Jen Looper: [00:00:00] It’s a great pleasure to be here at PixelPalooza. So, um. Let’s get started talking about something that I’ve been thinking a little bit about recently, which is the concept of the cozy web. And um, in this first slide, I’m showing the coziest thing I’ve done in the past year, uh, which was to, uh, just before I started at Cloudinary, I went and did a photo shoot at a Chateau in France in a dress that I hand stitched, um, myself from 1780.
Uh, so, uh, if you need, um, someone to you. Parade around in, in, in costume. That would be me. Happy to, um, happy to do these things. Um, but I wanna talk about. Um, not just tech, but also a novel. Uh, it’s, I’m a literature, uh, PhD by, by training. So, you [00:01:00] know, we, we literature people. We say, you know, have you read this novel yet?
We never say that actually. We say, have you reread this novel? Because of course, we’ve all read all the things. So have you reread a DU by Marcel Proust? Um, it’s a very, very long novel. We’ll talk about it and we’ll bring clips from that novel into, um, our discussion of the cozy web. Means does not translate very well into English.
It’s not so much looking for lost time, but looking, looking for also wasted time. Time that’s been, you know, spent and, uh, and maybe can be rediscovered by doing certain things. So let’s go ahead and get started. Okay. So this stock is really a celebration, and it’s a celebration about wasting time, right?
And all of this, in an age of AI where we are pushed towards relentless efficiencies, a lot of us have, um, been pushed in our corporate jobs or pushed out of our corporate [00:02:00] jobs because, you know, we have this, this push towards efficiency. You know, AI can do it much faster. It’ll make you so much more productive.
I don’t wanna be more productive guys. I just wanna, I just want to have a, a space to think, to concentrate, to focus and, and maybe to refresh my brain a little bit by wasting some time. Um, so the agenda today, I wanna talk about dark forests versus the cozy web. Let’s talk about streams of consciousness.
And the modern web. Let’s talk about AI and media where the kind of the AI moment kind of crops up when we’re talking about taking space to think, and a call to arms, actually a call to warm hugs is where I wanna end this talk. So let’s go ahead and get started. Let’s talk about how, um, a hundred plus year old novel can inspire us to reclaim the modern web.
I know it’s a stretch, but bear with me. Stay with me. And if you are curious about this novel, uh, it’s a great way to fall asleep at night. You know, you read basically one page and [00:03:00] then you’re, you’re gone. It’s, it’s, it’s a wonderful, terrific, I don’t think he does. Designed it for that, but that’s how it works for me.
Um, and I am rereading it now, uh, if, but you can look at it on the web, some genius, um, has created a website called unj de post.org, one page of Proust. It’s the entire novel, which is comprised of like seven books, uh, all on one page. It just keeps scrolling until your finger hurts. But, um, is a really, actually, a great resource if you wanna do any data mining or data science around his use of language.
Very, very useful. So, um, just to give you a couple stats, this is an incredibly vast, classic novel, uh, sorry. There are 13. It’s a 13 volume master work in French. It’s a cathedral of memory. It’s really a cathedral of memory, uh, and a couple stats. It was published between 1913 and 1927 and holds the Guinness Book.
Um. The Guinness Record for the longest novel ever written. It’s 1.2 million words all on that webpage. And it’s about, um, 4,200 pages. And we’re gonna see if this [00:04:00] beam of light that just emerged is gonna drive me insane. So it probably will. I’m just gonna take one second to pull the shade down. Gimme one second.
The pleasures of hosting from home.
Ah, that’ll do it. Okay. Back in business. Alright, so. This is a book that’s all about the concept of, of involuntary memory. Those little memories that just spring up when you’re doing something else. You know, you can be in your kitchen cooking something or in a restaurant tasting something, or in the metro smelling something and, and it’ll just trigger an entire sequence of memory and send you down, literally down memory lane.
So let’s talk about how Proust talks about this. And I’m gonna read you, um, a little clip that I also had to abbreviate because he just goes on and on. Um, so this is the most famous, uh, piece, the most famous, um, extract from from 1917. First book [00:05:00] Swan’s Way in English. Swan is the neighbor, a kind of mysterious neighbor who does interesting things and, um, um, the narrative sort of surveils him.
Okay, so. One day in winter, as I came home, my mother seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first and then for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called pet, which look as though they’d been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim shell and soon mechanically weary.
After a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea, which I had soaked, uh, in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. And no sooner had the warm liquid and the crumbs with it touched my palate. Then a shudder ran through my whole body and suddenly the memory returns.
The taste was that of the little crumb of Madeline, which on Sunday mornings in the little town, when I went to say good [00:06:00] day to her and her bedroom, my Aunt Leoni used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime flour tea. So just take from this extract the first of all, the beautiful language, which is even more beautiful in French.
Um. I taken this idea that a, a, a flavor or a smell or a perfume can always brings Proust back to some person, to somebody, to his Aunt Leone. In this case, the Sunbeam just embrace the sun. Um, and uh, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about. So again, for some trivia, the first book in the series landed just after World War I in 1919.
And think about that for a second. You always need to put literature in context, written right? You know, after World War I, uh, it’s a moment where, um, perhaps people are looking back at a past that’s gone. In France. France got absolutely pummeled during World War I. If you go to France, you’ll see that the biggest monuments are from World War I.
Honestly, there wasn’t, there weren’t that many people left [00:07:00] for World War ii. Everyone likes to dunk on France during World War ii, world War. I just pummeled the country. Um, but anyway. First had a hard time finding a publisher, uh, and eventually this book did, you know, come to be considered this great masterpiece of French language.
And as a study of memory, jogs, digressions, reflections and recollections, all kind of loosely tied together. And it’s considered the first modernist novel because it explores this streams of consciousness. And that’s what critics weren’t understanding. One critic said, you know, I don’t understand why a man could take 30 pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep.
It made my head swim absolutely legitimate. However, I’ll come back to my point. Great thing to use to fall asleep. But I would like to suggest that we find ourselves in a proustian moment. Normally people use the word proustian moment to say, this is a moment where I have those triggers of memory. That’s not what I mean.
I mean, you know, we’re in this moment where we’re starting to look back a little bit, at least me, after 25 years slogging through big tech. Looking back [00:08:00] at some of the interesting moments where we had memory, where we had great moments. And thinking about how does our current work reflect those memories?
How can we look back on our past that we created ourselves, at least we, the Gen X people who created the web. I don’t care what Al Gore says, we’re the ones who built the thing. And here we are, uh, looking at where we were and where we are today. We’re witnessing profound change in what the internet even signifies, what it even means.
And I’d like to ask, you know, do you have nostalgia about those moments and what triggers it? And should we take some steps maybe to reclaim what we invented? That’s, that’s an interesting question. And if so, how? So let’s start talking about some dark forests and the cozy web. Okay, so Maggie Appleton wrote a really, did this really nice illustration, kind of revived this concept that had been, uh, created by RAO in about 2019, um, about the cozy web as [00:09:00] being a place full of, um, layers.
So, um, sorry about the internet basically being comprised of layers. So from a technical standpoint, the layers of the web can be classified as the clear web, the deep web, and the dark web. And our social interactions over the internet, however, really favor a different mental model because socially we can see be seen as interacting with the clear web.
And the cozy web. And the dark web. So here we have this, um, these layers of reality on the internet. Um, we have the dark forest at the top in the inhabiting the clear web. And then right underneath are the digital gardens that comprise the cozy web. The dark web. We don’t go there. That’s not what we’re gonna talk about today.
That’s a whole different beast. Um, but the dark forest of the clear web, it seems strange to think about it, but that’s the place that according to Appleton, it seems eerily quiet. Devoid of life. And the quote is that all the living creatures within it are hiding from predators. The advertisers tracking bots, the AI [00:10:00] agents who are coming after you’re behind, right?
The clickbait creators, attention hungry influencers, LinkedIn, and the reply guys and trolls. The Dark forest of the Clear Web is inhabited by trolls. It’s unsafe to reveal yourself in any authentic way. So we retreat into these private spaces and we hide in the gated spaces of the cozy web. So that’s the kind of concept of the cozy web.
These are those gated spaces that we hang out in. We feel comfortable there. We have little circles of friends and we kind of, uh, reveal a little bit about our, um, true selves in the cozy web, nefarious things happening in the dark web. Let’s not go there. But in the dark forest of the clear web, which is populated by trolls, as we said, it’s unsafe right, to reveal yourself in it in an authentic way.
So here we have, um, we have created over the past many years, little elements of the cozy web. Here’s an example. Uh, this is called the Small Web. Uh, it’s a subway and it’ll take you to various little web rings around the, around [00:11:00] the web that you can look at. This is the architecture of a web ring. I don’t know if anyone remembers these things.
They’ve kind of been deprecated now, but. They were fun, right? We, you, you listed your website as part of a web ring and then on the left there’d be a navigation and people could just visit your little space and feel safe and comfortable and private and cozy. So that is, um, that’s kind of how this whole thing’s comprised.
So let’s look at the newer cozy web. It’s still there. It’s still out there. It’s available. I think Reddit might be an interesting example of the cozy web. You do need to log in to interact with it, and there are all kinds of, you know. R slash this is my favorite one. A. Aww. It’s all the cute pictures of cats and sunbeams and nice, cozy things.
Um, I think Ravelry, if anyone’s a crochet or knitter, uh, ravelry is a great place. Again, log in, come into a moderated space and you get all these cool patterns and you can interact with each other and talk to each other. Um, I think Blue sky is, uh, a new cozy [00:12:00] web, uh, element. I mean, it’s pretty gated. I do think that I interact with people on a different plane than what I would do on the current X or Twitter or whatever you wanna call it.
Twitter used to be our cozy web as in tech, but I think it’s, it’s been transformed, um, not in a great way, but One thing I wanna question and, and maybe people can put in the chat, you know, do you think the Cozy web is a cop out? Do you think it’s just us being scared to interact with each other in any kind of, you know, uh, open way?
As always, Proust has something to say about this sort of thing, and he says. No exile at the South Pole, or on the summit of Mo Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice that is of a thought different from theirs. So this is this kind of idea that, you know, finding your people by definition is a retreat into small, exclusive groups.
But even inclusive groups can feel exclusive, which is a weird thought, but it they can, you know. Thinking [00:13:00] differently can devolve quickly into group think in this version of the cozy web. So is it a cop out? I don’t know, maybe. So I’d like to propose perhaps thinking about reclaiming and rebuilding our own cozy web as a virtual third space.
One thing that was lost during COVID is the concept of a third space, right? Even libraries are a little bit under threat right now, but you know, I have to drive for a long time to find a Cat Cafe as a fun, you know, cozy third space. Um. You know, the, we’ve, we’ve kind of lost these, uh, VFW halls and these kind of areas where we could kind of group together and meet.
Uh, I think that, however, online people are building new types of virtual third spaces. One of them, I think is Scratch. Scratch, has done a really nice job of creating a safe space for kids to come and parents and educators to come together, create together in a safe. Moderated space that’s quite open to all.
So I think that, you know, this [00:14:00] might be a model of something we can look at to, you know, allow ourselves to be free, free to be you and me. Anybody remember that? Um, one way I’m trying to recreate interesting third spaces, interesting nostalgia and interesting interfaces that kind of reflect that. That, um, that ethos is by creating nostalgic interfaces.
Wonder if anyone’s done, done this? I’ve done this. Um, at Microsoft, we created Azure mysteries. We had the mystery mansion, and you would discover things about Azure by un unlocking desks. And in the, in the, in the mystery mansion here, I’ve created a website called clara dari.com. If you are clever, you’ll think, oh, Cloudinary Clara Dari.
Very cool. Um. And you can walk through this and help Clara, who’s a master detective in the style of Nancy Drew, uh, to, to discover, uh, clues that will help her restore some stolen purloined jewels. Um, so, you know, why can’t we create something interesting and nostalgic and inclusive like this sort of [00:15:00] thing?
Why not? Agenda on item number two, streams of consciousness and the modern web. So we’re in the business of seeking like-minded people with which to share, with whom to share our cozy spaces. But you know, maybe by doing so, we’re not allowing ourselves to wander freely into these kind of proustian streams of consciousness.
Because perhaps we’re in the process right now of marching towards uniformity. We’ll talk a little bit about how AI is perhaps pushing us that, you know, AI pushing us towards conformity. Um, and maybe this is a moment where we can say, no mercy, no thank you. Maybe we can say this is a moment where we can raise up our individualism and celebrate the aspect of just wandering around.
So let’s take a trip down memory lane as we do and think about how the web used to be this amazing locus of wasted and lost time. Uh, I wanted to go ahead and share my screen on [00:16:00] another tab. Let’s see if I can manage to do it without completely going crazy. So this is a useless web. Um, I don’t know if you have used these.
This is a great, uh, thing to just. Blow time. You click that, uh, oops. And then you get ads. Oh, no, well forget it. Let’s try something else. Um, this is the long doge challenge. I don’t know. It’s wow long you’ve collected three wows. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Click to print. Maybe if I refresh it, it’ll become longer.
I don’t know. Let’s try another useless website. This is the binary piano. Oh, cool. You know, you can customize the notes. It’s all just, just, you could just like, sit on this for hours. Hmm. Here’s a mini maze. Uh, let’s see what we’re supposed to do. So, oh yeah, this, this is where you, I think you, you click yeah and go down, down, down, down, up, down, down.
This kind of thing. So, um, [00:17:00] there’s just. You know, this is this, this moment that we, we would just, you know, build silly websites and I, I feel like this is a moment we’ve, we’ve somewhat lost, you know, what happened, what the heck happened. Uh, I’ll go back to my slides now and we’ll discover perhaps some of the things that have happened together.
I think what happened. Perhaps, um, is that, I don’t know, was it tailwind’s fault? Did we all, you know, March towards the uniformity of using Tailwind? Oh, no. Um, I don’t know if that’s true, but, um, the, and I love Pablo Stanley as an illustrator, but these faceless people are just populating the web with the primary colors, the faceless humans.
I think they just have to go. And why did all of our interfaces started looking like this? And I plead guilty. I had the swoosh at the top with the little extra bit. And the, and the faceless people and the blue, um, color. I don’t know. Do we do this to ourself? Do we just march towards uniformity because we were lazy?
Perhaps our laziness [00:18:00] is starting to feed into, um, this new pal on the block, which is the AI agent who’s picking up all of our laziness, ingesting it, and spitting it back at us, right? Um, this is this crazy article that came out. You know, why do AI company logos all look like buttholes? Like, why? I don’t know, they’re uniform.
Um, and this is this AI agent that has entered the chat. It’s not really thinking, it’s outputting up a bland version of our own collective stream of consciousness. Um, it’s, this is a really, really weird moment. And Wes. Boss did a brilliant video calling it out, asking why every freaking AI generated website is purple.
And the quote he had was that, you know, it looks like Barney did a huge round of VC funding. Um, and, um, I, I just love this video. It just talks about, you know, these kind of websites unlock your mind with Aura Mind. Excuse me, my mind is not locked. You know, so here we are. Um, but everything’s purple, so it’s just this kind of descent into one.[00:19:00]
All of our interesting diversions are coming into this, this moment of complete conformity and I don’t like it. A couple other examples. The great convergence of logos, tech logos are. Becoming just text. Same thing with fashion. Why on earth would Burberry do that? What about Belman? That is a, you know, a really awesome brand.
Even eBay, it’s lost, um, the individuality. Um, but there’s been a backlash, um, against this kind of conformity, right? The, um. There’s this march to conformity, but this backlash occurred with, um, actually when a third space was threatened. An interesting third space. I think Cracker Barrel was an interesting third space.
We don’t have them in New England so much, but, um, when I was in Mississippi, I, I did order takeout from Cracker Barrel. I can’t say that it was my, you know, I. It wasn’t my dream dinner in my hotel room, room eating cold grits. But here we are, uh, from Cracker Barrel. I wanted to try it, you know, because you have to.
Anyway, they tried to fix the logo. There [00:20:00] was a huge backlash because they got rid of all humanity and just created this, you know, square and they rolled it back and it was a interesting moment where some brand damage had to be, had to be, had to be fixed. So sometimes, sometimes if we speak out, you know, we can stop this march to conformity.
Item three, AI media and us. How can we raise up our individualism as we navigate an algorithmic world? That sounds terrible, but as always, priest has something to say, right? So he’s someone who celebrates the A consciousness of your own. A consciousness of his own, of his unreliable narrator. Here’s his quote.
The only true journey would be. Would not be to go towards new landscapes altogether, but to have other eyes. To see the universe with the eyes of another of a hundred others. To see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is, what a beautiful quote that really gives us permission to embrace this alternative to this [00:21:00] algorithmic world shaped by AI to really explore and dive into the various streams of consciousness that are all over the place that we need to rediscover.
And that actually reflects the original version of the web. Here’s Tim, be Lee’s, uh, vague but exciting proposal to create a worldwide web full of different streams of consciousnesses. Um, and then in 1993, we had the birth of the visual web and that really opened it up to all of us to express our consciousnesses in beautiful interfaces like this.
I hope you appreciate. The artistry. This is my first professional interface in about the year 2001. Um, but I was given permission to innovate by my little startup closing council.com. Um, I put some color on it, I put some people on it. Um. It has all the worst practices. Right? Sign up now is like a button that you click.
It doesn’t look like it though. It’s just like it’s heinous everyone. But anyway, we were given [00:22:00] permission. We were given permission to try. We were the web masters and we were inventing the web. What has changed? Nothing has changed my friends. We have a choice, right? We can, uh, we can open up these AI browsers, which are completely devoid of human intervention and this just being regurgitated towards us.
Or we can, you know, think about what browsers are, what the web is, what websites are, what we wanna create. Um, we, we have the option. And there are a couple really fun tools I just wanna point you towards. One of them is, uh, let’s see. I’ll go back to share my tab here. Let’s see. Useless website. I wanna show you about.
MM page. Um, I was really excited because an owl came to my house, so I created a website about it, and this is just this little silly drag and drop interface. You know why, though? I don’t know. What’s the symbolism of an owl, you know, but you can take these moments and you can create a completely useless piece [00:23:00] of junk that gives you pleasure, that gives you joy.
Why not? Why the heck not? Let’s do it. Feast your eyes. Okay, let’s go back to slides. All right, excellent. We do have another interesting tool to inject humanity back into our interfaces, though. I just wanna call out the C two PA standard. If you haven’t explored this, take a look as the Coalition for Content Providence and Authenticity, C two pa, and it allows you to.
Put a tracer on your images, even if it was generated by chat GPT. You can use tools like Adobe Lightroom to to show the provenance of that image and then you can show your, um. Your interventions to the image where you changed it, you changed the color, you did a little crop, that kind of thing. Uh, cloudinary supports that sort of thing.
We have a transformation which you put in the URL called FL C two pa and that will allow you to, um, use a, um, to create [00:24:00] this little button at the top. If you go to clara ari.com, you’ll see C two PA, um, uh, buttons, all over the images. Okay, great. In the last few minutes, I want to call, have a call to warm hugs, a call to arms, uh, because I think that we’re going down a slippery slope that we don’t have to go down.
Right. And just a reminder, and I love this image, most of Proust’s rabbit holes of streams of consciousness, of digressions, of diversions, they all lead back to a person. Right? That’s kind of where I wanna take, take you. What are the, what are the. What are the recollections that you can lean on to reengage yourself with people?
With the people who are creators, the people who are, are working to, to make the, the web great to make, uh, your experience great on the internet. This is a fun image because. He Proust is on his knees pretending to play the guitar to a little girl who’s absolutely [00:25:00] delighted. You know, and these are usually, he’s looking emo in his pictures.
But these, this, in this situation, he’s just having fun. My Lord, can we just have some fun on the web? You know, can we just, um, rediscover those connections to people? And just one note that I think I talk, I talk a lot about, you know, nostalgia and bringing back old things and bringing back, um, you know.
The way we used to do stuff, which is the privilege of someone who’s worked in this industry for a long time. Um, but sometimes no nostalgia is, is quite messy. I gave this talk in Mississippi and let me tell you, nostalgia for the way things used to be in Mississippi is not where we wanna be. Right? We wanna look forward.
Um, of course Prust has something to say about that. The memory of a certain image is only the regret of a certain moment. Um, but we can learn from the past, right? And we can channel. We can channel, um, those early vibes into maybe where we wanna take the web going forward. And I just wanna suggest that maybe this is a moment where we can think about rebuilding our own digital gardens, whether nostalgic or [00:26:00] innovative, something completely new.
We need to tap into what we used to do, building completely useless garbage. It’s a great thing. This is a picture of Proust with a nice buzz cut again looking emo, but at least he’s in his friends, uh, in a garden. So in conclusion, I would just say, you know what? If we reclaimed the web for our own, creating a new cozy web based, not so much on shielding ourselves from weirdos in the clear web.
Or avoiding the dark web, but based on cherishing, warm and inclusive human interactions make it self-sustainable. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what the finances are of this thing. This is just me being pie in the sky, which is my usual, um, place where I like to dwell. It’s self-sustainable, but devoid of adware, spyware and intrusive algorithms at least allow us to opt out.
And what would that look like? What would that look like? Maybe we have some ideas in chat. So thank you very much, just inviting you to stay cozy, [00:27:00] uh, and have an awesome day. Um, take a look at my website, visit Cloudinary if you feel the need. Um, we do cool things with images and it’s super cozy. Thank you.
Sean C Davis: Thanks so much, Jen, that that was amazing. I, I love your presentations. I always get my mind working in a different way, like open up the creativity. I’ve got this list of like, you need to spend some after, after AI helps you make more space in your day. Like you need to spend some time. Making a list of all of the useless crap that you can build.
‘cause that’s fun and like it’ll open up more creativity. So I appreciate that very much. Uh, folks out there in the chat, uh, drop your questions and I’ll pass them on to Jen. Jen, I wanna go to start by going all the way back to like one of the first things you said. That website that has the, um, entire what, 13 volumes of work on the one page you noted, uh, I think you said kind of in passing that you could.
You could run that through, you know, some AI tool or something like that, and data mine for the [00:28:00] use of language and that it just, it caught my attention. And I was curious what, um, I mean, what are some of the things that you would, that would, you would expect that would be kind of interesting that would come out of that?
Jen Looper: Yes. Um, I think you could do an interesting. Okay. First of all, I’ve done this with Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Okay. And ‘cause I wanted to see, so, uh, um, that’s where that’s coming from. So, um, because I wanted to test a, a hypothesis, which was that Emily Dickinson is usually very dark. Well, it turns out the most used word that she uses is something like love.
Um, it’s very actually cheerful. So you can do that. Kind of like what are the most frequent words that he uses? What does that tell us about him and his ethos? Get rid of the stop words, you know, like, and if, or do it in French. Do it in English. See how the translations compare. Um, you can look at his sentence length.
And where he’s really expansive and maybe look at moments in the narrative where the, the link of the sentences become an entire page versus where he truncates and becomes a more concise, um, I think you [00:29:00] could, you know, it would be really fun. You could do that and then you could set it to music. You could, you know, take the pattern.
So here we go. No, this could be fun. So there’s all kinds of useless crap that we can do, but it all can also help scholarship and it helps that everything is digitized like that.
Sean C Davis: Yes. I, I guess I just don’t even, I think of data as like, you know, um, mostly starting with numbers and then we analyze those numbers and it’s like, well, it actually, I mean, there’s so much you can do even just with language.
That’s, that’s really interesting.
Yeah.
Sean C Davis: Alright, so, um, you know, I think, uh, for, for the bulk of that presentation, you were really talking about, you know, how we interact with one another on the web and, and that’s evolved over time and. In our first presentation today, we’ve talked about how we looked at, at emerging tools from CloudFlare and how, um, real time video and audio capabilities.
Are rapidly changing and kind like opening up the door for people to build new tools really quickly. Mm-hmm. And I’m, I’m just [00:30:00] curious from your perspective and, and in the content that you presented today, do you feel like the way that we interact with one another on the web is going to change? Is it, is it changing or do you see it going in a certain direction?
Jen Looper: I do, and I’m not sure I like it, so, um. I’m in the business of building community and it’s getting mm-hmm. Really, really hard in an age of ai because if people are looking at, talking to other people, talking to other developers as transactional, you need a, you ask a question, you get an answer like, what we used to do on Stack Overflow.
If you are just doing that by hanging out in cursor and talking to an LLM, you’ve completely lost the human connection and, and, and, and it’s way more efficient. And it’s nice because you can set the AI agent to kind of do the work for you, but I think it’s, um, I think it’s gonna bite us a little bit if we don’t find other ways of, of rediscovering our connections [00:31:00] with people, because LLMs are just reflecting on what we’ve done in the past, right?
Mm-hmm. It’s not necessarily how we can evolve our craft in the future. I went to a conference called Squiggle Conf, and it reassured me however that you know. The craft is alive. We’re doing okay. We’re, we’re, we are. We’ve got people who are working so close to the metal and evolving the, um, the infrastructure of the internet.
Uh, I think we’re okay, but for the general basic developer or early career person, we we’re dumping them straight into tools like Cursor and they’re not getting that community element that, that we used to build. And that worries me. It worries me. I wonder if we’re gonna have to go back to in-person, kind of like, we’re gonna have to go back to Blue Books in the academy.
Right,
Sean C Davis: right. Yeah. Interesting. So, you know, I, because I, I know from, um, you know, a w work and business perspective, it’s like, well we, it’s hard to manage communities. We want to help as many people as we can. So we want to put those resources, um. You know, in a, in a [00:32:00] way that they are accessible and people can use them with these tools.
But is there, is there anything that you are working on actively or, or thinking about in terms of how you bring people back into the, that, that human element? Like where do you see that? I, I guess what, what are you, what are you doing today to try to, um, revive that connection?
Jen Looper: That’s a beautiful question and I really appreciate it because we just are launching at Cloudinary, um, the Cloudinary creators community.
So, um, we have had ambassador programs in the past, um, and we are evolving our thought process. I’m helping the company kind of figure out where we wanna go with community, what we wanna do. What I’m focusing on is working with, um, nonprofits that are focusing on bootcamps. For example, code to Inspire in Afghanistan, girl Script in India.
Um, she code Africa, these kind of nonprofits, vets who code, who have an educational outreach, um, arm. S getting people excited to get certified on, um, Cloudinary, [00:33:00] our new curriculum that, um, we’re also developing. It’s just about ready to go and, uh, allowing people to learn about the tools and then jump into discord so that we can all gather together across cultures, across countries.
And have some interesting educational experiences together, specifically tailored for early career people. ‘cause I want them to have a nice experience like what we had actually, I jumped into tech before Women Who Code. But I’ve seen the benefit that, that those kind of communities can have for, um, for early career developers.
And I kind of wanna recreate that. I’m really hoping that, um, that we’ll be able to recreate that. So if you go to community, community.cloud and area.com is our new landing page talking about the, the creator. Creator community. I want people who are also builders, you know, who are working with AI tooling, kind of AI engineers.
I want them to be as comfortable as fingers on keyboard engineers who are writing web apps. Um, so there’s, there’s a, there’s a whole different, uh, group of people that we wanna reach as well.
Sean C Davis: Uh, so, so kind of leaning [00:34:00] on the folks that are already really active in the space that you’ve established to kinda help you navigate how you can like spread that to be more inclusive to more folks.
Jen Looper: Definitely. And I, one thing I did at AWS was I created the AWS Cloud Club program and we had beautiful moments. Again, me being pie in the sky. But we had beautiful moments where, for example, our Korea, our captain in Korea, cloud club, captain in Korea had a coffee chat with the, um, his equivalent in, uh, Pakistan, and they found like human connections.
It wasn’t even about tech anymore. It was just finding those commonalities across linguistic barriers, across all kinds of other barriers, just to find a connection and learn from each other. I think that’s the most beautiful of all.
Sean C Davis: Yes. Yes. And that’s, that’s interesting. So on that, on that note of like inclusive versus exclusive communities, at one point near the middle of, uh, of your talk, you had noted that there are communities that can seem like they’re inclusive, but they’re [00:35:00] actually exclusive.
And I like, I kind of had this aha moment earlier in the year where I really felt like. The communities that I had been a part of were feeling very threatened by AI tools.
And,
Sean C Davis: um, and, and I think there’s a lot of justification for that. But what I, what I started to realize was that the, the byproduct or consequence of that was that those communities then shifted to actually being more exclusive,
um,
Sean C Davis: in terms of the way that.
Developers have worked in the past, and so folks who want to get into the space now have a hard time getting into specific communities. Mm. And I think we need to, so like that’s a whole other topic in terms of like, how do we open up communities for folks who are looking to, um, you know, to use AI or to just develop in a different way.
But what I’m curious to get your perspective on is, are there, are there things we can do [00:36:00] today beyond what you’ve shared that, um, that can make communities. More inclusive, even if they’re starting to kind of like meander in the exclusive, uh, direction?
Jen Looper: That’s a great question. Um, I think for me, everything comes from the top, and I think if the person running the community.
Speaks in an inclusive fashion and demonstrates their ability to evolve and try new things and not talk down to people. I think that patterns are really nice behavior that hopefully will in, you know, infiltrate and, uh, influence the community from, from the top down. Um, I’m. I think a nice example of an inclusive community that I recently worked with was Code for Boston.
Um, the Code for America, uh, group has a cohorts all over the place, and code for Boston is one of the og the really nice, um, nice groups. It’s about civic hacking. So what they do is they branch off into, [00:37:00] um, into projects and then they ship projects for, for, for the city, uh, for free or for communities. The one I was working on is the most Boston thing ever.
It’s the liquor license, uh, Boston, uh, map. And, and the way it’s, it’s organized. It’s just organized to make everyone feel comfortable. There’s a nice onboarding in person, uh, every, and they do one in person, one on Zoom every other week. So they alternate. So everyone can come whenever they can, can make it in person or on Zoom.
Um, they’re, um, and then they’re, they kind of break up the, the work and. In terms of like, if you’re a backend developer and you wanna try something on the front end, you’re given the keys to try, you know, if people, ‘cause people. I came there basically to upskill a little bit. I wanted to learn more about product management, um, and shipping.
And so I, we did this whole thing on working with personas and I, I’d never done that before. So we learned on how to create on Miro, like a whole persona board for. The types of bartenders who were gonna come to us, um, for our liquor license situation. Boston has a [00:38:00] really weird liquor license. Um, law.
There’s only so few, and they tend to be purchased nefariously, so they’re all kind of moving from the local neighborhoods and into the rich parts of town. So there’s a gentrification of the liquor licenses. It’s super, super weird, Michelle. Who’s gonna fix it though? We have, we have confidence.
Sean C Davis: I, I love that idea though.
I mean, you get people exploring spaces they haven’t been in before. For, you know, a, a good cause, which might just, yeah. With no judgment. Yeah. Right. Yes, yes. I love that. Mm-hmm. Um, okay. Real quick, last question. You know, if you were to leave the audience here with one thing they can do to push back against the conformity that we’re seeing, what would you leave folks with?
Jen Looper: I think you should just build, you know, just build something bizarre, um, and see how far you can push the envelope. Maybe pick one new CSS, um, element that’s being released and see what the weirdest thing you can do with it. Publish [00:39:00] it, build out loud and show us on LinkedIn like that would, like, let’s just like, let’s make LinkedIn populated with weird crap and see what happens.
This is my challenge to all of us. Uh, I have a couple projects in the hopper. One is a affirmation poster generator, and then the other is a Christmas card maker. You know, just '
Sean C Davis: cause
Jen Looper: Why not? These,
Sean C Davis: these are amazing. Yes. Uh, alright, so get out there. Build something weird. Build something useless. Thank you so much for being here, Jen.
Jen Looper: Thank you. Good fun. Have a good one.
