Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Hill and
welcome to the episode 100 extravaganza.
The only thing extravagant take about this episode is the
episode length is about double. The thing we do usually.
And with regards to little teaser, I'll just leave it to
the title and description that we have.
But it was a real blast of a conversation.
Although that has to do with my guest, all the way from Portland
Oregon here in person Jason langsdorf, he is the host of
learning with Jason and as I said, we had a blast of a
conversation, check it out. Out.
I'll put all his socials in the description below.
And with that being said, enjoy the episode.
How many, how many art in person stuff?
Have You Done? Usually, because I see you just
stream a lot for sure. Yeah, I've done a decent amount
of in person's done, but usually the in-person tough would be
more like a panel on stage an event.
Not so much like an in-studio like this.
So I've done maybe two or three of these nice and it will be
like a conference kind of thing. Yeah, a lot of them are, you
know, the we want to do a discussion about being a
generalist versus a specialist, and we'll do that on stage as
Out of a live podcast where it's me and the front and happy our
crew, for example, or you know, at a discussion where it's, I'll
be the moderator and I've got an expert and we're trying to, you
know, talk about the ethics of something or whatever like the
implications of some big change in the industry and the it but
it's usually, you know, us to an audience.
Yeah. So the the studio stuff
honestly, I would do more of it if I had more people Around me,
I'm in Portland. So I have a decent number of
folks around but, you know, it's not the same as being in San
Francisco where you can just be like, hey, why don't you come
down to the office today? Exactly.
No. I mean, I wish like with the
studio and everything I love doing in person episodes.
They're just that different different Dynamic, right?
Absolutely. Yeah.
But it's hard to get the same amount of people as I could
remote to get into the studio. Basically, I got very lucky that
you're like, hey I'm going to be robber jumped on that.
And yeah, do you like keep an eye on who's coming?
Through an Amsterdam and not necessarily it's pure
coincidence. Like I've had I forget his name
is the cloud security podcast. Okay.
He all of a sudden said, well I'm in Amsterdam like we can
hang out if you want. I was like this is the episode
as well because like you you were like, I mean do we have the
setup like how are we going to do this?
And right, right. I got you.
One of my favorite things to do. Yeah, I didn't know what to
expect. I wasn't sure.
If we were coming in here to like, sit in your office and you
just had a couple of mics or and I was not expecting this, know
what we like in Jan, we switched up the cameras because we had
different pods earlier and they were a bit more, like, flaky
resolution wise like they were good quality.
Yeah. You could just see the quality
is different from these and then since then I've only done remote
episodes. So do the mirror in the back
like this is gonna be our first day since While.
Yeah that's a lot of fun. Good one.
How long have you done like morsel public speaking?
Not necessarily YouTube and content creation but like
standing on stage moderating stuff like that.
I think I gave my first talk in 2006.
Maybe maybe 2005 well and I was in a in Missoula, Montana, which
is a small town. It was it was so small that they
didn't have like a JavaScript Meetup or a A PHP meet up.
They just had something called Montana programmers because
there were only about 14 people who wrote code and we just got
together to talk about computers and code in general, but none of
us use the same language as none of us were working on the same
kind of projects. And so I remember I had met one,
other person who was writing PHP, which is what I was kind of
focusing on at the time. Yeah.
And they had a question and I started answering it and one of
the organizers said, why don't you actually like give this as a
talk? So the next event, I stood up
and gave a little 30-minute presentation on.
Remember what it was something about how PHP worked and it was
fun. And so, then I think in 2007,
maybe yeah. I hit up Chris coiour and asked
him if I could write an article for CSS tricks and he was like,
well, I don't pay or anything like I guess you can.
And I said, oh great, that's all I wanted.
So I wrote an article for him and it went really well.
It, you know, I knew it was right, place, right time kind of
thing. I was teaching people how to
build their own simple PHP, CMS. And it hit the front page of dig
and a few other things, which led to me getting a book deal.
Which led to me getting invited to speak at a conference called
future of web design, or I guess it was called Future Insights.
The same family of conferences. It, I think shuttered, in 2015
or so, okay, but they invited me out to speak.
So I had like, kind of had this very fortunate by putting myself
out there kind of thing. I, you know, went to this little
Meetup of nobody and then had fun giving a tiny toy.
Which led to me wanting to, you know, be out there a little bit
more, which led to writing for CSS tricks.
And then getting a book deal with a press and then getting a
conference presentation on the main stage of Future Insights.
And each of those things was like, oh, okay, I think this is
what I want to do. Like yeah, I'm having fun with
the coding but I really want to teach people the code now so
just kind of spiraled from there.
So I love the snowball there. It's like I've gone to a few
meetups I haven't done a talk on stage like as of yet but it's
something I want to do. Moreover it seems very
attractive to me. I just have a lot of hard time.
I think figuring out what my topic is or what I really love
to talk about because I love the technical stuff but I also love
more of the soft skills side or the collaboration aspect of
creating software. I feel like I've talked about
both throughout my career I think my first my first onstage
talk was something about like PHP in real time because I think
that was what I was writing about when I got invited to
speak. Yeah.
And then Gave a whole talk about burnout, because at some point
in 2013, I think it was. I got so stressed out right in
front of my agency, that I had like, patches of my beard fell
out. You know, I couldn't couldn't
grow a beard for four years or something.
It was, it was pretty rough and I ended up, you know, selling
off my Agency for, for a loss, just to get out of it and then
went to Alaska and like, unplugged from everything for a
few weeks. And then took two years to go
travel the world And work like a single contract that paid me,
just enough to get by, which is really all I was after, and I
worked like 10 hours a week. Yeah.
And that led to a huge kind of, I talked a lot about mental
health, and work-life balance, and how to function, as a, as a
professional. That's like because I'm a very
ambitious person. I want to do everything but I
also realized that like when I burned out I didn't do anything
for three years. Yeah I was I was so afraid that
I so I'm now I'm like okay hey You kids that are super
ambitious and you think you can work forever.
Like you're going to lose a lot more time than you think.
If you're trying to burn the candle, at both ends save some
time like, get a pace going. Because this is a long career,
absolutely. Yeah.
It's a hard thing and I see a with myself as well, the most
ambitious people, the people with a high sense of
responsibility and accountability though.
She won't working together with right either in Timor working
for you. If you're talking about a
company yet those are also the people that go the extra Extra
mile and do that over and over and over again until they reach
a point where they look in the mirror and have to tell
themselves. I can't do that.
And if this doesn't happen then they hit a wall or jump off a
cliff and hit into that burnout mode.
Yeah. And in the thing that that has
been so heartbreaking for me is is I feel like it's a lesson
that's really hard to learn. Yeah, without doing the thing
that hurts and I think this is sort of, you know, why a lot of
cliches are cliches is that people don't understand the
cliche until they've made. The mistake that the cliche
would have helped them avoid. Yeah, you know, somebody says
like, you know, it's a, it's a marathon not a Sprint and
somebody says yeah and then they burn out and they go oh, it's a
marathon, not a Sprint. Exactly.
But I've worked with a lot of folks and so one of the things
that that I've before I got out of leadership most recently I
was I was the VP of developer experience it now if I and one
of the things that I repeated over and over and over to the
people in my team is like this stuff just isn't that important.
It's not worth hurting yourself, it's not worth losing sleep,
it's not worth. Not seeing your family, like do
the work and do the best work, you can for 40 hours a week and
then just close your computer, it doesn't matter.
There's no such thing as a web development emergency, like we
don't work on critical systems. We're not doing anything that if
it breaks, somebody is in at risk of harm or anything like
that. Like yeah.
If the websites down like we get a couple emails people like hey
do you know your website sounding you say oh yeah, we're
going to fix that tomorrow. It's okay, you know and and I
think that there's a sliding scale here you know of like
somebody who is paid to be a site reliability engineer,
they've got a pager they've got a system where they, you know,
they're on rotation. It's their job right now to be
available if you're a web developer you're not on page
Duty. You know, I have, why are you
checking your email and 9:00 p.m. it doesn't?
It's just not that important. Go be with your friends and
family. Go read a book, go do a project
just for fun. Like I don't care if you're
still working on code, just It don't do work code.
Yeah, right. And it takes a lot to, you know,
you have to build a culture of that where if somebody is on
slack or or whatever at 9 p.m. on a Friday, you got to go yell
at him. Yeah.
Hey, get out of here. What are you doing here?
Come back on Monday. And they're like well I just had
an idea great schedule it for Monday morning men you know
don't don't give anybody the impression that they should be
paying attention to slack at 9 p.m. at night.
Yeah, and when you work in a global team, it's hard because
you know, 9 p.m. for Is very different from 9 p.m. for me.
And, you know, if I'm having an idea at what two in the
afternoon and in Portland, it is the middle of the night for you.
Yeah. And so that becomes really
challenging as well to have to enforce that etiquette in a way
that's like hey, I know that like work is happening in this
part of the world that you're not in.
It's okay. You can look at it tomorrow but
yeah, I think that's probably one of the biggest challenges
that I've seen going into the pandemic is that we all win
Global all at once. Yeah.
And so our desire and willingness to be part of a team
Team and especially anybody who's really ambitious and
really driven is that just poured their whole selves into
work. And I don't even think we've
started to experience the real. Fallout of how burned-out people
are. I'm just starting to see it now
where people are, you know, we saw big big wave of turnover,
right at the when the lockdown started to ease up.
Yeah, we're the great resignation in 2021.
Exactly. And then we're seeing like
another huge shake-up in the industry.
And I'm really worried. We're going to see a lot of the
people. Were most engaged fall out of
the industry entirely because of just how stressful this is all
been. Yeah, I can see that as well.
And I'm looking back in my own career like I got a really good
Mentor and they told me like you know, when you go get into kind
of your first job, you get a new phone, you get a new laptop
stuff like that. I was like, should I get a
separate phone? Or should I just make this my
main phone? And they were like, no, no, no.
I was in operations. They were like, you make this
your separate phone because the best thing you can do is put
your work away, right? Whether it's in the evening,
whether you're on. Vacation, just Chuck your phone
in a corner and that's literally what I do.
My phone is also Now red, so it's like an alarm phone.
I put it away. If I don't want to look at it, I
put it away. And I've always done that which
meant my work, life balance was always pretty healthy.
Hmm. Now with lockdown, it's all kind
of blurry now and it's kind of a gray area because my laptop's
right there. Like my living room is my
workspace and then all of a sudden I'm working in the
evenings and like you said, I'm like, okay I can I can keep
doing this, this is still fine for me.
I can check in an extra few hours love working on the
podcast. I used to do the editing myself,
as well as of this episode in the previous episodes.
Previous two wrote my producer now edits.
So it's it's chugging along but I used to do a lot of work,
myself until I hit a point where I was like, I cannot do this,
like it's too much, it's too much.
I'm not spending time with my family, with my friends, with my
girlfriend, even to a point where I'm like, I cannot, this
is not sustainable. I also want to do more still and
I cannot do more. More if I don't like, take care
of myself first, right? Yeah, I mean, this is a constant
tension for me. Like, I'm feeling it right now.
I'm sort of on vacation right now, right, I'm on this
three-week trip, across Europe. It's the first trip we've taken
in years, you know, outside of the United States and to be
here. Yeah, I have my laptop now.
I don't have anything that I have to do, mmm, but I really
want to, like, I've got this. This website that I'm trying to
migrate to a new framework and I'm really enjoying doing that.
I've got these ideas for things that I want to build and teach
people and really excited about that.
I got some workshops coming up that I want a prototype, all
these things are exciting to me and I want to do it and I also
know how important it is to shut that part of my brain off and
and you know, there's there's a lot of science about how
important boredom is and how important distance from work is
for your ability to Solve problems creatively for your
ability to, you know, stay engaged in the work, right?
It's that, that another cliche distance makes the heart grow
fonder, right? You hear that all the time and
you got, yeah. But if I really love it, I'll do
it all the time. It's no wait no hold on.
Yeah, exactly. And so I think, you know, I have
always been somebody who will say to everyone.
Yeah, I you know I'm just built different.
I can just work more than everybody.
And and you know, I'm okay with that and I've consistently
proven myself wrong. Yeah.
Every time and yet I'll still like I'll take that break you
know I burned out so hard that I had to like completely change my
life right now and I still see it creeping back in.
I'm like well I can handle a little more.
I can do a little more like this is fun.
I'm having fun. How can this be work?
If I'm having fun and yet. So it's just it's, it's a really
tricky balance and it's a really sneaky thing when you do Enjoy
the thing. That is your job, especially
when your job is also what you do for fun when you're not at
work. And like at what point am I
doing a hobby where I'm just kind of playing?
Yeah. And when does that cross over
into being like, I'm working when I'm not at work and and I'm
not sure like if I start doing a music project where I'm working
with midi at that, still computer work.
Is that work work? I don't think so.
If I start building a visualizer for it, now I'm writing in code.
Is that work work? Hmm, I don't know.
All right, and there's a point where I'm like, okay, well now I
want to build a website for my visualizer so that I can do
music. I'm like, okay.
Now I'm just working exactly. And I really don't know how to
how to draw those lines. So, what I'm trying to do now is
I've gone independent, as of the, the beginning of 2023.
I'm a full-time educator and media creator for, I'm working
with companies to help them, you know, build better media around
developer education and around just Eating what their products
do. So I'm trying to take a lot of
those projects that I would have done for fun.
Like, oh, I'm an audio visualizer right?
Can I work with a company that would be part of that stack and
make that my day job, so that I can do it within the 40 hours a
week that I want to work and not feel like I have to, you know,
carve time out to sneak in fun. Can I make the fun what I do for
work? And yeah, so far I've been
reasonably successful at this like I don't feel like I build a
Things that I'm not having fun building.
I think the tricky part is how do you expand that to be the
things that you don't really know how to make them work,
right? Like I want to make music,
nobody's gonna hire me to be a music producer.
I'm not very good at it. So in the meantime, how can I
find little ways to work music in that allow me to, you know,
play and grow their. Yeah.
But that aren't the core of the work.
Exactly the same so that I'm still providing something
valuable and not just trying to get somebody to pay me for
playtime. Yeah.
Like a creative Outlet in that aspect.
Right. Yeah.
And I do think that that's sort of what makes somebody valuable
as a Creator. Is that you you you don't watch
somebody specifically for like the thing they're teaching you
usually you find creators that you like the way they think you
like the way they approach things, you like the, you know,
the their outlook on the world, right?
That's why some of us are really into something like Bob Ross and
others are watching something completely different and both of
those things might be teaching you how to paint.
Yeah. But somebody wants the
no-nonsense super tactical and somebody else.
Once the really like light-hearted, it's not that big
of a deal. You know, the Bob Ross ASMR
thing, ya know? Yeah.
And I think there's a, you know, it's the same.
If you watch some of the creators in the dev space right
now, you've got somebody like Kent C, Dodds who's very like
calm and and proactive and and like very kind of measured in
the way they do it. And then you've got folks like,
you know, Theo or the primer Jane who were like not measured
their super-sensational and they want to tell you why they're
thing is the best thing and and neither of them are wrong, no
way. He's nobody's incorrect is just
a flavor. That's like I want my
information to be more engaging and more like, I want to be
thinking about all this could change the world or I want to be
thinking about. This is, It's a tool, it's a
tool and I don't like none of them matter.
I'm here to do some work. Yeah.
You know. And and you can kind of choose
who you watch for that and what I think makes any of these folks
interesting and and what I hope makes me interesting is that
we're bringing our own stuff to it.
So, you know, when you watch me, I'm usually bringing in food
analogies. I'm usually talking about A
little bit about my past experience as a performer as as,
you know, creative outside of tech and each of those things
that I'm bringing in makes my stuff a little different.
You know, you're not seeing exactly the same thing.
Even if I'm teaching react and Kent is teaching react and the
prime agents teaching, react and Anya Kubo.
And whoever else is teaching me act, each one of us is bringing
something that you've never seen from the others and that you
probably never will, you know, like you just, you know, that
that person is Themselves. They're bringing a whole person
there. And so I think there's there's a
lot of value in really steering into the parts of yourself as a
professional that aren't the actual skill set because that's
where you start to get this interesting cross-pollination of
not just like what I know with the tool but what I know about
the world and how I can make that you know, uniquely
interesting or come up with the unique analogy, the help
somebody connect the dots in the light bulb goes on Or whatever
it is. Yeah, I mean it makes me think
back of when I used to work in a team that was with people from a
lot of different backgrounds and cultures.
Not necessarily they didn't study software development.
I didn't study computer science in that aspect.
They were from all over the place and I learned the most not
necessarily on a technical level, but also just on my
interpersonal level, right? Because they could Leverage What
They had, they could exactly as you say, leverage their
experience in explaining it just it slightly differently.
So I would Please remember those things.
I think it adds to whatever you're doing people are looking
for authenticity integrity and whatever they're doing whomever,
they're collaborating with working with or even watching
and consuming content from basically.
And yeah, I think I like that. It's getting more and more to
the Forefront because usually people used to take a product
and that will be that right? I would buy a glass.
Now I care about where this glass comes from, who made it
right the authenticity part of it.
Mmm and it makes me happier knowing the background of that
part of the production while I'm enjoying, whatever I'm doing
basically. Yeah, I authenticity is one of
those things that I think about a lot because it's it's
ultimately a completely made-up concept.
Yeah, right. Like what why do we care if a
paintbrush was held by Picasso versus somebody who does a
stroke for stroke perfect imitation of that same painting.
We do care. Yeah.
But there's no, there's no. Difference know, the difference
is just sort of Imagine, right? And so so I think about like,
what does make something authentic other than just
bringing your own like, bringing the fullest form of yourself to
whatever it is you're creating. And I think that's that kind of
goes back to what I was saying about trying to be more than
just the tools you're teaching or the the subject matter that
you're trying to be an expert in because, you know, it's anybody
can go to the docks and read the API or Or can go to the
Wikipedia page and read the history.
What they can't do is they can't take, you know, my background in
in music and writing and they can't take Sean day, person's
background. That makes her one of the best
analogous I've ever heard. Like she comes up with these
incredible. Like, well, if you think about
react, it's she'll tell a story and you just end, it just makes
sense and it's perfect and you know that makes her incredibly
special as an educator in the same way.
That each one of these Educators kind of has their thing if you
if you look into who's really successful the West bosses and
the Sarah dresdeners in the Cassie Evans in the space, each
one of them is sort of like known for thing and and sort of
an approach and the way that they break information down and
and if one of them is not your preferred style.
Yeah. Somebody else in the space is
probably teaching it a little bit differently and they're
bringing in their own background in their own history and that's
what makes it approachable. That's what makes it fun to
learn from them. Is that You find some common
ground? Some overlap with this person
you say oh they're like me. I can learn from them.
Yeah right. And you have to have a lot of
different creators and Educators in order to have enough people
find that overlap and feel like they can see themselves in this
industry and I think that's such a magical thing and it just
wouldn't be there. If everybody felt like they had
to be a robot and just yeah, and get exactly the content, right.
Exactly. I mean, it's interesting because
I've never looked at content creation from that aspect yet, I
do recognize what you say. And even looking back in the
team's, I've been mmm, those relationships and those kind of,
interpersonal connections what I have with someone, in the way,
they explain something on the way, they interact with me.
I think those are the most Fondest Memories I have of like
a Learning Journey because I I started out, I didn't know
anything of software development.
I came from operations is very obvious that I didn't know and
even in operations, I didn't know anything because I came
from uni and they don't teach you anything about Albrecht to
make a list. Of acronyms because it take it,
people love acronyms, but those extra hours those, I mean even
office hours where people really took the time and effort to
explain it and to keep explaining it.
Even if I would tell them, I got it.
They could see, I didn't get it and they would have go over and
over and over again. And I just really appreciate
that aspect of it. Absolutely.
I think you. You need that with whomever.
You're working also, yes 100%. It's a, I've never thought of my
career like that but I think those interpersonal
Relationships. It's interesting because people
always say that, right? You remember your relationships
with people, not necessarily even what you were doing.
Like I have Snippets in fragments of memories of the
things that I have done, but none of them matter in
comparison to the relationships that I've built.
And I'm also a person that is horrible in keeping
relationships with something. I'm trying to improve when
people say, like, let's keep in touch.
I'm like, please put in the extra effort because I suck at
it. Basically people.
Luckily do, but the relationship, Is really matter
at the end of the day, I think it's important and probably, for
me, it might be the most important, in wherever I'm
working is who I'm working with. Yeah, I think, you know, I have
a few things that I'm trying to optimize for in any given
situation and, and forgive me, because I'm about to go on a
wild. But so the, the biggest thing
that I'm looking for a nanny job is, what, what do I stand to
learn? Yeah, and typically, what I'm
evaluating is like, who is there that I can learn from not
necessarily. My going to be doing because you
know, when I when I took my job at IBM, I wasn't really taking
that job so that I could go to IBM and learn what.
IBM does, I took that job because the manager that hired
me in Robin Cannon was a fantastic person who was a very
good people leader. Yeah.
Right. And I wanted to see how that
work. How do you work on software in a
team in a functional team and I knew that Robin could show me
that and when I went to to nullify I wasn't even planning
on joining now. If I but Sarah Dresner hit me
up. And said, do you want to come
work in otherwise like there's no chance.
I'm going to pass up an opportunity to learn from Sarah
Dresner. Yeah.
And so, you know, that that makes a huge impact on where
I'll choose to be. And then I think the the other
things that I found to be really important in my career, at least
is thinking about the, the type of work that you're doing and
the scale of the organization because these are things that I
didn't know when I was, First getting into the workforce in
general, but that have turned out to be like the most
important things for me when considering what I'm doing next.
So the first thing being the type of work, there's a spectrum
of work that Simon Wordly who he's in the like planning space.
Kind of like he's talking a bunch of conferences and I've
seen him a couple times and one of the composite Concepts that
he brought up, is this idea of the spectrum of styles of work?
Yeah, going from what he Al's Pioneers in the middle, there
are Town settlers and on the, the other end, their city
planners which, you know, Pioneers are sort of like
generative start from zero. You know.
Go into a problem space that hasn't been defined and there's
not really a product and we're not really sure.
We just we think there's potential here, right?
So more R&D more chaos driven. Yeah, and then in the middle was
with Town settlers. It's somebody who wants to take
a product problem. That's sort of been defined
like, hey, we know, That people are willing to pay for this and
we know that like this sort of works but we don't really have a
business. We don't have a product, right?
So Town settlers the person who's going to take that that
seed of an idea and build into something sustainable that
that's going to move on. Yeah and then on the city
planner side you've got somebody who's going to like take a
running system and just make it perfect.
They want to fine-tune the machine.
They're going to make sure that it never goes down that all the
edge cases are covered that. It's completely polished that
they've got contingencies for their contingencies.
You know, somebody who's Really into like a sari or devops or
like, keeping something running. Yeah, resilience yeah,
resilience and all those things that just go into making things
really operate at the biggest scales with the most chaotic
inputs, you know, they're like now this is Rock.
Solid. Yeah.
And each of us fall somewhere on a spectrum between these three
places. Right?
And I think that for me personally, I'm much more on the
Pioneer side. Okay.
The more I spend doing maintenance.
Asks, the more I start to get kind of antsy in my job and so
if I get pushed toward like okay you've done all the work to
think about what it could be. Now you got to keep it running
and I start kind of going. Oh but we could maybe we should
re re-engineer the whole system, maybe we should start from
scratch. I'd I'm the one who starts
getting antsy and proposing a full rewrite that's super
destructive on a team right? But it's because I was in the
wrong roll. Yeah, so now I've started
optimizing for more of these Pioneer things, like I
effectively think of myself as an R&D engineer, I will be very
good if you throw me into a situation.
And tell me what the problems are like what pain pointer are.
What pain points are your customers.
Feeling? What?
Pain points are your team, feeling?
What? You know, what do you think you
want to solve? And also start brainstorming
coming up with ideas and work with the team to, you know, put
together some plans, some things to validate once we validated
the ideas, I want to move on and do something different.
And I want to hand it to a town, settler, and then, and then
continue on my next big chaotic task.
And so, then that brings me to the The second piece of my giant
tangent which is thinking about the scale of the organization.
And so, you know, the really small sizes when a company is 10
people, 20 people, you can have these very chaos driven roles
where you get hired and you don't really have a job title
yet. You just, you're there to help
make the company function. Yeah.
So, when I first joined Gatsby, I was in within the first like
ten or fifteen employees. I think number 12, and They
didn't have a job title for me. So I just started referring to
my role as human duct tape. Yeah.
Because whenever there was an issue, if nobody else was like,
oh, this is my domain. I was going okay, I'll figure it
out, I'll do, I'll see how it works then and this is how I
started my career. I actually I got into web
development in the first place, through being a musician and we
didn't make enough money to hire a design agency or a web agency.
So I just said I'd figure it out.
So I got into designing merge and designing the website and I
customize our Myspace page. And I learned flash, so that I
could embed music in the page, all these different things and I
never thought of myself as an engineer or as a designer.
Yeah, I was a musician who was just couldn't afford to hire
help, right? But I built this whole career
out of that sort of, here's an undefined space.
We need to figure out how to get posters to, you know, some
teenagers in Phoenix so that they can tell people were
coming. Yeah.
And I was like, I don't know, figure it out and, and So at a
small company, it's real, they're really well suited for
that type of approach. Like, okay, we just figured out
that there's a boot camp, that's over here, but we have no idea
what to do with them. Like, cool, all figured out and
I started put together like a, you know, a program for what's
our Devereaux program. I wasn't it.
I wasn't in developer relations when I joined Gatsby.
I sort of moved there because I realized that that was the place
that I could provide the most value and so I started putting
together programs to thank get contributors and and figure out
how to get the community activated and Create spaces for
people to talk to each other and share code and all that kind of
stuff. That's how learn what Jason came
about. In the first place is, I was
like, well, how can I like teach people more about how to use
this stuff and ho great it? Well, here's a format and then
is Gatsby grew. I mean, Gatsby?
I left because it was more of like dysfunctional leadership,
but when I joined, net, Le fine L, if I was 75 and it was still
at that phase where it was small enough that you could do a big
generative project. There was an unknown thing.
And you could just say, okay, I got an idea.
Can I get like these teams to get into a meeting?
And, you know, we'd meet and decide that it was the right
thing to do and we do something wild.
Yeah. But by the time I got to the end
of my career. Now if I they were at 300 and he
just can't do that in his did, when I start proposing a big
project like that everybody stressed out like I'm like, oh
well what if we just pull together?
The right people for a week and we all work on this thing and
get it done and you know, I'll need like a couple people from
these 12 teams and all the leadership is like, that's
exactly what we need to do, and all the man.
Just like, I cannot afford to lose those resources for a week.
Yeah. Right.
So I'm like, getting leadership into a worked up, which is
yanking the roadmap which is stressing out the managers,
which is causing the ICC to feel like they're not sure if they
should listen to the manager. Listen to me kale and I just
realized I God I'm like I am the Kaos agent, I am causing stress
to this team so I need to be in a chaos driven roll.
So smaller teams earlier, stage projects and that's where I'm
best suited to be and I think for each Each of us, if we take
the time to start thinking through like when have I been
the most effective one of my the least effective, when have I
caused more harm than good, more good than harm and what were the
common pieces of the organization's?
I was in that I have small team, a big team that I have a great
manager. No manager was, I working on
something established or generative, you know, where,
where do I make the best impact and consider a non these
vectors. And you can really start to get
a good map that lets you make good choices about where you
should be in your career. And, and this is sort of It's
the sort of thing that like I've had a theory that is similar to
this, hmm, for the last 10 years.
Okay. And it kind of it refines over
time and each time I joined a new company, I make different
decisions and so you know what? I would have told you 10 years
ago would be analogous to what I'm saying right now.
But I lack 10 years of experience that have led me,
make better choices for me, of course, but I do think that, you
know, for for everybody there's there's some things that like
release it as your core values, if you know, If you start to
think about what makes you happy, what?
Drains your energy when you do this work, you need a day to
recover or you want to just keep going forever because you enjoy
it so much. And if we can get a map of that
and what the conditions are that let us do that work.
We can kind of optimize our careers in a way that, oh, well
I know that this company is starting to grow toward the size
where I'm not going to be effective anymore.
So I should start thinking about making myself redundant.
Yeah, so that I can leave on good terms instead of like
having to pull the ripcord and oh, by everybody, I'm clearly
causing damage and and that's that was sort of what I was able
to do. I hope at nullify were when I
left, I don't think the team was left with a big hole.
Yeah, because I had worked really hard to try to make Make
myself not Central to the pieces of things that I was doing
because I saw the end coming. Yeah, like I knew that the
company was getting too big for me to continue to be effective
there, but I decided that so that was a really we're still
talking about the same thing. Anyways I it's interesting,
right? Because I've been in a lot of
organizations. I mean I'm I'm working at CBS, a
consultancy company. So I get to be in a lot of
different environments and I get to pinpoint where I felt like I
was most effective and What I haven't done yet?
Because you have 10 years of experience, you have even more,
I don't even have 10. So I'm still trying to figure
out like, where am I most effective, right?
Where is my value in that and I've joined a lot of products
and companies where they were already at one, right?
They just went live. We were building new features to
add value on top of I've joined where it was already past that
phase where we were building new features.
But we were a be testing them, so not even releasing them but
more. So researching and optimizing
what we already had, right? That reduced capacity, reduced
budget. And now I'm in a phase where I'm
building a product from zero to one and I've never done that,
and it was really excited because I was like, okay, how
does this work? And how do you make those
decisions? And how do you document for?
Because I have that future perspective, looking back.
Why decisions were made the way they were?
And now the chaos that I mean, I'm like, okay, this these
things usually slip through the cracks.
So that and that is then what I focus on but I'm still trying to
figure out work-wise where do I add the most value and what is
also like my sweet spot. My comfort zone and where do I
want to grow in? Because they all have different
facets and different mindsets to be effective and for you to
optimize kind of that work way and process in their
organization wise. I don't know yet because I've I
Look to myself and I've always been kind of entrepreneurial and
trying to get done what I need to get done or what I think is
best for the company is probably better and I always have that
kind of collaboration aspect in the back of my mind.
Like, I've been in teams where people are like, okay, I'm here
for And that's really hard to work together with and at some
point it becomes obvious as well but I'm never that person.
So I also haven't realized where if I'm really trying to get done
what I think is best for the company and I'm destructive as
byproduct of that I've never had that realization.
Like I think that's a hard one because you very much pinpointed
like the effects of what you were trying to cause and you
were doing it because you thought that would add value,
right? You can create something from 0
to 1 again within that bigger. Ation.
But because of the app is stablished patterns there and
obviously resource allocation and people already being kind of
lesson Innovation and More in kind of standardization that was
chaos for them because they were like what's going on here?
We're not going to do the same thing today.
Instead of yeah, Angel and so much of it comes into with with
understanding, how to navigate the I'm going to say politics,
but I don't mean that in a negative way.
I mean that in the the interpersonal relationships way
of how a company functions because You know, with a healthy
company, where everybody's talking to everybody at every
level. And there's a lot of
communication and a lot of context and Clarity of what the
goals are, what the vision are, what the expectations are, you
can be a little more agile at any size.
Yeah, the problem is is that keeping context and Clarity high
as a company grows beyond I think.
But there's a this famous number.
The Dunbar number which I believe is 250 which is like the
number of people that you can. An actually.
No. Yeah.
Before you did they just become like a reference like a number
on a spreadsheet or something. And once you cross beyond that
line, it's really difficult not to take shortcuts.
Hmm. And so I've watched leaders that
were really, really good at small groups and they would take
everybody into account and they would, you know, hold Big Town
Halls and they would always share contacts and they would
let everybody know what was going on.
They start Crossing that number. They get up above 200 300 and
Out of necessity because they can't spend, you know, 24 hours
a day in town halls, trying to explain everything to everybody.
They start taking shortcuts and so they'll write a dock and the
dock is missing a ton of contacts because nobody can
write with perfect clarity exactly what they want done.
Yeah. And then they can't afford to do
the town halls anymore because they have to optimize for for
movement. Yeah, right.
And when you've got 250 people, 300 people all asking questions
and not being clear on things. You'll I find that the whole
process bogs down to just complete inability to function
because no one's ever going to be happy.
And this is one of the things that gets really hard as in
leadership is like there's a point that you cross with a
sufficiently large team where you're no longer like doing the
right thing. You're trying to do the least
wrong thing, right? And you're no longer not doing
harm, you're trying to do the least amount of harm.
Yeah. Because you're all like you, you
get people who have completely opposed views.
Right? You've got the sales team who's
completely dependent on new features because their entire
income or 80% of their income is based on commission.
Yeah, right. So they need you to make
something that they can go out and sell and they've exhausted
the pool of people who are willing to buy the thing that
you have right now, they need a new thing.
And then you've got a product team Engineers who are really
spread thin. They're really worried about
tech dad. They're really worried about.
Look, if we don't start fixing some of these, these rough
edges, we're Going to have some real problems in the future.
Yeah. And you're like, okay, but if we
don't ship features, right? So if we don't fix this, we're
gonna have problems. If we don't ship features, we're
going to have problems. I have to make all of you a
little bit unhappy right now. Yeah, right.
And how do you find that balance where you're not doing what?
I think some leaders do, which is where they just say, figure
it out, right? And, and they kind of make it
everybody else's problem. And in this is, again, you make
an optimization. You go.
Okay. Look, I hired smart people.
Y'all can figure this out and you just say, look figure out
how to do. Maintenance work and features.
Yeah. And in theory that's possible.
But when you don't have that really high trust High context,
High Clarity at what point is the manager doing too much to
put that maintenance work in? Alongside the features at what
point is sales pushing too hard on engineering and product to
release new features over like letting them be functional as a
team. Who's drawn that line, who makes
that call in a disagreement? Who's the mediator?
Right? And what you would say is well
its leadership, but if leadership is a is committee, do
they like, does the chief sales officer and the chief product
officer? Did they live dial it up, right?
And because the, the product officer is going to say, do what
I say and the sales officer can say, do what I say, and, and now
you need like a CEO to mediate and they don't have time.
Like, what is this? Why did why are you bringing
this to me? You're like that.
Your job is to To figure this out.
And and the problem is that none of them have enough context.
Like the CEO only has the high-level business context, the
sales officers, clearly focused on keeping the sales team
healthy, and their people go into battle for their people
product. Same going to battle for their
people, and they just need different things, so they're
everybody's going to lose. Yeah, right.
And and that is the part, that's really, really hard about big
organizations is it? And when I realize that I got
super depressed, damn I was like, oh so you can Have like
this big happy, no organization. You can't work in a company
where everybody's always, stoked.
All the time, you're always going to have disagreement,
you're always gonna have misalignment as soon as two
people walk away from each other, they start drifting on
what their understanding is of things.
So you know, the last moment they spoke plus however many
seconds that's how out of alignment they are now.
Yeah. Right.
And it doesn't really get, they could be perfectly in agreement
with each other. If they're not constantly
sinking and you just can't Do that.
When you got 200 people, you can't have 200.
People syncing with each other constantly, because I'll never
get any work done. The exact and then everybody
complained about meeting culture.
So you cut back meetings, but then nobody's talking.
So everything is starting running off in opposite
directions and nothing's compatible anymore in your like,
oh my God, this is, this is an unsolvable problem.
Yeah. So in my case, I just wave the
white flag and I was like, I gotta get out on my own, I can't
do this scale of organization anymore because I like, I just I
didn't sleep anymore, like, I just had this conversation.
Did not of stress. Where I was like, I am letting
everyone down. I am screwing this up
constantly. Like I'm going to be the reason
that somebody burns out of this industry and I cannot live with
that. No.
So, you know, maybe the right thing to do, would have been
learn more about leadership, but what I did was I was like, I'm
just going to go back to making YouTube videos. that's it saying
like it's interesting because I've recently taken up a coach
like I've had a really good conversation with someone about
like my personal Journey, my career Journey at this company
Xavier and they were like, if you want, like I can, we can
have this on a more regular basis because I told them, like,
I really don't have, like, I have a mentor but I'm really
lacking kind of a coaching aspect and he comes from a
Behavioral Science Background, so he was like I'll give you
some advice which I think might be helpful because he heard that
where I have problems or we're at struggles with and he's like,
you are a person that has a lot of relationships but you can
learn how to leverage those as well, more strategically,
because then you can understand your place in the organization.
What is exactly going on, right? If sales is pushing feature
development and product, is pushing back because the they
cannot with where they are. Now that you can, then kind of
refine for yourself and you can more so understand what is
happening within an organization, right?
And if you don't want to put yourself into a position where
you're trying to solve. Because you think it's an
organizational problem that needs to be solved.
Then, that's the next question because I find myself always in
a position of do. I really like the thing that I'm
doing or do I do it? Because I think it's necessary
for my team for my organization because it's the best thing that
needs to be done, right? And I still sometimes struggle
with that because I genuinely enjoy doing a lot.
I'm a person that enjoys more than they don't enjoy basically.
So then I'm like, okay I might doing this for me.
Or am I doing this because I think This is the right thing to
do, and I don't think there needs to be a black and white
answer either because everything is experience anyway, right.
So when I feel like, okay, people are literally not hearing
me right now and I'm talking to someone and they see me as a
resource or number. They're operating on that scale
of like I don't know everyone and I find a mitigate damage
here and I'm like I'm at the damaged side basically and we're
having that dialogue it and I can really see.
They're not understanding me then.
I'm like okay this this And I'm sorry, but it is useless.
I'll go to someone else. I'll drag in more people to gain
a better understanding, right? Because one of the things that
I'm happy, you mentioned it. One of the things that is really
going to help and it's going to be detrimental is Clarity and
transparency with information because somehow if things don't
make sense, if people start doing weird things then there's
a really good reason why they're chaotic and where they're doing
this weird thing. It's because they're stressed
because some things are not going as they wanted to because
people are pushing back there having confrontations there.
Not comfortable with this. So then you can see this weird
behavior and when you're trying to strategically pinpoint where
it comes from, it helps when you have that information, yeah,
I've never been in a company where somebody was actively
sabotaging know. I sometimes I think that, you
know, you when you're in a specialty.
Yeah, it's it's tempting to look at everybody around you and say
well they just don't want us to get good work done.
Yeah. And yeah, it's them.
You can start to make this sort of villain story of like oh well
it's all marketing swallow. Products fall, that's all
leaderships fault. And the unfortunate reality is,
is that everybody's doing the best they can given the
information they have. So, everybody's operating on
limited context, you know? So we've got the series of
overlapping Windows, where each team, each organization has a
different piece of the like, smaller piece of the overall
puzzle, and they're making decisions that they think will
lead the company to the best outcome.
Yeah, and a lot of times, You just don't know when you're in
sales or when you're in marketing.
What a decision that have really helps marketing causes in terms
of, you know, roadmap, Whiplash or whatever.
Yeah, for engineering, or what a decision in engineering, might
cause for the reliability team, even if it's like, it can be
within the same general organization, everybody's an
engineering, the front-end team wants to do this thing and then
they didn't talk to the reliability team and they go.
No, no, you can't. We We don't have enough people
to stay up overnight to deal with whatever that nonsense is
right. And so then it sounds like
they're just saying no, and if they don't talk right and you
know, again, each decision is hitting every single
organization in the company like when I make a decision it's
influencing Tech debt or not it's influencing sales or or,
you know, causing problems for sales, it's influencing our
ability to communicate to our customers, whether that's
marketing, whether that's documentation, whatever it is,
write each of these decisions from each.
Each level of the company is going to impact every other
organization in some small way, or a, major way, depending on
what it is. Yeah.
But we usually don't have the time to really sit down and map
each of those decisions out. And and this is one of those
things that I think is so hard because companies what they
should do is really really focus down on one or two things that
they could all talk about and align on.
But that's way too hard to do. Yeah, they start doing it.
Everybody gets frustrated and burned-out people stopped paying
attention. Like a team breaks off and
starts doing whatever they want. So I go there just going to be
in planning for months so let's just play over here and then
they just break apart and they do whatever they want.
But if we could if they could maintain Focus, if we could stay
as a unit as an entire company on one or two things where we
keep that high focus, we execute very very quickly and you see
this every once in a while where a company just finds his groove,
right. Like, we've seen like GitHub.
Did this a couple years ago or was like all the sudden?
They were launched a new feature?
Hours every week they were just absolutely killing.
And this is a huge team. Yeah.
How, how did I do that? I don't know.
They found alignment for a brief moment in time where they were
just, like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And I want every company to be able to figure out what that is.
Yeah. Right.
And in the meantime I'm like okay well if you really want to
be that fast you just don't hire more than 15 people.
I mean a bigger team causes team problems right.
But what what? See.
And what I usually shut down is when people make it personal,
they're like, this is just a bad person or my manager, just he's
an awful human being and I'm like, listen, they're not right.
They're trying to do the best they can.
They don't have the information. Maybe they've never been a
manager. May be the really uncomfortable
in this position. They're not a bad person.
Like if it gets to that point that can spiral real quick and I
try and shut that down immediately.
Yeah, I know you're probably right.
I've been in this industry for 20 years and I've met two people
out of the hundreds that I've worked with that were Were
actually like bad people have exceptions.
Yeah. You know, but that's the
exception that proves the rule everybody else.
Like, even people that I thought, when I first met them,
I was like, oh, you're a mother. Yeah.
And then you finally get that
meeting where you, like really talk to them and you understand
where they're coming from, you know, all of your incentives are
are out of alignment with what we need to do.
Yeah, you know, that's the other problem too, is when you start
getting into big organizations, we all want to own a metric,
right? We all want something.
Thing that is like we own this. We influence us and the problem
is is that in in the pursuit of getting something individually
ownable. Yeah, we come up with things
that don't matter. Nope.
That directly compete with each other.
Like, one of the things that I so I come from developer
experience. What are we responsible for?
Right? Well, we're responsible for more
people getting interested in trying and hopefully like trying
lots of things within the product.
Yeah, that's my entire function as a developer relations
engineer, but product is also responsible for.
So, so, two names on those metrics, that would be like
active, users are active developers and actual
activation. How many features of the product
are they using? And are they returning versus
like? They try it once and bail.
Well yeah, long till I'm looking at active users, and activation
as sort of a broad metric of long-term usage.
So, I should own that in developer relations.
But product, also, influences whether or not somebody stays
activated. Yeah.
And marketing influences, whether or not somebody is an
active user, whether they sign up, right?
Yeah. So each of those things is kind
of co-owned. And so, I've seen companies try
to over I was really starting. Okay, we'll developer relations,
you own blog views, okay? It's like, but why?
Yeah, well because if a lot of people are reading our blogs and
they'll sign up but we can measure you on whether or not
you get blog views like cool. But I could do BuzzFeed style
articles about Kim Kardashian and get millions of views and no
one will sign up now for our product, it doesn't matter.
So why am I met like why are we measuring on this?
It's not the right thing. We need to be measuring on
active users and sign up so it will be can't attribute.
Mmm. Don't worry about attribution
worry about. Friends.
Yeah. Like we're a team were one
company exactly. We're doing this together but
the bigger a team gets, you can't like.
Okay, so now we say that, but we're 500 people now we're
going, tribution, active users are going down.
Yeah, whose head rolls now, do we just fire all of marketing?
And very well be experienced at the same time?
Because at no, of course not. Right.
So you have to look for where the problem is.
So you start going like deeper and deeper metrics that get less
and less meaningful, so that you can get accountability.
But the accountability is not meaningful because it's four
metrics. Don't matter.
And everybody knows that. So they kind of have this like
back-channel of like, well don't worry about the metric.
So much worried about this other thing.
And it's like, how do we function at all?
Yeah. How do we get anything done?
But, you know, It's Tricky. It's very, very tricky and
ultimately this is why I've really gravitated towards
smaller teams is because when it's, you know, under 50 people,
you can just look at active users.
And if something's going wrong, we all know who didn't do their
job. There's only 50 of us about.
It's over seeable. Exactly, interesting.
Like I felt that not on an organizational level, but more
on a personal level in performance reviews.
For example, there were like well for next year, these
outputs could be your focus to blog posts to get two times
standing onstage. Like all these numbers from like
listen, if I could, if I could really focus on this, I'll have
it done in two months. Like I'm either going to wait a
year for a performance review. Like this is not what I want to
focus on because firstly I don't even like some of the stuff
that's in there, that's on a more personal level, right?
But secondly if there's an opportunity.
Unity that comes by, and it's really exciting to me.
Do you want me to pass it up because I'm focusing on some
kpis, and some metrics, or do you want me to be the judge?
Right? That's why you hired me to think
and be like, okay, I think this is more valuable than what,
wherever I'm focusing on next, right?
It's important versus output like those kpis are more so I'll
put their easier right metrics. This is yours.
This is yours way easier, but input is where the value is and
the hard part is doing it right. Yeah.
I think there's this this interesting discussion my My my
partner, Marissa more be has written about this.
The the value of outcomes? Yeah, versus outputs, right?
Where like if I write a blog post that is an output, it's an
artifact, I've created something.
If I write a white paper, if I give a talk, if I host a
webinar, if I rewrite a doc in the in the docs pages, each of
those things is a unit of work. It's an artifact.
It's a piece of output that I've created.
What did it do? Yeah.
Right. The outcome is what it did.
I you know got more people All to try this product, how doesn't
really matter. But what I the artifact that led
to that outcome was a blog post in this case?
Yeah, or it was a video or it was a conference talk or it was
something completely different. But we get so focused on
measurable, which means artifact.
I need to be able to weigh what you did.
Yeah. And say you did a good or a bad
job because the outcome right like measuring customer
sentiment. For example, like I'll give you
a really good example, that happens.
All the The time in, in developer tooling there's a huge
tug of war over. How to shape the conversation
around web development, right? Each company wants to shape the
conversation in a way that leads to people thinking that their
tool is the right tool, right? So, you know, if you're one of
the big cloud providers, you're trying to convince the whole
discourse to talk about, why going to the cloud as the right
call, if you're, if you're selling server racks, obviously
you're going the other way. Way.
Yeah. And so the the sort of
tug-of-war here is as someone who works in developer
experience, or someone who works in developer marketing, your job
is to affect the conversation. You are trying to make the way
people talk about web development shift, How the hell
do you make that a metric? Yeah, right.
You can't. So instead people say well do
these SEO articles but that doesn't matter if nobody
searching for the terms, right? And so instead, what we need to
be looking at is like customer sentiment, you need to be
looking at usage of key phrases, you need to be looking at like
what's the message we want people to repeat and how do we
make sure that we repeat it enough?
That it can be something that people pick up and say?
Yeah, right because like repetition is so important when
you're trying to change a conversation And and if you look
at the way the culture shifts and changes over time, it's not
it's very rarely instant. It's usually a subgroup of
people who has influence over culture starts using a phrase or
a word or an idea or concept and through repetition, it starts to
move out into their concentric Rings, Where It Starts
influence, more people and then by the time it finally hits, you
know, me or my grandparents. And we start using that word or
phrase, it's no longer. Cool.
And there's another group that's that's causing settlement.
Right. Yeah, but that's the same thing.
We're trying to do. It's the same, as you know, when
New Slang comes in, we're trying to do the same thing when we're
talking about server-side rendering, or when we're talking
about using react server components, or when we're
talking about resume ability and apps, like if you've never heard
any of these terms, don't worry about it.
But these are the, these are the sort of things that that were
each group of web developers is trying to convince all the other
web developers that that's the right thing.
And if we agree with them, and we change our world view, To
include that as like, part of what we're arguing for, we are
more likely to use the tools that are built for those things.
And so each of these people works for a company and they
want you to pay that company because that's how they get a
paycheck. Yeah, right.
And we can say that they're not marketing that they're authentic
because they're developers but I mean come on we all have to eat,
right? So I don't know, I get a little
annoyed when people say it's not marketing, it's like the
marketing you're talking about, you're trying to convince
somebody to use a thing when I tell you to go to my favorite
restaurant. I'm selling that restaurant to
you. Yeah.
When I tell you to use my favorite tool, I'm selling that
tool to you. Yeah, it doesn't mean that I
don't believe in it. It doesn't mean that I'm trying
to like shill or it like con you into using something, but I am
absolutely trying to change your mind.
I'm trying to influence you to go and use the thing that I
like. Yeah, that's not a bad thing.
No, it's not a bad thing at all. That's just how Humanity works.
That's culture. Exactly.
But it going back to the metrics thing, can you make culture a
metric it? Because that's the actual value.
That's the outcome. You want you want a team that
Has the ability to influence culture and when you see a team
that's really good at it, you watch it happen.
You can watch a really effective marketing team or developer
relations team or you know, with with you no more macro.
Things like apple, apple will completely change the discussion
about what a mobile device should be.
Or what? Hardware should be present on a
computer. Yeah, and then we all talked
about it like we can, it's obvious.
Yeah. Like, who like which one of us
cares about having three camera lenses on her phone, but I
guarantee you were asking about it when We look at the
comparison between an iPhone and a the latest pixel.
Yeah, right. We're looking at like which
lenses which which thing about I don't care.
No. Give me one good lens.
I'm super happy. I don't need the macro in the
wide angle and the whatever else is happening.
Like one good lens is fine. That's, it's a phone.
I don't know, exactly. But by being very good at
influencing Culture, by being good at saying the things that
cause other people to pick them up and repeat them.
We we make that a thing that we have to discuss in a much more
negative way. Right now we're watching this
with the, the the trans right stuff where people have repeated
it as if it's a problem. Yeah, which it has not been will
continue not to be but enough people are saying it with a high
enough rate level of repetition that people are starting to go.
Wait do we need to worry about this?
And then they pick up and they start engaging with the
conversation which makes it a conversation which allows people
to make like actions that were in.
We're seeing all this legislation that never would
have flown two years ago because they were able to influence
Culture by raising these repetitive arguments.
That don't make any sense, but we're able to influence the
conversation. Yeah.
Right. So this is the sort of thing
that like that's the evil application.
The the positive application is trying to make people's lives
Easier by convincing them that a thing is worth looking into.
You know, and I think that we see that with a little bit of
the discussion around climate change or around like using
better developer tools like hey you don't need to run your own
server in your basement, you can use This Cloud hosted thing or
instead of confetti, I don't know, instead of configuring
kubernetes yourself, use a tool like render a fly that will do
it for you. Will, you know, based on a git,
push those, those sorts of conversations of, those are a
positive application of this cultural shift.
We're shifting to serverless, we're shifting to cloud-hosted,
were shifting to, like, config over like building yourself,
right? Each of those things is what the
company wants their team to do? That's the outcome, they're
after, hmm, right. And and you know, in any of
those examples that's the outcome, whichever person is
doing that thing, that's what they're after.
Yeah, but that's not the metric they had I know I guarantee it's
not the thing that's going to show up in their performance
review. Yeah.
And so and I think that's how all these teams are losing these
great. Like you have these Stellar
developer relations teams and they just slowly break apart.
Yeah. And I think it's because they're
not measuring the right things are they're going to, you know,
the Microsoft had this unbelievable developer relations
team and it just kind of slowly. Integrated over time like that,
all of them have left and not for any bad reason.
They just kind of all drifted away, moved on to their next
adventure. But I would bet that it was
because they weren't they weren't incentivized to do the
things that would have gotten outcomes.
They were probably measured on and I don't know, this is his
conjecture but I bet they were measured on things like you know
how many conference talks did you give?
How many badges did you scan and conferences?
How many articles did you write stuff?
That's output. Yeah, and it just doesn't
matter. No, nobody was measuring like
hey, did you change the conversation?
Like when did we Art thinking, Microsoft was a good company.
Again, we all shift the like, you know, if you look back what
15 years? Yeah, people Microsoft was a was
like a, the butt of a joke. Yeah.
And all the sudden it is absolutely the most competitive
space to be right now. Like they're killing it.
It's everywhere. Who change that comp.
How did they change that conversation?
That's a good one. The interesting thing is like
outcome if it happens in a successful, that's when we
noticed, that's when a general population knows Apple,
Microsoft they all have Successful outcomes.
Mmm, but if that's your metric and it doesn't work, then what
is what is wrong, they're right. And I was like, maybe maybe we
shouldn't measure, like output or even outcomes, right?
Because you're working towards a bigger goal.
But even from a personal point of view, I want to know if I'm
doing well, right? If I'm having impact, if I'm
even contributing, if I'm working on something, which I
don't think contributes, I don't want to work on that but if I
still work on something, which I think might contribute, I would
like some confirmation. So of clarification on that some
Ation so measurement. I think from a personal
perspective is still valuable, right?
You won't feedback in the way that you're interacting, so you
can do better in the future. Also, with regards to your work
output, yet the hard part is you need a certain Vision, right?
Because if you're really focusing on outcome you must
have a vision of what you're putting in that will result in
that outcome. Right without a vision.
What are you even doing? You're just working on a thing.
You hope something might change. Rope is not a strategy.
Basically, yes. And that's the heart, but I
think like, if people are let go that are working on more more
long-term outcomes, because short-term is more easily be,
how do you say that more easily, more easily?
Measurable my English escapes me sometimes, but I think, for the
long term, it's hard. Right?
Because you really need someone that believes in, you, you need
an advocate, you need a cheerleader, basically, some of
the believes in what you're doing that will have outcome for
the future. Like the most simple example, I
can use this podcast, right. Mmm.
It's super high over and it is marketing, right?
Because my company sponsors it. It's marketing towards the
pockets in and of its own. Right?
Has solid content that is the priority that is number one
without solid content. I wouldn't want to do this yet.
It is a certain aspect of marketing.
How do you measure it? Like listeners interaction?
It all contributes, but does it really does it really people got
into this company because they think the content creation side
of things and the fact that we're investing in this is
really Cool. That's another metric yet.
That is not necessarily the input that I'm giving.
I'm focusing on the quality of the conversations, the content
that is actually out there and the whatever outcome it.
Maybe that might not even be the Focus, right?
I'm just enjoying the ride. And if people are listening, I'm
so lucky that they are basically.
Yet people find their own metrics and they're like, okay,
maybe we should focus on this, or maybe we should focus on
that, and I'm like, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of
things. With this small type of example,
for me, the outcome, Um it's just I'm having fun doing it
well and I think when you, when you look at what good marketing
is, it's it's the sort of thing that people want to participate
in. Yeah.
Right. Like you use C over, you know,
the last year's there are these things that kind of became
cultural moments that were advertising like in traditional
advertising you look at you know, commercials And for when I
was a, when I was younger, the the Super Bowl, the American
Football Championship is like, would these commercials would
come on and then people would quote them.
I mean, people still quote them 30 years later are amazing and
and it's these sorts of things that they kind of inform and
drive culture in a way that that allows people to have shared
cultural connection. You know, like if I don't know
if this one made it across the ocean but like If I walk up to
just about anybody over the age of 30 in the United States and I
go what like, they know exactly what I'm referring to.
Yeah, right. A little bit and and it's just
the it's this very interesting thing where you you want to make
something that people want to participate in.
Yeah. And the great thing about
working in this industry is that we're giving people tools and we
can find ways to apply those tools that let people
participate. The the internet is inherently,
A participatory medium. Yeah, the best way to experience
the internet is by putting something into it, right?
And we lost a little bit of that.
When when we moved away from everybody had their own website,
two more of these. These sort of they're not even
Walled Garden. So much as they are just like
common Gardens of her Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Tick
Tock where you you go and you use their presentation and their
their reform. Yeah, their platform and their
presentation rules and guidelines, you know, when you,
when you You tweet, you do something different than you
would do if you were going to blog.
Yeah. And one of the things that that
but I mean it kind of works in both ways because one of the
things I really miss is in the in the early 2000s, when
everybody had their own blog, there were really distinct
Styles like it. Incredibly diverse ways of
blogging that weren't really like people just did weird stuff
and they were it kind of into whatever they were into and it
was really fun and some people would do like custom interaction
Our blogs and they would style them up and really silly ways
and, you know, good or bad, right?
But it was different. It was very interesting and that
drove people to go. Look at the way that the web was
being created. Now on Twitter, You Can't
customize the way the Twitter looks or present, you can't make
it more interactive or less interactive.
But people are finding ways to abuse the medium of Twitter.
They still do is you to do things.
You know, you see meme formats on Twitter, you see, little
Snippets of language that allow people to kind of Riff on a
cultural Text and that to me is also really, really fascinating.
And so what I'm always interested in is how how are the
tools that were using shaping our subculture and if we're
working in devtools you know the we see they're like really colty
subcultures and I'm not going to name names or anything but like
you see groups of dabs that are very much like use my tool or
else you're wrong. Yeah and then you see the really
creative subcultures like this one.
I will name Because it's incredible.
But like if you look at what the G sap Community is doing, or
what the like the shaders, there's this thing called Shader
toy, which is sort of like codepen for for web GL shaders,
okay? And it's just people out there
being weird, incredibly weird. They're having fun.
They're sharing things with each other there.
It's like one of the places where people who miss the old
web can go, be weirdos together, gotta write code pain is the
same where people go, they build a little thing and they share it
with their friends and you can go browse the front page of code
pain and just see CSS experiments and like interesting
little things that people are doing and it's just a good spot
to go get inspired about what you could do on the web.
Yeah. And I, what I want to see is how
do we take that, that sort of cultural discussion and turn it
into something that actually help?
Like, how do we get companies to stop?
Trying to get me to attend another webinar, right?
And instead, how do we get them to start thinking about what,
like, how do they inform the conversation?
Influence a conversation participate in the conversation
in a way that doesn't account to like crashing a Discord server
and just spamming it with links to their next webinar.
Yeah. Right.
Because we all like, I'm sure that it must work or they
wouldn't do it but oh my god. Do I I just I vastly prefer when
somebody from the community works at one of those companies
and is just doing cool stuff. Yeah.
And then they invite you to come, do cool stuff with him and
we've seen really good examples of this where people put
together a little Projects of like, hey, like Lynn.
Fisher is one of my favorites in this space because she's always
doing experiments with CSS, okay?
And she does, every year, this thing called div Tober where
once a day, she has a prompt and she'll make a little CSS.
Illustration around the prompt each day and in October, well,
and she just invites people to do this with her.
And so you get this big collection of people who have
some spare time and want to play and so they all play together
and they use this set of constraints in this.
This set of Prompts to build art together on the web or hack
Tobar Fest is another good one, where it's gotten a little, a
little controversial. But in its early days, hack
Tobar Fest. Was this thing that digitalocean
would do, yeah, where they encourage people to contribute
to open source and by doing that you could earn a t-shirt, right?
And so it was this for them. It's a big marketing effort.
They're spending, I don't know how much money to print
thousands of t-shirts. Yeah.
And they've got to do bunch of advertising around it and all
that, all that they're doing. Design work and everything but
for the community you get to go out and build a thing for
open-source. Not for digitalocean.
Yeah. And just by participating in
open source which is maybe hopefully something that a lot
of developers want to do anyways.
I should really get involved. I just don't really know what to
do. I don't know how to do my first
pull request, whatever it is. Oktoberfest, gives you a great
excuse it gives you a great community support system, an
incentive to go out and do that thing that you were probably
already thinking in the back of your mind.
I should go and do And so much Goodwill rubbed off on digital
ocean because of that. Yeah.
And I mean it rightfully so all's.
Yeah, right. Yeah, right.
They were doing this big thing. Yeah.
And like any system it gets a little too big and it starts to
collapse. You have to figure out what to
do instead. Sure.
But how can we do, how do we have more moments like that in
our industry instead of you know more advertisements for
webinars? Yeah, I and I feel like that's
that's sort of what I'm trying to do with this.
This new thing as I'm Trying to push this more toward like
engaging media. I don't want to go out and make
yet another ad. I don't want to host yet another
webinar I want to make TV like, can we make a reality TV show
about businesses? That went online during the
pandemic and didn't have a lot of money to do it and their
website sucks, and they're getting their their lunch eaten
by Amazon and they need someone to come in and help them make
their small retail business competitive.
Yeah. Right.
That sounds like such. A fascinating show to me.
I would love to watch that. Right, let's go make that show.
I can like I can make that show if a company wants to do it or
let's make the Great British Bake Off for nerds.
Let's make, let's make any any of these things you do.
Let's go make a documentary about the best code cities in
the world, right? All of these things are within
our reach and they would do a much better job of driving
culture. Yeah, then another webinar like
Grill and and like what a conference is going to cost you
a million dollars to throw Is anybody in show up as it's going
to be each company? Sends their Dev rels.
Yeah. And they talk to other companies
that have relevance and then do like, does anything happen or we
get in Leeds anymore? Because my experience at least
was conferences are really good for networking but I just wasn't
seeing the leads. Okay.
It wasn't leading to like actual business outcomes anymore other
than building relationships with other companies.
Yeah, really, really good for that.
So we do need conferences and I'm sure that there is like,
there's an Roi but it's certainly not what it was in the
2010s. Okay, it's just it just not the
same. Yeah, so we got to do something
different. Exactly.
So how do we reach more devs in a more engaging way that they
want to be part of? How do we make Game of Thrones
where every week, There's a new episode and people are talking
about and you're driving the cultural discussion.
Everybody wants to hey, what's going to happen next?
All I had this idea I'm doing this thing.
This is what I you know, we need it to become something that you
want to talk about. Yeah, when the, when the World
Cup comes on every year It dominates discussion.
Absolutely right. Can we do the equivalent of a
developer web developer World Cup?
We're at the thing. Everybody looks forward to and
it's a big event, you watch it with your friends and we all
want to discuss what's going to happen and argue about how it
went. Like, that's just such a fun
thing to do. I would love that.
Yeah, right. And we can make it, it's within
our reach. Now, we just need to, we need to
start thinking about media and marketing as that sort of thing
as opposed to, as opposed to Well our marketing budget goes
towards webinars. It goes towards conference
booths. It goes towards.
Whatever it is that we're you know paid ads.
Yeah that same budget can go so much further if we get creative
with how we apply it. Yeah I mean people Trend towards
more so the established right and I think it's if only has to
do with like in a human beings. Basically people don't like
change anyways but if we're looking for because what you've
described by companies investing and paying attention being
authentic, and Aging through the people that they have with other
people and it being resonating. Basically, that is a win-win,
right? Because a company invests.
Sure they have certain certain agenda they want certain
outcomes but through doing that through their people.
Also is there people want to do that?
They're engaging with the community that Community engages
back. Right then how do you say that?
That's energy. Their outcome might happen or it
might not happen. But the fact that something
beautiful happens, there is a win-win in and out its own
right. You plan to We'll see and it
might not grow immediately but at some point you'll have a tree
and you'll have a lot to thank for because of that you're
looking for win-wins and those are usually like there are
established when winds, I guess. But those limors on the
Innovation side of things Marcel in the chaotic rat urine.
Exactly like we mentioned before you're going from 0 to 1, right?
Basically and it's a hard thing. It's a scary thing, right?
Because you need a certain Vision, you need to be able to
invest and be fine with the risks involved.
Basically But when it pans out, you have something beautiful in
your hands as well and people talk about it, people know about
it. People like that's how you
create that, that culture shift, I guess.
And it doesn't have to be the whole planet that talks about
it, right? It can be smaller communities.
It can be in your city in your country, maybe even in your
problem. So I guess or continent that was
the, that was the next step messed that one up and that's
fine, right? As long as you keep going
towards your vision, you Measure to some degree, not only on
kpis, I guess, but you keep believing in it.
I think something will flourish at the end of it.
Yeah, I think, you know, we were talking about the kind of
concentric circles of culture and yeah, and if you think
about, you know, the the smallest concentric circle is
your company. And if you're running a company
that has a big marketing budget, does your team feel connected to
its marketing at all because the most important thing again is
repetition. Yeah.
Like, are we doing something? At our company that everybody
understands and believes in and can repeat, because they need to
repeat it enough that it escapes to that next concentric Circle,
which is the close the engaged customers, and then to the
Casual customers and then two people who are customers at all
and that sort of discussion. That's, that's how we drive
cultural change, but it has to be something that that people
can really get excited about. And the way that you make
something exciting, is you make it fun?
Yep. You got to make it something
that people want to participate in and they look forward to and,
you know, you can do this in a lot of different ways.
One of the things that I saw in it was like 2014 or so is IBM
set up. This thing called IBM design,
they realized as a company that their ratio of designers to
Engineers was like criminally low.
They had it was way too few designers so they decided they
were going to fix this and so they set up internally, they
redesigned a couple floors of some of their buildings and made
a moral start. Abby, you know, like lots of
like they had a screen printing lab and they had reconfigurable
spaces that were full of white board, you know, bright colors,
and just something that looked a little less button-down than IBM
was used to. Okay, and they started
recruiting into a boot camp. So, College grads people with no
experience, just a lot of potential, they would bring them
in for a boot camp and they would pay them to learn to
become ux designers, front, end, devs graphic designers.
And this created this sort of internal culture at BM, that was
so fun. And people were, you know, these
it was basically like kind of it was sort of a college style
culture where these were people who were, you know, they were
forming new relationships, friendships that have lasted,
you know, ten years later. I still know some of these folks
hang out also and they led to things inside of IBM that were
bigger than IBM design. So, I wasn't part of IBM design.
I worked closely with some of those teams.
Yeah, but I got to participate in a bunch of those things and
it really Really changed the way that I thought about IBM because
I'd always thought of it, as it's big blue.
It's very like business Consulting.
You wear a suit to work and that was not the IBM that I
experienced at all. It was very much like hoodies
and, you know, screen printing, we did posters at one point and
I remember one of my favorite things that I've ever done at,
as part of a job was, they did this internal sticker exchange
where anybody in the company, could sign up to design a
sticker, okay? And then you just printed as
many stickers as there were people in The Exchange. 50
people signed up, you print 50 stickers and you gave them to
the organizers. And then everybody got this
little packet of 50 unique stickers that will they will
never be parted again, and just like a fun little thing.
You can make it whatever you wanted.
So you got this really broad set of stickers and most of them
weren't your style, but it was still really, really fun when
you cool. Yeah, those sorts of things,
that's what escape to the cult. Like that led to people being
interested in working at IBM. Yeah, who would never have done
it before, right? And I think I would guess that.
Something similar happened at Microsoft when they saw their
big turnaround from being the company that that people would
say, like, oh no Microsoft to being the company now, where
they're like, they run how many devtools are Microsoft owned.
Yeah, so much our stack now, right?
GitHub vs code, all this stuff is powered by Microsoft.
Never would have seen that coming if you would ask me in
2008. Yeah, right around, like,
Windows Vista time. Right.
Or whenever that came out, I can remember.
But like, it's just very, it's fascinating to me that you, you
start with this internal campaign to change the way
people talk about the company. Yeah.
And you really do have to have a vision that you can be
consistent on, and you've got to be really clear on what it is
that people should say. And this is really hard for
leadership, incredibly, because as leader, you're always getting
new contacts, you're seeing new things, come in, and you want to
adjust and micro optimize. And oh well we should probably
clean up the marketing a little bit to deal with market
conditions. It shifted in you.
Oh Chad GPT is here. Let's wrap up the whole road map
and go all in on a. I you know and nine months ago
we were all ripping up the road map to go all in on crypto, in
nine months before that, we were ripping it up to going on
whatever the last thing was and that will keep happening, right?
Like, there's always going to be an exciting new thing.
And I, you can find a way to incorporate the exciting new
things without completely throwing away, everything that
you've been working on, right? And and to, That's the really,
really tricky part as a leadership team, as you have to
be willing to say no to so many good ideas to do.
The one thing that can actually be common of a culture to escape
and go bigger, right? Yeah, I think the kind of the
gold standard here is Apple because they're just, you know,
kind of revered for their design and advertising.
But if you look at each campaign that they run, it's like 6 Plus
months of them saying one thing. Yeah.
How many things does Apple have? How many products?
How many services? How many devices?
And each of those devices have how many features but they just
spent a number of months. Only talking about security.
Yeah, right. They could have talked about all
sorts of stuff but they only talked about security and that
was because they wanted to change people's perception of
what they needed in a phone in a service, right?
And they keep doing that, they're really, really good at
this, where they pick a campaign, they focus down on.
Just the one thing that they think can shift the way people
talk about mobile. Scizor about computers or you
know when they talked about their M1 chips.
Apple silicon. Oh, this is built for the
laptop. Specifically, we own it from
from Silicon to finish product. We built it exactly for you.
And everybody kept repeating that, and now everybody's like,
well, of course, I want them. This is the thing.
I mean, like, I never would have trusted a custom Prof course I
was gonna go with the Intel chip.
They say robbed everything. Right?
Somehow Apple did it. They completely shifted the way
that we talk about all this so companies need to look at that
Apple has way more features in way more products than the
average company. Yeah.
And they're focusing better than all of us and because of that
they inform the conversation and like you could say oh it's
because they throw billions of dollars but like IBM throws
millions of dollars in advertising and everywhere, not
influence a conversation at all. They just kind of show a farmer
next to a big crop machine. And say like, you know, I'm able
to do more with IBM and I'm like why?
Yeah, why would I use IB exam? I'm not a farmer.
Do I care? And then they show another thing
and it's complete. It's like somebody in a
spacesuit working with silicon chips.
And I'm like, okay, well, I'm not that person either.
Why do I care? Yeah, and, you know that they're
big and you know that they do a lot but you think of them as
being for other people. Hmm, apple is focused.
They tell you exactly why you individually are going to be
better off with this one individual feature.
Yeah. And then I'll go do my research
on what the rest of the Us but oh, I need more security.
I don't want, I don't want, but what was the thing they were
pushing? Like the don't let apps spy on
you that was their big thing, right?
Isn't that? You have to like, allow apps to
track now and that was a that was like a kill stroke of Genius
everybody. Right.
And all of us want. Of course I don't want me.
Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna go track meet right
and and we didn't realize that we just, you know, they changed
the conversation. We said I don't want to be
tracked here, Apple track me, you do it?
It's a it's a weird thing, right?
There's a lot of facets that go into that but what apple offers
is a win for someone, right? It's like when you have
relationships like talking about having an emotional bank
account, right? Someone cancels on you.
Last minute when someone changes plans, when someone's not really
reliable, those are all subtractions from your emotional
bank account. And at some point, you're like
a, this person is so much in the - I'm not really inviting them
anymore, but when someone could tributes, right, you have to
contribute as a friend with, in a relationship As an
organization, someone puts a link to their marketing page or
their website. Like this is just a link but if
someone engages in that conversation, tries to figure
out what your problem is and then solves it with what they
offer. That's what Apple does.
They change the narrative and they bring the solution you
like? Yes.
I want this because the narrative the thing they've been
honing and focusing on. That's obviously, then the
conversation. And then their solution is also
not only the solution. You'll see because you'll be
like, ha, this is the thing in this is this is I think In the
part where the industry like the web industry is disdain for
marketing. Yeah, holds us back so much
because if if we look at what Apple's in everybody's like oh I
want to be Steve Jobs. You know, you've got companies
like straight-up mimicking, Steve Jobs now.
Yeah and they all want to do this until they get to the
marketing part and then like well we don't want marketing, we
want authentic marketing is evil, then tick engineering and
then they just say well we have the most points of presence.
We have the we have Have the most resiliency, we have
whatever. And I'm like, okay, well I've
never really had a problem with points of presence.
I'm not even 100% sure. I know what those are.
Yeah. Or somebody says like our
databases like acid compliant, I'm like, you got explained that
a thing that do I do? I need to worry about acid now
like like the chemical and then they go back and focus on the
metrics, right? These are these are right tricks
but but if you look at what apple is doing, they're saying
like this new feature which is anti tracking Or this new
feature, which is a higher quality lens on a camera,
they're not going to you and saying, we've got the most
megapixels. Yeah.
Right. Because nobody liked women, who
cares? If it's 80 or selenium, but
there's such a point of diminishing returns on like
number of gigabytes and the phone or number of megapixels in
the camera. We all know we want the most,
but we don't like we don't, I don't know if you tell me that
you can give me 32, GB versus 64 GB.
And I started doing the math. On how many songs Is and then I
realize that I use Spotify anyway so I don't need to store
songs on my device anymore. Where's the edge?
I need any of this, like I can deal with 16 gigabytes and like
it's all in the cloud, right? And and so APPL realizes this
and they say, okay, we had a market.
This we got to make this a feature that matters and they do
that by going back and thinking about the problem that they're
solving now. I don't necessarily think that
they know what problems they're solving when they start building
the feature, I have a I have a suspicion.
Ian, that Apple just like every other company out, there isn't
pumping out features because they feel like they got to pump
out features, right? And internally is probably
complete chaos, but their marketing team is smart.
So they look at the features that are coming out and they
don't just immediately blast it out.
Like, we got the most megapixels, they go.
Okay, why would somebody care about a phone?
Yeah, right. Why would somebody care about
having better pictures? And then they go and they do the
the marketing campaign. I'll tell you who did a great
job of this recently was actually Google.
Okay, so Google launched. New camera that had a sensor
that was actually good at capturing darker skin tones.
Yeah. What a narrative.
Holy crap, like to take an entire group of people who are
used to their cell phone photos being too dark.
Yeah. Can't make out who they are.
If the light's not perfect, they just kind of Fade Into the
Shadows, right? And you tell them, we've got a
phone that's going to let you take photos that don't suck.
Yeah they're going to look like you.
What? A story exactly like.
And, you know, they could have just pumped that out as like,
better better color. Yeah, right.
And, and a bad tech company would have a company that
doesn't like marketing would have said, we have the truest
color spectrum, reproduction on the market, we've compared
everything. Like, we don't care, and they
instead said, what about this whole group of people who's used
to their photo sucking? We should go tell him.
Yeah, right. And then all the people who care
about that sort of stuff, even if they haven't, like, you know,
I was like, oh maybe I should get a Google phone because there
Paying attention to this group of people.
Yeah, right. It's a narrative.
They managed to tell a story that I cared about it.
Affects me if I've if I'm going to take pictures of my friends
and my friends have a darker skin tone, I don't want them to
hate the photo that I didn't look right.
All we have to do is work backwards and tell a good story,
but we go, oh, no marketing mu, it's hard.
Like people are used to, I think, linear thinking, and this
is more. So, out of the box, right?
With a marketing campaign, you're creating more solar
system and those byproducts you talk about that.
I want to be mindful of my friends, when I take pictures of
them, that was never the intent. But that is then the byproduct
of this system, you've built around whatever you're trying to
do. Right now is Will dabble they
didn't tell me that night. Didn't say like, hey you person
who's never had this problem, think about your friends, but
yeah, because I saw the marketing and then I thought
about the fact that like, I have taken selfies with friends in
bars and like they disappear. Yeah.
And I'm like, oh, that sucks. I wish I was better at taking
photos, but it wasn't the photos.
It was the sensor, right. Google just told me how to solve
that problem. So, use a sensor that is
actually aware of what somebody with brown skin looks like and
takes a photo of them instead of optimizing for white skin, which
is what most of them do their, they're looking for, like they
trained on. On white faces.
Yeah. And that's why they look good.
And so Google did the work and then they told me that they did
the work and now I can make a choice to do something better.
Yeah. Right.
It's such a brilliant way of approaching the problem, and
they didn't, like, it didn't change the way they did
engineering. But I'm sure that somebody was
thinking about this, like, in and pitched it in product is
like, hey, we should get better this.
So I don't want to take away that that work.
But on the marketing side, If we discount that effort if we
discount, the story that were telling and instead we just go
for the features which is what I think.
So many of us do. That's why we go to webinars,
come learn about how we get the most rows of data per second or
whatever it is. I don't write, unless I have
that very specific problem which is honestly why I think so many
of these companies are are doing a million webinars.
They do a Ultra feature specific webinar.
Yeah, to catch the 30 people who have that Ultra specific problem
at that. At exact moment in time and that
works like if you are currently in the process of micro
optimizing your database because you're seeing bottlenecks,
you're going to be looking for the company that's advertising.
You know, the supplies in your database for bottlenecks, you're
going to owe perfect. That's what I need.
But so many of us would benefit from that but we don't know
what's our problem. Yeah.
So if instead, you can tell me a story that helps me understand
where I am and I go, oh, I see myself in this story.
And then they say and then this thing happens and you don't like
it you go. I don't like that.
Go and you can solve it by doing x y z and you go.
Okay, I'm going to do that and they go great will help you now.
Perfect. I don't know how to do it.
I'm going to call you. It's and it's not really that
different from saying we can do the most right to per second.
Yeah, it's just taking that moment to contextualize it and
not getting feeling icky because we're telling somebody a story
about themselves and oh well we don't Market, we just talked
about features. Yeah, there's there's there's so
much potential here to just be thoughtful.
Be intentional to think about who were trying to help and then
just Be patient enough to write a story about how we're actually
helping them. Instead of just saying, like,
well, you're smart, you're an engineer.
You'll figure out what this esoteric set of features means.
Yeah, interesting. I mean, looking back on
products, right? It's been a while since a new
product launched, and you're like, okay, this is truly
Innovative. Now it's more of the same more
features but the things that stand out are the ones that have
that narrative, write stories are things people, remember,
that's just it if there's no story behind it and you have a
bunch of metrics. Don't really resonate.
So the thing you have to focus on then, even if you're a
technical company, right? You have probably a bunch of
competitors unless you're truly an Innovative space but that's
really hard. Then you have to establish
yourself. What is the difference, right?
What makes us more unique and if you focus on the numbers,
they're going to be like well what's the difference, right?
What's the difference between a six and a five or sixty?
And a 55 people don't really care, right?
At some point, they'll be like, oh, it's the same.
I'll go with the cheaper option, right?
But if there's a narrative behind, Find that.
Why that 60 is better than that. 55 people be like yes because
that's what we're aiming for, right?
That solves my problem. I can see I believe it.
This is what we need, right? That is where your difference
will be. And, and this can happen in a
way, that's not even, like, very polish marketing.
I'll give you a super concrete example of a time that I
willingly parted with double the money for no reason.
Okay. I was looking for microphones,
right? And I had looked up the specs on
these different microphones and and you There was this one that
was usb-powered, it was going to be great at did everything that
I needed. And then there was this other
one that was Excel are powered and it required this extra
device. I had to plug into and I needed
all this extra gear to make it sound good and I watched a
YouTube review and somebody just told me like okay well this is
me talking into this mic. Yeah.
And you hear how good my voice sounds.
Okay. Now this is me talking to the
other cheaper Mike and it sounded thin and I was like, oh,
I don't want to sound like that, right?
And she is, it's just this little thing, right?
And, and it made a huge Oommen connection to me because when I
was looking at the specs of the Mike.
No, I don't know about dynamic range, or high pass filters or
like academically. I understand them.
But I'll tell you what, I can't do is translate those specs into
what it sounds like. Yeah.
Right. And so the, in the same way that
watching a mic review on on YouTube, is going to really
drastically influence, what I choose for a microphone because
I want the best sounding one. I can afford and if I can hear
people, speaking into all the same mics that I'm looking at,
Right now and I go. Okay, this is the one that's the
most money I can afford to spend and it really doesn't sound
better than this one. That's two-thirds of the money.
I'm going to buy that one or you're going to hear a real
difference and you go. Okay, well that one is worth the
money because it's you, it's like listen.
Yeah. Right.
And I think the same thing happens with with devtools and
is one of the reasons that I'm steering more into video, is
that when I read, you know, if you read a tutorial, typically
what you'll see in a tutorial is the polished outcome like
everything went right. Right, in a written tutorial.
Yeah. And in a livestream, you don't
get any of that. You get the really rough.
Like, okay, I'm logging into the service, I click this button, I
don't know, what do I click? Where's the menu?
All you see these struggles, right?
And you can really feel the difference in a polished
product. That's really going to solve the
problem. I have versus one that I'm kind
of wrestling into submission to do what I needed to do.
And you can make videos that are polished that have that same
sense of like well okay well here's me speaking into the good
Mike and hears me speaking into the one that doesn't do what I
needed to do. We can get that same sense of
like oh my goodness this is so much better when we watch
somebody demonstrate Tools in an authentic way.
Yeah but with a little more intentionality around the story
you're trying to tell like I can't just you know give you the
if everybody just does the getting started.
It's not a comparison. I can't look at you know, the
getting started of this tool in the getting started this tool
which are completely different and say well this one clearly
feels better than the other ones.
No, that's one had better writers than this one but that
doesn't really help me. I want to build the same project
with a couple tools and and feel that difference and you know
that's one of the things I love so much about the the job I'm
doing now is that that kind of is what I'm doing most of the
time, but I feel like company should steer more into this and
really start to You know, why do people watch hundreds of hours
of YouTube around Niche interest?
Why are people watching like 12-sided die comparisons?
They really like, there's no way there's no way that there's a
difference between 12-sided die as long as they're the right
shape. I have to believe that color.
I know I'm wrong. Yeah, I know if I got into that,
somebody's gonna tell me that the composite material of this
one is better than whatever it is and I'm gonna buy it.
I'm gonna end up getting that, you know what I mean?
It's this is the world we live in now.
We're watching. Tic, toc were watching YouTube
where we're really, we're relying on other people to tell
stories and we rely on the the high dollar amount stories like
the Apple advertisements, and we rely on the zero dollar stories.
Like somebody talking into a microphone.
Yeah. But we have to be ready to tell
those stories. We can't keep running the same
Playbook that worked in 2005 because it's just not it just
the world shifted. We're just not there anymore.
More. Yeah.
It's it has to do with a lot of
things. I feel like, like if I look back
at what I own, I'm a very simplistic on a guy.
I don't own a lot of stuff, but the things I own.
I hold a lot of value in not because of the price, I paid,
some of them are really cheap. Even I have a water bottle, but
it has traveled to countries with me and I'm very fond of
that part of because of that, right?
I don't listen to a lot of music, but the music I listened
to our Japanese songs, because I used to watch anime.
Those songs came back in there, and Remind me of a certain time
period of a certain way they made me feel and if I have you
listen to them, you can be a, put the hell is this or even
friends with my they don't? They don't understand.
Nor will they write? It's my personal experience with
this kind of thing. And with the two we're using, or
tools were using, it could be the same, right?
It could be the first thing, someone taught me when I got
into my first developer job, right?
Or in operations, these were always the things we use to hold
value in them because of that, right?
I have a relationship. I have a sense of trust.
Just with them, when to change that narrative to do it
consciously, first of all, very hard.
But secondly, it's going to be very powerful.
The only reason you got that microphone and you remember that
story because someone told it, right, you didn't make that
exactly and so much of our experience.
Now, depends on stories, there's so much more information than we
can ever actually assess. Yeah, right.
So we're relying on recommendations, were relying on
people that we trust and typically, we don't have subject
matter experts as close friends. So we rely on Roxy's.
We rely on Experts and that's why we see in the web
development Community. This sort of inner circle of
respected, experts, that kind of make the call on how the
conversation goes. Yeah, and that's not necessarily
a bad thing, I mean it can be a bad thing.
But generally speaking were Outsourcing our trust because I
don't have a good friend who owns all the microphones and can
let me try them. Yeah.
And not everybody has a good friend who works in in webdev.
Who can show them how all These tools weren't yeah right.
And that is the space that we can kind of fill.
As companies is like go out and work with the same way that
these microphone companies are absolutely sending microphones
to these YouTubers and saying like, hey here's a microphone
can you can you try it out and say what we like about it, what
you don't like about it and I don't think that reviews are
going to work really well in webdev but I think Bill delong's
will ya and I don't think I know I'm watching it happen right
there. There's a there's a lot of space
for just relying on people who have put the time in to learn
how to tell stories and a lot of times that story is I like to
build stuff come build with me. I that's the story I took,
right? But people are willing to show
up and learn what I'm working on.
Hmm. And I think that it's a good way
for somebody who's not like actively solving a problem to
not have to go and do all of this research and set up on
Their own. They can just kind of skim over
what's happening in the, the web dev landscape so they at least
have an awareness of what's going on.
That's a lot of what I do with a, with a lot of my like
microphone and Camera consumption.
I'm not actively shopping for cameras, but I kind of want to
know what's going on in the space because I do know that
there's a period, probably six months in the future where I'm
going to do a bit of an overhaul to my studio and I don't want
have to start at zero. Yeah so I'm just casually
consuming information about cameras and you know, few
minutes here there and with web dev I think we all kind of do
this. Thing, and it depends on, you
know, if your only source of information is take Twitter.
Yeah, you're getting a very particular flavor of information
versus if your only source is Tick Tock or YouTube or RSS
feeds or just the the issue log on the spec right there.
So we need to meet people where they are and not.
If you don't like that, everybody is learning about
their Tech on YouTube and you feel like it's not an accurate
representation. Don't try to get people to stop
watching YouTube. Just put an accurate
representation on YouTube. Yeah.
Like just find somebody that you like and have them make that
content, you know, hire them or contract and whatever it is.
But you we can't we can't keep pretending that the same things
that used to work or going to keep working.
We got to just kind of look at this new space and go.
All right. This is what the world is.
Yeah. How can we tell a better story
in it? How can we, you know, we're not
going to get people to stop telling stories.
We're not going to get people to stop trying to It's all their
friends to use the tools they like.
So how do we become part of that conversation in a meaningful way
as opposed to just being sad about it?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, one of the, the final
thoughts I had and it zooms in on one of the things you
mentioned is that I've seen. You do a lot of live streams.
You are a lot of things life, right?
Programming, I love pair programming, myself with other
people with my colleagues because I don't really care
that, they see that I make mistakes, might or they can
learn from my work, for I can learn from their workflow there.
I kind of thought process I think it's very valuable to do
so but to do that on a bigger scale for me and probably for
some listeners can seem kind of frightening, right?
Because you're allowing a lot of people insights in your
workflow. Also the mistakes in there, the
imperfections in there and it can be frightening to do so yet
I see you're having a ton of fun with it.
You're being successful with it it's very enjoyable to watch and
it's educational. Write the value that you add
there is valuable just by virtue of the amount of people
watching, right? They don't have to be even
actively developing right now, they could just be touching base
with whatever they need, for the knowledge aspect.
Just like you are with cameras and microphones.
How do you do that, man? Because how it sounds
frightening to me? Like, I do it with a one-on-one,
kind of relationship. It's a bit more intimate, maybe,
but the scale of which you operate is impressive to me, I
think it is a It's a learned skill, right?
It's practice. So my background, I mentioned
earlier, was in music. Yeah.
And one of the things that we used to do is we toured heavily.
We played about 200 shows a year for for a few years there.
And every single show, we set up a camera in the back.
And then we'd sit in the van and we would watch our performance
and make notes about what we did well, and what we didn't like.
And I'd never danced like that again, or whatever it is, right?
And so I got used to Seeing myself on camera, which I think
was, you know, that it takes time.
You have to learn to listen to your own voice and not cringe.
You have to learn to see your own face on camera and not feel
like it's somebody else. And yeah, so I got a lot of
practice when I was a musician of sort of seeing myself in a
performance setting. Okay, I also have always really
enjoyed performance. I like working with a crowd.
I like that, that sort of, interactivity of being with a
group of people. And, and I also, you know, I'm a
ham. I like being the center of
attention. So, Fun for me to do these
performances and that's something that you know I
started doing live performances a musician when I was around 14
or 15. Yeah.
And I did that until I was in my early 20s and then you know, I
started public speaking and in my early mid 20s and I've just
kind of always been in some form of capacity of being in front of
people, nice. The other thing is just finding
systems that are repetitive so that I don't have to make it all
up on the go. Do you know what makes a
conference or what makes a concert work is having a set
list. What makes a conference talk
work is having a slide deck and having written something and
what makes my live streams work is that I have a format.
So, every show, if you watch it, I have a few things at all, say,
verbatim in a few segments that I use every single time.
Yeah. And I do that to give me some
structure and some touch points. If I feel like the show is going
off the rails. I can move it to another segment
and kind of recenter everything and get it back on track.
And then I think the other big thing is just you, something you
learn as a performer through doing it over and over and over
again. Is that mistakes are really only
visible if you stop to dwell on them because I'm constantly
screwing up on the show. And sometimes I'll point it out
and I will like make a joke out of it or make it a teachable
moment. Like I just made a really common
bug. Let's talk about what I did and
why, or most of the time, I don't mention it.
I just fix it and keep moving. Yeah, right?
And and often times when people are watching, they're not,
they're not watching to like nitpick you, people are in your
corner. Nobody, you have to be a pretty
high level of Creator before you get people hate watching.
Yeah, right on average, especially early in your career,
people are watching because they think you have something to
offer and they are pulling for you there in your corner unite
and until you give them a reason, not to be, they'll
remain in your corner. And so what, what I'm usually
trying to do and this is why a big Focus This for me is like I
don't bash Tech, I shut it down, if it happens in the chat I am
always talking about these things as tools.
We're here to solve problems and we've got a big toolbox in any.
One of them is valid if it's being used in the right
application. And so there's not there's not a
right or a wrong way to build for the web, they're just
different ways to build for the web and all of them are good,
you know, in their own varying degrees of effective.
Yeah. Who cares?
Not the said we're just moving dots on a screen.
Like, it doesn't. So we can just have fun with
this. And, and so that's been a really
big Focus for me. It's not that serious.
These aren't life-or-death decisions.
You can build a great career, whether you're writing Java Ruby
PHP JavaScript whatever you want, it doesn't matter.
There's money out there. There's success and happiness
for all of us. If we're willing to go out and
get it and fighting over the tools or Or worrying about
whether you're using the right stack or whatever it is that it
just, it just doesn't matter like it.
That's all stuff that brings you down.
Yeah. And so I focus very heavily on
the building part. Like my job is, I've recently
started, you know, my Mantra here is like we're here to learn
grow and build together. Yeah.
Right. That's the plan.
And if we're doing any of those things, it's a great show.
Even if we don't even get the thing working, like we've had
shows where we get to the end of the street, and I'm like, well
this This one maybe didn't go the way we want.
So, you know, we'll post a working version later when we
figure out, whatever the heck we're doing wrong credible, and
that's okay because the the ID intention was to learn and we
learn. Don't do it that way.
I love about that is, it's incredible because I see the joy
you have in there. It's very conscious right?
You want to build people up from the ground up, or Midway up,
doesn't really matter. The thing is, it's it's positive
right? In any negativity.
With regard to the tools or even preferences, you have shut that
down, right? That's not what you're here for.
Basically, right, you're here for a, how do you say that a
certain Journey, a Learning Journey and you're doing it
together? Yeah.
And I think, you know, one important caveat I think is is
this isn't positivity with like a know with like no room for for
disagreement or anything. Yeah, because criticism is fine.
You can always talk about the strengths and weaknesses of
something. And I do think that there's a
there's a Toxic positivity where you go so far in One Direction
that like, you can't acknowledge anything is ever bad, and you're
just going to ending. It's all fine.
That's not what we're after here.
What we're after is recognizing that like, all of this stuff is
a big wave, right? And if we try to control it, if
we try to get it, exactly right. If we're trying to be perfect,
you can't do that. It's like trying to, you know,
squeeze water. You have to be gentle, you have
to cup your hands. You got to surf the wave.
Yeah. Right.
And it's always going to be moving.
It's always going to be adjusting the Things that are
true today. Will not be true in a few years
because technology will advance. There's no done in a technology
spares. No, duh, never know, right?
You never finish your just adjusting as you go.
And so the biggest career hack, the biggest happiness hack that
I've ever learned is to enjoy the journey.
You your learning because it's fun to learn your building
because it's fun to see something emerge from nothing,
you're you're doing web dev because it's Great to get paid
for something. That's kind of enjoyable.
I like doing puzzles. This is a puzzle.
I can get paid for. Yeah.
Right. And if we can really Embrace
that and embrace that we're not going toward a destination,
we're just trying to have a good time for as long as we're here,
that makes this whole thing way, less stressful and way more fun.
And it's just so much easier to be around people who approach
it, that way, right? Like, we're not looking at a
winner-take-all scenario that will be no ultimate winner of
the internet, right? And if there is, that's the only
way we lose. Yeah.
So instead let's embrace all these tools, all these people,
let's try them all. Let's have some fun and sure
we'll all end up with the things that we prefer and I've got a
stack that I'll reach for if I'm building on our own but never
going to say oh no, thank you. I would I'm done learning.
That'll be the end, probably, right?
Yeah. I think I for me, that is
that's, that's the end of learning is the end of
everything. Like, if I feel at any point
that I've hit the, I don't know the the Goal of learning.
Oh, I know everything I'm ever going to know, like that's it
for. What are you doing then?
Yeah. What I just sit quietly until I
die. That sounds terrible.
You'll know what to do. When you reach that.
I've really enjoyed this conversation, to be honest, like
I get little cues. When we're about 45 minutes in
those have long gone. This is this is solely the
longest. It was a really enjoyable ride.
This is also going to Mentally, I didn't tell you.
This, this is episode 100. So, cool gonna be our 100th
episode and it's also been quite a journey.
Like you mentioning, how you're getting more comfortable with
seeing yourself progress and be on stage and listening to your
own voice? Yeah, hopefully no.
Actually, hopefully, it's already gone.
I still look at myself. And I'm like, man, I look
sleepy. But I'm like, I look sleepy and
every episode. So should we serve we a
permanent thing right now. I guess now, this has been a lot
of fun man. Thank you so much for coming on.
On. Yeah, thanks for having me.
This is a blast, you know, some, I'm really happy.
You were just in the neighborhood I guess.
Yeah. Works out.
We cool. So we're going to round it off.
If you're still listening, check out Jason stuff.
I'm gonna put all his socials in the description below.
Let him know you came from our show.
And again, thank you for listening.
This is the hundredth episode. Thanks so much for tuning in and
we'll see you in the next one.