Moran Weber is the CEO of Women on Stage. She helps women prepare for and speak on stages at conferences in technology and other related areas. She joins the Jabber panel this week to discuss women's place in technology, the importance of them appearing at conferences, and the outcomes of women in the technology space.

Special Guest: Moran Weber .

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week we're gonna do our intros a little bit different and this came as a request from our guests and a suggestion from Amy that we do a little bit longer intro, which is a great idea since we really haven't done that in a while. So before we introduce our guests, we're all gonna introduce ourselves. And so, yeah, we'll just go around the table and have everybody give a little bit of background who they are. And that way you can kind of put a little bit more of who we are with the voice that comes out of your headphones or whatever you're listening on, your car speakers, I guess. Let's go ahead and start with, I guess we should go in order of seniority. I'm gonna go last though, cause I feel special.

 

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: AJ, why don't you introduce yourself first? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Okay, I'll do it. So, well, first of all, I want to say Moan. If Moran? I don't feel free to interrupt and ask questions because we're doing this a lot on your request, which I think is a great idea. So I don't want to just monologue. Feel free to butt in and ask anything. So my name's AJ. I have lived in Utah for the past decade or so that's where I met Chuck. I think I was presenting at a conference or a meetup or something and he and I got talking and then emails exchanged words happened and then all of a sudden I was on a podcast. And so I've been here since the beginning, but with a few hiatus is here and there as I've pursued other projects that have taken away my time. I started, I started learning. I'm ashamed to admit this. Well, no, I can go back one further that I'm not as ashamed of. I started learning with basic. I think it was Q basic. I did a little bit of that on the calculator as well in high school to solve problems and stuff. I then got a job out of high school. My official title was AV Tech, but what I actually was was the network technician and I managed the computer lab and I got everything fixed in the school. And so then I had a lot of free time. And so I started learning, and my SQL. And then from that, I went to college and rub shoulders with some people that told me I should learn Python. And so I started a little, learning a little bit of that. And then Ruby was the hotness. Everything was something on rails, something on rails. What is this rails all about? So I learned a little bit of that. And then I was at a Ruby meetup and somebody said, you guys have got to check out this no JS. And I'm like, what the heck is no JS? And I'd been dabbling with jQuery. I was actually at the time, way before the time, people would call me an idiot because I was talking about what we now call single page apps. And they were calling me names, dirty mean names. Cause I was talking about something that was weird and foreign. Now it's what everybody does. But I was familiar with a little bit of jQuery. So I knew about JS and I was like, what is no JS? And when I, when I was introduced to node and I understood how the event loop worked and how it solves all these problems that you have in Ruby and Python. I was hooked. And so that kind of bootstrap my career at the same time. And I dropped out of school to pursue a job in node. And that was way fun and a great experience. I did some consulting. And I also picked up Golang around the same time, but I kept it on the back burner because I could tell with the rise of jQuery that node was going to get all the hype, but I was rooting for go. So I was learning a little bit of it the whole time and I dabbled in a little bit of Russ now and that's kind of my language experience and I'm a father of one and a half, but don't tell nobody knows yet. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Congratulations. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Thanks. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: AJ, my wife and I decided we didn't want kids, but my kids weren't happy when I told them.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: You tell them when you try to give them back, right? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, there was a no return policy by the store, unfortunately. So yeah, there you go. 

AJ_O’NEAL: One other note, I'll add I am the show's contrarian. So I'm the one that asks the hard questions makes you bleed. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, he's he's mean to our guests. 

MORAN_WEBER: I'm a little scared now. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. All right. Amy has been on the show the next longest, I believe. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Crazy. Yeah, I think it's been six years or so, something like that. Because it's been- 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Wow, that's amazing. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Seven years since I finished, well, it's coming up on seven years since I finished the bootcamp. So seven years will be in August or something. Let's see. So I did JavaScript for most of my career, probably still doing JavaScript, but the past year or so have made a transition into DevOps. So that's what I'm doing now and still doing some. JavaScript maintenance on like internal applications and stuff. But let's see, most people know me as like this girl who used to finger skate, how did I meet people here? So I came to JavaScript Jabber by way of Joe Eames, I think, and Jamison Dance used to be here. I met them at an, what was it? ng-conf. And let's see. And that kind of was like the voice of the junior developer, I think for a while, and I still try to be, but maybe sometimes forget. I don't think that, no, I've never met AJ in person. I have met Dan in person. We met the fluent conf, was that three years ago now? Four years ago, something like that. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, something like that. It's thanks to that that I'm actually on this podcast. But yeah, that's when we met. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: And then I have met Chuck a couple of times because I used to work at a place called Kuali in Salt Lake City and Chuck and I went to dinner and he's been out here to Nashville and I haven't met Steve, unfortunately. I don't know. What else is there about me? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Fortunately, as the case may be. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Many people know me as like the cat lady. I have two cats that are not my children. 

MORAN_WEBER: I remember when when Dan met you, because I think he returned back home and then he he approached me and told me I met this phenomenal lady. Oh, yeah. I. So do you remember that Dan? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I think I do.

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Was it actually about me? Somebody else? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: No, I Look, uh, we are kind of going to touch on that. I think as part of the podcast, but it has to do with under representation of certain groups in speaking communities and I really liked the fact that you were there. Let's put it this way And and and and that you brought a lot of value and content In so it wasn't just about you being a girl. It was about you being an excellent speaker who happened to be a girl. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I tried, I tried because I you know first talk I did was like a soft skill talk and I was like man talk is great and everything but I don't want to be known like for that forever. I need to prove myself technically so yeah I'm glad that the talk was good. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Good deal. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: That's about it. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right Steve and Dan I'm not sure who joined next. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I think I was before Dan slightly. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I don't remember. All right go ahead Steve.

STEVE_EDWARDS: All right. So I won't bore everybody with my long development history. Let's just say it goes back about 26 years and there's an episode. I first came in contact with Chuck when he opened up invites for my JavaScript story. So I can put a link to that episode 78 back a couple of years ago, I think. Started out doing tech support work in banking software for 10 years and then started studying web development on my own and got into PHP and MySQL like AJ a little bit and lived in the Drupal world for a number of years. And then starting about five years ago, started learning Angular and then moved from when Angular went from one to two, I moved over to Vue and had been primarily doing Vue developments. And over the past few months, been diving into the Laravel world, which is a PHP framework. And then views on Vue, actually we did an episode a few months ago with my boss on how we use Vue and Laravel, you know, very large complex enterprise environment. I listened to in terms of podcasting, I started listening to Adventures in Angular back in the day. We talked about this on episode 400 of JavaScript Jabber to Chuck, if I remember correctly, listening to like Dan Walleen and John Papa and you and Joe Eames and a lot of those people. And then you opened up people for my JavaScript story and I probably was one of the first people to make a reservation. And then I kept bugging you and bugging you about joining. And then the opportunity came up. So I jumped on the podcast and have been spreading the deadpan humor and dad jokes as best as I can ever since then. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. The world needs more dad jokes. Don't ask my kids about that. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Oh, you're going to like my pick today. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. All right, Dan, how about you? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, I think I've got the longest career by far. Let's just put it this way. I started my professional career before there was a web. So I think that puts it in perspective. I was also one of those kids that loved to dabble in computers way back when computers had 4K of RAM. And, but from that point on, really, my career kind of became quote-unquote conservative because I went to university, I did a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's degree in computer science. JavaScript was like this seventh or eighth programming language that I actually got around to using. So I got to it with a bit of experience, but I do have a sort of quote-unquote claim to fame there. And I think I developed one of the world's first, we might call it rich offline-capable web applications back in the late nineties, which was, which actually predates Ajax. So that's kind of crazy that you did that sort of thing. I've been doing web on and off since then, mostly on since I joined Wix six years ago, and I'm still there. I'm currently the performance tech lead at Wix, which means I have a responsibility for making something like 200 million websites load and execute faster, which is quite astounding, and it's actually becoming a noticeable percentage of the web. Other than that, like Steve, Chuck interviewed me for my JavaScript stories. So if these weird experiences sound interesting, there'll be a link in the show notes. Oh, and like Amy mentioned, we met on O'Reilly's Fluent Conference that got me as a guest on JavaScript Jabber. I really enjoyed myself. So I asked to be a guest again. And then I was asked by Chuck, I think, to join as a panelist. And I jumped on the opportunity because I really like it a lot. 

AJ_O’NEAL: One of the best things that happened to the show. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Thank you very much. You're making me blush. You can't see it because I turned off my video, but you're making me blush. And that's about it. So now it's your turn, Chuck. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yes, we do. You had quite the Israeli influx since you came on, Dan. We have a number of guests from Tel Aviv. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, that's true. Although I think my primary focus so far is to just to bring Googlers on board. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Googler recently made fun of me that it's like I'm like collecting, what's their name? You got to catch them all. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Pokemon.

DAN_SHAPPIR: That like people collect Pokemon, I collect Googlers. But yeah, so. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, that recent episode we had. The recent episode we had with the DevRel from Search was awesome. 

DA: Yeah, I agree. And also the Drecording. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I think that, is that the one? We did the two-parter. We had to split it into two parts. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, that's the one with the DevRel. That's the one with Martin Splitt. That was the one. Yeah, I agree. That was excellent. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: All those Googlers run together after a while.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. Well, it's, it's funny too, because most of the shows, the, the regular hosts usually boil down to either guests that came on and made an impression. So I asked them to come back or people that come on the show and then ask to come back. It's, it's usually one or one or the other, right? They, they asked to be a host on the show and I think about it and go, yeah, they were, they were good. And so then I invite them back.

STEVE_EDWARDS: That reminds me, because I remember listening to AJ, I was going to say, and I forgot to mention this, I listened to the two A's, AJ and Amy, for quite a while on either their Angular, it mentions an Angular JavaScript jabber here. So it was like, you know, when like a basketball player comes into the NBA and gets to work with his idols and play with his idols, that's what's, that's what it was like for me, you know, when I actually came on to host. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I think that's the first nice thing you've ever said to me.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Don't let it go to your head. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: At least on the air. Yeah, I've said nice things off the air, I think. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. Well, and AJ and Amy have not been regulars on Adventures in Angular, so. But we'll put that out there. So yeah, so my story, and you know, I've told my story in a few other places, so I'm not gonna go too long into it. When I was a kid though, my grandpa was always tinkering with stuff. He was one of the engineers that they called in to figure out what happened after the Challenger blew up in the 1980s, figure out what happened with that solid rocket booster that blew up. And he actually invented a laser machine that would examine the side of the solid rocket booster, make sure it was clean before they put the solid rocket booster fuel in it. Because that was part of the issue was that it wasn't clean and it created a pocket where hot gas could gather and potentially cause an explosion. And then if the O-rings were weakened, which was the other part of the problem, it could actually ruptured the solid rocket booster and explode. And so he actually engineered part of the solution when he was working for Rockwell International. But he got me excited about tech when I was a kid, taught me how to solder. He had one of those awesome old Radio Shack computers, right, that the keyboard slid out of. And anyway, so I've always been interested in technology did some programming in as a teenager. I always thought that it was kind of a toy though. I never took it seriously until I actually got my first job out of college. And we needed a solution to help manage our workload. I was working support for a company called Mozi here in Utah. And so we actually built that solution in Ruby on Rails. And that's when I realized, hey, this is useful. And it's fun. And Ruby on Rails is awesome. So I started listening to podcasts about the same time. And so of course, I wanted to do a podcast about Ruby on Rails. So I contacted Greg Pollock, who was one of the people I was listening to at the time. He later went on to start View School and Code School, and he's involved in a bunch of other stuff now. But he encouraged me to start a podcast. So I started a podcast talking about Ruby on Rails and moved up in my Rails career. I went freelance in 2010, started Ruby Rogues in 2011. So in a month, Ruby Rogues will pass 10 years of consistent production of that show. And we are pretty close. We're pretty close to 500 episodes. JavaScript Jabber will pass 10 years in January. So just to give some perspective there. Started a bunch of other shows. I mean, it's just been this wild ride. I'm currently working for a fairly large company that has a satellite office here in Utah. I grew up here. I grew up in Utah County. I live in Utah County now. And yeah I just, it's been this amazing ride for the last 15 years that I've been professionally coding and podcasting and I wouldn't have it any other way. So, and also just to give a little bit of background. So nine years and change ago, we started RubyRogues and Jamison came to me and wanted to start a show like RubyRogues except for JavaScript. And we started talking about what that would look like. And I tried to help him get it started. And eventually I just took over and we got it started is more or less how that went. AJ was one of our first panelists and it just kind of took off from there and it became more it's, it's our currently our most popular show. So this is, this is the show. It accounts for about half of the traffic on devchat.tv and yeah, it's just fun to be involved and see what's going on out there in the web world. So anyway, that's, that's my journey to date at this point. I'm working on training new influencers to come up in the dev space. I feel like as much as we see new podcasts starting and things like that, we need more positive voices out there influencing people. I think that's a large part of what we're talking about today. We need people of all kinds doing all kinds of things. And so that's what I'm about at this point is making sure that a devchat.tv has the content that's going to help people be top end devs which is kind of a phrase that I'm pointing at this point for people who are coming up into dev. And that means that we need more dev influencers. And you can find out more about dev influencers at devinfluencers.com and devinfluencers.com slash podcast. I'm launching the dev influencers podcast this week as we record this. So the timing is perfect. But anyway, that's what I'm doing now. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Are you gonna put them on Instagram so they can be Instagram influencers too? Or just like modeling JavaScript IDEs or something like that maybe?

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: You're hurting me. You stop hurting me, Steve. Anyway, so that's where we're at. We're already a half hour in, but Moran is our guest. Did I get anywhere close on that R? 

MORAN_WEBER: Yeah, that was perfect. Great. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So Moran Weber, yeah, speaking of Israeli influence. Yeah. You're here to help us talk about influencing being on stage, all that stuff. Do you want to just fill us in as far as like what your expertise is and, and what you bring to the table?

MORAN_WEBER: So hi everyone. I'm really, really happy to be here today. And thanks for the, for the long introduction. I feel like I know you a lot better now. So I'm, uh, I've been a software developer for the past, well, officially 11 years, but I actually started with HTML and Pascal, uh, when I was, it was, I think early 2000, but I didn't. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Interesting combination.

MORAN_WEBER: I was in high school. I didn't know what I'm doing, but that was the way I started back then. But anyway, I didn't consider myself as a coder. I didn't even know what I'm doing. But other than that, so I've been coding and I've been a software developer, mainly JavaScript, but I've been through also Java and now I'm going to say it quietly, flex, which is really, really old. So I've been doing a lot of those, but that's, that's not the only thing that I'm doing. And today I'm actually, today I'm actually an entrepreneur. And I forgot to say I have another, another skill set that I was, I used to be pretty shy about, but I'm also a psychologist. I'm a social psychologist and I have a master's degree in social psychology. And for a long time, I was very bothered by that. I used to keep that to myself. I was ashamed. I thought that makes me less technical. But a few years ago, I participated in presentation skills workshop. I forgot to say I used to work at Wix. I know Dan from Wix, we were colleagues back then. And a few years ago, I participated a presentation skills workshop. And I think it really, that workshop pretty much changed my life because I was working in a male dominant, male dominant world and I was suffering from imposter syndrome and I used to think that I'm a fraud and I considered myself as an introvert. I remember myself always sitting in meetings in the back being too scared to speak my mind that someone will find out that I shouldn't really be here, that I'm just fraud. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: If I can interject, I have to say as a colleague that you're an excellent developer. I've seen your code. So it was definitely a syndrome. Let's put it this way. It wasn't an actual thing. Well, it is an actual thing, but it wasn't a thing in the real world. It wasn't the fact that you were actually limited in your capabilities. It was apparently more of a perception on your part. 

MORAN_WEBER: Thank you, Dan. I'm blushing now. I wish it was that simple because I think that even if someone would have told me that back then, and there were people who told me that back then. I would tell them, no, you're mistaken. I shouldn't be here. And that's, you know, someone will find out I shouldn't be here. And that's why I wanted to talk about today, to talk about public speaking because that presentation skills workshop I attended really changed my life. Because I think many developers, and not just women, but many developers are introverts and they always think they have, they don't have anything interesting to say. And they always think, well, the things I'm doing are trivial and everybody knows that that's piece of cake. And I think it relates to what you're doing Chuck, that we want to create more influencers because there are people out there who are doing magnificent things and really, really interesting things, and they have to talk about it. It can be in podcasts, it can be on stage, they can write blogs, but if they don't speak their mind metaphorically or physically, people won't know. And I came to realize in that workshop that I do have something something interesting for other people as well. And it was really surprising to me because I remember I sat in a very round table and everyone was looking at me like, wow, she really knows what she's talking about. And I was surprised by that. So to make a long story short, and I want to have you guys ask me some questions, but. I started after that workshop, I started to speak in local meetups in Tel Aviv. And I became a meetup organizer. And I was accepted to a few big, very big conferences. And I was standing on stage in front of 800 people. Two, I was really, really shocked to see everyone cheering me on after, you know, one year before that, I didn't even think I could never imagine, I could never have dreamed that that's where I'll be. So when I said I'm an entrepreneur, I decided I want to about a year and a half ago. I decided I want to try things out for myself. And I was working, I started working on something else, but I had another side project that I call Women on Stage. I was really bothered for a very long time that many tech conferences and meetups aren't diverse enough. And the people there always used to say, well, we've looked, but there aren't any relevant women, or we don't know anyone who knows about this subject. And I actually wanted to prove them wrong. So I started building a little side project, which is like a marketplace for women speakers to register themselves and then event organizers can find them and invite them to speak at their events. And the next thing I knew, it grew really, really fast. And from that little side project, that's what I'm doing today. And I think it's really about creating more influencers. And I want to create, especially I want to create more women influencers, because I think those voices are important and we need to hear their stories and we need more role models. So that's my story. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I think that you also recently organized a conference, correct? 

MORAN_WEBER: Right, yeah. Other than as part of the Women on Stage platform, we also do training. We have a very big course for training software developers as public speakers. And at the end of the course, we have, we recently had a very, very big conference where each of our participants has built and polished their own presentation. And so we actually gave them the stage to, to show what they learned, what they've learned was amazing. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I, I want to jump in here. I honestly, I could sit here and fanboy for the rest of the episode. I mean, I am super impressed, but I think you've said some things that are really, really important that I just want to drive home to people. And one of the first ones is, is that honestly, you definitely have something to share. Okay. It doesn't matter if you're new. It doesn't matter if you are, you've been doing this for a long time or anywhere in between. You have something you can share. There's something that you've done. There's something that you have fought through. There's something that you have lived through. Your experience is different from mine. It's different from Dan's. It's different from morons is different from Amy's is different from anybody else's. And your perspective on something may be, even though I've been programming for 10 gazillion years and you know, Dan's been programming for a gazillion billion years beyond that, right? Your perspective may open his eyes or my eyes to something else that is going to enable us. But the other thing is, is that, and, and this is something because you talked about, we need role models and we need you brought up the issue of diversity. And for a long time, I really thought this idea. And I think part of the reason is because there's some really toxic people out there that go on the attack on people that disagree with them on this. But the reality is, is that I have talked to so many people and I've been trying to bring my kids into this, right? And what they want to see is they want to see people that they have something in common with. And one of the easiest things to see people that have something in common with you are the outward things. And it seems really shallow, but it matters, right? It matters because people see it. Okay. And so if you, if you have one of those outward appearance things that people are going to recognize that person is like me, then you can be a role model. And if you get up and you speak about anything that helps somebody else along the way. It is going to matter and it is going to make that impact. And we need you to be out there being that kind of influencer. Okay. The thing is, is just be out there, be positive, be helpful, and be the kind of person that people want to gravitate to. And mostly that's just being yourself. Be excited about the things you're excited about. Be the kind of person that you naturally are. And a lot of this will just come through and then go find somebody like Moran or, or other people that are out there but no kind of the finer points of getting out there and speaking. Anyway, this is just, it's so important. And this is kind of the thing that's been lighting me up for the last few months is that we need it. We need it so badly. And we have so many people that are out there and they're just looking for that one person that they can latch on to and say, okay, I'm just going to follow them because they seem to be wherever it is I want to go or just a step or two ahead of me. And we need you there. And that's it.

MORAN_WEBER: I think people are, and this is the psychologist speaking now, people, they look up to people who look like them, who they feel like they are similar to them. I mean, about role models, sometimes it's not good enough to have a role model who's too famous or too big because they're too far from you. I mean, you can't even imagine yourself going there, you need someone less famous or like a realistic role model, I would say. And it's really, really, really important. I can't stress this enough. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, I had that issue. Like I said, I used to listen to AJ and Amy and Chuck and just have this image of them as just being these amazing, godlike developers. And then once I got to know them, I realized, well, I'm actually not so far from them, so I could do all right here. So. So yeah, I know I know exactly what you're talking about 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, the other thing I want to add on to that though Is that sometimes the role model thing will go beyond the outward stuff? so sometimes it'll start out that way or sometimes you'll go to the conference and you don't really see any talks from anybody that you're really identifying with none of the topics really appeal to you so you'll go sit in a talk, right and you may be way into Star Wars or Marvel Comics or electronics or something like that. Right. And so you go sit in the talk and within the first 10 minutes, that speaker will say something Marvel comics and you'll realize they don't look like me. They didn't grow up in the same country. I did. Their native language isn't the same native language as me, but I really identify with all of the Marvel comics. The referencing and half of them are things that people don't get. Right. And that's the other thing that I'm trying to put forward is you have to be yourself. Right. And all the quirky stuff that makes you quirky is it's perfect, right? And so what happens is, and I've seen this over and over again at conferences, right? You see two people and you look at them and you're thinking they are the most unlikely duo you would ever imagine. And they're over there laughing in the corner because they're some obscure comic book character that they both love. And they're sitting there laughing their heads off at the latest edition of the comic book, right? So honestly, just go out there and be yourself. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, I know one of my ways to connect with people is people who are also fans of that cult classic better off dead. Great movie. Anyway, who dollars I want my $2 that was skiing this weekend. We're using the quote about go that way really fast. If something gets in your way turn. But anyway, I, 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: do you know I had two years this mountain? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yes. I had two shirts with both of those phrases on them actually, but I digress. So Moran you were talking about diversity and seeing somebody that, that looks like you. And so, that's something that I hear quite a bit, and not just in terms of technology, but in other places in the news or around the world. And so I guess what I'm curious about, since you have the social psychology background, is let's say that I have, I'm like you, I'm a woman, okay? And I see if I was to watch a talk on the exact same subject from two different people, one looks like me, and one doesn't look like me. It's a white guy or it's an Indian guy or whatever, something that makes them different. Why is it the one, why is it that the exact same talk, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but why is it that the same talk from someone who looks like me is going to have more impact than the same tech talk from somebody who doesn't look like me? Because you think, or is that incorrect? 

MORAN_WEBER: That's correct. That's actually, well, it depends. It's not so black and white-tone thing, but. But basically, you would see yourself... I think that the one that looks like you has a better chance for imagining yourself out there. It doesn't mean that you have to be in their place, but it has a better chance for you to feel like you're like them. But it's not, as I said, it's not so straightforward it depends on other things as well. It depends on race and it depends on the accent and where our culture and where you're from. So it's not so simple. And age, age group as well. So it's not that gender is the first thing that you would see. But usually we tend to correspond and we tend to see ourselves in people that look like us. That's as simple as that. 

 

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DAN_SHAPPIR: I also think that it has to do that it's especially true when you belong to a more marginalized group in a particular context. That you know if you're part of the majority then everybody kind of looks like you. It's when you're not part of the majority in a particular context that these things kind of matter more. But I actually want to take the discussion in a different kind of direction because we've been talking about the benefits that you as a person can bring to the community by putting yourself out there and obviously these benefits also rebound back on you. But my question is this, given especially what you started the conversation talking about, which is the imposter syndrome. A lot of times I try to convince people to talk at meetups, maybe come on this podcast, maybe even start blogging. And very often I get pushback. Sometimes it's because people feel like they don't have anything interesting to say Sometimes it's because they acknowledge that they might have something interesting to say but they're just too scared to say it. So my question is how do you go through this process? From what I've seen you can't push people on stage maybe you can pull them on to the stage, but to be honest I'm not exactly sure what the best way is to go about it. 

MORAN_WEBER: Okay

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: This is more common than you think, by the way, because I run into this all the time, too. 

MORAN_WEBER: Do you want to take that, Chuck? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, I want to hear your answer because I don't always have an answer that works. 

MORAN_WEBER: Okay. So I think it's also not so easy to answer that, but I think there are many ways that you can make people more comfortable with stepping out of their comfort zone. With regards to the stage fright is the most common fear human beings have. The evolution has made us this way. It is very scary. So there is, according to some research, most people are more scared to be on stage than the number one fear is stage fright, ahead of death and ahead of spiders. So it's very, very common and it's very natural to be scared and to be all, you know, the adrenaline is running and your heads are sweaty. So you need to acknowledge that it's perfectly normal. But the way to overcome it is not by letting it managing you. You need to manage that stage fright. You need to use it and you need to use it to become better at what you do. So at first, before you start, before you do your first time, you need to really, really, really practice. You need to really, really consider all of the alternative things that might go wrong. And you need to think about all of the scenarios that you need to really practice and be prepared for anything that might go wrong. And you might still be surprised. But if you narrow down the things that scare you, if you memorize the beginning, if you start by doing one little thing at a time, don't just go to the biggest tech conference on your first time. Pick a friendly audience, talk at a local meetup with people you know, talk to your friends. You need to do it one step at a time and you need to to get comfortable, not comfortable, because if you're too comfortable, then I think I'm still excited every time. When I say I'm telling people to be up on stage, it's not that I don't have that fear anymore, I do. Even today, before we started the podcast, I mean, I still get all excited, but it's easier from time to time. And when I see that things aren't so bad as I thought. I learned from my mistakes. I learned from, and I learned to get better at it. So it gets easier. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, I'll jump in here. One thing that I've noticed in both little and big cases, both speaking at large tech conferences and just in smaller situations is that people don't expect you to be perfect. And in fact, they probably appreciate it when you're not perfect. If you get up on stage and your computer doesn't work, or your presentation isn't displaying on the screen, you know, your dongle's not working, whatever the case may be, and you just sort of work through it, and if you sort of have a sense of humor about it, and then you get it going, they appreciate that. They see, look, I don't have to be perfect. Here's this guy who's a great, well-known speaker, and something screwed up for him, and he handled it. But it makes you more approachable, I think more human as somebody, because you don't have to have this perfectly produced and scripted presentation where everything just works flawless. They have anything that intimidates people. If you sort of let people in behind the curtain and say, yeah, I have struggles with getting presentations put together too, then that's gonna make you that much more approachable because they can see that things don't go perfectly for even these people too. And then the second thing is one thing I noticed over a number of years is I try to use the sense of humor and whenever I can. And I would go to things like, company picnics or be in other public places where I would notice that the people who said, screw this, I'm going to put myself out there and have fun. Everybody just loved them as compared to the ones like, oh, I'm so afraid I'm going to make a fool of myself. The first one that struck me was a company picnic for a large company that I worked for when I first got into software. We had this picnic and they had a karaoke machine. This guy got out there and just put it all out there doing twist and shout by the Beatles. Everybody loved it. He just had a great time. I was like, OK, this is fun. He was having fun. And so when I was in college, I spent a semester living down in Mexico. And where I lived had this huge international arts and arts festival lasted two weeks. And it was all through the center of this town, you know, just things going all over the place. And in the middle of this town square, there was this place where these mimes would come out and do these shows and it would pull people out of the audience to do different things to act on scene. And I'm watching there being a six foot blonde guy really stood out like a sore thumb in the middle of Mexico. And so I was at this one presentation, this one thing in the middle of the town square one night and some friends of mine were like, hey, go get out there. They're great out there. And so they pulled me out there and they wanted everybody to go through and do this acting some little thing, acting, you know, sort of stupid. And so there's a couple of people went before me and they were timid and embarrassed. And I got out there totally handed up crowd loved it. I got to the end and they were all applauding, yeah, he's the best one. He's the best one. Because I didn't care. Like, I didn't care about looking stupid. I just wanted to have fun. And so when you put yourself out there, when you show that you're human, when you are willing to make mistakes on stage, and let it all hang out there, they love it. Because that makes you that much more approachable, that much more human. And then they're realizing, hmm, if that happens to me, maybe it's not so bad after all. And that would give them a little more courage to, to get up on stage.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I want to pile on this too. I mean, a lot of this fear is the same fear that we were talking about before with kind of the diversity discussion. People want to belong, right? They want to belong. I mean, that's why when people walk in the room, they're looking at who do I belong with or who's like me, right? And yeah, so people will gravitate by interest. They'll gravitate by gender. They'll gravitate by all kinds of stuff. Right. And it's the same thing. You get up in front of people and you're worried that you're going to stand up there and you're going to blow it. And they're going to realize that you don't belong there. That's what you're afraid of. That's what stage fright is. And so if you're in that position, what you're dealing with then is that fear. And so all of the things that Moran talked about are things that help you have the confidence to know that you've done everything possible to alleviate a lot of that stuff, right? Because you're going to get it right. You've practiced it all the unexpected stuff you're prepared for, right? And so you can go up there and you can confidently present. But the other thing you have to understand is that when you get up there in front of the room, you're the crowd, right? Everybody's looking at you. And so you're now in a position where everybody else wants to belong with you. And so everybody's pulling for you. And if you can involve them and help them feel like they belong with you, there's real power in what you're doing. And there's a real situation where if you can get them to identify with you and and feel like they belong and feel like they belong with each other, I mean, that's what speaking really is. That's what the real power is in speaking. And so it's an opportunity and all you really have to do is again, get up there. And if you do even an okay job, people will have been pulling for you and they will appreciate what you brought. And so, yeah, it's scary because you're afraid that you're going to blow your opportunity to belong to the crowd. But the reality is, is the second you get in front of them, you already do. And so, yeah, the rest of it just boils down to how you present and how well you do what you do as to whether they're going to love you or just enjoy your talk. And it's, it's, it's definitely interesting to watch the dynamics as people get together and do this kind of thing. And so it's it's important just to realize that we all go through the same thing, right? The imposter syndrome. Do I really belong, right? Do I belong here? Am I good enough? Is somebody going to expose that I don't belong to this group? If you're in one of these marginalized groups, a lot of times the people that have the worst fear are the people that feel the most marginalized and the people that feel the least marginalized, they, they look less for those kinds of things and tend to do a little bit better fitting in just because they're less worried about it, right? And they'll gravitate to different groups. And so at the end of the day, a lot of this really does boil down to, who do you want to gravitate to? What are you trying to get out of this? What kind of a difference do you want to make? And then reach out to the people who are feeling like feeling that imposter syndrome, feeling like they don't belong, feeling like they're missing that. Right. And sometimes it's just your presence, right? Because you do have that.

 

easy to spot external thing that they can gravitate to because you have that the same. And sometimes it's going to be something in your personality, something where you put yourself out there like Steve was talking about something, you know, something else. But that's what our community is made of. Right. And so that's why we're trying to bring in all kinds of people is because we want to make all the other all kinds of people feel like when they come in as they interact with different parts of the community, they can find that sense of belonging somewhere without going and having to hunt for it too far and not feel like they belong somewhere. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: What I always tried when I was speaking about with people who I was trying to convince to go out there and present themselves, and I wonder what you think about this Moran, is to do it gradually. I think you kind of mentioned it. If the company that you work for has some sort of a forum where you can present, usually that's the friendliest crowd. That's a nice place to start at. 

MORAN_WEBER: Uh, by the way, sometimes because it's people know scariest, but prefer to do it with strangers. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I get what you're saying. Another possibility is like you mentioned meetups in your area. Usually these are smaller crowds. A podcast like this is actually an excellent opportunity. For those of you who don't know, first of all, it's a conversation, so you're not out there alone. And it's also edited. It's not broadcasted in real-time. So if for any reason you misspeak or something can be fixed, edited out. So yeah, if you're thinking about talking and you have an interesting topic that you want to discuss, hit us up. And then we would love to have you on the show. What do you do you think that this type of gradual approach is the right way to go? How do you convince people to take the first step? 

MORAN_WEBER: I think that yeah, the first step is the hardest I think you need someone you really need someone to to help you with that you need someone to push you you need someone to believe in you because otherwise people wouldn't necessarily think they're capable of doing that. I think that's what helped me in the first place because only when I saw my peers in that workshop, I took telling me that I have something interesting to say or telling me that I remember this one exercise which really, really blew my mind. The instructor, she asked us to speak a little bit, to tell a story. I don't remember what it was. And she asked us to, after we spoke, to rate the level of excitement. And I rated my excitement. And then she asked the entire group to say, what do you think Moran's excitement level was? And when they asked the group, they said on a scale of one to 10. And when she asked the group, the group said an average of three two, three, four tops. And when she asked me, I said 10. So more often than not, we tend to feel like the excitement is bubbling up inside us, but people don't necessarily know that. So I think that small exercise really changed the way I thought, because I said like, wow, I'm not transparent people when they they're up on stage, they think that like they're transparent and that everyone can see exactly what they feel and how and the way they like their feelings are visible to everyone but it's not true. And even if you make mistakes, people don't know what you meant to say. And even it's like you're the only one who knows how you feel and you're the only one, you're not transparent. And I also want to relate to what Steve said before, that it's really good to be authentic and to be, it really makes you more approachable and to say, yeah, you know, I'm really excited, I didn't sleep all night before I came here and just tell a little joke about it. People will be more forgiving. So yeah, the first step and the first time you do it is the hardest one. It's not always, it doesn't always get easier. It's a gradual thing. And I think, I think that's another thing that I said before. You don't need to think that it will go away completely. You will never get excited again. It's okay to still get excited. I think the day that you won't get excited from speaking in front of other people, it's probably the day that you will get too bored out of it and you shouldn't do it anymore. So it's part of the thing and it makes us bigger. It makes us better. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I totally agree. The adrenaline rush, it's scary, but rides in an amusing part are scary and we enjoy doing them because they're scary. I totally agree that part of the fun is the adrenaline rush that goes with speaking on stage. Like you said, it doesn't really ever go away completely. Maybe if you like, I don't know if you do it every day then it does, but then and you probably look for your excitement somewhere else. So yeah, I totally agree with that. One tip that I would like to give that I found that really works for me when I plan for a talk is that I don't try to memorize the entire talk. I think that's impossible. So what I usually do is I memorize the first two or three sentences because usually I find that once I get the ball rolling in terms of speaking in front of the crowd, then from that point on, it's much, much, much easier. So that's definitely something that has worked for me. And another thing that you can do, I know that it's become very popular to have minimalist slides, like just a picture and a word or something like that, but you don't have to do it this way. It's definitely possible to have more text heavy slides and you can actually use your slides as sort of quote unquote speaker notes so that you know where you are and what it is that you want to talk about. So just make sure that the main points that you want to express in the context of a slide is actually part of the slide that's perfectly okay for you to actually read it out and elaborate from there. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So you just got to be careful. Just got to be careful of death by PowerPoint where all you do is sit there and read your PowerPoint. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure. Don't try to write down the entire text of your presentation, but just like the salient point and extrapolate from there. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. But the other end of that too is that if you want feedback from the people who watched your talk, one thing that I've seen speakers do and I've done this a couple of times myself is I will put the link to the slides at the end of my talk. And then I will say, if you leave me feedback, I will email you the slides. Right. And since it has all the notes in it, they are driven to do that right. And usually the feedback is, what's one thing that you thought I did really well, and the other is, is what's one thing you think I could have improved? And they have to fill in that form along with their email address. And then when they hit submit, then it's like, okay, I emailed you the slides. And so I can get feedback on it and I can improve as a speaker. And as I improve on those things, that's another thing that has made it less scary to speak because I get ideas on things that I can work on to do better as I go. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So while we have a dead space here, I'll jump back to something being transparent and talking about imposter syndrome. So my background in terms of learning development has been, I guess you'd call it functional learning in that, you know, I didn't go to school and learn computer science, learn about algorithms and data structures and compilers and all that kind of stuff. I just jumped in and started learning, whether it was straight HTML and CSS, you know, and then into PHP and MySQL and Drupal and JavaScript and so on. So I don't always have the intricate knowledge of the ins and outs of a given language. I know what I know because I've used it in real life. And so we did a couple episodes, we've done two or three episodes, I forget how many, and all these things that a JavaScript developer should know. And if you've noticed on those, I'm pretty quiet. The reason being there's a lot of things in there that say, Hey, a JavaScript developers know these things and I don't know them. I don't have the familiarity with map versus sets versus so many things. I just know what I know. And, and the interesting thing is that the things that I don't know haven't hindered me in my job, at least to my knowledge, I suppose. And maybe there's cases where I was writing certain types of code that knowing those things might've made things easier. And actually not knowing some of that stuff, I think, cost me a job when I was interviewed for jobs last summer at one particular place. Actually, I had a couple of different places. But it's always been interesting to me that those things have never really hindered me getting my work done. But the point of all this is saying that I feel imposter syndrome hosting this show sometimes because I'm listening to AJ and Dan go into some of the details of Node and include versus require and, and different APIs that are out there. And I just, you know, do my best to jump in where I can, cover up my lack of knowledge with some jokes now and then, and, you know, just sort of be part of the show. And then after the show, what I do is I go, or even during the show, I'm going and looking up all these things. Okay, I need to know this stuff. But that's just a sort of real life case of imposter syndrome. 

MORAN_WEBER: I love that. And I think that's a great example that the way you just said that and the way you were so authentic about it and so real about it. I don't know about the others, but I'm guessing they feel the same. But it made me closer to you. It made me feel like, wow, that's amazing. So sometimes when we're vulnerable and when we say the stuff that we're shy about and that we're embarrassed about, and the stuff that we feel like we're the only ones who feel that way and other people can relate to us the most on those particular times. So thank you for that, Steve. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, the pressure to appear to be perfect, especially when we're on stage and appearing as the expert, it's real, but you don't have to, right? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: On the positive side, I have to say just to that point on the positive side, that probably the best way ever to learn a topic is to give a talk on it. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yes, that's very true. If you want to learn something, teach it. I've learned that in the fire service. I've learned that in programming is a hundred percent true. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So I gave a reverse talk one time at a Rusk meetup where I had done a little bit of research and came and said, look, I'm going to show you a little bit of what I know, most of you are more experienced than me in this. And so what I'm going to be doing is during the talk, asking you questions about how this particular piece works. And I don't know if that is up on YouTube. I'll see if I can find the link to put in the show notes in case it is, cause it may be, but that went pretty well because there was a good mix with Rust. You have this dichotomy of people who are super expert that are long time C plus plus developers that have come into Rust and have tons of knowledge about all these details work that are very low level details that when they come into Rust, they're like, boom, I got it. I understand it. Makes sense. This is awesome. This is perfect. And you got people like me, I come in a rust from this more dynamic language background. Mostly a lot of stuff doesn't make sense to me intuitively and the patterns and the way packages are made, that just don't fit culturally with the way that I've developed my programming skills. But giving the reverse talk worked really well because the experts chimed in and they filled in the gaps. And I was able to ask questions to the audience. And then there was other people there. They're kind of nodding their heads like, oh, okay. Yeah, I understand this a little bit better now. So that's an option too. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: The official term for that, AJ is a podcast interview. You have the expert come on and explain to you how stuff works. All right. We're kind of getting toward the end of our time. Moran. I'm kind of curious because I always love a good story and it sounds like you've helped quite a few people along this journey. I'm wondering, do you have a three minutes success story that you can tell us where somebody's kind of gone through this journey and come out the other side and had the kind of impact that we're talking about here? 

MORAN_WEBER: Yeah, actually I have more than one, but I will tell about one particular lady who attended our last course and she was kind of depressed in her job and she didn't feel like she has anything interesting to say and she felt like she's not getting paid enough. And she participated in the course and built a talk about, I don't want to say who that is, so I won't say what her talk was about, but she delivered a key cast presentation, a really, really good presentation. And the topic she chose was about the thing that she was scared the most before she started. So she told the story of how she was scared and how she hated what she did at first and how she came to love it. And her talk was on the conference. And there was a tech magazine who approached her about that talk and offered her an interview in their magazine. And after that, she decided that she's leaving her job and she decided that she's going to search for a better job and to search for a place that would see her talents. And that's a really nice story. I have another one who felt like she's behind and someone saw her talk and offered her a job. So I think that that's the last thing I want to say about being on stage. That's if you expose yourself, and if you take chances and take the risk, the amount of possibilities of wonderful possibilities that could come out of it is endless. So you need to be... You need to take that risk because it can be incredible afterwards. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That's amazing. And I think we ought to just leave it there because I think that really drives the point home. There's so many positive things that come out of this. 

 

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Let's go ahead and do some picks. Let's make AJ start us out with the picks. AJ, what are your picks? 

AJ_O’NEAL: I am going to do it. So first of all, I am doing beyond code bootcamp. This is for folks perhaps like yourself that are kind of in that junior mid-level position, trying to figure out how you're going to get up to the next level and you think that maybe reviewing some of the fundamentals and getting more of a basic understanding is the right approach for you. Or if you're just starting out and you want a really pragmatic approach, that's what this is. And right now I'm doing free daily live streams and you can ask me questions on Twitter at underscore beyond code. And I will do my best to answer you and perhaps incorporate that into one of the live streams that's then preserved afterwards. So I've got links to me on Facebook, beyond code on YouTube, as well as on Twitter that you can follow and as I'm developing it will become a full paid course that you can come in and get lots of juicy, good information. These live streams are kind of the, the burnt pancakes. My first draft is I'm working through the material. The next thing I've got to pick is the Vim Essentials, which is something that I just made up, you know, as I often do, but this is on web install.dev slash Vim hyphen essentials. If you are. Knowing if you're one of those people where you see other people use them and it's just too complex to learn all the plugins and figure out all the stuff. This is the max tomato potato, but this is the two to five second installer. That's going to give you the plugins that are doing the most good without any configuration. And then a breakdown of if you want to look at some of the most popular options for you, if you want to tweak them, there's cheat sheets for each of them. So I'd advise you to check out that. And this week I am adding shell check, which is absolutely amazing. I cannot believe that I have been going all these years without having shell check support in them because it catches so many of those little bash errors that are so dumb but hard to see because of all the quotes and brackets, but just boom. I love it. Absolutely. Love it. And then I am also going to pick so we just had Easter. I am going to pick Jesus Christ. And you may not be a religious person, and I'm not trying to turn you one way or the other, but if nothing else, as a philosopher, the man had a lot of very interesting ideas that I think, when people think of Christianity, I don't necessarily think they think of Jesus, because there's a lot of historical stuff that has happened that was not Christ-like among Christians the actual teachings of Jesus, if you pick up the New Testament, if you can read Shakespeare, you can probably read the New Testament. There's good stuff in there. And it's one of those things where, you know, if you try it out and you don't like it, throw it out. But if it does, if it works for you, if you find there's little seeds of good in there, check it out a little further. So those are my picks today. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I think a few of us think Jesus is pretty awesome. Amy, do you have some picks for us? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I do. I'll echo that. Okay, so my first pick, because I don't know, everybody was saying all good things, so I didn't feel like I had a lot to add. But I'll just echo everything that Moran said. It's all really good stuff and definitely encourage people. I've always said to like, feel free to reach out to me as well. I know a lot of people do like public forums, but I think sometimes especially the kind of people who like the show might be geared towards today, like sometimes don't always feel comfortable asking questions in a public way right away. So, you know, my DMS are always open if people have questions or you can email me. And I always try to get back with people. But as far as like other picks, I'm going to pick something that was helpful to me from a couple of weeks ago, and it is just a good like deep dive on reverse engineering and Docker image, and that will be it for me. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Ooh, I might have to go check that out. Steve, what are your picks? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So we've got a couple today, sort of picking up our AJ left off. Over the past couple of months, there's one set of podcasts I've really, really enjoyed listening to. And it's a pastor named Tim Keller. He had a Redeemer Presbyterian Church or Lutheran, I forget what church in New York City for a long time. And he's retired now. Just phenomenal sermons. And the things that I like about his sermons is that he incorporates so much what you call, he reads a lot outside of Christianity, just a lot of sociologists and historical stuff. And he incorporates it into his sermon. He just he makes them so approachable and so down to earth where the rubber beats the road that I just I can't get enough of a lot of his stuff. Switching to the humor side of things I started doing, you know, adding the weekly dad joke and I appreciate AJ standing in for me last week. That was great. I appreciate it. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Cutting edge. Cutting edge. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Cutting edge. And so one day, you know, I've had it over my years, I've had a very number of different jobs. I first started out as a banker. And I mentioned that in my JavaScript, my JavaScript story. But I got fired from that place because an older lady, I came in and asked me to check her balance. And so I pushed her over and then I got fired from a calendar factory because I took a couple of days off. And then most recently was one day I gave up my seat to a blind person on a bus. That was how I lost my job as a bus driver. So anyway, three for one today, since they all had the same thing. I can see AJ laughing his sounds off so you can't hear him cracking up. But I found something from a developer standpoint that incorporates with my dad joke humor, and that is a website called I can has dad joke. And so this is a repository of dad jokes and you can submit it, but it also has an API that you can hit and get a random dad joke. So if you have a website and you wanna have a random dad joke that is displayed every time somebody comes to the site, then you can use their very easy-to-use JavaScript API and get a random dad joke. So, you know, feel free to go in and add more. I certainly have myself and then use that API. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. Dan, what are your picks? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Okay, I actually have two picks for today. So the first one is totally not technical. And that's the fact that for the first time in over a year, we actually went out to a music show to hear a band play. Israel has been mostly under lockdown, everything having to do with culture and art and going out and stuff like that. So it was awesome to have the opportunity to do that again. They were actually checking, in Israel, you have this concept of the quote unquote green passport that kind of proves that you've been vaccinated. So you needed to have that in order to be given admittance to the show. But once you were in, people were just sitting around, having drinks, having a good time, listening to excellent music. And again, after such a long time, it was such a great feeling, this return to normality, and it was just excellent. So that would be one pick that I have. I really hope that this is just an indication of us going back to being normal. And my other pick is a technical one. It's a post about Back Forward Cash by Philip Walton. You know, I'll probably try to reach out to him to come on the show to speak about it. I'll post a link. It's something that relatively simple that you can do in your website or actually more accurately is a certain few things that you should avoid doing in your website and if you avoid doing them then you'll get the benefit of something called a back-forward cache which could really boost the performance of your website when people are well using back and forward buttons to go between different sites. So I'll just put a link to that and again probably try to get him to be on the show as well. And those would be my picks for today. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Awesome. I'm going to jump in with some picks and then we will have Moran give us some picks as well, a few things that I'm going to throw out there. First of all, I try not to do too many self-promotional things, but I am starting the Dev Influencers podcast this week. If you go to devinfluencers.com, you can check that out. If you're looking at becoming an influencer, you can go to devinfluencers.com or devinfluencers.com slash apply. Those both actually go to the same place and they will take you to a place where you can put in your name and email address. Basically, it just sends you a follow-up sequence to make sure that you can actually apply to be part of the accelerator. And I basically walk you through setting up a top-five podcast. We'll be in the top five within six months. Within the software community will help you figure out who you're trying to reach, how to help them, how to make a difference there. And then how to get whatever outcomes you're trying to get right. So whether it's speaking more, whether it's having courses on Pluralsight or having your own courses or any number of other things. Anyway, a lot of people are looking to open that up, but they don't know how. And I can kind of negotiate you around some of this stuff and say, don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. Save you a few months and then get you there where you need to go. So that's what that is. If you want to just listen to the podcast and kind of get some ideas on how to do it. That's devinfluencers.com slash podcast. But yeah, as far as other picks go, my wife and I went out to a movie last night, speaking of getting out to regular life. Of course, we were two of four people in the whole theater. But it's nice to be able to just go out, right? We went out to a restaurant and we went out to dinner or to the theater. And we saw a movie called The Courier. And The Courier has Benedict Cumberbatch in it. And it's about this British salesman who gets recruited by MI6 to become a spy. It's based on a true story. And he's not really a spy. What he is is he's the person who carries the messages, the intelligence from the Soviet Union in Moscow, back to London, and then that intelligence is shared with the United States during the Cold War, during the 60s. And anyway, I'm not going to spoil how it all goes, but just fascinating stuff we start talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis and some of the other things that kind of were influenced by or came out of the intelligence that was gathered. It was just so fascinating and just talking about what was the impact of these people in this film, right? That were put into this film and what sacrifices were made by some of these people. And anyway, just an amazing movie. So I really, really enjoyed it. And I really enjoy kind of the war era, true stories that are kind of the untold stories, right? Some of these other heroes that we don't hear about because it's not somebody in an airplane, you know, doing some heroic act in the middle of a battle, but it's just somebody who was a regular person that got kind of called up to do a thing that was pretty scary. And you really, I think they really put that forward well. So, uh, the courier, and that's a movie. It's in theaters right now. Just, just an amazing, amazing movie. Really enjoyed that. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hey Chuck, it looks like the Instagram account, DevInfluencers is open. So if you want to grab that one, you should jump on that like sticky on tape. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I probably will. And then as far as other picks go, I've been hiring people to do various things. One area that I am looking for help with is just some of the writing that I need for devchat.tv as far as like show notes and stuff like that. I've hired non-technical people in the past and they do okay, but I'd like kind of a technical eye to look it over. The problem is, is that if I hire somebody that doesn't know devchat.tv, it gets rather expensive because I wind up trying to hire somebody who could actually write code for money, right? And that's a little bit expensive for somebody to write copy or write show notes. So if you're interested in helping out on devchat.tv, I am completely willing to trade coaching or other kinds of help or things like that. I'm willing to help you with your career if you'll help me with the podcast, I guess is the offer. So if you're interested, just shoot me an email and you can send it to CMAXW at devchat.tv. That's my Twitter handle CMAXW at devchat.tv. I would really, really love your help. And those are my picks. Moran, do you have some picks? Picks are just anything that you're really loving in life right now. 

MORAN_WEBER: Okay, so I'm going to shamelessly talk about my platform again. And I want people, well, basically women and non-binaries. If you're speakers, you're more than welcome to register yourself on the platform. It's free. It's womenonstage.net. And if you are an event organizer and a meetup organizer, COVID times, it's so much easier. So it can be anywhere in the globe. You're more than welcome to invite those speakers to speak at your next event. And so that's number one. And number two, I want to say that I wanted to wrap it up when I started to speak at the beginning of this chapter, I hope that I said that I was really embarrassed about the fact that I'm not only a developer, that I'm also a psychologist. I used to hide that and I just thought that people will think that I'm not technical enough because of it. So I want to say to all of those developers who do other stuff as well, other than being developers, it doesn't matter if you're a music player or if you're, I don't know, if you like to cook I think having those, being a versatile person actually can make you a much better developer because I think the most interesting part is to be someone who does a lot of things and can learn to get better at one thing because they're inspired of other domains. It's like fusion.I hope that was clear. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: It does make sense. I've met a number of people who were attorneys or have other backgrounds and they just look at things differently sometimes based on that training. They understand people differently too because of that training and all of that plays into our job. So I completely agree. I also just want to pile on on women on stage because I went to the website and this is exceptionally easy to navigate. I've seen some of the others where it's just kind of a list, but you can sort it by talk title or abstract, you can actually search it for the speakers you're looking for. You have topic areas you can just click on and it'll sort people out. So this is this makes it really, really easy on event organizers. So if you're an event organizer, definitely check it out. And I'm assuming just because it's so easy to search that if you're a speaker, it also makes it really easy to find. So this is a gold mine. I've run conferences in the past and yeah, I'm going to be using this for sure. 

MORAN_WEBER: So thank you. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right. Anywhere else you want people to go to find you Twitter or GitHub or anything else? 

MORAN_WEBER: Sure. It's more, I will, it's more letter. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right. Very cool. Well, thank you for coming. This has been a terrific conversation. Hopefully we inspired some people to go out there and consider how they want to make a difference in the community. And until next time folks max out. 

MORAN_WEBER: Thank you for having me. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Bye.

 

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