Advice For Junior Devs Who Aren't Quitting Because AI - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

all right I think we're starting to go here let me just make sure that the different channels are doing the channeling so there is Instagram left I think that's it I'm going to refresh the chat last time the chat was being kind of weird there were people talking in the chat and it said there were zero people on it which is awkward um and I feel like impossible so like right now I can see there's some people on the chat I don't know is that me am I counted as one of those people um the number's going up and I am not so I feel like it's at least working so if you're joining in the chat come say hi let me know what's working and on what platform you're on uh happy that you're here if you are new to my my live streams they're absolutely like an AMA style so hello sir awesome I man thanks for being here um yeah like I have a topic that we're going to go through today but if folks have questions in the chat ask them like I will spend all of my time answering questions in the chat or or trying to at least so I'd rather spend time that way uh because I feel like that's probably more helpful but I do have a topic it is on my last newsletter article which is advice for junior devs who aren't quitting because of AI so um I will be going over that and like I said uh watching chat as well if you're watching the recorded version of this you can comment on the video if you have questions and stuff or just tune in next time I do these every Monday at 700 p.m. Pacific unless I don't know unless there's something else that I physically cannot do it hey Justin thanks for being here uh good to know the LinkedIn chat is working at least for now sometimes it does like this unknown user or like LinkedIn user said something and then I have to go over to LinkedIn and be like who's who's saying mean stuff to me but Justin's not mean so thanks for being here um and I do see you down here on subst I think substack acknowledged recently uh for the live streams are like yes the live streams you can now watch on on uh desktop but they called it out explicitly they're like you still can't stream from desktop which is such a pardon my language it's a pain in the ass because I literally have to set up my phone down here so that I can talk to people on substack I am trying my best to watch the chat though it looks like the chat section is like super uh thin though I see David Y is here David thanks for joining on substack um I just saw you join so I wanted to say hi but yeah um leave questions in the chat otherwise I'm going to link to the newsletter if you're on substack you already know where that is the chat does not come through to you um I think the chat only in terms of sending links and stuff it says it goes to Twitch Facebook and YouTube um but if you can't click the link I just sent so say you're on Tik Tok or Instagram in particular it's just just weekly. deev leader.com you don't have to subscribe if you're like Nick I hate emails and that sounds stupid that's cool but at least you can check it out before the stream okay um with that said I'm going to jump into the article and feel free to interrupt me at any point I don't care if it's unrelated to the topic if you just want to ask software engineering stuff or career stuff that's cool but to kick things off the way or like kind of how I came up with this topic and wanted to go through it was um I have a second YouTube channel that's called code commute and on code commute I answer questions for people that send them in or leave them in the comments and otherwise I go to Reddit and I look for things in like uh the subreddits like experience devs or CS career questions just like trying to look for stuff that people seem like they're kind of stuck on and look for themes that way and what I've been noticing on on my channel in particular and and sort of my interactions on social media is like there's a lot of people that are afraid of AI and I would say you know I don't blame Blame A lot of people for that but I think in particular I see a ton of Junior people that are saying things like like I'm you know one year into my CS degree and like I'm I'm dropping out because like there's no future here um and like sort of similar things to that right I'm about to graduate and I feel like I wasted my entire college or university time um like can't believe I'm I have no idea what I'm going to do now like my life is in shambles and people are genuinely freaking out about all this and so what I wanted to do was kind of start grounding people this is from my perspective I'm not telling you that you're not allowed to feel fearful um you're you you're not allowed to experience different emotions or anything like that but I want to be able to offer my perspective on why I am not also freaking out about this because if you think about it as an engineering manager if all of a sudden there are no software Engineers like I also don't have a job right it doesn't make sense uh so I should also be afraid but I'm not and plus if you had really good AI you could replace me too you probably don't even need that good of AI and you could replace me and just have a manager that you know helps people on the team so like why aren't I afraid so that's the beginning of this article I just wanted to go to the chat here um this is the dev life hello from California started watching your content about a week ago and I got to say I'm astonished the sheer amount of content value sh awesome thanks I appreciate it um the dev life I'm not sure if you're joining from watching codee commute uh code commute has actually kind of scared me with how much content I put out um I started making content sort of like regularly I would say at the start of 2023 and I said you're going to do three YouTube videos a week and stick with it and I've almost done that almost uh on my main Channel sometimes it's dropped down to like one or two um like full length YouTube videos and then like code commute which I really started ramping up the beginning of this year it's like on that channel alone it's like 10 plus videos a week so uh I found something that works for me because I can just record most of my content when I'm driving to and from work works so thanks for being here I appreciate it um so in terms of grounding folks I I wanted to like I'm trying to see if I can like Channel some of what my wife says to me right because my wife has a psychology background she works as a therapist and I don't know if I'm like you know the number one client so to speak but I think that uh she looks at things a different way and I can really appreciate that and um she'll also when she's like talking to me about things like from a like either like a biology or psychology perspective what I really value is someone as like a like an engineering mindset is she explains like why or at least like how things like you know almost like causation right so that I can understand and go oh like this thing triggers that which triggers that and like I can try to piece it together because otherwise people tell me stuff and I'm like look if you can't explain why like I don't I'm not buying it um so I I can really appreciate that and one of the things that she will often say if I'm feeling like beat up by something or stressed or like I don't know like there's all sorts of different emotions where it's it's like frustration is probably the best one that I can think of because it could be that I'm mad about something and maybe I classify that as frustration or maybe it's more sad but still frustration is a good fit and one of the things that she'll say to me is like you need to focus on what's in your control because a lot of what you're talking about or a lot of the things that you're kind of addressing are just things that like you don't have any control over so like you put a lot of time and energy into being like upset about that but like like those things you can't influence so you can keep doing that and you should expect that you will continue to kind of be in this in this mindset because nothing's changing you're kind of just waiting for stuff to change so instead she'll often try to um like she does some grounding for me where it's like you know well what can you do like what things are in your control and then for me I try to shift my perspective that way so just jumping over to the chat um H says sir uh I'm currently doing it in engineering I'm in the one year should I prefer AI expert or Dev um what does AI expert mean I don't know if anyone can actually answer that at this point um or and like Dev is just very general right so um I would say I I can imagine if you like doing programming and building software and things like that I honestly think that by saying Dev it's going to mean there's a huge AI element to there especially if you're in your first year um so AI engineering yeah so like what the way I look at this this is just my perspective I think about and this is maybe an overly simplified view of it but like hear me out just to try and explain um you'll notice on live streams sometimes the things I'm saying are like the first times I've like put these thoughts together in words so takes me a moment um the way that I think about this kind of thing is like when people will say should i f like for example should I focus on AI should I focus on software development I see AI engineering here the the thing that comes to mind for me is like do you want to focus on building the systems things like llms do you want to focus on Building Technology like that because to me I think a lot of that is actually probably more science right I can't say that for certain but I think there is a lot more science behind that than just like when people say AI engineering I'm like I think I think there's probably so much science that goes into that and understanding those Concepts before you can even start to build some of that technology now the way that I'm trying to frame that maybe not doing a good job is like do you want to be part of building the systems that like that are the llms or the next wave of whatever that is or do you want to be building things on top of that that leverage the AI Leverage The llms hey on Instagram it the chat is working I do see you there it might be a little delayed but thanks for being here so uh H I'm not sure if that answers your question but if you're if you're asking me like what do I recommend like this is the type of thing where like I I can't give you a recommendation because I don't know what you would like out of your career if the and I think most people are like well whatever is going to be the most money like that's the most success like I don't know um I honestly don't like thinking about things that way personally because I think that at some point you can be good at anything and make a lot of money doing it some things might be harder and you might have to be really really good to make a lot of money at it but I I think that you can sort of achieve success like uh financially uh sort of in any direction you try to go I think ultimately and I don't want to sound cheesy or corny here is like you have to make sure you're enjoying it because you're not this is my opinion on this you're not going to be able to do your best work at that if you're not enjoying it you might in the short term and you might say hey like I hate what I'm doing but I'm making tons of cash and this is sweet but then at some point you're going to be like I can't do this anymore and then all of a sudden okay well what are you going to do because you were relying on something that you didn't like that made you money so ultimately I think either of these paths if you want to focus on building the systems like llms themselves I think that could be an interesting path um I'm sure there are so there probably so many advancements in that space that like every day if I tried to keep up I still couldn't so I think that's really cool lots of stuff there I can't comment on it because I don't know it but on the software development side um I think that that's going to I'm as I talk through this this article and stuff I'm not worried that like it's just going to vanish I think it's absolutely going to change because it it is right now but that's not something that I'm like oh no it's just going to vanish and we won't exist like no it's just going to look different so um I hope that helps but honestly at the end of the day I think you're going to have to look at what's involved in those career paths I don't think you will choose incorrectly personally um so that's what I have to say about that uh wi hello good to see you as well I wanted to make sure I didn't miss your message um let's keep going here um okay so the okay I was kind of talking about the patterns I was seeing so fearful of AI giving up on school boot camps and even like giving up on job application so that's the other element here it's not it's I want to acknowledge it's not just people that are afraid purely of AI it's like you have like AI That's like one of the things we have a tough job market so people are like okay AI is coming to take my job and replace all the software Engineers job Market's incredibly tough and I'm never going to get a job um and then like you kind of keep stacking these things and then one of the things that doesn't help is it kind of creates this like vicious cycle now you have other people that are propagating fear and like what do we expect to happen right that's why I said I don't blame people for being afraid of this kind of stuff especially if they're new especially right because they haven't been in the industry to to start trying to make I don't know like what I would call their their own informed decisions that's not to say that they're not smart or something but they haven't been in the industry to oh here's how I would see that getting shaped because I've been in the industry for the last 10 years they're kind of going they're rely on these other people to tell me this hello wed it looks like you switched over to LinkedIn I see you see you moving around thanks for being here um okay so the I just wanted to scroll through quickly so the the topics that I'll be talking about are like ways to use AI because that is in our control right everything will be talking about it's like what is in our control so ways to use it um I wanted to talk about the importance of building real world projects because again building things is in our control as software developers you can choose to not or you can you know make that choice and that's something in your control networking is the other thing and then I'll kind of summarize all these things when I say networking I don't mean like ethernet cables I mean like connecting with other people so um good joke right Nick okay thank you thank you I appreciate the laughs um okay so when I talk about ways to use AI um the way that I think about this is that I think there's groups of people that have very different opinions on this and that's okay like we're all very much entitled to our own opinions so um I think that there are people in you know one category where they're like almost what people would say are like overly reliant on AI this is the typical conversation that happens where like senior developers are oh it sucks all the Juniors don't even know like how to program they just use AI for everything so you have the people that fall into that category of I I don't know how to code I just copy stuff out of chat GPT um you have people that are on the complete opposite end where they're like no um AI you know is not for me right I'm just I'm just not going to use it because I don't I don't like the idea of it or some people will be saying um it doesn't help them in their productivity and I think that I should clarify anything any opinion you have is fair I'm not trying to say you can't think that way but um for folks that are like hey like AI isn't fitting my workflow it actually slows me down or it's more problems like the um code completes garbage or when I ask it to solve things that's garbage I just want to encourage this group of people in particular that's absolutely fair if you find it slowing you down like I I'm not going to sit here and tell you to do anything different except that I would recommend that you don't write it off because it may not be helpful the way that you're using it now that could be how you're using it and it could just be because the technolog is not good enough right now the thing that I would say though is at the rate that it's advancing I would like sort of uh urge you to to reconsider periodic so don't say hey it's never going to be good therefore I won't touch it because I think this is the kind of group of people that is arguably most at risk if AI keeps moving in this direction they are most at risk of becoming obsolete not because the AI stole their job but because everyone else that's using AI because that's getting all of the investment for tooling and developer productivity you will be the one who said no I will never and I never gave it a shot and everyone else keeps investing into it so I think that that group of people is the most at risk I'm saying I'm choosing those words on purpose most at risk not you will never succeed it's impossible I'm not saying that because I think that would be foolish I don't I don't have a crystal ball but I do think the most at risk just and my logic here is there is so much money an attention being put into developer productivity through AI tools that I feel like ignoring it indefinitely is risky that's all then we have there's a bit of a tangent but then we have this group of people that is somewhere in the middle where it's like hey like I still do stuff I still program and build software on my own but like I'm trying to incorporate AI into what I'm doing and I think like that's probably a group that I I would recommend to try and kind of move into this group so if you use AI for everything I'm not sure um I'm still not convinced at this point that like that's a safe approach um part of my bias is of course I learned a particular way I practiced building software a particular way um I that's kind of I would encourage you to follow similar paths just because it's what I know um that's it's not to say that you can't be successful just using Ai and copying stuff out I'm actually very curious if there's a wave of developers that are totally kickass because of this like I'm trying to keep an open mind about it but I think there's probably a spot in the middle right you're understanding how things work sort of on your own exploring but then leveraging AI to give you that productivity boost so um what I wrote down is like so where can you find ways to start leveraging AI so that you can become more familiar with it right if you're sort of like I don't really know I'm on the fence um you can see where and how it's advancing where it can be helpful for you because what other people are telling you and how they're using it like if you might not see eye to eye on that that's totally cool but maybe there's something else right so I think that's worth exploring what works for you um and then acknowledging like there's going to be things that it's just not good for you right now potentially ever I don't know but you like it's not an All or Nothing kind of approach is what I'm trying to say so I wrote down some ideas that I thought were interesting if folks are in the chat and want to say things like their own suggestions for how they use it or things they want to try please feel free because like I said it's interactive it's not just me recording a YouTube video it's a it's a real person sitting here so if you want to share ideas in the chat for how you're leveraging AI or you're not doing it yet but you're like hey I want to try this even the tools you're using like feel free dump that in the chat we'll talk about it but I'm going to go through uh some of the things from the article that I wrote about and then if I think of anything else I'll I'll add it to but do your thing in the chat if you'd like first one I said was rubber duck debugging so if most of us maybe not all but um maybe most of us are familiar with this idea of uh rubber duck debugging and if you're not familiar with it the idea is that uh we often are able to progress in our problem solving by talking through problems now if you've never heard of rubber duct debugging you might have had this experience before where you're stuck on something you're sitting at your desk and you're like man like I I can't I just can't figure out how to get to this next step or I can't understand why this is happening and you're totally stuck and you're like okay screw it it's time to ask for help I'm going to do it I'm you know at the end of at end of the road here and then you go to turn to talk to someone or you call them on slack or teams or whatever you're using or you basically start this conversation and you start explaining what the situation is to your colleague that you called and as you're explaining it you go that's why like you basically solve your problem as you're explaining it I think if you haven't heard of rubber duck debugging this is maybe something that has happened to you and it's because of the same type of reason again I don't have uh like a psychology background or a biology background I can't tell you why this is a thing that happens but I can speculate and I think that's because when you're talking through it and trying to convey the information to someone else you finally start thinking about it in a different way that you haven't done yet and by doing that something magic happens in our brains it's probably not magic it's probably some type of uh biology going on but um something happens where we think about things a different way and then we're able to reason and make progress because we're thinking about it differently and with rubber duck debugging this is the same thing so with rubber duck debugging I'm trying to look around to see if I have anything that can be a rubber duck I don't um what do I have so if you have a rubber duck you have something you have it on your desk um I think people like rubber ducks and things that look like animals or people because you can talk to it and it feels less weird than I don't know talking to a brick or something but you basically you have this conversation literally with a rubber duck or whatever you want and you have because you're doing this thing where you're expressing your thoughts and trying to communicate to it you have this phenomenon occur where you solve your problem so when I think about leveraging AI for rubber duck debugging I think that this is sort of like the next level I think that you can do some cool stuff here because when you talk I don't know if you've tried this but if you talk to a rubber duck it should not talk back if it does you might want to get that rubber duck checked out but um you're you like you can debug this way but you don't have anyone else kind of giving you back ideas or different ways to think about things so I think that you could leverage an llm this way I haven't I'm very curious to actually set up a conversation where I tell the llm you are you're going to help me participate in rubber duck debugging and you will be the rubber duck in this scenario I haven't tried doing that and giv it like a persona but I think what you could do even if you don't want to do it that way is basically leverage it the same way right I'm stuck on this problem and how do you think that like what things would you consider um that I haven't called out and see if it can just get you thinking about different things maybe don't jump right away to Solutions right don't say like hey I'm stuck on this please output the code in C so I can copy and paste it but instead you could say something like I'm stuck on this problem here's the scenario here's things I've tried can you suggest to me any other ways you might even find that as you're trying to explain it to the llm you figure it out it's a good enough rubber duck on its own without even doing anything but I think that you can level that up by trying to get it to think about other things for you suggest other ways to look at the problem so that's one way that I would recommend trying it out that way you still get that benefit of like you're kind of getting stuck on the problem and working through it there's a lot of benefit to that by the way for learning it's the same reason that um you know I don't think that the best strategy is like you're stuck on something just ask and get the answer I think that sometimes it can be really helpful when you're stuck on something if someone just points you in a Direction they don't do it for you and then you go kind of take that next step I think like that leads to some better learning patterns so there's one example um I like another an obvious one maybe um it might not be obvious for some that are just trying to get uh code cranked out of it but I would say like use it to explain Concepts and the reason I wanted to call this one out specifically is when I talk about effective ways to learn I often say like building things in my opinions the best way get stuck on stuff but you want to be building things that's worked really well for me um I think that works really well for other people CU you're actually practicing putting stuff together but for different concepts and stuff depending like I don't know for for people in the chat are watching this like who's been to a boot camp versus college versus University versus learning on your own or any other path in your experience did you find out if you were like more of like an auditory learner visual learner Hands-On learner like for me it took I I always thought that like it was probably like a visual learner like until I was in university and I was like why doesn't this work anymore I see the things they're talking about it's not working and then I realized I'm probably a lot more Hands-On or at least for the stuff that I focus on I'm a lot more Hands-On so you have ai at your fingertips you want to understand a concept do you understand how you learn effectively because if you do you can ask the AI to explain the concept to you in a way that would be more beneficial to how you learn right so you could tell it I learn this way effectively like could you please explain this concept based on what I said in a way that I should understand it effectively um if it's not making sense to you it uh sense to you you could ask for more analogies you can basically keep telling this thing like it's still not clear find a different way to explain it to me what's cool about this to me is if you can imagine that you were instead talking to a colleague right and you're like hey colleague can you explain this concept to me and they try and you're like okay I I don't think I got it could you try a different way and they're like sure no problem like that's fine and then they do it again they spend another 10 minutes with you and you're like H nope I don't get it do it again and they're like okay and then they try another way at some point your colleagu is going to be like okay look I don't I don't know what to like I have no other ideas for for you the AI won't do that um which is pretty cool so you can keep asking it and keep trying to tweak how it's trying to explain things to you um so I think that's kind of interesting um in terms of how accurate it is that's something I think that will keep improving but what's a nice thing is that as it's trying to explain things it might be giving you other Concepts you can go search these online you can go cross reference them but the point is that it's trying to give you information in different ways more tailored to you so use it as something that can help explain Concepts um something that's a little bit more code specific um I wrote down try asking AI for ideas on how to optimize code for different metrics so for example you might say like I want to optimize for memory latency whatever um and I think what can be cool about this is like by the way I wouldn't like take your work code and like dump it into like a public chat GPT kind of chat um use the tools that your work says are okay if it's your personal projects for my personal projects I don't care it's going wherever um train the AI on my crappy code that's fine um just a heads up so I think what you can do though is try taking blocks of code or whatever you're working on and see like even as a learning exercise if I wanted this to be more memory efficient how would you go change this this and why if I if this if I wanted to get the hot paths removed from this how can I optimize this for performance and why right so you can use it on your code to go learn about your code I'm not necessarily like you could just ask it to do it and copy and paste the code blindly but what I'm trying to suggest is like let's go One Step Beyond that it's not just let me copy paste the output it's let me understand or like see what it's trying to do and if especially if you're trying to optimize for different things you can see how it's trying to change the structure so I personally I think it's an interesting way to have different perspective on things it's the same kind of conversation I might have with a human being right so say you're a more Junior person on the team or even your senior whatever you turn to someone else on your team that you admire you say hey like can you look at this code with me if I wanted to make it faster what would I do hey harry good to see you um I said this last week and I said I was going to respond to your message and I still didn't I've been really burnt out um so I do apologize let me say it again on the stream I'm going to go back and read your message because I feel like I didn't respond to you so really sorry about that um yeah I I have to have some compassion for myself because I am uh operating at my limits right now but uh I do apologize cuz it's not my intention to uh to leave you hanging there there so thanks for being here I appreciate you coming back so the idea with that last part was just um you know we I think we can do better than just copy pasting and take a second to go like try to dig in a little deeper and understand like what's going on um and then finally the last one I wrote here and I haven't seen any other ideas come up in the chat so I know you guys got them share them um I said like for maybe more mundane tasks right so one of them that I thought was kind of cool and I wanted to explain this a little bit when I'm building software on my own um I like experimenting with stuff if I'm building stuff in teams and there's a lot more design up front a lot more discussion around like Hey how do we want this code base to shape up when I'm building stuff on my own I like using that as an opportunity to try things now the tradeoff is like if I had to bring someone onto my project they would look at it and be like hey Nick there's like 50 different ways that you're doing this like what the hell's going on and I get it but the reason I'm doing that is because I might start with a pattern so that could be design patterns or how I'm like structuring my architecture going down a path and I'm like okay feeling this out and then I I build a lot of stuff with plugins so the the result of that is that I usually have some like common things that I'm like redoing so the next iteration the next Plugin or what I'm building I'm I might go okay like I kind of like this from the first one but like I'm going to try a different thing on this next pass and I'll do that so what happens is I leave this little bit of a trail of like the code is like constantly getting a little bit better as I'm going along sometimes I try something out and I'm like let's not do that again but the point is that there's diverging patterns in the code this is generally something you want to try and avoid in a shared code base so I'm not not saying like this is amazing practice for building software in teams I'm saying if I'm building it for myself then I understand what's going on um now what I think is a really cool thing that I could do though is like if I wanted to go refactor my code I could go tell the llm hey look here's a pattern that I've set up that I really like here's how it works here's why I like it here's how the code is structured and then say here is another version that it's not using these patterns here's what I don't like about it and then tell it could you refactor this other code to go follow the patterns and practices of this other code that I really like and I think I think I haven't actually tried this and that's why I'm saying I really need to is that if I can explain why I like the patterns and the code that I like what makes it good then it will know specifically what to go and try address and I suspect it can probably do a pretty good job because at the end of the day in my code base where this is happening the only reason I'm not going back and like I don't know like desperately trying to clean up all the patterns is because like that code is there and working the next time I have to go touch it and make updates depending like if it was one of the really early versions I might say okay like time to go patch this up like it's new and I'm here but otherwise like I got other stuff to build I'm going to keep going so if I could leverage AI like this then maybe I could speed through some of that refactoring um so I think that could be an interesting use case to try out so those are my examples for leveraging AI in some different ways I'm going to go to the chat uh I don't know if I can pronounce your name properly so I apologize Ki I candy or Ki so I apologize if that's incorrect hi I'm a junior Dev I continue to learn and get exposed to new tools and Concepts I feel like been on the Steep side of the learning curve when do you think Juniors make the uh transition across um good question I think this is going to be different for everyone different in the domain uh the language and stuff that you're using could have an effect on that the you know the Frameworks and stuff you're using um it's hard to like and I've had this question even for like Junior's onboarding and stuff right so um there is like a a a dramatic there can be a dramatic difference between individuals something that I like so you're not going to get a good answer out of me on this unfortunately so I'm not going to say oh it's exactly 7.2 weeks um I wish I could tell you that um or some other number maybe a better number but um I think what's important to realize too is like the the shape of that learning curve can also look different you might have people that that get things pretty quick and you might look around and say like hey like well what the hell like why not me like am I doing it wrong your impostor syndrome kicks in and stuff but what can happen is that you might have a slower start but then your trajectory for learning is actually accelerated past that so um I just wanted to remind you at least like please don't feel discouraged by that I think having awareness at the rate you're learning and like hey am I making progress on these things like one thing that you could try out because I think this maybe I haven't like put this to the test so hear me out though if you're building in some language okay so you're using some language and some framework and you're like I'm just going to pick like I'm using uh react and uh JavaScript and you've been building that with a for a while and you're like okay like I I think I get this but learning curves kind of like you know things are tough um well okay like if we want to see if you're learning effectively I would think that you should be able to abstract some concept set of that so could you try if you wanted to go read through a code base of some other language or some other text stack could you make sense of it like can you see the concepts even though it's in a different language right um little bit of discomfort because the language and the syntax is different but can you kind of like navigate it and be like yeah this makes sense um so I think there might be some ways that you can kind of trial that out for yourself but in terms of how long um I don't have a good answer for you unfortunately um um if you're if this kind of what's a good way to say this if this continues to happen where you're like always nervous I'm not I shouldn't say that you're nervous but if you do always feel nervous about like am I progressing fast enough am I progressing fast enough when you're in the workplace this is a great conversation to have with your manager um in general I would encourage you to um I I I don't think that I don't think that it's like helpful to be worried about it again I'm not saying that you are but I don't think it's help helpful to be doing that and instead like focus on kind of like the theme of this article like what can you do right if you're concerned well okay well where does the concern come from are you concerned that like maybe you can't be effective in frontend development okay like maybe go spend some more time learning about that and Building Things in the front end right so try to try to have a more of a bias for action versus like oh no I'm worried about it so hopefully that's an okay answer sorry that it's not um an exact timeline but maybe that helps um I don't know if I can say this name Jen is it Jen Kimmy Jen Kimmy I feel like there's going to be one of these days someone's going to come on here with a name and I'm not going to I'm going to say it and it's going to be a it's going to be bad like someone's going to I've seen them do it with pelaton people where they're like thanks for joining and then they say the name and they're like a like shouldn't say that I'm not going to give you any examples but um so I apologize if I don't got your name um this person says the problem is I'm running out of money and I have nowhere to go no other work I can do unless I find a job in this industry I will become homeless unlike most my age I can't afford to wait the market gets better in a few years my parents are dead I can't do most jobs healthy people can do studying is fine but life isn't free that's true life isn't free so um what again the theme of this I don't have answers for everyone right but the theme of this entire talk is what's in your control because and I'm not picking on you here but you listed some things that are not in your control and I understand that those are very challenging those are tough those are things that you know I wouldn't want other people to go through 100% I'm acknowledging those what is in your control because that's the thing that you want to start focusing on right if you're saying you're running out of money okay well if that's we have to think about my wife does such a good job with this and I'm not good at it but like from a hierarchy of needs perspective if you need money because you need to be able to eat and you need shelter you may have to Pivot you may have to Pivot to find different work that doesn't mean that you're your path and software development is is done for and you can never pursue it but it does mean if you have needs to meet from a hierarchy of needs like I agree with you if you need money to eat and to have shelter then I wouldn't wait I wouldn't wait and just keep trying because that sounds like a more immediate need so I would be looking for other things at least in the short term to make sure that you can reach stability and that way when you're feeling stable about your living situation your finances and how things are progressing then you can say okay cool how do I carot some time to pick up on building projects right but we have to look at what's in our control so again I'm I apologize and I'm sorry for the the situation you're in but we have to focus on what is in our control so if that means for you in the short term that it's a different path for now I'd say go to a different path for now don't let that be an absolute in your life though um I've interviewed on my podcast many people that have completely different beginnings and they're in software development now completely different Beginnings there's people that I've I've T interviewed two people actually one on a different podcast but um I've interviewed two people sort of in my my Creator Circle if I can call it that that like literally had uh either like drug addiction problems uh challenges with the law and like basically turn their lives around like they were going down a path where they were like this is destruction this is absolute destruction I can't have my life like this turned it around and became software developers like what most people would consider like late in their career and they're doing awesome so it's not a a permanent thing if you need to switch to something else in the short term um the dev life I have a a son who just turned 21 going through CS classes at the local community college and a boot camp to become a full stack web developer during the last couple of years we've been building projects together awesome and being as objective as a dad can be I think he has what it takes to be a junior Dev great okay in fact I would like to have someone like that in my team given the state of the market what would you do if you were in his position to land your first job as a junior Dev yeah great question um it's going to be super competitive so I'm not dancing around that um the the framing that I I try to offer for people because I I don't I don't know if this is helpful actually but so I'm going to say what I've been saying um but the framing that I've been trying to tell people because they're saying it's it's so unfair it's so unfair and I go but if we look at what's happening um and I just I'm going to use uh you and your son in this example um and this isn't meant to be negative in any way but there's a lot of people that have gone through something like a boot camp and I think that there are many people that looked at boot camps because they were advertised to them in this way right like hey you do this boot camp by the end of this boot camp you're going to be a softare developer and you're going to get these jobs and the boot Camp's only four months or it's whatever time period and hell yeah you're going to do it and then what happens is that you go through it and yes I'm not saying you can't learn there's tons of people that do very well they come out they learn a lot they make the most out of it um there's some boot camps that are great so I'm not I got to be careful when I talk about this stuff because I don't want people to be like you're an and like you don't see I'm just saying that the way that a lot of these are set up it almost feels like predatory unfortunately like it's a hey it's a business they're trying to make money that's their target audience and then I think what happens is we get this extreme volume of people that go through these they all have a very similar shorter sort of period of development and then there's so many of them with the same skill set and they go great I'm going to go get my job and then they go wait why is there so much competition and there's many reasons there's a lot of competition right now one is what I just said number two is that with so much remote work the job that used to be only applicable you know if I I kind of said this on uh a few Vlog entries and maybe even my last live stream if I were to open up a job position to come work for Nick and you have to it's only for local employees so you'd have to either live in Seattle or be willing to relocate the number of people that could apply to that it's going to be smaller than if I said hey anyone in the world can come apply here there's going to be a ton of people maybe not working for me but you know there's going to be a ton of people that could so I think there's a ton of competition now that's not helpful so far I realize so what would I recommend doing I think that we have to get creative so personally in terms of applying to jobs start doing it um I think the volume of resumés gets pretty crazy like people other people are applying to tons of jobs if you're not applying to tons of jobs you're kind of just like statistically less likely because I think a lot of it's a bit of a gamble right now which sucks and because of that I think we have to try and find ways around that the last part of this uh this article that I'm kind of basing to live stream on is about networking so maybe I'll kind of quickly pivot to some of the parts from that but I think there's a lot of opportunities with networking they take longer but they take longer they can help short cut some of these things so for example being able to network with the right people might give you a reference to somewhere they might say hey we're about to open up this job position or we've been looking and we can't seem to find good candidates but you know what I you know we've known you for a while and like actually because I know you I think you might be a good fit for this maybe we can refer you in I'm not saying that this happens like all the time but I'm saying that if you don't Network you miss out on opportunities like this I wanted to share an example with you because this came up on my code commute Channel and I I did the video for someone that was talking about this they said basically um I have a job somewhere and I started talking I don't know if it was the VP or the founder or something and a manager and they said I want a Dev roll so the person was like okay and basically they just they managed to in their circumstances they shortcut whatever chain of hiring needed to happen they were able to interview the interview didn't even even go as well as the person was hoping but well enough that they could go to the next part and the people said the manager was like look like I need you to do this take-home thing or I think it was like I need you to take the next couple of weeks and like learn more about the foundations of this language and then we're going to interview you again when you come back or at least follow up on it and that person after like I think they were near the end of their two or three weeks they commented back a week later and said they got the job so the reason I'm saying this is like I'm not saying this is going to happen to everyone just because you network what I am saying is that it creates potential for these opportunities and I think one of the biggest roadblocks for people is that you have this huge barrier for just being able to get the interview so you could be an amazing developer and for some reason your resume is not getting sort of through the pile you could also be an amazing developer go for the interview and someone on that particular day is slightly more amazing and then that makes people feel like they're worthless and they're never going to get the job because they did so well in the interview and still didn't get it guess what's not in your control how well other people do that day that is not in your control so all that you can do is try to learn get better and if you already did awesome in that maybe it's just next time which sucks to hear right but what's in your control is applying again or to other jobs um so yeah to the dev life my advice would be um keep building projects I think don't stop doing that um I think that if you can find Opportunities to be networking like get on that for sure that could be hackathons that could be looking for volunteer projects like um I don't know how to get into these sorts of things but for example like University there was like robotics clubs and stuff I'm sure if uh people were looking around for these types of opportunities they can find them but I would highly recommend trying to do that going to meetups talking with other software developers just creating more surface area for this type of thing I think I can't stress that enough I think right now we have tons of people applying sending resumés but networking is tapped um so I would recommend that so the dev life I hope that helps um honestly it sounds like a really cool opportunity it's uh I don't have uh children we have we have three dogs and two cats no kids but um it's it sounds exciting the way you're describing sort of this like uh you know the the relation that you have with your your child and how they're kind of going through this so it's exciting and I I hope the best for for your kid um silent Squatch do you have any advice for the self-taught developer route like Cho using a career route study routine resources um so I kind of touching on some of that um it might not have sounded the same um but I think a lot of what I said is going to be similar in terms of like when you want to go apply for jobs um choosing a career route study routine so study routine is going to be different for everyone uh if you're talking about studying for jobs um like in terms of interviews uh I would say that is mostly going to be a combination of like leite code style questions unfortunately so practicing that kind of stuff to be able to code um system design stuff depending on your level um some more Junior levels won't require it but I would still prepare for it and then behavioral interview questions if you're talking about studying in terms of just getting better at software development I would say I don't um and I don't mean like you should not pick up a book ever or don't ever watch video I would mean that that is the thing that would supplement my learning my learning would be based on building things and I don't mean go to YouTube so I have it and I say this as a person with a YouTube channel that makes tutorials don't go to a YouTube channel and just try to copy the code out of the tutorial and say I did it I am a developer no you watched a video and copied code what I highly recommend you do is try building things getting completely stuck and then going okay I need a tutorial I need to understand what's going on so I can unstick myself so that's what I would recommend it's not that those tools are bad just use them differently um career route this is tricky because I don't know um it's hard for me to give career advice career advice to someone that um I don't mean to like say that you're a stranger like in an insulting way but I don't know you so it's uh it's hard to know um but person Al I think like like my recommendation is like you have to find what you enjoy doing and you might not get that right right away and that's totally okay it's totally okay so many people are like I got to have it perfect or else I'm screwed you could you could do something like you know maybe you're a developer self-taught but you're like hey um there's an opportunity to do uh I was just talking with this is on code commute again someone was talking about like hey like I work in like it they didn't say exactly what they do so I don't know if it was like Network Administration or something I don't think it was tech support but they work in some it field they get to do some scripting and stuff and they're kind of like hey I wonder if I want to move try and move towards more software development like that might be a path maybe you get a job doing something that's not software engineer and you're like this is cool I'm making money and like as you're getting some experience you're like hey maybe my interests are more over here maybe you love doing it but I think um like my advice is you're going to have to find something you like so if you have opportunities uh to try things out I realize if you're selftaught like internships might be kind of tricky to go land I don't have a lot of experience with internships outside of um sort of like structured programs at uh like universities and things like that so I don't have much to offer there but if you can find anything to try and like get the experience even if it's volunteer to try it for you I think that could be helpful uh Harry okay I'm going to answer your questions Harry let's go um in your teams oops I hit my desk in your teams what Junior Dev skills are becoming more valuable because of AI uh not less okay and got two two questions and then there's a context Harry come on um what's the most surprising thing you've learned about managing Junior devs that completely changed how you hire them oh you're giving me you're going to make me think here I take it back I'm not going to go back and answer your LinkedIn question now or maybe this was your LinkedIn question originally um context I go to Five meetups per month awesome pretty much uh but I struggle with walking up to people hold a conversation on the topic of the Meetup and I'm wandering around any tips okay cool uh I think I want to address these all separately I want to talk about the last one first um because I am extremely introverted and that might sound kind of funny because I'm doing a live stream with people and I'm on a camera and I make YouTube videos and I create content I'm extremely introverted I'm an introverted engineering manager and I have to turn on being extroverted and it is the most exhausting thing ever because I am not extroverted at all um at this point just from talking to a camera a lot it's more comfortable I used to have a fear of public speaking not like a phobia not like I would literally like run away screaming but if someone was like hey you need to go present in front of a group I would be like if there's a way that I could not do that at all like sign me up um hated doing it in school never liked doing it in work um and just kind of something that I've managed to dodge for a long time uh it would be pretty rare that I would find myself like very comfortable in front of a smaller group and that usually just came from like being like having like super deep technical experience in an area where I'm like people need the answers from me that's why I'm here versus like uh being surrounded by other people that may be more knowledgeable or like I I don't know them very well so I've always been uncomfortable with this kind of stuff um I've had periods in my career where I've developed extreme social anxiety like I used to think I was pretty fun in like University I'd go party and stuff and like when I was working I reached a point where I was like I don't even want to see my friends because I was so anxious like so like it was just uncomfortable so where I'm going with all this is that like if I can do some of these things then you 100% can um I I know what you're you're trying to say here like I don't feel like I can hold a conversation with people right like the this is the kind of thing I it's it's like very ironic that I'm going to try and offer advice on this I just want to acknowledge that because I I have not been successful at this uh maybe at this point in my life I could go up and have conversations with people but I'm I'm introverted like I said it makes me nervous to go have a conversation with people um but I think my advice on this is like it's something that you have to like try forcing yourself to do you go to five of them a month what I like I literally challenge you to do this every single meet up go walk up and have a conversation and if it's awkward and it ends weird you're like hey like what did you think about the you know if there was a presenter like what did you think about that or like what what project are you currently working on or like if someone's like uh and then they're super awkward cool you did one right you did one good job because that's actually one more than I probably ever would have done in my life before starting to film stuff so you're doing one more than I ever did did next meet up you're going to do it again and if it's awkward that sucks you did one that's not two more than I ever did and I want you to do that for a whole month and then I want you to do it for the month after that and I can guarantee you I can say this with confidence it will get easier because at some point when someone else is like awkwardly not carrying on the conversation you're going to start to go hm that person is being kind of awkward it's not you it takes multiple people to have a conversation right so if you get it going get the ball rolling and then other people aren't doing it you get to decide do I put more energy into this or maybe this other person's awkward okay thanks for the thanks for the brief chat let's move on um I have reached a point depending on who I'm talking with I have been in situations where I this is kind of weird actually I recognize that other people are more Awkward than I am so for example this a really clear example is like job interviews right so if I'm interviewing someone and they're very nervous like I'm a little nervous because it's a stranger but I'm interviewing them I'm just kind of like uh it's not my thing it's like new people but then I see how nervous they are and all that goes through my head is like I know what it's like to be very nervous in conversations it's extremely uncomfortable and I will do everything I can to make that person less nervous cuz I know how it is so at some point in some situations I've kind of develop that empathy for it but uh Harry I just I highly recommend force yourself to have the conversations it's not going to be about how much you know no one's trying to quiz you on this stuff you might not understand things people are talking about ask them right like that's a easy way to participate in a conversation like hey I didn't understand that I didn't know could you explain what that means right like you're going to be around other people so try it I promise you it will get better and you will you will have done more than I have and I hope that's inspiring in some way um you got more questions so let me scroll back up what Junior Dev skills are becoming more valuable because of AI not less being curious um being curious asking questions um what else social skills incredibly important uh I think about Juniors that I have seen do really well are ones that are not afraid to ask questions they are um and sorry not not afraid to ask questions because they're stuck like they're blocked on stuff and they're also curious like two different ways right because I have seen people that are like they're Junior and they're asking questions and I'm like holy crap I didn't realize like you know you're you're kind of I think people get afraid of asking questions for for many reasons one of them is like I don't want to look stupid I have a question but I don't want people to judge me but I've seen people ask questions where I'm like you're clearly thinking about this at like a deeper level and if you're not there that's totally cool ask the questions anyway because if it's something you're curious about it's going to help you learn so I think you know Juniors need time to ramp up on stuff I don't think there's like a magic cheat code that's like do this and um like you know code this way and then the AI won't be able to code that same way and you'll be better but I think that like personally it's like the being curious asking questions and then um I think like social skills for sure and when I say social skills I mean just like soft skills in general because you know if you're in a situation where you're like I don't even want to reach out to ask for help or I don't know how to communicate things effectively those types of things will be very helpful as a junior and Beyond because if you don't have them as a junior and you try to develop them later your soft skills it might feel harder and harder and that's when you need them more and more what's the most surprising thing you've learned about managing Junior dabs that completely changed how you hire them oh man on the hiring I don't know um I've kind of always had this philosophy um I don't know if I can say always but I think for a long time so when I say I don't know always I don't think there was like a dramatic event that changed my mind on it but I think one of the things that um that's kind of stuck with me for juniors is is actually some of the traits I was just kind of talking you about but it's like I I don't look at hiring people in general junior or not about like what you know which might sound kind of funny like I don't if I need to like know a fact like that's what the internet is for like before we had llms like I would just go into my browser and I would search for the answer if I need to know a piece of information I I'm not I'm not hiring people based on like a thing they know I look at hiring people personally like one of the things that really stands out to me is like I want to make sure that when you're navigating problems this is something that you can communicate because what we're going to be doing when we work together is we're going to be solving problems and talking about those problems we may find ourselves in situations where we're working on the problem together I want to make sure that you're able to communicate that stuff you can think uh sort of like analytically I want you to be deeply curious I like hearing that people are interested in learning and challenging themselves um and then on top of that um and it doesn't have to be software related like are you passionate about things like what's a cool thing that you like to do because for me when I'm working with people I want to make sure that I can get them engaged in the work they're doing and if people if I don't have anything to kind of anchor to like it makes it really difficult if like people are and you don't have to be this way when you work with me but when people are totally closed off and I'm like oh like I I want to make sure that you trust me I can build respect with you like being able to have conversations about other things is helpful for me um so just knowing that you're like I don't know like able to kind of talk through things as well that maybe aren't necessarily purely software engineering like you know you love sports or um whatever it happens to be like I just want to know there's like things that you're like hell yeah like I really like this um I've been fortunate enough in my career to have actually had things like that at work and that's really cool and I think that being able to kind of do that reflection and understand like these are things I like these are things I enjoy um I think that you can also translate that into like talking with your manager and being able to be clear about like these are interesting challenges for me these are things that I'm not interested in it helps me work with you as a manager so um that was a whole bunch of different stuff Harry I hope that helps but I have not had a revelation where I completely changed my mind on on how to hire for my my experience there's a bunch of questions now I think let me keep going um I see Dylan welcome back Dylan good to see you um Dylan has been watching a lot of code commute so I appreciate that Dylan uh Josh says I apply find others who are in my position not managers tell them why I like that role this ends up being a solid conversation most of the time um then I straight up ask if they can put me in the right path to get an interview once here it's up to you yeah um I think this approach in terms of like networking is um like I just say like my my advice is don't treat and I'm not saying that Josh is suggesting this but like don't treat it like a Sprint like it's not like a hey we just met five minutes ago like basically get me in front of the jobs but I would recommend like you spend time building the relations that way when you go to ask for this type of thing like hey like people are more willing to help so you might have the way I think Josh framed it I think is is helpful right because you're not saying hey refer me to the job it's like hey like if I were looking to interview like what would you recommend right like I think that's a that's a lighter ask than give me a referral I literally have people that add me on LinkedIn send me their resume and they say please give me a referral to Microsoft I need a job and I say I don't know you like I cannot refer you to a job position and put my name behind it if I don't know you so I think that's a good approach um ishmail says what time is it there it's currently 800 p.m. uh Dev life you're welcome I hope that helps uh I would love like if you're going to come back I would love to hear how things are going periodically especially uh not if but when that job is landed that would be super cool um Mauricio how do you effectively analyze a new library or framework I know that reading the documentation is important but how do you make concept click and understand how to use them in your own code good question um I think for me maybe the extra framing here is like it's not um and sorry I'm not suggesting that you're suggesting this but it won't won't be random right I'm not I'm not going out to the internet and being like what's a random library to incorporate today so I'm usually trying to solve a problem and that means that I have some constraints I have some requirements I have a goal that I'm trying to achieve so let's pick um what's a good one like caching so I know I realize not everyone's a c developer but I'm going to talk about c a little bit there is a um there's hybrid cache which is newer in.net and um it's pretty cool it's like provided by Microsoft but like at the time and I'm not sure rate this moment at the time of recording um it's not or it wasn't and probably still isn't out of preview and that meant that like okay it's from Microsoft but we have to go add this other package so like that wasn't really on my radar even though it's like a from Microsoft good caching Library does inmemory caching does Hy like a remote caching which then I can do hybrid caching because that's what it's called um so there is that as an option I was using uh something called uh a library called bit faster caching they had a really good uh from my perspective a really good sort of like dictionary style inmemory cache that I could use um so I really liked using that so it's an extra package on top of just a concurrent dictionary but I'm like okay I like it and then I found this thing called Fusion cache um from Ziggy creatures it's pretty sweet uh no the author's uh he's great he's very active on social media and stuff and and making sure that he's uh talking with developers but uh Fusion cache actually had some extra features on top of the Microsoft hybrid one uh at the time when I want to go start using it I needed to move my requirements from an inmemory cache only to start thinking about okay if I have to start cashing off the Box what do I do so I went looking and again what I'm trying to say here is my constraints and requirements were changing so I had to go look so I'm trying to look at the library I'm looking at its features and the documentation if they if it's just code and there's no other supporting documentation I'm probably not going to waste too much time unless I can't find anything and then I'm like okay like get GitHub brought me to this spot based on what I'm searching for even though there's no documentation so I'm in the weeds looking at this code um unless they have like tests or some sample project that shows it being used that's also a good indicator if I can see the sample if I don't see something that looks like how I want to use it I'm I might be rolling my own at that point so um I think the most important thing I can say especially if you're thinking about this for work is like number one licensing if it's work rated make sure you understand the licensing understand um like what kind of support it's getting if it looks like an awesome library but hasn't been updated in four years what's the likelihood or like how much Reliance do you want to have on that thing in case there's a bug are you going to go fix it like different things to consider so I like looking for actively updated stuff you know like there was a commit last week or something like that makes me feel pretty good um good Community around it uh obviously like I was saying documentation so I can make sure the features match but I think those are some things that I I would consider and then you're saying how do you make the concepts click and understand how to use them I look for samples right that's why I was saying the documentation should have something or if they have samples and I want to see it's kind of it's it's kind of a weird phrase to use I know when I talk with uh some other developers I've been building software with for a long time we always talk about like the shape of code which sounds kind of funny but if you were to like blur your eyes and like look at how code is structured when you've seen enough of it it's not quite like looking at the Matrix but you can kind of see like some patterns and stuff like are you doing super deep nested like callbacks and stuff are you like are we templating or do we have a lot of little classes that are like templating things like there's there's patterns that you can kind of see showing up in your code um so I don't know that's kind of a whole bunch of different thoughts but I hope that hope that helps to some degree um okay archit architect's back welcome um do you write test during the development of brand ghost if so what Worth to test and what not worth to write test for I actually made a video on this it's like one of my first code Comm videos architect you told me you watched them all you you promised me um it's it is actually one of my earlier code commute videos um so for context uh I am building brand ghost with individuals that I've built software with before and we have a very similar sort of like philosophy around uh how we write code and how we test and what we have accomplished in the past is that we Willow mtuber wants me to say their name on Instagram I've said it um what we have accomplished in the past was Finding ways that we write code that we feel like is testable now writing testable code does not mean testing the code it means that it's written in a way that if you needed a test on it you would feel comfortable doing that now when I say testable code what kind of test so uh I like writing code for the most part that I would consider consider is unit testable when I write unit tests I have uh I try to separate out concrete dependencies from each other if that sounds really wordy for other people I just mean that if I have two classes right those are two implementations I am the kind of developer where I put interfaces on most things there are a lot of things that I don't and I'll touch on that in a moment but I put interfaces on a lot of stuff if I'm thinking I want to be able to unit test these things and have a b boundary between these systems in my code I will put an interface there that way I can write a test I can mock the behavior out I know some people hate mocks I'm talking about how I like to test stuff but I will write code in a way that supports that there are other parts of code where I know from my experience if I want to write an integration test so say repository repository pattern I want to call out to my SQL database I don't like writing unit tests at the repository because I'm not going to mock the database connection and we have enough tooling now where you can spin up databases super fast you can seed them with data run your queries against them so the database engine is running and your queries are running and you're not like oh I'm going to mock this and then you put it in production and everything blows up even though you're test pass so there's certain stuff at like the repository level I might avoid interfaces Al together where I'm like this thing's going to connect out to the database like I'm not mocking the connection here so from seeing enough code in enough different situations like professionally I will decide like how that code gets structured in terms of interfaces what types of tests I would want to run and then I don't write the tests and then I keep coding um architect is specifically asking about brand ghost and brand ghost is a social media platform like posting platform scheduling that kind of thing it's made for Content creators I'm building this on the side it supports all of my content creation so if you see me posting anything on social media it's through brand ghost I don't go to the site or to the app to post I go to Brand ghost um the reason I'm kind of half joking about I I don't test things then is that with brand ghost especially before we had paying users we are iterating so fast that like if I go write the test on it that code might not even exist by the end of the day why did I write the test so the code is testable but I'm not going to write the test because writing testable code is no extra cost for me writing the tests is an extra cost so I keep going until what happens is that if I stop feeling confident about Landing changes if I stop feeling confident about Landing changes ideally I catch myself before this happens but once I start getting nervous I'm like I have to touch this and it could break something like I feel nervous it might break something once that starts to kick in then I go okay it's time for tests so in the code commute video that architect promised me he watched but apparently apparently didn't it's okay I won't be offended um pardon me um I say in that video like one thing in particular was around databases I was basically at this point where I was touching SQL queries for like super simple things and then would deploy to production no tests and then like the most trivial thing would break because I was missing like a comma or had an extra comma and a sequel query and I was like man like that's not okay it's like super trivial and it's happened a couple times I'm like it's time like every repository before it gets landed tests so for me that's a good marker to start saying hey look if I don't have confidence it's getting test and then as brand ghost continued to grow and as we had paying customers it was like okay people are using this I feel a lot more nervous about certain parts of it good thing I made it testable so next time I'm in that area of code I'll go add test you know make sure my confidence is up push to prod and I feel good but what I didn't do this is how I developed I didn't go write all of the tests ahead of time because I fully acknowledged the the rate that rate at which we were changing things it would just be Overkill and a waste of time so that's how I approached it I hope that helps architect um Dylan says what are your thoughts on the different testing methods like test driven development tdd um one of the big challenges with tdd is like when you talk about it online if you disagree with any part of it or have a different opinion that you get swarmed so I'm even nervous to open my mouth here on stream even though it's my stream and I can say whatever I want um no I think uh conceptually a lot of good things there I think like with anything though um like I don't I don't have like rules about how I develop things I have a lot of things that guide me and like I said one of my big challenges with tdd is that a lot of the people that talk about tdd treat it like there is no other way and you must apply it all the time and I know that's not true it's it's like a ridiculous argument but it's hard to have conversations about it so um there are certain things that when I go build I think one of them that comes to mind is like parsers worked in digital forensics for a while for about eight years and if I have to write things that go over unstructured data and try to structure them I do a lot of tdd um when I was my ating my blog from WordPress to Blazer uh not quite tdd but I actually live streamed some of it and a really loose loose version of tdd where I was coming up with the scenarios and basically I could go change the the way that I was converting the blog posts and run them against my scenarios and say like does this work but I think when we talk about tdd it's a lot more about like you know you're getting to try out usage of your code like how you want it to feel and stuff and then having the test over it so there's a lot of like I think like interesting things but um when I think about different ways to approach programming I like thinking about like what things are valuable and then how can I apply those things so that it's not like I am a tdd person and that's my identity it's like no these are things from tdd that I like so that's my perspective on it uh chagy I think um hi I'm an intern here in Peru with a year of experience in front end development what position do you think would be the best fit for me I've been using PHP and laral but only for front end task I would say the best positions probably the one that you can get um because it's really tough right now and this is kind of I was saying this a little bit earlier in the Stream I'm not sure if you were on at the time but um I think there's a lot of people that are in a very similar experience level of EXP experience and skill sets so I think that it's challenging right now so you know what position do I think would be best I think doing front-end web development PHP and Lille um I think looking for something like that would be good and from there like growing and pivoting over to other things if you have an interest in them so um I I'm sorry it's not like a better answer like more creative but I I would say like if if that's your experience like lean into that right unless you're at the and I don't know this about you if you're like no but I really have an interest in learning something else like something I don't know I want to do embedded programming with uh with C I would say well great and your option is go spend time doing that and there's nothing wrong with that or you say okay I'm going to try getting my job and like the skill set that I have um and then kind of pivoting over to that so so yeah I mean please don't have doubts like I'm I'm trying to be transparent here it's going going to be challenging but I think the other thing that's worth mentioning I haven't really said this on the stream yet is like I've said go build things yes go build things there are people that end up discovering as they're building stuff one of the people I mentioned that I interviewed on a podcast that I said had trouble with addiction and things like that they were someone who became a software developer they started building things and they said like I'm struggling to get a job I'm struggling to get a job and I'm kind of doing some things on the side but I'm struggling I'm struggling and then at one point they were posting and they were like I don't need to go apply for a job anymore because I act like accidentally created my own job so this is possible for people depending on the type of work you're doing if you find that you can start getting some work on the side building like websites for people that might be a great opportunity um but I would say just keep building stuff um and then lean into your skill set that you have it's it's going to be hard but yeah don't be discouraged like you only lose at this if you stop otherwise you're just going to keep getting better so you keep adjusting your strategy um Harry what do you think about feature Flags generally I think that they're very helpful generally I think that people have to think about the intended uh lifetime of them um so I like being man there's a there's a lot of questions coming guys I'm going to have to wrap it up up soon I have to but I appreciate the questions I'm going to try my best um yeah we use like at work we use a lot of feature Flags um there's I mean there's the the in the vast realm of feature Flags in the digital landscape now there's a lot of different um like ways and thoughts on feature flags and stuff right you have people that are talking about like feature FL or like flagging things in general for like AB testing and experiments and stuff you have feature Flags purely just to by definition to like turn on features when they're ready um you know there's there's other things that like look like a feature flag but they're not um they're not a feature it's like a configuration that you flight so there's a whole bunch of like sort of use cases around this space and the technology is very similar which is basically you are changing the state of something generally in like a you know a production build of something whether that's a live service or whatever else right you have something that you can turn on or off or otherwise configure um I think they're super helpful I think that it's a technology to leverage and think about um I have seen a lot of success where it's like hey you know if you can roll your depending on what you're building you can roll it out and the features off and nothing broken like hey you should be good to keep going turn it on in a small scope that you want to see something exercised in try it out um you can do the same it's kind of like uh even with user experiments right like you turn on a feature and see how people are uh reacting to it but I think one of the big challenges is like you don't want code that is just like it's the whole thing is littered with feature Flags because with feature Flags you have different combinations of things that can be turned on at the same time and then your complexity of what's being exercised can get Gnarly so I think that there are ways to do this um there things to try and avoid like for example if you want to turn out a feature I would say the ideal situation to feature flag something is to have one spot for that feature flag not a hundred checks on that feature flag scattered across the code base ideally you don't have that um if it's more than one it's not going to end the world but having one is a great thing um but then you have to think like is this something that's going to be configurable forever is this like a setting that we want to be able to turn the the dial on or is this once the feature is out there now you have to potentially go run another build of whatever to go remove the feature flag and turn it permanently on so like there's it can create more work but I think depending on what you're doing it can create a lot of flexibility and confidence so overall I'm a fan but I think that you have to understand how to use them and the tradeoffs um Devon says how well are the devops and Cloud Fields after software engineering um how well are the devops and Cloud Fields after software engineering some say you should have experience in software engineering for switching probably yeah um I think so software engineering is a pretty loaded term to me um but I have a little bit of bias there when I talk about software engineering like I went to school in Canada to be called an Eng engineer like like by I don't know by the the people who regulate it like it actually isn't just you couldn't just go to a boot camp in Ontario for four months and say I'm a software engineer you had to go to an accredited University program pass an ethics test work under an engineer for four years I've only done one of those things and I one of them is not the ethics test um not to say that I'm unethical but there's a there's a lot that you had to do so when I think about software engineering I'm like that's a lot um but if you just mean in terms of like software development um yeah I think like when I think about devops and anything in Cloud odds are you're supporting or like adjacent to software developers you might literally be doing software development work in those roles it say that they're very specific to devops and and you know Cloud Administration or whatever else so I think that it's very helpful um is it required you could make arguments no but I think that it would just be tremendously beneficial so my advice would be if you're pursuing devops or something like anything in the cloud uh whether that's like Solutions architect or anything else I would say if you had if you started with software development and wanted to switch over to it or something I think you would be set up very well for that so if your interest is more specific than just software engineering or software development I think you're in a good spot but I would recommend development experience for sure um tooi um how can I transition from support specialist to Dev I worked as a Dev for a few years but now that I'm working as support for a while feel like I forgotten a lot of things well got to get back in practice so um when we talk about this kind of stuff this is very general advice so I apologize if it feels like I'm brushing you off just to say something generic but uh if you feel like you have forgotten a lot of things like my the situation I would say is okay imagine that you had to go apply to a job tomorrow and they said sure here's here's an interview you'd probably feel very uncomfortable considering you said you forgot a lot of things so what would we do to try and make that better well I would say like practice like go go build things um pick pick a language pick a a framework to go build stuff uh doesn't like what you build specifically is not huge but if you're like hey I used to be a Dev using this language and these text Stacks building mobile applications or web development if you're like hey I still think that stuff's interesting like dive back into that but I would highly recommend getting hands-on experience in building stuff please do that um that will tell you without like pressure like where do you feel like super awkward if you're like man like let's assume you were doing some full stack development you're like man like uh I can you know I can set up the database I can connect all that stuff this is great this is easy and then you're like but I have to go work in the front end you're like I can't even make a button and you know have that submit a web request and I would say like double down on that like get more confident there um and practice go from there go look up the tutorials and the other additional learning resources but my advice is like you know if this is your interest to which like hell yeah I'm all for it you got to practice though so go build up that confidence for yourself um and I would say like because maybe the next question is like well when do I know when I'm ready when you start applying and start getting some feedback uh so if you're not getting any interviews and stuff um it might mean that you need to tailor your resume more you need to show some different experiences there projects can go a long way um I've started uh I got to start doing a couple of like advertisements I guess but just a spoiler alert on my Dev leader YouTube channel I just started a resume review series and from what I'm seeing already it will eventually have to move to a a member's only offering um and just to share briefly I make a lot of YouTube videos I do on code commute alone I do over 10 a week There's no edit there I did edit a couple myself to do the 360 videos which are super cool by the way um but my Dev leader Channel I pay an Editor to edit my videos and I was like I'm going to start doing resume reviews because I think this is helpful people have asked for it I'm going to give the people what they want to put this into context because it it's absolutely ridiculous on paper people like charge money for resume review Services right so I'm basically offering it for free but it's going in a video and it costs me between like 50 to $100 to have the video edited so I'm literally paying $50 to $100 to review your resume um so that's not going to be sustainable um so my plan is that I'm eventually going to try and shift resume reviews to like a members only thing on on my YouTube channel um right now it's not so I'm going to keep uh trying to do what I can um so we'll see how long I can do that for but um at some point I think just to sustain it it needs to be members only um I'm not going to charge $80 for members to get the video edited but um I think that yeah at some point it'll have to be something like you know I unless my channel completely blows up and the ad Revenue pays for it doesn't I run two YouTube channels the ad revenue does not cover the video editing for one uh of the channels so um I'm far off from that but um my goal is to try and give back on that okay how to document my projects as I build them oh man unfortunately you're asking the wrong person it depends for what is this for yourself I guess if so um couple ideas you could you could write mini blog posts about them to yourself um there might you could even maybe there's some AI tools that are cool now that you could do and feed your project into it um or have it look at your repository I have I'm sure someone has done this already but one of the things I've said is like if I had infinite time I don't unfortunately but if I could just like go build whatever I think something that would be super fun and interesting to build is like uh some type of AI agent system I don't know the implementation of it specifically but it would basically like constantly build documentation for your projects in like a Wiki style so you'd have like the entire like wikis are cool but they're always at a date and they're a pain in the ass to keep up to date but if someone could have an AI agent system that would go through your code base and just like keep making Wiki Pages updating them based on the commit messages where there's bugs you could have it like telling you parts of the code that are brittle and things how things have been refactored over time to have a history I think it'd be so awesome um so I don't really have a good recommendation for now on how to do it um but yeah and the reason I say this is because when I switched to projects that I've been off of for a while like I've been building a 2d role playing game for like 20 years um I haven't touched it in maybe three if I went back to that now I would be like who wrote this this is ridiculous so it's hard um but I think the way to do it would be not all at once at the end so finding ways to to do it along the way in a format that you can search through uh I think ideally uh bruh that's a good name I'm 21 wanting to self te myself to cod as I think it's a wonderful skill to know do you think it's worth me Le uh worth me striving for given AI yes I've seen a lot of negative and positive conversations I 100% think so um I keep telling people my perspective on this is that it's going to change it's going to change software development it already has and it will keep doing so I do not think I don't think anytime soon we just like don't have people that work in software I think by the time we don't have people that work in software we don't have people working in like any job in which case we're having a different conversation so I personally think like I still encourage people um in just a moment when I'm going to switch over and show code commute and uh so bruh if you're still on the stream uh when I show you code commute if you didn't come from code commute um I would recommend you check out that channel because uh in the past few weeks I've posted some videos on on my thoughts of AI and that's like why this stream started you guys had so many good questions though that I didn't even finish my article so um let me answer the last one here from tayman T man's back help me out bro I'm a newsletter sub and I love you well thanks for coming back cuz I know you've been here a whole bunch I'll even give you a hug I'm a loser who will never get a job without a lot of help T man I tell you this every time you're here it's not true and um the first thing we have to do is we change that last sentence and I'm going to put it to you this way I want to see you start talking more positively about yourself when you come here because you do come back okay you come back and I appreciate that you're here but I need you to change your last sentence you're not a loser and you are going to get a job you might need help that's fine but number one thing that we're doing for you to help out is you're going to work on changing that last sentence and I think it's important because I said this earlier on the stream I didn't finish my thought because I ramble a lot but I was talking about um having like a fear of public speaking I always thought that this kind of stuff was a ridiculous thing to say when it's like oh you're manifesting it it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy and I'm like that sounds like you're just making up magic stuff and I'm like I don't want to believe what you're saying but here's why it makes sense to me now I for a long time so I wasn't saying I'm a loser who will never get a job but I would say I am afraid of speaking in public I'm bad at speaking in public I would say those two things I'm afraid of it I don't like doing it I'm bad at it then what would happen is that I wouldn't speak in public and then there would be some situation where I have to and I'm like oh my God like I'm bad at it I'm bad at it I hate it this is so awful and then I would do it and like I was terrified and then I would start to do it and like it was actually okay and then I'm like okay I'm never doing that again though I'm never for doing it again and then I wouldn't for a really long time and then it would repeat so you know what made me not so terrified is that I started speaking to a camera made 450 YouTube videos talking to a camera and so last year I went and did a public speaking thing I I literally paid out of my own pocket I flew to Seattle to go to Dallas at a small Meetup it's not like it was a you know 10,000 person conference in a stadium no small little Meetup I flew myself in I was guest speaker it felt super cool felt special and then I gave a presentation and it was fine and it took me a long time to realize that I have to stop saying I'm bad at this like it took me a lot of YouTube videos to realize I think I can talk at least to a camera which means I can do meetings right I can do digital presentations and then talking to people there's I'm not going to say the number of people that have been on the stream but like if I can do it what's the difference if it's in a room right and then that's why to be honest I started live streaming more started live streaming more because it's way harder than to just record a video and edit out all the times I mess up you've seen me on this stream already where I'm going uh keep touching my head like this I don't do that in YouTube videos I have to sit here like this and I do multiple takes I can't have my my bald head off the top and I have to get positioned properly and everything has to be perfect and when I mess up I say it again but that's not what happens I'm I'm half the time I'm looking at this screen over here um but all of this is just because of practice right so if you keep saying I am bad at this I will never you're right unfortunately you're right you will never get better that's why I'm telling you to change your last sentence stop saying it you come here like it's not every week but you come here a lot right you're obviously interested in getting better I I address you right like you are recognized so do that next step stop saying that you're bad that's my that's my ask of you for next time because I want to see you here next time and we're not going to say I'm bad cool okay and thanks for being here Tay man I'm not trying to be hard on you but I think I got to be a little bit hard on you okay um I'm going to switch over switch gears a little bit we're going to go full screen um this is also my ugly face um but if I go up to the top this is the it depends on those Monday workloads Bro yeah I hear you I am burnt the hell out currently so um this is my my newsletter so if folks wanted to see where this conversation came from that's where if you're on substack I realize you can't see the chat that's coming through thanks for tuning in by the way I think this is the most people that have been on the substack stream um so thanks for being here but you you know where the newsletter is uh I appreciate you joining the live stream as as well um so for folks that want to join the live stream next time it's same time every Monday 700 p.m. Pacific unless I'm sick or there's something else crazy going on the topic is generally going to be what the newsletter topic is you do not have to subscribe if you don't want to read my emails don't please don't um but if you want to see the topic is weekly. deev leader.com um wonder what the device is in the corner of my room shining a little blue light it's a light um uh this one over here or oh you can't see the other can you see the other side that's not on the stream right there's another one over here but they're just little lights um I don't know they're not Elgato they're um it's a some brand on Amazon but they have a pretty good little ecosystem of devices that I like um goie it's goie g o v e not affiliated that would be cool if I could make money from mentioning products but we're not there yet um okay so that's the newsletter um I should mention to folks usually I'm like promoting chuses by my chorus it's free it's literally free um I don't get money from it because it's free here you go um boom if you want to learn C the first one in the getting started uh course is basically learning programming from nothing so there you go and then there's a deep dive that follows that that is the device on the green light under the green light near the floor oh printer that's a printer it's just a little printer man um but these two choruses are 11 and a half hours you can see it literally says right there boom but if I just go to show you quickly hey look my face again again um like to jump into this one the curriculum is all here right you can see what's they have free previews what oh that's not even the course material that's okay it's free anyway um so yeah there's 11 and a half hours uh we had thousands of students uh sign up for this which is super cool I thought that was exciting unfortunately thousands and thousands of people didn't come subscribe to the YouTube channel but hey here we are that's okay not not sad about that but um check it out if you want to learn c um I don't promise like I never tell people hey watch my courses you'll be an expert you won't because you won't be an expert unless you practice for a long time but I think if you're trying to get started uh I I believe strongly in these two courses I spent a lot of time trying to teach beginners C and uh so when Nick chaps is from Dome train gave me this opportunity Nick chaps is one of the biggest SE sharp YouTubers in the world so when he was like hey yeah you can do the beginner ones I was like this is the coolest thing ever such an awesome opportunity um so I put effort into these and I'm I'm proud of them and they're free until the end of February so literally just get them because they're free why not next up my YouTube channel this is Dev leader this is my main one that's the stream we're on right now um this is the resume review Series so I'm going to link it to folks in the chat I just realized everyone on substack is like what the hell are you talking about right um sorry I'm sharing stuff on the screen once substack stops sucking with the live streams you can see the same thing at the same time so I apologize but this is the link to the resume reviews so if you're on substack and you want to know what I'm talking about it's just at uh my YouTube channel which is just Dev leader and um that's the first video in the series I have a whole bunch I got to do so send them in if you watch the video it tells you where to send them in um but yeah this is my main channel the videos on this channel are a lot more C programming and then they are also um like edited down videos kind of like on these types of topics but edited down so it's not me rambling to you for how long we've been on here for almost two hours so that's the kind of content you'll get here um my stupid face on all these thumbnails because that's what apparently works for YouTube clicks then there's code commute this is the uh Channel that's been really fun uh mostly in the car but when I don't go to work for a week I have to still make the videos but this has been can I one sec can I let me do this give me one sec folks I want to I want to see if I can show you a sneak peek preview I don't know if I can do this we're going to try we're going to try um I just got to get over to the studio and then I will show you the video that's going up because it's got a 360 camera um it's the better edit of the 360 camera ones I have look at this right how cool is that that's me that's my stupid face but look then we go drive to work actually this is to CrossFit so it's me blabbing about software engineering is this in 2x speed or am I just driving like a maniac both maybe anyway that's code commute um so I'll put a link to that in the chat as well if you want to check that out this is the one that I do about 10 videos a week they're not all going to be like this but isn't that fun like we can go look behind the car there's a seam I have to figure out how to edit that but right it's pretty neat okay that's enough of that uh and then otherwise if you're interested in posting content to social media brand ghost is the platform that I'm creating it's completely free if you want to do crossposting and scheduling stuff to these platforms um and then there is a paid tier that has more advanced features um but like I was saying earlier on the stream if you see content I post on social media it's through brand ghost I use it for absolutely everything it's the only reason that I can create content the way I do because I just have to focus on making the content and I never have to think about scheduling content ever again so I'm really proud of that that's what I'm working on and with that said that's all we got folks so thanks for being here I do appreciate you joining um same time next week and remember Tay man change the message you'll get through there