Does Company Alignment REALLY Matter For Developers - Principal Engineering Manager AMA

Oh wow. I think we're live hopefully. Just a sec here. We'll get things going. Instagram's always the last one. There we go. Awesome. Let's get that going on Instagram. Get the chat a little refresh. Maybe the chat will show up on the stream today. And it does. Wow. Everything is working so far except my right eye again. So, I'm always getting eye problems. I got to get that sorted out. Well, welcome to the live stream, folks. If uh you're new to the live streams, I try to do these every Monday as much as I can. And it's usually an hourong stream, sometimes a little bit over. And the context is that I will generally go over my newsletter article. It's not always that. Uh, sometimes we end up doing some live coding, vibe coding, that kind of stuff. Today we're not going to be coding though. We're going to be going over the newsletter article. And this one is going to be about company alignment. Hey Devin, thanks for being here. Devin is a supporter. I appreciate you Devon. You're on every platform and it's awesome. It's always good to see you. So yeah, this one is going to be about company alignment and how much that matters uh for you as a developer. And of course, as we go through this, like always, if uh people have opinions on this kind of stuff, especially if they're different than what I'm saying, I'd love to hear from from you in the chat. The whole point with these live streams is that it is interactive. There is a chat, so please feel free to use it. Uh Instagram chat doesn't show up in the in the shared chat, unfortunately, but I am I am watching it separately. And when people comment on Instagram, I try to read it out so everyone can hear. Yeah, it's a pardon me, it's an AMA as well. So, as we're going through this stuff, if there's even something you want to ask about that has nothing to do with the topic, that's totally cool, too. Uh I feel like this is a I don't know, a good opportunity to at least have these types of conversations. So, um, yeah, with that said, don't forget, you know, leave your questions and stuff as we're going and I'm happy to kind of finish up my thought and then, uh, get over to your question and and get over to it. So, I'm just going to pull up my my newsletter on my side and I'll share it in the chat because if you want to, uh, read along and kind of see the topics if you haven't already, it is available right here. Um, it's at weekly.devleer.ca. I always remind people that it's uh yes, it's a newsletter. If you're like, "Oh god, you silly tech creators in your newsletters. I don't want any email newsletters." It's totally cool. I don't blame you. Um I get lots of email. I I work at Microsoft and the Office 365 side of the house. And let me tell you, I get lots of email. I get so much email that it would be impossible to try and read it all. So, I get it. And if you know, email bothers you or you're not going to read a newsletter, totally cool. But if you're, you know, into the live streams and you want to see what the topic is probably going to be, uh, just bookmark weekly.devleer.ca and check it out on the weekend. Okay. So, the framing for this one, like a lot of the the newsletters that turn into uh these live streams, is that this is a topic that came up from the subreddit experience devs. And so if I don't have pending questions and stuff or topics that I'm just super excited to go over, I often go over to the experience dev subreddit because I think it's a it's at least an interesting source to see like I guess like I don't know good topics to to chat through because odds are if someone is curious about something right they're having a particular challenge or they want to understand something better odds are other people are going to have a you know um same types of questions or experiences on that to share. So, I like going over there for ideas, for things to talk about. And this one did come from a Redditor. And so, the framing here is like when it comes to what your company does, right? So, wherever you're working or wherever you, you know, plan to work, that kind of thing. Um, how much is that really a factor for you as a developer? Right? So, uh, if you know, just to I'm going to I'm going to try to pick some polar opposites of things just to to kind of get you thinking, right? But like if you worked at a software company that made software that was for like specifically for weapons, right? What would what would that look like? or if you worked at a company that made software uh specifically for rescuing animals uh or you worked for a company that made software for the music industry or for sports or for something else, right? Like does the company um align with you or do you align with the company? That kind of thing. How much does that really matter? Okay, so that's going to be what we're talking through in this. And I think for me this is a this is an important one because I like just to kind of give you a high level of where like where my perspective is on this. It's like I I want to acknowledge that kind of like whenever I try to have these conversations like every single person's different and not only is every single person different but like you are a different person today than you were a few years back than uh you know the person you will be in 10 years from now because the things that we value um and how much we value them all of that kind of stuff changes and evolves over time especially as our life circumstances change and that's not to say that you know in 10 years. Uh, I'm trying to sit here and guarantee like you're going to be a completely different person and everything that you know and love will be changed. Like, no, I'm not saying that. Um, what I am saying is that you may have different priorities in your life right now that you than you do when you're, you know, 10 years from now or 10 years ago. And I think that's important to factor in with this kind of stuff. Okay. So, um, that's going to be one of the meta points as we talk through this is that everyone is different and even you as a person will be different. Hello, Stony Eagle. Aloha. I don't have my Hawaiian shirt on. I do have some good Hawaiian shirts though. We finally got to we're my wife and I are in the in the United States and um when we had moved down here from Canada, it was kind of challenging because when we want to go on vacation, we're like, well, where can we go? Because we were going through uh some of the process uh with visas and uh immigration and stuff like that. And for different periods of time, we weren't able to leave the country. So, we're like, where can we go? We're like, actually, Hawaii is part of the United States. like let's go to Hawaii. So, um we went to Hawaii a couple of times and love it. So, aloha. Um so, yeah, I think that's one of the things I want to get across is that like, you know, everyone's going to be different. You will be different. And when I think about my um we could be happy for you without Hawaiian shirts. That's right. Um, I think when I think about my own career, uh, my perspective on this kind of stuff is that, um, there's a couple different parts. One is like the company's mission overall. I think there's kind of like a mission the company's after. I think there is how how well that comes through in the culture, which you know, in a in a perfect world, those things are aligned, right? like awesome mission, you have a really good company culture to kind of support that. And then I also think like kind of separate from the mission is like it's related, don't get me wrong, but the domain that you're in. And what I mean by domain is like software is kind of this super uh you know awesome industry where you're whatever you're building software for could be completely different domains, right? You could be making stuff for agriculture or for uh for finance or for sports or software for software. You could like there it's it's so cool because you can pick any industry and software is applicable, right? So I think that you know the the industry and how much like your interest aligns with that is part of it. I think that's also part of like the the company mission is part of it. I think that the company culture is part of it. And there's a bunch of these things that kind of tie together. And like I said, in a perfect world, these are all aligned. And I think that the reality is that it's not a perfect world. And so for me, um, the do I don't know. I feel like the domain is like less less important for me so far in my career. But I do think company culture is huge and I do think the company's mission is also very important. And I have like, you know, full transparency, I'm going to I'm going to use the word uh struggle. And I feel like that's way too strong of a word, but uh almost like an identity crisis kind of struggle thing going on where for me um like I said, company culture is really important, but the mission is really important too. and going from a digital forensics company where I was um you know before I started there if you ask me about my alignment to the mission I would say I think it's important but like it like I don't know I haven't been part of that it doesn't like seems uh seems noble but like shrug um and so a lot of what we did at that digital forensics company was um you know was helping law enforcement and a lot of the time it was as unfortunate as it is to say like was helping catch catch um the people that were uh doing terrible things to kids. And so I I hadn't really thought of that until I was working there and realized like man like this mission is nuts. Like it is such a like empowering and motivating thing to be part of that. And so I I do like for me it's not that without it there was no way I could see myself working at a company but with it was just like I don't know like this extra enormous boost on top of it. So when I was saying the word like, you know, struggle or identity crisis, the reason I have that now is because I just I feel like anything feel like anything else other than what I was doing. It's going to be really hard to compete with a mission like that. All right. And so to me, that's where it's kind of tricky. And that's not to say that I I don't believe in what I'm doing or I don't think it's valuable. So for context, now I work at Microsoft. I work on the Office 365 um side of Microsoft and I work in the routing plane. So, in particular, my team works the firewall um and I have some other uh parts of the routing plane, some different pieces of the tech stack. And so, like it's a really important part of what we do. um like we are responsible for making sure traffic goes to the right spots that it gets there with low latency that you know that the services that we're supporting remain highly available so it's it's incredibly important but at the same time like that that is a mission I realize there's lots of value and importance but when I compare it to something like you know helping save children I'm like I just one of those to me seems to uh to resonate a little bit more right and that's Why for me I'm like I don't know if I will ever have something that that kind of feels like that. So company mission for me uh it's not that it is a critical part that if it's not quite there like at the very top of like the perfect alignment that I'm like no dice I can't do this. But I do think that it's very important for me from a motivation perspective. And then just kind of jumping over to the chat right um Joshua was saying company culture and values have a huge impact. Culture is huge. places with toxic culture eat themselves alive. Yeah. And so out of the things that I mentioned like the the domain the the mission and then the culture culture all day every day hands down for me most important thing um I I don't know if I can I quote myself I don't even know if I don't even know if I can quote myself accurately but I remember at different points in time uh where I used to work saying to people because we were like at the time when I started there was like a seven person company that that grew to like 250 people uh when I was there. So like we went through a lot of change together, right? A lot of like a lot of times in the beginning where it's just like crazy startup times. And I remember saying to the people that I work closely with like to me it didn't matter like what we were building specifically. I was like it wouldn't matter if we were building this or cheese grers or something else. I know that like that we work well together and like that part was huge for me. The fact that um you know we were a co like a cohesive team that work well together. We could challenge each other. Um we were always there to support each other. Like just so much alignment. I do think the mission really helped with that. But at the same time like the just having good people, man. It's like the culture uh you know I think hands down is one of the most important things. TBD Gamer says, "I think I've worked in too many places where they try and force a culture." Yeah. And the mission feels hollow. Okay. Especially as companies grow fast. I think identity becomes a challenge. Hello. Yes. Um that is that is awesome. I I really really do um agree with that. And it's it's tricky, right? the I've said this if uh for folks that are that are watching this like if you do watch code commute I have said many times on code commute in my vlog entries that like um like culture is incredibly important right and I think that something that's misunderstood um especially people you know like unfortunately the people in leadership positions uh a lot of them will misunderstand this which is like you're looking at the the culture of like your team or your teams your organization or your company overall and you're like, "Okay, well, this is like we got to make changes because we got to make the we got to make the culture look like X." Like it needs to we got to do this, we got to do that. People should feel this way, they have to do that. And the idea that's in their mind is like, well, we'll just we'll set the culture like we just here's the culture, you know, press apply and now the culture is is rolled out. we'll deploy the culture to the to the team and like it doesn't work that way. Um culture is is observed, right? It's the observed side effect of what's going on. So you need to like live and breathe all of these things on a regular basis and you can be part of shaping the culture. You can be part of doing things that influence like how people work and interact together and and the side effect of that is that you get this observed culture. you do not get to just set the culture. And I think that um when I see TBD Gamers comment around like where they try and force the culture, to me that's where you have these types of situations where people don't realize it's a it's an observed side effect of all of the other things. And so it's very, you know, it's very easy to sit back and say like, no, our culture is this, right? We got to we we do things this way and that's the way it has to be done. and that that is our culture. It's easy to sit there and do that. The work is actually living and breathing it, right? So, um I think that culture feels forced when people sort of dictate it to you instead of observing it. Um and then the mission feeling hollow. I'm curious um TBD Gamer obviously not to put you on the spot, but if there's any like more specifics around that, I' I'd love to hear like examples of that. Uh I'm not saying that I disagree with you. I think that that absolutely can happen to your point especially as companies grow fast. So the um you know that one of the tricky things that as a manager I try to remind people is like what we okay a lot of the time in engineering we're focused on how we're doing things like what what are we going to do how are we going to do it like those are important to us because like we're building stuff we're technical you know we're software engineers we like putting things together and I think that it's very easy to focus on that right then we layer in the when cuz we got schedules, we got to deliver stuff. So, we got the what, the how, and the when. But so often we miss talking about why. And I don't mean for this to sound like, you know, woo woo or whatever, but like I think the why part is so critical because when we start leaving it out, we we can get disconnected from the work we're doing and then the impact that it can have, right? So in situ like I've literally had this type of conversation with people on my team where we're talking we're doing like status updates. I'm talking with someone in a oneonone specifically about the work they're doing and we get into some of the conversation and like I've had conversations where I have uncovered that someone like knew what they were doing. They knew how they were doing it and obviously they they understood like their timeline and like the deliverables and stuff. But when we got talking about it they were like it's not that how do I say this? like they don't know why they're doing it. Um because their framing for why might be like, oh, because we're trying to improve like, you know, from A to B. That's why we're doing it. And that's not wrong. But if you zoom out a little bit, why does A to B matter here? Like why are why are we trying to go from A to B? Like like what is that impacting? And I think being able to talk about this story for why um can be a lot more engaging for people when they go, "Oh man, like I didn't realize that this is the kind of impact associated with this." Like the why behind the work you're doing is is very important and it can often take things that might not seem super engaging because you're like, I'm got to go build this feature and sure, okay, I'm going to optimize performance a little bit or or fix this bug or whatever. And it's like when you're not catching the why, I think that that uh over time can just feel like you're just doing a sequence of things that just like tasks that people have assigned you. And like that might be fine. Maybe you find, you know, engagement and enjoyment and challenge in the in the tasks that you're getting and that's cool. Um but I do think that when you have the why associated with it, that can drive a lot more engagement. Um, and you know, I think people get weirded out when I say this, but like you could be a little bit more excited about the work you're doing because you understand the impact that you're having. Um, Joel says, "Yeah, forcing a culture makes it look like you're trying too hard." Yeah. And I think that it fails, too. Like people see through it, right? Where you have the people that are sort of responsible for uh, you know, carrying out everything uh, every day. uh they're the ones working in these teams and they're being told like this is your culture and they're the ones looking around going like uh yeah I don't think so like I don't know what you're what you're seeing but it's not this like this is not the culture like people see when you're trying to force it and it doesn't work so you have to live it right anyone I just this is my recommendation to anyone that may watch this at any point in time that is in a position where they feel like they need to to dictate the culture to set the culture. Um, if you feel that where you're like, "Oh man, like our team or our organization or this company I have like the culture seems off like I need to tell the people how to what the culture is going to be." Don't I mean, you can you can uh articulate your ideas around this like this is where you'd like to to you know to move the culture. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but you need to live it. Like, you have to start living it or else it's just not going to happen. You don't tell people and then go and then it just culture doesn't work that way, unfortunately. Um, TD Gamer says, "I think being in the dev side, you see how the sausage is made." Yeah. So, when you're putting out the message about our mission is to do X or we make Y our primary concern. You know, it doesn't work that way. There are things that are getting uh ignored to look better. Yeah, great point. like you can kind of uh I think the you know the sausage factory analogy is a good one here like you can see what's happening behind the scenes right and you it's this kind of goes back to um in in some ways like not uh you can't dictate the culture right if you're going to say that like these are the values we have and then you're like okay if we value I'm just making up an example if we if we value security right we value security then why is it that every time we're a little a little bit behind on a deadline, we just cut all the security features, right? We value privacy, okay? But like, you know, every feature we're doing, we're also finding these ways to sneak in things to like get some customer data because, you know, that's going to help our analytics or that's going to help us, I don't make more money somehow. I don't know. But, you know, you you get to see what's actually happening on a regular basis. So, you know, when when you're being told, oh, this is our our mission or these are the things we value, um, as TBD Gamer is saying here, like when you're in it and living it and breathing it, if those things aren't aligning, um, and you're seeing the people in like um, I don't know, these positions that you that you want to be emulating, right? Maybe that's your maybe that's your manager, maybe that is um, you know, the more senior engineers on the team, right? the people that you're looking up to and you're like, you know, I look up to these people. I'm supposed to trust and respect them. I'm being told like our organization values X and every person that I'm supposed to look up to and trust and everything. They're doing Y instead, like seems misaligned, right? And there are opportunities, you know, depending on how you feel about these things to maybe step up and and try to, you know, try to drive some change. And uh I would, you know, I would always tell people this. I would encourage that. And um at some point it may not be you, you may find like you're in a spot like that truly doesn't actually value those things. And uh it's uh it's kind of an uphill battle. But Joel says, "The why question is the most important when leadership answers why the team feels part of the team." Yeah, I like I I genuinely believe this. Um I know for me it is more helpful. I've seen uh I've seen people kind of completely change how they're looking at something when they understand why. Uh but at the same time, like I don't um I don't like I almost don't blame people when we don't talk about this enough. And I'm really sorry my mouth is super dry. I don't know why. Um, but yeah, I I think that a lot of the time we we omit the part about why. So, you know, as managers or if there's people that are in a product management position, I feel like this gets dropped a lot. Um, just not part of the conversation because we're just focused on trying to get stuff done, right? So people, you know, in a management position like myself, like sometimes we we forget to do that. And I'm not trying to make excuses for it, but like that ends up happening. And then on the other end of it, on the more receiving end, if you're in a an IC role and you're so you're a software engineer and you're contributing to these things, you know, I don't I don't expect that every single person's like, "Great. Now that I've seen the the story on the Jira board, like I'm immediately going, let's talk about why because I watch this Nick guy on a live stream say that we should ask this. It like it's not necessarily a natural thing. And I think that, you know, one of one of my goals over time is that more and more people just start to do this, right? Like more naturally. Deon says, "My last job, I tried to drive change. Ultimately, I couldn't change uh change my job, so I changed my job." Yeah, I love that. Uh I I I had a feeling what as I was reading that that I knew what that last part of the sentence was going to say and I still stumbled over it, but ultimately I couldn't change my job, so I changed my job. Yeah, that's pretty powerful, right? It's um it's hard because I know some people will hear me say things like this on whether it's on a live stream or in a code vlog or anything else like written in a newsletter. Um but I I genuinely, you know, feel this way that if you see things going on around you that you don't like, try to be part of driving the positive change. Like I do encourage people to do it. But I know that some people have like lived through these scenarios where they're like, "Doesn't matter what I say, doesn't matter what anyone says, like not going to happen." And like I hear you. So, if you're in a spot like that, I would just I would encourage you like it's either if you don't like what's going on and you can't drive the change, like as Devin said, I can't change my job, so change my job. Right. I think I think that's a really good takeaway. Joel says, "There's only one true culture in any organization. It's the one that naturally develops over time." Absolutely. But if it's force, there's always some instinctively wrong something instinctively wrong about the environment. Yeah. growing up as a minister son, you start seeing the face. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But I I do agree, right? Um you can't force this kind of thing. So, I'm curious because thank you for for being active in the chat, folks. Some some of these live streams it's like maybe I get one person or no people in the chat. Sometimes there's a lot of people jumping in which is really cool. So, I I do appreciate it. um if you don't mind in the chat like when it comes to your alignment with your company's mission, I'm curious to hear about that. So culture aside and domain maybe aside, the mission of your company, how much does that matter for you? Have you worked at different places that had a different kind of mission and that did or did not have uh an effect? Stony, I'm not going to complain about that. Welcome aboard. I appreciate you being here and uh I do hope to see more of you. Right, these try to do these every Monday, but when I can't, you can still check it out on code commute. I'm just behind on my my normal YouTube videos. I took like a month off from making normal YouTube videos. Just really, really behind. And you can see, if it's not obvious, my stupid eye, right? Like when I get like this, it's because I'm not sleeping and I'm really stressed out and I end up getting these stupid sty and my eye looks all wonky. Um, but yeah, I I got to catch up on my other YouTube videos, so we'll be doing that. Deon says, "It's easy to feel helpless. I was there 10 years." Um, in hindsight, it was 5 years too long. Yeah. Yeah. But I was beat down and didn't feel like I was uh good enough to take the next step. Yeah. This is like, you know, unfortunately, I would say not not a rare thing, right? Like um like a a bunch of that is not is not like a super rare thing. So there for 10 years, right? Devin says five years too long. So there's this period where when he's reflecting on it, it's like, yeah, like maybe should have should have changed, right? But beat down. So this is the kind of stuff that often sneaks up on us over time, right? I think there's situations where if you're like if you I don't know you have a conversation with your boss and it's not a good conversation. Like that's a more acute kind of effect where you're like, "Oh crap, like this isn't good." Um and then it's kind of obvious like something's not good, right? You have this this reaction, this feeling. But for these types of things, often it's like something that accumulates, right? When I talk about things like burnout, I'll often say one of the the scariest parts about burnout is that uh it's kind of like this overtime kind of thing. And uh it's not like, oh, I'm burnt out because it was a bad day at work or I'm burnt out cuz the week was long. You're burnt out because you've been doing things for months or years, right? It sneaks up on you until it's like a like a depressive episode, right? You don't really realize it's happening. So I think the same kind of thing can happen here where you you see kind of see things going in a direction or maybe you don't even see them going in a direction but by the time you notice you're like I kind of want to think I need to speak up about this and change but you're like nothing's changing around you or any anytime you try you're like h it's not getting resistance or like I'm not getting buy in and then okay so that all sucks and then you get to this point where you're like maybe it is time to And then what? Like when you Okay, you feel like Devon said, you feel like you're not good enough to take the next step. You feel kind of just stuck, right? It's like it's really not a good spot to be in. It's like you're feeling trapped and so no good. Stony says, "I have zero professional experience. I work on my own project that I work full-time on." Nice. Awesome. Lots of love and time put in. That's awesome. Um I think that's, you know, the best kind of stuff to work on. Uh, I can't comment anything about like, you know, income or anything like that, but I think if you have the means to be able to do that kind of thing, then hell yeah. Uh, that's great. Uh, and Deon says, "I wasn't the only one feeling that way. After I left and showed it could be done, five other people left over six months." Yeah. Right. Um, kind of like that's unfortunate, right? because it's like I don't know the details there but I imagine I I imagine that if someone could have started to show positive change internally that instead of having those people leave after you it would have been those people being like wait we can drive change like we can make a difference okay like let me let me speak up and do something about it right obviously I don't have data to prove that would be the case but I would I would speculate That's what would happen. Minister saying was no less than three years, no more than seven. Okay. I have never heard these things before. That's very cool. Um TBD Gamer says, "I have found I care more about the people around me. Believing in the mission is my motivation." Okay, I'm going to read that again. I have found I care more about the people around me. Believing in the mission is my motivation. I love delivering software to people and get the most out of seeing the end users not struggle. Okay. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Um I'm curious like um when you say that first part, I found I care more about the people around me believing in the mission is my motivation. I like one of the things that comes to mind around this is I I think about the times where I've worked on teams where um the people around me like the other developers or maybe it's other teams even so including managers or other roles but when I'm working around people that are like highly motivated and that could be for any number of reasons maybe that's like purely from um their alignment with the mission maybe that's just because how they are as people working on these projects, whatever it is. But when I'm around other people that are like super motivated and they're like, you know, I want to help you however I can. I like I can't wait to get this done or um even when things suck and they're like, this is part Can I swear on YouTube? I don't know. I swear on code when they're like this is shitty. Um and but like we got to get it done. That's okay because like we got to push through and and you know make it to the next part. when I'm around other people like that, it is so motivating. Um because that's the kind of like matching the energy that I want to have, right? I don't always feel that way on every project or every task I have, but I like that's how I want to be. I want to be in that mode. And when I see other people doing it, it makes me feel like, okay, it's like it's it's okay to be like that. and okay, we'll push through on this even when it's not good or um you know, we're working on difficult problems, but we can rally on this and like we can it's fun to work together to solve these types of things. And the opposite happens too, like if I'm around other people and I want to be like that, right? I want to be kind of driving and uh pushing on these difficult things and other people are kind of like, I don't know, man, we can do the bare minimum or like I don't know, we don't really want to change anything. like it's going to be a lot of work. Like we just I know the build system kind of sucks and it takes, you know, seven business days to to get a binary out of it, but like kind of just do it, man. It's fine, right? We're just we're okay with it. Or yeah, like the the tests haven't passed in three years, but like there's a lot of tests and we don't want to clean them up. Like when you're around people that are like they just don't want to be, you know, driving improvement. Um or for me like aligning in the same ways to me that's it's super demotivating because then I'm like well how much energy do I put into this? I want to put in the energy. I want to have the drive. I want to do things that way but if other people aren't it's like now it's almost like I'm fighting myself to to not do it. It's very weird. Joel says, "Um, Bruno is real. You don't you do you do feel stuck and loyal?" Yeah. As long as we don't get into the Okay. Yeah. Oh, I definitely need people around me that want to change things. Yeah. And I if uh and when I stop wanting to drive forward, that's my indicator it's time to go. Yeah. DBD Gamer, that's a that's an interesting point, right? I think I'm very similar in that regard. Um, I have been in environments where uh change was welcome. And so what that looked like for me at least was that I felt empowered. I felt uh that I was trusted. I felt um I'm going to use the word respected, but like that goes along with trust. So when I say I felt respected, I don't mean like, you know, people needed to treat me like a king kind of respect. I mean that like I had you know um whether it was employees, peers or managers that that like you know uh that valued my opinion that trusted me and they res they respected what I was doing right that respected the decisions I was making that kind of thing and ultimately that you know was empowering and gave me autonomy and that that meant if I was like hey this is a frustrating thing or I think that we could improve X that I felt comfortable able speaking up about it that I could put my hand up and say, "Hey, like does anyone else notice that like this thing over here kind of sucks and like I have a couple of ideas for this? Is anyone else interested in like trying to push this forward? And if not, like does any is anyone anyone upset if I like try to go do that? Because if not, I'm going to go do it, right?" And just having that uh sort of autonomy um because of those factors I think was a huge part for me. So, um, conversely, being in an environment where it's like, uh, I I try to raise awareness of some things and that's being either shut down or ignored or not supported, I'm like, well, I don't It just kind of goes back to like I want to be making improvements and if if I'm not going to be able to do that, then like then maybe this isn't the spot for me, right? I think I should try first. If I try and it's not supported and I don't see that there's going to be support, then like maybe it's not a good spot. Uh Holly, uh welcome. Uh there are studies that people who curse are more honest. Oh, awesome. Hell yeah. Um and if you're constantly around a crew who's honest about the situation, you can move mountains. Um that's awesome. The respect is about valued in your profession instead of treating you like an AI bot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's um you know it goes a long way I think being in a and I don't like some people may not have and it sucks some people may not have sort of experienced this yet um oh a lot of hair on this thing uh in their in their careers right which is unfortunate but like feeling like you're empowered feeling like you have autonomy those can completely change how you work right completely and that comes with you know someone trusting you to do the right thing, you know, to to do as best as you can with the information you have, to have psychological safety, to know that if you don't do the right thing, you make a mistake, that it's going to be okay. We're going to work through it together. We're we'll all learn, right? Like being in an environment like that makes a huge difference. And so, just want to remind people if you're hearing what I'm saying and you're like, "That sounds like crazy talk, man. Like, that's that's some I don't know what you're talking about." I promise you there are places like this. I I swear. And um you know, you you can be part of driving that change or you could be looking for a place that's like that. So, okay, I'm going to skip ahead a little bit in this newsletter. Um I think that just going back to what I was saying earlier that different points in your life might look a little bit different for the things you value. Okay. So, to, you know, to be totally transparent, like I I value for sure if I'm going to be spending time on things, I want to make sure that I'm well compensated. So, I know that I have friends that started off in a similar way where we're all like, "Hey, we graduated from school or whatever it was or getting our first jobs and it's like, how do we get as much money as we can, right? Like, who's going to pay me well?" And then some people, you know, you could jump between companies and try to make more money, whatever it was. Um, and so like money is a big part of it. And I would be lying if I said like having better compensation wasn't a very important thing for me. But it's interesting because over time, if I even, you know, talked to u like my wife and I don't have children right now. And when I talk to some of my friends um who have gone through life changes over the past 10 to 15 years, what's really interesting is that um I have I have a friend of mine who of course was like very focused on career development, very focused on on you know how much and I don't I don't mean this in like a negative way by the way but like focused on you know how much he could make that kind of thing. these factors that, you know, getting married, having having children, uh, he works at a place where he's definitely not making as much money as he could have before or could now, but he's also like, you know what, like I have these other parts in my life, like my my family that I really value. I live really value spending time with them. He's aligned the work he's doing to some things he's passionate about and like really cares about and the mission, right? So, he's he's optimizing different parts of his life. He's kind of like maybe I don't need to be trying to chase like how do I double my salary? I'm not saying like he's at a spot where he's not making any money, but he he was able to kind of, you know, even come down from where he was in terms of uh income to be able to go look at these other things that he cares more about. So, he has a should have a better work life balance, right? That's part of it. And then he's able to spend more time with his family. And then the work he's doing is also very aligned um to things that he's interested in, right? So those things changed over time. And it's not that he didn't ever care about that mission for the company that he's working at. It's not like he never cared about that. But in terms of a priority, he would probably be like, I don't know, man. like I would be okay not doing that if someone was going to pay me more money and I'm I am that way right now. Um I think there's definitely certain things where like morally I'm like no. Um but at the same time I you know I'm not I'm not at the point yet where I have found um a particular I don't know particular company mission where I'm like that that is the thing that I have to go do because I'm so drawn to it and so like inspired by it that I would be willing to just like take a pay cut kind of thing. And the reason for that is like just you know I like to work so I'm going to work hard and I want to be compensated for it and then between those two things I will try to do other parts in my life uh that bring me other types of fulfillment. So, it's just it's just different. And that may change for me, right, when my wife and I have kids, kid or kids. Um, that may very well change where I'm like or maybe maybe I'll feel more of a pressure even in the beginning where I'm like, oh, you know, are we making enough money? Like that kind of thing. I probably will feel that way cuz I think that's, you know, built into me. But I'm sure that when that time comes that it will be more of a matter of how much more like how can I get more time with my family. I don't know that for sure, but that's what I suspect. Uh Devin says, "It's the difference between being a ticket robot and a problem solver." Yeah. Um and then Joel says, "I respect that about my family first." Yeah. Yeah. So that these things are different for people over time, right? And I think that that's important to um remind yourself is that um you know the things that you value now versus 10 years from now might look different. And I I think that's important so that when you're looking at uh the place that you're working uh if you're starting to feel dissatisfied with things um you know maybe you're at a point where it is you know you're kind of shopping around it's another it's time for another place like to factor in like hey look you know maybe this was 5 years ago 10 years ago what however long since the last job change like you might very well be different as a person and to kind of go back to the drawing or do this reflection. Uh, what Eve Singularity, hi, I am morally obligated to tell you that I came on your stream to test out whispers on Linux. That being said, what you're saying is interesting, so I say, "Oh, by the way, it works." Whispers. What is Whispers on Linux? I don't know if this is a plug for I don't know if you're AI trying to advertise something, but go for it. Go for it, AI man or woman or other. Um, I don't know what Whispers on Linux is, but pitch it. Let's hear it. Um, Holly says or asks, "Oh, not AI, not advertising." Okay. Okay. You're a person. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I never know. There's people that come in from the streaming sites and it's like um I just I just don't know. Most of the time if it's from streaming sites though, I get people that come in from like Kick and unfortunately from Twitch as well and they're just like buy viewers and I'm like yes, that's that's what I need. I need to buy viewers. So well what? Um so thank you for being here but I'd love to know what Whispers is because I have no idea what it is. Um, Holly asks, "Do you find that leaders who are threatened for their own job stability are creating more misalignment?" Yeah, you know, I do think that's part of it. Um, when I in this is a generalization. When I think about people that seem to be acting maliciously, right, when it to me on the surface, I'm like, that's a thing that that doesn't seem like a good thing to do. Um, I have to like it's still a challenge for me, but I try to stop myself and and think like I don't really know personally um any people that are like truly on purpose. Uh, which might be um a funny thing to kind of say out loud, right? I I don't I don't think I don't think that's people's normal mode of operation. So, I think that we get uh people creating misalignment. Uh again, not uh not necessarily on purpose, not to be malicious, but I think Holly, I do agree that sometimes this can come up because um if they're if they're feeling threatened uh in terms of job stability or whatever else, right? Uh maybe it's not stability, maybe they're they're feeling threatened because their ego or anything else, then I think that they can do this kind of thing, right? and if they're, you know, they're a leader in a position of some kind of power and they can make some types of decisions or move things along or influence in certain ways that this happens. And unfortunately too, I I think a lot of the time I I again I don't have stats to say whether or not this is true, but I believe a lot of the time this happens like without them really realizing like they're not even proactively like, "Okay, like today's plan is we're going to we're going to screw some stuff up here." So that like it's it's not like that. It's just it kind of just happens as a side effect of them trying to to you know do some some protection. I see this kind of thing even happen like so you have people in sort of like a leadership or management position that might do this kind of thing. I've seen this even happen with individual contributors that are very focused on themselves, their career development where it doesn't matter kind of like what's happening outside of their bubble as long as they can steer things in the direction for them and then that creates misalignment. But again, it's not on purpose. It's not like they're they're going I'm going to go sabotage everyone around me on purpose. But blinders are up, you know, they they're hyperfocused on themselves. So I I think yeah even regardless of the role sometimes it can it can have that kind of effect. The Twitch dev community is very nice in general but there are some individuals who need to be okay. Uh I don't know much about it. Uh okay started using it 10 minutes ago. Here's a GitHub description maybe high performance in inter inference or have open eyes whisper automatic speech recognition. Cool. I've actually wanted to Okay, now I know what you're talking about because the that that whisper model. Um I don't know if it's the I think it's the same one that's in Azure and I wanted to use it for some transcription stuff uh to see. I have not tried though. Um so I'm very interested if it you said it's working on my stream. So I'd be cool to know. How do you So okay Eve, let's hear it. Um, how is uh how is it? How do you use it? So, like right now you said it's working on my stream transcribing speech to text. So, how like I realize this is a weird question to ask. How are you doing it? You're taking the audio from the stream and like real time like sending it over to this model and and how are you doing that? like did you write code for it or is it like how was that interface look? Just curious because this you're doing you're doing the homework for me. Thank you. Um this is genuinely something that I had on my list. Might even it's not it's not on my whiteboard but it it's one of the things that should be on my whiteboard. I've wanted to do this. Um I've just never got around to it. So be very cool to hear about that. Um, okay. I talked about why I'm just scrolling through my newsletter. Sorry. What should you do if you're not feeling aligned? Um, yeah, I started talking about reflection there. I think that's most of it honestly from at least from the topics from my newsletter that I wanted to get through. Um, but you know to to kind of summarize the different angles here, I don't I don't think that every single person needs to, you know, have 100% alignment with everything that their company's doing because some people I don't mean this in a bad way like they don't care enough because their job for them is a 9 to5 and they get a paycheck and that's fine and there like there is nothing wrong with that. I just want to be very transparent about that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. So some people and maybe it's many people again I don't have stats to just pull out of somewhere but uh for some people it is very much just like hey like I have fulfillment in other parts of my life whether that's you know um hobbies of theirs whether that's they have passion projects they're working on whether that's their family like it could whatever it is right some people have fulfillment in enough other things in their life in their career um their work there's nine to five and they're like, "Yeah, my my company makes sheets of paper and I'm fine with that. Whatever. They pay me. I'm happy with the work. It's fine." Great. Um, so, you know, totally cool. I think that for other people, um, how much they're aligned with the company that they work at and what those facets of alignment are, uh, can make a big difference, right? And for some people it might be that some of those things are like a a minimum that you need to meet. Like for example the the buddy I was talking about. I think for this stage of his life he's like hey look if it's not if it's not a mission that I am in love with. I just don't want to spend time doing it. Right? Like that. And I think that's totally fair and totally respectable. He's I got these other things in my life that I really love. Right? He's, you know, uh definitely, you know, rightfully so, spending a lot of time with his family and like so, okay, that's the priority and okay, he's got to work so that he can, you know, have an income. So, he wants to make sure that that is very much aligned with the mission that he's that he's on board with. And other people may like may not like I was saying for me like the mission is helps, right? But I don't I think that mine's almost the opposite where I shouldn't say opposite, but from the perspective of like I don't know specifically what that mission has to be, but I could probably think of a good handful of missions where I'm like I'm not I'm not okay with that. And so I think I would approach it differently where there are absolutely things that I would say no to. Like I don't ever imagine myself uh intentionally making software for weapons as that was one of the examples I used at the beginning, right? I don't see myself doing that. If if a company was like, "Hey, we would pay you lots of money to go do that." Like I just don't think that I could. And I don't know what the number would have to be for me to be like, "Okay, I guess we have to do this because it's like winning the lottery." I just don't know. But it would be wildly uncomfortable. And so for me, I think it's more of the opposite where probably a bunch of things I wouldn't do and then there's probably some opportunities where I'm like, "Wow, that does sound really cool." But it's not a like a threshold. The the company culture for me is right. If I ever found myself in a place and I'm like, "Wow, this culture I can't drive the change like I can't be part of that change in a positive way and I'm not supported to do so." I would feel like absolutely can't be there. So I think how we align will look different as individuals. And then uh you know one of the things I repeated a bunch throughout this talk was like that may look very different for you in your own life over time. Um yeah Sony saying I I do think you should have a sense of pride in what you leave behind even if it's just a little bit. I think so too. Right. When I when I think about things like that, I'm like that's not that's not for me to dictate to people, but I believe that like I I feel that way. I would like to be able to do that. I'd like to be able to do I'd like doing good work. And part of that means that I want to feel proud about what I'm doing and I want to be sure or, you know, one of my goals is that when I'm done doing work in a spot, I'd like to be able to leave and be like, "Yeah, like I did a good job. I'm proud of that." And I want people to to be happy with that too. Right? Like that would that is a you know a thing that I like and that's a thing that I believe in. Deon says the older I get, the more it's true that fulfillment comes from outside of work. Yeah. Yep. And Eve says, "Honestly, I don't think I Oh, okay. We're we're talking about the whisper stuff. I don't think I'm technically skilled enough to give you an architecture that makes sense, but mine works. Probably because you have perfect addiction. Wow. Well, thank you so much. Even my my Canadian isn't screwing up my addiction. Um, I piped Chrome audio feed live into Whispers AI. Okay. But but before you have to convert the audio into usable format. Oh, interesting. Okay. Very very interesting. Yeah, I'm gonna have to look at it. But yeah, Deon, I agree. um the more uh it's true the fulfillment comes from outside of work. I didn't talk about it on on this stream, but I actually so I I mentioned that where I used to work, it was very aligned with the mission. Uh for people that have, you know, seen my content and stuff before, when I talk about working at this place, I mentioned that like I worked a lot and not because, you know, like my boss forced me or like uh the founder and the the CEO or like they were mean guys or something like that. Not at all. um you know like I've said this like they were invited to my wedding even after I wasn't at the company and um you know so it was never anything like that. I just worked a lot. I like to work and I would find that sometimes there were because I love to to code, right? And I would find that any side project I had, I'm like, "Oh, I want to go try this out or I think I'm going to go build whatever." I would get into things and once I would kind of hit a a bit of a sticking point or I got over like this honeymoon phase of the little project I was building, I would sit there and I would go like I know that if I go do things for work, I just know that it will have an actual impact. Like it it almost feels silly for me to do any to spend time building anything else. uh which is I don't think that that was an incorrect statement. I think that it was true that I could have an actual impact by building more stuff or making more progress uh for work. But at the same time, I was never able to like give myself an honest shop for finding fulfilling things outside of work. So I do think now right like I do find that like I do a lot of stuff outside of Microsoft, right? like like content creation is one example. I have told people this on the code commute videos like code commute videos are really fun for me, right? YouTube like even making YouTube tutorials like that that is kind of work. I'm I like being able to do it because people will say it helps. But a code commute video is fun for me because I just talk about this kind of stuff like this is this is what I do. I like this is what I do for work is talk about this kind of stuff just with more context. And so like I I do enjoy code commute. I I find that some of the stuff I'm building outside of work now like I'm really excited about. I'm really happy to go spend time on. And I realize what Devon's probably not saying is like I can't like I'm very excited to go code more things outside of work. But those are things that I really like to do. And for other people probably not the case or maybe not the case. But yeah, finding more passion for things outside of work. Oh man, what would uh Holly says, "What would you build if the world would pay you top dollar?" H is I don't Is this is this question about how far would I stretch my my my morals and values or or or what would I Yeah, I don't know how to answer this because I don't know. I don't know how top the dollar is. Um yeah, I I don't know. Um, yeah. I I don't know because well and here's another thing too that's uh kind of a weird one that might not that people might not agree with and I I always find it uh kind of fascinating but I think it comes from working in forensics for a while but I know that if I talk about things that are related to like you know security privacy kind of stuff uh especially like privacy I I have a perspective where I'm like if I'm doing it and it's like on a computer or connected to the internet I'm like assume assume assume that the world can know. Assume it. Um and that again like I said comes from like a forensics perspective. So there are things where you know like even working in digital forensics uh one of the things that I was responsible for was with my team building software that would take um you know basically try to get as much information off of a mobile phone as possible, right? And we did this for a bunch of stuff, but one of the things that we focused on. And so people might be like wildly opposed to that because they're like, "Wait a second. You're making the software that's letting law enforcement, it's letting those cops look through my phone. Like you can't do that. You can't." Right. And like and so then then they're not in alignment with me. And I'm like, look, it's not um I think people have a very um skewed perception of like of things going on where suddenly everyone just because the opportunities there that suddenly everyone is after you like you are the you're the center of the universe. Every everyone wants the stuff off your phone. They don't want the stuff off your phone unless you're doing something very bad and they have a reason to go say you're doing something very bad and give us your phone because we're going to get the evidence. So, I think that a lot of the time in these types of privacy conversations, my framing is very very different um than some other people's and you know that's a debate that people could get into. But when it comes to like I'm not going to go build stuff that's like purposefully built for like surveillance on people like that wouldn't feel okay. Um unless unless someone said hey look I'm just making this up off the top of my head. Unless someone was like hey this is a surveillance technology and literally we are building this so that it serves um I don't know how this would come together so just hear me out. somehow this serves for like protecting children. Like I would I would feel like hey like I don't know about the technology yet but like interested if we if we're able to help you know save kids lives right where my my privacy threshold and how that works looks like the surveillance part seems kind of weird but is there something there? I don't know if it was just mass surveillance like what was this thing from the the Super Bowl commercials? Like was it the the Ring doorbells or what's the other one? I can't remember. But people were they advertised something like we're going to help rescue the lost dogs or something. And someone did the math on the number they said and they're like that's like a couple of dogs a year or something. and uh you just turned everyone's front door into a camera for um like a police state kind of thing. Like that's a little odd to me, but I don't know to answer your question. I don't know. Um I don't know what top dollar would look like and I don't know the things I'd be doing for it. But I I think at this point in my life um yeah, definitely even before I don't like more crossing moral boundaries that I have, I don't think that's uh it's in the cards for me. Uh Joel says, "For me, I have side projects because work never has enough variety of the challenges." Okay. Make my own problems. It plus OT. What is OT? Thanks for being here, Devon. You're probably already gone, but I appreciate you. Um Joel, what what is OT? Information technology plus something. O technology. I'm sorry. I don't know. You got to let me know. Um, and Holly says, "The question was originally because of a sigh comment of a building soft for the lines of morals." Oh, a lot of times you don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry if I didn't have a a good answer. Um, Sony says, "We would not need all this if parents were taught to raise their kids, right? Educate instead of punish. I don't have any kids. I'm just a silent observer seeing the difference in parenting." So, yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of uh a lot of stuff going on with that. I don't know. You know, I'm also not a parent, but so it's not really fair for me to to criticize or critique because I just don't know, right? But I I do I do strongly believe that a lot of, you know, how how kids are raised is going to have a, you know, profound impact on their on the rest of their life. So, I'm sure that could be a big part of it. Operational tech. I see. Thanks, Joel. I'm sorry. I hadn't hadn't seen the OT before. Okay, folks. I'm I think I'm at the end of my stream here. Um I'm trying to think if there's some fun stuff to share, though. Uh okay, let's let's do this. Give me a sec because I've been talking about this a little bit on on code commute. It's probably not that exciting for anyone else, but I will just show you guys a few things because when I've been talking on Code Commute, I feel like every time I want to get on to Code Commute and be like, "Oh, I'm building stuff with AI and it's fun." And then everyone on Code Comm's probably like, "This guy just is a a vibe coding lunatic." Now, uh, what do I got going on, though? Um, what else? What else? What else? We start with these. Sorry, I have a a tab pulled up and I'm um I'm looking. Yeah, Stony says just one hour, no stamina this streamer. I know. Um it's because I it's because I also have a job. Unfortunately, you know, can't can't be streaming during work. But um yeah, let me let me start with these, I guess. Okay, does this work? Here I am. Um, okay. So, might not seem exciting. I just want to talk about kind of what was going on because it's pretty cool, I think. Um, so I don't know if people know this depending on, you know, how long you've been with me for for content creation and stuff like that, but uh what is it 13 years ago? Yeah, 13 years ago. Um, I started this website and it's called Dev Leader and this is where my content is. But 13 years ago, I started this website and I actually completely gave up on it like a few months into uh to writing articles and it's called Dev Leader not for any other reason except that I had transitioned into an engineering manager role as a developer and had no idea what I was doing and a lot of the times still don't. So I wanted to thanks for being here Stony. I appreciate it. um I wanted to start writing about it. I wanted to start writing my experiences of trying to learn about being a manager and a developer. And so um dev leader, right? Development and leadership. So that's what um this all came to be. So, when I started taking content creation more seriously, I had taken a 10-year break from Dev Leader because I was like, um, writing blogs is stupid. No one reads my blogs. Um, and what I probably should have done was just kept writing them. But anyway, here we are. So, I took a 10-year break and then I started getting back into trying to write some blogs and making YouTube videos. So, uh, if you don't know, my main YouTube channel is over here. I'm just putting it in the chat. So that is the main YouTube channel and so started doing the YouTube videos there and writing blogs. But what happened over time again was that as I was creating more and more content I realized like writing blogs is a lot of work. Uh especially once making videos is a little bit easier and I wasn't like trying to do um you know a retake every single uh other sentence or something. It was just like hey man just go with it just talk like you're doing right now. Then I started to realize writing blogs is a lot. So only uh at the start of this year because I had taken another break from blog articles said we're doing blog articles this year. I'm going to get my site back on track. And so I was spending a ton of time over the past month uh using C-Pilot, using Claude, and trying to do site optimization. So I'm not a not a web developer at all. So if you're looking at my site being like, "Wow, this is a big pile of crap." Thank you. Um but at least it's performant now, which is cool. And so I was trying to do some other fun things. So, I actually did some vibe coding to bring over all of the videos from YouTube are now available on my site if you ever want to check them out. So, I have my two other YouTube channels here. Um, so I have Dev Leader, which is the one I linked in the chat. So, these are my programming and AI tutorials, uh, primarily in C because that's what I like coding in. I have Dev Leader Path to Tech, which is my resume reviews. I should post another two cuz they're um a little delayed. This is uh this is a Blazer website. So, you are you are right. Uh and then this is the Dev Leader podcast one, which is what you're watching right now. And I don't know. Oh, it does it does have the uh the live streams on here, too. So, this was kind of cool for me because I can now go into here, right? aside from my dumb face, but I have, you know, the transcript gets pulled in. Uh, there's an an AI generated FAQ. Um, I have the podcast, so this is on Spotify. You can check that out. And if there's a YouTube video also on my site, you can jump between it. Wow, look at that. Look how cool that is. Um, what else? My I optimize things like courses page. I got courses if you guys are interested in courses. So there's some .NET development and I have some courses for uh more things like soft skills, career development, that kind of stuff. I have what else? Oh, projects. Oh man. So been building some stuff. Been building some stuff. So uh Brandos is the the social media crossing platform that I that I always share and talk about. I have banners for it on my site. This is the business that I run on the side. Brand Ghost is what I use for all of my content creation. So, if you see the posts I make on Twitter, LinkedIn, Blue Sky Threads, Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Masttodon, Reddit, everywhere. Um, if you see it posted from me, it's from Brand Ghost. And so, Brand Ghost does all of my content that way for me so that I don't have to go on every site and keep posting places cuz I would go crazy. So, um, Brand Ghost is what facilitates that. Um, I will show you in just a moment, but I built my own link tree out of Spite because I'm very upset with the link tree people. So, I'll show you that in a moment. I have Needler, which I've been making some videos on. This is a dependency injection and uh type scanning library. Uh, and then I built a few MCP server tools. So, for especially because I was doing website optimization, these ones didn't exist from Google yet. I'm sure they will, but I decided, let's go build them. So if I just open one of these up, um, it actually comes with like docs that get generated. This entire thing is vibe coded. So if I go over to the repository just to show you, so I mentioned to all of you that I am a net developer. I almost exclusively program in C because I like C. And I'm not saying it's the best language, but if you think another language is better, you're wrong. No, I'm just kidding. Uh, it's just what I happen to like using, so I I use it for all the stuff I build. But if you're looking closely, you can see that there's Go on here. Now, I've never written a line of Go in my life. But, um, when I built these MCP servers out with Copilot, I said, "Hey, build a .NET version and build a Go version and make sure that they're at par." So, if you're ever interested in one of these MCP servers, uh, they are on just my GitHub. And so, they've been vibe coded. All three of them were vibe coded to have C. uh that is uh basically AOT and trimmed down and it has the uh any like you don't need other dependencies to go use it and there's the go one as well. So I just wanted to show you that because these were vibe coded. It was kind of fun to put that together. So there's that. Um and then I'll show you homebase in just one moment. My other site is code commute. So, Code Commute is the um the vlog channel I have, right? So, if you haven't seen it, I'll I'll show you because you can go over to videos just like just like on my main site. Weird. Um and you can check out these videos, right? So, usually, as you might expect, code commute is when I'm driving to and from work or to and from CrossFit and um I record these videos. So, code commute is primarily driven by people submitting uh questions, right? So, I answer questions. If you want to submit them, you can just comment on any video you want or you can go to this contact form and you can submit stuff anonymously. I get the email. It says it's from me. I have no idea who you are. So, um I just ask that if you submit questions, uh the more context you add, the more effectively I can answer. And then Code Commute is also available as a podcast because people were asking for this on YouTube, but um I didn't realize this because a lot of people listen to Code Commute like in the background and they're like doing chores or they're cooking or whatever else just cuz it's a vlog. I'm just blabbing away. They were leaving their phones open because I don't have YouTube Premium and I don't blame you for not having it, but they just leave their phone open so that the audio doesn't stop. So they were like, "Can you put it on Spotify?" So, it's there. Um, the Spotify one, you can see it's got 346 episodes. I think the main channel is up to 440. So, Spotify lags a little bit behind, but um but yeah, it will need to catch up. So, um if you like watching on Spotify, unfortunately, we'll always just be a little bit behind. Um, Stony, if you want, I have a How do you say that word, by the way? Is it a gist or a gist? In my head, I say it's a gist. Uh, with some basic moderation rules, it weeds out all the follow bots. Where? Sure. I don't know where you apply that, but um, yeah, if you want to, can you put the link in the chat? I don't know if it blocks you on Twitch from doing it. Gist. Yeah, but silent silent D. It's not a the gist. You're trying to You're not trying to trick me, are you? It's a silent D. Um Joel says, "I have written a line of go." Nice. Um how do you actually vibe code big projects? I use AI in the browser. Oh man, Eve. Yeah. Yeah. Uh not that way. Not in the browser. Um uh yeah, don't don't do that. Unless I mean you you can if uh if you use GitHub. Can I just Where did that go? So if you use GitHub, I'm not going to recommend this because it's a pain in the butt to do it all this way, but you can like open up an issue. I'm not going to do this for real, but you can make an issue and then you can assign it. um to co-pilot if you have this in your GitHub setup. And so when you do that, it will go take the issue and go build the thing you're doing. And I've built a lot of things this way with a lot of success. But um I think you have to have good expectations because when you fire things off this way and you go assign them to an agent, it's going to go work on it until it thinks it's done. And I would say if you don't have experience doing this with other LLMs building stuff like other LLMs a lot of the time you can see what they're doing and interrupt them and be like no man like that's not what I wanted. With this you don't get that. Like it stops when it thinks it's done and then you're going to get all this code and odds are it's not going to be exactly what you want. So I think there's like a it's like kind of setting you up to be disappointed. Uh sometimes it does things really well and it's spot-on, but I think in if you're not giving it very clear guidance, uh just assigning things to co-pilot this way can be a bit problematic. Like I said, I built I think most of the code I I wrote, most of the things I built last year were actually doing things this way in a very big code base. Um over over a hundred projects in a C in a .NET solution. So a lot work that way. But the way my code is structured, it's like uh feature slices. So I could say go to this project and implement this feature and not go touch you know 100 plus projects. That kind of stuff is usually brittle. But otherwise um yeah I I do a lot of my coding as a .NET developer. I'm in the classic Visual Studio with Copilot. And I know a lot of people like using VS Code. And then there's also um the uh Copilot CLI and Claude Code and Cursor as well. But I would recommend, you know, VS Code, Cursor, Copilot CLI or Claude um personally for building out projects. And that's just because you can watch them, you can see what they're doing, and they can access a local repo. the the one of the nice things about what I was just showing on GitHub and I do have if you want to see I have videos on this on my main channel, but what I really liked about this approach was I could like be eating breakfast in the morning, check on my phone and like submit an issue and then check it after the gym to see what co-pilot had done and then fire another one off when I go drive to work and then check it at lunch at work. Like it was just really nice to have this asynchronous kind of work getting done. So anyway, bunch of different ways to do that kind of thing. Um, but yeah, code commute also got the treatment. Um, the one embarrassing part that I still haven't done that was vibe coded from the first YouTube video I showed it is this socials page has really got a look at this Twitter icon. Look at this LinkedIn. Look at this little suitcase. I got to do something about this page still, but I'll figure that out. But I want to show you the thing I'm most proud of. And it's not really true. It's not the thing I'm most proud of. But one sec. Um, I want to show you I want to show you what linkree is. Okay, so this is Linkree. And so I changed my my link tree up because I was paying for this service and it was terrible. Um, terrible in that I went to go check it and you can put like these YouTube embeds on here. So when you're like click, you know, oh, click link for link in bio kind of thing and then people come from your Instagram or whatever to this landing page. I wanted to have my YouTube videos, which is a feature they have displayed right at the top and you could just press the play button. And one day I checked and it was just black screens. They're just black screens. And I contacted support and they were pretty painful to have a conversation with and they just stopped responding to me. So, I'm paying for this service that is this terrible link in bio thing. It doesn't even work and it has broken features. And I said, "This is a static web page. I am not a web developer, but I'm pretty sure I can make a static web page or I know someone that can." So, I worked with Copilot a little bit and I built It looks kind of silly on on desktop, but I built my very own link tree. And you know what's cool? These actually work. You know what's even more cool? It's free. You know what's even more cool than that? If you want your own, you can just fork the repo and have your very own page like this, by the way. So, totally free if you want one, but this is what it's supposed to look like. I can't believe that theirs was so bad. Um, I even have my projects listed here. So, if you want your own little home base, which is what I called it, you can go check out that link. Um, it's also got an FAQ on here. And you might be saying, "Nick, what's with all these FAQs?" Well, I will tell you. So, when it comes to optimizing things for SEO, and I think that anyone with any kind of web page should be trying to optimize things for SEO, AEO, and GEO, because why else would you have a web page? Um, you should be doing that. And Linkree doesn't even do that. They just it doesn't they don't have that. It's not a thing. So I said, I'm going to build this. I'm going to maximize it for SEO so it can show up on a a search engine ideally. And it also has a shop just like Linkree does. So you can also and you like I'm saying you can have your very own. It's it's all templated. Yeah. Only thing missing here are the 280 link tree only fans on it. Yeah, I I do not have an only fans, but if I started an only fans, I could teach private C sharp courses. My wife's upstairs and I was just curious if she was going to say something. But um but yeah, so like you can have your own little shop and stuff like that. Um but like I said, this whole thing is uh totally free on. Can I show it on mobile with that? Will that work? Yeah, it looks nicer on on mobile because the the hero image is less absurd, but pretty cool. And this is again fully vibe coded. U I didn't write a single line of anything you see here. So you get full analytics. You can set it all up. Um Course is now with extra feed pixie app. You got to do what you got to do, right? Um, but yeah, this is again documentation that gets written out for it. I should probably add more explanations in here. Oh, might be at the top on like the SEO and stuff like that. So, if you're curious and you're like, what is going on here? Like, there's a lot of stuff that was put in behind the scenes that you can't see. And that's because that's meant for search engines to pick up on. So again, you can go over here and fork it. Right, there you go. Um, there's some questions in the chat. What do we got? I got to sign off here. So, let me let me fire through these questions. Um, I'm automating error handling for both our back and Golang. Oh, no. Uh, and mobile React Native apps using Sentry and an LLM on the back and I can fix issues automatically and even open PR. Very nice. That's cool. For simpler cases, I commit directly to the main branch. On mobile side, I can push updates via EAS for feature packages, but I haven't gained enough confidence to do this in production with AI alone. Yeah, I mean, it's tricky, right? I think I'm not there's a lot of things where I need a human in the middle. And so I think AI doing a lot and still letting a human be in the middle I feel pretty good about at least at a minimum trying to push things that way. So what you just said handling uh error handling for both our back end and mobile apps using Sentry and LM before some of these things were I don't know this is going back maybe like 8 months or so ago. So, I feel like in the last 8 to 12 months, there's been just a lot of advancements, which is which is great. I tried building something like this for Brand Ghost, and I didn't hook it up to the LLM yet, but what it would do is on a weekly basis collect like uh like posting errors. And the idea was that I would take this data that it would output and then I could go give it to an LLM and then say like categorize these, you know, come up with a top 10 or something and go uh use like GitHub Copilot and open up those issues and then I can just basically, you know, on a on a Friday or something just after work review the issues or on a Saturday, whatever, review the issues for the week that it's tried to fix. I'm like, that seems pretty cool to me, but I still want to review them. I don't trust it. And uh so I haven't gotten there yet. And more recently, I realized I probably actually want to change that because instead of me doing a weekly collection automatically, I can use an MCP server and I can go let C-pilot, like I use a lot of Copilot CLI, let C-pilot go pull the logs from Graphfana for me with an MCP server because more recently I've just been having conversations with it when I have to go debug something in the the server logs. instead of me going to go look for the logs. I'm like, can you look between like this date and time and this date and time for something like this and it does it. So, I don't know. I think there's a lot of cool stuff that we can start to do this way, but I think that I will be finding ways to automate and put a human in the middle because I'm just nervous about it still. Then Eve would be interested to do a centralized merch store on it so people from all platforms can buy merch. Yeah. Yeah. So, the cool thing is like with that homebased thing is like like I said, it's uh people can take it. They can do whatever they want with it. Um I tried to make it so that everything was customizable like as much as possible. So, just Oh, I'm not sharing my screen. Sorry. To jump back to here, like if you don't have um I think this is just like a portfolio section, you can label it, right? Or you can have multiple portfolio sections. like you can have different sections and you can pick the types of things you want in them. So you can do that um if you're paying attention. Oh, it's covered up. Sorry. The all the URLs have tracking in them. So you can see when someone comes into your home base, if they end up buying something and it goes to a product page, like that's tracked all the way through. Um but all the categories, everything is customizable. If you have YouTube channels, this newsletter part is customizable. An about section is a boot because I'm Canadian. I got to say a boot. Customizable. You can change. Oh, I forgot. This is going to be blinding. I'm so sorry. But um because like I said, it looks kind of silly on desktop, but uh you can't see it behind the chat, but this is actually there's a thing that's let you flip this. Look at that QR code. animation's kind of wonky going the other way, but you get the idea. And then you can change it, right? So, if you don't want it to flip, you can move the QR code somewhere else on the page. You cannot have a QR code. Um, it also I don't know how to show this. Um, I don't know how many people know what unfurling is. It's kind of a weird word, but you know when you share a link on social media and then it puts the preview in and it like puts a little description and like a picture. So it at build time makes you an image that will get unfurled and it will show like uh an image with like your your profile and stuff like that so that it it nicely unfurls and it's I don't it's a little bit customizable so you can pick colors and stuff like that but I try to make everything customizable so that it's uh yours to use and that way no one ever has to pay linkree another scent because I'm not happy with them. Okay. Joel says, "Don't trust AI. I find errors naturally uh every 20 30 prompts are more scary. Find major errors in the output at a one and 100 prompts. Extrapolate over an agent process." Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that along the way ain't so great. So, even for me, a lot of the like I use AI for a ton. I have at any given time probably like eight power shell tabs doing all sorts of stuff with co-pilot or claude, but I spend a lot of time trying to put harnesses and guard rails in place so that they don't screw up. And they will screw up. It's inevitable. It's just that I try to minimize the screw-ups. And then Sarah says, "Yes, thanks. I currently only push simpler fixes automatically after larger, more complex issues. I review them first." Yeah. I You know what's interesting though? like this idea of like everything is um everything being fully like you know automated as much as possible AI in the loop on all these things like yeah like I think that's cool um but I also think that you get so much um so much unlock in terms of like potential productivity or whatever just by like even if it's done by AI just knowing like okay there's an issue and like shortly after there's already a pull request that you could go look at and it might be might be fixed perfectly with tests maybe and maybe it's not perfect but like just knowing that that's an option is like pretty cool right like yeah maybe you have to now you got all this stuff to go review but instead you used to have a bug backlog that wasn't getting fixed so I don't know like I think taking these steps to move like where the pain points are is uh is very positive. So, we don't always have to jump right to the end of like it's either we do nothing or everything has to be fully automated. I think there's some cool steps in the middle. Uh Eve was asking, did you guys notice it improve in that regard? Um sorry, Eve, what was the the question specifically about? Because I probably missed the context because I was rambling, but this is the last one. I want to answer your question effectively. I don't know if it was about the agent guard rails. Is it uh is is it less errorprone? I can't remember what I was saying though. Um I don't uh maybe I'll if you're still adding context I'll rewind my brain a little bit. Um I still find like okay so the more that you're using whether it's particular models or in a particular codebase the more um sort of patterns you can pick up on on like things that it seems kind of stupid about. So you'll be like hey do this and you'll be like why is it kind of acting dumb and like it gets somewhere? Um oh okay so co-pilot since you use it extensively over time did you notice improve? Yeah, a bunch of things though, right? So, um I'll I'll talk about Copilot CLI just as an example because I have been using that a lot recently. I use uh when I talk about this stuff, I'm not I know I work at Microsoft. I'm not trying to tell you like Copilot CLI is the best thing you have to use it. I used Claude a ton last year. So, I'm just using co-pilot CLI a lot right now because it's a new thing for me to try. And so Copilot CLI in particular over the past couple months, not only has the like the harness itself gotten significantly better with tooling improvements, but we've had a couple of model launches recently like when Opus uh like 46 came out and like Sonnet 46, tremendous models to use. Um just incredible. So the the models make an enormous difference. Uh just to give you a quick example, even some things for doing summarization uh using Sonnet or uh Opus compared to going back to like you know a faster lightweight model like GPT 40 mini or something like that or even just GBT41 um non- mini it almost that wasn't long ago and looking at the output from that seems like it is stupid compared to some of these other models. like it's changing dramatically which is super cool. Yeah, time to clip it boys. Microsoft employees says Claude is great. Yeah, we have like we have Claude at Microsoft. Um but yeah, drift is when the agent gets dumb. I I definitely agree. Um a lot of that's context management, right? Easier said than done, but managing your context, uh putting guard rails in place. There are times where um I feel like it's been poisoned almost and I have to give up. So if it has been documenting what it's doing at least or there's a plan and some state sometimes I'm like I'm I'm kind of screwed here. I will end the session and then when I start a new session I'm like hey here's the work we were doing. Here's the plan with like what was should have been done so far start and like you know use this plan to continue on. So, you know, there's a bunch of like techniques and stuff like that that you can decide to do or use over time, but um yeah, I think a lot of the time for me it's just like finding ways to put guard rails in place. I'll give you one quick example before I I shut up for the night. Um, I think I talked about this on code commute this morning, the video I filmed, but one of the things I'm doing on the side because I I'm like, I might as well do this because AI is going to build it for me. I have a speaking of side projects and stuff from earlier, like passion projects. I have this role playing game engine thing. It's like a framework that I've been on and off building for like 20 years. And it's never going to be done, but it was always like a um I don't know, like a playground for me to like go program and just build stuff. And so I'm revive coding it from scratch. Um I had the old source code I could point it at, like the like co-pilot at. Um and so it's just been kind of vibe coding this thing for me on the side. and recently got to like integration with Unity. But what started happening was I would be like, you know, okay, we're building this feature next and it would plug away at it. It adds the test and okay, all the tests pass. It's go run it in Unity. And I'm like, great. I can't I can't wait to go play this game that it's building. Obviously, it's going to be crap, but can't wait. I'm going to go press this button and um wait, it doesn't even compile. I have errors in Unity and it doesn't even compile. So I'm like, "Hey man, you just told me you ran the tests." Like, how do you what do you what do you mean it doesn't compile? Oh, well, I ran the tests over here, but not not the Unity tests. Okay. Well, so how do we And then you have I have a conversation with it. I'm like, how do like what what are some opportunities we have here to not have this happen again? And so it suggests a few things. And it was doing things like it was building some scripts that it could give itself an instruction like when I am done go run this script. And so some improvements like this over time or adding test coverage where it was missing just this iterative process of like slowly closing the gaps on like where things were just missing. And one of the biggest changes at least for this project is that um pre-commit hooks in git. So when it's done its work, it's like, I'm going to go commit this. And then the com the pre-commit hooks force it to go run the tests. And that was helping a lot. I think the last little bit of work I did with it and when I started to notice it getting really dumb again, like it's like, hey, I'm done this work and like it's not compiling or the features totally broken. I started to realize it's because it stopped doing the commits. I guess it I wasn't watching it, but maybe along the way it was like maybe I should stop committing this stuff because it's taking me so long to go fix it. So, um I have to go back and figure out like how to bake into the instructions like when you are done make sure you commit no exceptions blah blah blah. But the pre-commit hooks to kind of get a closed loop for forcing it to run tests. Um huge huge benefit in this case. So, um, that's what I noticed. Joel says, "When using Claude 46, the point where Opus goes dumb is four hours in the context for him. And on GBD5 and Grog, it's 2 hours." Yeah, I have I haven't really had I've never used Grog. I haven't used GBT. I think I used 51, but anything after 51, I haven't touched. uh 51 and Opus something uh were what I was going back and forth with with but Opus 45 46 Claude 4 or Sonnet 46 huge fan but I'm way over folks thanks for being here I appreciate it and uh I hope to see you next Monday same time I don't know what the topic's going to be but it's probably going to be something from code commute this week so hope to catch you then take there. Our