Hi everyone, my name is Patrick. A cue for today's episode.
I have my friend Lucas Montana over.
He's a senior Android developer over at Disney and we talk about
a lot of stuff. How Android development is
different from back end development, how his love from
content creation originated, and how he finds new ideas like
figuring out how Mr. Beast is going to do his famous tweet
giveaways even though the AP is on Twitter.
Sucks. Enjoy What?
What do you do at Disney exactly?
I'm a Android engineer. Android.
Yeah. And I looked up on LinkedIn what
you did previously and it's always been kind of mobile
development, no? Well, my background is from as a
back end, so I I yeah. So I started with VB6.
That was my first programming language and then PHP and then
Java. Then I bought my first Android
phone like in 2009, 2010 and then I switched to.
To mobile, yeah. Back then, yeah, everything was
app development. No.
People were like, this is the next big thing, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Like people wanted to put their
websites inside an app. Basically.
In the beginning it was like that, right?
So there was no market in Brazil in 2009, and I was learning to
how to code in Android in Java. So there wasn't, no, there was
no one hiring an Android engineer, right.
So I had to create my company like consultancy to create apps
for other companies. But most of people, most of
companies and clients, they wanted to put their website
inside an app. So in the beginning it was like
that. There was no like app, Let's
build the app. It's like, let's build what we
have on the web in an app. Yeah, yeah.
Was that the most of the client requests that came to you?
Yeah, yeah, right. And why'd you stop with your
because you said you built a company around this, I think
very early on when apps were kind of prevalent.
So you were even, let's say, on top of the game or ahead of the
game on that front. Why did you stop when it came to
kind of your own company and your own business?
I failed a lot, I think, yeah. So it was not not one company.
I think I started like three companies and all of them
failed. Yeah, Yeah.
So this first one, yeah, we, we didn't succeed to get more good
clients because that's a thing, right?
You need to get good clients. So yeah, we we got I think
shitty clients in the beginning. So it was very hard to, you
know, to to to make plans or to hire more people.
So we grew like to five to six engineers working with with me
and my partner and yeah, but then things got like a one
client didn't pay, you know so you have a cash flow problem,
you need to go back to the market start working again.
So that's what happened. That's rough.
Yeah. So in 2000 I think we, we
founded the company in 2011 thousand, yeah.
And then 2013 that's the third thing I think.
Yeah. I I had to go back to the
market, Yeah. Was that the period from 2011 to
2013? Did you start multiple companies
that in that period? Multiple apps, yeah, but below
this umbrella company, yeah. And then you continue with app
development from that point on. You didn't go back-to-back end.
Why? Why didn't you go back-to-back
end like? Because I feel like app
development was very much booming in exactly that period.
Why It was like this is the future, basically everything was
going to mobile and I feel like nowadays if I'm in public
transport, everyone is on is on their mobile phone.
So it's still very prevalent. Yet back in engineering and like
the web never went away. I feel like they're kind of,
yeah, either combining or it gets easier to go hand in hand
in that way. Yeah, I don't know why it didn't
go back, but I like the experience.
I I like the feeling of having created an app and then you see
someone using in their phone, you know, just like maybe like
the front end side, the client, the client limitation.
Yeah, I can see that they can do it.
But on my personal projects, like for the YouTube channel,
for instance, when I'm starting a project, a lot of times I go
back end. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, because your main. Are you mainly using Kotlin
nowadays or are you still doing Java?
I do Kotlin now, Yeah, right. Yeah, as an under right engineer
I do Kotlin. Yeah, and it is that.
I mean, can you do Kotlin for iOS as well nowadays?
Yeah, you can. You have Kotlin with platform
can be. Yeah, yeah.
Every name I think was KMM, but now it's KMP.
OK. Yeah, I've heard of KMM.
I didn't know about the name change, but do you do?
You're still focused on Android, right?
Yeah. Do you think platforms are
moving to a point where everyone's just gonna use
whatever language, whether that's React Native or Kotlin,
in that way and then develop for both iOS and Android?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think as long as we have Apple
being Apple, we are gonna always have two natives.
Platform 2, native platform, Android using Kotlin, iOS using
Swift. Yeah, because Apple is like a
closed system. So yeah, they they push back a
lot of things now in Europe not that much, right.
I mean until now every browser in the app browser in iOS was
the same was yeah, behind the scenes was Safari.
So if you download Chrome, Chrome or Firefox on your iOS,
it is basically Webkit from from from Apple.
Right. Really.
Yeah. I didn't know that.
So the engine is the same as Safari.
So that's why like if you do web progress like you can have that,
you cannot have all the features that you would get in underwrite
for instance. OK, yeah, but now in Europe they
need to comply some rules, right?
They can't do that anymore. Now yeah, now like Google will
be able to fully implement Chrome, so this is changing.
I never knew about that, actually.
I've never, I shouldn't say never.
Like, I've dabbled a bit with mobile development, a bit from
the React Native side, and I built kind of the back end,
let's say, for a later project, which was an IT project where we
had a lot of data and then we fed it to a React Native app in
that way. So I did stuff with
notifications and I was really happy to see that people already
thought of, OK, how do I send a push notification to someone and
it pops up and stuff like that, But what would you say?
It's like a big difference when it comes to mobile development,
for example, traditional web development or back end
development that way. I think the biggest difference
is that when you release something, it is released,
right? Like it is there in the user's
cell phone and you don't have any guarantee that the user will
upgrade or it will update your app, you know?
So if you ship a bug, you need to think like, OK, how can I fix
this? Yeah, because the user might not
want to update the app, right? So it can still be in a version
like 10 versions I go. So from the beginning when you
are creating an app, you need to think like, OK, how can we
enforce the user to update? So your app need to have some
kind of local logic to do that. Yeah, you need to also have of
course like versions on your APIs and config config files so
you can enable disable features on the flight in case the user
are using a feature that you don't want no longer support or
something like that. Yeah, you do those.
So those are dynamic configs. Then you don't ship them with
the app code. You ship the configs with the
app code, yeah, you can do like you can push code with rect
native for instance. Yeah but yeah on native we used
to native, I mean like coddling Java for Android we used to we
shipped the app with config like if else in the code.
So it will enable and disable based on the small feature flag
or. Yeah, I thought those would be
kind of dynamic because otherwise you have the same
challenge, right? If someone, let's say if you
enable a feature due to a feature flag, someone would
still need to update if it shipped with the bundle or
wouldn't they? What do you mean?
So let's say I have a new version and in that version my
feature is disabled. OK, I thought if you have a
dynamic config, you can just toggle let's say the feature on
and people don't have to update their.
Yeah, that's what happens. OK, in that way, yeah, that
makes sense. Yeah.
So you can do like even you can roll out the feature gradually
for 1% of the users. 5 percent, 10%, yeah, you can do
experiments, yeah. That's nice.
Do you do a lot of experiments on the app side?
Yeah. Cuz I have experience when it
comes to like AB testing on the web, is that easy to do on
mobile as well? Yeah, it is.
Yeah. Yeah.
So both rollouts as well as AB testing is all in there.
Yeah. Yeah.
And do you use those Disney? I don't know how much you can
talk about Disney specifically, but do they use that a lot?
I think I cannot talk that much, but yeah, they do.
Cuz yeah, you do that a lot. Yeah, that makes sense.
And a lot of like, I like that a lot of decision making nowadays
used to be OK market driven design.
We try and make a lot of assumptions and we test those
with the users and then we do features and now you have this
trend of OK, we do all of that sometimes a little bit more,
sometimes a little bit less. And then we actually see with AB
testing and experiments what actually hits.
Because I feel like especially with mobile and also on web, the
more features you build, First of all, your codebase gets very
complex and second of all, your velocity goes down because of
that complexity. And if the features don't get
used, they're just there and there might be either in the
way, especially from a code perspective, but from a user
perspective as well. So it would be best if we
removed them. But I feel like sometimes,
especially from the development side, we're just adding stuff,
yeah, adding and adding and adding until we say OK, it's too
slow or it's rubbish or code is outdated and we do it again.
That's like the cycle. It's crazy sometimes.
Like I feel like we we are always creating new frameworks,
new libraries to to use to have to be faster in deliver more
features and then you wanna buy a flight ticket and the apps,
the app keeps like restarting your whole search.
You know what I mean? Like you wanna you go to the
flow to buy a ticket, a flight ticket and then something fails
and they don't need to restart everything again.
That is the most basic feature on app.
Buy a ticket? Yeah.
So I feel like the, yeah, I don't know.
I have the feeling that the websites or apps, they are not
getting faster, you know? Yeah, I don't know if that's due
to more features or do they need to let me take a step back
sometimes on web and I don't know how this is on the app
side, but if we for example select a database or if we
select certain solutions, people like to compare speed right?
Because better is faster or faster is better when it comes
to kind of user experience and maybe even conversion.
But at some point I'm like, OK, how much faster do we actually
need it to be? Because when I'm talking about a
web page, I've built a web shop and that was like statically
rendered, a lot of it, very minimal JavaScript and that was
like super fast and I don't think we could get it faster,
but I didn't know if that was gonna make a big difference.
Is that for the app side? The speed really matter in that
way as well? Like, even those tiny, tiny
differences. Yeah, that's a good question
because I think that's the one of the most interesting thing
about working with apps, mobile apps, because you you have
millions of different devices and you need to support all of
them like a big company as Disney, we need to support all
kinds of TV's, TV box, Android or Fire stake from Amazon, so a
lot of different partners. So it's not about always like
your app need to be fast, but your app need to run certain
devices that have low memory, so you need to care more about
resource. Yeah, yeah.
How much of A hassle is that when it comes to actually
developing? Yeah, you need to the first
thing. Like if you wanna become like a
senior mobile engineer, you need to be good at profiling that.
OK. App inspection and just like
figure it out why your app's consuming that much memory or in
which thread it is running. Yeah, yeah.
Which is scheduler and so on. I didn't know about that
actually. That, that is, it makes sense
when you lay it out like that. Like there's just, I mean,
hardware has improved, but people still have old hardware,
especially when it comes to TV's.
TV's nowadays are cheap. Yeah, but people don't buy cheap
TV's if they already have ATV, especially if they bought it for
a hefty price, let's say years ago.
And then you have older hardware that runs on that.
Yeah, would you say like great mobile engineers also like think
about low level stuff like that? Yeah, they have to now.
I think so, yeah. So it doesn't matter if you
coding React Native, Flutter or Kotlin or Swift like.
You need to care about the resource that the app is
consuming, you know. Yeah, I wonder how I'm thinking
about, let's say I come from operations and in that way we
usually when there was new software, I had to test it and
back then I was working in retail.
So I actually had a physical test set up when it comes to
like registers and stuff like that, which I would patch the
software on and then I would see if I could scan everything.
And that would be like a more manual test when it comes to
mobile and especially when you talk about the suite and the
range of let's say TV's, Android phones, different versions and
what you need to support. How do you test all of that when
it comes to actually putting stuff to production?
Yeah. So it's very hard to get all the
device. Yeah.
So if you are like a freelancer, you won't have all the device
like if you work at Disney, Disney will have a lot of device
for you to test. But nowadays you can use also a
device in the cloud. So there are companies that
provide that you can run your tests in all kinds of device in
the. Cloud.
So that's nice. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. It makes sense that they would
kind of solve that solution in that way.
Yeah, even Google in the Play store they have with Firebase.
You can also run tests in the cloud and you can see yeah very
nice and you can do roll out in small percentage.
Roll out your app to 1% of the user base and check the logs.
Yeah. And do like a bubble roll out in
that way. Yeah.
Yeah, it makes sense. I do like the trend that.
I mean, I don't know how it is on Android cuz I have an iPhone
that my iPhone basically updates either stuff on the background
or really says, OK, now you have to update.
So then from a software side, we still built in the same check
that you said when it comes to OK, at some point we need to
force people to update. So it's in the software as well.
But at least from the App Store side, automatic updates just
roll out most of the time. Is that on Android as well?
Yeah, you can do that. Yeah, that's good, right?
Yeah, that makes it from a developer standpoint.
I think that's really nice to have.
Yeah, but there is a funny thing like that.
I am an iOS user as well, but I'm an underage engineer for
more than a decade now. But I use an iOS as well.
Yeah, why is that? You don't want the.
I don't know, but I have it tattooed in my arm as well.
Really. Yeah, just like a funny joke.
It's the first Apple computer running an Android.
Side of it. That's funny, man.
That's cool. I was wondering because you laid
out kind of this step in entrepreneurship that you've
made when it comes to kind of creating your own company.
I'm sure you made a lot of apps and you do a lot of like hobby
projects as well. But are you still thinking about
starting your own company down the line and doing that again?
Or what are you thinking when it comes to entrepreneurship?
Well, I think Content is the new app, right?
So in 2010 I launched my first app like what's the?
It was called Financial Specifies.
It's basically like a personal finance management app.
Yeah. And that went great.
So because back then people, they wanted to download the
apps. So like in two years the app
reached $1,000,000 and I was able to get some revenue from it
and have like, yeah, different source of revenue.
That's my first rule in life. Like you need to have more than
one source of revenue and I always did that inside project
into inside projects like apps. But nowadays like people don't
download app that much. Like if you are not having
dinner with a friend, you're not gonna say like, hey man, look,
this new app I download, no one, no one did that anymore.
Not anymore. It used to be like that.
It. Used to be like that.
Now people say like, wow, look, this new look.
How how funny is this 10 second video that I've have on
Instagram? Yeah, or this new AI stuff.
So yeah, that's the new app. Yeah.
AI and content. Yeah, and I know you're playing
around with that as well. Yeah, yeah.
So I think now my side projects are around content and I'm
playing with AI, but not that much.
Not that much, not. Yet I wanna see what happens.
Like when Open AI, they now have GPTS, right?
So they create the GPTS store. You can explore new GPTS.
So I launch two GPTS just to see what happens.
But no, people are not downloading that much or not.
They are not using that much, yeah.
It's not like the early days of the App Store.
No, Yeah, it's not. Yeah, that makes sense.
I like how you put it because I did use to like especially I was
younger. As a teenager I used to download
apps, many games, but also to see like OK what is out there
nowadays. No, I don't download stuff
anymore. Somehow sometimes there's one
app that all of a sudden all my friends then use, then I'm like
how how did this slip in? Like 1 is for example, it came
from the UK split wise where we went as a as a group on a
vacation and then people just pay.
You put it in the app and then at the end it breaks down the
split. But I don't know how that got
established. Let's say.
It's really hard, I feel like as an app nowadays to get that
popularity in. Yeah, yeah.
It's hard to to get traffic to the app.
It's not that much organic anymore.
Like as a YouTube I can launch an app and then I can maybe try
to drive audience to the to the load the app.
But if you don't have an audience then it's very hard to
to launch an app and get like $1,000,000 just because people
like and are sharing with their friends.
It's very hard to do that. Yeah, yeah, like that.
You said that it it does go hand in hand with the content side of
things. I do see a lot of let's say
content creators start creating and and expanding their revenue
stream, but also just their platform and their influence in
that way. Because if you have a a
community that's built around the content that you create and
you create more content in a different way like videos is not
just a a silver bullet. For example, I know a a person I
had on the podcast he's creating like this learning platform.
Where it's similar to league code but more for data science.
And he's really working hard on that platform.
And because he has an audience, he thinks this might be a great
fit for them to keep learning next to kind of the video
content that he creates. Yeah, yeah.
That's cool. So similarly, an app could work
in that way as well. But nowadays, yeah, I've always
thought it would be a cool idea to create apps or maybe even
like plug insurance. Browser Plug insurance are kind
of in the same avenue. I feel like I read these stories
on Twitter where people say I make so much money with browser
plug insurance and apps, and I'm like, is that still a thing?
But I'm happy you see it differently as well, that, yeah,
it's kind of not the main thing anymore.
You have to have stuff around it.
Yeah, definitely, Yeah. What type of videos do you like?
Content creation wise creating. Mostly about stuff that I'm
thinking, yeah. So sometimes I see a tweet and I
just like, OK, I think differently or I don't agree
with this and maybe I would mention that to a friend.
What I do is hit record and I mention to my audience.
That's basically it. Do you have an example of a
thing that you found on Twitter that was interesting where you
wanted to talk about it? Yeah, Most recently I saw the
Mr. Beast's tweet. You know, Mr. Beast, that Mister
Beast upload his first video, I think to X.
Yeah. And it reached like millions of
people. And then I think it was one week
ago, he said like, OK, I will share my revenue from this video
to 10 people. So.
You can retweet. If you repost my tweet, you are
in the game. I will randomly choose ten of
you. And I look at that tweet and I I
think like, OK, that's good, right?
I think I I'm gonna repost. They're not.
No. My friends will see that.
I wanna I want money from reposting a tweet.
So maybe I will not. But then I start looking like,
but this is very interesting. I will repost.
Then I saw like, OK, there are there are like 4 million people
that repost this tweet. Yeah.
And I start to think like, OK, how Mr. Beast will select and
people from 4 million people. So that was that hooked me like
OK, let's try to figure out how we can technically build a
script that will do this. Then I start creating content
around that. So I start a project to
implement how we can use a Twitter API to fetch this 4
million retweets and then select ten of them.
Well, yeah. So then, yeah, that was one of
the most recently thing that I found onto it.
That's a really cool use case. Yeah, because the Twitter API
has API rate limit. So the first thing is like you
have 3 tiers of API. Like as a developer you can buy
like you can use the API for free but you don't have access
to the retweeted by API. Or you can pay $100 monthly OK
to use this API, but you have API rate limits of five requests
per 15 minutes. Oh, no way.
Yeah, that's never going to work.
No, it will take me 77. Yeah, almost like 80 days to run
the script without considering errors or you know, Internet
issues. And then you have the Pro tier
that you would need to pay 5000 per month to Twitter to X.
It jumps up like that. Yeah.
Wow. To have 5075 requests for 15
minutes. It's not even that much.
No. And that means that if Mr. Beast
would pay the maximum tier to do this, it would take him five
days. Yeah, but he promised to select
them people in 72 hours. So I was like wondering how how
he's doing? Does Elon Musk send?
Open the gates. Open the like database or send a
file with everyone. So that was like what got me
interested to create this content.
So I will upload the video this video next week.
So there is also that you can do enterprise tier but you need to
filling up a form and you need to be already spending 42,000
monthly with with Twitter. I didn't know the numbers got up
that high. That is insane.
Yeah. And probably has something with
the rest of the enterprise tier. Maybe, yeah.
Or maybe a different way of doing.
Like maybe he's actually using the search API and choosing
based on time stamp. I don't know.
Here, yeah. Interesting.
I like that your use case. Some of the content creators I
see are like, OK, let's use this programming language and then we
make a calculator or we make something simple and they all
have the same type of projects, like a widget or a smaller app
that does something. But you're actually like, man,
the inspiration for your solution.
When you laid it out like that, I was like, that is very
interesting cuz I have no clue how you would do that.
And then you get those, let's say, functional constraints.
Your API sucks, basically, Or you have to pay thousands and
thousands of dollars. How do you do that?
It's fun stuff, and the trick part is that the API the the
pages they are tokenize it. So you cannot like from OK if
you have 100 because each page of the API will return 100
people, 100 registers per page. So you could basically have you
know that you have 37,000 pages or 40,000 pages for 4 million
retweets. So you could basically random
randomly choose 10 pages, right? And then you just do 10 fetch
and API and it's OK. But the the pages are tokenized,
so you cannot fetch like give me the the second page, give me the
page #30. Yeah, because you need the next
token. You need the next token, so you
need to actually fetch all the pages.
One by one linearly. One by one and you cannot, yeah,
you cannot do parallel, no. No, no, I was thinking I was, I
like thinking solutions also. So I was thinking maybe you can
do it parallel, but I'm assuming if there's a rate limit it's
based on the key. Exactly.
And I don't know if you can do multiple keys, but then the page
token that's like a you can't do much then you have to do it
linearly. Yeah.
OK, so did you end up solving this or this is like that?
Yeah, I solved it. I solved the fetching the the
40,000 pages so the script is still running, yeah.
It's running. I need to wait about 77 almost
80 days, but what I did to just demonstrate to the video, I
create a mock server and I set up a proxy a prox.
Using Charles Prox. So basically my script is
fetching, it's trying to fetch the data from tweet but my proxy
will redirect that to my mock server and my mock server is
generating fake pages. So just to demonstrate if the
script is working or not. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Otherwise it's it's within days you will either know if it's
right or wrong and then if it's wrong, that investment in days
you're not gonna get back. That's funny, man.
Do you like to come up with ideas like that?
It takes a certain way of thinking and to see an
opportunity there. I don't think everyone could do
that. I wouldn't have thought of that.
I didn't see the tweet, but I never wondered like, OK, how can
you do this? But you do.
Do ideas just pop up like that? Or do you keep a log of ideas
that you wanna execute on? Yeah, I keep a log of ideas, but
yeah, usually they come. Yeah, like that.
Yeah. Nice.
How big is your log of ideas? Like how many are we talking
about that are in there, you'd say?
Well, so I think one year ago I switched from talking about
random subject to react to content.
So my main content's like me reacting to an article.
OK. All right.
So that's the way we can have consistency.
So we, we post videos on Monday, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,
three days a week. So we have a format.
OK. So I will be reacting to
articles three days a week, but sometimes there are like this
tweet from Mr. Biz then. OK, it's interesting.
Let's let's put it in the pipeline too to deliver the
content. Yeah, that makes sense.
So so I have a road map of articles that I want to react
but I have this small projects that comes.
And when it comes to, let's say, the excitement, I can give you
an example of the podcast. This is my favorite part.
These are the conversations, is what I like.
I don't like doing the planning. I don't like doing the finding
of people, but I do that because I really enjoy this part.
I even like the editing part, but at some point it gets
mundane and it's like time heavy and the release part is like
more so the fun part. Then that's when you see it go
live, let's say. What about the video content
creation part? Do you like the most?
Do you actually like the research and review articles?
Do you like the shooting with the camera?
I like when I need to develop a project.
Yeah. Because also like one of the
things that I figure out early in in my YouTube channel was
that my content need to be, first of all, it needs to
entertain, but it needs, it needs to be a entertainment that
doesn't generate guilty in the audience.
You know, it can be that kind of video like that.
You watch the video, it's very entertaining.
But then you're like, oh, why I'm watching this.
It's just for entertainment. Like popcorn content?
Yeah, yeah, like the the audience needs to for me.
Like they need to finish the video with the feeling that they
learned something. And I think that when I found
something like this Mr. Beast tweet, this is the best for
these two pillars. Yeah, because it's
entertainment, but you also will learn something.
Yeah, Yeah. So that's what you like finding
those opportunities. Yeah, that makes sense.
That also makes sense with kind of your Android history, let's
say, because one of the things you said when it comes to why
you like Android development versus back end development is
making that difference for the end user in that way and it
shows in your content then as well.
I think so. I think it's genius because
everyone knows Mr. Beast, that example.
I love it. I'm going to check out the video
because I'm also interested. Yeah, Do you, when it comes to,
let's say, the technical side, do you experiment with different
languages? Do you like the technical stuff
as well? Because it feels like you're
very much solution driven. You like solving problems rather
than figuring out or playing around with the technical stuff.
Yeah, so I think it has been like a three months ago I was
like I need to learn REST. I think it's quite interesting
programming language, because I come from Java, so I hate
garbage collector. Yeah, but I also did some C, so
I hate my lock and having to unlock memory myself and think
about it all yourself. Yeah, yeah.
So Rust is just in the middle. So, OK, I need to learn Rust,
but I need a motive to learn Rust.
I don't like to go like, let's go to the Rust documentation and
let's do the hello world. Well, let's see an article about
how to build the. I don't know.
Calculator I calculate. I don't like to learn like that.
Yeah, I like to learn in a project.
So for this Mr. Beast project, I thought, OK, let's learn Rust
while I'm doing this. So, so yeah, nice.
That's how I learn new things. But it's not because of the
tech, not because of Rust itself, but it needs to be
combined with a project. Yeah, You find an opportunity, a
problem to solve and then use it as a learning opportunity as
well. Yeah, I think that's.
I see more and more like even my colleagues do that, like Rafael
that's listening, he also does that.
Hernani's another colleague, he does that a lot as well where
they first of all, they find a problem where they want to learn
something and they either create content through kind of that
learning and they talk about that or they create videos
similar to what you do when it comes to solving a problem like
that. And I think that's really smart
because you in parallel, you do a lot of things at the same
time. And I think it amplifies your
learning journey because you're not.
I mean, if you're starting out with Rust, especially, Rust has
like this huge learning curve. It's ridiculous.
If you create content on that and someone that has, let's say,
a few years of experience sees that they can also give you
feedback. It's like you're not learning by
yourself then because people, people can help you in that way.
If you're open to that because it can also be confronting,
yeah, have you gotten any feedback when it comes to your
code or the solutions in that way from the audience as well?
How interactive is that? Well for this challenge I chose
to do live, so it was like 5 private lives for my members
from YouTube membership program. So I did with the audience help
me in the chat also using chat DPD or that's nice, just like
regular how how I like what I like.
Like I don't like to to resolve the problem before going live.
When I'm doing live code with my audience I like to to just make
mistakes because I want I want them to see how it is actually
to learn a new language, you know.
So I just go like open chest like OK, yeah, I actually don't
know how to do that in REST. Let's search together.
Then I go to Google because then the audience can learn how to
also figure out how to solve a problem that you don't know how
to solve. Which is the most important
skill? Exactly.
Yeah, that's really nice. And it doesn't.
You don't get nervous doing that because I can see from my side,
if I were to do that, you need to have an ego, which is very
low, let's say you barely have to have.
You don't have to have an ego to do that.
If your ego is high, you're never gonna do that.
You're gonna be that person that prepares.
And he's like, OK, I know how to do that.
And then I'm gonna show them how to do that.
Yeah, I think I learned how to solve problems because I start
coding with 12. So for me it was.
I don't know. Writing code was always a thing
that I did, yeah. And you taught yourself at a
young age, Yeah, just playing around, you would say.
Just playing around, I started using Access for Microsoft.
Yeah, then inside Access you can actually create use Visual
Basic, VB Six. Yeah, so that's where I started.
Nice. Yeah.
But The thing is that, so basically what I like, I learned
that I I will always find the answer if you know what is the
problem or what is the question. Yeah.
So yeah, I think that's why I'm comfortable doing that.
Yeah, yeah. Would you say nowadays, let's
say for people listening or people even in your audience
that haven't done anything with programming, would you say now
you can still teach yourself and let's say up to a point where
you can be productive and solve problems that you see, just like
the one you mentioned? Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, I think that's the best way of learning.
Yeah, yeah. And nowadays you'll have AI to
help you. You'll have people online, in a
Discord server, or Reddit or Twitter.
You can ask questions or even in the comment section of YouTube.
Yeah, there's multiple communities nowadays.
I fully agree with you there. Yeah.
How much have you played around with kind of using AI to develop
software? I'm using more, but I don't like
copilots. Yeah, I don't like the feeling
of suggestions. Code suggestions come coming to
me without without me asking. I'm not asking for a suggestion,
but I'm typing and then GitHub Copilot is out of trying to
figure out what I want, so I don't know.
I feel like I'm not driving the car, you know?
Yeah. OK.
So the copilot aspect is you're kind of the copilot?
Yeah I think it breaks my flow. OK because when I'm coding I
have hyper focus on code. So when I'm coding the world can
be falling apart. I will like be focused on my
code. Yeah, and I think Co pilots,
they they make me lose the focus.
Yeah, I can see that. I haven't played around with
Copilot, let's say integrated in the IDE.
I do the, what you said, the conscious going out of it,
asking a question, then using that as an input.
And it's mostly because from the client side I can't use that.
But also from an interest perspective, I haven't really
played around with it, cuz I think what I do now solves kind
of my needs when I think I need a problem and it might be making
me less productive. But I still see this as kind of
a mental challenge where I want to figure out something.
It's also from a fulfillment perspective.
It's nice to do it, but I use it just like I use Google, except
I've started using that more than Google even.
Same here, yeah. Yeah.
I don't use Google anymore or Stack Overflow.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I sometimes do, but then
I'm like, maybe if I go through multiple articles and I still
can't figure it out, I'm like, why am I doing this?
Yeah. I like that a lot.
But that's easier when you have experience like I I think when
you are starting, the problem maybe is to delegate to the AI
your Rd. road map to study or you know, yeah, so because yeah,
the AI can be not lying but can making stuff up.
Yeah, the hallucinations. Yeah, those are funny.
So if you don't have experience, you won't be able to cut this,
yeah? Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
One of the final thoughts I had was we were talking about
content creation and we were talking about your schedule and
you said we a lot. Are you doing this by yourself
or what is kind of the team? What does it look like?
The team, it's me and my wife, Sarah.
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah.
How is it working with your wife?
Cuz I know she's listening. I know you can't say too many
bad things. No, I.
Don't have anything. To say it's been good.
Yeah, awesome. It's amazing actually.
Yeah, because for instance when I have an idea and it just, it
just feels good to have someone to share the ideas and also to
get it's you get like a quick feedback.
So because Sarah, she does the editing, but she does more like
she does the whole. She's back to the CEO of Lucas
Moncton. Incorporate because she handles
the partners and all this kind of stuff.
Yeah. But also she gives me feedback
about the content or about. So it's like social media
training or something like that. Yeah.
So that's good because then for instance, sometimes I will post
something or I tweet something and then she can see things that
I'm not seeing. Yeah.
So that's really good. And we are always In Sync, OK,
because we are daily talking about content or.
Yeah, that's fun. Yeah.
I started a YouTube channel with my partner as well and her
sister, so it was kind of the three of us.
And it was more so in the fitness space where I would do
the production and the editing and stuff like that and they
would do the videos, great fitness videos.
And it was fun And when we were In Sync it was a lot of fun
because in our personal time we could brainstorm and this was
really something we were building up.
But when it was not like when we would butt heads or have let's
say conflicting opinions where we were not In Sync, sometimes
it would bleed into our regular life, the the non work life or
the non YouTube life. And that was that was pretty
challenging at some point. Yeah, it is challenging, yeah.
But we are doing that I think for two or three years now
together. Yeah.
So I think we learn how to, you know, let's stop talking about
the YouTube channel. Yeah.
So I think now we can switch back to, OK, let's just be us
not be like YouTube partners. Exactly.
Yeah, I like that a lot. Have you ever thought about
expanding the team? Cuz I'm gonna show you.
Actually, I think when this episode comes out, the episode
that I'm talking about already came out.
I talk to Arjun and he does Arjun codes on YouTube a lot of
Python content creation. And he's recently also released
a lot of Rust videos and he wants to expand.
And when he talked about his YouTube team, every time he
wanted to do something new, he was thinking about what he needs
to do when it comes to editing or creating content or creating
courses. And he would bring something on,
bring someone on on his team to help him with that aspect.
And then he could do something new.
And his team is now a lot of people like, it surprised me
that from a YouTube perspective, I always thought about, OK, you
have a person that's on camera that does the content creation,
maybe an editor. But he has people that help him
with social media, people that help him with courses that he
creates, people that help him with business automation, where
he has scripts running on his YouTube channel, on his comment
sections for people that give suggestions.
And then that goes into like a whole notion thing where he just
has ideas from the audience, let's say, and people think
about those types of automations.
That surprised me. Like it was very cool to hear
about that. Yeah, we actually have a new
member now, so it's me, Sarah and Tony.
OK, We call the Tony. Yeah, so Tony is AI.
Actually, it started as a joke in a video that I made, Like
Tony was one of the characters that were like the junior
developer in a video. And then when when Open AI
released the GPTS, they also brought like action actions.
So now you can basically create your API.
So I created a Google cloud function and you can use swagger
API scheme to tell GPT how to communicate with your API.
OK so for the suggestions what I did is like now you can go to
the Tony on GPT and you can say like I want to send a suggestion
to Lucas and then he was reply OK what is our suggestion then
you can just send tell the GPT the suggestion yeah and GPT will
get this and create a payload based on my swagger scheme and
it will send to my Google clown function.
Perfect. Yeah.
And that then processes it and stores.
It stores it, and then I have a private GPT that I can ask, OK,
what are the suggestions that people send me this week?
Yeah, then he will use the same Swaggy scheme to hit the
Firestore Firebase real time database and from Firebase,
Yeah, and it will just tell me, OK, these are the suggestions.
So I think we can automate more. So before bringing more people,
I think first we can work automating stuff.
Yeah, that's cool. Like you have AI team members.
Yeah, and the YouTube channel is like a platform for projects.
So for instance, I work together with a company called Olympus to
create a memo flash card app so people could learn, can learn
like topics like agile or JavaScript using flash cards.
Nice. Yeah.
So we did that project with this company.
We did open source and we brought partners to sponsor the
project. So I create content.
The company developed the app, We released the app together.
I brought audience to the app and sponsors paid for it, right?
Exactly. And the audience learns.
Exactly, Yeah. And also now, Sarah, me and NATO
Marine, it's our partner. We found a new company in Brazil
called App Academy. So yeah, we have more partners,
but then it's not on the YouTube channel.
Then we create a new entity and then we start this project.
Really nice. Yeah, that's cool.
I like the part of automating whatever, let's say teamwork you
would need. And I think he's doing that as
well. And I think he's really smart to
kind of simplify the workload that you have.
Cuz if you have two people, and I get it, if you have, let's
say, this core team, it's hard to expand with more people, It
might disrupt the dynamic, but automating processes to make
kind of your lives easier, that makes a lot of sense in that
way, yeah. For all the solutions that
you're building, are those open source available to the public
as well, or most of them, let's say?
The Memo app is open source. Yeah, yeah.
But I think that's the only project, Big project.
Yeah. So I was wondering for the,
let's say the Mr. Beast example where you were playing around
with the rest, why didn't you open source that or that type of
stuff? I will, yeah, yeah.
But it's just like I think it's like 4040 lines of code.
Yeah, so it's barely anything. Yeah, OK, I can, I can yeah I
can create a git repository for that, yeah.
But the the entire content it was like around 5 lines, 5
lines, 5 lives and seven hours of content me coding but this is
private only for members. And that way, Yeah.
OK. So then open sourcing that would
kind of be counter. Yeah, kind of, Yeah, I get that.
Cool, man. Do you do members here?
No, I don't. I saw like I get this monthly
update from YouTube and they said you can now give your
subscribers free memberships when they first subscribe or you
can just gift them. And I've thought about what I
would do membership wise, but I don't have any inspiration yet.
Yeah, for me, doing this already takes a lot of effort and I
wanna keep doing it weekly. I'm having a blast with it, but
I do like giving something nice for audiences that wanna give
something back as well. In that way I like it.
Yeah, and sometimes people want to contribute.
To life. Yeah, I've seen that as well.
Yeah. Maybe I'll pick your brain.
Maybe you have some suggestions. Yeah, but we'll do that after.
This has been a lot of fun. Man.
I've had a blast chatting with you.
Is this kind of what you expected coming into it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm.
I'm a bit more nervous that I was imagined, but it was great
to talk to you. Good, happy.
Then I'm going to round it off here.
Thank you so much for watching, everyone.
I'm going to put all Lucas socials in the description
below, check them out, let them know you came from our episode.
And with that being said, thank you for listening.
We'll see you on the next one. Beyond coding.