The home team starts chatting about GitHub's CEO stepping down, then gets onto Cassidy's favorite topic—keyboards—before getting deeply sidetracked talking about how memory and brains work.
Episode notes
GitHub's CEO, Nat Friedman, stepped down recently to focus on his startup roots. Chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, will be moving to CEO.
The Verge reviewed our no-longer-a-joke April Fool's keyboard.
How many keyboard layouts are there anyway? Including non-English layouts, there's lots.
Do you have a mind's eye? How about an inner monologue? We explore why some people have a voice in their head when they think and some don't.
TRANSCRIPT
Cassidy Williams Hello everyone, look at my keyboard.
Ceora Ford How many do you have?
CW How many do I have? Well, not too many. [Ceora laughs] Yeah, I probably have like 12 keyboards, but this one that I just got, it's got like a brass weight on the back. It's a fully aluminium keyboard. And all of the switches are lubed with a very specific type of grease. And also the stabilizers are. Oh, I love this one.
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Ben Popper Hello, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast. I am Ben Popper, the Director of Content here, joined as I often am, by my wonderful co-hosts, Ceora, Cassidy and Ryan. Hi y'all.
CF Hello.
CW Hello.
Ryan Donovan Hey!
BP So the big news in the developer world today is that the CEO of GitHub, who I believe is also--was he the founder? Is stepping down and a new leader is coming in. Is that right?
CF I'm not sure about the founder part.
CW I don't think he was the founder.
BP Okay.
CW But he's returning to his startup roots. So it's exciting.
BP That's good. He's got some cool ideas for tokenizing something. AI and tokens. Cloud. Yeah. What's the industry reaction? And what's your reaction to this change at a company that is so central to so many developers lives every day?
CW I feel like it was coming. And we just didn't know about it, because their big GitHub universe conference was last week. And so because it was very recently, I wonder if they were just waiting for the conference to pass before they announced everything. And it was definitely a timing thing. But he has talked a lot on Twitter about investing in startups and stuff, too. So I think it's a change in interest more than anything else.
CF Yeah, I think we see this happen a lot to where someone is like in a big tech company, and they kind of miss the whole vibe of the startup world. And so they get their fill of being in big tech. And then they're like, you know what, I'm gonna go back to the more exhilarating startup world.
RD And I feel like what you said, Ceora, that's doubly so when they get acquired by a big company. They're no longer the big boss of, you know, a middle range startup.
BP The coolest move to ever be pulled. And I don't know how it's going. But I think this person might come on the podcast, is this guy Mitchell Hashimoto, who started Hashi Corp. and then went on to become co-founder and then decided I want to be CTO. And then earlier this year was like, actually, I'm just gonna go back to being an IC, I kind of missed that. So that's what he does now.
CW Yeah, I thought that was so interesting when I saw that.
CF But it's cool that you can like, decide to do that. I always feel like well, in my mind, if I think about going higher, higher up, like the ladder or whatever, becoming a manager, it's like, once you do that, I always envision that you have to, like, keep doing that. Right? Like if you make it to the level of being a VP or a director or whatever. I'm always like, okay, I can't go back to being an IC. Like, that's just not gonna work. But it's cool to see that some people are actually doing that, you know?
RD I wonder what kind of IC he's going to be though like, you still gonna have the residual. The people are still be like you used to be big boss. I'm gonna go gentle on your PR review.
CF That's true. I didn't even think about that.
BP Oh, yeah. So it looks like I was wrong. So Nat Friedman, worked at stripe was a corporate VP at Microsoft, and then became something like GitHub. So not a lifer. And what about the new person who's stepping up but guy from approach? Chief Product Officer?
CW Yes, Chief Product Officer, but then also what hasn't really been addressed in his blog post is that the person who was on the Microsoft side, in charge of GitHub was also promoted. The CPO Chief Product Officer is moved to CEO and then the person at Microsoft who was overseeing GitHub was promoted.
BP So they're tied a little closer together now.
CW Yeah, I think a little bit, we'll see.
BP Is CPO a cooler and more well paid titled now than CTO? I hear CPO more often these days, and two or three years ago, like Chief Product Officer was not something I was like, had thought of at all really CTO was like I was a title. I knew what seems like Chief Product officers like the cool, like the cool CTO is the CPO these days.
CW I'm not a regular CTO, I'm a cool CTO. [Ceora laughs]
BP I mean, there's tech here, but it's product product lead growth. That's what it's all about.
RD Although I feel like the whole product titling is pretty new. You know, within the last 10 years or so, it kind of grew up and people be like, yeah, I'm a product manager, sort of a project manager.
CW You're still all three though. And it's very confusing.
RD It's the worst.
BP I'm a PM. Don't worry about it. [Ceora laughs] Just whatever you think it means.
CF Yeah, titles are weird in tech sometimes.
CW Yeah. Someone in my company was just changed from a product manager to a program manager yesterday. And I was like, congratulating her. Yeah, this is great, but I also don't know what the difference is. And I assume this is a very good thing. Awesome.
BP Cassidy very important news for the two of us. The Verge, the world's number one gadget review site--
CF You had to add that in there. [Ceora laughs]
BP Has done a full review of The Key and 7.5 out of 10. Not bad.
CW I liked that under pros and cons, both lists said, I mean, just look at it.
BP Just look at it. It's really nice to do. The fully programmable part is cool. And this person did the hack that we had discussed. It's now their Zoom control. So you know, mute mic, drop off the call. So that's, that's in like a fun little implementation. Have you Have any of you ever heard of this thing? Instead of doing QWERTY? You do like a different layout?
CW Like DVORAK or COLEMAK?
BP DVORAK or something it was called? It sounded very, I was just like, so intimidated looking at that, like the thought of changing up the orientation of my keys is like, that's like a nightmare for me.
CW One of my co-workers types only in DVORAK. And I asked her like, so why? Was it just like for fun? And she's like, honestly, I kind of just went to prove that I could and I can't go back. It's so much more intuitive than QWERTY.
CF Oh, wow.
RD I've heard that it was sort of scientifically developed to be a better way.
CF In my brain that's like if I wanted to for the day, right with my left hand, like, I can't imagine doing that and not making a whole mess of everything if the whole orientation of my keyboard changed. But I guess you can get used to it over time, if like you make enough mistakes.
CW So QWERTY, a little history lesson for anybody out there who doesn't know, that layout was designed to sell typewriters. And so the top row of your keyboard, you can type the word 'typewriter' really fast, because it's all on the top row of your keyboard. And everything else was spaced out in a way where they didn't want keys to stick while they were selling typewriters. So they very purposely spread out letters that would commonly be used together.
BP So it's not, it wasn't built right for our hands or minds necessarily was built so that you could type the word typewriter. And so those little mechanical arms didn't overlap and get stuck.
CW Right. It was so you could say, look how fast you can type. Wow, that's amazing. Also, look, no keys are sticking wings.
CF I find out more and more every day that there are so many things in tech that just haven't been updated to fit like today. Like why are we still using the same format from typewriters when it doesn't really, it's not really effective. And we just don't change it. Like, it's so funny. It's so many things like that in tech.
RD I think, you know, in some ways, we're sort of built to do things, the way that things have always been done. There's a famous experiment where it's sitting in a dentist's office or something. And everybody except one is an actor. And every so often, there's a bell that goes off, when the bell goes off, people stand up, and the new person is like, I'm gonna stand up also, I don't know why, but I'm just gonna do it. And eventually, all the actors go out of the room. And it's all just regular people. And they still do the bell, they still stand up for the bell.
BP We're herd animals, you know.
CW There's that famous quote from Grace Hopper. The most dangerous word in the phrase in the language is we've always done it this way. It's very true. But watch out. I can talk about mechanical keyboards for way too long. So I'll cut myself off, I promise. But it is fascinating to see how people try changing it up. And like in the mechanical keyboard subreddit, people will sometimes propose a new layout and say, Hey, this is actually pretty intuitive, because and then they'll explain how it works. And one thing that has been particularly fascinating to see is all the people getting involved in stenography. Have any of you seen that? The corded keyboards.
CF No.
RD I've heard of, like court stenographers and such, yeah.
CW Right. So yeah, so it's like, like the court reporters how they write, they type so fast, because they're doing court reporting, people are able to do that with the QMK firmware, which is the firmware on The Key on the Stack Overflow Key. So what you could do, you could take a regular keyboard, or you can make your own custom thing. And you can do combinations of chords, just like piano chords, where you type like three keys at a time and stuff and it'll type out words. And it's fascinating, because it's just like writing in shorthand, which is also kind of a dying art, but it's typing. And I watched this talk where someone was saying that before on a regular keyboard, they were typing at a pretty decent speed, like 100 words per minute, nothing, nothing particularly wild. And when they switched to a corded keyboard to just try it out, at first, they were ridiculously slow, because they had to slowly but surely figure out how to do it. Yeah, but within six months, they were at their regular speed again at the 100 words per minute. And then within a year they were at 200 words per minute. And then like this talk was like three years in they were at over 250 words per minute and fast enough where some typing speed sites were kicking them out because they were so fast that it was like a bot then they thought that they were cheating.
CF Wow.
BP So corded is like right I have something some common word that comes up all the time. And I just quickly hold th in that writes the and then I just I'm moving on like right past it.
CW Yeah, exactly. And just, it's really complex. Like I couldn't really process it because I was like, Okay, but what if I'm writing code like, I want to write JavaScript or something. This person was just like, I'm a software developer. I do this all the time. And I was and someone in the audience of this talk was like, well, could you write like, a HelloWorld function that just console logs HelloWorld? And it was like three keystrokes and it was just done. It was so fast, very hard to process.
BP Right. Like if you're always putting in function this in class that like, why can't that just be a macro, that's just like so much--just pop it in there. There's no reason to spell that out. Speaking of doing well, we were keep doing things the way they've always been done. Stenographers, bless them, but nobody needs to do that anymore. We can just record the court and then transcribe it with a computer. Like, we don't need somebody to be like there with the type, you know, typing. They can read it back in court. Like, read back what they just said.
CW I've seen what a lot of them are doing now is, is just doing live captioning of podcasts or live streams and stuff. Because when it's human life captioned rather than by an AI, it's just that much more accurate. I've seen that quite a bit of conferences and stuff.
CF Oh, that's really cool. I've been seeing a lot of people on tick tock, get into mechanical keyboards. I only found out about mechanical keyboards when I got into tech. I didn't know they were thing before then. But now like students, university students and stuff like that are buying these really cute mechanical keyboards, there's a BTS one. I don't know if anybody cares about that. But there's a BTS mechanical keyboard. They like make videos of themselves, putting the keys in and everything. And it's always fascinated me to see like, non tech people doing things that usually only tech people do. Like, I think I talked about this on one of our pockets episodes before, but my younger sister, she's in high school, one of her projects, they had to build a website. So I don't know, I think that kind of stuff is really cool. When you see like, oh, the normies are doing tech stuff now like I don't know.
BP Well, we all spend so much time in front of our keywords. Like Cassidy said, this is like how we define our personality. Go ahead, show your keyboard.
CW Hello, everyone. Look at my keyboard.
CF How many do you have?
CW How many do I have? Well, not too many. Yeah, I probably have like 12 keyboards, but this one that I just got, it's got like a brass weight on the back. It's a fully aluminium keyboard. And all of the switches are like lubed with a very specific type of grease. And also the stabilizers are--it's very nice and stuff. I love this one.
BP When we're old, you know, like, I would go to my grandfather's house and just have so many books and like first edition books, and I just play yeah, I mean, this is great. This is like 80 years from now, people are gonna like find your old keyboard collection all laid out, like what is this stuff? Because they're gonna be typing with their minds. Yeah, exactly.
CW People used buttons to type? [Ceora laughs]
BP I wonder what the speed of thought like is like 250 words per minute sounds like faster than I can think.
CW If I were like rage blogging or something, or typing something out, I can't type as fast. I'm thinking because I'm just trying to get words out. So I could see that being very fun to just like, smash some keys and be just like, my essays written about how angry I am about things. I could see that being great.
RD I think your speed probably depends on whether or not you hear your voice in your head when you're thinking. Like some people don't.
BP They don't have an inner monologue?
RD Yeah, some people literally do not have an inner monologue and some people will think without sub vocalize--
CW That fascinates me.
CF That fascinates me too. On Twitter a year ago, the the image of it's like five stages of how people visualize things in their mind. If you close your eyes and you try to visualize an apple, what do you see? Some people see nothing. It's like stage one, or stage one or zero is you seeing nothing. And then stage five is you seeing like a full detailed apple that's very realistic. There are like, of course stages in between where it's like more vague, more cartoony, more detailed up until it gets like realistic. When I close my eyes and try to visualize an apple, my mind is completely blank. And like some people like, my sister, my parents, they see like a full detailed apple because I asked them, I just couldn't believe it. And it has a name, I forget the name of it.
BP I've thought about this a lot, too. It's really interesting. And just like what Ryan was saying, when I close my eyes, I'm like stage one I can make like a cartoony sort of like vague apple that like goes in and out. Like I've met people who are great visual artists. It's like having perfect pitch. They close their minds, like I see an apple and like rotate and in 3d and like change the plan to look at it however they want to look at it.
CF It's amazing.
CW That's how I am. I visualized holding an apple and like spinning it.
CF I'm like a blank slate. And then the funny thing is I draw and as a kid I used to paint and everything. But I've always been a person who had to work off of references like I can never do anything out of my imagination or make anything up like I'm not very imaginative in that way. People think I'm creative, but I'm always like, no, because I can't imagine things. And that's why this is like really interesting to find out about--
BP I wonder if you can train your mind to do that. Like if you could like learn how to have a mind's eye you know, that's what I was thinking because I was like--
CW Do you dream visually?
CF I do dream visually, but like if I--do you know, some people like fantasize and they get really like into their own like literal inner world or whatever? I can't do that. If I sit here right now and I try to imagine like, oh, imagine going to like Italy or whatever. And like being on a boat with like, dolphins or something, I can't. I will literally, my mind will wander onto something else because I can't like visually see it. So I much prefer to like watch movies and things like that just to see someone else's visualization.
RD Side question, what is your level of ADHD?
CF Probably very high.
CW I was gonna say I may or may not have gotten tested recently. So probably high.
RD I read something yesterday, a Twitter thread talking about ADHD that it's actually a deficiency of your nonverbal working memory, that you can't actually picture future states.
BP Nobody on this call has a photographic memory, do you?
CF Oh, no, absolutely not.
CW No, but like, okay, this is, we're getting into this now. I can remember a lot of things. So can I used to be nationally and internationally ranked for memorizing Pi, the digits of Pi. I memorized over 600 digits of Pi and like, had to recite them and stuff. And so I do remember things pretty well. And it was truly just like reading numbers in like history class in school and being just like, okay, I'll memorize this chunk next.
BP You have a numerical memory, it seems like but maybe not a visual memory.
CW Yeah, I don't think it's photographic. But it's weird.
CF I know, for me, I remember like facts about people really well. And I remember people's faces really well. Like I said, I used to be really frustrated with myself. When I was younger, I was like, really seriously into drawing. And I would try to like, sit down. And I would like, try to let me like, draw, draw this person, that's my best friend. Then without a picture, I couldn't do it. And I used to be so disappointed in myself, because I'm like, how can I like, I'm an artist, like, I should be able to do this. And I and I just couldn't. And I think it's probably because of that visualization thing that I just can't do. And I've tried, like, I've tried so hard to sit here and like, really try to like, let me think of the apple and nothing comes up. And it doesn't matter what I think of. I can think of a glass of water or a pencil. Still, all black.
BP You know what though, I really do think it's past--I mean, like, I think there's a natural tendency and like probably, like certain people have certain ceilings or floors. But I spent a lot of time doing meditation during the pandemic. And one of the things they asked you to do is like to just like, count to 10, and then start over again, like with your breaths or whatever. And so to prevent my thoughts from wandering, I started visualizing the numbers like as they would go by, and then I would start again, and then I would like, make the numbers into different different elements. And then like change between the elements or whatever. And like, the more I did it, the easier it was to like, hold the image in my mind, like change the image, like just, just like a casual practice of that, like, all of meditation kind of teaches you that like there's a lot of things with your mind, that are your patterns that you're setting your patterns that you can change, kind of like the way you can change what your body does, or can or can't do with exercise.
CW That's so interesting.
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BP But yeah, I was thinking yesterday about what y'all said about learning languages and learning to code. It's very easy for me to like imitate and pick up accents and like do like mimic people. But I've never learned a language like fully I was like, pretty converse in Spanish, but I never like got tenses. And I was just like a certain point. I'm always just like, yeah, and it's the same with coding. Like, I feel like as you're one I'm just like, like, this is too, like, I could learn this, but like, it's kind of hard. And there's other things that are easier for me that I just go the other way. You know?
CW It's funny that you mentioned that because despite being like, very visually, like, behind, I guess I could say it's not behind--like different, different. I'm very good with like, audio things. I'm very good with accents. I grew up playing instruments, music theory is very easy for me. Harmonies are very easy for me like all anything that has to do with like speaking accents, that kind of thing, I can remember and do very well. I can like visualize songs. And if I have like a guitar with me and like play a song, I can figure it out pretty quickly. But for visual stuff, just there's nothing there. Nothing but on the audio side of things is totally different. So I don't know if that means anything. If we have any neuroscientists?
RD We all have different skills, different brains.
CW So if you were to be just like okay, can you visualize like a train? Could you hear the train? Even if though you couldn't see it?
CF Oh, yeah. If I like remember a TV show or something like that. I won't really see the characters, but I'll hear their voices like from the scene.
BP I used to be such a huge reader as a kid. Yeah. And I realized later, like, I don't visualize any of it. Like, I don't have like a picture in my mind what the character looks like. And you see them in a movie for like, that's not like I never imagined it like that. Like, that's all wrong. And I'm just like, it's whatever it is. I was just reading the book. Like the people in the book don't have like accents, or they don't like appear. I don't know. Yeah, like, I find it interesting. And I could like ideas and imagery, but like, it doesn't like make anything happen in my brain. Just like words on the page.
RD I mean, that'll happen for me if I've seen the movie before reading the book. Like I did that with the Godfather, and it's like, watching the movie.
BP Alright, well, we've gone pretty pretty far down this esoteric path.
CW So about that GitHub CEO, right? [Ceora laughs]
BP About that GitHub CEO. Actually another thing that's interesting that came up. Speaking of like how you visualize and think about the world, we launched this collective. So that's like he pulled together a bunch of tags from Stack Overflow questions. So Intel launch one. So I just like browsing through it. And they're all these questions about programming, but they had to do with like chip architecture. And they were just like blowing my mind. It was like, you know, like, people trying to understand how to set up the machine and then like, write firmware or write some program. But like, ultimately, the question would boil down to like, the way the chip was actually, like laid out, and that stuff. So it's just like, several layers too deep for me.
RD We did have a blog post about programming for parallel architectures, like for SIMD programming. And that was just like, It all depended on the architecture, and it was baffling. I didn't even glance at the code.
BP And we have one coming up that's about like system on a chip, right? Where like, a lot of like, the chip is laid out in such a way that you can sort of reconfigure it so that it's good for, hey, I want you know, I want to write a program about robotics.
RD It has programmable field logic. So you can set up a neural net.
BP Yeah, different ones, different different applications, which is kind of cool. Alright. Well, I'm gonna read to you a few fascinating questions I found from the network. These are my favorite questions from Stack Overflow Stack Exchange today. Having a statistics argument over Dungeons and Dragons. So I'm going to roll a 20 sided die, and the chance of guessing it is one in 20. Or is it one in 400. And then there's an answer here, where they simulate it with a little bit of code. I just feel like these are the people, like Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, it's like Reddit, but for a certain kind of people. This is a statistics argument about Dungeons and Dragons. This is like, the sweet spot for us. And then I showed this to my wife this morning, because she's a teacher. Academia is one of our stack exchanges. And it's kind of like Workplaces. And I feel like the best questions they just feel like an episode of like a sitcom, or like a soap opera or something. This one is, 'Admit a teaching mistake without losing my authority. I made a small mistake while teaching a simple concept. And the numerical mistake concept was very well illustrated. I want to admit it to my students, but I fear losing my authority in teaching the class.' And then there's like, there's got to be 10,000 words worth of answers and comments under this just like people just pouring out heir hearts with some advice here. So that was nice to see.
CW I love seeing that stuff.
CF Yeah, it's like humans, they're kind of nice sometimes, you know?
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BP Alright, everybody, it is that time of the show. We're gonna shout out the winner of a lifeboat badge, somebody who came on Stack Overflow and saved a question from the dustbin of history. Thanks to Sandeepa, awarded two days ago: 'Why is Node.js required for Angular?' Okay, if you need to know we've got the answer for you. I am Ben Popper. I'm the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. I do not have a visual brain. But you can find me on Twitter @BenPopper. Actually, I just put in a new Chrome extension, Simple Twitter. So I'm using it more now. Because it's just the feed without the likes or the retweets, or the trending topics.
CW Oh!
CF I need that.
BP So it's like, it's clean Twitter. It's like smoking a light cigarette. You can email us podcast@stackoverflow.com with questions or suggestions for me or for any of the folks on the show. Yeah, if you liked the show, leave us a rating and a review. It really helps.
RD I'm Ryan Donovan. I edit the blog at Stack Overflow. I'll read your DMs on Twitter @RThorDonovan. And if you have a great idea for a blog, email us at pitches@stackoverflow.com.
CW I'm Cassidy Williams, Director of Developer experience at Netlify. You can find me @cassidoo on most things.
CF I'm Ceora Ford. I'm a developer advocate at Apollo GraphQL. And you can find me on Twitter my username is @ceeoreo_. I talk about a lot of different tech things and non tech things there so you'll definitely find me spending too much time here.
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