01:00 - Mae’s Superpower: Being Able to Relate to Other People and Finding Ways to Support Them

03:42 - Contributing to Humanity (Specifically American Culture)

Title Track Michigan

Climate Change
Clean, Accessible Water
Hate & Divisiveness; Understanding Racial Justice

07:01 - Somatics and The Effects of Yoga, Meditation, and Self-Awareness

Flow
Kripalu
PubMed
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Debugging Your Brain by Casey Watts

12:20 - Mutual Aid: Solidarity, Not Charity

WeCamp
Ruby For Good
Harm Reduction
Encampments
“We keep us safe.”
Rainbow Gatherings
Burning Man
Big Big Table Community Cafe

33:17 - Giving vs Accepting Help; Extending and Accepting Love, Empathy, and Forgiveness

Collective Liberation
The Parable of Polygons
Listening: What could be of use?
99 Bottles of OOP – Sandi Metz

48:25 - The Mental Health Challenges of Being a Programmer

Celebrating Small Wins; “Microjoys!”

Reflections:

Casey: The word mutual aid can be more approachable if you think about it like people helping people and not a formal organization. Also: help and be helped!

Jamey: Valuing yourself and the way that helps the communities you are a part of.

Mae: Engaging with users using the things your building is a reward and a way to give yourself “microjoy!”

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Transcript:

JAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 238 of Greater Than Code. I am your host, Jamey Hampton, and I'm here with my friend, Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey, and we're both here today with our guest, Mae Beale.

Mae spent 20 years in and out of nonprofit-land, with jaunts into biochemistry and women's studies degreeing, full-time pool playing, high school chemistry and physics teaching, higher ed senior administrating, and more. She went to code school in 2014 (at 37 years old) to gain the technical skills needed to build the tools she wished she'd had in all the years prior.

So glad to have you, Mae.

MAE: Thanks, Casey. Thanks, Jamey. Same for me.

JAMEY: So you may be ready for the first question that we're going to ask you, which is, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

MAE: Yeah, thank you. I think that my superpower is being able to relate to other people and find ways to support them. How did I get good at that? Well, I've dealt with a lot of pretty complicated people in my life that you have to do extra thinking to figure out. So I think I got my start with that and I've done lots of different things in life and met lots of different people and felt lots of different feelings and thought lots of different thoughts. So I think that's mostly it: living.

JAMEY: I was going to say that I know from knowing you that you've done lots of things, but even our listeners who don't know you probably already know that just after listening to your bio, so.

[laughter]

MAE: Yeah, and there's plenty more that didn't make it in there. That's something that is fun and a joke is no matter how long people know me, there's always still something that they didn't know and so, that's fun for me. I like to surprise other people and I love being surprised by people. So it's like a little game I have with all my fun facts.

JAMEY: I love that.

CASEY: I've got a question: what's on your mind lately.

MAE: What is on my mind lately? So many things, I don't even know where to start. One is where and how can I contribute to the future of humanity [chuckles] and American culture in particular and in the circles that I'm in, drawing it down even more. So I think about that a lot. I thi