4: Celebrating the Century with Hallie Kupperman

10/01/18 • 73 min

Before introducing today's guest, I like to setup a bit of context. Within the last two years, I wanted to get out of my regular circles and do something that didn't involve technology (for people unfamiliar, my day job is a software engineer at Amazon). I ended up picking up salsa dancing - little did I know that this decision would lead to some of the most significant relationships that I have today.

Most of these encounters took place within the Century Ballroom, an incredible dance studio in the heart of Capitol Hill Seattle.

Hallie Kupperman is the owner of the Century Ballroom and the Tin Table Restaurant adjacent to the ballroom. She's created an incredible community at the Century which is something I and many others here are incredibly grateful for.

Hallie moved to Seattle over two decades ago and learned to swing dance after arrival. She started teaching swing to the LGBT community not soon after which soon expanded into teaching all forms of dances when she signed the lease on the Century Ballroom. Hallie has been managing and teaching at the Century Ballroom for over two decades and has overcome many hurdles in the interim, including a dramatic rent increase after the building was sold to a new developer that drove out all other tenants and a steep dance tax levied by Washington.

With the Century Ballroom, Hallie has created not just a great dance hall but an incredible community, one that comes together in times of hardship. Examples include events such as "Dance Your Pants off for Lorraine", a fundraiser held for fellow dancer Lorraine which raised money for her cancer treatment and another fundraiser held in 2013 that raised over $90,000 to help keep century afloat after the dance tax.

Thanks for listening and if you want to leave feedback or nominate folks to the show, please send emails to feedback(at)folkstories.org

Notes

Hallie's swinging start to dancing
origins of century ballroom
perseverance through hard times
mission and community
a day in the life of Hallie
everyone can learn to dance
future plans for century ballroom
Hallie's suits
experiences of being a female lead

Links

These shownotes are also available at http://folkstories.org/4

Most of these encounters took place within the Century Ballroom, an incredible dance studio in the heart of Capitol Hill Seattle.

Thanks for listening and if you want to leave feedback or nominate folks to the show, please send emails to feedback(at)folkstories.org

Notes

Hallie's swinging start to dancing
origins of century ballroom
perseverance through hard times
mission and community
a day in the life of Hallie
everyone can learn to dance
future plans for century ballroom
Hallie's suits
experiences of being a female lead

Links

These shownotes are also available at http://folkstories.org/4

Previous Episode

3: Taking No Shortcuts with Colm MacCárthaigh

Colm MacCárthaigh is a Principal Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS provides on demand cloud computing services to individuals, companies and governments around the world.

If you're a customer of AWS, Colm has probably had a hand in the services you use - his past projects include Route53, Cloudfront and Elastic Load Balancer. If you like open source software, Colm was heavily involved in the original Apache HTTP Server and more recently was the driving force behind the release of s2n, a popular open source C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocol. If you're a fan of Irish folk music, Colm is part of several bands of such sorts and plays both in Seattle and on the road. If you're concerned about privacy and human rights, Colm is the founding director of Digital Rights Ireland and remains active on issues concerning privacy and immigration.

I could go on but I think suffice to say, Colm is a man of many talents and interests. I'm super excited to have Colm on the show, not just because he's a great person to have a conversation with but also because he was my very first guest in my internal podcast at Amazon. Colm was kind enough to talk to me some two years ago then and is repeating that kindness once again by coming on to Folk Stories.

A note that this talk does get slightly technical in a few places (what happens when two engineers talk about engineering) but I would consider the majority of this talk to be accessible regardless of your technical background. There are also show notes for everything we talked about if you want to find out more.

In today's episode, we talk about what its like to be a principal software engineer at Amazon, why Colm went back to school despite having a good job and solid technical skills and matters of music and activism.

Thanks for listening and if you want to leave feedback or nominate folks to the show, please send emails to feedback(at)folkstories.org

Notes

a day in the life of a principal software engineer
blockchain and being unburdened from the man
prioritizing projects and themes in past work
going back to school: motivation and learnings
thoughts on dev ops
thoughts on engineering and healthy team dynamics
juggling writing code with principal responsibilities
activism and digital rights
Irish folk music and finding inspiration

Links

Some tech projects Colm has been involved in
- Amazon CloudFront: Highly programmable, secure content delivery network (CDN)
- Elastic Load Balancer: Scalable load balancing for L4 and L7 applications
- Amazon Route 53: Highly Available DNS as a service
- Apache HTTP Server Project: the most popular web server on the internet since 1996
- s2n: s2n is a C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols that is designed to be simple, small, fast, and with security as a priority
Links to technical concepts discussed
- Blockchain: open distributed ledger that can record transactions between multiple parties
- Dev Ops
- Introduction to Computer Networking: self paced Stanford class on computer networking
- Cryptography: practice and study of techniques for secure communications
- Regions and Availability Zones: Concepts relating to how AWS places and isolates its services
Everything else
- Travel Ban: executive order issued by Donald Trump that limits immigration from a number of Muslim-majority countries
- Digital Rights Ireland: dedicated to defending Civil, Human and Legal rights in a digital age
- Tulip Mania
- Prince: American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer and filmmaker

Contact

Colm's Twitter: @colmmacc

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Next Episode

5: Love, Math and Design with Janet Galore

My guest today is Janet Galore, Creative Director of Amazon's Retail Experience Concept Lab. The Concept Lab is a department that looks 3-5 years ahead and explores potential retail experiences that could be possible in that time.

Janet is all about working at the intersection of emergent technologies and design and her past gigs include being an executive producer at Zombie VR Studios where they made the first VR exclusive computer game called Locus and as Speech Director of Microsoft's Advanced Strategies and Research where she worked on long term strategy for the company.

In 2015, Janet and her husband bought "The Grocery", a historic building in the Beacon Hill district of Seattle that started its life as a grocery store in 1929. They have turned the space into a creative space where they regularly host events, exhibits and performances (I first met Janet at one of these events).

Today, we talk about Janet's path into technology and design, we talk about the creative process and what it means to evaluate art and we talk about The Grocery and why staying small can be awesome.

Thanks for listening and if you want to leave feedback or nominate folks to the show, please send emails to feedback(at)folkstories.org