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**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, alright. Well, thanks, Anna. Thanks for sharing the story, I appreciate it. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Thanks for having me. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Great hearing about blockchain; I think you've definitely schooled me in terms of where it's going and what it's doing. I'm excited. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Great! |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Anna. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Happy to talk, thank you! |
\* \* \* |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks again to Todd Lewis and all our friends at All Things Open. It was a blast being there. So glad to be at such a great conference. We'll be there again next year, so look out for us in 2017 at All Things Open. If you've never been, head to allthingsopen.org, buy a ticket and we'll see you soon... |
• Katrina Owen's early days as an anonymous developer |
• Exercism.io and 99 Bottles of OOP |
• Sandi Metz's background and how she became a well-known speaker |
• Ruby programming language and its creator, Matz |
• Katrina Owen's meeting with Sandi Metz and reading her book in beta form |
• Katrina Owen's experience giving a talk at a conference and being encouraged by others to do more public speaking |
• The confidence boost Katrina Owen received after people reacted positively to her talks |
• Kristina Owen gave a talk called "Therapeutic Refactoring" at a conference |
• The talk was about refactoring as a process that can make you smarter by offloading irrelevant details to tests |
• It used an example from Martin Fowler's book and was told as a story rather than a traditional presentation |
• The talk received positive feedback and helped launch Kristina Owen's speaking career |
• She also got feedback on the early versions of her talk from Sandi Metz, who became a friend and collaborator |
• Kristina Owen later worked with Sandi Metz on POODR and launched Exercism, which was featured in Wired |
• The origins of the 99 Bottles problem in Exercism |
• Sandi Metz's expertise and "expert intuition" in solving the problem |
• The book writing process, including collaboration, curriculum development, and editing |
• The beta release of the first five chapters of the book (99 Bottles) |
• The book by Kristina Owen is compelling and transformative in its approach to coding |
• Conferences can be intimidating but are valuable for meeting people and having real conversations |
• Overcoming initial awkwardness at conferences can lead to deeper connections and relationships |
• Stepping out of one's comfort zone and engaging with others is key to making the most of conference experiences |
**Jerod Santo:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our first Spotlight series, recorded at OSCON London 2016. I'm Jerod Santo, managing editor of Changelog. Katrina Owen is an accomplished speaker, creator of the excellent coding practice and feedback site Exercism.io, and co-author of 99 Bottles of OOP. |
Have you ever heard the story of how Katrina went from anonymous developer to sharing a byline with Sandi Metz? She shared all the details during this face-to-face chat. Listen in. |
\* \* \* |
**Jerod Santo:** As I told you, we had Sandi Metz on the show recently, which was kind of like a checkbox, like a bucket list for us. We always have to act like we're cool about it... You know, we had Matz on a year ago, sweatin' bullets... Like, it's Matz! And he was nervous, which made us nervous... But on that one w... |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, because that's not awkward... |
**Jerod Santo:** I know, right? He was very gracious, and a great guest, and amazing story... Do you know his story...? He never had access to compute power, so he just read about programming languages. |
**Kristina Owen:** No, I didn't know this. |
**Jerod Santo:** He had one computer, but it could only do - and I'm gonna botch the details - Turbo Pascal, or something... |
**Kristina Owen:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** So he would just do that. But then he would go to the library and he'd buy books about Lisp and about these other languages... |
**Kristina Owen:** That's amazing. |
**Jerod Santo:** I don't think Perl was a thing back then, but probably SmallTalk and these things... And he would just read books about programming languages, and then he would kind of have this wanderlust, or this desire... He thought they were so beautiful, but he never used them. So by the time he was adult and doi... |
So he told us that story, and it was just amazing. But with Sandi we tried to play it cool, and even she seemed a little bit nervous, even though she talks now for a living. Then a few minutes later she was over it, and everything was good. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, Sandi's an amazing speaker. I first heard about her -- well, I stumbled across a video that she did, a conference... This is way before her book, so nobody knew... Basically, she knew whoever was at the local meetups; that's the thing that you do when you work as a minion at some university or ... |
**Jerod Santo:** She's like, "I don't do anything." |
**Kristina Owen:** And she was like, "Oh, I know I should, but I don't... But I'm working on this book, but it's not gonna be ready for a long time." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Did you meet her then? |
**Kristina Owen:** No, so the timestamp on this video was a year earlier, and she said "Oh, the book won't be ready for at least a year", and I was like "Where's the book!? It must be ready!" So I found it in beta on Safari Books Online; I tried to buy it and there was a bug on the website that they wouldn't take my mo... |
**Jerod Santo:** So you couldn't get it...? |
**Kristina Owen:** I complained on Twitter, I was like "Safari Books Online, you need to take my money because I need this book", and then Sandi came across it and she was like, "Um, let's figure out how we can make this happen." So I got to read the beta. |
**Jerod Santo:** You really wanted that book. |
**Kristina Owen:** \[04:03\] Oh, my goodness! It was really exactly what I needed at that time. I had been struggling with refactoring and trying to figure out on my own, like "How do you make code better? How do you remove dependencies? How do you make it more readable? How do you make it less painful?" The talk was a... |
**Jerod Santo:** You just knew it. |
**Kristina Owen:** It had to be. And then I was right too, because it was amazing. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome. You were right. So you kind of busted onto the scene giving a talk, and then you got on Ruby Rogues because of the talk, kind of... |
**Kristina Owen:** Very much because of it. I lived in Oslo, I knew 12 people; we'd go to the same meetup every month. I worked at a product company that was really cool there; small, like there were seven or eight engineers. And there was a conference that was announced in Sweden for the summer, and I hadn't really be... |
**Jerod Santo:** Ask and you shall receive. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and a couple of my colleagues came along as well. I met all of these amazing people in the Ruby conference (it was a Ruby conference)... These fantastic people, who were welcoming and friendly and interesting and interested... I was a nobody and I was still having these fantastic conversations ... |
At one point, a couple other guys were like, "You should give a talk." I was like, "No... Hah, that's not gonna..." |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's what everybody thinks at first. |
**Kristina Owen:** That's not even gonna happen. Like, when would I do that? How would I do that? What would I talk about? Nothing, right? And then a year later I applied to give a talk at that same conference. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, what changed your mind, though? Because you said, "No, no, no", and now later you're doing it. |
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