Jessica Kerr
Co-Host of Greater Than Code
Almost twenty years ago, Jessica chose to program because it was easy and it was 9-5. Now programming is hard, she spends all her spare time on it, and she loves it immensely more.
Software is fascinating because we create complex systems incredibly quickly. This means we get to learn about complex systems, which teaches us about everything else in life. For more, see her blogs at blog.jessitron.com and [tistil.tumblr.com](tistil.tumblr.com)
Jessica (better known as JessiTRON) works as a lead engineer at Atomist. Infrastructure is the best because it’s software about software. She also raises two daughters, speaks at conferences, studies piano, and stares at the waves in the milk film on her coffee.
Jessica Kerr has hosted 96 Episodes.
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271: EventStorming with Paul Rayner
February 16th, 2022 | 58 mins 24 secs
Paul Rayner joins us to talk about Eventstorming and how it’s optimized for collaboration among teams, helps to visualize business processes, and helps with knowledge distillation and clarifying semantics.
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242: Considering The Social Side of Tech with Trond Hjorteland
July 21st, 2021 | 48 mins 25 secs
Trond Hjorteland talks about the superpower of sociotechnical system (STS) design: considering the social AND the technical. The social side matters. He covers the origins of sociotechnical systems, design from above vs self-organization, systemic change and open systems, and the fourth industrial revolution.
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237: Empathy is Critical with Andrea Goulet
June 2nd, 2021 | 55 mins 10 secs
Andrea Goulet, who is known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, talks about distilling complexity, being “technical” vs “non-technical”, and how empathy is critical in thinking about reforming hiring practices and giving performance reviews where continuous improvement is the goal.
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234: Civil Society and Community Relationships with Michael Garfield
May 12th, 2021 | 1 hr 1 min
Artist and philosopher, Michael Garfield, talks about being able to creatively digest and reconstruct categories, recognizing economic value of talents & abilities, and civil society and community relationships.
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227: Doing DevRel Right with Jonan Scheffler
March 24th, 2021 | 1 hr 12 mins
Jonan Scheffler talks about launching the new Developer Relations team for his company, New Relic. He talks about how DevRel is changing, the correct role of DevRel, and engaging with communities and networks via DevRel by using platforms like Twitch, YouTube, Discord, TikTok, Twitter, etc.
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223: Emotions, Achievement, Joy, and Goals with David MacIver
February 24th, 2021 | 45 mins 4 secs
David MacIver talks about being confused, daily writing, learning to be better at emotions, and achievement and joy as aspirational goals.
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215: Gathering Data in Machine Learning with Abeba Birhane
December 30th, 2020 | 1 hr 1 min
In this episode, Abeba Birhane talks about why predicting how people behave and act via machine learning is ethically flawed, and how examining its models and data makes us inherently bias as a human race.
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207: Investigation and Influence with Chelsea Troy
November 4th, 2020 | 55 mins 45 secs
Chelsea Troy talks in-depth about her Techtivism blog series: coding in investigation mode, engineers considering the actions and impact of their work systematically, the power of influence, making a connection between values and your work as an engineer, and individual vs collective action.
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199: Toxicity in Tech with Amy Newell
September 9th, 2020 | 55 mins 14 secs
Amy Newell talks about toxicity in tech, specifically male toxicity and hierarchies in engineering roles. She and the panelists discuss measuring skill advancement, the concepts of congressive vs ingressive, how to unlearn ingrained beliefs, and recognizing and feeling value.
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193: Optimizing For Happiness with Tudor Gîrba
July 29th, 2020 | 1 hr 13 mins
Tudor Gîrba talks about how writing code is storytelling, optimizing for happiness while working, reading, and writing code, the concept of moldable development, editing code as a joint activity, and encouraging and supporting the presentation of new ideas and out-of-the-box thinking.
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191: Sitting Down Together with Amy Tobey
July 15th, 2020 | 1 hr 8 mins
In this episode, Amy Tobey talks about looking at messes and seeing the potential for what they could be, generalists vs specialists, artisanal and industrial modes of production, and why whistleblowing is good (because misuse of authority is bad).
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179: Conference Magic with PJ Hagerty
April 22nd, 2020 | 1 hr 13 mins
In this episode, PJ Hagerty talks about Developer Relations, having online vs in-person conferences, making conferences both diverse and inclusive, talking about mental health, and conference accessibility.
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177: Source Docs and People with Chris Stead
April 8th, 2020 | 55 mins 5 secs
In this episode, Chris Stead joins the show to talk about source documents and their relation to people, encouraging others to write code for people, interviewing for the benefit of the interviewee, and the fact that code stores emotion.
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172: Limitations of Human Knowledge with Miko Matsumura
March 4th, 2020 | 1 hr 5 mins
Miko Matsumura talks about the limitations of human knowledge, including coming to your senses, understanding the limits of what you know, decision making as an embodied process, problems with the interview framework, and the idea of small mind/big mind.
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169: Career Elbows
February 12th, 2020 | 1 hr 1 min
The panelists discuss career transitions and share information about job searching, interviewing, and resilience.