Fearlessly Asking Stupid Questions - Principal Engineering Manager AMA

All right, we're just getting the stream going. Hopefully everything works. I never trust it. I think Instagram's going. I think that means Substack's going. Let me get my chat in front of my face. We had weird issues with chat last time. Hopefully, it's back to normal. I have the chat like displaying again. That was a pain in the butt, but I think it's good to go. So, welcome folks. Um, if you're new to the live streams, then uh happy to have you here. These are basically an AMA format. So, I have a topic, we'll go through it, but if you're like, I want to ask questions about other stuff, like please do that. Um, for me there's I mean I feel like it's a better use of time to ask or to answer questions that are coming in from folks. So I'm much happier to do that. And um we'll kick things off if I can find my if I can find my window here. I will get a link shared. And this is basically where I get my my topics from. So one sec. Here it is. I got got too many tabs. I think we're all familiar with that experience. And so this is one sec, it's refreshing the topic we're going to go through. So this is called uh that's not the right link. What's going on? My clipboard did the exact wrong thing. Oh, I'm pressing the wrong button. and even streaming on Labor Day. Yeah, of course. Uh, one sec here, chat. Boom. So, fearlessly asking stupid questions. We're going to talk about that. I actually did a code commute video on this uh this past week and I had like a really good scenario that came up in real life and I was like, this is great. I think it's a good thing to go through. And um, hey, random programmer, good to see him. And so yeah, the the link did that not go in the chat? Oops, something went wrong. Try reloading the page. I see it on the stream. What's on my head here? Um, but it looks like in my own chat window, it's busted. So I think the link went through, but um if it doesn't, then it's just at Substack. So it's weekly.devleer.ca. And for folks, like I said, if you're new here, um my live streams are based on a topic that I write my newsletter on. You don't have to subscribe to it or anything, but if you want to check out the topic, it's just at weekly.devleer.ca and it's generally based on a topic from code commute where I'm vlogging about it and that way I can kind of look back over the week, see what people were more engaged with, and um kind of go by view counts or like how how comments and stuff are going. and then I I see what has traction and then I write about that and then we do the live stream on it. And like I said, if you want to ask about other stuff, please do. But um I think this is a topic that I think is really important from like an engineering culture perspective. And I realize it sounds kind of silly. I kind of um try to title it in a way that would seem kind of silly and try to catch your attention a little bit because um like asking stupid questions like why why would you do that on purpose? Uh it seems like it's something that people try to run away from. You know, there's a pretty common stereotype that we especially like in in software development and I'm sure in other careers and stuff where it's almost like you feel like your self-worth is attached to your intelligence and if you're going to ask a question that makes you look not smart, then people avoid it, right? And I think there's a bunch of different motivations or reasons why this happens. I'm not a psychologist or anything, but I think in some scenarios it's kind of like you don't want to come across as stupid. In some scenarios, it might be um that you have people on your team that make you feel a certain way when you ask questions uh that that happen to make it look like you have less experience or you don't know something. So there I mean the list can go on and on for different motivations for this. Um, oh, and uh, yeah, a random programmer had commented on a short on YouTube and and said, uh, he was curious. Sorry, uh, I'm assuming he, but I have I think I have just been assuming that, but, uh, they wanted to know how I got into a manager position very early. So, it's a quick reminder to talk about your six months meteoric rise to being a manager before you proceed. Yeah. Um, it's not it's not quite like that. It's uh in full transparency I would say it's like almost the opposite of like meteoric rise. It's uh I think very much just nature of being in a startup and um so yeah for folks that don't know I like I've been my career like professionally started like right after graduating university so in 2012 and uh started working at a digital forensics company that was a startup right after that and then you know within months was uh was was managing a team and I would love to sit here and say oh it's because I was just so good at what I was doing. I was clearly going to be the best manager ever. Uh no, literally no idea what I was doing. I'm still learning things uh 13 years later. Uh I would say that's largely just attributed to call it like I don't know right place, right time. Call it um you know needs for a startup. The startup was growing. Um I arguably I guess depending on who you ask my my soft skills are I think where they need to be or uh were where they needed to be to help uh with a role like that at the time. So um I was kind of approached to see like hey like do you want to do uh like leadership for for some of the teams and so started doing that but it's a startup right and so like this like if you were to ask me today in terms of like engineering management and time focus and all that kind of stuff I would say like for for what I'm doing if if I am coding at work for the sort of the scope of things that I'm responsible uh for there's a problem like there's a problem that needs to be addressed. It doesn't mean that I will never code at work or uh you know I refuse to or something like that but there's there's likely a pretty big gap or an issue if I need to go writing code and that's from from a scalability perspective when I was working at a startup it made a lot of sense for me to be writing code and by the end of my time there it it started to make a lot less sense for me to write code and so I did that for eight years writing code and uh managing engineering teams but um yes oh great yes tired of streaming to zero. Please go away. You are blocked. Um yeah, so I don't know. Uh it's definitely not a meteoric rise to being an engineering manager, but uh a random programmer. I hope that answers your question. But uh if you have other questions or curiosities about that, please uh feel free to ask. I'm a pretty open book. But uh unfortunately, it's not because they identified, you know, the the next best manager ever. it was kind of just a need. So cool. Um, when it comes to asking stupid questions, I think that this is important from from an engineering culture perspective primarily and I like as I go through this like one of the main takeaways that I want people to have is like when it comes to engineering culture and this isn't just you know specific uh you know to to asking stupid questions and stuff like that but when it comes to engineering culture uh we we as in people on the team. We as in management or leadership, we as in whoever you want. Uh we do not get to say what the culture is. You don't get to say the culture is X, therefore suddenly the culture becomes X. It doesn't work that way. Culture is sort of the the observed like side effect of all of the things that go into uh working as teams. So you can do things that influence the culture. You can do things that influence how you work together uh in the software development life cycle uh you know within teams across teams. You can influence all of these things but it is the repeated influence. It is the repeated actions that are taken that result in an observable culture. So if you're like wow the engineering culture sucks here or why does the engineering culture look like X over there? or why does it look like why over here? And like how do we do something about that? Like why can't we just say our culture is like theirs and like things get better? It's because it doesn't work that way. If you want your culture to, you know, to look and feel a certain way, that requires constant embodying of those things that you want your culture to be like. So that's going to be one of the takeaways for this topic is like if you're working in an environment where you feel like you cannot ask questions where like it's it's either frowned upon or people will look down on you for it or you're afraid to do it or if you go through this exercise in your head of like these are all the reasons I don't want to ask questions. If you're doing that, like we want to create a culture that lets you get away from that, right? That's kind of what I'm I'm trying to drive at in this conversation today. But the way to do that is to start leading by example. Okay? So, um, in a nutshell, if you wanted to turn off the stream right there, there you go. That's the summary of it. But, uh, I I think I wanted to kind of kick this off with the example that I shared on code commute. uh last week because it was very relevant and I personally like talking through stuff that's real. I like talking through stuff that is um a little bit vulnerable. Hey Danny, thanks for being here. Danny's the man. Danny, you want to advertise your conference? It's coming up. And I did, for those of you that were on the last few streams, I did message Danny. I talked to him on LinkedIn. I said I was gonna do it and I didn't a couple times, but I did it the other time. I followed through on it, but Danny's got commit your code conference coming up. I think it's at the end of September. It's in Dallas. Uh, sorry, it's in I don't know anywhere. I don't know the places in Texas. Is it Dallas? I'm so sorry, Danny. I don't know. I'm Canadian. But it's called Commit Your Code. And I don't it must be streamed, right, Danny? Commit your code. I was going to say for people that physically can't be there. It must be. Um here I'm going to put it in the chat. Um my chat feels like it's a little bit Oh, nice. Adding to the site as we speak. Yes. Um I put the link in the chat. It's just commityoucode.com. Um, yeah, I should really get better at geography. Um, okay. I wasn't totally off. It is in some part of Dallas. Yes, it's all grouped together. Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Thanks, Danny. I put a link in the chat. I don't know when it's going to show up there. Um, oh, if I look at my video feed, it shows there. Whatever. like this reream chat that's that I'm looking at is just like super delayed. So I don't know what's going on with that. Hey Oscar. Um anything I ever do that is technical will never be gatekeep. That's what we love to hear. Danny always streaming technical content. Perfect. Hello. Hello from LinkedIn. It's great to see people on LinkedIn jumping in here. This is great. Uh usually it's the Twitter people. It's all people from Twitter. And uh again, I don't have like a Twitter. My like all of my streaming stuff shows it's going to Twitter, but usually the Twi uh Twitter numbers are like 10x any other platform, and I can't see anything from Twitter right now. Very weird. Um okay, let's let's chat about this funny scenario. Um, and again, I like talking about this stuff because I think it's good uh again from a lead by example perspective to talk about like vulnerable things because it's like I think a lot of us go through life like this is kind of like a I don't know like this is outside of just software engineering in general, but like we go through life and like there's always going to be stuff that like there's obstacles or there's things that come up or you're embarrassed about something or whatever it is, right? and you're like it feels like it's a very unique thing to you like the universe is picking on you for something or like why me and it's like everyone goes through all sorts of stuff like doesn't matter. Um so I feel like when we have these situations where we feel like man like why does this always happen to me you're like you know why today like why did this happen? It's like there's other people going through stuff, too. And if you're feeling embarrassed about something, I think that it's for me, I like making sure I can talk about some things that are at least a little bit embarrassing for me. And I hope that when that happens and other people hear it, they go, "Oh, like that kind of stuff happens to other people." Like that's not so bad. This happens like with imposttor syndrome. If I was like, hey, if I told you every time I switch like into a new team or like my role changes slightly or a new big project, every single time that happens, I have imposter syndrome. Some people might be like, "What? That's crazy. I would never imagine." And it's like, yeah, every single time. And every single time you kind of get through it until there's something new and you have imposter syndrome again. So, I think that it's important um to to talk about these things so that other people have, you know, like a bit more comfort for whatever they're going through. Uh Oscar, um I just I if I'm completely honest, I physically do not have time to go uh checking out MVPs and stuff like that. So, I do apologize, but uh I think that's super exciting for you. I think uh I did a little bit with O Lama. Um, the performance was pretty terrible, so I have to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Um, but I think that's super exciting. But I, yeah, I unfortunately I don't have time to poke around and stuff because I don't even have time for my own project. So, uh, thank you for the consideration, though. So, this scenario I want to talk through is me making an assumption about something that was just completely wrong. And uh I'm not going to get into the specific details because it is workrelated, but um I had I had someone at work reach out to me and ask a question over email and they were asking about some of the uh the services that were running and they asked a question and I was reading the email and initially my thought was like that's a weird question to ask like you know based on like what I think is reality I'm going like that question doesn't really make sense like why would you ask that if if clearly this assumption I have is true. So, I'm reading it and it's a like a lot of, you know, good details and follow-up things to go through, but I'm going like, I feel like, you know, I feel like this person's kind of missing something here because because of what I know. Like, that doesn't really make sense. And then I get to the end of the email and they kind of they sign off by saying something where I'm like, hold on. like they literally have like concrete evidence that is exactly disproving my assumption. So, I'm reading this email going, "Wait a second." Like, I've been assuming something this entire time. And when I say entire time, I've been on this team for uh just over a year and a half now. Um you know, it's coming up on coming up on two years. Hey, Andreas. And so this is an assumption that I've had for probably most of that time. And that's kind of scary because um yeah, Andreas, I got to stream on Labor Day. I'm not not doing anything else. No, I like streaming. It's fun. So um yeah, I'm back to work tomorrow. So it's good to be streaming and I'm I'm thankful that folks are joining in. Hey, Mars. Howdy, Eve. So, the the framing of this situation is just that like I'm like, "Oh no, I'm reading this email. I want to go respond to this person to answer their questions, but I'm I'm kind of going, "Oh crap." Like, I actually don't know how to respond now because my my world is kind of being rocked here about one of these assumptions. Now, I'll be totally clear here. This isn't an assumption that like would be dangerous or has like I've made mistakes based on this in the past. Just kind of like it's peripheral. Again, I'm kind of being ambiguous and vague here, so I apologize, but this is just something that I have assumed. And so the first thing I did because I'm going uhoh, like apparently I don't know about this situation and I thought I did. I messaged a colleague and I said, "Hey, this is my understanding of this thing. like, "Does that sound right to you?" And they said, "Yeah, that's that's my understanding, too." So, I'm going, "Okay, hold on. That feels pretty good, right?" Like, I'm getting some confirmation that at least I'm not totally crazy. Not totally crazy. Maybe for other reasons, but like on this, I'm not totally crazy. So, I said, "Okay." I let him know. I said, "I'm a little bit confused because of this email, so I'm going to dig in a little bit further." And he said, 'Well, thank you for doing that because if that's, you know, if that assumption is not true, then he's like, I need to learn about that, too. Great. So, I'm starting this chain. It starts with one person, but I'm starting this chain of like, hey, look, I'm acknowledging to you that there's this thing that I don't really know about. And if you're kind of unsure, too, I'm going to start asking questions about this and get to the bottom of it so we can learn together. But it's a bit of like, you know, when it's like a one-on-one kind of thing like that, I'm being a little bit vulnerable, but like whatever. I'm talking to one person, not a big deal. And I happen to be at the office this day. So I turn and I ask one of the employees on my team and I say, "Hey, I know that you might not have a ton of exposure to this, but I said, I'm just curious. Do you know about this thing? Like do you know like is this assumption true from your perspective or not?" and they had said actually I'm not totally sure. Um so this again a little bit of confirmation coming back to me was like maybe this isn't an obvious thing for everyone. So so far in this story there are three people myself one of them the first person I reached out to two and then the next person three people that aren't totally sure. Now, this is kind of interesting, right? Because in my mind, I'm going I'm kind of going back and forth like, am I, you know, am I, you know, stupid for not knowing this or like, is this such an obvious thing or like I don't know how to feel about it, but there's a lot of emotions, right? Like, I'm kind of embarrassed. I'm a little bit confused, but I say, "Okay." So, I tell tell my employee said, "Okay, well, I'm going to go, you know, try to find more information on this. I'll let you know." Okay. So again, I'm acknowledging now to the second person. Here's here's me. I'm your manager. I don't know something and I'm going to go dig into it and then we'll all learn. Okay. So, the pattern continues. Shortly after, a couple people walk into the into like we call them like a neighborhood, like the area, the open concept part of the office that we work in. So, a couple people walk into the neighborhood and I say, "Hey, I got a question for you guys." I said, 'I think you guys actually you might have a little bit more exposure to the sea you probably know. And I So I asked them the question. I said, 'Ive made this assumption and I'm not sure if it's true anymore, but can you share what you know? And so they explained a little bit and they said that from my assumption, they're like, I don't actually think that's true. They said, we think it kind of looks like this, but then they said, but we're not positive. So I said, okay, great. like, you know, I would love to have the answer, but I said that's now four of us. Well, sorry, that's five of us in total that we don't have an answer to this thing, but we're starting to build up a picture. I think what's pretty clear at this point is my assumption was not right. But now there's a couple more data points coming up and we're starting to kind of come up with a bit of a picture, but there's still more work to do. We still have to go dig in and understand. Shortly after that, one more person walks into our neighborhood. And so I turned to my colleague and I said, "Hey, not to put you on the spot and he looked at me and he said, "But that's exactly what you're doing, isn't it?" So I said, "Yeah." Um, and that's because we were all still talking about this when he walked in. So I said, "Okay, let's, you know, let's put you on the spot. Let's ask this question." And so he gave yet another perspective. So now we have three different perspectives on this. And then he added in, but I'm actually not positive. That's six of us in total now that we're like, we actually don't really know the answer to this. And the reason I'm kind of pausing at every person to say like, hey, look, we're not totally sure. is because I'm trying to use this as sort of like proof or evidence to you listening that what I'm doing along the way is like acknowledging to all of the people that are part of this conversation like we don't know the answer and like that's okay. We will go figure it out but like it's okay to not know, right? We're going to go get answers. That's fine. Okay. So a little bit later um coincidentally a bunch of us like we had a team meeting coming up. So team meeting happens and so it's actually backtoback team meetings and um in between we're in this meeting room with my manager. So he's the one who's you know running the whole team. And so I was like this is a perfect opportunity. So I turned to my manager and I said okay I'm going to ask you a dumb question. And I said, "I've been making an assumption about something that I don't think is true, and I wanted to walk through it, and then you can help us understand." And he said, "Perfect. Okay." So, I said, "Here's the assumption that I've had." And I explained it. And I said, "But I don't think that that's true." And he's like, "You're right. It's not true." So, I said, "Okay." And I said, "Here's a couple of things that we've uncovered, but we still don't really know. Like, there's a bit of a gap." And then he kind of explained to the group of us that were that were all talking about this and he basically connected some of the dots. So every person who had had some perspective to share on this, they were all partially right. There were just a couple of missing pieces that we needed to glue this thing together. So my manager uh you know, he didn't look at me and say, "Oh, that's such a dumb question, Nick. How do you not know that?" He didn't try to belittle me. He didn't try to embarrass me. Um, you know, I I felt like I was in a comfortable enough environment. Obviously, a little bit awkward for me to go to my manager in front of this, you know, smaller group of people and say like, I don't know this, but I need to do that. I need to lead by example. And it was great. He walked us through how these things work. We could ask some follow-up questions, and every single one of us that day learned something. and nothing bad happened, right? Like it's not like he took me aside after and was like, "Hey, like don't be dumb." It's not like, you know, I don't think that he left that feeling like, "Oh no, I have a manager that works for me that's incompetent." Like nothing nothing bad happened and only positive things happened. We all learned about something. We all had more clarity. I was able to go back to the uh the partner that had reached out to me and gave them a lot of follow-up information. So, that worked really well. And then I had taken that opportunity to demonstrate at least to the people that were part of the conversation, there's nothing wrong with asking for clarity or for not knowing things. It's totally normal and we should do this more often. So, um that was the example that I wanted to walk through because it's very real. Right? That's me being vulnerable to all of you watching and vulnerable to the people that were involved. That like I don't have the answers to everything. I'm not going to pretend like I do. And when I don't, we need to follow up. We need to go figure things out. And it's okay to not know stuff. So, in my opinion, this is part of building a culture. Thanks, Danny. I appreciate it. Um, it's part of building an engineering culture where you feel safe to be able to ask questions like that to uh, you know, not have to worry that someone's going to belittle you, that someone's going to make you, you know, feel inferior for asking questions, right? We need to be able to lead by example. We need to practice that and to ask questions like that. But this type of thing applies to any type of behavior you want to become normal in your engineering culture. Okay. So that's the the little story that I wanted to share. Um you know I think that there's probably some like obvious things that I wrote in my in my newsletter um to kind of go through but um when we have people like when you have a culture where people don't want to speak up and ask questions, right? when you have that happen, there's a lot of really negative things that come from that, but some of the really obvious ones are like, you know, I I got lucky that the assumption that I was making was like it it's not because I didn't want to to ask for clarity. I just had assumed this from early on. And fortunately, it wasn't like a dangerous assumption. But if you're in a position and you're like, "Oh crap, I don't want to ask about that. like I'm just going to assume it's X and like kind of go on with X. Depending on your situation, that could be pretty dangerous. That could cause you a lot of issues, right? You could end up perpetuating misinformation. So, if I didn't go ask for clarity on that when I asked, you know, the first person who was like, I think that assumption is right, we could have doubled down on that, right? and then it would have just been wrong and I would have been spreading and confirming misinformation like we don't want that. Um the the next thing I wrote is like people can end up wasting a lot of time chasing the wrong solution. So if I would have responded to that partner who reached out to me asking for information and then kind of answered him in a way that was like no no that doesn't make sense because of my assumption. I would have derailed that whole conversation and it would have been super confusing and it would have spent it would have cost us a lot more time to to make any progress. So again like I was not confident there was enough information there where I was like oh crap I don't think I I don't think I know the answer to this anymore. So we got to get the answer. Um, and then the other thing like I wrote down, I'm just I'm not sharing my screen because I'm just talking right now, but um, is that in some of those situations, you might end up having problems that kind of go unseen for a while and they crop up later and it's just because you weren't willing to go ask about it and get clarity. Um, I wrote and I've kind of been talking about this, but I wrote in the newsletter like I that one of the sections is titled like why leaders need to model it. And I wanted to pause at this part just because like when I like often when I write things like why leaders I if you're like listening to stuff that I'm talking about if you're reading material that I put out there I don't um I don't like talking about like leaders as in like you must have a role to be a leader. So like the only way to be a leader is to be a manager or like a director or a VP. Like that's not that's almost the opposite of what I mean. Usually um leaders to me are are the way like are people that that act a particular way. They're are not just associated with a title. In some cases like if I'm talking about managers, they should be leaders to be a good manager. I think that you must be a good leader. Um but you don't need to be a manager to be a good leader. Like it one does not require the other. And um so like when I talk about like leaders needing to model this, this goes back to what I was talking about with culture, like if you want culture change, if you want to see improvements, you want to be someone who's leading the change, like you need to go model these things, right? So that's the the main takeaway for this part of the newsletter that I wrote about like in terms of leaders modeling it is like if this is what you want to have happen if you're just hoping that things change so that people start feeling comfortable to ask stuff. Um it's like hope is not a good strategy. Like you need to go demonstrating that. And if you have other people that are doing it on the team like acknowledge it, celebrate it, right? Like if someone's like, "Okay, like I'm going to ask this question in front of the the team and like you know they're they're nervous, it might be obvious or something like that." Like remind them that like it's good to do that. Remind them that if they're curious about something, it's almost guaranteed that someone else has the same question. So we need to model this behavior if we want to change our engineering culture to work in a particular direction. Um, I think that like one of the things I said at the beginning of this talk was like I think like a lot of people don't do this a whip. Ask me questions. Um, I think a lot of people are afraid of like they don't they don't want to um they don't want to look stupid. They don't want to make it seem like they're uh inadequate. They if they're if they are more senior, they don't want people to be like, "Oh, this person doesn't even know. Like, are they even worthy of being senior?" They don't want to appear as an impostor for not knowing something. And I think that this is very common in in job positions where like you're a lot of like it's it feels like your value is derived from your intelligence. So if you have to ask a question, it's kind of like acknowledging that you don't have some knowledge about something, therefore you must not be intelligent, therefore your value is less. And like it's just simply not true. Um it's impossible to know everything. A lot of the systems that we work with are incredibly complex and complex can look different for all sorts of different domains, right? Someone might talk to you about some big distributed system and like you're like, "Holy crap, that's complex." And maybe you work on a mobile application and when you're explaining something, it's not complexity from like a big distributed system perspective, but maybe the way that the code base is designed or how different pieces in the codebase work together like that has complexity. Doesn't matter sort of what level you're looking at. there's always going to be complexity and we end up making assumptions about things because we cannot physically know everything. Now I just think that it's important that if you are making assumptions about things that you need to challenge those assumptions you need to as you're coming across these things like get the answers even plants grow even better with miracle grow right you need to be asking these things right challenge your understanding of stuff but you also need to acknowledge that you won't know everything all the time all at once It's just it's not it's just not going to happen. So like if we understand that if we understand that it's impossible to know everything, right? It sounds pretty obvious like you're not going to know everything. But like that must mean that if you want to get smarter or you want to have a better understanding by definition then you must ask questions. You must. So like that's it only makes sense that you do that then. Like if you want to be more effective, you want to be smarter, you have and you want to understand things better, you must ask questions to go get to the bottom of the question you have. So it's quite literally the opposite of like looking stupid or you know uh seem like you're the impostor because you're you're really just operating at a junior level and you're not a senior. It's it's the opposite. You are trying to further your understanding. Okay. So, um I think that I'm I I'm just one guy. I'm just one guy talking about this. I realize that like I'm not going to say it once and then it's just going to, you know, uh stick with everyone. But I'm just trying to do my part with reminding folks about that, right? That it's okay to ask questions. And in fact, that is that is how you're going to learn more. So, do it. Um, the next section I have in my newsletter is about team culture. And I talked about team culture and stuff a bunch already, but what I wanted to remind people is like or sort maybe not remind, I want to acknowledge um I I realize that like when I talk about obviously when I talk about things a lot of it's from my experience, right? My perspective, my experience. I I need to acknowledge that that's not going to be the same lived experience as everyone else, right? So, I'm telling you about these situations where, you know, when I was being vulnerable and asking a question, my manager was very open and receptive and helpful and answered things and and didn't belittle me, didn't embarrass me in front of a group of people. um there was no ill consequences of asking a question but but that's my experience and like if I'm operating in a team I will do everything I can to make sure that that's the case and I feel like if I were trying to do those things I'm just again just being open and transparent if I were trying to drive change like that and I felt like you know my manager wasn't someone that would um that would get on board with bad or like the the team culture was so toxic that despite all of my efforts like I couldn't make those changes. That wouldn't be the spot for me. It just wouldn't I would try to make those changes if I couldn't do it. It it wouldn't be the spot. And like that would be it. And I wanted to talk about sort of the other side of this because you might be listening to this or watching this and going like, "Nick, that all sounds nice, but every single time I speak up and ask a question. Someone makes me feel like an idiot. Every time I do it, um, you know, like it's a reminder that I should never ask questions again. Like, I hate the feeling of it. Um, maybe you're more junior, right? And maybe you're trying to ask questions from someone more senior on the team and they make you feel a certain way. They make you feel like you're dumb. And like that to me, that's not okay, right? Like that's not something that I would tolerate ever. And I would try to work with that person to coach them for both people. Coach the person who's making people feel bad and coach the person who is is feeling bad to address that because that's not something I ever want to have happen in the team culture. But going back to what I said, like if you want to see that change, right, when other people are asking questions, like you know, thank them for asking stuff, right? Like if they're asking it in like a team chat, thank them for doing it, right? Encourage it. It's kind of like it works both ways. So when you are in a situation and you're like hiding from asking questions because people make you feel bad for doing it, other people are going to hide too because they don't see that behavior being modeled. So when you see those opportunities come up and people are doing it, thank them. Bring attention to it. This is a thing we want to do. This is a this makes us feel good, right? The more that people see that, like you build momentum the other way. So again, instead of falling into the trap of like running away from the things because you have some crappy people on the team or it's a behavior they don't even know they're doing. I've literally worked with people and I am not making this up. I have literally worked with people who unfortunately accidentally made people feel bad and it's like purely like a communication challenge. They didn't realize they were doing it. They were actually trying to be helpful and it backfired. And then what happens is the other person starts shutting down. Now they don't want to ask questions. They're like, I I must be stupid. But like we can work the other way to undo that. It I'm not saying it takes no effort, but like it's exactly that it does take effort and we need to lean into that. So when you see other people doing the behavior that you think is really good for your team, doesn't matter if you're the manager or not, doesn't matter if you're an intern or whatever, you see good behavior, say thank you. You know, try to model that yourself as well and you will you will build momentum the other way because more people will speak up, more people will start doing it. Ryan's here. Welcome, Ryan. Uh volunteer firefighter. I did not know that. That's awesome. getting a call just before the live stream. Um, no, that's awesome. I hope everything uh worked out okay. Um, Ryan says, "A big phrase I've learned helps reduce the chance of demeaning comments is just to recap, here's my understanding of X." And then state back the understanding. Yeah. Right. This is like it's um it's kind of like you can use this with active listening. Uh it's a it's a common and useful skill or practice that you can apply in different situations, right? um like I I mentioned active listening because in some uh conversations for like for engineering managers and one-on ones and stuff like or or even if you're like uh participating in a engineering conversation in general if you find that you're the kind of person that you're waiting for people to be quiet just so you can jump in and talk you can practice what Ryan just wrote to help with that. which means you literally need to listen to what people are saying and try to resummarize it back to them. It's very difficult to do that if you're not listening. So, it's a good way to practice active listening. But what Ryan's saying as well is that um you can based on how like the language you use and how you frame uh how you phrase things, you can set things up in a way that's more like inviting for um more inviting for like a positive interaction, right? to say like you know I wanted to summarize here here's my understanding like you know could you and you can invite people to literally correct it right like when you do this kind of thing you're opening up this invitation if you are wrong it's not for someone to be like oh this guy this guy's an idiot it's kind of like no no like uh you got X Y right but Z is not right so let me just update you on Z and it's kind of like again you are being open it's a little bit of uh vulnerability to summarize, right? And to say like, I think this is my understanding because you are opening yourself up for feedback or correction. So, I think it's a really good thing to try. Uh Ryan says, "Another fun way to ask the stupid question is to play the devil's advocate." Yeah, try and counter what people are saying and mentioning because uh you wouldn't believe how often people are are confused. Yeah, it's um this is a really good thing from like from the the perspective or context of like engineering discussions I would say. Uh I think depending on your experience level in different situations you've been in, there's certainly situations where people are kind of saying you might have someone who's being loud about something. I don't just mean like verbally loud, but I mean kind of uh steamrolling a conversation or a design or something like that. And um you might have other people that are kind of like, I don't know, like Jimmy's saying X. I guess I guess we gotta listen to what Jimmy's saying. Jimmy Jimmy must know. Jimmy's the the principal engineer, the staff engineer. I guess we just do that. And um some like what can be really helpful is to to frame things the other way or to ask questions about the other thing, the missing part. Right? Jimmy is saying to do X, but like hey, what would happen if we did Y? Like I don't see Y being talked about anywhere on here. So, like, hey, like, Jimmy, this is a cool idea. I see your points for doing X, but like, hey, like, what happens if we would do Y? Like, what does that look like? Like, what what tradeoffs are we making? Because like I could see probably some benefits with doing Y, but like, you know, you arrived at X and that's what you're backing. Just curious how that all lines up, right? And you might even want to you could say we could I want to advocate for Y. You can structure things to look different to get a conversation going. And it's kind of similar because what you're doing is acknowledging like I have a question about this thing. It's not immediately obvious to me. I don't understand about this other thing. There's probably other people that also don't. Right? What's going to happen? You're going to learn about it. You're going to open up a conversation about it. But you can do these things in a way that's not like um you don't have to like attack other people, right? It's not, "Hey, Jimmy, that's a stupid idea. You didn't even talk about this other thing." Like, no one's saying that. That might be a great idea, Jimmy. Thank you so much. But I'm curious about this other thing. I don't I just don't see it being addressed here, and I just wanted to understand it better. Right? There's a lot of different techniques you can do. Um, actually the next or maybe the last section, no, one of the last sections. Um, I wrote down a couple of these. So, the first one is actually kind of what um what Ryan was saying. I wrote down, you know, I uh as an example, I want to make sure I understand this correctly and then repeat it back like kind of summarize or explain what your perspective is on it. Um, you can pair it up with some evidence, right? So you could say like I thought that this thing worked this way because of X and like that that's some evidence, right? So if you're in this situation where you're like, oh, I don't want to seem stupid for doing this. Look, here's, you know, here's the reason why you thought this, right? That might be real real data. You may have misinterpreted it. That's fine. Or there's more data. And if you had that extra data, you would go, "Oh, like now I understand why that's the case." This is actually very similar to the story that I was telling because as we were going through it and more people were adding data, it was actually piecing the whole puzzle together. And then finally, there was still one gap. Again, I was kind of ambiguous and um about what the topic was, but by the end of it, I was like, "All of these things make sense, except there's still one gap." And when my manager explained it, I was like, "There's the the gap is now closed." And it every person's different perspective came together to answer that question. And he just kind of closed the gap off. Um and then I think like I don't love this one, but I wrote it down because I I still think that you can use it. I don't love it because I feel like what's a good way to say this? I I'll read it out and I'll try to explain why I don't love it, but I still think it could be useful. But you can use like um group learning as cover for asking your question. So the example kind of reads like maybe I'm the only one, but could we walk through this again just so we're all clear? So you're kind of saying like hey like maybe other people don't know. And I guess the reason I don't love this one is because I think, okay, I think that you can absolutely use this. I think that there's probably team scenarios where maybe the culture on the team isn't great or maybe you're trying to make progress and push things in the right direction and like that can be a good stepping stone. The reason I don't love this is because I feel like we're still avoiding like it feels like avoidance. Like you're asking the question, but you're not outright saying like I don't know. And I really want people on any team that I'm working with to be totally comfortable just being like, "Hi, I don't know." And like there there's no consequence. And I feel like when you're saying like maybe we could walk through it just so we're all aligned is kind of like I mean yeah that's a really good reason to do it, but I would want you to feel comfortable just being like I don't know. So that's the reason I don't love that one, but I still think it can be useful. Uh Ryan says, "The way I have learned is you really have to make sure uh sure to show true interest in the topic and understanding things. Make sure that you're showing interest outside of the meetings." Yeah, it's um it's kind of fascinating like there's you can kind of be part of conversations, right? You can you can physically be there or you can be on the meeting, whatever. You can have someone can be speaking, the words are going into your head, but you're like you're just not present and it's because you're genuinely not interested. You're not putting in any effort into being interested. And like if you if you can work on changing that, I think that you'll there's a lot of things that I think uh improve a lot. And like I'll give you one that uh like I would say this comes up in like management coaching and I realize it's not exactly what we're talking about but this this whole thing of being present and like actually listening is like you'll hear some managers when they're like managers like don't get a lot of training which is uh I don't know I feel like that's a huge missed opportunity but when people are new to managing and they're like oh I don't like you know I have one-on ones but like don't really know what we do in them. It's like it's and it's just a status update every time and like you know I feel like I'm kind of falling asleep when my employees are talking to me and like I don't know why we're doing this and I don't see the value. It's like yeah if you're if you are not actively listening like that's gonna happen and you it's kind of like a vicious cycle if you're like I don't really see the value so I'm kind of checked out then I'm not putting in like my effort like yeah then you're going to keep seeing that there isn't value but as soon as you can like put in a little bit of effort to being like oh like tell me more about that let me resummarize that back to you let me ask questions you'll literally just from that alone. Right? They'll see they'll have different perspective as they're chatting through things. Like, oh crap, like now that I've said that, like I think I know what I'm going to go do, right? Like you will unlock a lot more just by actively listening and like repeating things back to people. And it's not like this is one example from like working in management, but this can literally be applied into all sorts of other conversations. Try to be a little bit more present. Makes a big difference. Um, doing group learning is Ryan's saying, doing group learning in uh in just your own team might be difficult, but doing group learning across multiple teams in a project is invaluable in my opinion. Yeah. Let me make sure I have the process right. You need to listen to the people, not just hear them. There's a huge difference between the two. Yeah. And so that's like why a little bit earlier I said like you know kind of I challenge you right like it's it's interesting but I challenge you if you struggle with this if you struggle with like I'm just waiting for people to stop talking so I can jump in. Try seeing if when you go to open your mouth you can summarize things back to people. You need to practice listening in order to do that. Or else it's going to be like you'll you'll either go, you know, oh, I can't summarize it, so whatever. I'm going to ignore what Nick said and just keep going. But it's at least a mental checkpoint, right? I want you to be a little bit more aware of it because if you're like, oh crap, I can't summarize that. Even if it doesn't have to be perfectly right or anything, but if you if you're like, I don't even know how to start summarizing that, you might not have been listening. So try it. Um, hi Nick. How are you so consistent in your YouTube with just a little views? Uh, yeah. I don't know. I wish it wasn't just a little views. Uh, yeah. I think, um, I do have a few YouTube channels. I have four YouTube channels. Um if you are depending on which one you're talking about uh not that any of them have done extremely well but um this is all based on a a perspective of mine and so some people don't know this but in 2013 actually the whole reason I have like dev leader is because when I became a manager um and in 2013 when I trying to be I was like kind of realizing like, oh crap, I literally don't know what I'm doing and I want to be better at this. I I said I'm going to start trying to learn in public. I'm going to start blogging about this. So things I'm learning, articles I'm reading, I'm going to start sharing back what I'm learning because that way other people can learn as well. That's that's what Dev leader is. And Dev Leader started in 2013. So the question about how I end up being consistent. Well, what happened was in 2013 I did it for a few months and I said, "This sucks. I'm doing all this work and no one cares. No one's no one's reading the articles or no one's engaging with me on social media. Why am I doing this?" That was in 2013. Now, I think like unfortunately growth is very slow, right? So, I I picked this back up in the beginning of 2023. So, that means from a content creation perspective, it's almost been three full years. And I told myself if I'm going to do this, I'm just going to be consistent. I will not succeed in doing this unless I'm consistent. So the the answer to your question is like I have failed once before at this because I gave up over a decade ago. I just said, "Nah, I'm not doing this. No one watches my stuff. That's okay." Right? But now I'm doing it. Now I'm posting content consistently. I've done over 600 YouTube videos. I think there's it's again numbers aren't crazy. I think I have like 16,000 subscribers across a few channels. There's some people they put one video up and they get more subscribers than that. So, I do it because um there are it only takes a couple of people periodically to be like, "Thanks, that helps so much." And I go, "Great, I'll keep doing it." And uh I lose money from YouTube. I'm not breaking even on editing costs and, you know, ad revenue. It's terrible. Um, but I do it because it's helpful. And then I do sell courses on the side. And I take whatever I make from courses, I just funnel back into content creation. So that's that's my way to be able to make sure that I can keep creating free content because I like to do that. I Danny was in the chat earlier. Um, Danny Thompson who runs uh the Commit Your Code Conference. He's an awesome creator. Danny said I won't I won't like his words were like I don't gatekeep you know content so like if I'm doing it it's going to be streamed blah blah blah I feel like the same right like I I'm h I'll put out courses because some people will they're willing to pay for courses because they want structured learning right they want to make sure like if I pay for this then I have like a commitment to it that's it's going to keep me on track to do it but it's like I still make YouTube videos on the stuff that are in the paid courses that are free. So the the the very short answer to that is like I don't want to fail at this again. So I have to be consistent. And unfortunately it's taking me a lot longer than it takes some people, but I'm trying. Um what's this whole username? Evil eye Interactive LLC. There we go. Um it's because it's all the same case. I can't bring up the word summarization. Remove the leave your feelings at the door sign at the entrance and give every employee a box of tissue. Yes. Um it's hard. Um you know it's uh engineering is tricky, right? We're humans. We have emotions. It's and I actually I don't I do not think that it's good to to not have emotions. I think if you have emotions, you feel certain things like that's a signal. But when it comes to decision-m um engineering context like we need to be unbiased, right? I think the biggest difficulty is that um what ends up happening is that people go well that's right we are engineers. We we we need to not have feelings as part of this. we need to be unbiased and that's correct except the way that we interact with each other is sometimes pardon my language but it's shitty and then when you go well we're just engineering like you shouldn't have feelings about it it's like well you shouldn't be terrible so I think that's the the thing that I would call out is like yeah we when it comes to making decisions we as engineers we don't want to have emotions brought into it but when we're working with people. We have to be careful on that because people do have feelings and we don't get to tell other people that they cannot have those feelings. It just does not work. It's not how that happens. People have feelings and unfortunately if you do things and people have an emotional response to that, that might mean that the way that you're interacting with them, maybe that can be adjusted. Maybe they need to get their feelings in check, too. But it's like people have feelings and it's not just we turn them off. So something to think about. Well, thanks Romesh. I appreciate that. Um but yeah, I think to kind of summarize the topic from today, uh I kind I kind of said it earlier. I just want to remind folks like engineering culture, right? This is just one example of engineering culture. If you want things to improve or to look a certain way, you want to model your culture on something some other thing that you've seen because it looks awesome. Um ah sorry evil interactive the software engineers that I watch they like to dig into each other. Uh it is normal for them. Yeah. I don't know. Uh so when it comes to engineering culture, if you if you want your culture to be a certain way and you're going, man, like sucks to be on my and it doesn't matter what level or role you have, right? So, this is I'm trying to talk about this in a way that hopefully feels more universal. But, um, if you're working in a culture that you don't like or there's parts of it that you don't like and you want to see that changed or you see something else on some other team or you're talking to a buddy and they're like, "Here's how we do it." You're like, "Oh, that sounds so good. Why don't we do that?" Um, whatever the situation is, like all these things. Unfortunately, you don't just get to write it on a piece of paper or put it on the wall somewhere and say, "Our culture is that we don't belittle people for asking questions. You don't get to say that um our culture is we have a safe place and everyone can ask questions without fear." You don't get to say that. You don't get to say it and then it just is. You get to say that when you regularly do these types of things and that's actually how the culture changes and the culture that you observe is no one gets belittled for asking questions. People do feel safe. Culture is observed. Right? So, it's all of the things that you do within your team, how you impact your team, how you lead by example, how you celebrate what other people are doing, you draw attention to the positive behavior. Does not matter if you are a manager or not. Sometimes it's even more impactful when it's coming from a peer. When you do do those types of things over time consistently, other people start doing it, too. That's how you change your culture. But you don't just get to say our culture is X, therefore it becomes X. You have to do the work. Uh Ryan says, "This top goes so much further than uh just engineering. Sometimes doing these tops uh tips and tricks outside of your team can open up doors and uh doing it inside your team one day." Yeah. Model what you want others to do and be. Exactly. Right. um as someone who is a manager like I have to take on you know some of that responsibility to like again to lead by example. So, just to give you like a bit of a meta example here, I'm telling all of you, hey, like if there's things you're seeing on your team, like, hey, like, you know, thank the person like, you know, acknowledge what they're doing so that other people can see that. Like, I have to do that to show other people to do it, right? So, I have to go like, hey, like, thanks so much for doing that, Jimmy. Like, in in the team chat so that other people can see, hey, look, Jimmy's getting praised for doing that thing. Like that's that's a good thing, right? Like and we have to keep doing this on repeat. It's like we we all need to be doing these things and to some people and I I get it. To some people I get it. If you're like, well, that sounds like a waste of time. Like we're just here to build software. Like I don't care. Like I just want to write the code. I want to do the design. I want to get in, get out, and be done with it. Like the reality is that we work in teams, we work with people and like these parts are super important. They don't act like all these things that I'm talking about whether it's today or in like other topics and stuff. I'm talking about a lot of different things and like the reality is that if you start doing these things and I think a lot of them are just like come down to like just be a nice person to other people. It's not really that hard but we have to be intentional about it. I think that's actually the hardest part is like be intentional about these things and you will notice positive team culture changes. Infected FPS says, "Also got to have a culture that encourages asking questions." Uh, I remember my first few months at my current role, I asked a senior engineer for some assistance on a test. His response was, "Uh, there really isn't that kind of mentoring environment here." Oh. Um, I took that, made it my goal to turn around. Awesome. And it worked. Fast forward to now me and that senior now actually ask each other our own stupid questions perfectly. More like uh design stuff now. Got to be the change you want to see. Perfect. Love it. And thank you for sharing that. Right. Like it's I'm not like I am just a guy just some bald guy with a white beard talking on a camera, but like you can see there's other people that are saying that like this does work, right? Um this topic is surprisingly closely tied to your podcast with Adrian. Yeah. Right. And like so there's like uh just more sort of evidence that these types of things are like they're they're real, right? Um where can I DM you where the chances of reply are higher? Um honestly uh LinkedIn um and I'm I'm totally transparent about this by the way. If you message me on LinkedIn, I should be able to respond. People that send connection requests, I'm again totally transparent about this. basically colleagues. I accept connection requests from connection requests from uh from people that are not content creators. I generally do not accept and that's not because I'm trying to be elitist or something like that. Let me explain very briefly. The reason I do that is because if I have uh a lot of connections on something like LinkedIn, for example, other social media platforms, I don't really care as much. But on LinkedIn, uh for those of you that are not LinkedIn creators, it's a real pain in the butt to get anything visible. Like I think there's 30,000 people that follow me on LinkedIn and the impressions that I get on a post are like a few hundred. The way that you need to get impressions to your own content is you have to go engaging with other people's content. So I I really need to make sure that my news feed on LinkedIn is other content creators. So if I do go on LinkedIn and engage, then like I can find stuff easy. So just a heads up if you're like, "Hey, well Nick, I tried to connect with you on LinkedIn and you ignored me." It's just because I I need that as a content creator. It's nothing personal, but it uh LinkedIn messages, Twitter works, but the problem with Twitter is the inbox experience for me is busted. It sometimes takes 10 minutes for my inbox to load and it I wish I could say it's cuz I'm so popular and I have all these messages. No, it's just because Twitter sucks. Um I don't know why it's like that, but it takes forever. And if I go to respond, sometimes it takes like five minutes for me to send a message. So, Twitter will work. Uh kind of crappy experience for me, but LinkedIn should be fine. So, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's just Nick Cosantino. I can't remember what my picture is, but it probably looks like me. Uh but yeah, you can message me there and I will do my best. I've been pretty pretty slow on replies over the past couple weeks. Uh I've been on call for like uh almost three shifts back toback. So almost a month and a half straight of on call uh which is a lot. So um this is very draining for me. So I think I'm I think I'm past that now. So we should be okay and I'll try to catch up on stuff. But uh folks, I think that's it for the stream. So uh huge thanks for, you know, folks in the chat for sharing examples and stuff like that. I really do appreciate that. Super awesome. Um I'm just going to go through stuff quickly. So this is the newsletter article I was sharing. It's got my dumb face on it. Um, and yeah, let me just share with you if I go back to the main spot here. So, this is just where the newsletter is. I ignored your message on LinkedIn. When did you send it? I'll go back and check it after this. Um, promise I I had to do this with Danny the other day. Um, and I'm I'm speaking at Danny's conference and Danny was like, "Message me." And then I just didn't. Um, but we sorted it out. So, I will I will follow up again. Um, weekly.devleer.ca is where the newsletter is. It's also where this infinity video is. Um, that's where I'm just streaming on Substack. So, you can check that out. Again, it's a it's an email newsletter. You don't have to subscribe because if you just want to check it out, you can treat it like a blog. Right there you go. Uh, and then usually, like I said, I have a video that's uh like the newsletter is usually based on a code commute video. So, if I jump over to Code Commute, just to show you very quickly, here's Code Commute. This is one of my YouTube channels. This one is all vlog style entries. Um, the goal is for them to be Q&A driven. So, you submit questions and I make a vlog response. And if I don't have questions to go over, then I just go to Reddit and I look up experienced devs topics and respond to those. But you can go to codecommute.com and there is this uh form if you want. You can submit questions anonymously so you can write um all sorts of details on things. And the more detailed the better because uh sometimes if people ask really generic questions they kind of get generic answers which is unfortunate. The Dev Leader podcast is where I'm doing live streams from now on YouTube. Um, so let's get that copied into the chat. Boop. There we go. And so I'm reposting a bunch of my uh podcast episodes that I had on my main channel. These are all uh most of them I got to catch up are on Spotify. Uh, and by the way, I forgot to mention Code Commute is also on Spotify. So you can check that out if you don't want to. Um I realize some people don't have YouTube Premium and they just want to leave it running in the background of their phone. So Spotify is pretty good for that. So uh Dev Leader Podcast is where I do the live streams now and where I interview other software engineers. So um I got a few more going up this week and next week and then I'm going to send out invites again to get more people on the podcast. Dev Leader is my main YouTube channel. So, this is the one where I have all of my programming tutorials and uh so like AI software development, C development. There's got to be new videos up there. Come on, refresh. Oh, it's not in chronological order. That's why that's the latest one. So, yeah, you can check those out. Um, thanks Evil Interactive. I appreciate that. Um, so yeah, if you want to, you know, follow along with C development, that kind of stuff, this is the spot to be. And then the one of the other new YouTube channels I made was split out my resume reviews into this other channel called Dev Leader Path to Tech. Um, this is where people can submit their resumes and I will review them. It is free for me to do resume reviews. Costs me money because I get them edited. Uh but uh people have had you know positive feedback on them. So happy to try and do that for folks. Uh so if you check out any of the videos I explain how to submit your resume if you're interested in that. And then finally I'll jump over to uh do train. So do train is where I have my courses that I mentioned a little bit earlier. So if you want to learn how to program in C, I do have beginner courses for that. There's a couple more advanced topics like reflection and then I have a refactoring course as well. And then otherwise some of the other courses are in more like general software engineering and career advice. So paired up with Ryan Murphy on those ones, but they're all available on domain. And last but not least, Brand Ghost is the social media content cross-osting scheduling platform that I'm building. So the question that I had earlier in the chat was how do I stay consistent even though I don't get a lot of views on YouTube. This I built Brand Ghost so that I could power all of my social media in a way that lets me write content and not have to worry about scheduling and posting it. So I get to focus entirely on the posts I want writing content and I never think about when it gets posted or how it's going to get posted. I just add it to Brand Ghost and it does it for me. So I do uh I think like 250 or something social media posts per week. And if I were to show you very quickly, if I were to show you what Brand Ghost looks like, right? Like that's September. Come on server. That's October. That's November. You might notice that all of my content is already scheduled uh basically for forever. So, all that I have to do is create content. Sorry, I realized my face is on the other side of this. Let me do that. Um, but like all of my content's already scheduled. This is February 2026. So, I just keep creating new content and then Brand Ghost will post it for me when it's ready to go up and that way it's a lot more automatic and that is the only way that I stay consistent. So, if you're interested in Brand Ghost, you can check it out. There is a entirely free tier. So, if you have a small business um and you need more help with your social media marketing, you can try out the free tier. If you are interested in trying to learn in public or just post stuff across social media, it's free. You don't have to put your credit card in the advanced stuff like the way that I post content and have it recurring like that does cost. But I would tell people don't don't use that or don't pay for it until you need it. Right? So if you need help posting content to social media, I don't care if it's for your personal stuff, if it's for your business or anything else, send me a message. I'm happy to try and walk you through how Brand Ghost can help. Like I said, it's totally free. Um I I confidently believe that if I can build momentum for you to post on social media using Brand Ghost and you stick with it that you'll want to upgrade to the paid version at some point because it helps that much. Anyway, folks, that's it. Thank you so much. And I owe someone a followup on LinkedIn. Uh I'm not sure I can pronounce your name, so I really apologize. Is it a nanny? I apologize if that's incorrect, but I will follow up with you. I'll check LinkedIn if you've uh sent another message. So, folks, thanks again. If you can't wait until the live stream is at this exact time next week, watch on Code Commute. It's similar type of stuff. So, I hope to see you there. And thanks again for everyone for jumping in the chat. I hope you had an awesome long weekend if you were celebrating a long weekend. And otherwise, I hope this week is awesome for you because because it just started. Cool. Thanks, folks.