Here’s an interesting interview with [Jeri Ellsworth] over at the Jenessee Network. Usually the interviews I see popup with people are fairly short and sweet but this one really delves into many subjects and takes its time to explore. They start off talking about how [Jeri] began with hacking, which was literally smashing toys “with rocks” to see what was inside. They move on to discuss her adventures in building a race car, and then racing it as a teen… as an act of defiance.
In case you didn’t know, [Jeri] has been full time at Valve for about a year. Much of the discussion focuses on this from about 20 minutes in. She doesn’t hold back on information about what her daily life is like at valve as well as her experience during the hiring process. An interesting fact is that she didn’t initially recognize the name “Valve” and ignored them for a while. She does admit that if they had mentioned portal she would have paid a little more attention.
I was unaware that she had a side job putting the overflow of pinball machines she aquires into bars. When she moved to valve, she shut down that business, but she’s been flooding the halls with pinball machines, much to the enjoyment of the older folks.
Here is another 1 hour long interview on twit.tv: http://twit.tv/tri3
From what I remember she talked a lot about her history as well.
Is there a link to a non-flash-in-browser version of this video?
I love Jeri Ellsworth, but hearing Jeri’s life story is getting kind of old. I wonder how tired Jeri must be to keep telling it. Currently listening to this interview–eagerly waiting for Valve related info.
skip ahead 20 min or so
I will have to watch this later. Jeri is a fascinating person; I’m amazed by what she has accomplished and all the things she continues to do.
Other than what she mentions in the interview… what has she accomplished?
Didn’t think so.
Ellsworth is such an inspiration to the community, I’m delighted for her that she’s happy out, doing unknown top-secret badass cool stuff in Valve, but it’s sad she doesn’t video blog so much, still hoping to some day see her pull a microprocessor out of her kitchen tube furnace.
There’s another hacker community hero working at Valve on some unknown project, Ben Krasnow, who has a lot of great Youtube videos. I wonder what they’re up to.
I am only about 10 minutes into this video, but it seems to be mostly a rehash of the 90 minute “retro computing” talk she gave (on youtube). It is interesting to hear Jeri’s “back-story” again because she gives different details, and devotes more or less time to various topics.
If you liked this talk, be sure to check this out too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g05Wfqv-8es
I cant watch the video because of my location (Germany). Any idea to watch it anyway?
Tor?
not ot be a dick but the only reason why anyone is interested in her or her life is because she’s a woman… there are thousands of tinkerers who have achieved more than her
This.
What a load of bollocks. How many ‘tinkerers’ do you know that designed the electronic hardware (chipset and all) in a product that sold 250,000+ devices? Plus, that’s just one example of a project she’s worked on. You’ll be hard pressed to find many ‘tinkerers’ that have achieved more than Jeri.
Please ZeroArrow, elaborate on the achievements she accomplished that were not due to opportunities afforded to her for being an attractive female… or ANY of her other achievements for that matter.
The Commodore schematics were already out there. porting them into an FPGA at that point isn’t very difficult. How many dozen transistors were there?
I’ve watched all these videos and still can’t tell why she has the following she does…. other than the obvious psychological reasons mentioned earlier.
I did notice quite a few of her stories were about intelligent men mentoring her though.
Jeri consistently produces interesting hacks AND does a very good job of explaining what she’s doing. She graces our pages along with all those other ones, both male and female, you mentioned that deserve credit.
Don’t make this about sex, because if you just look at the projects posted here, you’ll see that hers are amongst some of the coolest.
The original post was asking why anyone is interested in her life to the degree they appear to be, in excess over other tinkerers.
No one is saying she doesn’t deserve credit.
Just don’t pretend the reason she is interviewed 10x more than someone like like Ben Kraslow (spelling?) has nothing to do with her gender and/or appearance.
I’m also unable to watch the video at twitch. Alternate?
Who?
To have your own copy of the above embeded video for those of you restricted by region:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1362400/DTV%20engineering%20Jeri%20Ellsworth.mp4
Thank you ralph!
10 minutes so far and I’m starting to wonder why the guy is there.
she can tell me bed time geeky stories anytime, and give me sweet dreams to boot!
Flooding the halls at Valve with pinball machines. Other employees farting around playing pinball instead of working… Nahh, couldn’t have anything to do with why she was fired from Valve.