Browse Interview Clips

Explore key moments from our interviews, organized by theme and speaker. Each clip captures unique insights into the open source movement.

Showing 90 clips
Karen Herman: What did you, what was the thing that you learned the most about at IBM? Deb Goodkin: At IBM, it gave me a really good foundation on how to develop code. And so you didn't really have like a hacking mentality then, like you have now. And, and, and that's fine, too. It's just that you really had to think through, what are you trying to do? And then how are you going to do that? And then, And then, as like a junior level engineer, I would actually, so I'd have to come up with my plan or my design. And then you actually had a design that you hand wrote. So it wasn't a programming language yet. And, and so we actually refer to it as pseudocode. And then you would actually meet with others, your colleagues, and, and people would review your design. And so you wouldn't actually implement it until it got approved. So, so it was a great way to learn because if someone saw like a hole in that, or even a, you know, a better way to do something, you would learn from that. And so taking that time to think through, you know, what, really, what are you trying to achieve? And then how can you get there? I, that was a good skill to have, and philosophy to have. Also working with others to learn how to collaborate with others. I mean, you learn that in school, but, but now, you know, you have a real product. And, and the way IBM worked back then, too, is sometimes you had competing teams. And so they had the money to fund, like, similar teams, you didn't always know it. And, and so whoever came out with better product, you know, basically won. You didn't look at it like that, basically, they would cancel your product, project, and you'd move on to something else. So, because things were so new, back then, too. So you didn't, there was so much possibility for innovation. And so I think that philosophy, that IBM was able to do that, was great. I also learned a lot from my manager, who happened to be a female, and her background was electrical engineering, too. And she was such a good role model for me, as well as a lot of the other people there. So, so it was a great experience starting out.
Zack Ellis: What kept you interested in computer science? Heather Meeker: Computer...like programming is, it's an experience like almost nothing else, like when you are writing a program, you are in total control, right, subject to the rules of the language and the environment you're in, you tell the computer exactly what to do. If the computer doesn't do what you ask it to do, it's your fault. Right. I mean, that's not always true. It's almost always true. So that's like this experience. It's like pure engineering in a way. Like you're not even you're not even really bounded by the physical world in programming. Like it's like being a little megalomaniac, you know, it's like really exciting for that reason. Also, it's one of the most absorbing things I've ever done. Like when I was a coder, I would go to work and I'd get there, you know, at eight in the morning and then at five I would look up and the day would be over. And it was almost as if no time had passed because I was so focused on what I was doing. And I don't think I've ever experienced anything else quite like that. Nothing else I've ever done in my life, either for money or for fun, has has absorbed me that much. And I really loved it for that reason, but also got kind of burnt out on it for that reason. And and I stopped doing it. Not sure whether that was a good idea or a bad idea, but but it was what happened, you know. So that's what I loved about it. It was just you got to solve puzzles however you you know, and you were only really bounded by your ingenuity in doing that. I also thought coding was a very creative activity, and I'm not sure everybody thinks that. But but you have like so much control over how you do things. I just found that fascinating.
Heather Meeker: so open source is used by everybody now. Like almost everyone in the technology industry now actually contributes to it. I mean, it's everywhere. We're using it right this minute to do this interview. It's in your phone. It's everywhere, right? And if you go back, I guess, 25 years, the notion that that private companies would do collaborate was not an idea. I mean, it wasn't a thing that it wasn't a thing. Right. And and today you have all these like big organizations and companies collaborating on things and giving stuff away. And that just wasn't done. I would say open source changed the entire face of technology because it it changed a paradigm for how people interact. You know, they were just strictly competitors and now they're collaborators. And even there are there are only like maybe two, three companies that are known for not doing it now. Right. If you go back 25 years, like no one was doing it. They were terrified about what these licenses meant and everything. So it's completely been absorbed in business. And that, you know, if you believe in markets, which I do because I studied economics and all that stuff, that wouldn't happen unless it worked. Right. It actually works as a paradigm. Like it produced a lot of really great stuff. And over that time, people became convinced of that and they overcame their fear about these licensing paradigms they didn't understand. So they got over the fear and then it really changed their behavior. So to me, it's changed everything about the way the technology industry operates.
There was one thing in my high school that was interesting. There was a course I took as I began to try and understand electronics and computers, but more a course at this time. And gosh, you look back and you realize how far the world has come. That my first sort of exposure to doing anything with programming was punched cards with cobalt. And as a high school student, I was able to take a course where we didn't even have a punch card machine. We had these big coding forms, big ledger sheets of paper, 11 by 17 pieces of paper with lines on them. And there were 80 columns on a punch card. And you literally wrote in clean print across these sheets of paper. And we would send them in. So I'd have to write my program out by hand on a piece of paper. You'd send it in. People would punch those into the punch card machines. You would get back decks of cards. And then you sorted the cards into a program. And then you sent the cards in to run. So we think today about fast turn and programming and developing code. The productivity in that sense of lines of code was pretty low. It was, you know, you spent a day writing forms. You sent it in. You got punched cards back. I mean, it took a week to turn around. And if you made one change, a comma in a different place, one different line, it was a week to make a minor change. So you had to get that right. You had to make sure that was sort of perfect when it went in because the turnaround was very slow.