Education & Mentorship
28 clips
Who influenced your journey?
Who were people, areas of study, or ideas that have influenced you?
Filter clips by:
Introduction to FOSSDA
Cat Allman
Eric Allman
Kirk McKusick
Karen Sandler
Joshua Gay
Tony Wasserman
Jon "Maddog" Hall
Lawrence (Larry) Rosen
Tristan Nitot
Deb Goodkin
Heather Meeker
Bruce Perens
Larry Augustin
Roger Dannenberg
Bart Decrem
Early Exposure
Personal Mission & Values
Challenges & Growth
Open Source Projects
Community & Collaboration
Evolution of Open Source
Showing 28 clips
1:52
Early Exposure to Technology Through Family
From: Cat Allman • Introduction and Childhood Influences
Elisabetta Mori: Can you talk about your childhood? Cat Allman: Sure. I was born in Oakland, in Oakland, California, in 1958, and raised in the East Bay Hills, looking out across San Francisco Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco with my older brother Eric Allman, creator, original creator of Send Mail, the mail transfer agent. Went to public schools, ending up at University of California, Santa Cruz, where I studied American Studies, so not engineering, not computer science. Growing up with an older brother who was a science child prodigy put me on another path for a while, though because of his interests we grew up with like boxes of punch cards, which it turns out if you make a cone out of them and staple them and spray paint them gold, you can make a Christmas wreath out of them...
3:56
Journey to Google and Advocating for Open Source
From: Cat Allman • Google Summer of Code and Global Outreach
Cat Allman: So they eventually broke down and hired me. And yeah, it was very exciting to try working at a big company. I have to say my first day was spent in a windowless room in a group for an orientation with all these extraordinarily perky videos. And I went home in tears because I thought oh my god I've made a terrible mistake. But unlike most people at least at the time who applied to Google I went into it knowing who I was going to work for and what I was going to work on. I didn't go to work at Google, I went to work on free and open source software at Google...
0:41
Building Models as a Child
From: Deb Goodkin • Early Interest in Building Things
Karen Herman: Did, did you have any interest in computing or computers as a kid? Deb Goodkin: So, um, we didn't have a computer when I was growing up. So that was before home computers. And so I really, the only thing I knew about computers was really the word processors, which were fancy typewriters. And because my dad was also a writer, we had one at home. And so that was pretty novel. And but, but I didn't grow up with computers. So I didn't know anything, I really didn't know anything about them. And, and so it really wasn't until I went to college that I was exposed to computers. So really, before that, I mean, part of my growing up, and maybe because I had brothers too, I built a lot of things, I was really into, like building models, and we would build like, model cars and model airplanes and things like that. So I've always enjoyed that building things.
1:08
Discovering Computer Engineering in College
From: Deb Goodkin • Finding the Path to Technology
Karen Herman: It's interesting, because you said that you really didn't have, you didn't know anything about computers till you got to college. How did you then decide to major in it? Deb Goodkin: Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. Because when I started college, actually, I was focused more on business, because like I said, before, the plan was really for me to take over my dad's business. But it wasn't something I was really interested in. And my mom actually helped me try to figure out what I was good at. And I grew up thinking, never thinking I was good at math, but my mom would always tell me how she was good at math. I don't even know why it would come up. But I knew that I knew my mom was good at math. And so I realized that I was also very good at math. And so in doing like an assessment test at that time, computer science, and engineering actually came up as a strength. And I thought, you know what, I, this would be a great major, because I could get a job. And so that was really why I went in that direction.
2:35
Learning Software Development at IBM
From: Deb Goodkin • Professional Formation at IBM
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.
4:03
Being a Woman in a Male-Dominated Field
From: Deb Goodkin • Gender and Technology
Karen Herman: Have you had any challenges in your career, um, being a woman in sort of a man dominated field? Deb Goodkin: Um, well, yeah, I have, um, I mean, even, you know, starting out in college, um, there weren't that many women in, who are studying any, any of those disciplines, uh, computer science, engineering, computer engineering, and math. Cause those were, I think the areas that I touched on. Um, but I also found that because it was such a hard discipline that we really worked together to understand things that we had. Um, I mean, maybe you didn't have Google back then, but yeah, we had our own working group that spent a lot of time together. And so sometimes, so there might be six of us and really just teaching each other concepts, if someone doesn't understand it.
0:47
Early Exposure to Computing
From: Eric Allman • School Years and Early Interests
Eric Allman: So back in high school, actually in junior high school, there was a teacher, I guess a math teacher at a different school when I was in who decided it would be cool to do an after-school program teaching kids how to program, Fortran to be precise. And I got involved with that and learned Fortran.
0:41
Early Career as a Programmer
From: Heather Meeker • Early Career and Transition to Law
Well, so I actually was a computer programmer in the 1980s. I know that just sounds absolutely ancient now. Doesn't sound ancient to me, but it's all a matter of perspective. And I got into that because there was a lot of demand for people to work in particularly applications programming. When I graduated from college, and I didn't have a degree in computer science, and in fact, most people didn't have degrees in computer science, you couldn't really get a degree in computer science, except for maybe, you know, some schools.
2:16
A Passion for Programming
From: Heather Meeker • Passion for Programming
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.
0:38
Navigating Uncharted Legal Territory
From: Heather Meeker • Early Experiences in Open Source Law
Heather Meeker: That scares lawyers a lot. Like when they don't have rules, they get freaked out. They like rules. So the experience was like walking out on a wire, you know. And by the way, there were some people at the time and probably still some some people, some lawyers who just would not deal with it at all because it was too weird and too new. And they felt that it was risky to give advice about it. But but my clients had questions. You know, I couldn't just say, oh, no, I don't know the answer to that. Like, you have to figure it out.
3:10
Early Influences and the Path to Technology
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Early Life and Influences
Maddog: My father was a good influence on me because he was very interested in mechanical things and machinery... I particularly liked the Popular Electronics magazines...
2:39
First Steps in Computer Programming
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Aetna Life and Casualty: Mainframes and Early Software Development
Maddog: ...I said, sure, I'll take the course and I would read the book at night and then I would go in and practice at night and on the weekends programming this IBM 1130...
1:40
Empowering Education through FOSS Initiatives
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Memories of Grace Hopper and Maurice Wilkes
Maddog: ...Malaysia, the Malaysian government was creating a five year program to use open source software. And Malaysia is particularly interesting because... 70% of the IT workforce were women...
1:11
Fostering Open Source in Latin America through Education
From: Jon "Maddog" Hall • Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Maddog: ...40% of the students who qualify for a free university education [in Latin America] cannot accept it... Project Calwan teaches these young students how to set up their own business...
3:11
First Exposure to Programming: TI-82 Calculators and Fractals
From: Joshua Gay • Early Interests: Poetry and Programming
Joshua Gay: In the first moment, I kind of got intrigued by computer science. There's TI-82 calculators, what we used or what I had for school. And a friend of mine who was also one of the first people I knew to run Linux back in the 90s, he introduced me to the world of programming on a calculator in high school.
0:44
A Shift: From Intended English Major to Computer Science
From: Joshua Gay • Finding a Career Path
I remember he saw the graphic arts award that I had won. And he suggested, but we recently just started a computer science program and we have almost nobody applying. So if you apply direct to major for computer science, your odds will be much higher.
5:46
Making an Impact on Education Through Open Source
From: Joshua Gay • Joining CK12 Foundation and Scaling Open Education
I ended up getting connected with Neeru Khosla. She had just started a project called the CK12 Foundation, a new company organization... her and her husband had been in Silicon Valley for quite a while then.
3:52
Early Influences from Parent's Engineering and Teaching Careers
From: Karen Sandler • Introduction and Early Childhood
Karen Sandler: Sure. I grew up in the suburbs in the United States. Um, my parents had grown up very poor... And so, uh, he was quite technical, and he was one of the first people using, uh, computer code in order to, like, using computers to replace the, um, the manual, um, crunching of numbers...
3:40
First Experience Writing Code
From: Karen Sandler • Introduction and Early Childhood
Karen Sandler: ...I think I wrote my first really, really, really, really silly program when I was probably six years old, you know, or 5 or 6 years old...
1:22
Early Exposure to Computers and Technology
From: Kirk McKusick • Introduction and Background
Kirk McKusick: Well, math and science classes were clearly my strong suit in school and the ones that I enjoyed the most. And I had just a little bit of stuff with computers because there was nothing in my high school at that time that involved computers. But I had an opportunity to do some other stuff at the University of Delaware where I'd gotten a little bit of introduction to computers.
2:13
Early Programming Experiences with Punch Cards
From: Larry Augustin • Advanced Education and Early Career
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.
0:53
Bell Labs Opportunity
From: Larry Augustin • Advanced Education and Early Career
They would recruit kids right out of their undergraduate, they would bring them in, they'd give them an opportunity to work for a year, and then they would send them off to school to get their master's, get advanced degrees. Fabulous, fabulous program. I was lucky enough to get accepted into that. And I went from South Bend, Indiana, Notre Dame, to Holmdel, New Jersey, the home of the transistor, and Bell Labs, the place where the Big Bang was discovered.
0:37
The Cathedral and the Bazaar Impact
From: Larry Augustin • Business Challenges in Open Source
If you look at the concept of I am selling you something that's free, it's kind of an odd concept. It takes people a moment to get their heads around this concept.
1:54
Learning by Doing
From: Larry Augustin • Entrepreneurial Lessons and Growth
I always encourage learning. You know, as I look back now, I realize how naive I was at every stage, but that's how we learn. So I'm not big on the would have, should have, could have done it differently. I think everyone has to go through the learning phases, and there's a ton of things that I got wrong all the time. But I listened a lot, and I hope I learned from those. This is a little of my philosophy when I advise entrepreneurs and companies - I give them advice, but I also think they have to learn themselves. People make mistakes, that's part of the learning process. It's one of the things I think is great about the Silicon Valley culture - it's a culture in which people learn from making mistakes, and you can make a mistake, and get better, and learn, and come back, and that's okay.
1:30
Early Exposure to Computing at Dartmouth
From: Lawrence (Larry) Rosen • Childhood and Education
I studied computer science before there was a computer science department. Uh, I became a devotee of that. I played with the computers that they made available to all of us. They had computers in the student rooms...
0:41
Learning from Open Source
From: Roger Dannenberg • Learning from Open Source
Roger Dannenberg: Well, I think maybe open sources is really an outgrowth and maybe I just see it this way, but maybe it really is an outgrowth of the academic world. Where in academia we do research and you know, we get the rewards are not so much money, but recognition. That people want to want to be recognized for being, for making contributions to whatever field, they do research or public or writing in.
2:09
Early Computing Experience at University
From: Tony Wasserman • Early Academic Pursuits
Tony Wasserman: So I went to Cal, University of California, Berkeley... the first computing course as a junior at Cal. And it was very quickly obvious to me that I was much better at programming and computing than I was at math or physics. And so having gone through Berkeley, I then went to graduate school at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
3:37
Introduction to Open Source Through AI Research
From: Tony Wasserman • Introduction and Early Academic Pursuits
Tony Wasserman: ...And my original thought was that I would go for a master's degree, but they made me an RA and encouraged me to stay. So eventually I got a doctorate in, of all things, artificial intelligence... Rolls of teletype paper that printed 10 uppercase characters per second and clattered as it did it...