Sam Livingston-Gray
Co-Host of Greater Than Code
Sam Livingston-Gray has been a dad since 2008, a Rubyist since 2006, a Portlander since 2001, a programmer since at least 1998, a juggler since 1988, and a human since 1974. He’s keenly interested in writing software that makes other humans’ lives easier, in making technical topics easier to understand, and in helping increase the number and variety of humans^ in technical spaces.
^ And, of course, other sentient species or constructs just as soon as we find any. ^ ^
^ ^ Sam reads a lot of science fiction.
Sam Livingston-Gray has hosted 74 Episodes.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
December 10th, 2019 | 12 mins 10 secs
On this day in Paris in 1948, the United Nations issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document that sets out the fundamental rights and privileges of all people and all nations. In honor of the anniversary of this document, the panelists of Greater Than Code have come together to share their reading of the document with all of you.
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139: Conferencing
July 18th, 2019 | 59 mins 19 secs
As veteran conference speakers, the panelists decided to have a conversation around conferences: what newbies can expect, how to make the most out of them, and advice for if you’re thinking about speaking.
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136: Addressing Technical Friction
June 26th, 2019 | 55 mins 5 secs
In this episode, the panelists talk about a Tweet of Sam’s that had recently gotten some attention re: responsible refactoring and technical friction. They discuss reacting to other people’s code with kindness and empathy, requesting code walkthroughs, being explicit and clearly stating the problems you are trying to solve within your codebases before refactoring, and what to do if you experience resistance.
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134: Building Profiles with Halleemah Nash
June 12th, 2019 | 54 mins 51 secs
Halleemah Nash talks about the ideas of “cultural fluency" and “urban authenticity”: operating authentically and being who you are in any space you are in. Other concepts discussed are existing in Other spaces, active listening, and building bridges to change the complexion of the workforce by shortening the distance for Generation Z.
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132: Distilling the Hailstorm with Claire Lew
May 29th, 2019 | 43 mins 2 secs
Claire Lew of Know Your Team, joins the panel to talk about bad bosses: panelist experiences, symptoms of poor leadership and management, and asks the question, “how do we know that we, ourselves are not bad bosses?”
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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.
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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.
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122: Surfing with Michael "GeePaw" Hill
March 20th, 2019 | 1 hr 5 mins
Michael “GeePaw” Hill talks about autopoiesis (say what??), the cost of certainty, doubt vs narrowing, thin and thick culture, and occupational game playing.
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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.
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118: A Piece of Luck with Jessica Kerr
February 20th, 2019 | 1 hr 5 mins
Panelist, Jessica Kerr, talks about her superpower being a property of a situation. She also ponders the interpretation of luck, physics, conference speaking, TDD, and continuous learning.
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114: Theory of Mind with Jean-Francois Cloutier
January 23rd, 2019 | 1 hr 16 mins
In this episode, Jean-Francois Cloutier talks about theory of mind: his Elixir-powered robots, predictive processing, object-oriented programming, intuition and emergent properties, and the ineffability of Smalltalk.
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110: Human Incident Response with Courtney Eckhardt
December 19th, 2018 | 1 hr 22 secs
In this episode, Courtney Eckhardt talks about incident response: how we talk and interact with people who are affected by crappy things. She also talks about disabilities in the workplace and professional spaces, the tension between accessibility and security, and incident retrospectives and defensiveness as a natural instinct to feedback.
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107: The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship Program
November 28th, 2018 | 42 mins 27 secs
This episode was recorded live at RubyConf in Los Angeles. We talked to special guests, Jennifer Tran, Christine Seeman, and Jeremy Schuurmans about the Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship Program.
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104: Jellyfish Signaling with Sam Livingston-Gray
November 7th, 2018 | 1 hr 3 mins
In this panelist episode, Sam Livingston-Gray talks about driving evolution, fitness landscapes and functions, how humans make decisions, and scaling, optimizing, and thriving as individuals and communities.
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103: The Org You Were Born Into with Marcus Blankenship
October 31st, 2018 | 1 hr 7 mins
In this episode, Marcus Blankenship talks about wanting to be in management vs. just ending up in management, the idea of organizational alignment and not agreement, defining the word “boss”, and the up/down managerial hierarchy.
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102: Sticky in the Flow with Katrina Owen
October 24th, 2018 | 55 mins 31 secs
In this episode, Katrina Owen talks about organization and systematization, motivation by success, and how her past experience in training for circus is parallel to her career in software development.