Annie Ruygt - WTR 8
Women’s Tech Radio - Episode 8
Annie Ruygt |WTR 8
January 6, 2015
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DESCRIPTION: Annie came to RethinkDB without much technology knowledge but has picked up a few things after being hired as an illustrator making storyboards and graphics!
ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio, episode 8.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology careers.
ANGELA: Paige, I would like to talk about today what your favorite apps are.
PAIGE: Oh man, there’s so many. Definitely one of my favorite right now is this app called buddhify, which is kind of a mediation app where you can learn how to meditate through their basic program, but you can also go through this awesome visual interface to select, hey I’d like to meditate right now and I’m taking a break from work. And they’ve got specific guided meditation for that. It tracks all your stats, it’s pretty neat. I’ve been trying to add medication as a habit for a couple of years now and without the app it was not happening.
ANGELA: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve actually been working on mindfulness lately, so I am totally going to check out this app.
PAIGE: Oh man, for mindfulness I have an amazing nap. I love The Five Minute Journal, which was originally a book format, so you would grab it and write in your stuff, but --
ANGELA: Whoa, writing?
PAIGE: I know, I don’t really do that anymore. So, they have an app and it reminds me every morning and every evening to like say what I’m thankful for and what would make today a great day, and kind of like do a little daily affirmation. And you can include a photo and it just kind of keeps you in that, like, gratitude mindfulness space.
ANGELA: I love that it’s positive oriented too.
PAIGE: Oh yeah.
ANGELA: Because, it’s so easy to complain and default to the negative.
PAIGE: Oh yeah.
ANGELA: So, forcing yourself to think of the positive things in the day is super handy. Well, my favorite apps includes FitBit, because I have a charge and I track my steps to try to make sure that I’m getting the amount of exercise that I need. As well as it tracks my sleep and other things. I just -- I love seeing stats like that. Data about me. It helps me -- like if I go home and I’ve only got 3,000 steps I’ll get on the treadmill.
PAIGE: Nice.
ANGELA: IN the winter. Obviously, I walk outside during the better weather.
PAIGE: I’m a total data junkie. I love that stuff. Quantified self is really fascinating to me.
ANGELA: And then the other thing that I -- the other app that I really use a lot is Instagram. I have two different Instagrams that I manage. I manage my own personal one, which is @momvault. And then I also operate the Jupiter Broadcasting Instagram which is just @Jupiterbroadcasting.
PAIGE: So, today we’re going to be interviewing Annie Ruygt who is an illustrator, actually. She works at a highly technical company called RethinkDB, which is an open source database solution.
ANGELA: And before we get into that interview, I’d like to talk about DigitalOcean. You can use the code wtrdecember and go to DigitalOcean to get a $5.00 per month droplet. It is a full blown server with 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabytes SSD, 1 CPU, and 1 terabyte of transfer just for $5.00 a month, and you can get that running in under a minute. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting solution provider, dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. They also have data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. So, pretty much no matter where you are, you can find a local data center. The interface has a simple intuitive control panel which power uses can replicate on a larger scale with the company’s straight forward API.
PAIGE: Awesome. And if you would like to get a $10.00 credit, also help support the show, you can use the code wtrdecember at checkout. We started the interview today by asking Annie what it’s like to work as an illustrator in a technical field.
ANNIE: Well, I started in animation and illustration university, and I was kind of going to school to maybe work at someplace like Disney or Pixar. I did a lot of other things after school and then eventually found myself applying to this job at RethinkDB which is a database open source company in Mountain View. I was a completely crazy experience because I had no idea what a database company was, but now I’ve fallen in love with the tech industry and all the wonderful startups out there and I’m learning a lot and I’m finding a really cool place for my art within it.
PAIGE: Yeah, that seems like a really neat, unusual position to have a company kind of hire and illustrator on purpose.
ANNIE: Yes, I don’t really know of a lot of other companies that have a positon like mine. I know art is used a lot for web design and possibly some graphics for apparel and production stuff. But, the guys at RethinkDB really valued having art in -- kind of to help with the community and to bring something different to their company, and they definitely got that when they hired me.
ANGELA: So what is one of the weirdest things that you’ve been asked to illustrate?
ANNIE: Whenever they ask me to do something kind of on my own, I usually -- I have a weird side, so some of the weirdest stuff is what usually comes from my own head. But some of the most memorable was we did this post for Redis, because on Twitter we wanted to kind of say, hey we love you Redis. And I did a drawing of Salvatore, with his little baby. I think he had a one year old at the time. And I said, “Happy Birthday Redis”, and it showed him holding his little icon instead of his baby. And it went really well. The Twitter community loved it, and it was kind of like that ah ha moment of like, wow I can use art to talk to people, to say something, and celebrate something. So I’ll never forget that.
PAIGE: Do you find that a lot of your work is taking these really abstract technical concepts and kind of -- I see, looking at your art -- I see you like wrapping humanness around them.
ANNIE: Oh, well thank you. Yes, especially with these concepts that I don’t quite understand yet. I had to kind of learn what it meant to shard and replicate. I had to interpret that visually. That was actually our first t-shirt that we designed. It has all of these swirling objects; photos, buttons, different icons, music going into this celestial galaxy type thing. It’s a crazy, unique, kind of difficult process having to visual something that I don’t quite understand, but it also helps me understand it that much more. I really -- I really love it.
PAIGE: Learning these concepts that you don’t really have a good basis for -- do you find that you have to struggle to talk to technical people about it? Like the right brain/left brain problem or is like a kind of organic and you’re working well with developers or how -- what does that process look like?
ANNIE: From what I’ve learned, because it’s kind of -- it’s been a learning process. At first it was difficult. I felt completely on the outside. I didn’t know how to talk to my other team members. I didn’t know what the product really did. I couldn’t explain where I worked to my family. I was like, yeah it’s a data base company. You know, well like what does that do? Well -- but eventually I started learning more about the company. I understood kind of what they were building. I started going on Code Academy and just kind of learning some basic HTML Java Script, things like that. Familiarizing myself with terms. And then I realized that I didn’t needs to know everything. What I needed to do was add -- well it comes down to we’re all people. We all have emotions. We all like creating something together. So, once I focused on that aspect, I kind of felt the pressure lift a little bit. I was like, okay I actually -- I deserve to be here. I can live here. I have something to do.
PAIGE: That’s really interesting. We talk a lot as developers -- I talk a lot with other women developers about imposter syndrome and so that’s really interesting to hear as an artist in the tech space you kind of have the same idea. You need to come to grips with the fact that you deserve to be there. Like, that’s still a process for you.
ANNIE: Oh yeah, definitely.
PAIGE: You gave a talk a bit about branding and stuff. Do you find that your work branding at RethinkDB has really helped? I mean, I think it’s a really interesting product and company, but I hadn’t really had a lot of exposure to it until we started talking about doing an interview.
ANNIE: It has helped. It’s actually helped a lot. Well, before they didn’t really have a lot of images and if you did check out my talk about art in open source and branding and things like that -- images, regardless of what they are, are going to help anyway. But I was able to use my love of characters and character design and create a little mascot for us. And he’s been really, really helpful because he tells a story and people connect with him kind of on a different level than they would maybe just like a graphic of some sort, because he has a personality. So, I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on Twitter and so far I think it’s going really well. It’s helping a lot.
PAIGE: Do you think it’s something that -- if you had a choice would you encourage other open source companies or projects, this is something they should consider, like humanizing their idea or putting -- wrapping art around it or?
ANNIE: Definitely. Definitely. For a lot of reason, because it’s going to help them. It’s going to help people remember them, because once you see something it’s like seeing that face. It’s like a face to a name. But also, there’s so many artists out there. I have tons of artist friends from college who would love to use their abilities in some way like that. Like helping build something. And it would really bring a lot to the lives of those artists too.
ANGELA: It’s kind of like the next generation of social media it seems.
ANNIE: Yeah.
ANGELA: I mean, it started with logos that have a personal touch to it, but actually having somebody on staff full-time to work in the story of the company, that’s brilliant.
PAIGE: Do you think that his is a movement that could happen from the artist side? I feel like, especially myself, as like a super left brain person. It’s not even something I would have thought of.
ANNIE: Yes, I think it’s actually happening on the artist side. I’ve been listening to a lot of other artist on Twitter. I love Twitter by the way, because it’s just a great -- it’s a great conversation, I think, in the industry that you’re involved in. People are starting to ask, what if we didn’t have to worry about getting paid. What would we do then? And the answer is, you would start working with people on projects that you want to work on and people you want to work with. And open source is a great avenue for that, because developers are artist, I think. They are creating minds making their ideas into something physical, really, because technology usually manifest itself physically in some way. And it’s like they go together so well, and I never realized it. So, I’ve been trying to figure out, actually now, how I can start bringing some other artists together and how them, hey let’s start working with these people and starting the conversation. I was lucky I came across this add for a job posting.
PAIGE: I totally agree. I think everybody could benefit from that sort of interaction, more between arts. Because I do think, for me, programing is a creative outlet. It’s not just a math, it’s making something out of nothing.
ANNIE: That’s awesome.
ANGELA: And having something to share.
PAIGE: Yeah. Yeah, totally.
ANNIE: But the key is then finding great jobs out there in the tech industry that pay really well. And it’s finding -- either brining artists into that space, or finding a way for artists to provide art to those projects and have them still be fulfilled financially in some way. You know, on their own or --
ANGELA: Right.
ANNIE: I don’t know --
ANGELA: Starving artist syndrome?
ANNIE: Yeah, exactly. And I hate to even say that, because it’s like -- I want people to break free of that.
ANGELA: Sure.
ANNIE: But it’s hard. So, that’s a problem I’m trying to solve.
PAIGE: I think, even as much as there are awesome paid developer roles, there’s definitely plenty of people who are out there just trying to get started and doing work for free, and it’s the same sort of struggle, like just breaking through. Do you think that Rethink has any numbers on -- almost analytics on -- like before they had you on board and after? Like, by their exposure, their engagement, any of that sort of stuff?
ANGELA: Well, she’s still employed.
ANNIE: Well, the numbers -- yeah, thank goodness -- the numbers are higher for a couple of reasons though, because when I came on they didn’t have a lot of promotional material. So, now that I’ve made a lot of promotional materials, we get a lot of feedback, because people are having physical things to take home with them and enjoy, like t-shirts, notebooks, water bottles.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANNIE: But also, the user engagement on Twitter, Facebook, all the social media is a lot higher when we add an image.
ANGELA: Yeah, I bet.
ANNIE: Significantly higher when we add an image.
ANGELA: Do you manage that or do you just hand over the image and then somebody else takes over the social?
ANNIE: We have an awesome community manager, Christina Keelan, and she handles all of that. And she really does all the copy and she has a great voice to go with all the images.
ANGELA: So you mentioned that you used Code Academy, right?
ANNIE: Mm-hmm.
ANGELA: Are there any other resources that you have found invaluable?
ANNIE: I’m working with a web designer right now, because we’re working on some web design stuff together, and she’s been -- she’s also a developer, so she’s been explaining things. Yeah, that one-on-one, especially for me, because I can’t learn things as well through just text, through reading.
ANGELA: Sure.
ANNIE: That’s probably why I’m not -- I wouldn’t be a great developer, because all the documentation would be really hard for me, but once I can get past a certain threshold I think I’ll be so. So, one-on-one.
PAIGE: So, just reaching out to you colleagues?
ANNIE: Yeah.
PAIGE: And taking the time to sit with them and stuff?
ANNIE: Yeah, maybe -- maybe there’s a class in my future.
PAIGE: So what is the hardest part of working in tech industry as a non-technical person, or the hardest part working as a woman in the tech industry? Where’s your struggle, your pain points now?
ANNIE: I was the first woman hired at RethinkDB and I have to say, they’re team is so awesome that I instantly felt welcomed. I had no problem there, but I do know that the demographic is mostly male and for me I think I’m a little outside of it just because I’m doing the art.
PAIGE: Do you find that it influences --
ANNIE: So I’m not competing.
PAIGE: -- your art because you have a mostly male audience?
ANNIE: Yes, oh definitely. Yes, it has to. I have to speak to my demographic, which is mostly male. And that has been a little difficult at times, because I like to draw flowers sometimes, and dresses, and sparkles, and hearts. But we’ve kept in some of the hearts (unintelligible). I think also, the other pain in just, it’s kind of hard because people are so knowledgeable. It’s a very skill based industry and it’s kind of hard to get down -- or sometimes I get down on myself and say I don’t know enough, I should know more, and that’s just always tough.
PAIGE: Running my Women Who Code network, it’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is kind of putting together, almost like a flashcard set to be like, here are the basic things you should know.
ANGELA: Right.
PAIGE: Like, you should know what a server means, and you should know maybe what agile means, and that’s kind of cool.
ANNIE: You know, that would be so helpful, because sometimes it’s like -- sometimes I just don’t know the language. I don’t know the terms that are being used.
ANGELA: Yeah, but I’m sure you’ve learned a lot, because when I got thrown into IT stuff I had to learn so much, so fast.
PAIGE: And Annie, you’re definitely on the deep end of things, like database stuff is some of the most complication stuff that we build.
ANNIE: Yes.
PAIGE: That’s really -- I talk when I -- I teach an intro Java Script course. And when I mean into, I mean like intro. The biggest thing that I try to hammer home is, I don’t care if you ever write Java Script again, but I want you to understand what a variable is and I want you to understand these basic building blocks so that then you can ask the right questions. Because that’s probably the most difficult part about learning technology is that the vocabulary is so fast.
ANNIE: Yeah, that sounds amazing, because that honestly has been, definitely a pain point, is just where do you start? You need to start at those basics.
ANGELA: Yep.
ANNIE: You need to know what a -- yeah, what does the server do? Sometimes you start looking at code and you’re like, I kind of know how to do this, but then you still don’t even know what the server does.
PAIGE: Right.
ANNIE: Or least that’s what I did.
PAIGE: And this is the dirty secret in the tech industry, because there’s that one percent of people who do really know everything soup to nuts, but there are like neck beards or just have been in the tech industry or geniuses who are MIT, but the vast majority of us are like, we know how to ask the right questions. If you’re like, hey how does this HTTP stuff work, I’m like I don’t quite know but I can find out for you.
All right, so one last question I like to know. What are you most excited about about technology and how it’s moving forward, or what’s on the horizon?
ANNIE: Well, I am most excited about -- I feel like now I’m in a space where I can -- I can grow. So, I’m really excited to see where -- where my tentacles kind of start going. I think the open source space is going to be a big one. And like we were talking about earlier, finding out how to get in there and start encouraging other artist to do the same, and maybe doing some more talks down the road, some conferences. I’ve been hosting some drawing groups, but maybe doing some more with Women Who Code and getting some art classes in there.
ANGELA: Yeah.
ANNIE: Or getting some artist in there to start pairing up with the developers, things like that.
PAIGE: Well, if you would ever like to come up to Portland and have a class, you’re more than welcome.
ANNIE: I would. Oh my gosh, I’ve been waiting -- I’ve been trying to come to Portland.
PAIGE: This has been fantastic. Thank you so much.
ANGELA: If you’d like to be on Women’s Tech Radio, you can email us, [email protected]. And don’t forget that you can subscribe to us in iTunes
PAIGE: You can also catch us on Twitter at heywtr.
Transcribed by Carrier Cotter - [email protected]