Navigating a Mid-Career Tech Stack Shift - Engineering Manager AMA

e e e how about now there we go seems to work right ah can almost get through one of these without everything being busted and hopefully you guys can hear me okay testing testing there's a huge delay between the chat is there still nothing come on I need one person to tell me that there's audio now yeah nice okay huge delay okay sorry about that I what was I doing I must have connected my uh my OBS setup to something else also it crashed before I started streaming so um there's that but I looked over I was I was talking to myself for a little bit I guess I looked over and the uh the waveform itself was just like if you farted I heard it oh no I I didn't do that um but I looked over at OBS which is on my other monitor and as I'm talking the waveform like wasn't moving so I'm like oh no um and then there's no obvious way to tell what's going on but I think I was uh I was recording a podcast with someone and uh I think that's probably what it was the audio wasn't working on their platform or there was like background noise or something so I tried switching over and I guess it stayed stuck like that so um yeah I'm a little bit sick so if my voice sounds a little funny I'm sorry um just just how it is um but what I was saying uh what I was muted apparently was that if you've never been on these before these live streams are very much an AMA format so uh I know the chat's working now because I see people typ in in the chat um definitely feel free to ask questions if you've been here before you know how it works right so uh I will kind of uh pause whatever I'm talking about after I wrap up a thought and I'm happy to answer questions on soft engineering career stuff um as always just my perspective I'm happy to entertain different perspectives and stuff hello from Germany good to see you um and yeah it's a supposed to be interactive like I say like I make YouTube videos and stuff so I could just be recording videos I'd rather be uh engaging with you folks so and trying to answer stuff so today's topic uh if there are no questions and stuff I'll be going through uh this newsletter article if you're on substack um because you can't see the screen I'm sharing and you have to watch me record off my phone which is sorry just the way it is um it's you're on substack already so you know where my newsletter is but it's going to be navigating a midcareer tech stack change uh so this was submitted as a topic on code commute which is the Vlog YouTube channel I have and um I thought it would be a good one to go through because it had the most views and engagement from the week and that's how I've been trying to pick my topics um so if you're not familiar with code commute um it's one of my two YouTube can't speak one of my two YouTube channels if you're watching this on YouTube right now you're watching this on my main Channel Dev leader code commute is the other one I have uh unedited videos they're either vlogged from right here or generally when I'm driving two or from Crossfit or two or from work and um yeah more of us stream of Consciousness attempt to answer questions that folks submit or I go to Reddit and see what's up um but this one's going to be about switching Tech Stacks midcareer so this is um the audience that this is intended for is not necessarily folks that are brand new to software development but um that's not to say that it wouldn't be useful and the the reason why I think that it still can be useful for for beginners is because the the reality is like when you're trying to switch between text stacks and programming languages this is something that I think a lot of people when they're starting out get really worried about because the amount of time and effort I see people that haven't really started yet getting Paralyzed by like how do I pick the best language or the be best text stack or the best whatever they um it's almost like they they don't even get started because they're they're too busy trying to to optimize but the reality is like you just got to get started and then you can switch to things later so um that's what the Topic's going to be about if uh if you don't want to subscribe to the newsletter or anything that's totally fine but I would recommend if you like these live streams aside from the technical glitches um definitely check out weekly. deev leer.com generally the topic of the live stream so if you're like hey I want to join next week and I want to know what the topic is you got Saturday Sunday and Monday to to figure it out um and make a decision I guess so uh with that said um let's dive into this topic so um the sort of main questions that I think I saw coming up with this when it's like okay so you've been working for a bit uh and when I say a bit you can quantify this however you'd like in terms of years of experience but say you start with a language and a text stack so you're a JavaScript or typescript developer you're working a lot in react maybe building with the nodejs and stuff and um you've been doing this for a year two three years and you're going okay this has been cool and for whatever reason right you're like I'm seeing maybe it's uh Trends shifting or perhaps you're um I don't know you're you're feeling like there's other opportunities that you'd rather pursue or even your interests are changing right so you're like hey I I know that I've been doing a lot of web development I've been using JavaScript a lot but um I'm just making this up right like I've always wanted to build video game engines and like every I read about that is like people saying that I need to know C++ and I need to kind of work in languages like that and that's what I want to do and that's the direction I'm heading in like you're you're set on wanting to go in a different direction that you're currently in the fears that I've seen come up around this are like number one like is this going to have a really negative impact on your career number two um are you kind of um are you starting from scratch right so and when I say starting from scratch I mean like in your role so you're like okay the company that I'm at they don't make video games I'm just going with this example right they don't make video games they don't use C++ that's what I want to be doing so if I have to go somewhere else or maybe switch teams right maybe it's still internal uh or I have to go to a different company do I have to start back as a entrylevel developer I might have four or five years of experience working with like professionally with JavaScript and react but with C++ zero years right like I just started and um does that mean my career sort of resets um and then the other question is like is this even is it even worth doing right I'm I'm five years in shouldn't I just stick with the things that I I know and that I'm building my experience in so far like wouldn't that make more sense um and doggy said in the YouTube chat uh switching Tech Stacks since 1985 this is a common thing so doggy has been doing this for a little bit that's actually that's longer than I've been alive and I would wager longer than a bunch of people if not most people watching this have been alive so if um if you don't want to believe anything I'm about to say about about this topic then at least you have doggy here in the chat that's saying that this is a common thing and uh I haven't you know there's no additional comment on this so if doggy wants to add in more context I would suspect that they've been able to do this with success right if they've been doing this since 1985 I suspect that wasn't oh I did this once and that was the end of my career it's it's a common thing it's probably happened a whole bunch and I'm sure their career has has gone well and that's why um however many years later uh I'm going to be 36 this year that's 89 at another four years another another 40 years been doing this for 40 years it all started with that c64 basic in games it always starts with games right actually a quick note on that sorry I'm G to be coughing and stuff I'll try to I don't I don't have this stupid thing hooked up where like I should be able to like press a mute button or something I don't know I I bought this and then I never plugged it in so one day um so I'm G to try to get the mic out of my face so I can cough in the other direction but um a quick note on on the game comment is that I I ran a survey um or a poll I guess you'd call it on on LinkedIn um was it on LinkedIn or maybe Twitter uh maybe it wasn't even a poll maybe it was just a comment thread but um there are a ton of people who got into programming and like primarily because they were like I want to do stuff with games like including myself right tons of people their first projects are like I'm I'm building a game and it's all different all different uh Styles uh and stuff so pretty cool that that's a common thing for people um okay so when I started writing this article I thought it was important to kind of for yourself figure out why you want to switch right like um when we're making decisions like this I think it's it's important to do a bit of a reflection and understand why and that way you have like sort of clear motivations and so I was giving you a contrived example with switching from you know full stack JavaScript developer over to video games and C++ just because it's the most random first example I could think of but I think it's important for you to understand why because if you're especially if you're feeling pressure from different directions there's there's nothing wrong with making a switch um I just think it's important that when you're trying to like to weigh your options out you're understanding why you want to do that so to give you an example right perhaps um it's just a matter of you're realizing your current environment and you're going I don't want to get stale or stagnant and I want to switch things up and I just want to go into something completely different I want to hit that you know that that newbie phase again I want to feel like I'm learning I want to feel like I'm growing and switching text St for me or just languages alone would feel like a great way to do that nothing wrong with that but that could be a motivation could be that you're bored with what you're doing and you want a different challenge um I gave the example a little bit earlier but um maybe you know you're working in a a text stack and you're like it feels like you know whatever path you pick for a programming language in Tex it feels like it's getting kind of dated like you're seeing other languages pop up or a lot of community support with people building packages and Frameworks and something else and you're kind of going like the ecosystem I'm in like maybe it felt like it was thriving before um or maybe I wasn't paying attention to it and it just kind of feels like it's not it's not really there right um in which case you might say like maybe I want to switch to something else and make myself feel like I am more employable for example and uh another reason could just be that if you have some some data that is suggesting that maybe um switching into a different domain with different text stack and a different language like that might be something that is going to come with better compensation right nothing wrong with trying to say hey I want to switch over to something and uh you know there's better compensation alignment with that that could be a motivator um now on that last one what's interesting though is right if we're trying to balance this thought of let's just keep going with this example this isn't real by the way I don't have any data to say this I'm just going with the example hey I wanted to go into C++ and game development because the compensation is going to be higher you're balancing that thought with um wait am I going to be starting off as like a novice developer even though I might have been oh Dave Dave binsky good to see you man 10K yeah I hit 10K a little while ago now I have to cough again this I should have got some water before I started streaming I'm an idiot um but yeah like if you're balancing this thought of like is my my compensation supposed to go up with this Tech stack change versus am I going to be you know sacrificing being a mid or senior level developer and starting from scratch like now all of a sudden you have this game in your head where you're like well what's actually going to happen here right so um okay back to the comments here so Devon good to see you Devon's everywhere all the time which is awesome uh Deon says my first professional language was c one and I haven't switched in that's before that's before I got started in C man I got started with two um or net 2 um I just keep adding Stacks to what I already do yeah I think that's good um and even for me right like uh for folks that see my other content and stuff like I am a c net developer I know couple other things I just don't really prefer to use them I'm I'm very comfortable in CP in net so I just stick to it and because of my comfort level with it I feel like I can build most things that I have to get involved with so just seems to work I'm not saying it's the best for all things but for me it happens to be very uh very flexible that way and then doggy lists off a million different things basic assembler turbo Pascal C C++ Pearl PHP VB6 that was my my first language is VB6 and then C shortly after there was a vb.net period right in between that but VB6 and vb.net were the the dark days for me JavaScript typescript react nextjs everything yeah there's always that new thing everyone wants yeah yeah it's true this is going to be a battle with trying to hold in coughs the entire time oh it's funny I was on like calls and stuff today too and I guess I'm not talking this much on on 101s and stuff so it's going to be a little rough so yeah the f I think the first thing is really just understanding about like why you want to do this switch because if you have an understanding of that and it's not just like on a whim um and you what your motivations truly are then when you're trying to look at the options and trying to see how you want to navigate this at least you can come back to this framing this is why I'm doing it right and if the options aren't lining up with that then perhaps it's not the right action for what your motivations are so back to the compensation example again I'm just making this up so I'm hoping that people don't join like mid me explaining this part and then very um poor takeaways from this part but um is LinkedIn is working right I think someone joined from LinkedIn sorry for the the distraction should be working okay um if we go back to the example of compensation if you're like hey I heard that uh working in this text St in this language has a better compensation because it's going to let me work in finance or it's going to let me work in the the medical field or whatever and then you're exploring jobs and the data that you're coming across is actually not aligning with that if that was your motivation maybe the St the tech stack the teex stack that you're changing to is is not actually the direction you want to be going in right so understanding your motivation I think is important here uh doggy says the important thing understand the concepts really well then learning new new Stacks is not that hard that's exactly it this is um one I feel like it's one of those things that sometimes people have to learn like the hard way like you have to go live It Is What It Seems like um because people um people seem to be very concerned about it right if I pick the wrong thing that my career is screwed or I'm going to be behind and like I'll be trapped in this whatever and it's like that's just not just not it and um you know when you spend more time in your career you start to realize like thanks Justin I appreciate that um you start to realize like you're going to be switching between stuff throughout your entire career it might not be like every day or every week you're like new tech stack new language but you know between potentially on the same team different projects stuff might come up like my team I have team members at Microsoft right now most of them work in C there are some that work in C and C++ and there are some that work in C C++ and rust and then there's Powershell in there right like there's a bunch of stuff so people are going to get exposed to a whole bunch of different things and like in in my own example that I just gave like that could be from Project to project that people are working on different text stacks and languages oh my goodness sorry um so it's uh it's just one of those things like it's gonna happen in your career like it's it's very likely okay um so I wrote down as an actionable tip like write down your why understand that you can always revisit it you can always try to refine it but I think it's important to understand your why next part um if you're going to be going down this path of like doing a switch to a different Tech stack programming language um one of the things that I recommend is that when it comes to learning these things that you try to reduce the friction around it and I've made videos on this Vlogs on this we've done live streams together if you've been on every single one of them pardon me I've talked about this where my Approach for trying to learn new things is not to change everything all at once because let's say that you're trying trying to I'm just going to make this up you're trying to learn a new database technology right what I wouldn't recommend you do is go hm I've never used mongod DB before I've only used my SQL okay I want to learn well since I'm learning I better go pick a new programming language I've never used python before so I'm going to use Python and and I've never deployed that into AWS before so I'm going to go deploy into a new cloud provider with python using mongodb like stop um unless unless you just get a lot of enjoyment out of like kind of scratching the service on a bunch of things but I find that this type of approach when you're changing too many variables um starts to feel overwhelming because what happens is that you have a learning curve on every one of these things that's been changed that you're not familiar with and unless you're just like super excited about touching a bunch of different things then you might run into this problem of like getting a little bit frustrated here getting a little bit frustrated there and all of a sudden things start to feel pretty crappy I only have like this smidge of water that's got to last me the whole stream I guess I could I could walk away and get more water but I don't want to do that we're going to we're going to Champ it out and I dare not message my wife wife and say could you bring me some water cuz she'll tell me to shut up um and she should uh that's what microservices are good for that one simple new service do it in a language that fits best yeah carve out small pieces of things so the examples I like to give are like fixing all of not maybe not all but most of the other variables if you can right so if you wanted to learn a new database Tech stick with the same Lang that you're comfortable with right if you wanted to try a new cloud provider and you're like I've only deployed to Azure and I want to try AWS don't go pick a new database to work with a new language and text stack to work with on top of a new cloud provider just do take something you've already built deploy it to AWS if you wanted to go learn a new language right like don't go try to pick a new database Tech and like pick pick one thing to go change that you want to go Le about is my recommendation and the reason I say that is because it's just reduced friction overall it's not that it's wrong to go trying to do a bunch of different things I don't think that there's like a wrong way to do that or to do like approach learning I just think that for a lot of people that can be overwhelming and if we're going to try to reduce friction so that you stick with it to try and learn I think that's uh what I would recommend okay um so the example that I have of this for myself actually um is like when was this um gosh not too long ago okay so if you're not a net developer you might not know about Blazer um for those of you that are net developers and you're like me and you spend a lot more time working in like backend kind of stuff or the front-end experience you have is like Wind forms and WPF um Blazer is a sort of text stack that we can use in the net ecosystem that lets us build front ends for web applications using things like C so yes you can hook up JavaScript to it yes you have HTML in there but um you don't have to go like learn typescript or JavaScript and then go learn react like you can build like a full UI um without having to lean on those things so yeah little bit of HTML yeah some CSS but otherwise like you can write C and so for me when I heard about Blazer I was like hey this is awesome um because uh I always find that like I like gravitating towards C and when I have to use other things it's just like I don't as I'm an engineering manager right so if I'm going to go build my own hobby projects that I want to to turn into something for me to go have to learn other things things or spend more time like I'm just less efficient so Blazer I was like this is going to be such a cool opportunity but I don't know it yet so I was doing enough learning so that I could make YouTube videos about it so that was a good way for me to practice but the one project that really helped was I took something that was familiar so I had my blog hosted in WordPress so I took a familiar domain my blog it's in C so I'm not changing the language I'm changing the text back here I had spent time deploying to AWS before was not enjoying that anymore with my WordPress blog I had already been exposed to um Azure for deployment so I was going to move over to Azure something that I was actively more and more familiar with and on the database side I stuck with to get things going I just stuck with SQL light so that I could minimize again minimizing friction I'm not deploying the database dealing with connectivity issues or anything like that it's like it's just a SQL a database man it's a file on my computer like let's just get this going so when I was doing this I imported I had a snapshot of my database I imported into sqlite was running this Blazer blog engine locally and it really helped me get to a point where I could just like do small iterations and uh I'm not saying I'm a Blazer expert by any means now but I can I can navigate Blazer I can make updates to my website very comfortably again language is familiar um any weird things it's like you know I can at least narrow it down to like hey this might be a Blazer specific thing let me go look into it and and learn about Blazer so that was a really good opportunity for me pardon me actually hold on just got to make sure my shorts aren't rolled up I specifically did this when I was sick a few months ago I had these throat candies and instead of keeping a pile of them on my desk like a a maniac cuz I would just eat them all um I took this pile of throat candies and I put them on my bookshelf so I'm going to get a throat candy I'm going to get two throat candies nice okay and I'm going to read the comments as well um Devon says don't pay any attention to the people on social media who are constantly going on about how you you should hyper optimize everything yeah it looks good on the gram but try actually getting work done yep um there are some situations where extreme optimization can translate into sort of what the right thing but it's pretty rare um like to give you an example we have so let me eat this so I can at least start trying to get myself so I can talk um at Microsoft the team I'm on for the routing plane we serve like trillions of requests per day and if we're able to make small optimizations that can translate into a big impact right so for us even you know very small optimizations can help a lot are you running a service that's routing trillions of requests per day no probably not um not to say that you couldn't I don't doubt you but you know depending on what your needs are at some point when you try getting like crazy optimized it's just not there's diminishing returns right um Jessica says on the middle of midlevel on the on the middle of midlevel got rejected when applying from flutter to Native Android just because there's someone who is more of an expert on Android yeah and so Jessica this is an important thing to remember too um and sorry I'm not I don't mean to imply with what I'm about to say that this is not your thought process I'm just I wanted to address the comment because I I think that other people could have similar situations um in other live streams and some other videos I've made we talk about this a lot where um unfortunately you could you could absolutely Crush an interview you could be like that's the best interview I've ever done and you could genuinely impress every interviewer and then in that round of interviews they happen to have another candidate that also happens to do amazing and they happen to do even though you were amazing they happen to do a little bit better in some aspect and then you don't get selected because there's one position and then the unfortunate side effect of that is that what can happen to a lot of candidates that actually did do really well is they can go well how is that possible like I did so good and you're telling me that even when I did so good I'm still not good enough and it's like really it's crappy right but I always try to remind people like number one if you don't get um the position after an interview it's not a matter of like you must blame yourself because you're not good enough and that's why I said I'm not suggesting that you're implying this for yourself just want to talk about it um so it's not a blame yourself thing but I always just recommend to people like we could all that we can do is think about what's in our control so I always and I know it's way easier said than done because I've absolutely had periods of my life where I dwell on things and I'm sure I still will in the future just I think it's a human thing um I think it's important to think about what's in our control and then we can focus on those things so if you're like hey um I thought I nailed that interview and you're reflecting on the things that you could do better if you were like honestly like everything I did was spoton the interviewers were giving me really good feedback and like everything just felt good if you reflect on that you don't think there's anything you could improve on then so be it but I I think that I think there's probably always something and I think if we can always look for the something to try and improve then at least we can focus on that because that's in our control uh at the end of the day there when it comes to an interview there are always going to be things outside of our control the same thing with applying to jobs you could have an amazing resume with amazing experience and I don't know like your resume gets skipped over right there were a thousand applicants and somehow they they used a keyword thing or someone happened to just miss your resume and then you're just not selected or they were going through the resumés and they were doing them in batches and they started interviewing candidates before going through all the resumes I'm not saying this is a good thing by the way I'm just maybe that's what happened and then they ended up hiring someone before they even got to your resume like could be so many things outside of your control so just a reminder we don't blame try not to blame ourselves for it um doggy says currently I'm getting a small company from a 20 years ago ASB classic is stack to Blazer nice containers I see the struggle of uh those not using not used to learning ah doggy what do you um maybe I mean no pressure because I know you're participating in the chat so I just want to ask like when you say I see the struggle of those not used to learning what um you want to elaborate on that because I think that could be an interesting interesting take like what is it that you're like when you say they're not used to learning how do you tell right I think that could be interesting to dive into um Devon says you might have interviewed before lunch versus after yeah like literally it could be something that's that simple and then and I know Devon watches basically every code commute Vlog that I have I know because he comments on every one that I have um thank you by the way um I think that people don't like hearing that kind of thing because they end up saying well that's not fair like that shouldn't have an impact and I agree like it should not it should not have an impact on your ability to get interviewed and affect your role but the reality is like that's not in your control and all that we can do is focus on what's in our control so um n says uh by the way if I'm pronouncing that wrong let me know because I've seen this name and I don't know if I've ever said it out loud Nick Hill I think um even after working for Microsoft on a contract role my resume is not getting picked up for a Microsoft full-time role is there something that I'm missing um it's really hard to say um what I can recommend and this is for anyone who's watching this whether it's live or recorded um uh I see you're on YouTube and for folks that aren't on YouTube my main channel is called Dev leader and um thanks to code commute folks were asking me about resume reviews um because I get all the time people will send me rums and like can you review it and I'm like no I'm busy then I realized I could be busy because I'm making content I could be busy making content about your resume if you want um so I started a resume review playlist and if you go to well I can just send the link because I'm at my computer um I'll send the link in the chat and if you want you can send in um your resume to be reviewed one sec and I'll anonymize it and stuff um it's free literally cost me money to get it edited so one sec uh I don't want it to play I want it to give me a list why is it so difficult it's like uh it's not oh view full playlist there we go that was way more complicated than it was supposed to be this is the playlist if you want to check it out um again if you're not on YouTube or you can't see the comments you can't click them it's just Dev leader on YouTube and then look for the uh developer resume reviews playlist and um I would recommend if you want to see what's involved I would recommend um here let me just show you so you can see um they get awesome thumbnails by the way like look at this one I can't take any credit for that that's just my stupid face and the editor does his magic on top um I'd recommend watching one you can see what's involved uh first minute explains how to submit a resume and um yeah I'll anonymize it and then hopefully you get the benefit of uh of some feedback on it like I said totally free cool um I wanted to keep that marked though so I could go back to my channel when I have to there it is cool yeah so check that out and uh that way I can try to see because it's it's kind of hard to say you know like is there something magic that's not being mentioned in a resume for Microsoft no um it's just big company lots of applicants so there might just be something general that we could go look at um and I'm happy if you want to send that in um I just take the time to make YouTube content for it so um Holly Lee I think this is a good question um are there bad Dev experiences that you should work on avoiding in your career H um okay Holly maybe to I want to ask for a clarifying question back so I can try and answer this um do you mean are there bad uh projects to work on bad Tech Stacks to work with um bad can like can you um maybe elaborate a little bit uh on and because I think it's a good question I just want to make sure I can give you some perspective um sort of that's more tailored and not just super generic and then you're like what the heck's this guy rambling about um are there bad Dev experiences that you should work on avoiding yeah I want to know if you're more focused on like Tech stuff if you're more focused on taking a role doing a project um yeah I I think if you can elaborate a little bit then I can try to tailor the answer but I think this is a good one uh doggy says so this is back to uh people that aren't learning effectively modern Concepts which have grown over the years hard to learn all at once so you send an ASB classic server side rendering all the time skipped all the single page application text Stacks um now you deal with SSR wa mix of both C instead of EB Docker kubernetes get lab get instead of SVN long list learn um yeah and then he's saying currently SSR is the new thing but like is it we have that back in the day with Burl PHP Etc yeah so kind of a it's interesting how things change over time I'm amazed that like people send Bots into these channels on Twitch for my my one twitch viewer um could be bad projects or bad career prospects basically growing too general or Too Deep yeah okay so I think that what's a good way to answer this I don't think that I can give you a one- siiz fits-all answer because this is a a very typical it depends answer uh welcome to software engineering right everything is it depends so Holly's question is are there bad Dev experiences that you should work on avoiding in your career and then elaborate to say it could be bad projects bad career prospects is it are you too General too deep um and my general advice is that like uh I try to avoid extremes of anything so but it doesn't mean it's wrong and Devon kind of said my it's a pretty common thing but what I would recommend is like being t-shaped and t-shaped is like this concept of like if you think about the shape of a t the letter T you have bread and the thickness of the top part of the T is narrow right it's a horizontal line so you have breath but it's not very deep and then you have one thing or several things maybe it's not t-shaped what's the other I don't know other letters um that take that shape with more vertical Parts um you could consider yourself like an expert in one or several areas um but the reality is like you're not going to be an expert on everything and if you're an expert on only one thing and you have no bread that's also kind of dangerous so dangerous um limiting is maybe a better word so to answer part of Hal's question too general or Too Deep I think t-shaped is the sort of the middle ground answer for this and that's my recommendation now there are some people that have gone super deep on certain things and they happen to align their career with that because they're an expert in like such Nuance things and they're like I'm all in on this and I'm such an expert that people will pay me top dollar to be able to do this kind of stuff you could go the exact opposite direction and say I'm such a generalist that like I can get I don't know I'm able to work in maybe it's in startups or something and I'm able to kind of do a little bit of everything just enough and get things going and you don't find it to be a limiting factor that you're not like can't go super deep on stuff so I think you can be successful in either direction but I think that once you start getting too broad and with no depth or like ba basically hyperfocused on one thing with no breadth I think that's where you you start to have like limiting factors I think t-shaped is probably the best way to uh hit the middle ground there um bad projects bad career prospects I would say in terms of bad career prospects um I realize uh what I'm about to say some people might say well it's easy to say when you're employed like if you're looking for a job and you're struggling with that um I know some people are like I'll take anything that I can get right now fully acknowledge um I'm just trying to say that if we can pick um I would absolutely not work in environments that uh don't have psych olcal safety and what I mean by that is if you're in a setting whether that's your team the organization whatever it happens to be um even if it's just like the the relationship with your manager if if it's putting you in a situation where you're fearful to make mistakes or fearful to ask questions that kind of thing not a good spot um I think that even if you get paid really well um if you can work interesting projects that's going to be a limiting factor for growth because you will literally be fearful of doing things or you'll be put on you know you'll be called out for for doing things um you'll want to avoid stuff uh we talk about like um post incident reviews and having people like blame other people for stuff like environments like that aren't good I think they are career limiting um I think if you have a manager that doesn't support you and that can look different ways uh one is If your manager is just like what's a good word for this um I don't even want to say too nice um they could be let's say that you have things that you need to work on and your manager is just like pat on the back keep keep doing good work and you're like okay I'm just taking the feedback and you keep doing the work and nothing changes um ever after years I would say you have a manager that doesn't actually paron my language they don't give a they might be a very nice person but like they're not helping you grow you need to be given feedback to grow and I will give you sort of a an I don't even know how to say this properly you might find that in your career um yeah let me let me say this it's not a not a fault of any manager um for myself I I have historically found myself like I'm I'm quite motivated I'm going to go um that's called toxic positivity exactly um you want someone who can give you radical cander right now the example I wanted to give is not even a person's fault except myself in my own career I've been quite motivated right I will go uh I've defi like I've described this on code commute is like set me in a direction move out of the way and like I will go get done and uh I'm very motivated to do that um and that's worked really well for me in my career and to the to a point where I'm like I don't actually feel like I need to rely on my manager I'm an engineering manager I I understand how the Dynamics work between manager and IC been doing this for like 13 years now um so I've always kind of felt like I think I feel like I got it figured out kind of thing but the reality is like uh especially at Microsoft I should have been asking for more support and not that I didn't have supportive managers but there was a period of time where like I had no manager because he switched teams and then I had a new manager and then we had a reorg and then I switch teams and like throughout that in my mind I was like well it doesn't really matter like I don't I don't need to rely on my manager for success but like at my level I absolutely do right um and I have had supportive managers but I think that I needed to do a better job of asking for support and those periods of time where I didn't have support that should have been a sign to me like you need to go reach out for more support not just be passive just as an example um Devin says I wasted 10 years under a manager who wasn't interested in growth not of himself his team or the organization it messed me up yeah um and then sorry I'm just kind of catching back up in the chat have a broad index in your head and be able to dig in deep in the short time learn how to learn fast try learning methods yeah and then doggy says I I don't I wonder why they don't teach learning methods yeah like I I always say that like I didn't like University but one thing that University taught me was how I learn and I'm very much a Hands-On learner and I didn't know that I always thought from high school and stuff I was like I can just sit in this class for 15 minutes see what the teacher is talking about and like it just gets absorbed into my head no not at all does not work that way uh not for me um so hopefully hear the need for psychological safety for growth it's so important for me Y and uh many companies don't train managers well many companies don't train managers at all many companies promote engineers into man management positions and go good luck and then expect them to be successful and uh by the way that's not a promotion that's a complete role change it's a complete role change it's insane um and it's weird right like you can go to college or university for like three to five year programs study computer science software engineering Computer Engineering whatever what about managers right um kind of weird kind of weird that we don't treat it with the same level and then we just expect people to be successful and Lead teams it's very odd um find out what you want being directed work free get things done quickly want things done well both does the comp fit yeah so yeah Holly I think um hopefully that answer some of your questions I just want to scroll back up and see if there's projects um I think this depends on your manager so I'll give you an example I've always told my my direct reports when they're asking about promotion and projects and stuff like that um I never tie promotion specifically to projects I never say finish this project and you'll get promoted ever I don't do that I've seen other managers do that um I I think it's a mistake in the reason I think that is because there's some situations where uh projects can get canned they could be going very well and something comes up has to be deprioritized it's completely outside of someone's control and then what happens do we say hey I know you worked on this this project this big Initiative for a year and like that was your one thing that we tied your promotion to and we just canceled it sorry no promotion what like that's that's not okay for me um for the overwhelming majority of developers I feel like personally for people on my teams I'm able to make a good case for their promotion if they work on projects like that and they get canned or something the project right to be able to say here's the amount of like uh how this person Works how they interact with others like what they were able to deliver along the way I feel like I can make a pretty pretty good case for someone like that still now other managers know because they'll say nothing you know in the end nothing actually got landed didn't ship it sorry nothing to show so it's kind of a I have to be careful when I give advice on that kind of stuff because it depends a lot on the manager um I think that even for me though it's let's say at Microsoft I think there's some levels of of software Engineers like I would say at my level not I'm as as a manager but my level as a as an individual contributor if you were working on a project and it did not land while I feel like I could do a good job representing you I know that when it goes to my manager my skip level and then beyond they will say well where is the impact of that work and if it hasn't landed it's going to be very difficult to show impact because if it didn't acrude anything tangible then where is it now that doesn't mean that there aren't things that like we couldn't address along the way maybe there's learnings from it maybe there's technology that we could spin off like could be a ton of stuff right it doesn't mean it's the end of the world but I think that it be um can make it more challenging so with that said for feedback on projects I would say if you're stuck on projects that aren't going anywhere um you're not getting support you need like that kind of thing I think that can be a a spot you don't want to be in unless you're super motivated to like to save it and that feels like something that you're excited about I don't think that's a really good spot to be in um would going into management hold you back into your career too yeah could for sure so um even if we don't talk about um switching roles okay so as an individual contributor switching to manager this can happen literally with career hopping it can happen literally with going from like say senior to principal level when you're at more Junior levels as a developer or an individual contributor there's the expectations of you in your role they grow obviously as you're gaining levels and experience sounds like a it's a role playing game right except it's life as a software developer um level one um get 100 experience points so they they grow in terms of the amount of complexity in the work you have um your ability to work autonomously that kind of stuff at some point there is and it this I'm saying some point really generically here because depending on the company the leveling scheme expectations this could be different at some point there there can be sort of a trajectory where it's not just like a linear step to the next level and the expectations the bar is set much higher kind of break through to go to the next level and if you are put into that position whether because someone thought you were going to be ready and you're not or because you were operating you're kind of like burning yourself out going way above and beyond and you're like finally I did it and then you know you've sustained it long enough you get promoted then all of a sudden someone's like that's the new expectation though so like hope you're ready to keep doing that if you were already putting yourself into a state of burnout to get there and that's you're like just to sustain this now I have to keep doing the same thing that could be career limiting so to give you an example you might have been operating at like uh 100% of your expectations or above at some level and now you get promoted and you're not able to keep up that pace at that level so all of a sudden at the next level you're underperforming that can happen I think this is a lot more noticeable with career hopping because the the change can be so dramatic can be and I'm not saying it always is I I don't want people to misinterpret what I'm saying I think it can be because you'll go from one company to another you know different teams different leveling mechanisms different expectations they might be similar but you get in there and you're using that opportunity to like level up as well right so you were a level a at some company now you're a level two at the next company and you know on paper that's a higher level so you you got a promotion out of it and you got brought in there right so they were like we think based on this person's application and their interview they can do it and then you find like you're struggling to do it now that might not happen right away and this is why I caution people to nothing wrong with job hobing I don't want to say that I think if you're only doing that to try and sort of like cheat the system as fast as you can I think absolutely you will run into a problem where you're like I cannot do my job some people can interview really well right they spend just enough time at a company they're like I know that with what I have on my resume I can I can you know pretty this up go interview then they get a job they can't do their job right and sometimes people will do it just long enough where they're like okay time to go to the next company and they make their career out of that it can work for some people I just don't recommend it and then specifically to Holly's question going into management hold you back yes and I really feel for the people that um their manager thought they were doing a good thing they said hey I have this awesome engineer and I know what we're going to do we're going to promote this person and we're going to promote them by making them a manager like what what better way to promote someone who's been doing an awesome job as an individual contributor than to completely change their role from a very technical position to a people oriented position what better way to promote someone and then sometimes and this is this could be different at different places too right sometimes places expect managers still to be Hands-On in code I would say if you have big enough teams makes absolutely no sense to do that um speaking from experience I did that for eight years um if you're unable to do your managerial expectations like that's going to hold you back in your career right you'll be trying to do this this thing this role that you're ill equipped for and it's not your fault right and now you're going well I need to figure out how to adapt to this so instead of operating at like a you know high level engineer you're like I don't really know what I'm doing in this other role kind of uh you know floundering through it and you might even be like I don't even like this like thanks for the promotion but like I don't like doing this at all so I just think that for this kind of stuff it's important to acknowledge you know what the expectations are in your role uh what your in trusts are right especially going from IC to manager if you don't like dealing with people problems you will not like being a manager it's all about people right so if you're like I want to be a developer so I can never work with people first of all that's not a good option either um but second of all if you are then in the manager position it's going to be significantly worse so Holly I hope that helps answer some different perspective on on that question I think it's a really good one though um okay I don't see any other questions pending right now um back to the newsletter article um the next part we kind of touched on this earlier in the chat and I think this is like doggy said something specifically about this so Kudos doggy for the the chat messages transferable skills are your superpower right so the reality is that when you're spending time writing code in a language working with a text stack yes there are going to be some things that are nuanced to that language or that text stack that you're learning about 100% this is going to happen but there's going to be a vast majority of things that you are doing like on repeat or exploring and learning for the the first time that are absolutely going to be applicable to different areas as well okay so I wrote down super high level list in this article um so like things like debugging testing and performance tuning like those are some things that you could take a general approach to you might have specific tools you're using in the text stack or the language right you might use a specific testing framework for your performance tuning you might be using some things to do uh metrics and analytics on stuff um but like that's some of the Nuance part but your approach your philos phos ophy like how you do this kind of thing in general there are going to be common patterns that you can take away from that so if you spent you know in your five years of development you've been debugging stuff you've been writing tests for things like validating things putting regression tests in place you've had to do performance profiling and stuff like that do you like even if you had to go learn a new tool in a different text act does that mean that all of a sudden like you don't even know what debugging means anymore you don't know what a test is or what a good test would compose of like you probably know those things you've learned them over time it's just that now you're using a different tool for that so very transferable set of skills um then I wrote down a bunch of stuff that's not even like necessarily code right um actually the the one that is specifically code still on this list is like um I just said like years of experience writing production code like what regardless of the ACT ual language you're using what things do you care about in production code right you're designing stuff to be extensible and readable so that other people can come through you're designing it so that it can be testable that's going to there's going to be some common patterns that come up that regardless of the language you're using you're probably going to want to uh leverage those right um I wrote down pardon me one more candy um familiarity with planning reviews deployments um cros team collaboration experience solid system design instincts Devon says you can't go wrong learning to be a good communicator knowing how to talk with other developers and even non-technical folks will get you far absolutely right this is one of those things that I feel like a lot of people take for granted either because they happen to be good at it which awesome work good for you not factious I think it's awesome if you didn't put any effort into this and you happen to be good at it I don't think it's common um I think what's more common is that people don't realize how important it is don't spend any time investing into it and then have a lot of challenges with it and they don't even acknowledge that it's a thing and Holly Holly says communicated with AI is a new Norm too and interestingly enough like yes while I was more specifically thinking about like how to treat people like people and how to think about your audience this is it's a really good point though right um like if you think about this example from Holly with like communicating with AI can you think about a time where you were talking with chat GPT or something else you're playing around you're like I want to I want a Vibe code or something else um and you prompt it and you get it to try putting something together for you just to realize you're like this is garbage like how did it do such a poor job of this like AI must be stupid right like a lot of the time when that's happening there are things that you could have done more specifically in your prompt and it's really come coming back to like your audience in this case is an llm so are you communicating with your audience effectively you have to give it more context give it more details give it examples um Roma says roam Ro Roma yeah been struggling getting a mid-level interview at a big tech company like Microsoft or Amazon it seems like I meet all their qualifications any advice do I need to get a masters nope uh do I need to keep applying yes um and if you want uh Ro I don't know when you joined pardon me I'm going to scroll back up in the chat I have uh this playlist you're on you're on YouTube so you can see my YouTube channel already um if you look for the resume review playlist if you want you can send in your resume I will make a YouTube video on it give it a review um happy to see if there's anything I can identify the common advice here though is like focus on what's in your control right if you're applying to these places not getting any any feedback I would say keep applying um look at what things you can tweak and tune if there are jobs that stand out more considering taking what might be a very generic resume and tailoring it to be a little bit more stand out for that specific role just to see if it uh helps Stand Out amongst the volume of applicants big tech companies will be very hard to get into given the volume of applicants right it's just unfortunately the way it is right now um not saying to give up on that please don't um but don't be discouraged and of course if you're if you're looking to switch uh I would ask yourself does it need to be big Tech I don't ROM I don't know your background uh I think something that I would say to a lot of people is like a lot of people won't even enjoy big te they'll say well yeah I would cuz they they pay so well and it's like there are small companies that that pay more than I'm making at Microsoft so like if that was your only goal like you can go look for that um but like the way that big tech companies operate you might not enjoy I don't know so that's not specifically geared at you that's for you and anyone else who's thinking like the sort of the end game is like I must get to Big Tech absolutely not like longterm in my career I don't think big Tech is my endgame at some point in my career I would love to have a software company it's not going to be a Microsoft it's not going to be you know a trillion doll company I don't need it to be but at some point in my career I would like to I would like to work for myself and I'd like to have engineering teams why just because that's what gets me excited I would like to be able to do that does that mean that I'm quitting tomorrow no does it mean next year no it's just like at some point in my career that's what I'd like to do so no big Tech is not my endgame but I'm finding like I have lots of interesting challenges one of the things that I like in the space that I work in is that it's kind of a weird example to give but we can take I found if you're looking at like embedded systems where things are really constrained like you really have to think about optimizations or like data structures and algorithms can really come into play then there's this like band in the Middle where like some of that stuff just seems like everything's abstracted from it so like who cares um aside from my interviews like I don't really have to know all this stuff just because there's a library to do it anyway and then some of the stuff we're doing on our team is like we because of the scale that we're at we go back to like we need to know the little details because it's going to make a big difference at the scale we're at so kind of uh kind of interesting I think that's like a a fun part for me but do I like the the speed at which things move no and I think they move that speed for very good reason but I don't enjoy that part particularly just kind of the nature of like when things are at this scale they they'll end up going slower Hol says I heard some SDS have better pay and work life balance at a Fortune 500 companies that are not in the software industry interesting where their main sort of product is like not software that's uh that could be very true I don't I don't know I don't I don't see why not so that's that's cool all right so there might be other options for 500 companies are still huge companies but maybe it's uh maybe it's not directly like our company builds software to ship to customers as the primary thing right could be uh I'm just thinking Finance right maybe they have a A Bank application or something that could be a thing or internal systems that you can go build could be a lot of options there Devon says don't even worry about Fortune 500 I work at a company outside of tech and our pay bands are competitive in the Seattle Market nice and a lot of us aren't even in the Puget area or even in Washington yeah we got less than 300 employees there you go I think there's there's lots of options right um I say that I say that not to be like therefore should be so easy for you to get a job not what I'm saying I think there are I'm trying to say there's lots of options uh when we're I think some people are like big Tech so I have to select from like five companies no there's there's many options outside of that if your goal is payband just as it heads up so um so transferable skills hugely valuable if you're thinking about switching Tech Stacks um I wrote in here because on the newsletter one of the things it's like something to consider is is this fear of am I starting over right I'm a midlevel or I'm senior but I'm going to go and do a new tech stack and like am I starting over I would say if you're going to a different company something that you'll want to consider I'm glad we're talking about like interviewing and stuff right now I was like what does a job market actually look like now this isn't a rule but I would say that at Big tech companies and when I say big Tech I don't just mean like Fang I mean like Fortune 500 companies it could be uh just companies that are an established business that aren't like literally a startup fighting to stay alive bigger companies can often take a little bit more risk and invest a little bit more time meaning if you are jumping into a new language or Tech stack but you have other years of experience as a software developer they're not necessarily going to look at that and say oh but you're not an expert in JavaScript so like H too bad like no chance um if there's someone else that is an expert and they happen to check all the same boxes you plus that they'll probably get it but point is um bigger companies can take a little bit more risk and time to invest with getting people ramped up generally to give you an example and I've shared this many times over the past few years at Microsoft um my first team that I joined uh the whole team was not the whole team there's a few team members that were there plus the new team members that were added were hired right before me of those team members no one knew C our team uses C and the second team that I was on again is an existing team and then the new hirers that came on board I think one person knew car no one knew rust and they had to go learn rust some people didn't know C++ and they have to work in C++ but we can take that opportunity to invest in them and wrap them up why because the next day Microsoft isn't about to go under because someone couldn't on day one go right and ship stuff in rust or in C or C++ there are startups that are fighting to stay alive and if you're unable to start delivering RightWay it doesn't make sense for them to hire you and I'm not saying that because like you you aren't good or you're not valuable or that's the best approach I'm just saying their goal is to keep the business alive and grow it and if they have to take a risk on you to be able to hope that they can teach you and wrap you up quickly that might not be a risk they want to take back to what's in your control maybe not that right like that's just the reality of it so something to consider if you are applying to to startups and you're like hey why is no one you know I have I'm applying for C++ and I don't have any C++ experience in my resume they might just be like no we can't take that risk maybe right not every company but just trying to put that into perspective something to think about um okay and then otherwise the last little bit here is um at the end of the day when it comes to resumés you're doing this Tech stack switch in your head you're kind of starting over in a language or a teex stack by now hopefully we're on the same page it's not resetting all of your experience the point is how are you going to stand out because all it could take is one applicant with similar experience to you but they happen to have that experience in the Target text stack in the target language and then automatically it's going to look like they're a better candidate for that role if all other things are equal right so I think that if we frame it this way then we really need to think about how are we going to stand out right you can't control the other people that apply so your control doesn't make sense but you can control your resume you can control how you're showcasing yourself so if you're like okay I do have side projects okay how can I make these stand out as really awesome things or there is this project at work um and maybe on the surface it's kind of like it's a so so project but like how can you tell that story without like lying how can you tell that story to demonstrate impact like what was the value of what you did there how can you make it very obvious for the reader sometimes and if you do take me up on the resume review thing you just want to watch a couple videos sometimes I will read comments on the resumés and in my head I'm thinking like this person probably knows exactly why it was such a kickass thing to write but I'm like as the resume reader like I don't know like I might not even know what you're talking about but to you it's very obvious to you the impact is very great you might have even had like had Kudos from your manager your skip level manager maybe it was talked about in like a company meeting and it was such an awesome thing and how you relay that in the resume is just like it's the value is completely lost so it could be little like seemingly little things like that where you had such a good experience to call out on a resume and then it just gets lost so I think that's one of the biggest things that I'm noticing on rums right now is like there was a really good opportunity to demonstrate or showcase something and it gets missed uh Roma says thanks for the response I work for honey well uh right now mostly working C++ just want more uh Focus company where do I send the resume you got to watch the first minute of a video uh on that playlist I say it in every video I don't put the link down because I don't want Bots to crawl it and if I tell you now then you won't go watch a video it's free but you got to watch a minute I'd recommend watching more though um Holly says startups are interesting because they would rather have something working than something optimized for another engineer to understand your code to yeah um it's true so I spent I spent before Microsoft I spent eight years years at a company and it was a startup and it was just about like day after day after day it was like ship value to customers ship value to customers got to keep going and then people would be like oh the tech debt and we're like okay well like is that is that actually holding us back from shipping value to customers or you just don't like the code and it's like well the code's ugly and it's like well we're not even touching that code and it's working like forget about we got to keep going um obviously at some point enough things are sticking around Things become a bit more of a platform than just like you know something we're just trying to stay alive with and yeah there were things that over time it was like would have been nice if this was built in a little bit more of a robust way for sure but that company was very successful um unfortunately like and some folks might know this if they watch code commute like after I left they ipoed and then I think a year after that maybe two years I don't know um but they bought they went back they got bought back to private for $2 billion like it worked we didn't have to hyper optimize things right um there was tons of garbage code I wrote most of the Legacy code that was there at one point like unfortunately so you know it's uh I think a lot of people they miss it right they miss that like you have to like as a software developer working at a business we need to be able to ship value to customers if you want to resolve Tech debt you want to go rewrite things you need to be able to demonstrate how that's going to help a business if you're unable to do that it's people get frustrated by this they're like well we don't ever get time for Tech debt and it's like make a business case for it uh have you ever successfully negotiated and overhaul Tech de projects that were worthy yeah absolutely I've done it both ways or I've shut down Tech de projects and we've done things where we promoted them um and ultimately like I've seen many times where people will complain about tech that as a third party I've seen this happen where I've talked to like uh the product managers or project managers on teams that are organizing like the Sprints and stuff for work and having conversations with that where they're like man like developers are pissed off we can't get Tech de schedule but they're like I don't I don't understand what the tech debt is and then I talk to the developers and they're like oh it's so crappy they won't schedule our Tech debt like no one listens to us like and then it's like back to communication from earlier did anyone here communicate the business value to the product managers no you just said that the code was bad like if you can't explain it to a way that the stakeholder is going to get the value out of it like it's not happening that's not to say that it's not worth doing but you might be terrible at communicating it and sometimes we' get into these conversations and it's like well what is the value like what is it going to unblock like what's it going to help with and someone would make a case for it and it's like yeah but you're that makes an assumption that we have to go back into this code and touch it and like we're not adding new features here we're not even getting bug reports in this code you just want to go make it look nicer in fact you are just introducing more risk at this point it's not to say that the code wouldn't be written better better But it's already working so it's not worth you doing that because the opportunity cost of you doing something else could be much greater um but yeah we've worked on stuff where people would say we need to get this feature in place and we'd say look things weren't designed that way like like we we cannot go build that on top to go follow up with more features after like basically if you want this added on the tech de that we would have to acrew to do that means like the next thing you want to pile on top of this is just like it's going to keep being a recipe for disaster it's going to be breaking a lot or we're not going to have confidence that it works so we have to find ways that we can present to stakeholders like this is why right this is why we need to go do this work for so yes it might mean an upfront investment but here's how much like we anticipate it's going to take here's why so like hey this code doesn't have any tests on it like you want us to go pile this stuff on we're not confident it's going to not break anything so like we're going to probably ship this it's going to have broken stuff we're going to spend a lot of time fixing it doing a poor job of explaining this but the point is that you collect enough data to present back to the the stakeholders to explain like this is why and I found just having open honest communication trying to explain the business value and then without getting into all the technical details like I need to go touch this class and like this method signature needs to be like don't get into those types of details I don't give a I wouldn't expect them to right but talk to them about the value that they want to understand what's going to make sense for them to go make a decision on it so I've seen it work both ways and I say this as someone who at the time was an engineering manager and an I um like I I got to play Both Sides all the time so uh I think that's something that helped me was like I had to see it from both angles and once you start to see how different sides are looking at things it'll give you some perspective on how to more effectively communicate with those different stakeholders right just having a product manager say we're not doing Tech de is not going to make a Dev team happy and then having a Dev team that just tells our product manager we only want to do Tech de like to to solve or reduce Tech that it's like you just got to be speaking uh more on this same page I would say um okay I think that's mostly it the wrap up from the article is basically don't change everything all at once right try to keep your learning more narrowed down to something specific so that you can focus on that uh I said anchor your learning to something that you're interested in that way when you're getting challenged by things at least it's still align with your interest said be intentional about how you present yourself because that will matter right so if you're thinking about your um your resume and how you want to stand out be intentional about it uh and then I said lean on the skills that do transfer right so if you're like well I learned how to do all this stuff but that was in C and I'm not using C anymore like call talk about things in a way that's very obviously transferable to other languages just being like I master in C in these very nuanced things and the job is for a completely different language like it's just it might not carry over as effectively as you might hope um okay and then Devon says another skill to develop is the ability to understand the business value that you're working on absolutely and if you don't know ask I tell people this all the time um like it's helpful for many reasons one could be just purely motivation number two is like if you understand the the value the business value of what it is you might have been presented a solution it might have been documented some way and you're like wait a second they want this done for this value and if I wouldn't have asked the question about what we're trying to do and why I wouldn't have thought about this other solution that might be even better or something like that so understanding why can make a huge difference um so please ask yeah if you only ever see the technical problems without understanding the business value how can you communicate the value of what needs to be done yeah right like code is the tool that we use to solve problems as software Engineers the problems are going to be domain specific for our customers so you need to understand that right so hopefully that helps great questions in the chat today holy Holly H get it holy yeah okay to play on words okay not funny okay okay with that said I'm going to wrap this up though um I'm going to jump over to the part where I saw you guys on stuff this is the newsletter it's Dev leader weekly I'll just put a link to it like I said if you guys don't want to uh subscribe to a newsletter it's totally fine um folks on substack you already subscrib right um if you don't want emails and stuff don't worry you can just check out the newsletter if you want to it's like a a blog entry right so if you just want to see what the topic is um it goes out on Saturdays you can check it out and that's this is the one I walk through I also Link in the code commute video that it's generally based on so because I mentioned it a few times code commute is my Vlog YouTube channel I'll put a link into the chat as well it's just called code commute and as you can see I just drive to work usually and film I don't have any new 360 videos from last time um but this is the video here that it was based on so if you wanted to check out code commute um these Vlog entries kind of fuel the content for the newsletter uh I realize most folks I think on this stream today are actually coming from YouTube so you probably already know my channel this is the the main Channel sorry that's the playlist Tabo here you go um so this is the main Channel um more edited down videos all of the almost all of these are resume review videos I have another one I have to film uh a lot more like programming tutorials and stuff like that so you can check that out and speaking of programming do have courses so if you want to learn about C you can check out this page here these are my Dome train courses so um they're are two for getting started in Deep dive and there is still a 40% off sale which is sweet um for you guys not for me because I don't I don't get the money when there's a discount but but uh very proud of these two proud of all of them but these two are my my most my most proud moments and then if you're interested in stuff outside of C I have uh a couple of courses with Ryan Murphy who's an engineering manager at Yelp so have career management we have getting promoted behavioral interviews and soft skills as well so you can go ahead and check those out and then last thing this is going to be a flashbang warning it's very bright sorry um this is brand ghost so brand ghost is the uh project that I'm doing on the side for all my content creation so depending on how you got to my content um it's if it was from social media somewhere everything that you see posted on social media from me is from Brand ghost so it's a Content scheduling platform and we're building out the sort of content creator dashboard so you can create all your content on our platform AI assisted you can bring in all of your uh sort of raw data that you want to work with and if you're just getting started and you want to start posting on social media you can use this totally for free to cross post and schedule content out and that way like our goal is that as a new Creator we can help you build the momentum a lot of people are like I want to try it and then they're like oh like it's too hard or I can't be consistent or I I can't possibly post like more than just LinkedIn or more than just Twitter like it's just too much work you can write it once in a year and then post it everywhere for free um so that's what I'm working on and like I said I use it for all of my content creation it is my hey that's even that's even my Instagram that's what that is but then there's paid four options that have fancier features so check that out if you want to get started with content creation and uh if you have any questions say you're interested in this you're like but I have no idea what I'm doing just message me happy to chat about it and that's it Roma says how often you do these lives I do them every single Monday at 7 p.m. Pacific unless I'm sicker on vacation technically doing it while I'm sick right now um and then the if you're if you like this style but without the interaction I realize the interaction is the best part but um code commute is the exact same style if you don't believe me you can ask Devon if Devon's still in the chat he'll vouch for me cuz he watches all um but it's just kind of a stream of Consciousness conversation about a topic I just don't stream it live because answering questions while driving would be like absolutely not okay but I think that's it folks I wanted to say thanks so much for watching um and I hope to see more folks next week sorry about the mic issue at the beginning I don't know what's going you people are not going to watch it on YouTube now because they're going to be like oh this guy's screwed up but thank you