The ReadME Project // @GitHub

Here’s what’s in store for this episode:

00:00 - Neha and Martin discuss the return of social norms and the childhood video games they remember best.

03:38 - First Commit: The hosts share the origin story of the NORAD Santa tracking system.

06:57 - The Interview: Dr. Johanna Pirker provides her perspective on how open source can help the gaming industry move toward a more inclusive future.

21:17 - #AskRMP: Cassidy Williams joins the podcast to answer a listener question about how to makes sense of functional programming. 

23:24 - Feature Story: The ReadME Project’s Klint Finley digs even deeper into how open source game developers are pushing gaming industry innovation and accessibility even further.

Looking for more stories and advice from the open source community? To learn more from the authors and experts featured on this episode, check out:

• (Virtual) reality check by Dr. Johanna Pirker

• What we can learn from vintage computing by Klint Finley

• Privacy engineering: 8 tips to mitigate risks and secure your data by Ayden Férdeline

• How to optimize your code reviews by Safia Abdalla

• Game Lab Graz

• NORAD Santa Tracker

Special thanks to Cassidy Williams for providing her insight into getting started with functional programming, Dr. Johanna Pirker for speaking with us about the future of gaming and virtual reality, and Harmony Honey for offering their perspective on the open source engines and tools that are making game development more accessible.

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Martin: You know what I'm not going to miss about 2022 is—it's so nice to actually see people again now. It actually feels we're actually getting there.

Neha: I find myself also being, like, much warmer than before. I'm finding myself engaging in more like, serendipitous interactions with strangers and people kind of returning the same. It's really nice.

Martin: It is. You normally put the cold into “cold open,” but not now. 

Neha: This is The ReadME Podcast, a show dedicated to the topics, trends, stories and culture in and around the developer community on GitHub. I’m Neha: Bartra and I lead the GitHub community engineering team.

Martin: And I'm Martin: Woodward from the GitHub Developer Relations Team.

Neha: Martin:, I've got a question for you. What was your favorite video game when you were younger?

Martin: Oh, man. I used to play a game called Jetpack Joyride. 

[Audio] Digital video game music

Neha: Ooh!

Martin: I'm on a computer called a VIC 20. William Shatner used to advertise the VIC 20. It was a great game, it’s a platform, and you can get it now in the Internet Archive and things like that. But to be honest, I wasn't hugely into video games because I used to code some games and things. That was kind of how I got into programming, was typing in video games from a magazine and then debugging them and then getting them to work because it was hard to buy games at the time. So what about you? What did you use to play?

Neha: I feel like my childhood was filled with computer games, particularly educational ones. Very fond of the Learning Company. [Video gaming music plays] There was this game called Gizmos and Gadgets that you could play, and you're kind of going through these levels and collecting different parts to put together like a bike or an airplane. I really, really loved that game. I played it many times. It may or may not have inspired me to become a mechanical engineer, which is what I have my degree in.

Martin: One of the things I worry about with kids today is, you know, games for us, they weren't that impressive and they were things that a person could do and then make some money from. And now you see these games by these triple-A studios that are amazing and have more budget spent on them than major Hollywood movies. You know, and then and then they're coming into coding and they realize how much work that is actually to do.

Neha: Yeah, I think what's fascinating about that is that, just like with open source, right? Like the concept of computer games and video games has been around for a while now. And so we have this breadth of knowledge to have the ability to texturize and shadow and move. And these are all these libraries that are built now. We don't have to go through the same beginning pieces of, like, building a video game. We have that now, right? And we could build on that foundation just like we can with open source and software in general. So I feel like it's so exciting. It shows us how far we've come.

Martin: Definitely. You don't have to be individually painting pixels on a screen. You know, you can get Sprite Libraries, you can get 3D animation, libraries, all that sort of thing.

Neha: Well, if you couldn't tell, the theme for this show today it is gaming. And so for starters, we're going to be hearing from Johanna Pirker, a game engineer and professor working to create more equitable spaces online. We're also going to have some tips on functional programming resources to check out and a feature interview all about how open source is democratizing the building of games. And first, of course, we have First Commit and I'm really excited about this one.

[Jingle] On your mark. Get set. We're writing on the Internet.

Neha: Many Decembers ago on Christmas Eve, back in 1948, to be exact. The United States Air Force, just a few years out of World War Two, issued a statement. That communique gave the simple message that an early warning radar had detected, quote, “one unidentified sleigh powered by eight reindeer at 14,000 feet.” Getting in on the fun, The Associated Press then passed along the information to the general public. And it wasn't the first or only time that an official U.S. government organization made formal mention of a certain Santa Claus and his trusty reindeer.

Martin: Flash forward to 1955 when the story goes that Sears put an advertisement in a Colorado newspaper telling children they couldn't make a phone call to Santa himself. But due to a bit of confusion, it was actually one digit away from a top secret number: The Colorado Springs Continental Air Defense Command, or CONAD. One lucky kid was unfortunate [enough] to misdial and actually got through to Colonel Harry Shoup, who was the crew commander on duty, and was a little bit stern at first.

Neha: Yeah, definitely not Santa Claus.

Martin: No.

Neha: Actually later in the season, the crew decided to have some fun by adding a picture of Santa to a board used to track unidentified aircraft at the center. Shoup wasn't as grumpy the second time around. He saw an opportunity to reach out to the broader community and so he had the Public Affairs Office announce the Santa Sleigh Tracker. The press release went so far as to say that, quote, “CONAD Army, Navy and Marine air forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the US against possible attack.”

Martin: NORAD, or the North American Air Defense Command took over the responsibility from CONAD in 1958, and every year it's become more and more elaborate with reports in the following years even detailing an emergency landing in Canada that happened following a foot injury of one of the reindeer.

[Audio] Hi, I'm General Glen VanHerck, commander of NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command. NORAD tracks the skies and approaches to North America 24/7, 365 days a year. But every year on December 24th, we have a special holiday mission… (fade out)

Neha: The tracker has a pretty large Internet presence going back to 1997, and it now has its own social media accounts. And in 2011, a smartphone app was introduced featuring an interactive game called Elf Toss. Santa cams have tracked him online for nearly 15 years, and he's even made an appearance or two on Google Earth.

Martin: Today, the NORAD program is still going strong. It's run by an army of volunteers. Do you get it? Do you like what I did there?

Neha:That's good.

Martin: Yeah. Thanks. They get tens of thousands of emails and telephone calls every Christmas season. And on NORAD's Santa.org website, you can see the position of his sleigh, the exact amount of presents to be delivered at any time on Christmas Eve. And this website now gets millions of hits every year.

Neha: One thing that's great about open source is just how much it levels the playing field for people who want to become developers. But there are still lots of inequities in the programming world and in the gaming world as well. Today's guest is on a quest to make sure that games and other parts of the online world are more accessible and equitable.

Johanna: I love sharing content. I love spreading knowledge on the one hand, and it’s all about the community. So it's so nice to be part of a community which also loves to share content. Being a professor sort of means that I can spread the knowledge and teach, like, hundreds of students how they can develop their games.

Martin: Dr. Johanna Pirker is a software engineer, an assistant professor at the University of Technology and a professor at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Hey, Johanna.

Johanna: Hello. Hello.

Martin:  Before we sort of dove into your career today, I wanted to hear a bit more about how you got started. You mean we used someone that was always interested in video games at a young age? Or did you get into computer programming early? How did you get started?

Johanna: When I was like, I think three or four years old, one of my first memories was actually me sitting in front of the PC of my father, and playing Prince of Persia. I didn't know how to read or write yet, but I knew what commands to press on the DOS machine of my father in order to get my favorite game started. The next one was, I think Zelda, which is this sort of a prince—it’s not a prince—but, like, saving the princess, then Super Mario, even the plumber saves the princess. I was really fascinated about those crazy digital worlds. I sort of did not connect the world of games with computer science. Back then, there was also not the possibility to study game development, for instance. When I grew up, not a lot of people would say, “Yes, what a great idea to go study computer science.” After studying computer science, all of a sudden, like, I found that I can use it as a tool to create those digital worlds myself. Because I've always wanted to work in a creative way, and I always wanted to be a good artist, a good writer, but I'm not. But all of a sudden, after learning the basics of programming, I connected that that I can actually create those digital worlds.

Neha: I love that so much. I feel like it's so interesting how you really doubted kind of how you can kind of express your art and your ideas and now you're leading, you know, Game Lab Graz, right? I'd love to hear what it’s like leading the Game Lab Graz and what's hard and what's rewarding?

Johanna: For me, it's super exciting to work with such a bunch of talented people who have a common vision. Our mission with the Game Lab, it's really that would change a little bit, the perception of games because at the moment games are always just about violence. Games are just about addiction. I'm making educational games, games about empathy, games for learning. This is a little bit of our vision, that we develop games with a purpose. That we develop… like, show the world also the potential of game development tools or tools related to the games industry—like, for instance, Twitch this game streaming platform—and show the potential for other industries. For the health sector or for learning.

Martin: Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I think it was Roger Ebert or somebody said that cinema was a machine for creating empathy, but I think for virtual interactive experiences and, you know, games, if you want to call them that, what these virtual interactive experiences, again, can give you a whole different level of empathy.

Johanna: Exactly. Because in a movie, you're sort of like sitting in front of the TV and thinking, “Oh, wow! This poor refugee. What a terrible situation he's in.” And you're sitting on your sofa with the popcorn, right? But in the game, you are in the shoes of this refugee, for instance, and you have to make decisions. I certainly think like, games can be this sort of empathy machine.

Martin:Why is it important to you to make sure we're making these virtual experiences kind of inclusive to everybody?

Johanna: I see so much potential in social experiences and game worlds. I think we all saw there during the lockdowns, everyone like we were so all by ourselves. And it's so nice to see the both of you, right? But it's very obvious that we are apart. This does something to our head because we are not physically in the same room. And in a virtual space, like, for instance, Animal Crossing or World of Warcraft, we can just like be next to each other. We can digitally spend time next to each other. And this can be very rewarding. And there are really nice studies actually showing the potential effects for your mental health. This especially also during COVID. Many gamers had a better mental health experience compared to non-gamers. Because again, you can spend time together. I can invite you to all to my animal crossing island.

On the one hand, many people are sort of left behind because some people just don't see this potential in games. Again, have a little bit of a negative bias, thanks to news and media and so on, so forth, which only talk about violence and addiction. And secondly, many of those games are also particularly designed for people who have experience with games. But I think like, especially experiences like these, could be for everyone, right? I would love to see a young girl walking with their grandparents in their virtual museum. People who are often like left behind in our society in general I see so much potential here for social connections and integration into our society as a whole.

Neha: You know, I've always been like a big believer in games, but when you put it like that, you know, you're really opening my mind up to like all the possibilities. And I can picture how different it is when you get to share an experience side by side that you may not have, like, access to otherwise, you know? So I'm curious about, like, kind of the opposite right now. What are some of the biggest challenges to inclusivity, diversity and accessibility in the gaming world that you think need to be solved? 

Johanna: Yeah. So I would love to talk about two main points here. So one is certainly this topic of toxic behavior in this online world in general. So I think we know it from social media and especially, although in different online games, it is when you enter the game and especially… you find all the “isms”: sexism, racism, ableism. Again I, as a woman, do not enter some specific online games. Which is a terrible experience because the games are themselves, they're great. But it's just like the community and this, like, toxic environment which was built around people. So this is like one of the things we are very interested in also, research wise: to identify eventually toxic behavior even before it starts. Because sometimes this is, especially if you start a new game and you're not being included in this already existing community, this can be pretty much of a challenge. And then you might turn into a troll yourself just because you're sort of left behind. So how about we find and identify ways for how to integrate people in a nice way?

What I also see is that we're—this is also really in regards to the metaverse experiences—we are building social environments which are not only for gaming but also for like social experiences in general. But all we do, instead of making for the first time an environment which can be for everyone. What do we do? We just copy the real world. So I enter the world to find, again, a lot of sexism. We already have the crisis around apartments and lands and landlords. And this in this virtual space, which is ridiculous because virtual spaces should be infinite, right? And this is like something which I'm a little bit scared of. How can we avoid the mistakes we have made in the past in real life, on the one hand? And secondly, also in past social media platforms?

Martin: Yeah, no, definitely. It's always trying to get the environment to be native to the way you're doing it. And if you do it in a way that's copying the environment you currently know, you're probably doing it wrong. 

I'm a failed physicist. I'm a failed physics teacher, and so I can't let you go really, before you sort of tell everybody about the Maroon project that you're involved in, because I'm a big fan of that work. What are we doing there?

Johanna: The Maroon project is basically a virtual physics laboratory, but now we also have chemistry experiences and computer science experiences. But the main idea is that you have a learning environment in this 3D social space where you can, together or with virtual reality goggles, make interesting, cool experiments. You can do a physics experiments which are usually too expensive or too dangerous or just not accessible. A little bit of my main inspiration was when I was at MIT, I saw this really cool physics lab and I was honestly super impressed, but also speechless because I knew that I would not have this possibility where I'm studying or at any school. And I think we can get so many more people really excited about engineering fields, science fields, physics, just by showing them this cool stuff. And the future is definitely, we want to extend that. It's an open source project. So we are always looking for people who are also excited about building, maybe, new experiments and simulations and adding to this ever growing, endless growing, project. And yeah, make a little contribution for the future of learning.

Neha: It really warms my heart to hear you talk about it so passionately and you kind of gave me a memory. Like when I was in high school, I went to a school that would not have as much access. That was right when computers were starting to get integrated into the school system. So I actually did some biology experiments on the computer where I wouldn't have had access to the lab equipment otherwise, right? And so, with these tech changes there are really people who are overly optimistic about the future and overly pessimistic. And metaverse has been pretty heavily criticized, right? So I'm curious, like beyond what you've said so far, why should people be excited about it as well?

Johanna: I think in general, tech wise, we're living in a very interesting and exciting time. And I think like the idea of the metaverse, even though I see it as a little bit of an overhyped term these days. However, I think it's a great opportunity to get more people also excited about the topic of social online experiences. Because I think due to the pandemic, we've all seen that digitization can do good things for us to get more people on board. That we had now all of a sudden we don't have to fly all over the world just for a one hour meeting and fly back. And we can do so many more things online and a more flexible home office situation and time situation for me as a woman is it makes it much easier to have a good career, for instance. However, I think it's very important that we work on this together because there are so many people who are very critical about those virtual worlds and social experiences online. But now we are sort of creating something new. And if we create this together and get many people on board, we can start very early to define what we want and what we don't want, not only as engineers, but also with people with sociology, psychology, ethical backgrounds that would create something inclusive, nice and something we're just—again, not the copy of the all the problems that we have in the real world.

Martin: Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, that just stresses the importance of why we need diversity in these fields, because without having those diverse viewpoints and, you know, the risks that people have got from coming from different backgrounds, it's hard to build in (from the beginning) the safeguards that are needed to make it a welcoming space for everybody. I was talking to the R&D lead at ILM [Industrial Light & Magic]. She built StageCraft, the thing for how they made The Mandalorian. Absolutely, like, a legend. Complete genius. And she was saying as well that early in her career, nobody really connected for her that she could be artistic and mathematic at the same time by doing things like this. So if a young, you know, Johanna was to come up to you now and ask your advice, what would your advice be?

Johanna: Yeah, I think everyone I talk to about my experiences in the past, so don't let anyone stop you. Secondly, I think it's always important, a little bit more to think not of what you want to become when you're a grown up. So, “I want to become an astronaut or I want to become the lab leader of a game research lab.” I didn't order this when I was three, right? But rather, what do you like to do? What skills do you have? How do you enjoy spending your time? For me, that’s solving puzzles and I don't know, gaming, but also being artistic and thinking maybe about philosophy or something like this. If I think of it in retrospect, I see this all coming together with what I'm doing now. And third of all, learn the things you might be interested in. There are so many fantastic opportunities these days online where you can also contribute, for instance, like in open source communities or be part of a community. Join those communities, they're always super welcoming. Go to YouTube courses, tutorials and so on and so forth, and really try to explore, to learn more about what you like to do and what you're good at.

Martin: That's fantastic, Johanna PIrker. Thank you very much for joining us on The ReadME Project.

Johanna: Thank you so much.

Neha: Now for #askRMP, the place in the show where we grab a listener question from you and get an expert to give us their advice. This month, Thomas in the Netherlands asks: “Any good resources you recommend that can make functional programming click in my head? I'm interested in this, but never got around to it.” So we went to a friend of the show, Cassidy Williams, Chief Technology Officer at Contenda, for some answers. 

Cassidy: Functional programming is one of those things where it probably does click in your head because a lot of the rules that apply in functional programming—for example, a function should accept at least one argument. If you return data or another function, you shouldn't use loops—those kinds of rules already are probably in some of the programs that you've written. You just haven't applied them in some kind of functional way. And so what I would actually recommend, if you want something to just click, if you want to play around with it, if you want to understand it more, is use a library like  Ramda, for example. Where it allows you to use functional concepts in a language that you're already familiar with. And then once you're kind of more comfortable with that you can switch to something. For example, if you come from a JavaScript background, something like Elm, where it's a functional language, but it compiles to JavaScript. And you can see how it works, play with it more, but then have more restrictions and guardrails set upon yourself so that as you experiment with it. You can continue to build these functional programs and have it click more and more. Because the more you use it, the more you understand it. And it's kind of a repetition as recognition kind of thing. I know for myself, I took classes for it. I did a lot of watching videos and reading books and stuff, but it didn't actually process in my brain until I used functional programming. 

Neha: Do you have a burning question about open source software development or GitHub shared on social using the #askRMP? That's a-s-k-R-M-P and it may be answered in our next episode.

Martin: A lot of us still think of video games as kind of separate from maybe our day jobs or our side hustles as developers. It's something we do in our downtime. It turns out open source is really revolutionizing and democratizing the video game world as well. And to talk about that, we have Klint Finley back in the hot seat. He's a senior editor for GitHub’s The ReadME Project. So welcome back, Klint.

Klint: Hey, it's great to be back.

Neha: I'm glad to have you here because we were just talking about some of our favorite video games. So I was curious, what about you, Klint?

Klint: Oh, wow. So my two big favorites from childhood would have to be Bionic Commando for the original NES and the first Zelda game for Game Boy: Link's Awakening.

Martin: So many programmers who are gamers or who got into developing because they like video games. But lots of these folks, they might not really think about open source or or different parts of video games that need good developers. So Klint, to start, what are the different parts of video games that developers are working on?

Klint: I mean, there's so many pieces to a video game, which I think is why a lot of developers don't necessarily think that they can get started making games themselves, even though there's this, now, a thriving indie game development scene. But there's all these different things. There's the graphics, the sound, and then all the different programmed components of it, physics engines, all the different interactions that go into a game. It can be really intimidating to get started, especially if you don't kind of know about all of the different tools, especially open source tools that are out there.

Neha: Yeah, it sounds like, you know, the landscape is complex, right, with so many of the different roles. But also that means that developing video games is democratizing, right?

Klint: Yeah. So one part of it is that some of those things like graphics and sounds, there's now a lot of assets that you can download and either use for free in a game or buy a license to use. So if you want to make a game, you don't necessarily have to have the artistic chops that you might think you do. But the other really big thing is the emergence of game engines. And these have been around for a while. Unity is, of course, you know, the most famous one. There's the Unreal engine and there's free versions of those out there now. So that's really been part of what's led to this boom in democratization. So, I mean, it's sort of analogous to, you know, the rise of web frameworks and libraries where there are these off the shelf tools that you can use to get started. So you don't have to be building every single part of a game. A physics engine, again, is a good example of something that would be pretty laborious to hand code, but you can now get those basically off the shelf and use them for your own games. In my reporting on this, I spoke with Harmony Honey, an independent game developer. Here's what they had to say about why they got into game development and how open source engines and tools have made it more accessible. 

Harmony: Why do I love building games? Honestly, it's because I can put my hands in every part of the process. I can use every part of my brain. I love to make music. I love to make art. I love to solve puzzles. And I feel like writing code is solving little puzzles. 

I used, like, GameMaker and learned how to do, like, basic programming until I started learning more programming and doing like C# and eventually decided I want to own everything I make and I want to be able to revisit old projects and update them easily. So it's obvious to choose an open source engine. Godot was a good one, so I went with that and I can make like, like I've had old games that I've done in Game Maker that I want to update, and it's just a challenge to even make sure my license works and to have the correct version of the project. But with open source software, you can download any previous version and do all these things easily. 

Martin: So Klint, how does open source come into play around this?

Klint: Right. So there's now some great open source game engines out there. So there's Godot. And for web games, there's Phaser. Twine is a game engine for making more, like, text based games and interactive fiction that you can, if you want to, add graphics and sounds and programmability. But it makes it possible to make a game with no programming experience, no artistic ambition, whatsoever. Visual artistic ambition whatsoever, I should say. Now we're even also starting to see open source games like Thrive, which is an evolution simulation game that a community of developers have been working on for years and years because they wanted a more sophisticated version of this commercial game called Spore. So it's kind of a classic open source story of some people deciding they, they had a need that wasn't being filled, and so they just decided to work on it themselves. So just this whole community of like-minded people have assembled around this game and made, you know, really like a commercial game that can rival some of what's coming out of the bigger commercial studios now.

Neha: And so when you've been talking about some of these open source games, what comes to mind for me are like online games or apps, right? But I was curious, what does the big burst of more open source pieces and components and games mean for traditional video games?

Klint: Right? Well, I mean, you can use these tools to work on console games, though, the SDKs for those are proprietary, so you can't really go for a full end-to-end open source game for most consoles, I don't think. But for old school consoles like the Gameboy, the NES, the Super Nintendo—there's actually a lot of open source tools for making games for those older consoles. And there's even a thing called GB Studio that makes it possible to make Gameboy games without any programming experience at all. And so, using a cartridge flasher you can actually make physical cartridges that you can play in these old systems. So there's people that are releasing brand new games for consoles that are 30, 40 and maybe 50 years-old at this point and people playing them. You know, there's a whole market for this stuff.

Martin: Video games is an incredibly profitable industry. I mean, you know, it can make more money than movies nowadays. What do sort of developers think about releasing their IP as open source when there's money to be made? Do you have any examples?

Klint: Yeah. So a lot of commercial studios will probably be nervous about open sourcing stuff and there's some IP issues that could come into play. But, you know, some indie developers are dabbling in open sourcing commercial games. Thrive, for example, has a commercial version on Steam. And the lead developer of that actually told me that they don't think that it's actually lowering sales to have it available as an open source project that you can compile yourself. It doesn't necessarily compete with the people who want to buy it on Steam. That's sort of, you know, at the vanguard, I guess, of open source gaming. Most of what we're seeing in open source in gaming are much smaller things created for game jams and events like that. There's definitely still a lot of reluctance around releasing a full commercial game as open source, but just as we've seen open-source commercial software, I think we'll start to see that more in games as well. Even smaller indie developers are often reluctant to open source all of their IP. So Harmony actually is a big advocate for open source games, but even they had some reluctance to open source everything that they do. But, after speaking with me for this interview, they actually went ahead and open sourced ROTA, which was a commercial game that they put out that initially was not open source. 

Harmony: I feel good about releasing my games as open source, because, if anything, it'll get more people looking into the projects and only the super nerdy people like me are interested in the code. And so many people are only interested to play the game that it's a win-win for me. I'm going to try and open source as many projects as I can. And, in the same way that I was fascinated with Counter-Strike and its user created content, if my games can lead to user-created content, then it's good for the longevity of the projects. Creativity leads to more creativity.

Neha: So it sounds like, you know, the shift to open source is good for makers. Is this shift also good for developers?

Klint: Well, on the one hand, there's a lot of, kind of, lower quality games getting made because the barrier to entry is now lower. But we're also seeing just, you know, a huge community arising from this movement. So I mentioned earlier game jams. That's become a major way that people get involved in making open source games and just making games in general. So if you haven't heard of these, they're a lot like a hackathon where there's a, maybe a theme, a time frame. GitHub has actually sponsored our own game jam.

Martin: Yeah, that's right. That was the Game Off that we've had. We've been doing it for a few years now, and I'm just amazed by how every year the number of people getting involved goes up and up, and the quality of entries that we get for the Game Off are just, are just phenomenal. I think with the rise of kind of mobile gaming as well, you know, you don't need to be able to have a game that is this massively expensive triple-A, you know, millions and millions of dollars invested in this whole VR experience, to be able to have a game that people play and spend a lot of time in. 

Neha: It doesn't have to be complicated to bring you joy, right? SoKlint, before we go, I wanted to ask you what's coming up next for The ReadME Project ?

Klint: We published some great new content this month. I got the chance to write about how open source communities keep old tech alive and the lessons that can be learned from the platforms of the past. We also have a new guide that dives into designing for privacy. It covers best practices for identifying faulty architectural assumptions that could lead to some foundational security issues. And lastly, Safia Abdalla outlined the importance of code reviews in asynchronous communication. She shared how teams can rethink their review process to improve knowledge sharing and team building.

Martin: That sounds great. Well, thanks for joining us again, Klint.

Klint: Thanks again, as always.

Neha: That's it for this episode of The ReadME Podcast. Thanks so much to this month's guests, Joanna Pirker, Klint Finley, Harmony Honey, and Cassidy Williams. And thanks to you for listening. Join us each month for a new episode. And if you're a fan of the show, you can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review or drop us a note at thereadmeproject@github.com. You can also learn more about all that we do at GitHub by heading to github.com/readme.

Virginia: GitHub’s The ReadME Podcast is hosted by Neha Batra and Martin Woodward. Stories for this episode were reported by senior editors Klint Finley and Mike Melanson. Audio production and editing by Reasonable Volume. Original theme music composed by Zander Sing. Executive producers for The ReadME Project and The ReadME Podcast are Rob Mapp, Melissa Biser, and Virginia Bryant. Our staff includes Stephanie Moorehead, Kevin Sundstrom, and Grace Beatty. Please visit github.com/readme for more community-driven articles and stories. Join us again next month and let's build from here. 

 Martin: Do you know the kids nowadays, they call MIDI is like a term that's something that's fake and sounds unreal and it stems from MIDI files on computers because if you play the MIDI version of something, it sounds really like cheesy and…

Neha: Whaaaaat?

Martin: Here you go, MIDI from Urban Dictionary: when something sounds hollow without skill and computerized or no emotion. Umm, “yo that Liz Truss, she sounds so MIDI.”