An Interview with Jen Looper from Microsoft

what is up everybody welcome back to the channel today I had the privilege to speak to Jenn looper Jenn is a cloud advocate lead at Microsoft I had to do this because I keep thinking about avocados and it's not the easiest thing to say but next to not being easy to say it's a great title to have right so in this interview we talked about how Jen landed her job at Microsoft but also about how she came up in the first bubble of the internet about how she started few fixins now called front end foxes to include women into technology and a whole bunch of other things we've had a super wide-ranging conversation and I enjoyed it a lot so without further ado this is the interview with Jen looper from Microsoft welcome to the channel how are you doing great thank you how's it going all good staying inside staying safe yes absolutely so let's kick this off so I tend to start those interviews by asking people about their cultures or differences in culture and stuff like that and I always ask them to say their name the way it's supposed to be said but I guess for yours it sounds kind of English so we're kind of fine there let me go at a different way because when I met you a while back you actually did this super cool I think it was like a sonnet or maybe a poem in French during a conference your French is really good but you're American so what's the story here huh yeah that's a that's a funny thing about about my weird existence um I when I was 16 I went to France on an exchange and I never really recovered oh yeah right and it wasn't Paris I went to the countryside so I was in Vaughn dome and then I went to Brewer actually blew on that Vaughn dome and um so it was really really enough hospital food it was like deep fry and just kind of fell in love really have I still am very good friends with my host family so which is really a really a long time ago and it was it was really changed my mother my life I wanted to become a French teacher and I went all the way through school with that assumption that I was going to go ahead and teach French and I have a PhD and in French literature very specific yeah it's very specific as I was really interested in the Middle Ages so if you're you know looking in a flesh wound in deep France you're gonna stumble across a lot of little Romanesque churches and and we did just touring and touring and touring and it was really a very special occasion in my life you know you have these kind of spiritual experiences and cathedrals and I wanted to be medievalists so that's what I trained to do um and unfortunately it's not so easy to get a job as a French medieval scholar and in the u.s. especially I think anywhere yeah especially as an American oh yeah yeah yeah so there's a couple biases there but um the problem one of the problems was I was on the market in the kind of talen of the dot-com boom when it was going towards bust and the universities were discovering adjunct Aang so they weren't hiring tenure-track they were hiring adjuncts so I adjunct it it was the college and Regis and I found I couldn't pay my childcare it was hey it's so poorly it's fifty hundred bucks a semester teaching everyday in French Wow it was really poorly paid and this is ridiculous like this is not worth it so you've studied so hard you know so much you have so much in-depth knowledge that you can share and it's yummy valuable almost and you're still speaking you're teaching French language you know what you really want to be doing is teaching the French literature on the attended track basis but it just wasn't a possibility at the time so that's okay and I was lucky I retrained and had to start from Ground Zero I thought I would go into technical writing because that seemed like a more normal thing that wasn't really an option it I didn't find many opportunities there I thought maybe design turns out I'm not that great at design so but I was lucky and I just got into a start-up at the tail end of the dot-com boom when like a monkey who could do HTML could get a job it was that I was that level you know HTML CSS yeah I actually remember back in the day I think I started working in like 2007 or something like that but the company where I work just before that during the 90s and up they were teaching HTML kind of for dummies and yeah I came to break bucks it was crazy yeah yeah that was a really interesting time right yeah it was and I I'm grateful actually to Macromedia University there's a blast in the past so they had kind of just yet I know that name right yes flashy enough to know yes and they had really good courseware online so I just kind of skilled up using using kind of riding the Macromedia adobe stack which was you know big at that time yeah sure I mean I did ColdFusion for years paid the bills I know right I came after that I think I did ActionScript one yeah yes kind of stuff came in and then I had a brief moment where I stopped being I went to nursing school and then in between doing that and going to work as something more creative I decided you know what maybe I should go to school for just a bit or at least walk not for a bit it ended up to be only a little bit but they were teaching web technology in ActionScript because it was really easy to understand mmm but even at that time nobody used it were you doing things in flash where they actually script er yes yeah I I miss flash I thought it was a nice lat forum to just do stuff quickly write it a nice ecosystem I understand that it was there yeah so let's jump on the next part a little bit because we now covered that you were doing some technology stuff um but I can imagine not that many women were doing it at that time right I'm here how did that feel what happened there did that work for you or I had this nagging feeling that I was hired because I was cheaper I don't know I just I don't know I never could prove that but the big difference for me was that I was in I'm in Boston so Boston is not Silicon Valley like all the horror stories you're gonna hear are kind of out of Silicon Valley and some of the bigger tech ecosystems so in Boston it was kind of like if you could show that you had skills your hireable so I think it was a little bit less biased driven and not only was I in Boston I was in the Boston suburbs so I live in the Metro West so there's even a smaller pool of people who can do this stuff says like you know you walk in the door thank God and and and if you can show that you can do something you're hired and people are willing to to allow you just go up on the job at least at that point cuz everything moves so fast so yeah exactly yeah I think I really think I had a bit easier time and the other thing that made a difference was I was a young mom at the time so I had my first daughter in 97 my second in 2000 so um it was just a you know like nobody's gonna hit nobody's gonna bother a young mom like you're too busy chuckle dad at that time like being kids is kind of a lot and we all know this job is demanding like if I if I didn't stop myself I would work 24 hours yeah yeah and we still do right so yeah yeah I did do a lot of midnight burning of you know burning oil or however you say it um but I was lucky my husband's was supportive he's a professor at MIT so he had that kind of stable job and he was always very encouraging very supportive um and then I always tried to negotiate some kind of work from home what I would do I had a sneaky way of negotiating I would say I'll forego healthcare because it's covered by my husband but they didn't like to know that they didn't need to know or go healthcare if you give me a day that I can work from home like always trying to get negotiating ya know find some kind of trade off and that usually worked so that you could have at least like Wednesday working from home that used to be my system oh that's cool so you just worked around invasive kind of yeah um tried to get the kids into him on a story school as we we were lucky we found in Montessori school that took babies which is kind of unusual and yeah cuz normally they start at 2.9 and yeah it's um it's just a question of finding systems that work and just having a supportive partner yeah exactly that that's a huge one so the first time I saw you speak on a conference I think it was in Amsterdam and they announced you as part of few fixings back then yeah and when I saw that it's like wow this is so cool there's like someone standing up or people who might not be even close to development or being a woman and not even getting in stuff um so I think it's a really cool thing to do saying this as a guy I don't want to be bias or anything I think it's just a really cool initiative to make everything inclusive right so um how did why did you feel like you have to start this and why you yeah great question um I'm actually coming out of the angular community so um yeah so I was before I did view I was coming out of even angular one and then I draw yeah yeah a lot of angular one people found their way interview because there's some similarities there feels a little more similar yeah yeah yeah yeah and it feels good um the angular 2 stuff it's like a completely different beast but um I was working at progress on the native script stuffs and we had to get on to angular 2 but angular is really cool because it has a nice community and they always had ng girls which was started about yeah by my colleague Schmo Ella we're all at Microsoft now I was like all of these yeah so she's in Israel and I remember she announced ng girls onstage at ng-conf in when was that many several at least five years ago yeah and maybe 2016 or something and she um she really impressed me as you know somebody who was starting something because she felt there's a need for something and then I started participating in ng girls I led the Paris cohort once when ng Europe and I joined the view community because of what I was doing at work and I realized you know there's no such thing in the view community as of yet let's start it so I just felt like may as well write and I always like these kind of initiatives because I went to a women's college I went to Wellesley so for me it's kind of a natural thing to just found something like this and kind of build community and it's been yeah it's been two years of ups and downs it's kind of a wild ride and we are rebranding now to become front-end foxes because we are finding that we can kind of expand into the react space which also doesn't have well it has reacted girl yeah react to girls and they just did the women of react conference which was amazing they did a great job yeah but they don't have this kind of like a workshop model yet like which is what we borrowed from ng girls and I think they borrowed it from Jango girls so there's a whole chain of stuff oh yeah yep yep like yeah yeah and for us we found that our way was kind of paved by women who code which is yet another you know really big group um lots and lots of initiatives out there we just thought let's do something for you because okay why not i scoped it so people i can actually see because there's this kind of funny story that so well it's not super funny but let's see the coincidence is there so like mark my wife is not that healthy so she has some chronic issues and now during the pandemic she can actually not go back to work because she cannot really like she used to be a nanny so she cannot eat close to kids anymore and so she's lucky but I've always wanted to do like some code and trying out and she has her own company with like a Shopify shop she wants to customize so she's been learning and then one time she comes to me like yes this few fixins thing and I love this I think your friend Maria is in it and I just want to join it and yeah it is so much fun to see that it spreads and people actually feel like they want to belong somewhere and I think if you started something like that that's a big up for you I think that's great oh thank you I appreciate that yeah let her hop into our select Channel and I think okay yeah it's pretty quiet right now that the pandemic has has really been tough on groups like ours because we built our model on in-person events right so we're trying to figure out what is it what does viewbix look like what does front-end foxes look like during a pandemic and I don't we have a zoom account and we've done a couple online events I taught at Auto School recently in France so yeah yeah so we're just seeing kind of trying to figure out what works and all of our stuff is always online anyway yeah always open source so we we have a new workshop we just published from the girls from homework our German chapter who are very very active they they have a new workshop on Harry Potter it's like a Harry Potter quiz app that you can create the data from those books is always fun for for teaching right yes absolutely super fun um so I guess you're doing a lot of advocacy for coding and for being together and doing that kind of stuff and now you actually do that from Microsoft yeah right yeah yeah what how did you get there like I think a lot of front-end people or like-minded people are kind of aspiring to work for a company like that but you also do stuff for Google so how did that happen how did you get there yeah um well I was really lucky to have been mentored by Sarah Dresner who was at my crystal at the time and I credit her with just helping me negotiate the the labyrinth of getting into a big company it's like in Google the interview process is a you know is the whole thing and you really need to be coached through it yes same thing with Microsoft it was like five interviews you know bang bang mmmm bang and I was I was up for a lean position so I was going to be leading the regional team at Microsoft and I did for about a half a year before we folded it so I was managing Canada u.s. and Latin American advocates we folded that because it was that was a model that didn't work so great for us and now I'm part of the academic team so it works well for me it's all advocacy but for a different demographic from me I'm taking care of the kind of K through 12 and college kids okay so it was actually a goal of yours to go into something like this or did it just come on your path because before you were producing software right yeah so I was an engineer for 20 years in all different tech stacks mostly closed source which is actually something to avoid um and I started moonlighting doing mobile app development using Corona SDK and got into the kind of advocacy role there cuz I just started blogging about it and my friend Brian who was a Boston guy at the time he got me into telluric for my first developer relations job but six years ago and telluric was acquired by progress in progress and telluric all work together to create native script and that was kind of my products exactly you talk about that exactly yeah so native script is great great product all open source and a beautiful view an integration yes and by even her absolutely stunning so that was a pull a real pleasure so it's talking because I love mobile apps yes yeah so then at Microsoft it's just a question of joining a really huge department and developer relations I think there's a hundred and thirty of us it seemed well muster yeah it's big always have that or did they pivot towards it um they had a department called DX developer experience and that kind of morphed into developer relations as the whole kind of ecosystem of Deverell has changed they've just developed you know they basically hired a lot of really amazing advocates to join this kind of huge department and we're just kind of figuring out you know what does develop Brad because he look like nowadays I think it's gonna be a lot of content creation like you mentioned earlier yes nowadays is gonna morph a little bit I guess yeah fewer events a lot fewer events although online stuff I still think that we can certainly do online events without any you know it's it's budget neutral as we say clearly sure that's probably worth a lot how can you mention is this yeah we going sir I was gonna say I mean it it's it's all part of the job you know you're talking to the community and you're trying to advocate you're not selling you're just trying to figure out what people are interested in and what they're looking for yeah but I can also imagine that a secondary goal is to have Microsoft there in the background and then you representing them so it's great for Microsoft also so there's always this kind of yeah that's kind of the point yeah marketing by association because you are great with the with the audience let's say yeah I guess a little try to give credibility and try to like bring the brand into communities that might not necessarily have have thought about using Microsoft products before especially front-end communities so there's a quite a few front Enders in our department like Waseem check um you know well uh a lot of really super people and I manage six really amazing advocates and all different who are interested in all different areas of academic advocacy so yeah so it's really it's a really great place to be it's a terrific department my group's terrific so I'm just grateful because it's been a long road ya can imagine so as an advocate you kind of have to speak quite often right so where are you speaking at conferences before or did you roll into speaking this way by advocacy um I think the first conference talk I gave was at a progress event so it was an internal conference that we were doing and kind of you know you cut your teeth and you figure out what works for you my colleague Brian Rinaldi kind of he's a very good conference organizer nice very good coach about speaking so we kind of like looked at slides and kind of coach you through it Wow and then it was just a question of CFPs and trying to get some speaking slots when you're working in a big company as an advocate a lot of times there's a sponsorship involved so then you have a slot you know available to you know this is a good question how do you feel about that because I write that's a tough one yeah um I would rather earn a slot but if you've got a slot available specific to a sponsor I think as long as you're open that it's a sponsored slot then that's okay it's not like you want to go in and pretend that you know you won this into your lap you know by magic yeah so I think it's some conferences I want to say that one conference I went to in Nashville it was like specifically to eliminated this is a sponsored talk and then you don't feel bad about speaking about product as well but you know product first it's all good yeah yeah so at that point that's fine but very few conferences really want a billboard you know so you kind of a mix delicate balance yeah me now my job is it like I am the director a front end stuff at a big pretty big company and but we're not known for front-end so now my thing is like I'm just gonna speak at conferences and do content creation so you know I belong there and then but I also always sponsor but I don't want to get a sponsor slot because then I'm buying my way into knowing my company that we can do front-end so that's kind of it's a bit tricky for me I tend to go for sponsor talk yeah I think I think that's gonna all change everything's gonna change anyway um I mean for the online stuff people are still going to be having sponsorships but um at this point I'm finding I'm just invite I'm not doing really CFPs I'm just I'm just being invited so that's really um nice it's nice to be right it's a nice place to be I'm just kind of grateful and I'm not really worrying too much of not speaking because I have so much other stuff to do yeah um if they want something I'll talk about a passion project that I'm doing there will probably be some little tie-in to a Microsoft thing but I'm not going to beat people over the head with it you know it makes sense I love the cocktail one you did a while back ah that was a good one that was good for the crowd also well yes I was happy to be able to serve a drink to my friend from the stage that was yeah exactly of my career when you look at like let's say your Twitter feed or your online profile and all your different things you do everything looks so good it's so polished you do so well but to get there there must be some sort of challenges along the way because the best way we learn is through some challenges right so do you have maybe a story if you want um that was challenging that actually made you much better at what you do or maybe on how you feel about what you're doing yeah well um the the problem with Twitter is you can't edit a tweet good thing about Twitter's you can delete its week and a reason this is pretty recent actually I put up a poll asking for some ideas about conference swag and you know in a Twitter poll you can only have like three or four options um and then people can either vote or they can add whatever they want at the bottom and it turned out that the options I was offering were not considered inclusive by um some folks and okay and I I had no idea yeah so I basically apologized um to the community reached out to the person who had who mentioned this to me a couple people and then just deleted the tweet so but I was a huge learning moment for me because Twitter is a risky business you've got an awful lot of people looking at what you say I don't know if it's worse now or if you gotta feel like maybe between the continents it's still quite different I think in the US and Canada especially it's all it's a lot about inclusion or inclusiveness and in Europe it's it's I don't know I did something similar what I did is I made a video one of my first videos on YouTube where I made a little joke about like being a dude kind of like a brogrammer something like this but back in the day in Amsterdam we were just guys going to the gym having fun making music but also programming there was nothing American bro about this which is I guess not a good thing Wow the stuff I got on my I actually wrote a pre-written answer for everybody oh and so I learned but I left it on and I apologized the next video and I actually left it on because no women were upset with me it was holy men who thought women would be upset and who are defending the women who could defend themselves without a problem such a strange Devine yeah my mistake you have to learn it spreads like wildfire right and if you you get if you get sideways of communities it can read it could be really really damaging it can hurt like the ripple effects can be kind of terrible and so you just have to be extremely careful I'm lining very public platform and you know when you got a lot of a certain number of followers it just ripples out to people you have no idea so I'm just be secure a much more now what do you do and yeah I'm doing a lens you go to that might have different newsworthy sinks and stuff like that um yeah I I'm just a little bit more careful especially because in our department we're very very sensitive towards these issues and we have like one of the top ok ours in our org is inclusiveness inclusive DNI do you know enormous yeah Satya the CEO of Microsoft is huge huge huge advocate forum for D&I so it's such an important thing that you just don't want to get sideways of anyone see if you just take it off 1% but you do that for 3 months you suddenly gone you're no longer in that community right so it's yes it's a complex issue I guess that's true yeah let's let's go to something a bit lighter sure do you have something that you are like super good at or you think you're almost an expert at or something whatever that nobody else knows about like your kids probably know but not us here in the community of web developers well I wouldn't say expert at I like to do a lot of things I like to draw and paint and I love to do old-fashioned crafts and I like to sew clothing and I like to make jewelry and I like to try my hand at all sorts of crafts um I used to be really good at violin I used to be quite a good violinist no but I picked my poor violin up recently and it turns out you have to practice oh man place is ringing that's actually easier than a violin I got her yes so you so I was like okay I'm gonna make it a goal I'm gonna try to join the Wellesley symphony but I just don't know if I don't I would have to put in about an hour a day just practicing a price and probably need to get a teacher again and unfortunately for me I did have a teacher who was 92 and he died and he but it was interesting because he was the foremost Boston practitioner of Arabic style violin which is a completely different beasts than the classical violin but I really want a fingering is amazing right well it has half tones so we're very used to that you know the straight tones and you know exactly what you're looking for where your fingers are but you you know you go a little bit back and then that's a perfectly proper Arabic halftone but it sounds super weird to our Western tuned ear so I really regret that I couldn't keep studying with Fred I would drag up to New Hampshire you know and we'd have a nice afternoon and he likes me because I was classically trained and I liked him because he was - he went to Boston Conservatory and and the Arabic music scene in Boston has took a hit when he when he passed oh wow so influenced her but like the real deal influencer a real deal he was American Lebanese he he he he came up in the Las Vegas system in the 60s can you imagine and I was like Fred you've got to write a memoir he sounds like he needs a book like the Arabic Rat Pack you know it's like oh so that's gone so that's a that's a regret but I like to say I used to be a quite a decent violinist and I'm missing a teacher right now so anybody people listeners out there do you know a good teacher maybe I should we connect what I think you are likely still pretty good but because you're classically trained you don't have that DNA in you to actually realize you're actually pretty damn good I think I think you really like that pick up a repertoire and just like it hit it again if you just practice now for an hour a day for a month you're close to 80% of what you were able to do I think so and I need to get like a practice because I can run through Brandenburg Concertos and try to remember but um woof that's pretty challenging start maybe simpler just uzuki no Vivaldi well exactly like there's so many things like I have all the time those people that actually see me playing it aren't like wow you have all this technique and actually I don't actually care and people think technique is what makes you good but it's the it's the feeling it's the timing then if you're happy doing it like if I go on stage now and I smile and I play bad stuff people are fine with that yes I'm high I'm doing it classically maybe that's a different story but when you go into rock music or stuff like that it's pretty fun yeah it's fun I also love ancient early music so when I was in Wellesley I was taking lessons with the collegia musical and there is a very nice set of viola da gamba which are the precursors to the cello all right so there's no end pin you're holding it between your knees and and the way you hundred bow is different yeah and that would and I played lute for a while so yeah it's like a lot of music and a lot of way a practice scenario that's great to know because actually most people are interview we kind of have as this similar thing where this creative drive basically just boosts everything we do oh yeah definitely definitely yeah I love creative coding the concept of creative coding I wish there was a Boston meet up and we would do creative couldn't there was a fantastic New York City meetup for creative coders I just love the concept of just getting together engine in your case if you think creative coding is that just having a lot of iterations and just try stuff out that's outside of the box or is that more like we do music based animations this kind of creative coding yeah I think it's more emerging on music art visual arts and code so trying to figure out you know how you can create something creative visually creative or artistically interesting yeah but by means of code so yeah I don't know something to think about maybe we should start a Boston meetup hey Boston let's get going honestly I join you because I have this idea and I'm not even sure if I can do it but I want to put a MIDI pick up on my guitar and I want to have that MIDI into my laptop or whatever and then with an API in the browser interpret that and then create some sort of music visually but then by playing guitar and doing that on a stage in front of a crowd it's a very interesting thing being your own Fiji kind of thing yeah so don't want to spend a thousand bucks on that I just want to do it like simple it needs to be accessible for others also right yeah mine too yeah the magenta project by Google is super interesting and I would love to really take the time I would love another professor I had did the entire corpus of Gregorian chant I would love to run that through machine learning models and see if we can't you know there's like so much we can do so I think all right I'm gonna talk to Carol in New York City may we can do like a pan pan-pacific pan and Atlantic where are all on soon anyways yes we can do it so many meters that are merged now yep so almost the last question okay if you had a billboard that is on top of a highway that like hundreds of thousands of people a day can see what would you write on it for them to read hmm I think I think for me personally so if I was supposed to look at it every day it would be something like like think twice okay you know to be really thoughtful and not go off half-cocked but to you know count to ten and think twice and make sure that everything is done in a deliberative fashion so that goes against the kind of wildly creative instincts that I have in the right actually the right brain um to just which is my which is my propensity just to kind of do I like creative stuff but just like think twice and make sure you've analyzed the repercussions of things I think that would be really good advice if that billboard is is from me well I think that's a very good one actually because a lot of people don't think twice especially when they two sites in politics and those kind of things and it's kind of the place where you shoot I think yeah like assumptions are don'tdon't so fast nowadays I see it in my team's as heat everywhere oh yes maybe it's social media all social media is just scrolling past constantly everyone's got those hot takes yeah it's not right no no I don't actually read much of that stuff to be honest that's why I'm not okay yeah I'm not on Facebook too much my my high school friends are though just keep up with one or two people from high school who aren't on Twitter is otherwise I would just kill it yeah so last one though you go well maybe now not so much but when you used to go to conferences all the time people basically just hand out stickers left and right what do you do with those ah yes um well I collect a lot of stickers and I've found that putting a sticker table out in events that I throw like I used to run the Boston DJ s Meetup and we're just like spread stickers on people can take what they want people really like that um I do have a curated collection of stickers on my laptop and I haven't I have a latte a plastic-like like a tray thing that you can clip on sheet or something yeah it's quite it's a little bit hard plastic like it Clips right onto your laptop so then um when it's full and I'm tired of those stickers I'll just take it off get another one like the collection going that's great so you actually organized it yeah yeah cuz I was finding that I was peeling off stickers with razor blades and putting new ones on it only this is ridiculous let's just keep it that is a historical moment and that's the next one I'm gonna have to do something like that because I I do keep them and if I have doubles I give them to my teammates who weren't able to go to the conference for example but the rest are all in a drawer so I'm not gonna lose them and some of them especially the ones from gate lab my wife puts them on her laptop because they look so cool yeah but she doesn't realize it's like super nerdy stuff exactly well the big thing now is the hologram stickers I found that those will just people go crazy for hologram stickers sticker mule had a sale oh it was like a madhouse yeah my for my wife's company that's about dogs she actually has a little hologram of our dog as a factor itself if people love that stuff from sticker meal yeah pickles great sticker app is another one that has pretty good Holograms make sure to check it out listen thank you so much for your time this is great sure I love the leaf blowers just started out there so sorry about that but no I don't actually hear it so we're good for now thanks again for your time this is great thank you I appreciate it yeah sure all right thanks [Music]