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Episode #109: Jenn Schiffer
176 Plays7 years ago
Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you were able to enjoy some R&R, and spend some time with friends and family. To kick of a great new slate of guests in 2018, I’m very excited to welcome Jenn Schiffer to the...
The post Episode #109: Jenn Schiffer appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you had a happy, healthy, and safe New Year. Welcome back to the show. We're going to kick things off in 2018 talking about ethics and data and technology. And to help me do so, I'm very excited to have on the show Jen Schiffer, who is an artist in Jersey City. And she can talk about why she chose Jersey City. She's an artist in Jersey City, also works at Glitch, and started a conversation, well, probably
Ethics in Technology Discussion
00:00:40
Speaker
better put continue to conversation I think on Twitter a few weeks ago about teaching ethics with code and so that really intrigued me and so I reached out and fortunately she was nice enough to come on the show and chat so Jen happy new year welcome to the show how are you thank you for having me happy new year I'm doing great how was your holiday season how are things in New York it's cold and and windy and dry I got a new humidifier so things are looking up so far
00:01:09
Speaker
Kicking 2018 off. Right, that's gone, that's awesome. So I'm excited to talk about, mostly about this ethics question, because I started this little Twitter discussion that I found really interesting. But then I started going into your work and your portfolio, and I found a whole other bunch of stuff I want to talk about. But we can start with having you just introduce yourself for folks who may not be familiar with your work. We'll just go from there.
00:01:33
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. So I, as you mentioned, live in Jersey City. I'm originally from South Brooklyn. I've always lived in this area and I don't see a reason why I'd leave yet. But I've been working in tech for quite some time, but I had changed careers about six years ago from academia where I was teaching computer science and doing like
00:01:57
Speaker
curriculum planning and recruiting and student advising for computer science at a state university in New Jersey.
Glitch and Pixel Art Platforms
00:02:06
Speaker
I've also have been, and this ties into the ethics part, a member of the Association of Computing Machinery, or ACM. I was a member of IEEE for a short period of time, but I think I let that lapse because I'm not so much into electrical engineering.
00:02:24
Speaker
You know I come from a classically trained computer science background I have a bachelor's and master's in computer science and now I work in the industry I work at fog creek on a product called glitch which we call the friendly community where you'll build the app of your dreams and
00:02:40
Speaker
We have a community and we provide you with really cute, powerful in-browser editor that auto-deploys your app. So you don't have to know how to do DevOps in order to get things spun up like a cool bot or any sort of app that you can dream of. You don't need to have been building apps for years to figure out how to get that stuff online, which is super powerful and also runs parallel to my side passion project.
00:03:08
Speaker
which is make8bitart.com. It's like Glitch, an in-browser editor that allows you to express yourself in a fun and nostalgic way. But with Glitch, it's expressing yourself a code. And make8bitart.com, it's expressing yourself with pixel art. And so in my...
00:03:26
Speaker
guest career of being an educator, I've always wanted to tie in real world issues and things like art and ethics into teaching theory of computer science and also web development. Because, and this could have just been my background in college, I was taught by my mentors that engineering and coding is a way to solve a problem and we're solving problems for society.
00:03:55
Speaker
And so the whole idea of ethics in computer science education just feels natural and right to
Integrating Ethics in Tech Education
00:04:03
Speaker
me. But it's very clear that the industry is, I guess, fallen into a different pattern. And so I try to talk about it as much as possible because, like you said, I'm not starting the conversation, I'm continuing it. It just needs to get a little bit louder because I don't think people are listening, obviously.
00:04:25
Speaker
So when you talk about teaching ethics when it comes to code and computer science, can you give me a sense of what tangibly does that mean in your mind when it comes to teaching ethics?
00:04:37
Speaker
Well, I think that the reason why professors have told me why, like, oh, we don't teach ethics because, you know, there's too much curriculum. We can't fit it in there. I try to say that in nicer words, that that's a cop out because when you're teaching computer science or really theory or math or anything like that,
00:04:58
Speaker
You have to use examples everything is sort of a word problem a lot of them have numbers in it and you know more a lot of people i'm sure that like. Those numbers are everywhere and there's only more numbers coming and they're telling stories that need to be told you know we have all this data like why are we using.
00:05:17
Speaker
X equals one and Y equals two. What does one and two mean? There's probably a ton of data sets for those numbers have meanings. We can tie that into our examples and teach something in tandem with theory. It takes work because that means that the people who are teaching have to be more multidisciplinary. They have to read outside of their own texts and their own blogs and their own brain, which is a lot of work. But again,
00:05:46
Speaker
It's really important. And I say I'm classically trained in computer science, but I did go to a liberal arts college. So I was sort of the minority in terms of background and major. And I did have to take those general education electives. So I was like,
00:06:03
Speaker
taking 7 a.m. reading Asian culture classes and being exposed to all this stuff, which at the time, when you're waking up at 7 a.m. to read old Asian texts, you're like, what do I need this for? But then in retrospect, I'm like, oh, I'm glad that I was exposed to these different ideas and cultures. Back then, it makes me a better engineer because I'm a lot more mindful of the existence of those different cultures and
00:06:29
Speaker
and different histories and I'm a white woman, so I have to do a lot more work in order to do that because this sort of society right now has cleared a very easy path for me to not have to do that, but it doesn't make it right for me to take that path.
00:06:47
Speaker
Right. So I guess there's this part of being broader, trying to be aware of the people and the places around us in different cultures and different perspectives. But when someone is training to be a computer scientist or training to be a technologist or diving into code,
00:07:08
Speaker
How should they think about ethics when it comes to working in the code is there something that they should be considering or thinking deeply about as they are writing a web app or developing a data visualization where i guess i'm trying to figure out where do the ethics come into play.
00:07:25
Speaker
practically in the work or is it more of as individuals we need to be more maybe self-aware is the right part the right phrase or certainly sort of general you know having high ethics as individuals but I'm trying to think about how we merge that into these technology fields specifically.
00:07:43
Speaker
That's a good question. There are a lot of layers to ethics and how you apply it as an individual at home personally to yourself. We talk a lot about these days about self-care, remembering that you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else, putting that oxygen mask on you before you save your kid. Whenever I see that, I'm like, I don't know if in that moment I would put mine on first and then put it on the kid.
00:08:11
Speaker
You have a kid, I'm sure. You probably put it in your kid verse, but it goes against the grain of what I've been raised, especially as a woman to think, I would take care of myself. But then when you're writing code, there's the syntax and then there's the semantics. There's the meaning of what you are writing. You can work at a company like Uber and be told,
00:08:35
Speaker
we want you to write the code that tracks our competitors or something like that. And that might be a big deal to you. There are people who code for, I'm sure Lockheed Martin that writes software to put on airplanes to track and most likely kill civilians. There's all these options and jobs out there because code is so pervasive and is such a useful and portable way to solve problems as technology advances.
00:09:04
Speaker
There are these ethical quandaries that we haven't been exposed to yet. Nobody in college ever said, how did you feel about the idea of virtual reality being used for torture? That very rarely comes up. And so we have to think beyond the code that we're writing and why we're writing it and think about those problems in society to mirror what we're thinking about, how we're solving problems and how this could be affecting other people.
00:09:34
Speaker
The ACM has a code of ethics and like professional like responsibility. And the first one is contribute to society and human well being. So like if you just think to yourself whenever you're doing anything like my ultimate mission is to contribute to society and human
Ethics, Accessibility, and Community Collaboration
00:09:49
Speaker
well being. It's a good start.
00:09:50
Speaker
And I think that everyone, especially in tech, individually should have their mission. I always tell people my mission is to not make people think that they all have to learn how to code, but make learning how to code accessible in case they do want to learn.
00:10:07
Speaker
So when I'm creating educational materials, not doing it in a way where I'm like, everyone has to do this class. If you're not doing it, you're missing out. You don't deserve any more money, blah, blah, blah. And following the lines of what capitalism is driving. But my mission is to make it accessible to people. And I try to remember that when I'm doing different projects. Because if I'm doing something that is going against that, I have to catch myself and be like, this might go against that.
00:10:36
Speaker
And that happens a lot in terms of building apps with accessibility. That's probably where that gets me the most. For people who might have vision difficulties or sensory difficulties, especially when it comes to using technology.
00:10:49
Speaker
Yeah. And that comes up a lot because I make a lot of tools that facilitate the creation of art. Right. And people think like, oh, well, if it's a visual thing, then it doesn't matter if blind people can't use it, but it does. Yeah. It will be a difficult problem, but it's one that I have to actively work on. And even though it's a side project, I just at least have a conversation with people like, yes, this is what I'm thinking. And also make 8BitArt.com is open source. And so people have contributed to
00:11:17
Speaker
making it more accessible as well. Which I think is the true power of open source beyond just sort of like recognition that you're in that community. But I can't be an expert on accessibility and JavaScript and like all the different frameworks and like be a good person like all the time and an educator. Like it's a lot of stuff going on. And so by like allowing yourself to delegate that work to the community is another way that we all can sort of
00:11:47
Speaker
be more ethical in our planning and our projects, but also that leads us to talking to different people, which leads to learning about more experiences. It all ties in together. Right. One thing that's interesting is this idea of
00:12:00
Speaker
you know, working for a defense contractor, for example, or let's just say a weapons manufacturer, where maybe some of these ethical questions are a little more, I don't know, maybe not obvious is not is not the right word, but they're a little clearer to talk about. And yet, probably a few of us actually do that sort of work.
00:12:17
Speaker
But a lot of us are making web apps or making visualizations or giving presentations to people. And so for most of us, thinking about people with vision difficulties or learning difficulties is probably something that most of us have to deal with day to day and yet may not actually think about it. One of the issues that comes up in the world of research that I work in is
00:12:41
Speaker
how do we think about and write about people of color, people in lower parts of the income distribution, people in other countries and other cultures that is not sort of condescending. It's taking those different perspectives into account as opposed to saying, I'm a white guy writing about, you know,
00:13:01
Speaker
poor African Americans in Chicago.
Diverse Narratives and Inclusivity in Tech Storytelling
00:13:04
Speaker
And there's ways to write about that. I think a lot of the social science fields hasn't really thought hard about, but maybe is changing now.
00:13:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, appropriation in tech is becoming an even bigger problem as people are sort of almost kind of like tripping over themselves to try to, I guess, feign an interest in diversity and inclusivity.
00:13:31
Speaker
I always tell people like I speak at conferences a lot and I always sort of talk about the parallels of art and code and recently I've been talking a lot about the negative parallels. One of those is appropriation. And in art, we see a lot of like white artists trying to tell the stories of black people.
00:13:50
Speaker
And I was just saying, don't tell someone else's story without their consent. And consent's a hard thing to get in that case, but it's extremely important. And so if you're telling a story about poverty in Africa, you should have the resources in order to
00:14:10
Speaker
talk to the people that are involved in that or who have already been telling those stories. Because none of the stories that we're telling these days are particularly new. We're just telling them against to bring more awareness. We know that there is poverty in countries. We know that there is slavery. We just actively ignore that. And so making sure that we find the people who have been continuously working on those stories, I think it's important.
00:14:38
Speaker
Because I think for every movement and hashtag on Twitter that a white female celebrity gets the credit for, there's a black woman that has been using that and working and bringing awareness to it for five years prior. Yeah.
00:14:54
Speaker
And if you make that assumption, then that gets you to start doing the work, which is hard again, because when you have an idea and you're like, oh, I have the ability to tell this story, you want to like tell and get out there, but you have to do the work to research if that story is already being told by somebody else. Right.
00:15:11
Speaker
When you're working to help people build web apps, are these the sorts of questions that you are asking folks you're working with? Are you thinking about them, you know, sort of quietly in your mind's eye and sort of subtly trying to get people to think about this? Or are you sort of right out there saying, Okay, you're trying to build this, can we think about this other group that may have already thought of this or may not be able to use this? Like, how are you thinking about this in your day to day?
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean at my current job at Glitch, we have a small team about like seven or eight of us. And Fog Creek itself is a small company with like 30 something people. And we've been making products for developers for like 17 years now. It's a weird company. I mean, we invented Trello, co-created Stack Overflow,
00:16:02
Speaker
I've been fog bugs are sort of pioneered bug tracking and we've sort of revamped it and launched manuscript calm a couple of weeks ago so we've always been really involved in building tools to help developers build the best software they can, but also be mindful that building the best software that you can is not just meaning that it like.
00:16:22
Speaker
works technically, but also that it's not harming others. You can't do that exactly with a tool. You can't have a tool yet that is like, error, this function is going to lead to someone's job being taken by poorly made self-driving cars.
00:16:42
Speaker
We can talk about it through our content marketing and stuff like that. My CEO, Anil Dash, is well known in the tech community and is very outspoken about social justice issues. I'm like that at another level, closer to the developer level of that.
00:17:00
Speaker
And I think that people appreciate that the people that are building software and designing software are also really interested in social issues. Because again, the point of engineering and using code to solve problems, in my perspective, and I feel like it's the right perspective, is to contribute to society and human well-being.
00:17:20
Speaker
And so working on a product like Glitch, we have to be proactive about making sure it remains a friendly community. But also back to my mission, making sure that everybody has access to it.
Fostering Ethical Online Communities
00:17:32
Speaker
We do talk a lot about accessibility, which is a hard problem in code editors, especially in the browser. We just had like a full week, like all day for three days planning session for 2018. And it's something that I brought up.
00:17:47
Speaker
a lot because I really want to make sure that we are creating a tool that anybody can use in some sort of way. And we'll learn as we get more users. We only launched Glitch properly like less than a year ago.
00:18:02
Speaker
I hear about different ways that people are using it and the pain points that they hit. We're very mindful of how our users are using and communicating with us, and so we can make those changes because it's our product. Right. One of the threads I hear you talking about in this conversation is this idea of community, both
00:18:24
Speaker
in Glitch and your day-to-day job in the education field. I know that you co-run the Brooklyn JS meetup group in Brooklyn, which I think is the largest or one of the largest JS meetups in the country. So I noticed that idea of community comes up again and again. Is that in your mind the place where not just the technological development happens, but the ethical and moral and cultural development happens?
00:18:51
Speaker
Oh, for sure. I mean, I would need more than two hands to count the number of people that I've met like four years ago in Brooklyn JS started who I can already tell are way more socially thinking and ethical in their thoughts and work than they were when I had met them.
00:19:09
Speaker
And I'm a social engineer myself. And I'm a people watcher. I like to talk a lot to strangers. But I'm also kind of like an introvert. As long as someone's talking about something I'm interested in, then I'm game. But otherwise, I'm like the wallflower. But looking at everybody. And I see at these meetups and conferences, I can tell when someone has talked to,
00:19:38
Speaker
I could tell when a guy has had their first technical conversation with a woman before, which might not be his fault, but his job might not have any women, stuff like that. And I can tell and I can sort of see, a lot of the times I see them becoming more relaxed and realizing like this isn't a completely alien experience, like this actually feels right.
00:20:02
Speaker
I think of when I went to college, I had a roommate who had very obviously never been around gay people before. And my University of Montclair State is a very huge and vibrant musical theater and theater program. So we had a large homosexual community and it was a lot for her to like take in. And she, it was just very obvious she wasn't used to that.
00:20:27
Speaker
And I think of a lot of developers now who don't go to college, who don't get exposed to those large, completely new communities that you're stuck in for four years. And I get worried that they're sort of being siloed into their own sort of white male identity bubble, which makes it harder for the rest of us to sort of like socialize. So I think like the more that we have meetups that actively work on diversity, inclusivity,
00:20:57
Speaker
you know, have codes of conduct and are prepared to act upon them when called and are also just remind people that like, you know, we want to have a safe space and we want all of you to stay here, not just, you know, the ones who bring diversity. Everybody brings diversity to the table.
00:21:20
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, for me, it's a no brainer. Like if you want to be exposed to that, you have to go to a social event. But then I also know that there are a lot of people who don't feel comfortable in social settings. And so I wish that there are more tools for community online. Like a lot of people use Slack, but Slack is a terrible product for community. And I think that they also like.
00:21:40
Speaker
do not want communities on it. I mean, you can't block people on Slack, so I think that's a huge signal that they're like, we're geared towards the workplace and not community. For Brooklyn JS and our other meetups in our family, we call it Borough JS, we use Slack.
00:21:56
Speaker
I'm just like, yeah, I think a couple of weeks ago I was bringing up, maybe we should move to something else, but that would be a huge ordeal, I guess. I guess. But I just wish that there were more spaces. I mean, because Twitter was great, but now it's not. And Facebook is terrible. It's all these tools that showed great promise for communities allowed us to start communities, and then they just abandoned us.
00:22:24
Speaker
Uh, and now I'm like hoping that people who are more ethically minded are going to create tools to sort of bring that beautiful feeling of I can't leave the house, but I can make friends and family online. But we're at sort of, um, what I call a weird haircut phase when you like, if you have long hair and then you cut it and you're like, Oh, this looks great. And then it like grows out and you're like, Oh, this is so bad. You have to wait like it to grow an inch before it like feels normal again.
00:22:54
Speaker
It's like that weird haircut phase. I don't know how long it's going to be. It could take a while, though. Yeah, it can. And I feel it. And that's why when Lyft and Uber, we're going to invent buses.
Diversity in Tech Meetups
00:23:08
Speaker
I'm like, we don't need fucking buses. We have those. Make us something so that we can all be friends and be good to each other, for crying out loud. Well, if they could be good to their own employees first, that would also be nice if we could start there.
00:23:23
Speaker
Yeah, the bar is so low. We got to raise it. I want to ask you one last question before we go about Brooklyn JS. So I know you're co-running it. And I know you recently gave a talk about it with some new products or new projects, I should say. Do you want to just talk about those real quick?
00:23:40
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, we had a couple of people drop out for the December meetup. And so I gave a talk because, you know, I haven't, I've been like, co emceeing it for a few years now. And emcees and organizers don't typically talk in meetups, but you got to do what you got to do. You got to fill in, man. Yeah, yeah.
00:24:00
Speaker
And the holidays are so hard. I get it. We were pretty late in telling the final speakers when they can speak and they're just like, oh, I can't do it. I totally get it. Someone who speaks a lot. I did a podcast interview the day before that was last minute, can you do this for 15 minutes? And I was like, whoa, that wrecked me for a day.
00:24:25
Speaker
I'm like, I need six months to emotionally prepare myself for a 15 minute phone call. I'm building myself up. I'm going to stand up from the mirror for a while and build myself up. Yeah.
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, so a cool thing about working on Glitch is that the product is a code editor. So really, a lot of my role is dev rel. And working in dev rel for a code editor is great, because you could build whatever the hell you want, because it's a code editor using the product. And doing pixel art, I've always been mostly interested in hexagonal grids. There's research into whether a hexagonal grid
00:24:57
Speaker
would be more efficient in terms of holding data, especially for images. I think the only thing holding us back from that is just displays on pixel grids. But I used to be obsessed with my light bright when I was a kid, and that's on a hexagonal grid. And I didn't have a TV in my room. And so I would just stare really closely at the TV, watching Rescue 911, and then trying to recreate what I saw on the light bright.
00:25:26
Speaker
I was a freak and uh yeah so it's like having a tv in my room and I've always just been fascinated at that idea and so the thing with hexagons and a grid is there's a lot of math and I happen to really like math but I I don't like to make things that I can't explain um to somebody who doesn't understand
00:25:47
Speaker
what's going on behind the scenes. So I find myself putting projects on hold because I'm like, it's done. It's ready. I just don't know how to explain the source code in a literate way. Really into literate programming. And that's something I wish I can just type out what I want to do. And the computer just does it. That would be great. Higher level than JavaScript or
00:26:08
Speaker
C++ or whatever. And so yeah, I finally like finished it. And I'm just sort of making these glitch apps that are based around creating like a hexagon mode of make 8-bit art. And yeah, so that's what I talked about at Brooklyn JS. I always like to, my goal for the new year is to always have something like in my pocket ready to go. Someone's like, hey,
00:26:35
Speaker
Can you give a talk for 10 minutes? I'll have something new and fresh to go, which is an ambitious thing. But I feel like if you start with one topic that you're really into, and it could be something as what seems mundane as a hexagon, there's so much about it, the hexagon. I'm also really interested in platonic solids. I have two dodecahedrons tattooed onto my body, so that's for life.
Tech Culture and Future Goals
00:27:03
Speaker
So if you find that
00:27:04
Speaker
thing that you're super interested in. It's like the sky's the limit with what you can sort of talk about. Now, being coherent in what I talk about, maybe that's 2019. I'm just going to put that out there to everyone. I like this as a goal though, having all these different topics ready to go. And I think we just need to get everybody who's listening to this episode just invite you to give a talk. You'll just have to give a dozen different talks every week, which would be great, which would be great.
00:27:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the talks that I've been giving over the past few years has been about tech culture because there's a need for that talk. I used to also talk about art and code and now art and code is a lot more popular and accepted by the mainstream tech world than it used to be five years ago.
00:27:50
Speaker
I like talking about tech culture. I feel like I've been in it for not all that long, but maybe I'm just a little bit more self-aware than some of my peers are. And people appreciate it. It's just, it's very draining. Like when I go on stage and I talk about how we're fucking things up, like, and then people like, oh my God, you're so right. I'm like, I kind of wish that I can just like,
00:28:12
Speaker
build a hexagon grid and just give a technical talk on that instead of like letting all the guys get to do the cool fun technical stuff. And so, not that I'm going to stop talking about tech culture because I can't and I feel like it's part of my ethics that's my way of contributing to society and human well being.
00:28:31
Speaker
I also do want to keep in mind that computing technology is an ever-evolving subject. And if I want to stay in there, I not have to only follow the culture, but I also have to follow the technology and keep up to date. So it's very intense and it's very challenging, but I'm still young enough where I think I am ready for that task still.
00:28:55
Speaker
It sounds great. And it's super ambitious. And I have all the faith you'll help us evolve. It may take a while, but I'm optimistic. Yeah. Well, Jen, this has been really interesting. I look forward to keeping up the conversation.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:29:08
Speaker
And hopefully, 2018, we'll see some more growth in all these different areas. So thanks so much for coming on the show. Oh, thank you so much for having me and asking me these kind of questions.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, and I hope everyone will check out Jen's work, check out what she's doing at Glitch, and have these conversations, hopefully respectfully and nicely with one another in person too, which is great. There's lots of meetups, of course, all over the world. So you should be sure to check those out. And for the podcast itself, should you have comments or questions or things that you'd like to talk about, please do get in touch. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.