Salma Alam-Naylor // @whitep4nth3r

OPENING QUOTE: I think, with tech, and a lot of the preconceived notions that people have of tech sometimes such as, "Oh, it's really difficult, or oh, I can't do it, or I don't want to do it." Once you bring people together, and you show them what's possible, as a collective, they want to do it more and more, because it makes you feel good on such a like, primitive level. 

Brian: That’s Salma Alam-Naylor, aka whitep4anth3r, who is currently a developer advocate at Contentful.  Salma has had a varied career as a teacher, musician, performer, comedian and now, live code streamer, and this is The ReadME Podcast, a GitHub podcast that takes a peek behind the curtain at some of the most impactful open source projects and the developers who make them happen. I am bdougie aka Brian Douglas…

Neha: And I’m nerdneha aka Neha Batra.

Brian: Every episode, Neha and I invite a maintainer or open source developer into our studio to explore the impact their work is making on the world around them. 

Neha: In this episode, we speak with Salma, who discovered programming at a young age but focused on music and performance as a kid and into her twenties. Programming always intrigued her, and she returned to it in an unexpected way. Since then, she’s become a sensation, through her videos on Twitch, discussions on Discord and her vocal commitment to accessibility and inclusivity in tech. During our conversation, we explored her journey to open source, the intersection of writing music and writing code and how becoming a parent changed her perspective on the future of her work.

But first, as always, what was Salma’s first experience with a computer?

Salma: I was about six years old. I have a brother who is much older than me who didn't live with me growing up, and he had a Commodore 64. And I used to play games on the Commodore 64 when you put the cassette tape in, and you wait for an hour for it to load, and then you play your game. But it came with this really big manual. And, I don't know if I could even read the manual. I mean, I could read at six, but I flicked through the manual, and all of a sudden, I noticed that there were lots of different characters that you could put in, into the blue terminal, and make things happen. So I remember painstakingly sitting there for hours, typing in character by character, these codes that the book gave me, and I made balls bounce across the screen and stripes appear. 

And, I made this stuff happen in this blue terminal right before my very eyes. And it made me feel extremely intrigued and powerful and I wanted to do more and more. But back in the early 90s, tech wasn't really a thing. There wasn't really much access to it, especially—I grew up in quite a quiet place. So I just had my Commodore 64, I had no idea what I was doing. I realized now I was writing basic at six years old. That's my earliest memory that stuck with me. I can still feel myself there now. And it's brought me here, I guess.

Neha: So it sounds like that curiosity or that moment for you was the fact that you were writing things in, and then like things were appearing on the screen. How did you go from there to take it a step further?    

Salma: It was when I first got the internet in my house at age 13. And I would be on the internet, back in the old days, in chat rooms and all sorts, and I have no idea how I discovered it, but I came across GeoCities. 

Neha: Yes. I remember that. 

Salma: So I've built GeoCities websites, I can still see it now. And actually coded an homage to that last year. I made a GeoCities website with all sorts of fancy GIFs and things. So it went to there. But again I didn't really know what programming was still. I was like dragging and dropping stuff in GeoCities. I didn't really know what I was doing. And again, there was still no access to tech. The wealth of resources and tutorials that we have online now did not exist. So I had no idea how to go about learning what I was even supposed to learn. And so it just felt more like a hobby when I was doing IT classes in high school. I was the one making websites, whilst everybody else was working on spreadsheets, I was still using GeoCities, but it was always something that I gravitated towards. And it really, really attracted me and intrigued me but I always came up against dead ends and I didn't really know where to go from there.

Brian: I'm curious though, it sounds like you stumbled into computers through the Commodore and your brother. What sort of made it stick for you? At what point did you figure, “Okay, I'm making websites, I'm going to do this more often now?”

Salma: It really happened completely either by fate or serendipity, or it was always part of my life. In my early 20s, when I was studying at music college, I gravitated towards making websites for my musician friends, and I did a lot of graphic design. So I was always gravitating towards front end as well, and the UI elements. I had a boyfriend, actually, in my early 20s, who was a SharePoint developer. And I still had no idea what he was doing. But he introduced me to the basics of HTML and CSS, and helped me put a real website live over FTP, with HTML and CSS, no JavaScript yet. And that was for my own personal website, and my own band’s website. So I was always finding a need to build a website by whatever means. I was also using, I don't know whether you remember the software called iWeb on Mac computers in the early 2000s. 

So I built a lot of websites all just drag and drop image based. I had no idea what the code looked like. But I was always trying to find ways even though I couldn't really code to bring tech into what I was doing, because I think I knew the importance of having that tech presence and to keep experimenting, and to keep trying things in order to hopefully open doors and find some other kind of learning and make connections. But again, I think around that time in the early 2000s, there still wasn't that type of community there is now with tech. And I didn't really know anybody who was doing that, all my friends were musicians, all my friends were teachers. And so it was always there but never really realized until a bit later.

Neha: It’s so interesting to hear that music was such a core part of Salma’s life, and we have had several guests on the show for whom that was the case.  Tech and music came together for Salma when she made a website for her band. And while she was certainly intrigued by tech, music didn’t cease to play a prominent role.

Salma: So I started playing music the same time I started programming basic on the Commodore 64. I played the piano for as long as I can remember. I've composed music for as long as I can remember as well. My major in music college was composition. So I think there are some real similarities, actually, between programming and composition in that you're architecting something, you’re putting together a big thing. You are building blocks with little repeatable motifs, and ideas and concepts. And with an end goal in mind, whether that is just listener pleasure or user satisfaction. So I think they came hand in hand, really, I think my brain is very satisfied by thinking of code as music and music has code. I did a lot of mathematical things with music at one point as well. 

And I've been reading around some studies about what part of the brain actually is most used in programming. And there's a lot of debate whether it's like language, or maths or logical reasoning, but I think they're very similar parts of the brain as what music lights up, and music composition lights up. So it kind of feels like it's always been natural to me—both of those things—and I can't imagine my life without either really.

Brian: So I just want to ask, so you had a band, can we actually just kind of pick that apart a little bit? What kind of music were you playing that kind of led to building websites eventually?

Salma: It was folk music, Scottish and Irish and English folk music. And we toured the country at all the festivals, we played a lot of weddings, we recorded an album. You can still find it on Spotify, if you really wanted to. 

Brian: I do want to. 

Salma: Tell you later. So it's a world away really from tech, this kind of grassroots folk of the people thing, but again, there's a big sense of community around folk music and the occasions that folk music is played out. And I think also that mirrors the whole community thing with music in general and nowadays tech. I think one of the things that I love about tech and music that are very similar is the whole community sense now. When you're a musician and you're in an orchestra, or you're in a band, you are working with a number of other people for something that's greater than the sum of its parts. And saying, when you're on, like a product team, or you're building something, you're programming something with either one person, pair programming, or a group of people in a big team. 

There's that sense of community and creating those very primitive human chemical bonds that come with a shared vision, and shared experiences. So I think they're very similar in that way as well. I think that's why it's not really very far away from me in my music world, being in this kind of tech world, because so many crossovers are present. 

Neha: I think what's really interesting about that is that like, I feel as though for open source communities, we are still in our first few phases of discovering what the community really needs. But for music, it's so much more of an understood area. Do you find yourself applying any of the concepts from the music world, and the sense of community you created there to like how you interact in the open source world?

Salma: Absolutely. I remember this one music lesson that I gave in high school. It was a group of 12 and 13 year olds, and it was my first lesson with them in a new school. And I was going to do a singing lesson with them, there was me at the piano, teaching them a song. And they came in, and this school was in a very deprived area, and they hadn't had a music teacher for a few years. And as soon as they came into my classroom, they said, "Oh, I'm not singing, I don't want to sing. Singing is rubbish." An hour later, those same people left my classroom saying, "I can't wait to do it again." And I think, with tech, and a lot of the preconceived notions that people have of tech sometimes such as, "Oh, it's really difficult, or oh, I can't do it, or I don't want to do it." Once you bring people together, and you show them what's possible as a collective, they want to do it more and more, because it makes you feel good on such a like, primitive level. 

So I always think about that lesson. And I see that happen a lot in my community and in the wider community. When people get that little spark of, “Oh, my goodness, this is actually possible.” And the people at the forefront of these open source communities, and the people in the limelight of these communities are the people who are responsible for empowering those people who think they cannot be part of this, to feel better about themselves, and to better their lives, and to better their futures through tech. I thoroughly believe that tech is the future. And I think as we go on, in the next few decades, I think the job opportunities for our children are going to be very limited to mainly tech. And the more we can open up tech through open source and through what we do, the more our children's generation will be able to thrive and live better lives. And because they will feel welcome and empowered and able to challenge themselves without shutting it down and saying, "Oh, I can't do that. I'll just go and do something else."

Neha: What’s so interesting about each of the interviews we’ve done, is hearing the path the guest took into software development. Each is unique in its own right, but Salma’s has some surprising twists that brought her into the profession. 

Salma: Yes. So see, one of the things is when you do a music degree, there's only two things you can really end up doing—it's playing music or teaching music. So the first few years after I graduated, I was mainly playing. But I needed money to live and pay my rent. So I started teaching, kind of ad hoc freelance teaching and I kind of liked it. So I thought I'll go and get a qualification. So I did a year's teacher training, which is not the usual teacher training you do. In this country, there are two ways you can do it. You either go back to uni, or you can do an on-the-job training if you've had experience before. So we did that. A great school, and then I got a job at another school to do my newly qualified year that you have to do in order to get your full qualification. Around that time, I was still playing music, but this time musical comedy. And I was telling jokes and playing music with one of my closest friends that I met at music college. 

We were going all around the country, we played at Leicester Square Theatre, we did all these competitions, we were doing quite well but it was pretty stressful. And she is still a teacher. And so we decided to stop that because we were doing some strange, cutting edge comedy and it was quite tough. We'd get canceled now by the way, like our comedy was of such a time. Comedy is a difficult business. Anyway, so I was still playing comedy, and teaching at the same time. And then I left teaching very soon after I started at that school where I had that wonderful lesson and carried on with comedy for a bit. And that is the time of the transition into tech and the strange series of events that led me here.

Neha: Oh my god, now you have to tell us what are those strange series of events, I want to know.

Salma: So when I quit teaching, I had no idea what I was going to do, and I again, still didn't think tech was an option because I didn't have any experience really. And you need experience to get a job even if it's entry level and all that nonsense. So I applied for a variety of different jobs including writing for radio, and all sorts. I got quite far in that process, but thankfully I didn't get that job. It all started when I was desperate. So I took a job at a cold call center for minimum wage, and I was there for eight weeks. And my manager there noticed that I had graphic design on my CV, on my resume. And funny story his girlfriend was working at a small little startup place who needed a graphic designer/sales person.

So I interviewed for this graphic designer/sales person role, and I got it. And it was a very tiny little outfit above a furniture shop in Wigan, of all places, which if anyone is from England knows that Wigan is a strange place. And there was this one IT guy there. So this product that we're working on was a magazine website. And the IT guy there did the back end, the front end, the DevOps, everything, he was the only person working on the tech. And I happened to sit on the same desk bank as him and we got talking about tech. So in a few weeks, I just moved my seat ‘round to sit next to him, and I started working on the site with him. He had never taught or mentored anyone before. So whilst he was teaching me tech, I taught him how to teach. So again, there was this really nice, like symbiotic relationship where we were creating something together and bettering ourselves together. 

I was there with him for six months until I got made redundant and then went on to do a series of front end development jobs from that. But I owe my career in part to him, mentoring me so openly and it wasn't even my job. It wasn't in my job description, but I took that chance. I learned PHP, I learned SAAS and CoffeeScript. Actually, those are the three things that I did. I didn't even learn the basics of HTML and CSS, I just went straight into some kind of deep end. And here we are today. I'm still friends with this guy; went to his wedding two years ago. And I often talk to him about what I'm doing and how I remember how good he was to me. 

So again, this brings back the importance of mentorship, I think and being open to those kinds of experiences and opportunities and finding people who you connect with on a human level to talk tech with. I think that only really works if you are on the same kind of wavelength and the mentor wants to engage in that kind of relationship as well. But I owe a lot to him and I don't know what I would have done otherwise.

Neha: Totally, I feel like I've been on both sides of that coin too, because I remember being mentored, I also switched into tech from a different area. So I was learning how to program and I feel like the people who were the most influential in me making that switch, were the people who I'd asked them, like what I thought was like a really simple or just like, dumb question like, "Well, what happens after I press enter here? And why does this appear on the web page?" And they're like, "Oh, my God, that's an excellent question." And those people are responding to these questions with actual excitement and trying to figure out how to consolidate all that they've learned. So when you're saying “same way wavelengths,” I definitely feel like I can relate to that a lot. Even being on the mentor side, when someone asks me a question, and I'm like, actually, this is really interesting. And I'm so excited to share this with you. I feel like there's a lot of magic in that. 

Brian: Salma has grown so much since those early graphic design days. Over the last two years she’s built a large Twitch community, which is actually where I first got to know her. I wanted to know more about what drew her in that direction. 

Salma: So after a few front end dev jobs, I quickly moved to being a tech lead. And I think that was due to my teaching and leadership experience in other areas. I felt really comfortable empowering a team of people to build really great stuff, rather than being behind the scenes and writing all the code. For those of you who've been in leadership positions, know that the further you go up, the less code you write. And there came a point in 2020 where I kind of became a bit frustrated with how little tech I was doing.  And the pandemic came around, and everyone was at home and I discovered that people were streaming coding on Twitch. Again very serendipitously, I found Twitch—I didn't even watch Twitch before 2020—I found Twitch through Kip Boga who does YouTube videos about scammers, and I watched him on Twitch, live. 

And then I started browsing. “Oh, these people are writing code, this looks pretty cool.” And then there were two reasons why I started streaming. So one of them was, "Hey, maybe I could challenge myself? Maybe I could learn some new things in public. It looks pretty fun. Why not?" And the second reason was because all the people I saw doing it were men and all the people I saw doing it were doing back end. There was no front end love on Twitch, there was no like, real kind of showmanship to the whole thing. I'm a performer, I always have been so I thought I could bring some kind of variety show kind of themes to the whole thing with front end, and being a woman. So people could see that actually women can do this stuff too, because I wished I'd always had a female role model in tech especially. And I've only ever worked with like a handful of women in my tech career ever. So those are the reasons I did it. 

I started and my channel grew extremely quickly. And I decided it was my favorite thing that I liked to do. So I did it more and I did it more and I did it more. And I met loads of people and I became very familiar with the DevRel community and that's how now I work in DevRel. So it's again been a very happy accident, really I just wanted to write some more code. And the fact that I did it on Twitch has allowed me to build a very delightful community around my stream, which again as you know, I'm very, very passionate about because of what it can achieve in people. And the way I've seen the community grow and form relationships and build great stuff. And another thing, I think being a community kind of leader, or a figurehead is very similar to being a tech lead as well, because when I was a tech lead, I had very, very firm rules and structure and routines. So much so that if I wasn't there, the team could just manage themselves, they could get on with it. 

One of the biggest goals of being a leader is that everyone is fine without you. You give them the tools, and you step away, and everybody grows and it's beautiful. And it's kind of happened by accident with my community as well. I've got some strict rules about how to conduct yourselves and the values that you should exhibit and the things you should call out and the things you should celebrate. And again, I've just been able to step back, and this beautiful community is like growing and cultivating itself in front of me, whilst I go off and do things like podcasts for GitHub. And, you know, it's really beautiful to see that just because I decided to press “go live” once, I've seen all these people get their first tech jobs, they have become more knowledgeable and advocate more for accessibility, and inclusivity. 

I know one person who changed jobs because they were working with just a bunch of white men, and they wanted something different after being involved in my community. So I've been able to kind of accidentally influence lives for the better just all because I decided I wanted to write some more code. 

Neha: I don't want to gloss over some of the really important points that you made. I think, first of all, representation absolutely matters, right? And like seeing the gaps, and then saying, "All right, well, I'm going to roll up my sleeves and do it myself." I feel like that takes courage and awareness and intentionality. And I also think... It's something I've been thinking about a lot recently is that people often think about structure as something that is limiting. But with the right structure, you can actually open up creativity, right? Like with that consistency, you know what to expect. And then you can go beyond the things that we might struggle with in making a community and being part of a community. And now you know what's expected of you and you can be creative too. 

I'm curious if you have any more stories of some cool things that you've gotten to observe with the community being together?

Salma: Well, actually, right now, some of the community are starting to organize their own community hangout night, as well, because they just want to get together and talk tech. Like, obviously, this time last year, we used to do that quite a lot. It was a smaller community back then. And it kind of tailed off when everyone started to get Zoom fatigue and whatnot. And now they want to bring it back because the community is bigger, and there are new people who are coming in and people want to get other people involved and bring them in and make them feel welcome and give them an opportunity to explore and talk tech and maybe find new projects to work on together. I've also seen some of the community come together through The Claw—which is the name of my community in the Discord—to build just other projects.

What's really delightful as well is that we have a co-working channel in the Discord, which is mics off, but you just have faces on the screen. And people hang out in co-working all day, every day. They choose to go there because they feel safe and at home, and welcome and productive. And I guess that's another thing not to gloss over is the whole feeling safe, psychologically safe, wherever you are. Being a woman online is generally not very safe, right? Being someone who is disabled is not very safe, or someone who is not heterosexual is not very safe. But I've always strived to create the safest space possible, and that's why you need those rules, right? Because people from those types of communities, when they come in somewhere, they want to see that you are seeing them, they want to feel seen and catered for, and feel welcome and safe. 

And that is something that's been the highest on my agenda. So much so that when people come into my Twitch streams, if they comment on any single part of my appearance, they get a timeout, or they get a ban if they don't stop, because you can't draw a line anywhere. Like, “Oh, your hair looks nice today.” Yeah, but where do you draw the line? “Well, I'm only saying your hair is nice.” But you have to have those rules to make sure people don't try and cross that line. And what's great is when you have those rules, you automatically attract people who are going to live those rules, and uphold those rules and make it safer for everyone. As I was saying before, the community manages itself because of that structure. And it does seem very harsh to people, but it's there for a reason and it works. And it means that everyone is safe. And I think that's a really important thing from childhood to old age, you need to feel safe and not in survival mode—especially in this day and age.

Brian: Salma’s Twitch community is vibrant and, much like how she learned to code by sitting next to someone at their desk, her followers are learning from her. Her approach is inviting and that really drew me in. When I’ve watched Salma’s stream, I’ve had several aha moments, and have learned so much from them myself. In one case, Salma took a part of her Twitch video and put it on youtube. And I’ve found myself going back to that again and again.

Salma: That makes me feel happy, because I thought that video was a bit of a hack. Because cutting down streams is so difficult. It's so hard. And I am trying to find the time to create more curated YouTube content, but I don't have the time right now. So every now and then the odd light cut downstream. And you know how hard it is to cut down a three hour stream into something that logically makes technical sense with all the nonsense going on. But thank you for that. That makes me feel very proud. 

I had a really good one the other day as well, where I was using NextAuth with Twitch auth. And I had no idea what I was doing, but I deployed it and it worked first time and that was a good joyful moment as well. And it's great that I get to share that with 100 plus viewers and they see that joy, “the joy” that programming can bring when something like that works. 

Neha: Yeah, I feel like it's really hard to compare the joy to putting something out there and then it works the first time. I think for me, it's probably a combination of that and relief where I'm like, “Oh my God. I actually know what I'm doing every now and then.”

Salma: Yeah, it's a wonderful feeling. And it's the same feeling as being on stage as a musical performer at a festival. When I'm doing a Twitch stream, I prepare like I would prepare for a gig on stage. I have the same energy, the same adrenaline. I plan a lot of what I do. I'm adding new things to my stream production all the time. I'm keeping things fresh. I'm doing it for the viewers to keep engaged. I always have a plan and an agenda and it does look very improvised. But that's another thing, it's like some people, I don't want to hate on any of these streamers who sit at smaller viewer numbers. But some people, they turn their computer on and they just code. But you're putting on a show. You are providing a service. You are teaching a global classroom. Well, I am anyway. And I think that's the distinction that I made between what I wanted to do and what I saw out there at the time. 

I think a lot more has changed actually over the last 18 months when more and more programmers are coming to Twitch.  But I guess this brings me to your earlier question about where did whitep4anth3r come from? And because the Panthers have been integral, I think to growing my stream and it being a very memorable stream—the whole whitep4anth3r name was a joke, again. It was a joke because before I started Twitch streaming, before the whole pandemic, I was doing a lot of climate activism with Extinction Rebellion, and we had, again, a small community of tech people who were doing some tech things for Extinction Rebellion. And the team lead in me thought we needed a team name and code names, a bit like Mr. Robot, because I felt like some kind of ethical... We weren't hacking, but I felt like it was appropriate. 

So it was a color and an animal. I chose whitep4anth3r And I signed up to Twitch with whitep4anth3r 10 months before we started streaming to watch a friend's charity stream. And then when I started watching Twitch streams, people knew me as whitep4anth3r. So I had to go live as a whitep4anth3r and here it is. So again, another happy accident.

Neha: With a background in performance and teaching, the parallels to Twitch are obvious. And the collaborative nature of open source makes it seem like a natural playground for her too. It was interesting to hear how she ventured into it. 

Salma: Yeah, so what's been great is actually learning in public has actually taken me into the open source community that I really wasn't involved with before when I was just working in regional tech in Manchester building products for clients who were paying by the hour. And that's been wonderful, I remember… So my first open source project that I was working on, on stream right at the beginning, is the Fretonator, which is a guitar theory learning tool. And I built that for my husband, because he'd always wanted me to teach him modes on the guitar, but he could never quite get it with me speaking. So I built it in code. And that actually attracted a lot of musicians/coders in the beginning. It's still a website that there's a specific channel for in my Discord, that people talk about and use every day, as well. 

And I remember being quite afraid of making it open source, because originally I was thinking, “Someone's going to steal my great idea.” But I realized it's not about that. Open Source isn't about people stealing your ideas, it's about being able to make those ideas and those things better and bigger, and part of something and bring them into a community. And remember, I chose a very cautious license for the Fretonator. I chose Apache 2 because I was like, "Oh, I don't want it to be MIT, because blah, blah, blah." I spent a long time deliberating over that license. But now, everything is just MIT, whatever, just go and take it and use it and learn from it, right. So the Fretonator was the first one and then I've been building my Twitch bot for 18 months. And a lot of people on Twitch who are programmers build a Twitch bot. So that is a huge open source project that a lot of people have forked and used to increase the production of their streams as well. 

But more recently, there was the Random Code Generator. Funny story, I got the idea for that about 10 hours before that stream, and I bought the domain for that 10 hours before that stream. And it's the most fun I've ever had in my life. If you don't know what it is, you just press some buttons, and it spits out random nonsense code that makes you laugh, because it's me, me. And again, it's kind of comedy, isn't it? So when you're on stage, telling jokes, and being a comedian, you have to relate to the audience, that's when they laugh the most. So when you're a comedian, depending on what venue you play at or what location you're in, you have to change your jokes a little bit. And that was the project that gave something for everyone because there were a variety of different random programming languages that can be generated. Because I got almost 100 PRs for that because people wanted to add their own language and add their own random nonsense to it.

And that is the joy of open source because people were excited about that. It wasn't anything useful. But it was something to learn from, something to laugh about. When I'm having a bad day, I still go to the Random Code Generator and press “give me some random JavaScript” and it makes me laugh. And that's the beauty of it. 

After the fun projects, I kind of moved on to some more kind of serious projects. I touched on earlier about it being a bit of a minefield, being a woman online. And the sexual harassment I have received while streaming on Twitch, it's not going away. There are a lot of safety measures that I've put around my stream for this, I shouldn't have to do it but it's kind of... it's under control. But at the same time, it's like, why does this still happen? And women and marginalized people are talking about this over and over again, and it's pretty exhausting. 

So I had this kind of idea, like should it be us who are talking about it over and over again? Should it be the people who are lying wounded on the battlefield, trying to repair their own wounds? No, it should be the people who are fit and fighting, and able to help and drag those people away from the battlefield. And so came on unbreak.tech, which is a platform for men, to educate men about the need for change and equality in tech. I actually got a really, really good response when I first started talking about it on Twitter in May. It's kind of died down. This week, actually, I resurrected it yesterday, I did a redesign. I'm making way for different types of content, because I understand that writing actually, might not be just the only way to communicate. So I'm streaming again tomorrow, and it will be about adding video content and audio content to the site as well. So people can contribute in different ways. It's very similar to a campaign by Scottish police that came out last week called That Guy Scotland, where men are talking to men about these kinds of issues, and want to try and like work with them maybe or something. 

But I kind of thought I'm a bit tired. So let's try a different approach. It's an experiment, it still might not work. I hope it kind of does something. It's got a long way to go. I want it to be more than just a collection of articles and whatnot. I want it to be more of a platform. We'll see how it goes, and it'll take a few years, I think, but that's open source and it's there if anybody wants to contribute. In the same vein, I also want to be able to elevate other women who do what I do, because there is a sea of men out there. And it's sometimes really hard to find other women streamers on Twitch when you want to read someone after your stream. 

Also there is womenwhostream.tech, which is a curated selection of as many of the women Twitch streamers we can find to do any aspect of science or tech or maths. So they're all together. It's actually quite a big growing list actually. I’ve got big plans for that as well, at the moment. It's just a one page with a bunch of people on it. But again, I think being able to do these things on Twitch in public, again, sparks the imagination, and you find ideas and inspiration where you least expect it from one message in chat, you know. “So why don't you do this? Oh, it's a great idea. Let's do it.” And that, again, makes your viewers feel included and seen because you're implementing something that they just suggested off the cuff. And you get live usability testing, live rubber ducking. And it's also, I mean, it's hard to talk about on stream because people have questions like, “Why are you building a website for men?”

But here's why, and I guess more and more people talk about it and come to know about it, and these things take time. But I feel proud that I… it takes courage I think. Like sometimes I don't want to do it. Sometimes I just want to do some easy stuff—let's just play with some CSS—but actually I kind of can't stop. Once you gain that kind of momentum and you're seen as a person who talks about these things and challenges these things, you can't stop. I guess, it's a huge responsibility being a streamer at the center of a community like this who is challenging stuff like this and giving those messages to people, but you can't stop and you carry on, youkeep fighting when your legs are bleeding. But one day, I will get picked up on a stretcher, and it will all be worth it.

Neha: I'm curious, you're talking about how much work this is and how hard it is to stop. Where do you get your energy? What re-energizes you? 

Salma: The feeling of adrenaline that I get when I see people come together and have a great time. It's kind of addictive. Streaming is addictive, because of the chemicals that it creates in your blood. The community is addictive. It's hard. I do always strive for a better life-work balance. I'm a mother, I'm a wife, and it's difficult, but I kind of I'm spurred on by the fact that I'm trying to make the world better for my son's future and to gain the perspective and the tools to enable me to educate him to take this message forward as a white presenting male, you know. So he's pretty privileged, but he can take this message. And if I do that right, then it's people like him. I mean, there's only three now. It's people like him who can change the world, I think. So I want to put these things in place. That's what keeps me going. Really I do this for him. And for those mothers out there, you know what I'm talking about. 

There is some strange thing that takes over your body from the moment you find out or feel pregnant. And from that moment, it changed me a lot. I became a lot more outward looking and a lot more thinking about the future for him. And like what can I do to help him and his generation have a better time than what we're currently experiencing now. 

Brian: I am a parent too and it certainly changes your perspective, many times over. There’s a beauty in seeing your kids grow and find their talents—helping guide them, create space, and give them the tools to succeed. And while many times parents wear their “parent” hat or their “work” hat, it’s not always that clear cut anymore. 

Salma: No one really talks about being a parent much in tech, and it's weird. I even feel a little bit weird talking about it now. But it's so important. It's so important because being a parent gives you that empathy for the people who don't know the same things as you do. And it gives you that desire to make things better, because your child is the most important thing in the world. I don't know why. Maybe that's going to be my next open source project. Parents in tech, mothers in tech, let's talk about it because it's still a bit taboo and it's still a bit weird. 

There are so many people when they find out I'm a mother, they're very surprised, and they're a little bit shocked. They're a little bit taken aback, but why? I'm a very private person on stream, no one knows my son's name, no one knows my husband's name. It's like, I keep that very separate. But also, it's a big part of me and it's why I am who I am. And so I think we need to talk about it more. 

Neha: I think so too. I know in my teams, for example, even like in work, people aren't necessarily talking about parent life unless it gets normalized from the top or from the people with who are in positions of power, right?

Brian: I was just going to say, during the pandemic. So I've got two small kids, and during the pandemic, one of the best places for energy was actually the #parent channel in the GitHub Slack, because as we were trying to figure out how to keep our kids entertained while also working. I had come from a place where I'm the dad, the male in the household. So like I would go to work and travel and honestly, my wife would pick up all the sort of, slack, when it came to parenting. And then right in my face was always a kid, every single day. So now it's like, “Oh, cool, I guess I'm going to have to show them some cool things.” And like recently, my eight year old, I got them on code.org. We started building some really generic looking Minecraft, pixels and stuff like that in JavaScript. 

Being able to have that sort of structure in your day and have that sort of limit it actually, for me personally, it fuels my creativity. So knowing that very similar to yourself, the reason why I stream and why I started in 2020 is because I wanted to timebox myself to write code, every week, in open source, and didn't matter what it was, I just wanted to write some code, and it had to be within a couple hours. 

And if I showed up every day, I kept myself accountable, I could build projects. And I find so much more rewarding, fulfilling that dopamine rush everything you had mentioned, I get from that too, as well.

Salma: On that note, I cannot wait to teach my son JavaScript, HTML, CSS. I am just chomping at the bit to show him the joy of opening up the dev tools and changing the color of the text, those little things. I'm actually also consulting with the IT teachers at his primary school. I'm going to go in and talk to the older kids to be that role model, that female role model, about what I do in tech and how I got into it. And also show them some really cool stuff. And I feel like I've got a nice opportunity to get involved in the really local community as well, with my son's peers. But I just cannot wait. I really hope... I can not wait for him to play music and write code. And obviously, it might not happen that he likes either of those things. But I'm going to try because I want to be able to build stuff with my son. How cool would that be? And make music at the same time.

Every parent wants to do those things with their child that they love. But I can't wait to see what I can achieve with him maybe. And that's going to be a joy. And I can write about that, I could create some child courses based on what I've learned, like teaching him. Who knows what I'm going to be doing in the next 10 years when that comes around.

Brian: I would say that you're in DevRel now as an advocate at Contentful. And I would just say that some of the best DevRel people I run into always have some sort of skill set that they bring to the table from previous lives, previous careers. And you mentioned serendipity or fate, and you sort of dance around the word, whatever the word is, I think that really puts you in the right place. And just saying that you definitely belong in a role like this. Because you now get to combine all your sort of secret and past talents into what you do today—which kind of blows my mind, knowing now your story in a complete, linear history for the most part in this interview, knowing where you are and why you're in this place today. So thank you so much for chatting with us today.

Salma: Thank you. I just want to say before I started streaming, I had no idea DevRel was a thing. And when I found out about it, I thought, "Oh my goodness, this is the most perfect job for me, when can I sign up?" I had no idea that people did this. And like you say, to be able to use all these different skills and bring them together for something that's greater than the sum of its parts is just a joy, and I can't imagine doing anything else.

Neha: I have a really quick question before we go. I'm thinking back over the course of the story that you've told us so far, and there's so many moments where you say like “Oh, and just because this happened to have happened” or like “through this random mistake, I got to this next step.” What is your reflection on the importance of mistakes?

Salma: Maybe there are no mistakes. My dad always taught me that everything happens for a reason. And so I like to always see bad things kind of like, "Okay, so that's a bad thing that happened, but what is it making way for?" For example, if you're stuck in traffic, and you're late for something, actually, what has that prevented you from doing? Maybe you would have been in an accident if you were like 10 meters down the road further. And so at the time, when I left teaching, it felt like a mistake. I spent a lot of years learning how to be a music teacher and training and whatnot. But, I feel like it doesn't feel like a mistake, it doesn't feel like something I did wrong. It was a very weird, bad thing to happen at the time. And I know not everyone is privileged enough to be able to just do what they want and change jobs whenever they want to do it, I see that. 

But I think, I went from a teaching job to being unemployed, to having this minimum wage job in a call center, to taking opportunities that I found and meeting people and creating relationships with the people that brought me to where I am today. And relationships are possible by anyone, I think. So my reflection is maybe there are no mistakes. And when you think something is a mistake, it's not a mistake, it's not a failure, it is just a different part of the journey. I don't think I would change anything that got me here. And it's been really difficult at times, it's been odd and challenging. But I know I have worked really hard, and I've made some great friends and some great relationships. It's hard work still, but I wouldn't change this and I do look forward to the next mistakes that may happen at some point.

Brian: That whole moment that you just shared, reminded me of the creator of the artificial Pearl, I don't know if you know how pearls are made in oysters. But this Japanese guy Mikimoto, he actually discovered that pearls are created because of agitation inside of the oyster. So if a speck of dust gets inside an oyster's mouth, it covers it, and creates this beautiful thing. And truth, there are no mistakes, because you'll have a pearl at the end of the journey, like quite a few pearls. So all these experiences and these different left turns and stuff like that as you're trying to figure out your career and then eventually get into tech and you now have all these pearls that you bring into your community and you get to share weekly, daily, every time you stream, every time you push a commit out to GitHub or merge a PR from somebody else. That's a pearl for somebody else as well to take and sort of hold. 

Salma: Just a little bit further on that when talking about many pearls. I think there's a culture ingrained in society where when you're a child, you're asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And you say one thing, but actually, why not have four, five, six options? I've had three careers and I'm only in my mid 30s. And who knows how many more careers I could have. I could do whatever if I meet the right people and do the right work. So I think that there could be a bit more of like a shift in how we view what we do in our lives. We don't have to do one thing. My degree is completely unrelated to what I do now. My qualifications are completely unrelated to what I do, but that doesn't matter. I think that's the kind of shift we need in the industry, I think. Like you say, developer relations is so diverse and beautiful and varied with the type of skills that people bring to it.

What if tech in general was the same? Think about the beautifully diverse teams and colorful teams and different skills people can bring, if people were actors and dancers  and musicians or mechanics or orienteers or anything? I think that could be a great future.

Brian: Amazing. I feel like we've got so many closing snippets and quotes from you. I feel like if I say one more thing, I'm going to get another really profound statement. Just again, Salma, thank you so much for agreeing to join us and chat about this. I hope everybody who's listening goes and checks out unbreak.tech, shares their ideas and builds the beauty of that. It is open source. So check to see how you can contribute if you have ideas. I'm looking forward to talking to you a year from now, and you'd be Salma, creator, founder of unbreak.tech—leader extraordinaire, working on whatever you're working on.

Neha: Yeah, I want to say that your energy is really electrifying. I feel so excited about doing whatever my next meeting is, or my next task is, and I think that your passion, I can feel the genuineness and the authenticity of it. I'm really, really excited to get this podcast out to our listeners, because it's—I don't know. Thank you. I'm so excited.

Salma: Thank you. You could have made me cry. Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here and to allow me to talk about all this stuff. I think we need more people just to talk and pave the way for change. Things are happening, I think, and who knows who'll be next. 

Brian: It was great  to speak with Salma Alam-Naylor and have her on the ReadME Podcast. To learn more about Salma and her work, please visit whitep4anth3r.com. That’s white-p-4-n-t-h-3-r dot com. I am Brian Douglas, aka bdougie.

Neha: And I am nerdneha aka Neha Batra. The ReadME Podcast is a GitHub podcast that dives into the challenges our guests faced and how they overcame those hurdles. In sharing these stories, we hope to provide a spotlight on what you don’t always see in the lines of code, and what it took to build the technology that inspires us all. 

Brian: It’s been really great spending time with you. The ReadME Podcast is part of the ReadME Project at GitHub, a space that amplifies the voices of the developer community: The maintainers, leaders, and the teams whose contributions move the world forward every day. Visit GitHub.com/readme to learn more.

Our theme music has been produced on GitHub by Dan Gorelick with Tidal Cycles. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. 

The ReadME Podcast is produced by Sound Made Public for GitHub.

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