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**Kristina Owen:** So one of the guys said, "It's really challenging, and it's really worth it." And I was like, first of all the fact that he acknowledged that fact that this is really hard - that was a relief. That made me think, "Okay, so he's not pretending it's easy." Hard things - I know how to do hard things: yo... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you put in the effort, and... |
**Kristina Owen:** So I was like, "Um, maybe I could do that", but I put it away... I kept going to these meetups in Oslo, and every meetup I'd bring a little refactoring that I had done; I wouldn't show it upfront, but when most of the people had left, I'd pull it up and then say, "Oh, look what I did! This was a fun ... |
**Jerod Santo:** And people liked it. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, somebody said, "I would watch a whole talk of this." I was like, "Oh, I could do a talk." |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice! So that was like a little bit of a confidence boost. You have to try. Was this the talk that shocked the Ruby world? |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, totally. \[laughter\] It brought down Twitt-- no... |
**Jerod Santo:** Twitter was going down pretty easily back then. |
**Kristina Owen:** That's true, there was a fail well going on... |
**Jerod Santo:** It was a low bar. |
**Kristina Owen:** The bar was very low... No, so I did this talk, and James Edward Gray of the Ruby Rogues saw a video of it, and was like, "You should all see this talk, it's really good", and then they invited me on the show to just talk about refactoring. Then later they brought me back on as a panelist. |
**Jerod Santo:** I recall that, because I used to listen to Rogues back then, and James was so effusive about this talk that I was like, "I should just pause this and go watch, I guess." |
**Kristina Owen:** It's fascinating... I was so terrified when I was gonna give this talk. I thought I was gonna throw up, because I was just so scared. I had no idea what the reception would be. |
**Jerod Santo:** What do you think that -- first, for the audience's sake, let's lay out what the talk was, but then tell me what you think really resonated about it. Because it did. Everybody loved it - why? |
**Kristina Owen:** \[07:53\] Yeah, so the title was Therapeutic Refactoring. The CFP was blind; first of all, I was given a chance, even though I had no experience speaking, nobody knew anything about who I was. The abstract spoke for itself, and the title I think was alluring. This conference was also at a spa... |
**Jerod Santo:** It was at a spa? |
**Kristina Owen:** It was at a Japanese spa in Sweden? |
**Jerod Santo:** Talk about therapeutic, right? You were so on theme. |
**Kristina Owen:** Right, so I think I totally lucked out, in some ways. The talk itself was a very straightforward, simple story... But it really was a story. I formed it as "There's this horrible code and it's untested. How do you deal with it?" So it was the process, step-by-step, of adding characterization tests, a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right, you were just applying something that you read. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and applying it sort of gently and carefully. And the whole point of the talk was that refactoring is something that can make you smarter, because it offloads a lot of the irrelevant details out into your tests, and this process, which is like lots of tiny steps, so you don't have to hold as mu... |
**Jerod Santo:** So it was therapeutic, yeah. So that happened, that was a thing... |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and I think the thing that resonated was that it was told as a story. It's not a readme; I'm not reciting a readme. They could go read a blog post, but it might not feel the same. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So I'm just now thinking about your journey a little bit, because here you were, kind of stalking Sandi Metz's Safari page, trying to get her book... |
**Kristina Owen:** No kidding, yeah... Sandi Metz, who at the time was completely unknown, which is almost ridiculous to think about now... |
**Jerod Santo:** And then your internet fame explodes because of the talk, Sandi's does because of the book... |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and she's way more famous than I am. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...and then she starts giving talks. |
**Kristina Owen:** Her fame - she can't even go to the restroom if she goes to a conference, because she's being mobbed by the hoards who want to talk to her. |
**Jerod Santo:** But you wanted to read her book so bad, and then a few years later you're writing a book with her. That's kind of a cool reversal... |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, it is a cool reversal. I'm trying to think what were the steps in that. So the first thing was I gave her a ton of feedback about the book. After reading the first chapter, I was so excited that I sent her feedback, and she was like, "Oh, could you do that more? Could you just put your stream o... |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice. |
**Kristina Owen:** So I did, and when I finished doing that, we got on a call and talked about... |
**Jerod Santo:** And a friendship probably spawned, or a relationship spawned. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, in some way... We had things to talk about, and it was an interesting -- I think we both got something out of that. And this is just about the time where my talk got accepted (Therapeutic Refactoring), so... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, so it was pre-Therapeutic Refactoring. |
**Kristina Owen:** She gave me feedback on the early versions of the talk, and the most important feedback - there were a couple of really important things that she... My talk would have been worse than mediocre is she had not had given me some pointers. |
**Jerod Santo:** And they were...? |
**Kristina Owen:** The first bit of feedback was I showed her the before and after shot of the first refactoring -- I had like seven examples that I was gonna put in this talk, and she was like "That's enough for ten talks. Let's just go with one example." |
**Jerod Santo:** I see... So focus it in, and don't try to do too much. |
**Kristina Owen:** Don't try to do too much. And then I showed her the before and after and sort of explained, and she was like, "Okay, so now you look smart and I feel dumb..." I was like, "Oh, that's not good..." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[11:54\] That's not the goal, right? |
**Kristina Owen:** That's not what I was trying to go for, so I worked really hard to try to figure out how do I carry the audience along with me in this discovery, so that it really feels like this is... I mean, this is not hard, right? But I want you to understand when watching it that this is simple and it's approac... |
Then she said, "You've gotta tell a story", and I was like "How do you do that?" She was like, "You just do..." \[laughter\] This is something that some people have been doing all their lives, they tell stories, and that's never been something that I had done, so I started reading books about storytelling; The Anatomy ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice, that's a good one. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, so I just started reading as much as I could to try to understand how do you structure a talk in order for it to be compelling, and stuff like that. Over time we just had things to talk about. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Then POODR got released, and she continued to give talks. |
**Kristina Owen:** And I continued to give talks... |
**Jerod Santo:** Rinse and repeat... |
**Kristina Owen:** Rinse and repeat... I launched Exercism. |
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