Episode 243

Kevin and Jon talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his new documentary film, Hello World. Shawn talks about how this film project began as a "love letter to software development," exploring how amazing this career can be. As he delved into it he became more aware of the lack representation of women and people of color in this profession, and this film details his exploration of that topic through interviews and historical background.

You can pre-order the film now, and watch it on-demand on a lot of streaming platforms starting December 15,2020.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 243: Shawn Wildermuth on his new film, Hello World

Links:

Transcript:

Jon: [00:00:09] Hello, and welcome to Herding Code. This episode is being recorded November 20, 2020. And today we're talking to Shawn Wildermuth about the Hello World film. Shawn, can you introduce yourself and the film?

Shawn: [00:00:22] I'd be more than happy to. I'm Shawn Wildermuth. I'm a technologist and mostly a teacher these days. They don't let me around code anymore. But I've got a blog at wildermuth.com and I made a documentary about software developers called Hello World.

Jon: [00:00:38] So what's kind of the main focus. Like how do you approach software developers and you know, what, what are you kind of talking about there?

Shawn: [00:00:48] Sure. I started making the film. I'll tell it in this kind of story. I started making the film because I wanted to sort of do a love letter to software development because it's been so incredibly useful to me. Like it has saved me from a life of working in a 7-11 night shift. And I just love everything about.

How interesting the job is, and I want to sort of encourage people who didn't think they could do it, that they could. And so that was sort of the first approach. And in the middle of that the me too movement came through and some other things in our industry were changing with conferences and such, and I realized that.

I hadn't really worked with almost any women and certainly not women from the United States or Canada that I've worked on exclusively with people that looked like me. You know, I look a lot like a, the comic book guy, if you don't know what I look like from the Simpsons. Right. I fit the, the stereotype really well.

And so I pivoted the movie to be about the lack of women and people of color, especially in the industry. Because it's it's, as I say, in the film, it wasn't that there weren't enough women or people of color in, in, in In software development. It was that I had never noticed there weren't enough.

Like, it just didn't even occur to me to notice. And I like to think of myself as someone who's, you know, at least should notice those sorts of things. And so in that same time, I was having a dinner with Richard Campbell years and years ago. And he was mentioning about the early women in software development, being the first programmers, which was a story I didn't know.

And, and that's part of what we talk about is sort of the history. Of software development and how this sort of went from one thing to another. And then I looked back and it had been five years and I didn't know what I was doing with my life.

Jon: [00:02:43] it's a, it's really fascinating that you've kind of created a documentary during a time of some transition. And some of my favorite documentaries that I've seen have kind of. Almost, but either through discovery during the filming, or just kind of by happy accident with evolution, you know, with history of evolving have kind of captured things.

I remember there was a documentary I saw called startup.com and it happened during the.com startup time and that startup bust and it followed these founders and, you know, getting huge valuation and going and interviewing. You know, in the white house and then everything. And then they get into huge fights and then the whole thing comes crashing down and the, and the film captured all that.

And it sounds to me like, I mean, and just observing everything that's gone on, it's been a lot of change and a lot of awareness has occurred just over this past year and few years. So what does that look like in terms of. You know, things changing as you're filming. Do you just kind of keep filming more stuff and figure it out in editing?

Or do you kind of, you know, how do you pivot a film?

Shawn: [00:03:57] It's difficult. We interviewed 50 different people software engineers. We interviewed some people in education and a couple of others and what, what I learned, cause I didn't, I've never made a film before. Right? I mean, I've done some little things, but nothing like certainly of this size that you find the story in the editing bay, even though I had an idea originally, it almost always changes and it reminds me of software in a, in a lot of ways, because often what you think you're building when you start that first sprint, or when you write that first spec often, isn't what it really looks like because you it's, it's this continuous discovery of what is going on.

And that really attracted you know, it attracted me to it because I liked the way that I. Like to build software, which is finding a group of people that all have specific skills that are gonna lend themselves to it. Not thinking that one person is going to be the best at everything and getting over the idea that I could be the best at everything.

You know, for me, it's been, eye-opening not only in how I spend the rest of my life, but also like, Oh, you know what? That's a lot less pressure.

Jon: [00:05:07] Hm. Yeah. As you're talking about that, then it makes me wonder, like with software there's been a change over the past, you know, I mean over our software development careers to moving to a more agile and, you know, being able to like pivoting is considered just something you do every day. Like you're constantly redeveloping, you know, like.

Figuring out the next best spin thing based on today's information, is that is that something that felt similar? Like, are you able to apply those kinds of like agile development sorts of things to film development?

Shawn: [00:05:42] You are in a lot of ways, though it's a little different. So one of the things I learned early on was that there's a difference between documentary and let's say you know, regular films that you might see with a story in them. So when the Avengers was filmed, the Avengers shot about four minutes of film for everyone, one minute on screen.

And because they go in knowing exactly what they're going to film, like they have a script, they have this, they have this, they've got it all planned and documentary isn't like that. In many cases it's a hundred to one. A lot of it is this filtering mechanism, or if you take a movie like hoop dreams, which is four hours, which is really a long time for a film they had like 4,000 hours of footage cause they spent 10 years with these kids.

And so it is, it is really, you know, mining that information and digging through and reading transcripts and watching the footage as you're shooting it. And the, the, the agileness comes from as you're gaining information from, let's say an interview or spending the day with somebody or watching an event happen.

Things are really changing. There's a good example of that. I was interviewing Debra karata who you may or may not know, but

Jon: [00:06:59] Oh, yeah.

Shawn: [00:06:59] does a lot of angular stuff with Pluralsight and I was interviewing

Jon: [00:07:03] when I was first learning to program, one of her books was the, one of the first books I read. And I, it was, it was like mind blowing when I actually met her in person. I was just like, Oh yeah, she's amazing.

Shawn: [00:07:16] She is. And she hadn't mentioned that her, I think it was her daughter or a friend of her daughters had gone to this college in California Harvey Mudd college, and that they had changed to be graduating from 15% to 50% women in their computer science. And that like changed my perspective of like, Oh, I need to go back and do some research about the education piece of this. And that really changed the whole view because you're in the middle of, you know, information gathering or mining or whatever you want to think about the way filming does. And you go, Oh, this changes, everything was changed is the way we think about this in an entirely different way.

And that's, you know, that's what happens at least happened for me with documentary film. And when I talk to other filmmakers, it's very much like that, depending on the kind of film they're trying to make, but being unwilling to move or pivot or adjust. Has that idea has really changed the way we build software has allowed me to make a film because I was already sort of adept at it, but it's also...