As a Principal System Architect at Wikimedia, Moriel Schottlender’s career has taken many different paths, but she wouldn’t “undo” any of her decisions. Each success, failure, and stumble has given Moriel a unique perspective that makes her stand out from others. In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Moriel dive into the power of localization and accessibility, programming puns, and Minecraft.
As a Principal System Architect at Wikimedia, Moriel Schottlender’s career has taken many different paths, but she wouldn’t “undo” any of her decisions. Each success, failure, and stumble has given Moriel a unique perspective that makes her stand out from others.
In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Moriel dive into the power of localization and accessibility, programming puns, and Minecraft.
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Episode Timestamps:
(01:31): Moriel’s role as a Principal System Architect at Wikimedia
(05:19): What Moriel’s day-to-day looks like
(14:06): Rapid Fire Questions
(21:50): Random Segment Generator
(25:52): What Moriel is most proud of
(29:37): Moriel’s advice for software development beginners
(38:07): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“I wouldn't ‘undo’ anything. Everything kind of impacted me to where I am now. I will try to then adjust my course maybe, or see where I'm going from here. The good, the bad, it all gave me some perspective that is unique from other people.” – Moriel Schottlender
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy William...: Hello everybody and welcome to the Dev Morning Show at Night. My name is Cassidy Williams and I am here with my lovely co-host. Zach, what did you eat today?
Zach Plata: I ate a cheese sandwich from the freezer but it had chicken in it.
Cassidy William...: Was it frozen?
Zach Plata: It was frozen.
Cassidy William...: Zach, do better.
Zach Plata: Sorry.
Cassidy William...: Anyway, speaking of doing better, we have Moriel on the call. Moriel Schottlender.
Moriel Schottle...: Hello.
Cassidy William...: Moriel Schottlender is a principal systems architect at Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia or Wikipedia? What should we say?
Moriel Schottle...: So the foundation itself is Wikimedia and we support all the operations of Wikipedia and 11 other projects. Not a lot of people know that, but we also have Wiktionary and Wiki Commons and, I'm going to forget a whole bunch, Wikidata and Meta-Wiki and we have a whole bunch of other things that people are not aware of that we have. So we are the foundation Wikimedia but you're most familiar probably with Wikipedia, the website.
Cassidy William...: Great.
Zach Plata: I definitely had never known.
Cassidy William...: So small websites mostly.
Moriel Schottle...: Tiny.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Moriel Schottle...: Tiny only around the fifth. I think we're somewhere in the top five depending where so it's tiny, kind of.
Zach Plata: Wow. Amazing.
Cassidy William...: So because it's such a small website that only covers a fifth of the internet, you probably have to solve a lot of really big problems. What are you working on right now that interests you in particular that you'd like to talk about today?
Moriel Schottle...: So this is cool. So I do a couple of things. Right now as a systems architect, we are looking at the future of Wikipedia and Wikimedia and all of these other projects that we have in terms of what does knowledge and the service of knowledge means in a world where, let's face it, reading full articles, full pages is less of the things that people do today online. So people do read Wikipedia and Wikipedia is very relevant, but that's not the only thing that people do online or that's no longer the main thing probably that people do. And then that, that's the question for us. Where is technology going and what does that mean for kind of a website that is crowdsourcing information that is valid, making sure that the information is crowdsourced and also valid, cited, and what does that mean for the new style of information? So that's mostly what I'm working on.
And then there's always my passion which is what I started with which is localization. And then how to also make sure that we are approaching everyone equitably and allowing basically all human on earth, right? That is our mission, to make sure that the information is available and accessible to everybody on earth which is a tiny, small goal. But what does that mean and how to make sure that it is actually accessible and convenient in all languages, what does it mean to devices and whatever that means to the accessibility, all of that kind of stuff. How do we approach this and look at this?
Zach Plata: Do you work on localization as part of your day to day duties at Wikimedia, Wikipedia?
Moriel Schottle...: So not anymore. So right now I am doing... My day to day work is systems architecture, but the idea about localization is that it never goes away, right? We are looking at Wikimedia now as a system, as kind of like Wikipedia and the rest and how does it work and where are we looking at? And localization is a piece of this, and this is kind of like once you get into localization, accessibility and stuff like that, it never goes away. So I may no longer submit code that actually touches on a localization problem but I definitely work with localization in mind, and I think that's true for all of the movement, all of the movement of Wikimedia and Wikipedia. It's something that's been very, very important since the beginning and we also have to do that I guess. We are pioneers in terms of localization and languages. We support 320 languages online right now which is a lot higher than everybody else-
Cassidy William...: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Zach Plata: Gosh.
Cassidy William...: It's the actual whole world. It's wild.
Moriel Schottle...: It's not the whole world yet. We're trying to add more languages just to make a point here.
Cassidy William...: A lot of the world, more than most websites in the world.
Zach Plata: Truly.
Moriel Schottle...: Yes. Fair.
Cassidy William...: Speaking of things that make the world go around, advertisements. Here is an ad from our sponsors of the show.
Zach Plata: The Dev Morning Show at Night is a sponsored podcast. I mean, someone has to pay the bills around here. We're sponsored by LaunchDarkly, and LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster. How? By gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they want, fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business teams. Thanks for the money, LaunchDarkly.
Cassidy William...: Could you talk a little bit more about what systems architecture means? Because some of us in this room totally know everything that it entails and some of us don't.
Zach Plata: That's me.
Cassidy William...: So could you go into a bit more detail about what does day to day systems architecture look like in your work?
Moriel Schottle...: Yeah. I think my coworker defines it really well by saying architecture is the translation of strategy into technology. So there's a lot of ways to look at how the future looks like technologically and architecture is happening in multiple layers, right? If you build an app, you have some sort of architecture you decide on. But our architecture is confined or usually kind of relatively smaller, right? Like this thing, but you're still thinking about it. And the way to think about it is also what is the strategy of this app? Where is it going? What's the vision? Where am I going? And that's how you choose stuff. And then the same thing has happened when you move up and up to something that contains more things in front of you. So if we talk about Wikipedia, we have now a much bigger system. And again, if we talk about Wikipedia and we talk about the 11 other projects, each project, almost each one has 320 languages in it.
Now you're talking about 900 websites, but those 900 websites operate with the same system underneath, right? We call it MediaWiki. It has a system underneath. But that system is about 20 years old now, 21. It's PHP, LAMP stack. It works, don't get me wrong. But when we're thinking about the future now, do we want to do things that support videos and the new style of doing stuff and better kind of APIs that do machine... Whatever it is that we're looking, AR, VR, whatever, we need to start thinking about what is the future and move towards the future. So your architecture thinking is now dealing with a lot larger system, right? So you're looking at the strategy of the system and you're looking at where you're going, and then you're looking at the component and not necessarily delving into is this component made up right, but what would these kind of components need? What kind of services or what kind of structure generally or what kind of things we can do to allow for developing the type of direction we want to go with?
So that's what we're thinking. It has to do a lot of the strategy discussions but also experiments, right? Because there are certain questions we can't answer. We don't actually know what it would look like specifically to edit certain things that we want to get to. And so in order to get that, we also design these kind of, well, we need to answer these kind of questions. How do we do that? How do we answer that? How do we pivot? How do we go? And so it's kind of both ways of the strategy of listening and getting the strategy and figuring it out, but also figuring out what the strategy is and all of those layers to give us an idea of where to go,
Cassidy William...: Oh my gosh, that's so many levels. It's really cool but it goes so much deeper than honestly just most companies have to think about because there's so many levels. But at the same time, we probably should be at all of these companies thinking about it the way that you are, and it's probably changing the face of a lot of localization and patterns and scaling that companies just haven't thought about before.
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Moriel Schottle...: Yes. And I think that some companies also have the benefit of being able to pause maybe, like pause development. We're going to rewrite this thing, re-architect it, do great and then move. And some don't. Like there's no way that we are shutting off Wikipedia even for one second if we can help it, right? So the question is also how do we do that? How do we move forward and stuff like that is a very big question. And while we do that, we also know that we have new things we have to do. For example, we're talking about localization. We need to make sure that we're opening ourselves a lot more to new areas and new editors that may not have been editing as much on Wikipedia and may not have enough information. And so how do we do that? How do we continue or start to better support more languages, better languages, more accessibility, all that kind of stuff while also thinking about this new thing. So it's multifaceted but it's fun. It's a lot of really interesting challenges to think about.
Zach Plata: And speaking of editors, what is your favorite terminal or editor to use?
Cassidy William...: Nice, Zach. A plus segue.
Zach Plata: Thanks.
Moriel Schottle...: Yes. Well, I guess it kind of depends. I know I'm a very bad participant of the editor war. Yeah. It depends on what I use it for. So regularly, if I do web stuff which is my usual thing that I do, I use VS Code. I moved to it from Sublime and then Atom and now VS Code. I find it very, very useful, lots of really cool extensions that I use and I just get used to it and it's great. When I upgraded my computer, I cried a lot because I forgot what kind of extensions I had and then I had to dig them up again and get it exactly to the place I wanted, but the pain. But I use IntelliJ for Java stuff because it seems to just work better for that. I do Minecraft plugins.
Cassidy William...: You don't use Eclipse? I don't understand.
Moriel Schottle...: I did and then someone showed me all the cool stuff that you can do with IntelliJ and I'm like, all right, I got convinced. So this is why I'm saying it depends. It depends what the tools are.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. Spoken like a true senior engineer.
Moriel Schottle...: I know VS Code and I don't want any... VS Code can also do Java, I know. I know, I know.
Cassidy William...: I get it. I get it. And do you use the terminal that comes with your computer or did you get fancy ones?
Moriel Schottle...: No, I use the regular terminal. I use my Ubuntu. I use just whatever terminal is in there. I do use Nano though instead of-
Cassidy William...: Instead of Vim or Emacs or something?
Moriel Schottle...: Yeah. I could never get used to... Nano is so simple. You don't need to remember the colon what am I again?
Zach Plata: Same.
Moriel Schottle...: So I do use Nano.
Cassidy William...: Man, I didn't expect to be alone in the Vim wars here but I'll stand strong.
Moriel Schottle...: As you can see, we're very war like with our choices.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, so much battling. What got you into this industry in the first place?
Moriel Schottle...: Well, how far do you want me to go?
Cassidy William...: Keep it interesting. And you could go as far back as you want.
Moriel Schottle...: Yeah. I think it's a familiar kind of story for a lot of us, I don't know, passionate computer people. When I was very, very young, I got into computers. I was like six. I think that my first thing that I ever did was a Logo Lego. You guys remember Logo with the little turtle?
Cassidy William...: Yes.
Moriel Schottle...: Am I dating myself here?
Cassidy William...: That's an old reference. I know it not from my personal experience but from a Wikipedia article I think.
Moriel Schottle...: When dinosaurs were roaming the earth I used Logo. So when I was like six or something we connected Lego stuff and whatever and we did Lego and I remember I made a little robot arm and all it did was if you put sugar... You have to put sugar in it because it wasn't that smart, and then it would dump sugar into a cup and stir and it was for my dad. That's it. And that's how I got into computers. I was like, oh, that's so cool. I can make stuff do things. It was a hobby for the longest time. I didn't really want to work in this. I didn't understand that I could work in this and make money. I know. I was always interested in kind of that technology and stuff but it was always kind of... I made website, I made whatever, but I worked in actual things. And I went and did a physics degree because-
Cassidy William...: Why not?
Moriel Schottle...: I wanted to make money. No, I wanted to be an astronomer. I actually wanted to be in Star Trek and when I asked-
Cassidy William...: Who doesn't?
Moriel Schottle...: How to get there, I went to study astronomy as if that'll get me there. But yeah, so I kind of came back to it after being a little disillusioned with academia and physics and I was like, how about maybe my hobby? I can actually do something with it and ta-da.
Cassidy William...: And here you are running one of the largest websites in the world.
Zach Plata: For real.
Cassidy William...: Running it.
Moriel Schottle...: Running, I think my bosses will have something to say about this but sure. I'll get Alex up-
Zach Plata: 300 plus languages.
Cassidy William...: Take the credit, it's fine. It's fine.
Moriel Schottle...: Will do.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. You know 300 languages.
Zach Plata: I can't believe you learned that many.
Moriel Schottle...: Yes, fluently. Yeah, still more to go.
Cassidy William...: You're getting there. You're getting there kid. Okay. We are going to move on to our next segment and it is the rapid fire questions. We're going to ask you a bunch of questions rapidly with fire. So here we go.
Moriel Schottle...: Okay.
Cassidy William...: First of all, we all have a domain name or 10 that we're squatting on. What are yours?
Moriel Schottle...: So I have open sourced the WTF. I love the WTF.
Cassidy William...: Nice, that's a good one.
Moriel Schottle...: I don't know what to do with it but it's there. I don't know why but I got techbro.me. I had ideas for it and then wasn't sure so it exists and I own it. And then I bought localization.works, localization.fails and localization.rocks and I'm still thinking what to do with it. By the way, both spellings is, with a Z and with an S.
Cassidy William...: Oh, you're dedicated.
Zach Plata: Oh, wow. Nice.
Moriel Schottle...: That's it.
Zach Plata: Next question. What is the most recent thing you over-optimized?
Moriel Schottle...: So I was starting to get into Arduino, I have it here actually. This is the over-optimization now.
Cassidy William...: Cool.
Zach Plata: Oh.
Moriel Schottle...: And I totally over-optimized the code. Everything was kind of like, let me test out if this works, and then I look at it and I'm like, there's no way I'm just not making it into a class and then that allows me to input specifically, and I just over-optimized the entire thing. I only used it once. There was no reason for me to over-optimize it but it was...
Cassidy William...: But you can.
Moriel Schottle...: And it was in C.
Zach Plata: It happens.
Cassidy William...: Oh. I mean, yay. Wow. Sounds rough.
Moriel Schottle...: Yeah, that was basically the mix of emotions I had which is why I switched to CircuitPython so now it's a lot better.
Cassidy William...: There you go. There you go. What is your golden rule for coding?
Moriel Schottle...: So my very first lead of the team used to say first get it to work and then make it good, which I used to follow a while and I thought it was good. But then, I don't know, after getting to more senior and seeing a lot more and working in open source kind of forces you to do that. I think a document and comment as if you build it for others whether you build it for others or not. Always comment on everything, you will thank yourself in a year or in a week when you look at it back and don't understand what you did, and you will serve others by maybe considering making it open source.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. I love that. That's also why whenever I figure something out, I write a blog post as fast as I can because you never know when it'll be helpful for someone else or you within a month.
Moriel Schottle...: So that's even next level documentation.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, that's true.
Moriel Schottle...: I was talking about code comments. This is even better. If you can write a blog post after every time you do something, that is-
Cassidy William...: It's all about sharing knowledge and all that.
Zach Plata: It's a nice, organized way.
Moriel Schottle...: It's like master level.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: What is your favorite it depends question?
Moriel Schottle...: Well, we talked about this. What editor to use, right? Full circle.
Zach Plata: There we go.
Moriel Schottle...: Yes. But I think it depends is probably the answer to a lot of things that people don't think about. So what architecture is best? Depends. What localization system should I use? It depends. How to translate a certain language. It depends. So I guess the answer to what is your favorite it depends question is it depends.
Zach Plata: That's very meta. I love it.
Cassidy William...: That's the most annoying answer you can give but it's true.
Moriel Schottle...: I am realistic.
Zach Plata: Love to hear it.
Cassidy William...: So what is the oldest piece of tech that you own?
Moriel Schottle...: Yeah, that's a good one. So if you'd asked me that a year or two ago I would've told you that I actually have an IBM XT 286 which is a computer from 1986. And I had it not only working, I had it with a Word editor in Hebrew.
Cassidy William...: What?
Zach Plata: Oh.
Moriel Schottle...: Yeah. And then my mom decided it's gathering dust which was not false and wasn't worth anything which probably wasn't false and tossed it out.
Cassidy William...: No.
Zach Plata: Oh.
Moriel Schottle...: So I guess it depends on your definition of own. I still own it even if it's in the garbage or something.
Cassidy William...: You don't necessarily have easy access to it if it's in the garbage.
Moriel Schottle...: That was not the question though.
Cassidy William...: True.
Moriel Schottle...: We should frame the-
Cassidy William...: True. We need to work on specificity. I'm sorry.
Moriel Schottle...: There we go. There we go. So I don't know. What do I still own? You know there's so many ancient technologies that today we take for granted. Maybe scissors. Are scissors ancient?
Cassidy William...: Oh, that's fair. Yeah.
Moriel Schottle...: Paper, parchment.
Zach Plata: That's a way to look at it. Have you written a piece of cringy code and could you explain more if you have?
Moriel Schottle...: All the time?
Cassidy William...: Nice.
Moriel Schottle...: I mean, this is the problem with working in open source. Not only have I written cringy code, you can see it.
Cassidy William...: And everyone can.
Moriel Schottle...: Just look up my name and then you can see all of the corrections that either I or everybody else tried to make to it. But also because of that rule first make it work then make it good and because we are open source, then a lot of it is kind of like, okay, this is cringy code right now but we're trying to make it work and whatever. And then we keep refactoring. So there's a whole bunch of... You've got to be humble when you work in open source because at least when you're closed source your coworkers will see it but that's it, but everybody online can see exactly what kind of cringy code I wrote.
Cassidy William...: I think it's a good vulnerability exercise almost because a lot of people are just like, oh I plan on open sourcing this project after I make it perfect. And I think if you just make it open source from the get go you might be like, oh no, people can see it, but it kind of forces you to be just like, it's out there, I'm just going to work on it. It's done.
Moriel Schottle...: It's also you're going to get people come and comment on anything even after you make it perfect to realize that nothing is perfect so you might as well just toss it out there. But it does cause interesting effects. A couple of years ago I strained my shoulder and I was on some legal medicine and I was working and apparently my lead wrote comments on the... I was submitting code and apparently my comments were very philosophical.
Cassidy William...: Oh.
Moriel Schottle...: And it was very, very interesting to go back and read. The code was good. The code was working, everything was fine, but the comments got into the philosophy of why should we?
Cassidy William...: What is this about?
Moriel Schottle...: It was very good.
Zach Plata: Is this in a Git history somewhere we can peruse?
Moriel Schottle...: You probably can.
Cassidy William...: Perfect.
Zach Plata: All right, we'll leave it at that.
Moriel Schottle...: Everything's open.
Cassidy William...: What is your favorite programming pun?
Moriel Schottle...: Okay. This is not fair because I'm in front of the queen of puns here.
Cassidy William...: I know that you are capable though. You have plenty that you have made me groan with.
Moriel Schottle...: How many program does it take to replace a light bulb? None. It's a hardware problem.
Zach Plata: Hey.
Cassidy William...: Ugh. Hey.
Moriel Schottle...: Am I supposed to be happy with groaning? Because I think that's the way it's supposed to happen.
Cassidy William...: I think it's good to feast off of the groans and be just like, this is the power that I've been given.
Moriel Schottle...: Excellent. So, good. There were enough groaning then, I'm perfect.
Zach Plata: And now the last question, what is your most used emoji?
Moriel Schottle...: I think the smirk. You know the half smirk one.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Moriel Schottle...: That one.
Cassidy William...: I don't know how to do that. It's like a kind of side eyed...
Moriel Schottle...: It's like you're looking at people knowing what you've done but you don't know if they can name what you've done and you're like uh-huh.
Zach Plata: No, that's good.
Moriel Schottle...: So that one is my main one.
Cassidy William...: I like to describe that one as... There's a line in SpongeBob where he makes that face and says, "You like Krabby Patties, don't you Squidward?"
Zach Plata: That's such a good one. A good reference.
Moriel Schottle...: There we go. That's the face. That's the face.
Cassidy William...: Okay. It is time for the random segment generator. In this segment, something random happens. There's going to be a bunch of different options of what we could talk about. And the first segment is talk and ship slash sip. We're going to be spilling some tea. Moriel, what's something that's underrated or overrated in the dev community in your opinion?
Moriel Schottle...: Overrated, Twitter threads that are definitive instructions. Don't use SSR anymore, it's blah, right? Or React is better for everything, jQuery sucks. This is for you, Cassidy. As we establish, it all depends. I mean, even coming from Wikipedia, we have a lot of cases. We see don't use SSR and for us, for example, speaking of localization and accessibility, there are actually really valid reasons to make sure that your website like Wikipedia especially loads without JavaScript first and then hydrates, and most of the features you can edit even if you don't have JavaScript on. So even features have to be... And we're discussing now how much of it, many of the features should and shouldn't, but we are in a situation where if you're talking about universities for example, a lot of them have computers with still Internet Explorer which died this week, but still have Internet Explorer and a lot of the JavaScript that modern stuff is written will not work on it, right?
So if we want them to use the website, we've got to make sure that it renders without JavaScript which means that we might have different use cases than a lot of other places. So a lot of those threads, they have good intent and I get it and a lot of them make good points about stuff, but this absolutism about this is not good for traffic or for whatever, not always true. A lot of the things you should look at the system and what your goals are and what you really want to achieve. And sadly, most times, the one thing that really drops between the cracks when those things happen is localization and support for accessibility and for languages. So they also make me groan. Not a pun groan, an actual grown like a-
Cassidy William...: A pained groan that's not humor oriented.
Zach Plata: Sadness.
Moriel Schottle...: Yes.
Cassidy William...: It's very real though. I agree with you completely because a lot of times when I see those threads, first of all, a lot of times it's marketing where it's someone trying to market their specific style of development that they want to put out there, or they're marketing themselves because they want to be a thought leader of some kind. And no hate to the hustle and what people have to do to get by of course, but you're right. The absolutisms, it shows such a very narrow column of what can be for specific use cases.
Moriel Schottle...: New people who come in, you tend to sometimes shame them for what they chose or how they do things, right? There are different choices. People have different tools available for them. Nothing is... Okay, maybe there are a couple of things that you shouldn't do, but nothing is world killing horrible in the world of programming and making those definitive statements also make people just feel excluded. So even in that aspect, you kind of...
Zach Plata: We're all trying to learn.
Cassidy William...: I agree completely.
Zach Plata: It makes it harder.
Cassidy William...: We're just trying to do our best.
Zach Plata: Just trying.
Moriel Schottle...: Yeah, with a chicken sandwich.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, straight from the freezer.
Zach Plata: [inaudible 00:26:06] lunch.
Moriel Schottle...: My heart is... I'm identifying-
Zach Plata: Thank you. Thank you for empathizing.
Moriel Schottle...: How many times it happens between meetings. That's the only choice you have.
Zach Plata: It really is right now. Okay. Well moving on to the next segment is what are you proud of? So tell me something that you recently built or something that you're really proud of right now.
Moriel Schottle...: I was thinking about this and I was like, oh, I built stuff for Wikipedia, I can kind of show you and stuff. But I got to say, the one thing that was very recent that I actually literally shipped code for and I'm very proud of because it came out really cool is my personal website. Right?
Cassidy William...: I'm saying yeah because I saw it before we actually recorded this. Moriel's website is sick. It's so cool.
Moriel Schottle...: It was such an adventure. So moriel.tech is the website and I made a little slider at the top that changes the way that... Just basically replaces CSS files. I'm going to give you all the secrets of how I did it.
Cassidy William...: The juice.
Moriel Schottle...: So it's written in Vue and it's also open source by the way because of course it is. So you can actually see what I did on GitHub, but it has a little slider with years so you can slide and change how the website would have looked like in '96 or I think the earliest one is '89 and then there's 1992 where everything took forever to load.
Cassidy William...: It's so good.
Moriel Schottle...: And then Myspace somewhere in the middle I think in 2001 or something, and then slowly it kind of moves when you move it. And then there's a future, kind of like the future with a little bit of a... That might be a surprise.
Cassidy William...: Some Easter eggs.
Zach Plata: I want to check it out right now. That's such a cool idea.
Cassidy William...: It's the coolest. Yeah, it's so clever. I love how you put that together because it's something that a lot of people don't think of, especially in these different eras of web development. There was a time where Bootstrap was the thing you use and that is it. And then there's times where your website was GeoCities like where it was just kind of a lot of Times New Roman and some animations in the background.
Moriel Schottle...: You remember frames?
Cassidy William...: Heck yes. So good.
Moriel Schottle...: You know, I had problems replicating that in Vue.
Cassidy William...: Oh, I believe it.
Moriel Schottle...: Oh goodness.
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh.
Moriel Schottle...: I had to cheat to make Vue think that I'm going backwards in time in order to get... It was definitely an adventure in learning how to program, I don't know, better? Weirder?
Cassidy William...: Differently. Yeah.
Moriel Schottle...: Differently.
Zach Plata: What is frames?
Cassidy William...: I mean, we touched on the fact that Internet Explorer is now dead, rest in peace. I remember way back in the day when Internet Explorer 7 came out and animated PNG... Not animated PNGs, just PNGs in general were available. And so suddenly you could have transparent rounded corners because you could add images that had that built in. And so many interesting things just weren't available back in the day that we take for granted now.
Moriel Schottle...: But you know what's funny? I tried to do exactly what we did back then, right? I tried to use images of rounded and whatever and it turns out that over the years we upgraded the browser so much that certain things I had to re-implement in order to work. We did not just add on features, we... The blink tag and marquee are gone now but they were all the rage in Myspace.
Cassidy William...: They were so good.
Moriel Schottle...: I had to do tricks to get them back.
Cassidy William...: Good times. Where has the web gone? Nowhere good. Okay.
Moriel Schottle...: On my website, apparently.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: There we go.
Moriel Schottle...: That's where it's gone.
Cassidy William...: Take a look. All right. Next segment is launch lightly slash crash darkly. What is your best advice for someone just starting out in the web development world, software development world in general?
Moriel Schottle...: Do not listen to Twitter definitive threads. Take them with a grain of salt. That would be advice number one. See, I keep closing circles.
Cassidy William...: It's so good.
Zach Plata: I love it.
Cassidy William...: Closing all these loops. Love it.
Moriel Schottle...: So I think find a place that is safe for you while you learn. So there's a ton of places to learn and you should go around and look for a lot of it, but find a place for you to be. It could be a chat room, it could be a classroom, it could be a group of friends, it could be a open source project that you actually got into and are supported by your peers. Whatever you find, find a place that you can kind of mentally take a load off and talk to people and brainstorm in a safe environment while you learn because there's a lot of stuff going on and it could be very stressful while you learn about, well, the new thing is now and now and now and now you can't keep up. And it's really easy to drown in a lot of that and there's a lot of opinions out there and not the entire environment is nice out there. So finding a place that gives you inspiration and gives you the safety I think is probably the one thing.
Cassidy William...: I think that's so true. I agree with every single thing you just said and in particular, the safe element but also the brainstorming thing that you said. Being able to just brainstorm with people who high level know where you're coming from where you can just spew ideas until you hit something that you're interested in I think is such a good thing just for your brain in general for thinking out problems. I mean, it's why rubber ducking is such an important aspect of coding where you can just talk out your problems. I'm looking at my duck right here to someone who will listen and I agree, having that space is so important.
Moriel Schottle...: And the intent I think is also important because especially when you work in open source, you do some of that brainstorming [inaudible 00:32:13] just put something you were thinking about blind and a lot of people come in, but a lot of people come in a lot of times with the preservation intention of what are you doing? Don't move my cheese and stuff. And it's really good to have a group of people that doesn't judge you when you ask a question. They're kind of like, all right, let's go with it. I don't know, let's see where it leads.
Cassidy William...: Right.
Moriel Schottle...: Right? And it's building a lot.
Zach Plata: Do you have any places off the top of your head that people could go to for these kind of spaces whether it's like a discord server or something like that?
Moriel Schottle...: There is a discord server.
Zach Plata: Perfect.
Moriel Schottle...: I don't know. Can I-
Cassidy William...: I feel like it's weird if I talk about it so you can talk.
Moriel Schottle...: All right, I'll talk about it. Cassidy has a really wonderful discord server called Rendezvous with Cassidoo and you can join it by supporting on Patreon or Twitch and it is 100% lovely. There are brilliant people there. There's really, really great moderations. There's a lot of people. Like oh, it grew.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, it grew. Because you were kind of an OG member of the discord and now I think it's over 100 people.
Moriel Schottle...: Oh, wow. Yeah. But this is the kind of space that I actually was... It is serving that. We play games sometimes together and Cassidy beats all of us in-
Cassidy William...: Tetris.
Moriel Schottle...: In Tetris.
Cassidy William...: You crush all of us in Minecraft though because your Minecraft skills, she's won awards people. She's really good at Minecraft.
Moriel Schottle...: Well, I started because of you. You got me into it.
Cassidy William...: This is true.
Zach Plata: Wow.
Moriel Schottle...: So credit goes to... I don't know, credit or shame, whatever because I am a little addicted.
Cassidy William...: I do feel like a proud parent that it went too far. I'm just like, oh no, I really introduced you to something serious here.
Moriel Schottle...: That's basically what happened.
Zach Plata: But you did it.
Moriel Schottle...: But yeah, lovely, lovely service. So something like that but wherever you find yourself.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. I think Zach was one of the people who introduced me to Minecraft actually because we first played it in college.
Zach Plata: Full circle.
Moriel Schottle...: So wait, do we have a chain of culpability here?
Cassidy William...: Yeah, there you go. We'll just call Zach your Minecraft grandfather.
Zach Plata: Just pass the blame along.
Moriel Schottle...: There you go.
Zach Plata: All right. If you could undo one thing in your career, what would it be?
Moriel Schottle...: I'm no fun at this. I'm going to say it depends. No. I'm going to say nothing and not because there are things that I'm proud of everything. No. But I've been thinking, I had a trajectory that is not usual for programming, right? I started in physics. I actually started in electrical engineering and then I moved to physics and then I worked in physics for a while. And I was older when I got to study and started working. I was an intern, relatively a lot older than others and stuff. And I was thinking a lot about this, about what would have happened if I started a lot early, like right in the beginning got into computers. Well, then I wouldn't have the perspective that I do have from physics that I think gives me a lot. A lot of the things about how to model problems I did get from physics and I think it shaped the way that I solve problems, right?
And there's so many things that happened. I think that I take it as everybody has a very unique perspective and this is also true for diversity. When we talk about diversity, it's really your experiences shaped you and shaped the way that you approach problems and that is the benefit here. Right? And that to me, I wouldn't undo anything. Everything kind of impacted me to where I am now. I will try to then adjust my course maybe or see where I'm going from here, but it's kind of all of it. The good, the bad, it all gave me some perspective that is unique from other people.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: I love that.
Cassidy William...: And I think that's probably the wisest answer you can really give too. And you could get into the physics of it and be just like, well, think about the different timelines that could have happened and the butterfly effect and multiverses.
Moriel Schottle...: There is probably a version of me in a parallel universe that has better puns.
Cassidy William...: No way. This is the peak. This is the peak timeline for puns. I know it. Okay. Speaking of things that are very exciting like puns, what excites you right now in the world of software development more than anything?
Moriel Schottle...: So I think there's a lot of conversations right now that are happening about localization and globalization which I think is very, very good. I don't think the solutions are still there yet, but we are starting to talk about it, especially the world is a lot more global. People are moving, people are traveling, people are not living in one place anymore. They kind of move around and that creates a lot of implications about a lot of the assumptions we used to make about localization. Localization used to be a lot about local. You're connecting to the internet and then if you're in the US, you get English and if you're in Portugal, you get Portuguese and that's it. Not true anymore because you can travel and you can just live in a place. You also have places with multiple languages, right?
So all of these things must change and they're starting to now because a lot more people are encountering those problems as opposed to the relative minority of just the immigrants or just the whatever, right? So I think that is very exciting. I think that opens up a lot of conversations. I would like to see those conversations go more towards solutions that are equitable. Sometimes they don't, sometimes they kind of land on its edge cases or whatever that might not be. But the fact that we start talking about this a lot and the fact that it's being flagged and people notice more, I think that's a good thing for the entire kind of world of developing software.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. And you love to see it too. The fact that there's so many more diverse perspectives now, it's a good thing and it just leads to better products and better experiences for everyone.
Moriel Schottle...: 100%. And we see it. I mean, it was never an argument really but we used to get the argument of like, well, how do we know? We do. We have literally information right now, lik data.
Cassidy William...: There is research that proves it.
Moriel Schottle...: Yes.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Zach Plata: Agreed.
Moriel Schottle...: Is it localized research though?
Zach Plata: Oh.
Cassidy William...: Or globalized with an S.
Moriel Schottle...: Me and my full circles. There we go.
Cassidy William...: All right. Now it is time for some sage advice and then we will close up for the day. My advice for you today everyone is to not deal in absolutes, kind of like what Moriel was saying with all of the Twitter threads that are going out there and the Medium articles and the opinions on the internet. It's very easy to think, wow, this must be the one true way to make websites. This must be the one true way to build apps. Must be the one true way to put together some hacky hardware thing. There's no such thing as one true way with software fortunately or unfortunately. And so if someone is saying to you, you are wrong because this is the only way to do it, chances are you might be wrong in a particular case but not in every single case. It depends is kind of the answer for almost everything in software. So build the best you can, get educated, and that is that. Moriel, thank you so much for being with us today.
Moriel Schottle...: Thank you for having me. This was great.
Cassidy William...: It was so fun. Could you tell us, where can people find you on the internet and any sort of plugs that you'd like to share with us?
Moriel Schottle...: Yes. So I feel like I made already a plug for my website so you can find me there moriel.tech and you can play around with the future and past and stuff and tell me whether you like it or not. You can find me on Twitter and practically everywhere as Mooeypoo, it's M-O-O-E-Y-P-O-O, including Cassidy's chat server which come in, join us. Mooeypoo everywhere and moriel.tech has all of the places to find me including on Wikipedia where you can find me as Moriel Schottlender and I'm there.
Cassidy William...: Do you edit lots of articles?
Moriel Schottle...: Actually, not so much. I work more on the technical side. So I edit a lot of documentation.
Cassidy William...: That's something.
Moriel Schottle...: Like software documentation. And I edit some articles. I edit a little bit but I mostly do the... I said you have to comment everything so I do that.
Cassidy William...: That makes sense.
Moriel Schottle...: On Wiki.
Zach Plata: Yeah. Full circle.
Cassidy William...: And once again, because making podcasts is expensive, this show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly toggles peaks of 20 trillion feature flags each day and that number continues to grow and you should use them. You can head over to LaunchDarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible, LaunchDarkly.
Zach Plata: I'm Zach and I'm a dev [inaudible 00:41:22] and you can find me on Twitter at Zach Plata.
Cassidy William...: And I'm Cassidy Williams. You can find me at Cassidoo, C-A-S-S-I-D-O-O on most things. I do dev experience for remote, an OSS Capital, and memes on the internet. This show once again has been brought to you by people who have money because not all of us do. Thanks, LaunchDarkly. You're the best. Until next time, bye everybody.