New Years Resolutions For Developers - Principal Engineering Manager AMA

There we go. Awesome stuff. I'm just waiting for one more connection here. How do we want to do this? Substack, man. Substack is really sucking. I don't know a good way to do this. I have to use my phone. That'll actually work. Cool. Welcome, folks. Uh, first live stream of 2026. We'll get Instagram going here, too. Um, today's topic is going to be New Year's resolutions for developers in particular. So, I invited developers who had New Year's resolutions that they wanted some advice on to come join. Um, I had a bunch of people send in stuff to Code Commute, which is really cool. I've already uh recorded the Code Commute videos for those responses. Um, and so this is just a reminder for all of you, too. If you're not comfortable answering on the live stream or you're watching the recorded live stream if you have questions about software development, career um advice, stuff like that, go to codekcom.com, submit stuff there, and I'll do my best to make a video response and answer you. Uh but yeah, super thankful that people did it. There was a bunch of people sort of asking in different ways around like just spending more time building stuff. Um, and I figured in this live stream, if there's people joining in the chat and stuff, if you um, if you are comfortable kind of sharing, um, you know, if you have any New Year's resolutions around software development, that kind of stuff, like feel free to put it in the chat. We'll talk through it. Uh, if you're new to these live streams in general, they're the intention is that they're interactive. So, you know, if you want to ask questions or share stuff, like, please do in the chat. Um, and we'll we'll switch over to it. And uh what I usually do on these is that I go over to my newsletter. Um which I always remind people like no if you're like I don't want to I don't want to subscribe. Don't. That's totally cool. Uh no pressure. It is at weekly.devleer.ca though. And you can kind of read it like a blog. So totally free. Uh the the newsletters get archived after a month. And that's really the paid subscription is to access the archive so you can see other stuff. Um, but otherwise, no pressure. And the reason I share that is because I write my newsletter based on code commute videos. And the topics are usually from code commute and then we bring those topics from the newsletter over to the live stream and go through them. But um, that's just the basis for what's going on. So we'll remind you one more time. If you have stuff you want to chat through, put it in the chat and we'll go over it. Um, aside from other people sharing New Year's resolutions in chat that we can jump over to, the primary thing that I wrote about that I want to talk through is kind of like what am I going to be looking at this year in terms of my focus areas. Um, I'm trying to do a uh a better job on some things. Some of them are, you know, programming related, developer related, others are not. So, I want to talk through that. Um, we'll see where things go. So, let's see. To start off, I guess, um, I think the one I want to talk through is I wrote down get comfortable being uncomfortable. And I've written about this before. We've done live streams on it. Um, it's not a new topic. And when I wrote about this in this newsletter, it was like trying to remind myself and that's kind of the the goal with this as a you know air quotes like resolution here is that um I think a lot of growth in my life in my career has come from being in situations where I I wasn't necessarily like fully prepared for. Right? like if you gave me a a checklist of like do you meet all these requirements yes or no um before you start doing thing X uh [laughter] I don't check the boxes and then I'm you know put into a position where I'm doing thing X and uh it's uncomfortable and it's one of the like because it's uncomfortable we like naturally want to avoid things like this and uh the reflection is ultimately that those are some of the best opportunities for learning and getting better and growing growing. So, uh, I wrote down a few of them. Um, man, I'm watching the Instagram feed and it's like super super super choppy. Um, so I don't know what's going on. Hopefully everyone's like feed [snorts] seems okay, [laughter] but it's like a slideshow on Instagram, which is nuts. Um, but yeah, I think I wrote down a few things that in my career so far were kind of like these situations where they're they're uncomfortable, but like you stick with them and then you you realize like there's so much growth that comes out of that. So the um the first one that I wrote down was like literally my first job outside of university. Uh I worked at a startup and um it was in digital forensics and I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that I did not study or do anything related to digital forensics ever before. So I started work at this company building digital forensics software with literally zero experience doing digital forensics, right? So this was like one of the first things in my career at least where it was like man I have no idea what's up with this. I can remember uh I can remember like one of the first meetings I did at work and this we're talking there's like when I joined it was like seven people and then a week after there were like two more engineers that started and I remember we go into this meeting and we're meeting with the CTO who was a former police officer and had started building these digital forensics tools and he said okay like we're going to we're going to go through some file system stuff. He's like, "You know, you guys familiar with like NTFS file systems or like FAT32?" And I remember being like, "I've seen those words, man, but like I don't I don't know what those are." Like, I couldn't tell you the difference. And uh having this initial experience of like, "Oh man, I just started work at a digital forensics company and I feel like I already don't know what this guy's talking about." Like, uhoh. Um, and so the reality is that being at that company and working in digital forensics, I was there for for eight years. That's a that's sort of a a long one, but um there were so many times even at that company where I had similar experiences where it's like something has to get done. You're kind of put into this situation and yeah, it's uncomfortable because you're not an expert. You don't know the answers. You haven't done it, you know, a hundred times before. And in each one of those scenarios, you know, starting with almost day one there, it was like there's a lot of growth that came out of that. Um, one of the other ones that I shared in the article was actually around like my career development, right? So, uh, for those of you that that are new to, um, the channel and stuff, uh, my career after university, I became an engineering manager pretty early on. And I I always say to people like it's not because it was like oh you're the best manager. Like literally was because I was at that startup and as they started to scale they said like we need some people that can do like team leadership. Like basically you seem to be able to talk to the engineers. Can are you interested in doing this? And so this is just another good example of like I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to be a manager. I don't know how to lead people. I don't know what's involved with that. And that one thing has led me like, you know, so far in my career to this moment. the fact that I'm, you know, recording a live stream talking with all of you around like what my career and stuff is like. It's literally because of jumping into the deep end on this, diving into, okay, I guess we're going to guess we're going to be managing a team now. And so when you get into situations like that, like, no, you don't know what you're doing, but you got to figure it out, right? if if you had asked me at that time like [laughter] you know you said like this is going to be really uncomfortable and this is the comfortable path like you probably want to lean towards a comfortable path but I'm I'm very glad that uh you kind of took that chance and took that opportunity. Um another one that's very related is uh to what I just said about live streaming is like I decided one day to turn on this camera, right? like that's something I had no experience doing. And I like reminding people kind of a little bit about how I got here doing this stuff is like uh it is it's actually related to engineering management. When I wasn't uh early on as an engineering manager, I realized like I had this kind of um this kind of realization that like the way that I was dividing up time was not really great. And I've talked about this and I've written about this, but the idea was really like I'm spending as a developer, right? I was still like writing code and stuff. I'm spending I'm basically working two jobs and that amount of time as well. I'm either coding while everyone's at work. I'm like helping them out. I'm coding and whatever. Sorry. I'm I'm not coding at work. I am helping people out throughout the day and then afterwards when I'm not doing stuff with people, I'm coding. So, sorry for the confusion. I'm I'm kind of working these two separate jobs. And then I would have periods of time where I'm like I'm not really working with people even though I'm, you know, managing the team. I'm just coding. And then other times I'm like, "Oh crap, I got to catch up and like actually work with the team and do like one-on- ons and um you know, do like get like basically get aligned with people and then I'm not coding." And I kept doing this pendulum swing back and forth. And I realized like I don't know what I'm doing and I should spend more time trying to learn about what I'm doing. So I said I'm gonna I basically said I'm gonna start learning in public, right? There's got to be other people and I'm obviously I'm new to this at the time. I'm like there's got to be other people that are going through this. Were there an engineering manager that's still coding and they're like I don't know how to navigate this. And I said I'm going to start writing about the things that I'm learning. So I started you know reading articles every week trying to share like um like a digest kind of kind of [clears throat] like a newsletter. Um I didn't have any subscribers [laughter] so I wrote this on my blog. I would write blog articles about things I was learning. Um, and I gave up. I gave up after a few months because I'm like, why am I doing this? Like, no one no one reads my blog, right? No one's no one's reading my blog. No one's commenting on the the social media statuses I'm sharing about this kind of stuff. I gave up on it. And it took me 10 years. That was in 2013. And it took me until 2023, the Christmas break, like kind of like right now was uh like 3 years ago. I've been doing this now for 3 years. 3 years ago now, right before I was like, I'm going to I'm going to change things around. I'm I'm going to start making YouTube videos. I'm going to do three videos a week and I'm just going to see what happens. But I have to stay consistent. The reason like the uncomfortable part with that is that I like reminding people I am very introverted. [laughter] Uh for most of my life I've had a fear of public speaking. Uh that goes as far back as to like being in elementary school and it's like the teacher calls upon this student to like read a you know a paragraph from the book uh or having to do like presentations in front of the class and stuff like dreaded it. Hated it. My least favorite thing in school was uh presenting or speaking in front of people. And that kind of stuck with me right through university. It stuck with me into my jobs. I remember having an internship where uh as an intern they wanted me to present to the other engineers on on stuff we were building. And I remember being like I will do anything to get out of this. I can't stand it. But I decided one day I was going to turn this camera on, right? and the amount of opportunities and growth that have come from just trying to make and share social media content. Um, it's been life-changing truly. And I mean that like in many different ways. Um, like one of which is I don't have a fear of public speaking anymore. It took me hundreds [laughter] hundreds of videos and uh many many live streams uh to get there, but I've done speaking engagements now, right? Like I don't run away from it being terrified. It's like I don't mind doing it. I think it's pretty cool. Deon says a little late, but the worst manager I ever worked with was a guy who thought he had it all figured out nice and had read all the books and and done the management classes. Management classes? I don't I don't Devin, you must be lying. That sounds made up because I haven't seen I haven't seen management classes ever. [laughter] It's uh it's awesome that at least there were management classes. Uh but no, I get what you're saying though. It's um yeah, I think I I shared uh something on LinkedIn and well all social media last night about imposter syndrome and um someone I can't I apologize because I can't remember who it was, but someone left a comment and said like, "Hey, you know, it's like the people I feel like everyone has some amount of imposter syndrome and the people that don't are the ones that like they think they have it figured out but like not really. And you can you can kind of tell because they seem full of it. Um so uh Devon, I imagine that's perhaps what this person kind of seemed like. But um yeah, the honestly uh turning on a camera kind of jumping into like I'm just going to start making content. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to start. I'm going to stick with it. Uh been super super impactful for me. Um, and again, I I I mean, it's funny to say, but I I do mean it genuinely, right? Like, uh, the fact that you folks are here like turning turning into the tuning into the live streams or checking out content or um, you know, I've put out choruses and people have said like, hey, like that's been, you know, that's been the thing that's helped me kind of get through and and really understand stuff. to me that's I don't know that's like super rewarding and I do really appreciate all of you. So um you know thank you for the opportunity and I'm glad that I turned this camera on one day. Uh turned it from car photography uh not good car photography. I was doing car showing like I have a show car. It sits in the driveway. Um, I've shown it on Code Commute, but I have this car that I used for car showing and I was like I was posting a lot of stuff on Instagram and I'm like, I gotta get my own camera. So, this camera that I'm live streaming with is what I bought for for taking pictures of my my stupid car for car shows and social media. And now I've turned it into like I'm going to make educational videos. I'm trying to look to see if I have my car anywhere. I don't. Um, it's it's my entire background. It's like literally on my my mouse uh my mouse mat. But anyway, it was a nice purple car. Now it's a black car sitting in the driveway. Um, but yeah, I I I made the decision to to kind of switch over and do this and it's been really cool. Um, you know, I have a few other examples on here and they're not like they're not all like techreated. They're not all work and career related. And I I I'm going to share uh I'll share two more. The next one is like on um is for work. And really the two teams that I've I've been on at Microsoft, the two different areas. Uh both of those are examples of kind of jumping into something that I had no experience in aside from managing teams. The domains, zero experience. And um one of the one of the hiring man well I I really would like to thank the hiring managers that brought me on at Microsoft, but like uh one of them I think in particular his name is Aaron. Uh I I really think that I I was able to get an offer because of Aaron. And my interview with Aaron was really uh I I think that he was looking at me as someone who's like I know that this guy is gonna like he doesn't have the experience doing this in particular, but I think he's the kind of person who's going to bust his butt and try to learn and like do what he's got to do to um you know to make this happen. And I I don't I've never talked to him about this. I don't think he'll ever watch this, but I I think from my conversation with him and kind of learning a bit more about him that he was probably one of the people that was like definitely like we got to get this guy in. And so I started at Microsoft. I was managing um you know, one of the managers for the M365 deployment team. I had never worked at a company that had machines running in data centers. I've never done deployment of services, right? I was building desktop software for almost a decade. I mean professionally uh actually professionally for a decade including internships and then outside of that more years. My entire development experience was building Windforms applications and WPF applications. spent a long time in C building desktop apps and this was the first job where it was like hey like this is something completely different like in terms of uh tech stack and my goodness [laughter] the learning uh pretty pretty intense and when I switched teams at Microsoft um it was similar like I I now manage uh the firewall um uh uh caching techn technology and and and basically routing accuracy for and route resolution for for our proxy in Microsoft 365. And I had zero experience before joining the team in those areas. And again, the when you get into these situations, it it almost feels like you're drowning, right? There's like there's so much to learn. The imposttor syndrome is at all-time high because you're like, "Wait a second." like I don't actually know this, right? But what I do know is how to manage teams and work with engineers. So you stick in these areas and uh ultimately a lot of growth comes out of them. So final one I'll share on this. Um by the way for folks that are joining the stream uh this stream is about New Year's resolutions. Uh I'm talking about one of mine which is getting comfortable being uncomfortable. So, I'm just going through a list of stuff that is like my reminder to myself, like these are evidence of times in my life where this has happened. And uh I'll I'll kind of summarize in just a moment like what my my goal is. Uh but I wanted to invite any of you that are in the chat watching um if you have any New Year's resolutions related to software development or like sort of uh changes in your career, that kind of stuff, if you want to share them, uh happy to talk through them. Uh obviously only if you're comfortable sharing. So, I am watching on Substack as well. Uh, Substack streaming is broken on the desktop or the website. It's kind of silly. So, I have to do it from my phone again. Sent in a support ticket, but we all know how that goes. So, [laughter] um, so yeah, if you got anything, please share. Uh the final one that I'll share that's not related to to like tech is like um I it's probably not obvious just because I'm a a talking head on on the internet, but uh for for many many years I was really into bodybuilding and um kind of like that was part of my personality, right? It was like that's what I do, you know, every day I go to the gym, I do bodybuilding, I eat the same food every day. It's just who I define myself as. And I ended up, my wife does CrossFit and um if I don't know for folks that are like into fitness and stuff like that. Um every different group in fitness has like, you know, memes around it, right? So bodybuilders are just like the people that are, you know, hyper obsessed with like being vain and like eating the same things. And um you know, powerlifters are they're strong, but they're fat and they're lazy. and CrossFit people just like do all the do all the moves wrong. And um it's like, you know, there's memes for all of it. And so I never saw myself doing CrossFit. I thought it was, you know, I learned over time, like realistically, I'm like, it's not like CrossFit people are stupid or something. It's just that that's not for me. I'm not interested in that. And uh as I get older, um and my wife, you know, she does CrossFit. I said, "I think it's time that I have like this was me getting myself to do something uncomfortable. Crossfit is all of the things as a bodybuilder that I am bad at. I am not good at anything with a high heart rate and running or whatever. Uh I'm not good at doing things fast. I'm not good at um There's nothing wrong with eating the same things, Devon. I'm just I I mean like literally I would eat ground beef and rice like three to four times a day every day um [laughter] for like 10 years and uh I don't know like some people not okay with that for me. I'm like I love those things. Um I also realize I'm going to go get checked but I think I probably have ADHD and that's part of it but it's a different story. We'll give an update on that later. But yeah, I switched over to doing CrossFit and this was a, you know, a intentional decision of like we're doing something that's going to be wildly uncomfortable and it it has been and I'm still terrible at it. I'm absolutely terrible at CrossFit, but I go in there regularly and every time I can see myself uh improving in some way, which is really cool. Um, they did a they did a strength competition like just for fun for the gym. And sorry, I know that this is about tech and software development. I'm just we're just live streaming. It's the first one of the year. Um, they did this strength competition and the first two movements were Olympic lifts. I'm terrible at Olympic lifts. Been going to the gym for over two decades and I don't do Olympic lifts. But the other three movements were like powerlifting moves. So, bench, squat, and deadlift. I can do those things. So, um, what was really funny is for the Olympic lifts, I went out and I, again, I'm very, very bad at them, but I haven't been doing them for a long time. every single lift, including in the warm-up, I ended up hitting a personal best, [laughter] which is really funny, but just goes to show you that like like I hit on one lift, I hit four personal bests in a row, right? And the point being, not to not to brag about how terribly good I am at Olympic lifting because it's very bad. Um, the point being that these are opportunities to get better at things. Okay. And so to summarize this whole thing, my goal this year is to to lean more into this because I I definitely spend um I don't know like a lot of mental energy being like concerned about that, right? Despite all of these examples where I'm like if I reflect on I'm like, man, like every single time it's worked out really well, still scares the crap out of me. And so this year I wanted to be a little bit more conscious about like hey like stop running away from that because it's uncomfortable. Like maybe it's time to like to do that because it's only going to seem uncomfortable like every time you think about it but once you start it's probably going to be pretty rough but it's going to get better. And so that's for me like one of the major things I want to focus on this year. Okay let's get over to some technical stuff. I know everyone's favorite topic. Any guesses? Any guesses what the the favorite topic that everyone has is? That's right. It's AI. Everyone loves AI. No one's exhausted from AI yet. How many people drop off the stream when I say that? Let's see. Um, no, but I I wanted to to have a bit of uh, you know, intentionality around AI uh, for this year. And so, uh, I I use AI a lot. And so, it's not like, hey, this year I'm going to start, um, one of the things that I tried to do in 2025, and I actually I'm I feel pretty proud of myself. I I stuck with it. Um, at the beginning of 2025, I remember when people were talking more and more about like writing software with AI, I was trying things out and I'm like, man, like yeah, like chat GBT can, you know, get a a small like small program together, can do a script or can build out some classes. Um, yeah, I try out co-pilot or I try um [laughter] or over robot overloads. My chat's not showing, guys. My chat. There we are. Um, sorry about that. I'm just saying things and you can't see that Devon's typing them in the chat. Um, [laughter] sorry on Substack you can't see the the shared chat. My apologies. Um, I remember, yeah, at the beginning of the year it was like I just was just having really bad experiences with using AI to build and it felt like I don't know like I really uh benefited from uh sort of the autocomplete style of of co-pilot. Like it was really just you know better autocomplete. the very beginning it was so bad that I was like I have to turn this thing off because it would do the thing where it's gonna autocomplete and it was always like the most nonsense garbage and then I guess over time like it got more familiar with my codebase or like had indexed it properly. Really enjoyed it. But to go build stuff I was like man this is this is so trash to go like you know be hands off and let AI go build stuff. And I just remember telling myself like don't give up on it. So every time you're turned off from it because it's doing a bad job. Cool. Lesson learned. Maybe try a different tool out. Maybe take note that this how you're approaching things or this type of task maybe isn't a good fit for AI yet. And I think that was the key word was yet. Because what I tried to make sure I was doing a lot of last year was like, you know, exploring, trying things out, hit a roadblock and going, "Okay, roadblock acknowledged. Let's pivot, but not trying to write it off." Okay. And I think that's the thing that I want to focus on this year is like continuing that first of all is like not writing things off. But now that I've been finding my groove with how I build things using AI, I'm a little bit nervous that already I'm going to start getting complacent. And I realize that maybe sounds kind of ridiculous because the tools change. Like since I've been streaming this video, there's probably, you know, 10 new models and 10 new idees for everyone to go use. Um, and they're all VS Code forks. But the, um, it moves so fast. But I think what I've started to notice is that I'm getting I'm finding a workflow that works for me and getting pretty comfortable. And that's good. But at the same time, I don't want to go, you know, a new tool comes out and I'm like, I don't I don't need that. Like I got it figured out. Um I know I can't try every tool. I'm not going to be an expert in every tool. Not every tool is going to survive. But I want to make sure that I'm still exploring um and being curious because I feel that last year that worked really well for me. That's why I said I am actually proud that I stuck with that and didn't just get frustrated and say screw it. You know, AI is not ever going to be a thing. Um I said let's try it. Let's keep going. And uh I think you know we're going to keep seeing more and more stuff come out and I I just want to keep an open mind to make sure that I'm trying some new things. and uh and seeing where we get to with AI. So for might as like to get a little bit more um specific my current flow I spend like I do a lot of .NET development for folks that don't know um my main channel is Devleer. Um if you're watching on YouTube this is the Devleer podcast where I do interviews with software engineers. If you're coming from like Twitter and stuff like that you probably see a lot of net articles and stuff I post. If you're on LinkedIn, you get a mix of everything, but depending, you know, where you know me from, um, you may not know, but I do a lot of C and .NET development. And so, uh, Visual Studio is like is my home base. Like I need to program Visual Studio. Even VS Code is like, uh, it's not it's not quite right. Um, so I I like my familiar tools. Visual Studio is like where I will build almost everything. With that said, my typical workflow is kind of like the following. So, um, if I'm doing hands-on coding, and so there will be a lot of that I code every day. Um, so I go in Visual Studio, I am, unless I have something very specific that I'm just going to go do because it's quicker for me to go literally code it than it is to try and explain to AI. Um, for more advanced things, I usually have a conversation with Copilot and do that in Visual Studio and usually like have a lot of context for what I'm trying to uh get done. So whether it's a bug fix, feature development, but when I'm in Visual Studio using Copilot, my literal intention is not to go hands off and walk away. Um, it's pretty rare. I'm usually pretty like hands-on or truly treating it like one of us is a co-pilot. I guess while it's doing the work, I'm the co-pilot. Uh, but I'm babysitting it, right? I'm watching what it's doing and I'm trying to figure out where do I jump in to go help this thing. Where do I stop it? I notice that it's going down a path and I didn't want it to do that. Like I'm paying attention and uh and letting it work. There are situations where like say I get to a point a good example is like with tests and stuff like that. So say it wraps up all its work and it has some tests in place. I go run the test they all pass. I'm like cool checking out like looking through the code changes. Sometimes I'll go over and I'm like oh you know what like the way that it structured the tests um it is I'm just making up an example. It's it's basically resolving a dependency the same way across 20 tests, but like it's not it's not the pattern we use in the codebase. It's not that it's wrong, like it's it's working, but it's not my preferred way to do it. And now we've we've introduced like a new pattern, and I don't want that. So sometimes I'll just say like, co-pilot, go make this change. And depending on how complex it is, like I will just let it go off and do its thing. And then I'm, you know, checking social media. I'm doing some other stuff and I'll come back and and poke in on it. But it's pretty rare that at my desk I'm just letting AI go off completely unsupervised. Okay. So, I use it while I'm coding and kind of take turns back and forth. Um, but Copilot does do most of my work. Um, and yeah, Devin said in the chat, "I've been very surprised by how well the auto model selection in Copilot works." Yeah, Deon, are you using it in um in VS Code uh in in GitHub or in Visual Studio? Just curious. Um but yeah, I I I really do like Copilot. Um but that's what I just described is like one of my workflows, but my favorite one is this. Um so I never thought that I would say this, but I code a lot for my phone now. And code is a interesting word to use here because when I say I code from my phone a lot, I don't actually code. Um I do most of my develop I think truly think most of my development work from my phone now or something that could be done on my phone. Um and that's using GitHub Copilot like in GitHub. So um I very very frequently and I've made YouTube videos on this. I should probably try and uh pull one up or something. That's probably what a what a good streamer would do, right? Um but yeah, I I have a video on this, but my flow is basically like um GitHub Copilot has um sorry, GitHub has GitHub spaces. It's this one here. One sec. Let me get my screen and stuff shared. We'll we'll do it the the right way. You can see my dumb face. Um Devin says both Visual Studio. Oh yeah, both uh VS and VS Code. Um yeah. Yeah. So what Devin said is more towards Visual Studio like the big bad Visual Studio. Um the full-on Visual Studio for like C# development VS Code for front end 100% the same way uh that I build brand ghost with my team. Like if I'm doing C it doesn't make sense for me to be outside of Visual Studio. I don't know why I would um personally uh it's way more familiar for me. Um but VS Code for front end stuff. Give me one sec. Uh it's going to be faceception. Look at this. Oh, this way. I got to It's mirrored. This guy right here. Right. That's me. Um look at that stash. That's a good stash. Okay. um this video and I should get the link in the chat. I actually walk through um one of my workflows in particular. And so um aside from my stupid face. No, it's not even this one. Oh man, I put the wrong link in there. Don't look at that. My videos are out of order. Oh, I was on the for you list. One sec. One sec. It's this one. Okay, that's the pirate eye, right? You know what's really funny? Side note, um, sorry Substack people, you can't see what I'm sharing. Um, oh, I got to stop it on that. Um, if you're on my YouTube channel, the video is called Here's How I Use GitHub Copilot to build features. And so, um, this is how I actually do a lot of feature development, and I can do it from my phone, which is super cool. So, um, I'm just going to fast forward a little bit. This is, um, GitHub spaces. And if you haven't used it, I I love GitHub spaces. Reason I love it is because one of the ways that I like to develop is like I still find chat GBT is so good at least for me for talking back and forth when I want to like brainstorm and design things high level conceptually. Um the reality is that when I'm trying to get more serious about what I'm implementing like okay let's take these concepts into like something real um chat GPT is not good for that because unless I'm building something completely from scratch it's not going to be useful. I need my code and I find that GitHub spaces does such a good job with this because it's like chat GBT right you just have a chat window but you can pull in different repositories and so when I'm working on brand ghost brand has a front-end repo and a backend repository and so what you can do is in your in your co-pilot chat you can say like reference these sources and those sources can be repositories you can add files and stuff as well. So, um I love working in GitHub spaces. And in this video, um again, if you're on Substack, uh if you want to check it out, it's just on my main YouTube channel called Dev Leader. And the video is titled here's how I use GitHub Copilot to build features. And I just walk through like this is it's a real a real example. Um I had a user from Brand Ghost. Um, I'm not sure how many people use Tumblr or even how many people have heard of Tumblr based on ages and stuff like that, but um, Tumblr is a social media platform and you can post stuff there. And Tumblr allows you to have their blogs is what they're called and you can have multiple blogs on a Tumblr account. And I didn't know this and I've used Tumblr many times before. So a user said, "Hey, we want to have multiple blogs for one Tumblr account. Like, can we do that? and I checked the Tumblr API and this is what the video shows. I checked the API, the API says yes and I said, "Okay." So, I went over to GitHub spaces and I had this conversation with it. And so, what I'm showing in the video is like me going back and forth with uh GitHub Copilot talking about, hey, like there's a pattern in the codebase for this other social media platform. I want, you know, I want to tie this together. Um, the same way, like here's the the Tumblr API. And I go back and forth with it. It ends up making a GitHub issue. So, if I jump to the end of this video, sorry, it's kind of like behind my head in the chat and stuff, but like it's it's made this GitHub issue at this time in the video. I'm reviewing it. And then the follow-up video, if you do watch this, at the end it links to another video and I'm showing you like the poll request that it made. And so, genuinely, I do this nonstop from my phone, non-stop. It doesn't always work perfectly, but I get so much done this way because if it doesn't work perfectly, it's like it's at least 80% of the way there. Um I have two huge feature changes, two sorry two huge uh one huge feature and one sort of like refactoring to leverage a new type of framework in Brand Ghost and the first one was like I actually used Claude for this in the beginning then I had uh GitHub take it over. I used Claude in their um their web view. Like if you go to claude code do or claude.com/code or whatever it is. Um you can use a similar interface. I don't think it's as good personally, but for people that like claude, it's the same idea. And so kicked off an agent that way. Um if you're watching this, if you know how to get clawed in their cloud environments to use net, please let me know because it does not work for me. Um, anyway, Claw did an okay job, but it couldn't finish it. And it couldn't finish it because it can't use .NET to build. So, it had a bunch of crappy code. So, I gave it to C-Pilot to complete. And this was this was a really complicated change because this was an entirely I'm I want to explain this in a way that makes sense. I need a workflow system that I can chain together different actions in a generic way. And I had co-pilot and claw go build this. And really the only thing that it didn't get right was like I don't know some of like where where it put the files in terms of like which projects had what and stuff. But ultimately a lot of the logic and stuff was really good. And then I just kept iterating to get better test coverage. But this this drives so much of my development flow right now. Um, and I see there's a question on on YouTube just to wrap up on the AI stuff. Um, the the way that this all comes together for me is that a lot of the time, um, I have co-pilot, like I just showed you, going off and doing work in the background. So, at any given time, I usually have like a handful of things being built that way. That way, as I'm coding with Copilot on my desktop, if I run into something where I need C-Pilot, I'm like, "Okay, like Copilot, you got to go refactor this stuff." I'm going to go uh check social media, whatever. I also go review the code that Copilot was doing in the browser for me and then come back to that. Um, so yeah, it it's uh it's crazy powerful compared to what I was doing before. So, um, really enjoying that. And to wrap up this thought on AI, if there's other tools, right, like the fact that Claude does have their, um, their, uh, web runners and stuff now, great. It's not working for me because I can't use .NET. Uh, but I think that's probably a me problem. I would still love to continue to explore it. Um, if you know Claude is the only tool that's going to let us do like multi- aent stuff uh in the same session, like great. I'm not married to GitHub. It's working really well for me and I'm happy with it, but I would love to keep exploring new stuff. And that's my goal this year is to not be complacent with the AI tools, but to keep challenging myself to try uh and continue to explore and learn. So, that's uh resolution number two. Um, Scarminy, Scar Marie, not Scarminy, sorry I got Pokemon on my mind. Scar Marie 7 says, "I have an unrelated question. What would you do if you work as a contractor, the company changes the payment policy, you don't agree, they terminate you, and you don't want to pay and don't want to pay you some time you worked?" Um, I would talk to a lawyer probably to be honest. Uh, I I've never been a contractor, but um, I would go talk to a lawyer. Um the tricky part when you get involved with lawyers is that uh lawyers cost money unless you know or have support from some place or whatever that doesn't most of the time. The big challenge with having to go talk to a lawyer is you're going to have to start paying out of pocket. So in the worst case, I shouldn't even say the worst case. the the middle case. Um, you pay a lawyer, they review what's going on, and they're like, "Ah, sorry. Like, you're actually you're out of luck here." And then, like, you just lost even more money because you paid a lawyer, but at least you have closure. Um, because they've told you legally this was what's up. Um, but in the best case, like if truly it's not the right thing, um, you might be able to go get that settled. Whether the company pays you and what the legal system does around that, I can't comment. But if you want my personal advice on this, um, if you are terminated and believe you're owed money based on an original agreement and you believe that that original agreement is a legally binding thing, then I would talk to a lawyer for sure. Um, that is what I would do in that situation. If if you're looking at the amount of money that you could be owed and it's a smaller amount of money, small is going to be um different for everyone in different situations, especially because I have no idea if you're talking about, you know, a year's worth of work or something. I don't know. Up for you to decide. If you're looking at that and you're like, that's really not that much, but it really bothers you. um it might not be worth it because you're going to be paying a lawyer plus you get I'm exaggerating, right? Then then you get your $20 payout and you're like, "Okay, I got my $20 payout and paid $500 an hour to a lawyer." Um so you you'll have to kind of get that balance, but my my recommendation is talk to a lawyer. That that sounds like something that you'd need um some legal representation for. Hope that helps. Sorry, it's not like a I don't have a great answer aside from, you know, talk to an adultier adult. Uh I am not the adult for that, unfortunately. Um okay. And I'll give one more call. Uh I'll do two more calls, I guess. Um a call for if you have other resolutions and stuff that folks want to talk through or if you have other questions, if they're not even related to your New Year's resolutions, if you have anything that you want to chat through on the live stream, just drop it in the chat. like please uh like I said I'm oh I'm ignoring Instagram my bad. Um not anymore. Uh if you have questions, comments, whatever, leave them in the chat. We'll jump over and spend some time on them. Um as folks are doing that uh my final resolution and this kind of ties into like doing the uncomfortable thing. If you watch Code Commute or you uh kind of look at some of the behind the-scenes stuff that I I've been doing aside from just like making software engineering content, uh I talk a lot about Brand Ghost, right? Brand Ghost is the social media crossing and scheduling platform that I build outside of work. Um it's really interesting now. It's like all with AI it's like everyone's building crossosting and scheduling apps and I'm like it's not hard to go build the basics for but like there's a lot going on uh when you start adding a lot of things to it. So that's what I build. Um it is a business. We do have paying users. Um we did uh 50,000 social media posts last year and uh added hundreds of users which is really cool. But, uh, if we want to keep growing, like I I recognize the way that we're operating doesn't work. And when I say doesn't work, I mean it continues to work the way it is, but that's not what I want. I want to be able to grow it. And so, things have to change if we want that to happen. And, um, that means that I need to spend more time doing things that I'm not currently doing. So, Nick, what does that mean? That means I have to spend more time creating content for Brand Ghost. And so, kind of uh to come full circle on some of the stuff I talked about, right? Um getting comfortable being uncomfortable. I don't I don't feel super comfortable, you know, trying to be like a saleserson, right? I I get shy. I'm like, I build this thing that I'm really proud of, but like like it's it's kind of, you know, I don't want to ask for your money kind of thing, but I think it could really help you. So, like I'm shy. I need to do a better job at that. Um, in terms of cold outreach, I've been saying this for a long time now, like I'm super uncomfortable with doing it. I feel awkward. Uh, feel slimy. But I have to do a better job of that. But one thing that's worked really well for me that I'm not doing with Brand Ghost is content creation. Um, you're watching a live stream, right? You're watching a live stream of me talking about historically like my software engineering, right? Career stuff. I'm obviously on this stream we're talking about some new year stuff. I'm giving you some other insights into things. But um what I have not been doing a good job of is making content for Brand Ghost. And so that has to change. So I'm not going to stop making content for Dev Leader obviously. Um I'm probably dialing back some of the creation, right? So my goal when I started three years ago was to do three YouTube videos a week. Uh on dev leader I have gotten down to probably one to two right now. I mean over the holidays it it dropped to zero. Um so it's usually like two is the the minimum I'm trying to do and I want to keep that but I think it's probably realistically going to get down to one video per week on dev leader and that's the reality of it. Code Commute is set up in a really interesting way because I film videos while I'm driving. Microsoft has a more uh it's still hybrid, but uh some return to office coming in February. So, I have one more day of the week I have to drive into work. So, code commute's not going anywhere. I'll still have at least five videos a week. Um which is funny because that's code commute alone is more videos a week than when I started three years ago. Um, but I need to start making videos for brand ghost. I need to start uh writing newsletter articles and blog posts. So, this is me saying like I need to take some of the experience and skills that I've built in one area and go apply it to another. Um, and it's going to be uncomfortable and I'm kind of nervous about it, but I I need to do it, right? And I need to remind myself like I've built and will continue to build a software engineering audience and I will like there's a brand I'm not going to sabotage this one. Uh, there's a brand ghost YouTube channel. There's Brandos social media accounts. Um, there's a brand ghost blog. Uh, there's a brand ghost substack. like I will use Brand Ghost itself and I will start creating uh more videos and and content for that kind of stuff and I will be doing the marketing for brand ghost. So yeah, it's going to be uncomfortable but it's going to be a year of doing um doing stuff that makes me better. So that's uh that's mostly it for me and my resolutions. I realize that not all of them are technical for me. The AI one is probably the more technical one. the doing uncomfortable things is really like a career philosophy kind of thing. And then the really big one uh outside of that is is just more brand ghost focus. Um there's there's a lot of stuff to do um that's not just coding and I I have to do a better job on that. Uh Scarie 7 says the amount of money may not be worth an attorney. Yep. Company nor emails and annoyed not being paid for work. Would you expose a company on the internet? Um thanks Devin. take care. Uh, honestly, like I I think Scarie, my my response to your question is uh is the following. So, Scarie is asking if I would expose the company on the internet to warn others. Um, I would what I would say is like consider what your motivations are because I think it's and I don't I don't mean this in like a condescending way or anything like that cuz I I get that like rightfully so you're pissed off, right? You weren't paid. You believe you should be paid. So, I just want to acknowledge. Totally get that. Um, I I think that it's easy to say that your intention is to warn others. And I bet you if you were to write, you know, whatever post or whatever that you plan to to do to to help warn others, if you were to stop before you press send and read it, it pro what it probably actually looks like is that you're attacking them because rightfully so, you feel bad. So, you're trying to put them down. So, instead of it being a warning, it comes across more like a like an attack on them. And so I would just caution you that I I suspect uh in your situation because you're upset with this company, trying to warn other people of them may come across as like, you know, being sour about it versus doing a good job warning people. So what's the goal? I don't know. In this case, I might say like if they're, you know, if it's not worth the uh the amount of money for an attorney, okay, drop that. Um, are you trying to warn people? Okay. But what are you going to write? Because if you're the if your evidence for supporting that is all these things that you're mad about them for, like that's kind of like kind of attacking them and it's going to feel probably pretty good because you're like, I'll show them, but I don't know if it's actually going to to be helpful. Okay. So, that's my honest opinion on that. You don't have to you don't have to listen to anything I'm saying, but if you ask, that's my honest opinion. So, uh reality is um regardless of what you decide to do, I do hope that um you know, in the future you have better experiences with that. That's really really crappy and I'm sorry they had to have such an experience because it's unfair and um I don't think anyone deserves that. So, Okay, folks. Um, it's it's the end of the hour, the top of the hour as some would say. So, this is usually where I go over um some of the things I got going on. So, um I know we spent a lot of time doing that already, but this is Dev Leader Weekly. I'll put the link in the chat again. How weird is that, right? That's a a live stream of me, but weekly.devleer.ca A Substack folks, you are already there. Um, my YouTube channel. There we go. This is Dev Leader. This is the main YouTube channel. Um, you can see that I accidentally picked this video because I thought it was the the one, but it's not. I wanted this one. Um, but yeah, I done few videos recently on AI development. These uh these last two or if you're a net developer. Um, I was showing how I build Roslin analyzers and Roslin analyzers are like uh, for those of you that aren't familiar, they're like uh, linting rules but pretty powerful. So, you can basically put more rules in place to keep your agents from building stuff that you don't want them to build because they'll write the code and then it won't compile. even though it's technically legitimate code, it's rules to stop them from doing that. So, uh there's that. I have um a couple of other YouTube channels and honestly um I haven't published them recently and I apologize. Just uh a little bit uh little bit hectic. So, one sec. This is the Dev Leader podcast. So, if you're watching the live stream on YouTube right now, that's where this is. Um I have one more podcast to go upload. um that I recorded at the end of last year, just a little bit behind on that. Um yeah, this is where I interview other software engineers and I have every person that comes on I ask them to talk about their career journey. That's sort of the requirement. Um otherwise after that they can kind of talk about anything that they're interested in. So there's that. I have Dev Leader Path to Tech which is my resume review channel. And oh man, look at that thumbnail. That's a good thumbnail. Right. Like look at that. That's that's something. I can't take any credit for that. That's my awesome editor. Um but yeah, Dev Leader Path to Tech. I have resume reviews. I honestly think that I have a couple of résumés waiting on me right now and I really do apologize. Um but this channel you can submit RS and I review them for folks. Uh, I have had people that have emailed me after or messaged me on LinkedIn and said, "Hey, like thanks for the review. I made changes and and got interviews." Uh, I don't take any credit for that. I think it's probably they just had a I don't know, a chance to go review things and make it more clear and, you know, they did all the right stuff. I don't take credit. So, uh, last channel cuz I got a bunch is Code Commute. Um, this is the inspiration for the newsletter articles and then the live streams. So, um, you can see, yes, was in pirate mode on on code commute as well when my eye was having some issues. By the way, I had Thank you for a lot of people that were concerned. I do appreciate that. Um, it was just a sty, but it was like kind of unsightly. Like, I didn't even want to look at it. So, I'm like, I need to make these YouTube videos. I'm going to cover my eye. The really funny part about that, and this is like a I don't know, like a silly content creator thing, um, people were seeing the eye patch, and any video that I put out with an eye patch on, like any short form video, the the retention curve is way better. It's hilarious because people are like, "Why has this guy got an eye patch on?" So they automatically watch a little bit longer. when it's just my stupid bald head without an eye patch, people don't care. They want the eye patch. So, maybe I'll bring it back full time. [laughter] Just be that guy with an eye patch for no reason. Um, but yeah, that's Code Commute. So, for folks that are interested on Code Commute, um I it's basically a Q&A channel. So, you can go there, leave comments on any video. Uh I go through the comments and you can ask questions and I'll make a a whole video for you. Uh, if you're not comfortable asking in public, my face is so itchy. What's going on? Um, if you're not comfortable asking in public, you can go to code.com. I should just pull it up because there's a a page there. Actually, I'll just show you. It's over here. If we click on the newsletter article, I put a screenshot. Um, on the contact page, there's just a spot that you can submit a question and you can check off submit anonymously and then that way uh I just get an email that says it's from me and you can put um, you know, any questions that you want help with and I'll make a video for you. If it's anonymous, I can't send you the link to the video. You have to check the channel and look for it, unfortunately. But, um, I do appreciate people that send in questions, uh, and people have had follow-ups where they'll they'll message me on social media and they'll say, "Hey, thanks for answering my question. Like, I got another one." Um, so really, you know, really cool. And I I do appreciate everyone that's kind of connected with me uh over time on that kind of stuff. U, I'm going to talk about Brand Ghost very briefly because uh, I know you're probably sick of hearing of it from this stream already. Um, Brand Ghost is the social media crossosting and scheduling platform that I build. The entire goal with Brand Ghost is trying to get people to a point where they can uh, publish content consistently. This all stems from the problem I said I had originally over a decade ago where I started trying to share content online and I was getting frustrated at the amount of time and effort that was going into sharing stuff on different social media platforms was so much and I wasn't getting any traction and I just gave up. What I want people to realize is that there isn't magic into what's going on here, right? Outside of software development, any, you know, this applies to anyone. If you've been doing stuff for a while, you probably have interesting things to share with people, right? I am not some, you know, magic engineering manager or like Uber developer or whatever. I'm I'm just a dude who's been an engineering manager for a while. I've seen some stuff, proud of what I've done, and I'm happy to try and share different things with people, right? If it helps you in your career, I'm I'm happy to have those conversations. So, like what I'm doing is not special. The part that's special is that I keep doing it, right? And like that's boring, but like that's that's the only secret. So, you have to keep showing up every day. And most people, including me, give up on it because it's not sexy. It's not exciting. You know, you don't post your first video and you're like, "Oh my god, I had 10 million followers and I can retire from life and just, you know, code video games on a beach sipping pin coladas." Sounds like the dream. Um, it's not how it works. And right you you'll see other people who they their first video was very successful and then it's even more discouraging or like why do I even do this? You just keep showing up and you keep doing it, right? It will get better. Um it'll get easier. And I build brand go so that people have an easier time getting over that because if you can make the content, at least make the content, you put it into brand ghost, I'll make sure it gets everywhere it needs to go. I rely on Brand Ghost for all of my content. I do hundreds of social media posts per week. Like I said, we did over 50,000 last year. Um, Brand Ghost is to help you be consistent with your social media. And I love building it. It's so much fun. And um, yeah, I think that's it, folks. I'm not even going to advertise courses. If you want courses, go to domtrain.com. I got a bunch of courses there. But thank you so much for being here, folks. I wish you all an amazing start to your 2026 and I will remind you that we do the live stream every Monday 700 p.m. Pacific. So I hope to see you next week. Take care.