you think of librarians as about Dewey decimal system and putting books in the right place, which it is, but that's a tiny piece of a giant and incredibly difficult science, which is information organization. The organization of knowledge of humanity, which is a lot of what I think I do and a lot of us do on with software. ISA: I feel like that every day when I get to work. It's like, wow. There is a certain responsibility I feel and I'm just happy to be mission aligned with some really good folks with RailsBridge, with Bridge Foundry, with the Internet Archive; with all of the grassroots things that I do. Everybody's hit by this pandemic and San Francisco is dealing with high overdoses, tech flight, people fleeing, all of these things and every day I'm just working to help my little community, my hyper-local community. I'm buying eggs every day in extreme markups so I can go help the restaurants that I love so much, things like that. I see that type of kindness with the people I work with and that's very empowering. CASEY: Isa, we're getting near the end of our time. Is there anything else that you want to share with us that we didn't get to cover yet? ISA: No, I think I just had a really good time talking to y'all. I really wish that I could have asked you more questions for sure. Have our moments, have more moments, but I'm okay. Hopefully, I can connect you with y'all on LinkedIn and we could be friends on Twitter and we can do all the digital things that we do. DAMIEN: Absolutely. This also sounds like a great time to plug the Greater Than Code Slack channel where we invite all of our guests and also, is open to our patrons, but I hope to see you there and get to know you better there. LAURIE: So one of the things we like to do at the end of each episode is to have everyone who's been involved in the episode go around and talk about what really stood out for them and reflect on something that they're going to take away from this conversation. So let's start with Damien, do you want to go first? DAMIEN: I will go first. I think the big standout for me and it goes all the way into your work, Isa is the focus on community over architecture. Architecture being the idea that we can build something that's nice, neat, structured, that we understand, and it will stand the test of time versus how human society, technology, and culture has been built for the past 5,000 years, which is through culture, community, communication, and that sort of thing. It feels very messy to—I like that term classically trained—classically trained people who feel like they can put everything in a box and stack boxes on top of each other and that's just so not how the world works. CASEY: The takeaway I have is this theme of community and mentorship that we keep coming back to all episode. If you want to learn something new, it's a really good idea to find a community to get support from and then once you get the support, you're well-equipped to give it back to the same community. That's like the RailsBridge model and I think that could apply to so many things. I'm going to ever try to remember that and to apply that in other groups that I'm in. ISA: With this episode, y’all have really helped me with just talking to other engineers about non-code. It's quite challenging when you are actually in the thick of the code and doing the work, doing your everyday work to step back and have discussions around other topics, but can still have that engineering mindset. I don't really talk to a lot of engineers outside of my work and Twitter isn't the best place to connect [chuckles] at this level and so, I really appreciate the vulnerability and openness that you three have given me. I love the way Greater Than Code stays sustainable, keeps yourself sustainable, and I think that you're right, that whole thread of community and sustainability, I really appreciate that all of you pick an hour or so to hang out and chat with me, but then now we can all just drop our stuff and go on with our merry way afterwards. So I really love that, I love that everyone is okay to just do a little bit and then do something else after. LAURIE: I love that. So I guess, I'll finish up with reflections with the idea that I think we know that we're all adjusting right now, but every time I talked to someone new, I realize a different way, a different organization, or a different group of people that's finding new ways to collaborate in this remote pandemic world. I love that because sometimes you hear challenges, but so often, you're hearing new opportunities and it's nice to know that there may be some benefits that even when we're all allowed to be in the same place together again, there are things that we've learned and we've improved upon so we'll get the best of both worlds going forward. An uncomfortable situation can sometimes force us into better outcomes. DAMIEN: Isa, thank you so much for joining us. It was a real pleasure to have you and I hope we get to hear from one more later. ISA: Yeah. Thanks again, y'all. I mean, it's just a pleasure to be here with y'all and have honest conversation with some like-minded people. DAMIEN: Awesome.