It’s always fun to talk about the futuristic potential of virtual reality, but it’s even more fun to talk about it with Ciara Sheehan, because she actually knows some real information about this topic. Ciara is a radio presenter, journalist and tech entrepreneur, and provides us with proof that you don’t have to be a former coder to be a founder who does cool stuff with tech.
Ciara is the founder of Orb Media, where they’re taking the cross pollination of gaming software and integrating it with ecommerce platforms to improve the customer experience. Essentially, they are game-ifying the online shopping experience, allowing platforms to better showcase their products, and giving customers that dopamine hit you would usually only get from levelling up.
Ciara tells us that there are many ways to “gamify” an experience. It doesn’t have to be all zombies and helicopters (although it can be!), there’s also plenty of subtle ways to apply it to the shopping experience. Now, while Orb Media is a Web 3 company at heart, Ciara maintains that her goal was always to keep this technology accessible, so there’s no headset required for this immersive experience, all you need is your phone.
She also lets us in on how she got her start, from journalism to radio to tech and the roadblocks she experienced along the way. Ciara is also a speaker, and she tells us about how she believes speakers are simply vessels carrying a message, and that focusing less on yourself and more on how the information you're delivering relates to your audience, might help you get out of your head when the nerves take over.
Reach out to Ciara here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ciara-sheahan360/
Check out Orb Media: https://orbmedia.ie/
Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast
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Interview Intro
Richard Rodger: [0:00:00] Welcome to the Voxgig Podcast. We talk to people in the developer community about developer relations, public speaking and community events. For more details, visit voxgig.com/podcast. All right, let's get started.
As developer advocates, part of our job is to stand in front of people and present, and thus we can learn from those who present for a living. Ciara Sheehan, my guest today, is a radio presenter, a journalist and a tech entrepreneur. Time to learn some tricks of the trade. [0:00:33]
Main Interview
Ciara Sheehan
Richard Rodger: [0:00:34] Ciara, welcome to the Fireside with Voxgig Podcast. It’s great to have you on today. You’re not a coder; you’re not a developer advocate, but you are a founder. You are doing some really cool stuff with technology and you also happen to have some founder superpower skills like radio presenting and all that sort of fun stuff. And some strong opinions about where tech is going to go – but we’ll get to all of that. First of all, let’s start with the basics. Who are you and what does your company do? [0:01:08]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:01:09] My name is Ciara Sheehan; you can call me low-code/no-code Ciara from here on out. And I am the co-founder of Orb Media. What we do, Richard, is we take a cross-pollination of gaming software, and we put it into ecommerce platforms to help improve the conversion rate, for retailors and brands. [0:01:28]
Richard Rodger: [0:01:29] And this is effectively 3D immersion; it’s virtual experiences of the brands? [0:01:35]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:01:37] Yeah. It’s a virtual store environment, although it doesn’t have to be. It can a desert island; it can be on the moon. It can be a beauty spa or whatever you want it to be. Most people seem to gravitate towards the stores that we build. And we take all the brand assets and the hero products and we put them into the store, in such a way that we discreetly gamify it.
And when I say gamification, there’s lots of interpretations of that. The first thing I say to the lads on the team is, it doesn’t have to be zombies and helicopters. It can be shiny gold coins; it can be moving Brown Thomas logos. It can be exceptionally high quality, high rendered digital twins. There’s lots of ways to gamify something in order to feed the intermittent reward system in our brains. The gamification can be zombies and helicopters or it can be something a little more discreet in accordance with the brand values. [0:02:33]
Richard Rodger: [0:02:35] And do you think – we’ve seen this refocusing on machine learning and all that sort of stuff, away from virtual reality. Because virtual reality was pretty hot, but I always found the tech was a little bit behind? Do you think it’s improved or do you think it’s – do you think we’re waiting for the next step up? [0:03:00]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:03:00] Here’s the thing about virtual reality, and I’ve never been a fan, which is ironic. Because everything we make, we make for mobile first. Because I’m about inclusivity. And this is the thing about VR tech. VR tech is only accessible to privileged people who’ve access to headsets and machines to run it. [0:03:21]
Richard Rodger: [0:03:21] That are really expensive.
Ciara Sheehan: [0:03:23] Yeah. So, that’s the first issue. And we’re about inclusivity and democratization of the tech. That’s my underlying core value as a founder. When you put a VR headset on, you are taking yourself out of the room, but you’re taking yourself out of your community in the room, so it’s a lone experience even though it’s meant to be a connected experience.
For me, I find that that dynamic doesn’t fit. I’m not a fan; I don’t like it on my head. It gives a lot of women vertigo, rather than men. It’s great for particular tasks or aspects of business, aspects of learning. I don’t know what the knowledge transfer measurement is like. Is it 100%? I don’t know. But I do know it does have an impact, and there’s lots of cases of VR for good.
However, if it’s not task led, I think that it’s overhyped, if I’m truly honest, in its current form. It’s great to see the Apple Vision Pro coming out at $3,500. It’s great to see Metta coming out with their new version of the Oculus Quest, which doesn’t require all your details to go to Metta, in the new version, not the old version. [0:04:40]
Richard Rodger: [0:04:40] For once, yeah, for once.
Ciara Sheehan: [0:04:41] You don’t have to give Zuckerberg part of your soul just to put a headset on anymore. However, is the content of VR quality that’s out there enough to drive user growth in a meaningful way? That is debatable. [0:04:53]
Richard Rodger: [0:04:55] What’s the difference between that and what you do? [0:04:57]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:04:59] What we do is, we build so that you can have an immersive experience, i.e. a 360 experience, in the same quality as VR, built with the same technology, but on your phone, on your tablet, on a large screen in a retail environment. If you’re in an airport and there’s a screen in the luxury lounges, we’re designing for them.
So that you can pick up the tablet, have an immersive scroll through the duty free, buy your product, and then it can be delivered to your luxury lounge. It’s very much in that it’s open to everybody to access; you don’t need a VR headset – although it does work seamlessly and perfectly in VR. [0:05:33]
Richard Rodger: [0:05:36] And this what you mean when you say democratizing it, because you only need a standard mobile phone to access the – to access it. I’m intrigued by the possibilities – because the gears are spinning in my head now – around developer education. Because one of the challenges that we have in the developer relations industry is that you’re trying to explain really detailed – not difficult, perhaps, but really detailed, involved concepts.
If I’m trying to integrate with something, there’s a lot of stuff that I’ve got to learn about an API. And there’s been a trend recently where people are going beyond the usual reference manual and a few tutorials. People are trying to apply pedagogical principles; they’re trying to say that you should have ways to learn in different media, so video, content, short video content, online communities. And I’m intrigued by the possibilities of your technology for learning as well. I know you’re focused on ecommerce and the more marketing/sales end of things. But do you think it has potential around teaching complex concepts? [0:06:52]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:06:52] Absolutely, I do, and I’ll tell you why, because you can take all of the standard 2D content formats you’re talking about and you can put them – you can embed them in such a way that the user is on their own discovery-led journey and that they’re compelled to click the next item. A few years ago, when COVID hit and there was no gatekeepers, we managed to get ourselves in conversation with Vogue for business.
Now we hustled our way – I have to be really clear about this – we hustled our way into a conversation. And we understood that they had a challenge in how they presented their financial merchant services to a female audience. And we built an immersive experience for Vogue Business that embedded all of that messaging in a really discreet way, layered in between high fashion and luxury items, including items for men. And every single video that we put in – they were only YouTube videos, but every single one of them was watched till the end. And some of them were quite long. [0:07:52]
Richard Rodger: [0:07:53] That’s because it’s not just – let’s be clear. What you’re doing is not just 360 views of a fashion article or something like that. This is actual learning content; this is information. This is useful – it’s a journey that you took people on. [0:08:10]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:08:10] Yes, it is. To give you an idea, we do some work in the SME sector. Even though our core offering is to – is building platforms for ecommerce and brands, we as a startup need to keep the lights on, and we keep the lights on in the SME sector. We work with brands – we work with customers across various industries, and one of the projects we did was for a lighting distribution company.
And they wanted to – they were wholesale and they wanted to teach the engineers who would be helping sell these lighting systems how to use them. We built a virtual warehouse, and in the warehouse, we had those products and then as an aside, we had a little showroom. And in the showroom, we had the products, and at the end of it, we had a quiz. We were able to educate – they gave us the questions; we were able to educate the users based on what they had just learned in the showroom. And that was a lighting distribution company. [0:09:04]
Richard Rodger: [0:09:07] I’m particularly intrigued by the fact that – I have teenage children. The way that they like to experience media is TikTok, Snapchat or – it’s these really short sequences of different things. And I’m not talking about dancing videos; I’m talking about science videos, all sorts of stuff like that.
Their primary learning medium is video, and it outclasses what they learn in school. My 10-year-old comes up to me the other day and he goes, “The universe is going to expand forever and the expansion rate is getting faster over time.” I was in my 20s when I found that out, from New Scientist or some magazine.
The level of learning that you can achieve and deep knowledge, where it’s not stuff – if you try to study a textbook in school and you forget the stuff. You do the exam and you’ve forgotten it then. But the video stuff stays because it’s this multisensory experience. Is that what you’re going for, that type of thing? [0:10:17]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:10:18] Yeah. It’s – in the commercial side, in the ecommerce retail side, what you’re doing is, you’re talking the core aspect of gaming technology and you’re building them into the shopping experience. But equally, they can be built into an ecommerce experience or an e-learning experience in the exact same way.
So, what you’re doing is, you understand the intermittent reward system in your brain. And that’s what releases dopamine through the synapses in your brain, which compels you to go to the next level, click on the next icon, engage for the next two minutes. Knowing that there will be another reward at the next level of that experience, whether that’s shopping or learning. [0:10:18]
Richard Rodger: [0:11:02] Yeah, it’s interesting. Because I’ve never seen anybody try to structure developer learning in this way. The closest thing that I can think of is – there was a time before the Chrome web browser, years and years ago. And when Google first brought it out, they, as usual, targeted it at techies. And one of the things that they did to make it popular was – it had a new system that made it faster, new underlying technology.
And one of the things they did was, they produced a comic book, explaining the technology. Which I read, end to end; it was fascinating. I’m a serious technologist; I have a degree in computer science and I’ve read the textbooks and the state of the art books and all that type of stuff. But I was quite happy reading a comic. [0:11:02]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:11:55] You would be, because it’s a diverse way to take in new information. [0:11:59]
Richard Rodger: [0:12:00] Yeah. There’s a large amount of scope in my industry for new learning media, new ways of learning. I’m going to plug you, because I think somebody should do this. What is it? Orbmedia.com, that’s your website; isn’t it? [0:12:19]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:12:19] Yeah, that’s it. When you log onto that, you’ll see a selection of the projects that we’ve done, but as I said to you, we did quite a bit in the SME sector. We’ve a lot of money to raise, so you know they say; the best way to raise is from your customers. We can build test-and-learn pilots we can build very low-cost demonstration platforms. It’s straightforward enough once you have the content outlined. [0:12:43]
Richard Rodger: [0:12:43] If you’re a developer advocate and you’re trying to get people to use your API, talk to Ciara, because we miss out on different ways of learning. It’s a – a lot of it is so textual, and it’s quite difficult and boring in in a lot of ways. You have- [0:13:04]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:13:04] It is difficult and boring.
Richard Rodger: [0:13:05] You have learnt not to be difficult and boring, because – or perhaps just boring. It’s important to be difficult; that’s an important quality when you’re- [0:13:12]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:13:12] As a woman, you definitely have to be difficult, let me tell you. [0:13:14]
Richard Rodger: [0:13:15] It’s a badge of honor, in fact. You learned your stripes when it comes to entrepreneurship and promotion of things, with an obsession with radio. I’d like to talk about that a little bit. Because a lot of the people who listen to this podcast have to get out there and present on stage. They have to do podcasts; they have to be interviewed in podcasts. They have to host podcasts; they have to do Twitch, all that sort of stuff.
And a lot of people are a little bit intimidated. There are people with big egos like the two of us, who’ll jump up and start spouting in public. But how do you get started? What have you learned being on radio? I’m looking for – tell us your most embarrassing radio story. Let’s start with lessons of what not to do? [0:14:06]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:14:08] My most embarrassing radio story. I tell you something that happened to me when I was very young which – I wouldn’t say it was embarrassing, but it really impacted my confidence. I was in and out of radio studios from the time I was about 14. I wangled my way into some pirate radio stations in Dublin.
And then I went on, and I couldn’t get into Rathmines Senior College to do a degree in journalism because I was too points short in the Leaving Cert. And I repeated my Leaving Cert and then the points went up, and it was like – it was only a certificate course. And at this point, I’d been published in The Irish Times, Phoenix Magazine, all the local newspapers I was involved in in Dublin, and I was only 17.
But Ireland being Ireland, they wouldn’t let me in – computer says no. And I ended up, I went to Coláiste Dhulaigh in Coolock and they had a media course. So, on the back of that, I had something produced in RTE – two pieces produced on RTE on the Gay Byrne Show, God rest him.
And I managed to get myself into the very early days of Today FM. And I had this really good news editor – Paddy Clancy, his name was. And one day, he put me into studio and he said, “I want you to read this piece for the news.” And I read the piece and he said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
And he walked out of the studio, and just as the studio door closed, I heard him say, “She sounds too young. People won’t take her seriously.” And my heart sank. My heart sank. Because you can’t – what can you do about that? You can’t change your voice and then you can’t change perception. And I- [0:15:44]
Richard Rodger: [0:14:44] And did you still have to go and do the piece then? [0:15:46]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:15:47] I still did the piece, but I knew from overhearing that that my trajectory would not be in the news on radio, so that was really tough to take, really tough. And the reason I’m telling you that is because no matter who’s out there and who’s trying to get out of their comfort zone, it’s all about perception. And it’s never about you; it’s about the audience. You have to forget that you even matter; you have to think about the audience. What do they want from this?
And you’re just the vessel for delivery. But if you can enhance that delivery as impactfully as possible, with your quirkiness, with your swearing, with your – the mistakes that you make, then that makes it a lot more intriguing than someone who’s delivering a Shakespearian, pitch-perfect script. Because people don’t want that. [0:16:39]
Richard Rodger: [0:16:40] Yeah. There’s so much polished stuff out there; it’s so hard to find things that are real, that have an authenticity to them. Is it a bit clichéd to say that buzz, to be yourself maybe. Is it – is that the advice, or is it a bit more- [0:17:04]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:17:05] What I would say is, don’t try and be anyone else. That’s – and that – and I remember I was pitching for – this’ll tell you how far I’ve come. I was pitching to Enterprise Ireland for CSF funding. And this was my third time to pitch and it was on Zoom. And a friend of mine in the industry said to me, “Listen, Ciara, have three gin and tonics,” she said. “Be your best Bet Gilroy.” That was her exact words.
And for anyone who doesn’t know, Bet Gilroy was the landlady in the Rover’s Return in the ‘70s and ‘80s and she was so sassy. She did not take any prisoners. And I thought, you know what? She’s right. I don’t – feck it, I’m just going to do it; I’m going to give it my best Bet Gilroy.
And that was me saying, “Listen, the bus is leaving town. I’m driving the bus. Are you on it?” Rather than trying to conform to this pitch-perfect, completely well-delivered explanation of the text. At the end of the day, Bet Gilroy got the funding; we got it in the end. But it was- [0:18:11]
Richard Rodger: [0:18:11] There you go.
Ciara Sheehan: [0:18:13] And I purely believe that’s why we got it. [0:18:15]
Richard Rodger: [0:18:18] Yeah, it’s interesting; isn’t it? Because people are often afraid of making a fool of themselves, but you can’t do that if you’re authentic. The only way you can do it is if you’re dishonest, if what you’re selling isn’t – if you’re a schill for something or there’s some sort of scam going on. [0:18:38]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:18:39] Yeah. Call out the fake-
Richard Rodger: [0:18:40] If you’re genuine about what – your message.
Ciara Sheehan: [0:18:43] Yeah. Just call out the fakery – no fakery. And if you mess up or things don’t go right, you have to remember; the audience don’t know that. [0:18:52]
Richard Rodger: [0:18:54] That’s a critical thing; isn’t it? I – and this is something I often find people – that makes people really nervous, especially when it comes to doing conference talks. They don’t know how it’s supposed to go, so they can’t tell if you’ve made a mistake – only you know. So, you can keep going and it’s fine – nobody ever knows. People do get so wound up. Do – when you’re about to go on the radio, do you still get that nervousness, butterflies in your tummy thing, or is it – have you done so much now that it’s… [0:19:28]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:19:29] No, I wouldn’t say that. What I do get is, I do – I’m an over-preparer when it comes to the facts. To me, it’s all about the facts and the research, and I think, have I researched that enough? Was that figure for Fortnite, was it 544 million or 54 million? No, it was definitely 544 million. Even though I know it’s 544 million, I’ll still doubt myself.
Rather than the nervousness, because I’ve moved on from that in that – bear in mind. The radio show that I do is on FM104 and it’s really good crack. I have to remember that the people who are listening are people in chippers; they’re taxi drivers. They’re kids who are coming home from college with their headphones on; they’re on a bus.
They want to know what is the story with Web 3; what is the crack with AI, and why is it so complicated? And my job is to demystify it, to tell them what the crack is. But at the same time, I’d be like, “Oh my God, did I get those facts right? Did I get all those facts in?” And my producer just laughs and she says, “Ciara”- [0:20:35]
Richard Rodger: [0:20:35] It’s like – doesn’t matter.
Ciara Sheehan: [0:20:36] -“there’s a taxi driver listening to this going to think, what planet is this on? Is this really for real?” We were discussing this project called Worldcoin, by Sam Altman, the [inaudible, 0:20:50]. And it’s about this massive golf ball, massive bowling ball that scans your eyeball. when it scans it, it turns it into code and the code comes out as your individual proof of personhood. And the reason you’re going to need that is because there’s going to be so many bots out there in AI land that nobody’s going to believe you’re real. That’s all in the pitch deck.
But then what happened was, the people at Worldcoin started offering ppr people money for their eyeball scans. And because the Chinese weren’t allowed download the app, they started offering the poor people money for the code to prove that they were actually people. This crazy story came up where the Chinese were offering money to the people from Kenya who had no money, who were being paid by Sam Altman to get their eyeballs scans. The people in China were buying proof of- [0:21:43]
Richard Rodger: [0:21:43] It sounds like a movie plot.
Ciara Sheehan: [0:21:45] Yeah. The people in China were buying proof of personhood and it wasn’t them. We were talking about this, and I was saying to Louise, “This is the story.” And then afterwards, I said, “Did I mention that it was actually 50 American dollars?” And she was like, “Ciara, there’s a taxi driver somewhere listening to this, thinking,” what in the name of God is this? How can this be real?”
It is real and it’s happening, and it’s true. And there’s 15 million users on there now and they’ve all had money and they’re all – and the dark practice is, they’re selling the scans of their eyeballs. But that’s real, so therefore, that wasn’t about me; that was about the audience and me saying, “This is coming down the line, lads.” [0:22:27]
Richard Rodger: [0:22:28] Yeah. Speaking of things coming down the line – because I did want to ask you, because it is your business – what you thought of Mark Zuckerberg and the metaverse and machine learning and where all that stuff is going. Because it’s fair to say, it’s – and maybe he did a lot of damage to it. Because it has taken a few knocks, because of his incredibly awful avatar – good Lord. [0:22:54]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:22:54] Yeah, I know. Honest to God, it’s like- [0:22:56]
Richard Rodger: [0:22:56] Where is it going? What’s going to happen with all this stuff? You’re obviously finding a use for it, a practical niche, but what’s the bigger picture? Where is it going to go? [0:23:04]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:23:07] When people mention the metaverse, the first thing they mention is hype cycle. When Mark Zuckerberg did was, he tried to take ownership of the word metaverse., and the metaverse and Metta are two separate things. And he created this hype cycle, and AI then stepped in in the middle of the hype cycle and took all the hype. So, he created these really creepy avatars that you wouldn’t want your children to see at half nine at night under – in a tablet under the bed. [0:23:33]
Richard Rodger: [0:23:34] I know.
Ciara Sheehan: [0:23:35] And he put them in this really low-quality graphics environment, and he took all the sexiness out of it, by trying to be the gatekeeper yet again. On one side, you have the gatekeeper’s Metta, where they are selling you an immersive advertising engine; that’s it. That’s all it is. They want your eyeballs; they want your data. Same trick again, as it was in Facebook, in Web 2.
But on the other side you have these community builders, who are building interoperable worlds that we can all visit, where we don’t have to give our data. We don’t need proof of personhood. We can go in; we can hang out; we can learn; we can exchange values. There’s amazing recruitment options in Web 3, e-learning. Anything that you can think of that you’re interested in.
Say for example, you’re interested in Formula One. You can go into a Formula One metaverse type space and engage with other Formula One fanatics. And that’s all outside the gatekeepers where they get to keep your data and watch everything you do, and they track everything that you do. You’ve got the – this other community who – they’re building for good, and they’re building – some of them have funding; some of them don’t.
But they’re building this other universe where, when things become interoperable and linked, we can all hang out and we can all exchange value, education and information if we want to. And if you think of – I do a lot of corporate education on Web 3 and the metaverse, and they do it in the finance sector and in retail. And people say to me, “What does it actually mean? What does it actually mean?”
And this is what I say. The metaverse is a spectrum of digital functionality, depending on where you are in your digital life. If you’re on Snapchat, that can be argued that that’s the metaverse, because it’s not real. However, from there, you go all the way up the scale of the spectrum to the hardcore blockchain Web 3 guys, where they say, “If it’s not on the blockchain, it’s not in the metaverse.” So, it’s a spectrum of functionality depending on the user.
Therefore, when it comes to interoperability, people talk about Fortnite and Minecraft and Roblox are Web 3 – they’re not. They are Web 2/two and a half. What they’ve done is, they’ve built these massive platforms where people can build and make money and spend money and hang out in these gaming environments, but they’re still Web 2.
It depends on – when things become linked – I’ll come back to the games again. When you can go from Fortnite to Minecraft without having to log out and log back in, then it’s interoperable. And then the functionality builds out from there, the plumbing builds out from there, even though there is a whole other layer of plumbing, protocol plumbing that’s currently going on. [0:26:36]
Richard Rodger: [0:26:38] We’re still waiting for – I’m a science fiction enthusiast and all this stuff is – this is the science fiction that I love. But it still seems so far away. Because even though I don’t have to – I don’t’ have a dial-up modem anymore, but I still have to connect to wi-fi. I still have to press buttons and make things happen and go to- [0:26:58]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:26:58] I get that.
Richard Rodger: [0:26:59] -Gmail.com. And it’s clunky, right? [0:27:02]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:27:03] Yeah. People are waiting for that scene off that Tom Cruise film. [0:27:07]
Richard Rodger: [0:27:07] Yeah. Minority Report; isn’t it? [0:27:09]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:27:09] Yeah, and all the screens come up. That’s what people are waiting for. And that will come when we can get the Google Glasses that we can wear that are discreet. Unlike the Facebook RayBans that are not appropriate in any way, for ethical reasons. But when we have mixed reality, then it will feel nearer.
The thing I say about the metaverse, especially when I’m pitching to investors is, retailers and brands are – they know it’s there, but they’re afraid of it, and it feels so far away. But in some ways, it’s not so far away, because if your customer is between 11 and 22, they’re already in it – they just don’t know it. [0:27:46]
Richard Rodger: [0:27:47] They are, yeah. And that’s the new generation of coders as well, which is part of the reason why I was really interested to have this discussion. Because the old ways of teaching people how to use your API or documentation or whatever – nobody has time for that anymore. You’ve got to be able to reach people. [0:28:07]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:28:07] Or the attention span.
Richard Rodger: [0:28:08] Or the attention span, yeah, absolutely. Or the attention span. [0:28:10]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:28:12] The attention span is 1.7 seconds is your attention span now, Richad, thanks to TikTok. [0:28:16]
Richard Rodger: [0:28:17] I’ve noticed that myself, even.
Ciara Sheehan: [0:28:19] Yeah. It was the TikTok people who told me that. [0:28:20]
Richard Rodger: [0:28:24] God, and we used to sit in our bedroom studying for hours on end. I can’t imagine anyone doing that now. [0:28:29]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:28:31] I know.
Richard Rodger: [0:28:31] Ciara, thank you so much. It’s been absolutely fascinating, covering a really wide range of stuff. My hope out of this is that somebody in the developer relations space will pick it up, and somebody’s going to build some sort of immersive API learning environment. Which is an awful lot more exciting than looking up reference documentation, I can tell you. [0:28:50]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:28:51] Absolutely. If they need a hand, let me know, and I would say if anyone’s out there and they have to do stuff online or podcasts or radio stuff, just remember – somebody told me this years ago. When you think the spotlight is on you, mentally move the spotlight to the audience, and then that makes it much easier to be your true self. [0:29:11]
Richad Rodger: [0:29:12] Yeah, fabulous. Wise words, wise words. Thank you so much, thank you so much. [0:29:15]
Ciara Sheehan: [0:29:15] Thanks, Richard.
Richard Rodger: [0:29:16] Take care. Good talking. Bye-bye.
Endnote
Richard Rodger: [0:29:19] You can find the transcript of this podcast and any links mentioned on our podcast page at Voxgig.com/podcast. Subscribe for weekly editions, where we talk to the people who make the developer community work. For even more, read our newsletter. You can subscribe at voxgig.com/newsletter, or follow our Twitter @voxgig. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. [0.29.47]