John K. Sawers
Co-Host of Greater Than Code
Amongst John’s weaponry are public speaking, doing the rails thing, and talking about feelings in public. His technology talks aren’t about technology and sometimes he has time to meditate. He remembers the sound of dialup.
Soon, John will no longer write much code, having intentionally (yes, intentionally) moved into management. He seems to think that making people better is more satisfying than making computers better. With that in mind he’s also spent a lot of time mentoring bootcamp developers and supervising workshops focused on deep emotional work.
He spends days at Privia Health, nights as co-founder and CTO of Data Simply and all the rest of it at johnksawers.com and emotionalAPI.com.
John K. Sawers has hosted 95 Episodes.
-
145: Balancing Hierarchies and Equity in Organizations with Brandy Foster
August 28th, 2019 | 1 hr 3 mins
Brandy Foster talks about code of ethics, the role of diversity and inclusion in solving problems, balancing hierarchies and equity in organizations, and unlearning racism and other harmful behaviors.
-
144: Being Greater Than Code with Jamison Dance
August 21st, 2019 | 50 mins 46 secs
Jamison Dance joins the show to talk about life as an engineering manager: context switching, career advancement, and providing team members with opportunities for growth. He also talks about his podcast that he co-hosts: Soft Skills Engineering, the evolution of tech culture, and organizing the React Rally conference.
-
141: Navigating Blame
July 31st, 2019 | 48 mins 16 secs
The panelists talk about blame: perspectives on blame, blamelessness, postmortems/incident reviews, the fact that systems are benign, survival rules, and gaining EQ and inward exploration.
-
140: Bounded Perfection with Amitai Schleier
July 24th, 2019 | 58 mins 12 secs
Amitai Schleier talks about talks about running mail servers, orientation in problem spaces, refactoring, and the concept of “bounded perfection”.
-
138: Job Satisfaction
July 10th, 2019 | 1 hr 3 mins
This conversation came from a discussion in the Greater Than Code Slack community. We spend a lot of hours of our lives doing our jobs. Do you look forward to those hours? Do you dread those hours? Are they enhancing your life? Are they ruining your life? How does your job affect your whole self as a person? The panel discusses.
-
137: Pairing & Sharing with Llewellyn Falco and Clare Macrae
July 3rd, 2019 | 1 hr 8 mins
Llewellyn Falco and Clare Macrae talk about the special bond and kinship they have formed via pair programming, as well as the sharing and writing of documentation from the perspective of what the human reading it is trying to accomplish.
-
133: Dark Horses with Chanté Thurmond
June 5th, 2019 | 1 hr 6 mins
Chanté Thurmond talks about spotting talent (dark horses), perceiving talent/potential, confronting biases and societal categorization, identity as a feedback loop, and using metrics to improve organizational D&I.
-
131: Poo-Covered Rocks with Cat Swetel
May 22nd, 2019 | 52 mins 59 secs
Cat Swetel joins the show to talk about managing a platform with ancient value, exploring systems, Wardley mapping, and looking for poo-covered rocks: the importance of observation and reflection.
-
130: Acceptance is the First Step with Britni Alexander
May 15th, 2019 | 52 mins 52 secs
In the first half of the show, Britni Alexander talks about resilience: seeing failure as an opportunity, not wallowing in failure, and the ultimate acceptance of failure.
Then she shares a bunch of lies that developers tell themselves and others including: who is or isn’t a programmer, what it’s actually like to be a programmer, how to measure success as a programmer, and more.
-
128: Finding and Cultivating Community Leaders with Ben Pollard
May 1st, 2019 | 58 mins 40 secs
In this episode, Ben Pollard talks about starting Local Welcome, a charity in the UK that makes it fun and easy to cook and eat with refugees in folks' local community. Humanization, cognitive biases, and heuristics are discussed, as well as the ideas of humans thriving together and measuring success.
-
126: Asking Powerful Questions with Suzan Bond
April 17th, 2019 | 52 mins 45 secs
Suzan Bond, Coraline, and John discuss blending technology with coaching and humans, managing and working on distributed teams, autonomy, listening to yourself and your intuition, and developing solid leadership skills.
-
123: BOOK CLUB! Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
March 27th, 2019 | 1 hr 43 secs
This show is a group discussion about the insights inside Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig. The panelists consider how the book can help us to understand the culture war that is going on in the world right now and what we can do as individuals, communities, companies, and as an industry of software engineers, to build bridges that can help bring humans back together again at all scales.
-
121: Emergency Communication with Thai Wood
March 13th, 2019 | 54 mins 30 secs
Thai Wood is a developer turned EMT turned developer again. He talks about resilience engineering and closed-loop communication, his experience as an EMT and the lessons he’s brought from there to his work as a developer, incident response, the normalization of deviation, and asking questions to get helpful answers.
-
119: Cultural Brokerage with Bianca Escalante
February 27th, 2019 | 1 hr 6 mins
In this episode, Bianca Escalante joins the show to talk about code switching, normalizing conversations, speaking about race openly, and the concept of distance traveled. Reconciling failure, repressing feelings, and the importance of human connection are also among topics discussed, as well as a conversation around who is ultimately responsible for diversity and inclusion work.
-
117: Wholeness and Separation
February 13th, 2019 | 42 mins 4 secs
What does it take to create safe conversations in our organizations, and in our global world? What does “safe” even mean? In this episode, the panelists get into a philosophical discussion about the dynamics of human relationships, differences in paradigm, and how to improve our ability to see one another.
-
115: Tension Between Opposites with Sam Joseph
January 30th, 2019 | 59 mins 42 secs
In this episode, Sam Joseph talks about making spaces to have safe and nonviolent conversations, collaborative communication and learning, delivering working solutions that meet end-user needs, and the value of doing things the way you’re used to vs a ...