Teaching Kids and Building Products with Tom Rossi

Gene Liverman: 0:05

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the volunteer technologist podcast, where we look at the various different ways that technology happens behind the scenes of our day to day lives, and the people who are donating their technical skills to making other other things happen. Today, I am joined by Tom Rossi, the co founder of Higher Pixels. And going let Tom introduce himself.

Tom Rossi: 0:30

Sure, sure, yeah, like you said, I'm Tom Rossi. And I'm one of the co founders of Higher Pixels. And we're a software development company. And the product that we spend most of our time on is Buzzsprout, which is a podcast hosting platform. And that's how you and I connected and I'm happy to, you know, be able to help and be a part of what you're doing.

Gene Liverman: 0:52

Awesome. Thank you very much for taking the time, I really appreciate it. No problem. So one of the things I like to focus on here is the way those of us that have varying technical knowledge, how we volunteer, and that knowledge comes into play in that. So what kind of volunteer work related to technology are you into?

Tom Rossi: 1:14

Right now, most of the stuff that I'm doing is related to either being available for nonprofits that I'm a part of, like, I'm on the board of several nonprofits, you know, and they're reaching out with technical questions of setting up domain names and email, and all those internet related things and hope, hopefully, trying to avoid the, you know, getting a printer to work type. Those are the worst ones, but mostly helping out with nonprofits. And I really enjoy teaching. And so I teach every year I teach the Hour of Code at my children's Elementary School, which is a great way to, you know, the kids, my kids, you know, don't really understand too much of what I do. And so it's fun to be able to go there. And, and, and talk about coding and all the kids, kids love kids love coding. And so it's great for my kids to see other kids like what I do, yeah, makes them more interested in it. And, yeah, so that's mostly what I do these days. But I've done a lot of volunteering over the years, I think it's a big part of how I want to spend my time, right, like, I want some part of my time to be investing in something that's bigger than just my business, which is what I'm getting paid for. And so we've done things like teaching, we would teach Ruby on Rails classes, I really enjoy teaching. And so we put together, a couple of us in the company put together a little free class where we just would teach it one night at a, like, we've done it a couple different places. But the most recent couple times we did it, we did it at a local pub. And we just set up a room in the back, we were teaching Ruby on Rails coding, it was like a coding class, it was once a week. And you know, that's a lot of fun. I really, really enjoy stuff like that.

Gene Liverman: 3:04

That sounds really cool. I think might be good to kind of dig into some of the different teaching you've done. and the Hour of Code stuff sounded really interesting. Can you talk a little more a little more about that?

Tom Rossi: 3:16

Yeah, so the Hour of Code is something that started I don't know how many years ago maybe within the last five, five or 10 years. And the idea is to inspire kids younger, to look at coding. And so it goes all the way down to maybe I think they have lessons that go all the way as like third grade, where you can teach them concepts. And there's a website code.org, which is full of resources that are free to help people learn coding, and kids, man, they just, they just get into it, you can tell you'll have a group of whatever, 20 kids, and there'll be a certain number of kids where they're in their flow state where they just they lock in on whatever, whatever the exercise is, and they just love it. And then you have some kids that are like they just don't get it. I'm not interested in this. I don't want to do this. Why? Why am I doing this right now. But man, they really can understand harder concepts than you typically think. And so my favorite if anybody is is, you know, thinking about it. code.org has tons of resources. One of them is Code Combat. And that's, that's my favorite, where you're writing Python code for a warrior. And you have to like, every, every level, you have to solve the puzzle by you know, writing the code for how the warrior is going to do it. And kids love it. And it's a great, it's actually a great way to hone your own skills because you can do all kinds of refactoring and come up with your own your own methods of coding, and then you can put your warrior into a combat against other coders. And so then your warriors fight that's really cool.

Gene Liverman: 5:00

That is really cool. For the, for the ones who you said don't seem to really either get it or aren't truly interested, if you found any interesting ways of helping them, either have that mental quick for how things work or seeing why they, why it's helpful to them, even if they don't want to be a programmer later.

Tom Rossi: 5:21

It's tough. They definitely, they definitely understand the concept of how code makes everything work. But they just don't love it. The I think they probably approach it the way other, they might approach other subjects in school that maybe they're just not that interested in. Whereas some kids, they think it's a game. Like they're asking how can I do this? When I get home? Right? How can I spend more time writing code? Whereas other kids or you know, not? Not as much, but it's, I don't? I don't know, I don't? I don't? I think it's definitely possible that as they get older, they're going to catch the vision for it. But I don't know any, I don't know any magic that I've been able to come up with, like, oh, no, no, think about it this way.

Gene Liverman: 6:06

I understand that one of the one of the things I've learned is that, much like some of the math classes or English classes, were others that we've taken in school, learning, the concepts of coding is practical with so many other places because of the problem solving. And the logic aspects are that you don't have to have any desire to do later. But understanding those concepts is incredibly helpful.

Tom Rossi: 6:32

And I think there's people that are naturally drawn towards problem solving and Legos type building, you know, where you're building little blocks, and you're putting them together to create something bigger. And so it's trying to, to really get into that. And I'll say this too, because I'm so so code.org. The idea is to to make it accessible at earlier ages, which they're done, which they've done, and also to, you know, both genders, so guys and girls, boys and girls can get can get into coding, and so they make it attractive to both and I've done it for a number of years. And I can honestly say like, there's no gender disparity. It's not like, oh, all the boys are into it. And all the girls aren't like, there are definitely girls that get into it. And there's boys that don't want to do it. So it's, it was interesting, I totally thought that it would be all boys. The first time I did it. Actually, I did it. And it was my son's class. So I knew a bunch of the boys. And I was surprised at just how many girls just they loved it.

Gene Liverman: 7:32

That's really cool. What kind of I know you said it goes all the way down to about third grade. What kind of age groups of kids have you been working with?

Tom Rossi: 7:41

The most recent one that I did was third grade. And that's why I think it's the youngest.

Gene Liverman: 7:45

That's really cool, I actually didn't realize that it started that early. I knew they did something in the elementary timeframe, but I didn't realize it was all the way down to third grade. Now. That's really cool.

Tom Rossi: 7:56

Yeah, they they go down to about I can't remember they go down to but I know that the stuff that I did with them was actually on code.org at the sixth grade level. But I did it with third graders and they loved it.

Gene Liverman: 8:09

Very cool. On some of the the other teachings that you've done. Is has that been, I think you said one of the other ones you did was some Ruby on Rails with like the last one, I think you said was that a pub? We have experienced has that been? And how does that compare to working with the kids?

Tom Rossi: 8:26

Um, it was fun. It was fun. You have adults, you can go deeper, you get, you know, really complicated questions. The problem is they're not paying for it. Yeah. And so they're not as committed to it. And so you'll have people that are there, and then they're not there. And so it makes it really difficult to build on something. So it was fun, but I don't, I don't feel like it was it didn't totally scratch the itch for me. And so the next time we do it, which the last time we did was before COVID. And so we haven't we don't have any dates or anything, but the next time we do it, we'll definitely charge something from now on, like, just to make it so that there's some buy in to get some later what

Gene Liverman: 9:06

even like a $10 registration fee does, for example, buy into it. Yeah,

Tom Rossi: 9:11

yeah, even if it's just even if it's just $10. So I think, you know, the the aspects of doing something in a volunteer capacity, you know, when it comes to not having commitment or buy in from the people that you're that you're working with, right? Like I think it takes a specific skill set even for an organization to engage volunteers. And you look at you look at what makes it so that volunteers run away from it, right? Like code.org is a great example. They do an excellent job of providing you with all the resources that you need to go out and do what you need to do. If they didn't do that. If you couldn't get access to I mean, it would have never it would have never taken off. So figuring out how can we engage the community whenever we're going to engage with volunteers, how do we how do we turn that into something? Now that we're not, you know, consuming them using them up, and then they never want to come back and volunteer again.

Gene Liverman: 10:06

Totally makes sense. Shifting gears just a little bit, you said you do a bit of work with various nonprofits? What kind of things have you been doing with those? I know, you said you try and avoid the printer help, which certainly don't blame me for there. Yeah, but what kind of what kind of things have you been doing in that realm?

Tom Rossi: 10:25

So we actually have a product called donor tools, which is donation tracking for nonprofits. And so a lot of times, I'm helping them just get there. How are they going to process their donations? How are they going to, you know, what are they gonna do with those checks? When they come in? How are they going to set up their website? How are they going to set up their email, mostly getting connected up on the internet, and then helping them just with leaving the organization like I really enjoy leadership topics and enjoy? Like I was talking about being able to lead volunteers, which most nonprofits have a volunteer arm. And so how do you engage those volunteers so that you can then in turn, engage whatever your ministry is. And so those are typically the things that I'll do when I'm helping out with nonprofits.

Gene Liverman: 11:11

That's very cool. Because I have a few and some people don't really realize how much tech is involved in a nonprofit. What kind of pieces or aspects of tech Have you seen in the nonprofits that you're working with other than just like having to have a website. And so I think everybody understands that people have to have a website, but I'm not sure that people even understand what that really means. As far as the work that goes into some of that kind of things, or that kind of stuff.

Tom Rossi: 11:38

Yeah, it gets, I mean, it can get really complicated. Just like I think any any organization it's got, as it grows, it just has a lot of complications and how you manage relationships, for example, like relationship management is huge. And so having some type of CRM, and there aren't any, there are any that I've come across that I really think are easy for nonprofits to be able to use, you know, typical nonprofit will have volunteers that come and go, so you might have a volunteer, and they might be committed, they might be awesome, but they're only going to be there for a year or two years. Right. And so if you have a really complicated piece of software, and you have volunteers using it, then the chances of another volunteer being able to come in and hit the ground running are slim to none. And CRMs are a great example of it's just so complicated, donation tracking, that's why donor tools we built that we want it to be really simple, actually Buzzsprout, our podcast host was built with the same idea. So we originally built that, and it was for churches, the majority of our customers were churches, and they need they have volunteers that are volunteering their a tech person in the church that you know, somebody engaged to upload the recording, to Buzzsprout. But we had to build it in such a way that if that guy, you know, gets hit by a bus or just stops, you know, volunteering, that somebody else can step in and be able to do the same thing. And so helping helping organizations kind of manage relationships, manage their volunteers and do it in a way that's simple. You know, that's, that's not challenge. That's not easy.

Gene Liverman: 13:15

Yeah, that what you just described with the people at a church who are uploading a podcast, that was a verbatim of me, I was that volunteer. That's actually how I learned about Buzzsprout. And then how we ended up eventually getting connected, was through that exact process. And I've actually moved down from that particular church now had to hand off the Buzzsprout bits to somebody else. And so I can let you were basically telling my story in that part. Yeah, I can, I can totally relate to where you're coming from on that. And I've lived that kind of scenario of volunteers come and go. And the tech still needs to work. And you've got to show somebody brand new how to do something, or they've got to figure it out on their own, because there's nobody to do a handoff, to a lot of volunteer organizations, that handoff that you might have in business doesn't necessarily ever happen, because you need a new person because the other person is just not there anymore.

Tom Rossi: 14:09

Yeah, you could say this, the standard for ease of use is maybe a little bit higher, especially in small nonprofits that are volunteer driven. If it's not easy to use, they're gonna have a difficult time when their volunteers turn over which volunteers are going to turn over. It's okay. Like, yeah, not, that's not it. That's not a bad indicator of the health of the organization. It's just natural that it's going to happen. Yeah, totally

Gene Liverman: 14:30

agree. So we were talking about using Buzzsprout just a moment ago, and how y'all created it for initially for a focus on churches, and that's how I learned about it. Can you tell me a little more about how Buzzsprout came to be or some of the story behind it?

Tom Rossi: 14:45

Sure. Yeah. And I think it's funny as I was, as I was thinking about the podcast today, and I was thinking back like of my volunteering experience. It's interesting that volunteering is really what ultimately led to Buzzsprout in a convoluted way, because way back in the when I was when I was younger, in the mid 90s, I was a young life leader. And Young Life is a campus ministry that's heavily volunteer led. And I did that. And I was the guy who was helping out with all the technology stuff, right. And so meanwhile, our company has been formed, and we're getting into technology. And I keep seeing over and over again, I'm helping them do the same thing. They're trying to upload some photos, they want to put up a calendar, and this is the 90. So this is like before Facebook, this is before. I mean, this is Angel Fire for the old code out there, right? Angel Fire, and, gosh, geo cities, stuff like that. But what happened was, we're like, maybe we should just build a product, we should just, we should build something that these organizations that are volunteer that are heavily relying on volunteers can use to be able to build a simple website. And so that led to a product called M sites, which we ran for, until we started it in probably 2001 2002. And we just shut it down at the end of last year to have at the end of 2021. And that was geared towards campus ministries or campus organizations that had pictures and, and calendars and all that kind of stuff. Well, what happened was those guys, you end up helping them a ton with with the product with the MSX product, you're helping them with their website. But then they're also asking you about other things like, hey, what about email, we need to get email setup. And so you're like, you're helping them out, get their email going, I'm not really part of the M sites, but you're just helping them out because you're your customers. And then those M sites people ended up moving on to to be church pastors. And they're like, Hey, I understand how insights works. Can I just keep using it for my church. And so over a period of time, next thing, you know, our insights, customer base, gets to be a lot of churches, not campus ministries anymore. So now we're serving churches with this product. And inevitably, the question comes up of how do I get my sermons online? And so we keep hearing the question. And my partner, Kevin was constantly updating this document of like, how to build an RSS feed and how to upload your mp3 is to GoDaddy, or DreamHost, like these old, you know, just file servers that were connected to the internet.

Gene Liverman: 17:23

And that's when you had to build the RSS feed by hand to the match that we created for you like it is in most tools now. Exactly.

Tom Rossi: 17:32

Yeah. And so. So that's what we were doing is showing them how to manually build an RSS feed in link to their sermon audio, right, that had to be encoded correctly, to, you know, not just destroy their internet when somebody tries to download it. And so we were constantly updating this document. And finally, we're like, you know, we should just build a product, right? Because what we're doing this is a podcast, nobody, they're not calling it a podcast, but what we should do is build a podcasting tool, we should make it really, really easy. So again, you can a volunteer who's, who doesn't understand how to build an RSS feed and doesn't understand Audio Encoding, but they can upload a recording, they can just take a WAV file off of their, you know, church computer and upload it. And so that became Buzzsprout, it actually came through a convoluted way of us initially volunteering in different campus ministries, which led to M sites than then then that led to people wanting to be able to put their sermons online, which led to Buzzsprout so that now they can upload sermons. And when we launched BestBuy, I remember, it was kind of a, it was a kind of a fun launch, because you already have customers. So when we launched it, you already have people that are using it. And so I'm watching all these, you know, uploads happen. And next thing, you know, we're seeing uploads from all over the world, different types of content, right? It wasn't, it wasn't just for church sermons. It was it was a podcasting tool. And this was maybe 2008. And so it was still early in the podcasting world, in the podcasting timeline. But there were tons of podcasts that started signing up for Buzzsprout. And they were attracted to the same thing that was attractive for the for the nonprofits, which was it was just so simple to be able to do, they didn't have to worry about a lot of the things that back then you had to deal with,

Gene Liverman: 19:14

and need to be an audio engineer or web technologies engineer to be able to just get a simple podcast out the door.

Tom Rossi: 19:21

Exactly, exactly. That was that was what we used to tell people all the time because the the old podcasters would have a hard time with it because they they enjoyed the tech they enjoyed, you know manually encoding their their audio, where I'm like, Man, Buzzsprout is not for you. Buzzsprout is for the person who says I never want to think about it. I just want industry standards. I want to upload something and just have it work. That's so true

Gene Liverman: 19:47

of pioneers in any technical field as part of what drove him to be a pioneer in a particular field is the same stuff that other people don't really want to do. The rest of the population myself included some time arms. We want the simplified easy button version of what made them really happy. We want them to wrap all that up in some logic that we don't have to understand and just let me push a button. Yeah.

Tom Rossi: 20:13

What's what's interesting about it is that person who initially just wants the button, then they get used to the button. And then they want another button. And now they want a text field. And now they want to drop down in it. So this is, this isn't really about volunteering and in technology, but it's definitely software is that we have user base that as they mature, as they use the product more and more, they asked for more complicated features for getting that when they first got there. The reason that they loved it was because it was so easy. So if I gave you all those complicated things that you want, you would have never signed up from from the beginning.

Gene Liverman: 20:50

I'm definitely not guilty of that. ever put in a feature request for something that is the antithesis of the simple, easy process of Buzzsprout, or any other tool. I've never done that. Never.

Tom Rossi: 21:04

Yeah, I think it's natural, right? Like because you get you get used to it. And so me and if it just did this one thing, I was just just one thing, the problem is, there's a million of you that all have have a one thing that you want. And it's not the same one thing.

Gene Liverman: 21:20

When working in technology myself, I know that there's only so many hours in the day that you can put toward engineering, software engineering that goes into tools and products. And with that limited time, you have to focus it somewhere, just if you don't you end up with a bunch of half baked things. Aside from the fact that you don't want a million different options in a single tool. You also don't want half a million half baked options. Yeah,

Tom Rossi: 21:46

yeah, we talk about it a lot. So we're very, we're very intentional about how we build features, we take a lot of time to make sure that we're asking all those questions like, do we really need to do this? Do we really need to build this? If we given this option? Is it just going to be confusing? Or is it is it actually going to serve the end goal of making it as easy as possible for someone to be able to build and host and monetize their podcast? And that's, you know, that's where you start. And there's a lot of argument and debate that goes into it.

Gene Liverman: 22:16

Just to kind of bring things back around a little bit to that same set of questions about is it easier to use? And does it really solve the problem is the people we're actually trying to serve what they actually care about this and benefit from it. Those are the same questions we have to ask when doing volunteer work. I liked when I was working on technology in a church site. Is my congregation actually going to care about this? From what I know about my congregation? Is this too complex for them, or they just want to look at it, throw their hands up and call the church office. Because this is too complicated, and that you haven't actually solved anything, you've just made it harder on the tech team, or the tech team spent a bunch of time doing something that does it actually bear out. And I think that most likely holds true with the vast majority of nonprofits and other places we might volunteer our time is we've got to be careful that we don't take the things that we're SMEs own and try and make this super geeky version of it. For them. We need to take what we know and help them get to where, where their particular audience actually needs to be. Whether that's a a church or anybody else, or fire department or whatever.

Tom Rossi: 23:35

Yeah, I think as technologists we typically are opinionated.

Gene Liverman: 23:40

We, we have strong opinions, definitely have strong opinions.

Tom Rossi: 23:44

And so then you go in and you're you're trying to help a nonprofit, right? And they say, whenever we need a website, we need help with our website. And what's the first thing we do is like, Oh, well, you need to change your technology. It's the wrong technology. You built this in JavaScript, and I'm gonna build it in Ruby on Rails, like, you know, like, we start, we're just come in and have these requirements, which makes it difficult. And then now every change that they make to their website has to go through you, which doesn't really serve the organization. It just makes them so that they're dependent on you. And you see these, these nonprofits where their website changes drastically every like year. And it's because that's what's happening is they Oh, they got they got a new volunteer. Totally new technology for their website.

Gene Liverman: 24:26

Yeah, absolutely.

Tom Rossi: 24:28

I think to what you were saying goes back to like, what motivates us to volunteer like, what's the motivation? And I think there's there is a connection between our, our skills, our talents, you know, those things that we do that we enjoy, and then what we want to do is help. We want that we want to see that talent invested in something where the return isn't monetary, it's not a monetary return. It's a return some some other way. But if I if I invest it in an in a nonprime Have it and then it falls on deaf ears, right? Like you're going to do something, but nobody, no organization cares that you did it. Well, that's not motivating. As a volunteer, you want to see your skills come to bear in a way that positively impacts whatever the organization is that you're you're volunteering with.

Gene Liverman: 25:18

No, with me a lot of the motivation to do the volunteering is just that motivation to give back to organizations that in one way or another have either helped me or that I see the value in the Help they're providing to someone else, or the services they're providing to someone else. And at the end of the day, it's got to be rewarding for both sides are beneficial to both sides for it to be a good engagement or a good relationship. Yeah, both sides need to get something from it, the the organization needs to get something that actually solves a problem that they care about. And the volunteers got to get something out of it psychologically or otherwise, to make it worth their time to walk to actually do it.

Tom Rossi: 25:58

Yeah, which I think a lot of times what the volunteer wants is to know that it's valuable to the organization. That's all that I need. If I know that you value this thing that I'm going to do, whether I'm literally I'm gonna go fix your printer, if I'm gonna fix your printer, and it's gonna make you happy. And your, your, you know, staff has a bunch of printing, and they can tell Oh, man, we're, we're doing this thing. And now we can print it. Like that just makes it much easier to volunteer, where instead of you do something, and it's just falls on deaf ear, nobody cares.

Gene Liverman: 26:26

And just stretch that printer analogy or scenario one farther, since we've talked about churches so much, you know, sometimes it's not just the printer that a lot of us think of that's maybe sitting on a desk somewhere. It's Oh, the connectivity to the big printer copier is messing up and we need to print bulletins for Sunday. Yeah, and we've got two or 300 bulletins, or if you're in a big charge, maybe 1000 bulletins, that you need to get printed. And it's like, nobody's gonna have any idea what's going on. If we can't figure out a way to get this printed. Sometimes it really is, the thing that makes the biggest impact to them is going and doing that thing that as a technologist you might low doing, but you've got the skills to help them with that, and then hopefully get to do more interesting things the rest of the time. Yeah.

Tom Rossi: 27:13

Yeah. That's, that's, I think the way that it typically plays out, right, is that they need help with something you go in to help with that something. And then you get connected with them. And you find these other areas that you can really make an impact.

Gene Liverman: 27:26

And so many other things. It's all about finding a way to have a foot in the door so that you've had get past that initial introduction, and people actually say, Oh, this isn't Johnny, Tom lightly this person really does know some stuff that they really might be able to help us with this, that or the other. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. And when did you have you a moment to share anything that you want to share with the audience just in general, or ways that they might reach out to you if they wanted to contact you afterwards or anything else?

Tom Rossi: 27:56

Sure, share it. You can reach me on Twitter, Tom Rossi, seven. And I appreciate just the opportunity to be able to be on the podcast and hopefully inspire other people to volunteer and find ways to use our technology technological skill set to, you know, benefit others.

Gene Liverman: 28:11

Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. All right, thanks. A wonderful day. You've been listening to the volunteer technologist podcast. This is a value for value podcast, which means I will never charge you to listen. That said producing and hosting it does cost money. If you got value from today's show, then I hope you'll consider contributing to its ongoing production by sending a boost with a new podcast app such as fountain or via the balmy a coffee link on volunteer technologist.com forward slash contribute. You can find shownotes transcripts and links to the things talked about in today's episode at volunteer technologist.com Thanks for listening