Sean Tibor:
Hello, and welcome to teaching Python. This is episode 137. My name is Sean Tyber. I'm a coder who teaches.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
And my name is Kelly Schuster paretes. And I'm a teacher who codes.

Sean Tibor:
And this week, we're joined by the one and only Kelsey Hightower. Kelsey, welcome to the show. We're really excited to have you here.

Kelsey Hightower:
Happy to be here.

Sean Tibor:
It's funny, we've been following Kelsey for at least I have on Twitter. For years, Kelsey's been binging podcast episodes of his. We've been looking forward to this episode for a long time, and looking forward to the conversation and talking about education and computer science and coding and a career and how that all fits to together. Kelsey, we're excited to dive into it with you here in a few minutes.

Kelsey Hightower:
Yeah, fun fact. Python was, like, the first, maybe, relationship with the open source community. So that was, like, my first meetup was speaking into Python, small meetup in Atlanta. And also some of my first open source contributions were to the Python project. So it felt like my becoming an open source was all about Python. So it has a kind of special place in my career.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
That's python people. That's what got me hooked. What is it? I came for the code. I stayed for the people community. It's the truth. So cool.

Sean Tibor:
Absolutely. Before we dig in too deep, let's cover the winds of the week. I'm excited to share some this week, but, Kelsey, I think we'll make you go first because you're our guest. It can be anything. Inside the classroom, in front of your keyboard, out in the great outdoors, whatever works for you.

Kelsey Hightower:
I learned how to do some electrical work. I needed to run in a brand new house. I wanted to run two new electrical circuits, all the way from the garage where the electrical panel is, all the way to upstairs to the master bathroom. And I called a couple of electricians. They gave me some quotes. They told me it's going to take a couple of months. I was like, this can't be too hard. I got YouTube, and I pulled permits, and I read all the codes, and I ran all the wires, and I put the breaker in at the end of last week, and everything works. My house isn't burned down, and I'm ready to call the inspector to come approve my cable runs to make sure everything was good. So that's a big win. I did the thing I was afraid of, which was run an electrical line.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Into, and you have a heartbeat still. That's awesome.

Kelsey Hightower:
I do. Everything works.

Sean Tibor:
And yet I'm sure you had that moment, the first time you flipped the breaker just to test it, that it's like, what's going to happen? And it's both the most exciting and terrifying feeling in the world.

Kelsey Hightower:
You can't stop it. It's just like it's going to go and hopefully everything is still wired up correctly and it all worked out.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
That's funny.

Sean Tibor:
It's like a big congratulations.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
It's like a major philosophy, right? Do something different, Sean, probably. Sean's gonna be like, I wonder if I can wire his wife.

Sean Tibor:
Oh, I do. It's fun.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Not me. I'll pass on that one. But anyways, you go first. Oh, no, no, you go.

Sean Tibor:
Well, this week has been super busy. My one of the week was forcing myself to actually take the weekend off. And to the extent that I could, there were a couple things that came up, but I was able to push for that work life balance to be able to say no. I know there are things I could do for work. I know I could be catching up or whatever. That's. Instead, I'm going to take some time to just decompress, unplug, take some time for me, spend some time with my wife. Just have a moment. And I came back on Monday and of course everything was a million miles an hour right away, and I could have been more caught up, but I don't regret taking some time for me and for my own health for a second.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Yes, you need to do that. He's hard to reach. He's been working way too hard. I never get to see him anymore. We never have our, I was going to say margaritas, but I couldn't think of anything. Our tacos, but that's cool. I'm. My win is really funny and I'm gonna say it's for today and I'm gonna get caught in it. But I work all summer. I do all the background apps for our school and all the books. And I had some vendor calls today. I booked out, like, from one to 330, but I did it at Tidal Cove at the water park. So all these vendors are like, there's a lot of happy kids around you. I'm like, yeah, sorry, here's the water park. So it was. I found out that I work really well outdoors, and we've always known that. I think when we had this venn garden outside of our classroom, and I like to work out there, but I think more and more people should be able to work from home or from a certain location. I got a lot accomplished in 2 hours, so definitely the children noise the chaos going on is like a zen moment. So I think I'm going to try coding in that kind of environment next time, see if it works, because that was, like, a huge win. Felt very accomplished. Lots of vendors hooked up.

Sean Tibor:
I think the question is, with or without noise canceling headphones.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
I did. And I had these things on, you know, so I was like, you know, whatever. I'm getting it. We're getting into it. I'm going to make these connections to new apps and vendors, and hopefully it all works on Monday when I check them out. That was a huge win. Anyways, I digress. So go.

Sean Tibor:
All right, I'm so, Kelsey, let's just introduce you for a moment. You've been working at Google up until recently as a distinguished engineer, which is a pretty big deal. It is a reflection of all your contributions and hard work. But I think a lot of people know you more for your public interactions with the community. The conferences that you've spoken at podcast a huge following on Twitter. And I've been following you for years because I found your post to be thoughtful and insightful and provocative. Right. You've provoked my thinking in terms of how I view a career in software engineering, a career that involves code, and also how I engage with people around me. So thank you for that. First of all, you've expanded my horizons and my thought process over the years, and that's very much appreciated.

Kelsey Hightower:
You're welcome. Thank you.

Sean Tibor:
Anything from your background or, I guess, how you got started, you mentioned your first contributions to the python community. Let's explore a little bit of how you came to be Kelsey Hightower, the public Persona. But who's Kelsey Hightower? The person who started and came to that place.

Kelsey Hightower:
When I look back, I think I got a bit lucky. Not necessarily like, I didn't go to the college route. I always reluctant to call it the traditional route because I don't know a lot of computer scientists. So most people I know are self taught, lifelong learners. And so I didn't go to college throughout 1999. I want the a certification, and let's see what happens. And so at that moment, the Internet was exploding. The hottest career thing you could do. Forget doctor, forget being a lawyer. You want to be in tech by any means necessary for someone coming out of high school deciding that college wasn't going to be for me. I'm working fast food jobs, and I used to say I never looked down on those jobs, but I never looked up either. And I've always thought that was going to be my path. It was the easiest thing to do, very little friction and everything else is going to require way more effort. So I went to it certification route, and not necessarily having the college identity or the first job and tech identity, you end up having to figure out who you are, right? And so I realized that I was willing to put in the work. I was willing to find my own confidence. We also didn't have social media or Instagram or any of that stuff, so I didn't have these illusions on what tech was supposed to be. I was still in the hard work era. You put it in the work, and then something comes back out. And so for the first five years of my career, it was exactly that. The more I put in, the more I saw come out. And so the whole HR job title stuff really didn't shape my career. It was more about, I can do this if only I would try. And so that's the early stint, and then there's this pivotal appointment part where I get to, it's okay to be good at your job. You'll end up with a really great resume, but if you want more than that, then that's on you. And that's when I decided to go to a meetup. And it was a python meetup. I was writing Python at the time. A lot of the tools I was using at the time were written in Python, so I was like, hey, what better way to go from consumer to someone who can create things than learn the language behind the tools? And so I went to this meetup, and I'm sitting there at Georgia Tech University in Georgia, and I'm sitting there watching like, these are all the smart people. Look at them. They're giving the talks, and I'm sitting there in the audience, and look, the talks were pretty good, but I was like, I can do that. And so I asked. The person's name was Brandon. Hey, can I. Can I come talk next month? He was like, sure. What do you want to talk about? I don't know. And so I was like, I got to be smart. And so I compared Haskell list comprehensions to Python list comprehensions. There were quite a bunch of study, and I wanted to just look smart, but in that preparation, made me feel like, you can learn the things you were missing. So all those computer scientists that were at that meetup, I felt like they made room for me, and I felt like I didn't make a fool of myself.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
I think it's huge, and I think, as Sean said, I've been binge watching a lot of your podcasts. I couldn't stop. There's just so many of them. And every time I hear you speak, I kept finding myself thinking, oh, my gosh, why isn't he speaking at schools? Why is this guy not in there? I can see you in the schools sharing your insights on open source collaboration. All these skills are things that you talk to adults. But Sean and I were saying it's the same thing. Kids are people, too. And I've been thinking, like, you talk an open source about openness and collaboration, and it's so different. It's so different than what we do in the schools, right? We tell the kids, hide your papers, don't share with each other. And I wanted to hear your talk and let everybody else hear your talk on our show about your thoughts on open source and how that collaboration and global, global thing is good and how maybe as teachers, we can start thinking of ways of bringing those skills down into the classroom.

Kelsey Hightower:
My wife has been an educator for 30 years.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
See, I knew it, right?

Kelsey Hightower:
Like, spanish teacher, high school teacher. And she looks fairly young for her age. And I remember high school students proposing, like, hey, you can't propose my wife. First of all, you're in high school, and stop it. I used to come and do the career days, and kids deal with a lot, right? It's not just can they learn this stuff. It's like, they got stuff at home. They got social pressures. Some need to be cool or try to fit in. Some of them are like, what do I got to figure out life in the next two years? And so they have a lot on their mind. So it's hard for them to hear everything and also believe it, especially when you're talking to a group of students who don't know anyone that has those type of careers. So it's, like, hard to imagine something you've never seen before. You almost can't believe it. And so I learned through that, was that kids, you have to talk to the whole child. You have to understand where they're coming from, their foundation. And it's not like you have to dumb it down for them, but you have to bring it closer to their reality. What's the delta between where they are and where they want to be? Because a lot of kids feel like, oh, I'm not a straight A student. I didn't take the AP classes. I guess it's over for me. It's like, well, not really, because after high school, this is a great reset that happens, right? In the real world, they stop asking about grades. Once you get skills like hey, I'd rather have skills over what your grades were in elementary school. Like, we don't talk about those things. And so when it comes to education, number one, I had to make sure I really understood how to respect formal education because it's very easy to say I don't need that because you don't even know what that is. But at the same time, I understood that education doesn't stop in the classroom. And so for me, that open source community is like that continuing education where it's like there's going to be no grades. And so how do you learn without the structure? And for a lot of kids, it just doesn't make sense. So if I go get this exam, do I get a job? Not necessarily. Do I get a grade? Not necessarily. And I think about open source, there's no certification body you're just going to go work with, in some cases, the best people at a particular set of technologies in the world. So you go from theory to application, and for a lot of kids, it feels weird. It's like you have to go break the ice. You have to go show up and not say, just teach me. It's like, no, you need to probably go and learn. In the arena of saying, hey, I see you opened this GitHub issue. I don't know if that's the right problem, but let me try to reproduce it. And from that reproducing step, you actually learn more than you've probably learned in the last year, and now you're starting to learn how to do human interaction. I think that's the key about education. It's like when I was in school, it was a lot of remember this, you get a grade, and I learned how to game that. I just learned enough to pass the test and that was it. So I didn't feel like I was growing as a person. It felt like I got really good at memory. So when I'm talking to these kids, I'm like, I need you to grow as a person. And so your attitude is going to play a big role into how this plays out for you long term. So I think when I think I do, I've spoken at Stanford University before, at the height of all this distributed systems and containers and kubernetes. And when I went to Stanford and they asked me to come speak to some PhD students about what they were studying, and I realized in that moment is that the theory is great, but their appetite for reality was so high. And so when I walked into that room, I didn't have to pretend to be a professor, I didn't have to create a lesson plan like their teachers you would do. They were like, no, no, no. We want to know what it's like in the real world. How does this stuff actually play out? And that moment, I really realized that I knew enough theory to match the terms, but then give them something more. So we're all students and teachers forever?

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Yeah, 100%. See, Sean? Sean's like deep thought. He's going to come up with something.

Sean Tibor:
The other thing that is coming through for me is this strong sense of doing right like that. Especially once you leave that structure behind of a formalized education, whether it's in high school or 8th grade or college or wherever it is, you have to replace that structure with something that. That you create for yourself. You have to like what you said, you have to discover what it means to be you, what makes you the person that is going to move forward. I resonate a lot with that. And I went through the full college experience, undergraduate, graduate school, the whole thing, and I still had that moment, same as you. Okay. After that happened, who am I and what do I do next? Like, hard work. Again, like, you put the work in, you get the result out, you start connecting with other people, you learn from them. The learning never stops. Those are the things that I think are helpful also for students to see because they do crave that. What's next? It's this big unknown for them about what life is going to be like whenever that exit point is there from the structure of school. And I still struggle sometimes with how to actually tell them that it's going to be okay. It's going to be hard, but it's going to be okay because you will have to figure out what it means for you. And I can give you what my experience has been, but I can't tell you what your experience is going to feel like for you from the inside. Have you seen any of that? Where there's particular experiences that you've shared or stories that you've told that seem to really connect with people that help them understand what it's really like once they make that transition?

Kelsey Hightower:
Yeah. I think the one thing I've learned over the years is that when you're, like, mentoring someone like a real person, the job is to hold up a mirror and convince them to like what they see, because I think their whole lives, they're being shaped and molded into something. You're a senior, you're a PhD student, you're these things, and you're going to apply to be this other thing. Hopefully, they let you get it. But that whole time, the question remains, where do you learn to be you? And there's no exam for that. There's no AP course for that. There's nothing that says, you're doing a good job being you. There's no rubric. And so I think a lot of people go on to be senior engineers and junior human beings, like, ten years into their career, and they're surprised about why they still struggle. And so I just had a kid I'm calling my kid graduated from Grambling State university, and he reached out to me, and I take random DM's. I said, look, let's just jump on the chat, because I know how important it is at this stage for you to have someone to talk to. And they're like, kelsey, I'm struggling. It feels like I'm applying to hundreds of jobs. I'm putting all these skills on the resume, and I don't know what to do now. And I understood. I was like, oh, all these kids are walking around with the exact same toolbox, the same color, had the same words on it, right? Same tools in there, and they're all trying to get the same job, to twist the same wrench, and for them, they don't stand out in any unique way. So the company's just like, well, we'll choose which one of these robots we're going to hire, because you all try very hard to suppress who you are and try to impress us with who you think we want you to be. So I can't tell who is who out of this mixed. And so I told that person, who are you? And, boy, did he pause. I don't know. I'm trying to be all these things that I was taught to be. And so I said, look, I know how you can find out. I want you to go to a meetup, and you only can sit in the audience one time, but the next time, you have to talk, and you're going to talk in 30 days. Now, here's the thing. When you make those slides, I want you to write the talk and put the bullet points, and then I want you to delete it all and try to get the talk without the slide deck. And only the things you can remember will be important, because that's who you are. And I want you to realize what you're doing. It doesn't matter if you're the best public speaker. I just want you to realize, what do you care about? Because that's what you should talk about. And then you can let people see you, right? So when people can see you behind the podiums, I like that person. I think on social media, some people get to see me because I show it to them. And it can be dangerous, because when you show people who you are and they don't like it, it's hard to get to a maturity point of saying, man, people don't like me. So the natural thing we try to do is make adjustments until they like me. But then are you still the same person? And so I've just asked people, like, find your tribe, find your group, find your community, those that might be accepting of who you are. If you like to play magic, the gathering, there's a whole bunch of people in the world that like to play match of the gathering. Stick to that, and it's okay to be unique. One in 9 billion is better than being a photocopy of 2 million other people. And I think that goes a long way. So I'm saying, get your skills. Pick any language. Learn that skill. Make sure you got your toolbox, but it's okay to have a different color shirt on. It's okay to add a name tag to the mix. And it's an okay to let people know why you've chosen that language, what you plan to do with it. Let your imagination be married to that toolbox.

Sean Tibor:
It really resonates for me because I just went through dozens of resumes over, like, at the end of last week. And what I was really struggling with was that they all started to look very similar. A lot of it, I think, is an algorithm. Like, we're looking for keywords. And so people are putting those keywords on their resumes because it means they get a call back. But what I really want to know is, what is it going to be like to work with this person, not with this robot, but with this person? Because I'm convinced that anybody who is willing to work hard and learn on the job and do their best to try to grow as a person in the role is going to be successful. It helps to have some basic skills. It helps to have some things that you know that you can bring right from the beginning. But I really care more about the person that I'm going to be working with. This is my coworker that I'm hiring. Even if they report to me, I'm going to be working with them. So I really feel that, because what I really want to see is, who's this person? What do they offer? What do they bring that we don't already have, or maybe we do already have. We just need more of it because it's really awesome. And they bring some other things too that are great. So I really hope that more people hear that right then and understand that it's a little bit of a vulnerability. It's taking a risk. It's not the safe place to say, this is what I am, and here I'm going to leave all the other things that I'm not to the side. It means that I would be much more likely to go call that person to set up the interview to talk with them because I have a better sense of who they are and what they can bring. And if they're not right for me, it means that there's probably some other hiring manager out there who they are the perfect fit for.

Kelsey Hightower:
Can I give people a specific example? Because this is the teaching channel and I think people love examples. Like, when you're writing code, it's one thing to see a function name, but it's really dope to see a function used in a larger context of a program just helps us understand how to use it. On my path to becoming a distinguished engineer, there's a very stringent set of review processes to get that promotion. And I think it took me about three or four promotions at Google to get to where I was. And remember the first promotion, I followed the template. Like, there's these templates on how you should format your activities versus your impact. So an activity would be coding, right? I wrote a bunch of code, and some people's resumes are packed with a bunch of activities. I wrote this many lines of code. It's like, great. But the impact is the thing where you say, I wrote code to change the way people fly. With this program in place, we save 30% of fuel and profits rose to match. Like, whoa, whoa. That is an amazing story. And it's more than impact. And so I'm expressing myself using the template like everyone else. And I remember there was a step to go to the principal engineer. I was like, you know what? This time I'm going to not use the template. My colleagues like, what are you doing? Review committee is going to freak out when they see this. That's what I hope happens. And so I was describing my accomplishment. Hey, you're probably reading this. I'm probably the 50th review in your batch. And one thing I want you to know is I carefully pick what I worked on. I actually was working on the things I care about most, and some of them actually match where our customers care about most. So what you're about to read are my greatest achievements for the last two years. And I would describe a thing I worked on. Now, this project, it's important. It's small, but it's important. Without this, customers can't sign those hundred million dollar deals. And so here's a list of companies that are using this thing to achieve things. And here's some links to some articles. But here's what I did to do it. I sidestepped the traditional route of over complicated, very impressive engineering project to doing the smallest thing possible. And it worked. And we got those results. And my thought was, is that the person reading this would be like, who is this storyteller amongst us? I feel so connected to this person and their achievements that I gotta at least put this one to the side, if nothing else. And it worked. And I got promoted. And look, maybe my achievements were so good, that didn't matter what template I used, but I found the courage to at least represent the whole person in the pack.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
I think that's. I think that's what got me hooked. And binging on your podcast is like this. Ideas, teaching philosophies, and who we are as teachers. We all are hoping that our kids are going to aspire to be a certain way. But as much as we hope and dream, we still always come back to this. Stay in the line. Gotta check the box. And I feel really bad for people that have to follow state standards. We're in a private school, so I get to make stuff buff of my curriculum. And there's been a constant theme with a lot of. Maybe it's just we're selecting these people, but it's constant theme with our guest. There's a divide between that typical computer science teacher and I'm not gonna leave every other curriculum out because I don't want to get anyone mad. But the curriculum with a computer science teacher and, like, a real coding teacher, Shawn and I, we're in there. I have 610 year olds coding thousands of line of code in nine weeks because our philosophy is, get in there, tell me what's you. And it's not just like, about all this stuff. Like, what's your thought? I've already listened to some of your podcasts. I know you're not gonna, Sean, listen to it, but what's your thought between that whole computer science theory vocabulary and actually a person in tech and that development and then in the road that you took?

Kelsey Hightower:
The truth is, I needed it all, actually. I think people forget. Like, for example, if I'm learning a new piece of technology, and maybe I'm learning it so I can land that job. The job says you need to have two years experience with Python. So we're just going to talk about day zero. So day one, I'm reaching for the book. I want the rigid, let's get to the point, hello, world, and then build me up from there. And so I want to feel good that I can type out the syntax, I can make something happen, I want to see something move. And I probably don't want to get into the fuzzy stuff. I probably want to get straight to the point, give me the skills that I need. But the one thing I've known is that if you really want to be good and stand out a little bit, what's the extra mile look like? So I'm the type of person that goes back, and now I want to be a historian. Who invented Python and why? Guido Ren Rossum. Great. All right, who's this person? Why Python? What was he, what language was he writing before Python? Oh, Python's written in c. Oh, so maybe he did some c. And then all of these people take influences from each other. Larry Wall and Perl and Python. What were the mailing lists talking about back then? And I just go read the whole mailing list about features and what to keep and what not to, tabs versus spaces, indent base versus braces. And I'm now learning the philosophy of Python, the pythonista, the whole style guide, the way you write idiomatic Python. And for me, I need that cultural part of why are we doing this? So I like to start with, here's how to do it. Then I like to dive into, why are we doing this? And then I like to go into the other side of this, which is, when should we not do this? Right. When is Python not the right choice? Because that's when I feel the most confident. Right? I'm never confident when I only know enough to use it, but not enough not to use and say, python is the wrong choice for this. And I think that's when people start to enter to that level of mastery of, you're so good with this tool when it should not be used. So those are the phases that I like. So I think as a teacher, it's hard to be all of those things. Sometimes it's like I gotta, you know, when I'm on stage talking to 20,000 people, I can't give you the personal thing you need. And so I try to go to this rollercoaster mode. I'm going to show you this thing and maybe I use a story to lead into the thing and then I want to take you on a roller coaster ride up and down so that I hit all of those points and give you enough to go and dive deeper yourself. So I think as a teacher, I think you, you have the biggest challenge, that sometimes you're with these kids for months, if not a whole semester or a year, and you have to service every one of these curiosity needs or assign them homework so they can do it themselves.

Sean Tibor:
I found that was the most challenging and rewarding part. Right. The fact that you could have so many different learners that were interested in so many different things and your challenge is to reach all of them. And it's exhausting, but it's also really rewarding. Kelly, you remember that time that we had one student who came to me and said, mister Tybur, I don't think I'm going to be good at this because I have learning differences. It's hard for me to read things and really get the information. And I said, I think you could look at that differently. You could look at that as you actually probably will read everything more carefully and more thoroughly than the other students who think that they read well and they'll read through it quickly and not really absorb the information. So if you read something three times in this, you're going to know it really well and you're going to do well at it, but you have to be patient enough to give yourself the time to do that and know that it's okay. And I remember she came to me at the end of the course and she said, you were right. She's like, I really feel like I know this way better than I expected to. And it was like that moment where I was like, oh, my God, I actually did something cool. This was good. And that challenge of finding that for each person, she took something that she had viewed as a weakness and turned it into a strength. And I'm just glad that I took a moment to slow down enough to really listen to her and try to give her a. A different way of looking at that. And it seemed to help.

Kelsey Hightower:
I guess if I did have a question for you all. There's this thing in sports where you can have the most talented player in the world, but they're not coachable. They don't fit well on the team. Actually, they're detriment to themselves because sometimes they will meet their match and that's where the coaching comes in. The second pair of eyes, someone that can identify their flaws and weak points, you know, how do you deal with a student who isn't coachable? It's like, look, I'm just here to. To just get a c on the test, or. I know everything already. There's nothing you can teach me. How do you deal with the uncoachable?

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
It's funny, the two sides of the spectrum, right? You have the kid that's like, I can't code. I think I'm better equipped for that end because I was 40 something when I started doing Python. And I'm like, I get it. It's freaking hard. Sean was in this classroom. He would know how many times I would just, like, start banging on my keys. It's hard. I get it. So those people I tend to have a lot of empathy for because I was in the hole with them. We find a lot of ways for those people with different things. I think. I think, not to toot my own horn, but we do a lot of different little things. And imagi, we use hands on, we use micro bits a little bit. We do a lot of drawing stuff. So those kids are fine. It's the kids on the other side of the spectrum, like you said, it's those kids that are like, I know more than you. I'm like, you probably are. And in 9th grade, you'll be out coding me because I'm still teaching basics. I think it's the kids that when I pushed them, I said, you know what? You don't know? You don't know GitHub, or you don't know how many different libraries there are, or you don't know how to pick this book up and read through it and try to find out the problems and write the code and check your mistakes. So a lot of the kids that come in with a really strong knowledge, they are very stubborn. So I try to stubborn their way with them. And typically, it's a long road, but it's that pure stubbornness of saying, show me something that's different. I have this one kid I just had who didn't want to learn anything. It was chat cheapy teen, a lot of the homework assignments, and I was like, I don't care, do something. So we started doing machine learning, and he's an 8th grader. It's like finding horse race. I was telling this story to sean the last time, like horse race spreadsheets, and I was like, I don't care. Go find. You know what? Why don't you go look at this? I forget, was the playground, the tensorflow playground? Like, check this out. He's like, what does this mean? And I'm like, you know what? I've used it. Someone showed it to me. It went like this. I know it does this. You come teach me. And he did. I made him do a video on it and actually explained it really well. So I sometimes think that one you definitely have to find on the one spectrum, how to get them hooked. It's like everyone, you have to find a hook. And on the other spectrum, for the really, really strong coders, challenge them, because a lot of teachers are afraid to go above that teaching point because it's too much work. You have to actually put in more work to teach the smarter kids. So that's fine. Anything? Yeah.

Sean Tibor:
Well, I was just going to add that in both cases, it requires a lot of empathy and a lot of intuitiveness about what's driving that behavior. Right. So trying to look behind what's obvious or what they're presenting to you into what could be driving that. So I love the approach that Kelly laid out for students who don't think they can give them something that's an on ramp, something that just gets them on the road and moving so that they can do the next thing and the next thing. And it doesn't matter whether they're moving at light speed or whether they're just creeping along, but they're at least making progress. And once you have them making progress, then you can build on it for the heart, for the students who think they know everything or think that you have nothing to teach them.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Sean orders from Adafruit and gives him lifesavers. Go build it.

Sean Tibor:
I mean, like, I know the longer that I keep working in tech, the less there is that I really know, right. There is so much out there, and I just have gotten really good at being a beginner at things and learning things from the start and understanding that if I turn over one piece of knowledge, that uncovers three other things that I also should go learn or can go learn. And so being able to break through that barrier for those students that are. That believe there's nothing more to be taught, right. Is almost the same thing as what Kelly was talking about with the students who are hesitant to start. It's showing them that there are things out there that are hard that we could go learn or things that maybe are easy, we just haven't learned yet. But showing them that there's a much bigger world than what they have learned so far seems to really help them understand that there's something to this, that there's more to the world than what I've learned so far. And sometimes that the empathy and the intuitiveness comes from realizing that sometimes they're just covering up a lot of insecurity. Maybe this is the one thing that they really are good at in school, and so you can't take that away from them, but you can show them that, like, they can have confidence in their abilities and learn new things and hopefully enjoy successes in other places, too, which will help them grow into that more complete person that we all hope they get to be.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
And I'm just the mean one. I'm like, perfection doesn't exist. You can always be better. I don't care if you're only in 8th grade.

Kelsey Hightower:
One thing that I think in the tech career, there's a point where I think you get the luxury of being able to learn without a deadline. And this is hard, because in work, if you're assigned a task that needs to be done by Friday, you're on this deadline and you know you have to get to good enough, and then it needs to go. And if you're missing those kind of deadlines, it can get really tough for you. But this is why I think it's so important to diversify your skillset and have a few additional investments that don't have deadlines. So a clear example would be, I'm at a job, everything's in python, but there's a new set of tools coming out, and Ruby's all the rave now. No one at the job is thinking about Ruby at this moment, so now I get to use it for myself. And now when I go home, I'm studying Ruby, and I start off just like everyone else. I try to rewrite some of my python programs into the Ruby language, but I also get to control my own pace, right? What's missing? What's there? Pros and cons, sometimes what we can learn from these new communities that we can then bring back to our existing ones. But I just think learning without deadlines, it just feels very different, right? It doesn't feel like I'm being forced to do this. It doesn't feel like I'm running through this too fast. So I just hope everyone in their career gets that experience of being able to learn something without a deadline, because it just feels way better than this force that comes with these artificial deadlines we create for ourselves.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
I know we're tied, but I have to ask this stuff. Sorry, Sean, if you let me know if I run over.

Sean Tibor:
No, go ahead.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
So I want a little switch gears, just not really, it's all connected. But I've been hearing a lot in your talks about your entrepreneurial mindset, and I love this because we're always telling kids, oh, entrepreneurial. We're going into this entrepreneurial class, and we're doing these I labs and these stems and et cetera, et cetera. And there's been a lot of new young people that are becoming entrepreneurs with this AI wave. But if we had to encourage students or help students or develop skills for students, for an entrepreneurial mindset, what would be some suggestions from you?

Kelsey Hightower:
The fundamental to this is that when I say entrepreneurial, these are the things that get you fired. So a lot of times we try to stay within the lines, do what's been asked of you. Don't talk back, don't rub the wrong people the wrong way. And ideally, you play it safe. And the truth is, there's risk in everything because the people who play it safe, no one really knows who they are, actually. And so when it's time to do these big layoffs, they just include you into this 10% number. Yeah. That person doesn't cause too much problems, but they don't take too much risk. And honestly, if they were gone, we don't think anything bad would happen because we don't know really what they do now. They're just solid. And there's a lot of solid people in this world, just to be honest, because you're dealing with a global competition, there's millions of people who are solid. And so when you think about entrepreneurial, you're going to take a risk. Everything works as is, but you're going to ruffle the feathers on purpose. So what does this actually mean? So, look, you might say, hmm, I think we can improve this portion of code that no one else wants to touch. But the thing about being an entrepreneur, you have to do calculated risk. This isn't cowboy territory. There has to be some profit from some of these decisions. So if I go touch this area of code, what's the reward? What's the profit for doing so? It'll get faster. Well, how much faster? Because if it's 1% faster, that's not worth starting a business around that. You got to think through this. But what if you can get a breakthrough that fundamentally changes the way things work? So when we introduce speed to things, think about travel back in the day. It takes nine months to get overseas. You can't have three day vacations if it takes nine months to get there. So the minute we get air travel where you can get somewhere in 6 hours. Of course, you can stay three days, and a whole industry blossoms from that fact. So when you're thinking entrepreneurially, you have to think about, hmm, no one asked me to go touch that area of code, but I did the analysis. If that area of code were to get 50% faster. So, notice what you're doing. You have a business plan. You're able now to call your shot and say, hey, I'm gonna go off the beaten path. There's a risk here. I should be doing something else that everyone understands and approves of, but I'm gonna go off field and look, as an entrepreneur, you may have to put in twice the amount of work, the work you were asked to do and this bet you're trying to make. But, boy, typically and not always, but when that bet pays off, there's an outside payment because you took this risk to invest in this new venture. So that could be a start in a company. It could be looking at the things on the workplate and saying, you know what? Why are we afraid to bring machine learning into the app? I think I found a novel way to do this. So, even if you're not the owner of the company, if you were thinking about how to increase profits, that means you got to understand how the company currently makes money. Is your job valuable? Would you pay you to do what you're doing? A lot of people wouldn't pay themselves because they're like, I'm literally doing nothing at my job. It's too easy. I wouldn't pay anyone like that. So, like, when you hire an expert, like, my toilet's clogged up, you call a plumber, and you pay them because they're going to come in and be very efficient at what they do, and you feel it's fair. I know a lot of people that know what they're doing every day at their job isn't worth what they're being paid. That's why they just try to fly on the radar. Would you pay yourself? The answer is no. Then you need to start to recalibrate. So that's what my mindset was. What if I owned the place? How would I increase profits? How would I increase my value to make it where you want to pay me double what I'm making now? So there's something that has to happen there. I'm the product. How do I make that better? So, that's what I mean by this entrepreneurial thing. You just got to take this lens at it and say, do the risk assessment. Why is this ticket being assigned to me, is there a more efficient use of my time? Is there a bigger payback for the business? If you add that to your software development skills, you will literally stand out from the crowd. Because I promise you, the majority of the people you're around do not think this way. They're playing it safe. So take your calculated risk.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
That's what I think. When I was talking to doggy, I was talking to some of the students. They're going to go and they're going to apply for college and they're going to show their AP scores and they all have 5.8 or whatever it is. But I tell the kids, put in your 8th grade code in GitHub and it sounds silly. Put it in. And then when you get in 10th grade, 11th grade, you look back at this code and you start laughing, oh, this is crap. Code. Make it better. Show the train, show the process of learning. But I think kids are afraid of looking bad. Where I think when you have that opportunity to look what I did, you look good in 8th grade, it looks bad in college. But if you don't do anything from 8th to 12th grade, then that was, that's not a good decision. So I think that's for us is as educators trying to get out of that way of telling the kids that they can't take those risks, take, calculate.

Kelsey Hightower:
It's very tough, right?

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Yeah.

Kelsey Hightower:
Yes, it's very tough because you don't really have to, you just have to do what's in the curriculum. So it's like you're on rails, for example. A lot of kids, I want to go to the absolute best college I can get into in the story. But why, if you had entrepreneurial mindset like, hmm, I'm going to go to a college that costs half as much, take the difference and invest it. That's an entrepreneurial way of thinking. Go to a college that doesn't have a great computer science program and make it great. Can you make the program great? What do you mean? I'm just going there to learn. But what if you can make it great? There are some athletes that are the greatest athletes at their school. I never heard of Iowa until Caitlin Clark. And so even think about that. What impact can you make on the university? So maybe you go to one where you have a bigger chance to make a bigger impact because you are coding on the side, you're really great at GitHub, and maybe you can bring that type of energy to your university's computer science program. So that's the way. I'm encouraging kids to think. It's like, of course, do the stuff that you need to graduate, but, boy, don't miss out on those opportunities that may be right in front of you 100%.

Sean Tibor:
Sean, is the art of what's possible, what could be done, instead of what is. And I think that what I've really appreciated, I've worked at very big companies, I've worked very small companies. The ones where I've been the happiest is where I've been able to say, I wonder if we can do this and then have enough people saying yes, that it works. And sometimes I have to wait to ask. You're going out and begging forgiveness instead of seeking permission. But at some point, when you show them what you're doing, how many times do you get told yes versus no? And that's the part that I think makes, whether it's the school that you're at or the job that you're in, the family that you're in, the community that you're in, better is how often are you saying, I wonder if we can do this? Or what would it be like if we got this instead and having people say yes instead of no? And I think that's the part for teachers, that's the tricky part, is how often can you really say yes? And it's probably more than you think.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Can I switch gears one more time? So you're really good at explaining stuff in natural language. Another thing I picked up from your podcast. So explain kubernetes to me.

Sean Tibor:
No, we don't have time.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
He's really good at. You could do a quick little metaphor.

Kelsey Hightower:
There was a documentary about this whole Kubernetes thing, and the way we described it is just another form of automation. Kubernetes is so powerful because ten years prior to it being released, we figured out a bunch of ways of doing stuff, especially when it comes to cloud computing. And then ten years later, we gave it a name. We took all the things that companies figured out on their own and we pushed it all together into a single thing. And now, anyone that was starting at that time, just download kubernetes and you can run your apps in the cloud like a lot of people who figured out before. And that's the big thing around it, because there's been this concept in computer science that the challenge of a distributed system where things are beyond a motherboard or a memory bus, when you start putting things over a network and you want to have it function with great usability, your job in that realm is to make a bunch of computers look like one computer and hide the complexities of failures and consensus and distributed algorithms to make it feel like people are literally just working with one global computer. And for a lot of people, Kubernetes is that computers operating system you install that, you take a bunch of little machines and you make them look like one big machine. And that was really, really hard. Right. It's like the foundation of a lot of computer science to figure this out. But if you're not a computer scientist, you can install kubernetes and be doing a lot of this stuff that people spent decades trying to learn.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Thank you. Sean's got a very important phone call from a very important little girl at camp, so I can see it. That's very good. I'm going to call you back on the show. We're going to talk more.

Sean Tibor:
I do love Kubernetes. We run several different clusters, and when I first got it, because it took me a long time to really understand what was going on, once I got it, it became like magic, like, wow, this is really, really cool. And what you can do with it, to your point, is extremely powerful without as much effort as you would think. Once you understand how it works.

Kelsey Hightower:
Yeah, that's the beauty of all of this stuff, is that what makes open source so interesting as a teaching tool, even if you weren't around to learn it in real time, it tends to serialize itself into libraries and platforms that you just get to use. So, yeah, if you start your career ten years from now, more than likely you would just be able to import ten years of knowledge as a library and be able to do all the things that people were trying to discover back then. If you're in this industry, welcome.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Very cool, very cool.

Sean Tibor:
All right, well, we'll wrap up here. This, I think, is as good a place as any. Kelsey, thank you for joining us. It's been an awesome conversation. Just really enjoyed it. And I think my prediction was right. Pretty high density, lots of good content in a short amount of time, and let's do it again sometime.

Kelsey Hightower:
Awesome. Thanks for having me. Kelly shop.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
Thank you.

Sean Tibor:
All right. All right, so for teaching Python, this is Sean.

Kelly Schuster-Paredes:
This is Kelly signing off.