The Vicious Cycle of Helping Other Developers - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

oh where's my Instagram at one sec almost there we'll get it kicked off in just a moment that should just take one more sec I'll get the chat pulled up there we go I see some people joining already hello welcome um if you want to do me a favor I appreciate it if you're joining in the chat let me know you're here let me know what's working um because I have definitely had some situations where it is not working and then it's a bit of a pain in the butt but I just want to make sure that I can go looking in the right spots if you're sending messages um looks like Instagram just can't connect so um very interesting try one more time with Instagram then I'll give up on it oh I think I copied and pasted the wrong thing like an idiot that's okay okay that's my fault oops um we do got a topic for today it is going to be about the Vicious Cycle of helping other people um this is something I talk about um oh awesome I'm sorry I'm just seeing LinkedIn is okay all good from here on YouTube so thanks Justin and thanks geek hamster that's good um cool and with that Instagram is also going to work so that's good news but this topic is actually something that I have spent a lot of time on in my career uh whether that's stuff I've had to work on for myself stuff that I've had to I feel targeted by this topic welcome infected FPS I hope it feels like you're targeted not because you are but that tells me that it probably resonates which is good but I've had to work on this for myself uh especially early in my career so I'll talk about some hard lessons I had to learn I should also mention I I must be sick I don't have a voice um we'll try to get through it and the other part is that I'm going to approach this from the perspective of people asking for help because that's one thing I've spent a lot of time coaching people on and then the flip side which is you are the person being asked for help how can we coach you through this and make sure that you're not kind of uh in the Vicious Cycle so we will look at that for folks that are new to the live streams if you are interested in knowing about what I'll be going through it's generally going to be the newsletter topic that I have uh you know just put out so this is the newsletter that went out on uh on Saturday so this past Saturday if you are not on uh twitch YouTube or Facebook so that means LinkedIn people uh Tik Tok people um that's so weird does that mean I can't send messages to to X that's so bizarre um and I see people streaming it on on Twitter so it it just tells me that chat only goes to those three platforms so I apologize but if uh if you just want to know um where that content is going to be most likely for the every week's live stream it's just weekly. deev leader.com the site uh before the live stream or during because you want to see what the Topic's about that's where you go weekly. leer.com and I've been using Code commute to talk about topics like this as like a stream of Consciousness and I basically just drive to and from work I'm commuting and I keep the camera on and I just talk as if there was people driving around with me uh I yell at traffic and stuff a lot um but this is one of the topics that I want to uh to go over in code commute so um felt good to talk about it and I I thought it would be a good newsletter article and then I felt like it would be a good discussion too so with that another reminder that you know there's people talking in the chat I know it works because they just tested it for you so please feel free to ask questions share your thoughts um I know infected FPS is basically here every single live stream which is awesome uh so they can attest to whether or not I try to answer questions and stuff right I would rather spend the time engaging with you talking to you answering your questions and than just blabbing about other stuff so uh please feel free to use that but with that said um let's get into um the topic and maybe I'll start this off with sharing I have a couple of different stories I guess for my my experience and I want to share probably one of the first times I struggled with this uh this concept of like a vicious cycle of helping other people so um pretty early on in my career if again if you're new here you might not know this but um if you've been around it's going to sound like a broken record um but when I had graduated from University I became an engineering manager pretty early I was at a startup it's not because I was you know the best thing since sliced bread it's just that I happened to be someone early at the startup where they they felt that I could do a good job at this and um put me into a management position but at the time I was also like developing software full-time and managing teams so what happened pretty early on was as we were bringing people on like onto the teams into the company there there were only a few of us there and we hadn't been there that long but we had the most experience at the company than anyone else because we were there first um so what ended up happening at one point for me was that I I remember people would on board and you know they're trying to explore some of the product that we have so we're building Desktop Digital forensic software and someone would call me over and they say hey can you help me out with this because I had you know I had Rewritten some part of it or the whole thing so I had the most experience in that area so I would go help them and then what would happen is that someone else would go oh Nick Nick knows about that so like let me go ask Nick a question and over not that long of a period of time what started happening was that I and I'm not exaggerating when I say this like I would spend almost my entire like 9 to5 period just going between people's desks and helping them and I'm not saying that's because again I'm not saying because I was so amazing it's not because they weren't smart um it's it's just because of how this was going and it's because they needed help and I figured I would just help and I started to realize like I don't have time to do anything like I think what I'm doing is is helpful like people are getting stuff done so it must be helpful in some capacity but I'm no longer getting my stuff done and I also learned this about myself that I like to work so I basically started solving this problem by adding more work hours to the day so I would wake up earlier I'd get to the office sooner and I would do my coding people would start showing up I would start helping people at their desks spend the day doing that then people would start leaving the office and I would start coding again and then i' go to the gym I go home whatever and then at night I would start coding again for work so I basically solve this problem for myself just by adding in more work hours and as you might expect like that's not it's not a good thing it's not like the solution here and it took me a while to realize that what I was doing was a vicious cycle I was basically helping people get through their current work but I wasn't like enabling them for next time and that's what we're going to start talking about here so I wanted to share the story to kind of frame up some of the mindset around this and the fact that early in my career so this would have been what 11 to 12 years ago probably 12 years ago at this point so it's been a while um but I live this so we're going to start things off by looking at the perspective of people that are asking questions so if you a junior developer and this this applies to people that are new to teams um it could technically apply to every level but I've seen it more common um with with Junior developers and this could be like interns like literally your very first time working um and I'm not here to this isn't about like picking on people for doing this um I hope I should maybe have like a disclaimer here like I hope that none of my content or videos ever feels like I'm picking on a group of people um so if I'm talking critically about a group or something like that that's not my intention to to single groups of people out or if you're if you're like hey that sounds like me like Joe I know infected FBS is jokingly saying in the chat I feel targeted by this topic so if if you happen to resonate with a group of people that I'm describing I I don't want you to feel like I'm talking about a group to to make you feel bad or anything I'm talking about a group so that if it does resonate with you I'm trying to help so hopefully that's what what comes across and pardon me because I can tell my voice is disappearing quickly um so with more Junior developers and in particular I've seen this a lot with interns um there is a couple things to look at here when it comes for asking for help comes to asking for help and one of the first things I would call out is like I have noticed that a lot of the time interns or Junior developers shy away from asking for help and I wanted to just like before talking about any other parts here please do not shy away um from asking for help because I think that it's such a missed opportunity um I have seen people struggle to on board feel like they can't get any momentum like it's obvious to me it's obvious to the person going through it like they they're like man like it feels like not getting anything done I have seen other people that basically can counteract this entire experience by just reaching out and asking for help and unblocking themselves so I want to remind folks that if you're new to a place um please don't shy away from asking for help because you have a team of people that wants to help you they want you to get better faster so that you can be helping them okay so like don't shy away from from it infected FPS is I've been doing the get in before everyone an hour and a half early for 12 years that 90 minutes is my most productive send help happy face y um I hear you yep it's a long time to be doing it so hopefully there's something that can help here so if you're junior don't shy away from asking for help okay that's that's number one but now the question is okay well Nick said it I'm not going to shy away but how do I go ask for help and I talk about this like as in I think there's a way that you can do this effectively or things that you can focus on when you're asking for help um so and I I'll get to to geek hamsters com in just a sec but the the two ways the two primary groups of of asking for help that I generally see are one you need Clarity on something so you've been tasked with something and you're like I actually don't understand what's been asked of me that's one and number two is that you're stuck on something so I want to start by talking about the first part which is I need Clarity right I have been I'm stuck on something because I don't actually understand what's asked of me this is something that I would not spend time waiting on get yourself unblocked immediately if someone has P you with something and you're like I don't know what I'm supposed to do here cuz I don't understand the ask you can make this crappy in two different ways one way is that you sit idle and go I don't know what to do I guess I'll wait until it clicks don't do that that's a huge waste of time and number two is guessing and assuming the wrong thing so you go I don't know what's being asked of me but I guess I shouldn't wait either so like I'm just going to assume it's X and I'm going to go down this path both of these are crappy because they end up wasting time in the first case it's you're literally wasting time because you're like I'm just not going to do anything and I know that sounds silly but I think what happens is that people get more nervous that they haven't done anything and now they don't want to ask for help and this is another vicious cycle like oh no I have anxiety about not not asking so don't do that and then the other thing that I was saying is when you pick the wrong thing you could get lucky and happen to pick the right thing that was expected of you but what happens you go waste all this time and energy and it's not even what was being asked of you like you wasted not only time but now you you worked on something and it's not even relevant so in this scenario if you need Clarity ask for help right away don't spend time being blocked on it T man that's not the right answer helping others is not stupid but there's a way to do this effectively so geek campster saying the worst part of helping other devs is when you realize the other guy you helped lasts a few weeks and suddenly moves to another company and you repeat the process with someone else new Dev yeah so there are things we can do to try and optimize this we'll get into this when we start talking about it from the other side so we're starting with the um the people asking for help so if it's not a clar issue and you need help the advice that I have for you is to assume that you're going to get this question and this is going to come up later but assume that say you're going to come to me and ask uh you want to ask me for help and the really ironic part here is that someone watched my code commute video on this and then asked me a question and then I said the first thing that I taught you in this video was to do this and they didn't do it um so I used it back on them but you should assume that someone is going to ask you so if you're coming to me I'm going to ask you what have you tried so far it's a very simple cue and I think that if you keep that in mind when you want to go ask for help if you've already deemed that you don't need more clarity you understand what's being asked of you if you're about to ask for help assume they're going to say what have you tried so far because you should have tried something you should have tried something because you understand what's being asked of you okay so that is a good indicator that you should go at least try something spend some time do some problem solving some exploring be resourceful okay go try something you're going to be a software developer we're spending all of our time solving problems not all of it but a lot of it so get good at it you need to practice it go try something now now you can answer the question you've done something so assume I'm going to say what have you tried so far and if you need help still right so you've tried something if you still need help it's probably because of maybe another two different scenarios one is that you've tried a couple of things and none of them seem to work none of them seem to do what you were asked to get done so you need some guidance around this and the other way is that you actually have multiple things that seem to work but you're having difficulty weighing out which one's the best the second scenario is a really good spot to be in right maybe you need some clarity around the things that you're optimizing for what's most valuable it's good right I mean you have two things or three things that work that's a good spot to be in let's go pick one that we think is ideal the other situation feels a little crappy but at least you can go to someone and say here's what I so far and now that person is better equipped to give you some guidance okay so number one they're not going to feel like oh man here's this person again they don't even try anything it's Nick again he's knocking knocking at my you know knock knocking at my office door and he's or he's pinging me on teams whatever and saying hey I need help and I know that when Nick's here he hasn't even tried anything I got to go do all this work for him I can't tell them no okay this sucks people aren't going to have that response to you because they're going to say oh it's it's Nick again Nick I know every time Nick comes to me he's already tried some stuff out this is good let's talk through what he's done so far okay now you give someone context and they're better equipped to help you they're not going to waste time trying to explain option one to you for 20 minutes and then you go oh yeah I already did that you tell them right at the beginning what you've tried right like don't waste their time so you tell them and then they're able to help give you guidance around that now this isn't a bulletproof mechanism that's going to mean that someone can just give you the answer after but someone's at least able to understand that you put in some effort and they can try guiding you down the next steps the coughing is never going to end it should be a a Pepsi ad how I get the logo here please sponsor my stuff and fix my cold dear Pepsi um so this is the first part and I just wanted to see if there's anything else I wanted to add um oh I have yeah I'll I'll talk about it now um because I I wrote the article in a way that was like a make sure you read to the end I'm not going to make you wait till the end we're going to talk about it now so um a thing that you can layer on to this because if you're like hey that advice makes sense but how many things should I go try and what happens if I'm like four months into trying the first thing and I still haven't finished it like am I doing it right because that's what you said to do Nick the answer is no um but there's a thing that we can do and it's called time boxing and time boxing is a really handy tool it's I mean anyone can do it and I use it for different things but I recommend people think about this and they try leveraging it so we can time box our effort that we're spending on the what have you tried part right so you come to me and I say what have you tried so far and you say I have tried nothing and I go great you should go try some things and then you go okay well I should time box this effort and I would say that's a great idea and then you would say well I have I have no idea how how the H long I should time boxes for should it be a week a day and we can have a conversation about that this is something that I would say takes experience to try and figure out and even after gaining a lot of experience there might be situations where you're like I feel like I might want to spend like two weeks like really digging into this and someone else might say like no way man like we got to get started on that like next week so like you spend a couple days this week we're going to talk about it and we're getting started right away next week so I I think personally that overc communicating is a good thing in general especially if you're going to be time boxing some effort and you want to get some agreement on what makes sense but every team's going to be different so I would say hey like I think it's a great idea to time box that and you might say well Nick I'm not really sure how long I should do that for and I would say okay well given the scope of this work I think that if you spent maybe two days time box and trying some things out you have two days to go experiment learn right especially if you're junior I usually air on the side of like you're new to this it's I want you to go take some time to learn or I might even have a more senior engineer that's very capable but they're in a new area and I'm saying hey you're new here like in this area maybe go take a little bit of extra time right I'm trying not to rush you through this yeah I want the work done yeah the business wants the work done but I actually think it's valuable for you to go a little bit slower right at the beginning here you know feel things out but it's situational so I might say hey go take two days to go do this and you go great okay and you might even say like how many things should I try here like are we good with like we we'll look at the first option and that's another great conversation right so being able to talk about things and get on the same page is like this really undervalued thing that I feel like a lot of people just don't do and we can do it for almost free and we should so I might say time box up for due days and I think you know if you can try two things out we can go look at them together after and if you and I'll say at the end of the time boxing if you've only made it through one maybe started looking at the second one we can still talk through that but we'll see okay so now we've time boxed it that means that if you're thinking about your your work and you're halfway through the first day if you're like I haven't even started the first thing I mean probably not a good spot to be in because in theory if things were equal you'd be starting on the second thing the very next day so if you make it through the first day and you're still barely started on the first thing you're probably falling behind that is not the end of the world okay this is just something that you can leverage to say oh wait am I on track for this like based on the expectations that were put on me I actually feel like maybe I'm behind on this now maybe I should maybe I should talk about this and spoiler alert the answer is yes should talk about it CU this is another thing that people shy away from where they're like oh no there's an there's an ETA we talked about a deadline for this and I'm not on track for it if I just be quiet no one will know um that's not how it works uh in fact people will know and then it's a bigger problem later when someone's like what do you mean for a week you've been blocked on this and no one said anything so please communicate status um please you know if you're working at a place where people are like mean to you for not being on track or something and you're so you're being communicating early and often something else has got to change there the problem is not you people should be communicating this stuff very early very often okay so couple things we just touched on there time boxing aligning on what's supposed to be done and then the expectations around around that as well so that's a try and round out the if you're new here are some things you can try um okay we're going to shift gears and look at it from the helping side and I'm going to answer uh Ryan wakefield's question here um and then we'll so we'll do Ryan's question then we'll switch gears uh so Ryan says feelings on orgs and not investing in their I it departments and providing educational programs so good question um I think that this because it's a general question I have to give you a general answer and try and give uh some more specifics in my answer so that it's more meaningful so um the high Lev General answer is yes I agree that probably doesn't feel good I think that in general organizations should try and find ways to invest in the education of their um their employees in different ways now what I'll add on is now some of the more specific things let's take a small company okay so let's have let's imagine a startup that is fighting to stay alive I would be totally understanding if a startup that's fighting to stay alive is like we cannot spend extra money on educating people now maybe they can offer something in other ways maybe there's um staff members at the startup that are able to um help contribute back to the team by giving them you know Tech talks or something right so finding free ways to try and like help educate they're giving up some time maybe to try and help with that I think that could be smart because I think like I said I think companies should try and do it but if it's a small company that doesn't have Capital um I I think it's I would be very forgiving I don't know if that's the right word of that kind of situation like I just wouldn't have that expectation on a very small company um and then on the second part and then I'll answer your second question as well if you're at a larger company um so if a company has a lot of capital right um so you know big tech companies are a good example of this uh and you don't have to be a big tech company necessarily I just mean a company that's got some money in the bank they're not like oh no if we you know we're cutting budgets so that you know we have to cut all the pizza parties or else we're going to have to shut the doors um I think if they are being intelligent through thinking longterm and they have Capital they should be trying to have budget for Education this might look different at different places uh again larger companies generally have more money in the bank to be able to do this reinvest into teams and I think the issue is less about for my experience at least it's less about companies not offering stuff and from my experience this is my manager bias um my manager bias is that I have been in situations where people provide feedback to management and Leadership and they go we wish that management would support this and we go we do we literally have budget we literally tell you that there's budget for it we just ask that you're looking for the programs and you're bringing them to us right you want to go take a training somewhere bring that to us right if or or have a conf like if I'm your manager directly and you never talk to me about the fact that you want some training on something I don't even know to go look for that for you and to be honest I would probably push back and say I think you should try looking for some of the training first right bring me some examples some things you're thinking about and we'll talk about if there's budget and how that looks and we would like to try and support it and if you're if you're struggling and you can't find anything then I'll say sure like let me try looking too too but um I would generally say for my experience it's been more like that where people are like they're the companies they're at are willing to pay and have budget for it and then people assume people assume that it's supposed to be like given to them or like someone's going to come by and say by the way training's coming up here you go here's we're sending you off to this conference and a lot of the time it's the other way around where and I'm not trying to say managers are perfect at this by by no means but managers should be like hey there is training budget like you should be trying to look for these things if you're trying to learn so I've had people come to me and ask to go to conferences and I'm not even sure if we've ever said no whether that was at Magnet forensics or Microsoft I think the closest thing to a know is we can't cover the whole cost because it's outside of the budget scope but we can cover part of it right I think that's like the most I've ever had to push back on something and people were like oh man that's awesome cool and like I can take the days off work to go to that and I'm like yeah like that's that's part of the training you get to go do that they're like this is so cool even though sometimes they're paying a little bit out of pocket so um I think that companies should be doing it though they should have budget for it um how do you approach leadership to educate them about the necessity of those programs this is interesting because um this is something I would hope is like part of the culture in the leadership at a company is to understand that they should be investing into their employees now uh so Ryan saying I work in healthc care for hospital and they invest heavily in medical training education awesome so that's that's good right um for companies that don't this is one of those situations where like if you don't have visibility into the finances of the company maybe they're like we really want to be able to do that and we can't we can't afford it it's too much risk in our budget um maybe that's the case right but I would still bring it up I would I would always recommend and this is like general advice that I would tell anyone on any team I ever work for any any team I ever work with that works for me cuz I work for them um any any people I'm managing regardless of the team I'm on I would tell them please if you have thoughts concerns whatever like suggestions please talk to me about them so in Ryan's case if Ryan was like how do I how do I start having this conversation I would say bring it up with your manager I would love to hear about that if someone was like hey I think it would be really valuable if we could get some type of education or training covered through work like I personally I agree now again before Microsoft I was at Magnet forensics when that that was a really small company when we were like eight people if someone came to me and said that I would say I think that's a really cool idea I don't know if we're going to exist next week maybe we should try to exist next week before we talk about that it wasn't ever that bad for us um but I would say in the beginning it was probably more like I don't know if we have budget for that kind of stuff and uh we had a really good HR leader though I feel like early on she actually made sure that we could have convers like that so if employees did come to us we could say yeah like you want to go to that thing it will get covered but I think it's starts with having conversations about it to let like if management and Leadership is not doing it maybe it's not because they don't support it maybe it's because they're not advertising it as much because it does save on budget if no one's using it but also if the budget's there then people should be trying to use it so maybe they have to advertise it more so uh Ryan I think my advice on that last part is start having the conversation communicate why it's valuable to invest into people um I I don't know I feel like good leaders get it and sometimes other people are so focused on on trying to save money that they don't realize that you know people people want to stay around in places where they feel valued and part of feeling valued is being supported in your learning so that's my recommendation there um want to be nerd I'm going to read your comments backwards cuz I I briefly read the first one uh companies offering certificates is fantastic can't wait to have such an offer um yeah I think you know I I do strongly if you know if you're at a place and it's not being talked about I suggest try having a conversation with your manager about it I think it's important um I'll give you another example at Magnet forensics so I think this is super cool actually um I worked at a digital forensics company and as you might yes when we're hiring software developers the likelihood that they had a forensics background was was basically zero right who has a digital forensics background digital forensics people that's it like not generally not software developers so what was very interesting was that as that company was maturing and we had trainings we had um you know we had people that were brought on to the staff that used to be forensic exam examinator forensic examiners and forensic investigators there you go I combined both words like an idiot um we had both roles right we had people that had these experiences so when there was training we used to be able to say hey look like we have training for digital forensics that we're selling and like wouldn't it be really helpful if our employees that were software developers or testers or product managers could go have this experience and go learn about digital forensics and actually have a better domain understanding of all of the stuff they're building uh hell yeah so generally the cost was basically negligible but it meant that someone would be away right so this was a in in my opinion that was like an absolute no-brainer to support you might be in a an industry that's kind of like this maybe it's not digital forensics but maybe it's a very specific domain I don't I'm trying to think of something off the top of my head I don't want to embarrass myself trying to come up with a random example but you might be in a very specific domain where it's not common that people have this knowledge um but then you can go like if the company has training maybe that's something else to get the domain experience if you're looking for other training it's General like I want to learn kubernetes okay like if that's not something that your company just is doing already pardon me um then that might be a conversation to have like hey I think that learning kubernetes would be really helpful here um part of like I I I feel like it would be motivating and engaging for my career growth and talk to your manager about it um advania I I don't know if I got your name right but a big fan of your Dome train courses thank you very much I I appreciate that a lot uh I will try to uh plug them a little bit more later I did just launch another one uh for soft skills with Ryan Murphy so I will plug the those a little bit later uh but thank you so much I appreciate that and want to be ner back to your question have you ever thought about founding a startup company yes um yes I have I I think longterm in my career I don't know when what that looks like um but I I suspect at some point in my career May and who knows maybe it's like when it's my time to retire I I have no idea right I love working at Microsoft so what I'm about to say is not like I can't wait to leave and get out of here um I do like working at Microsoft I would say though that I Envision like I I don't know if I'll ever retire which sounds kind of funny because like I like to work so maybe maybe it is during retirement maybe it's before then I don't know but at some point in my life I would like to run a software company um I think like from a sense of fulfillment I think that's where I'll get it um and I think from some of my experience like you know I have never run my own company but I think from some of my experience I understand it's not easy right I understand like I have uh you know side projects I have a failed SAS company that was called meal coach that I worked on for two years on the side um we could never sell we could never make a dollar from it so that uh that failed um by the way on on Instagram devcraft I see your comment I will answer you in just a moment um so I had that that failed I have brand ghost that I'm building now on the side uh and has paying users which is cool so brand ghost is the first SAS company that I've had on the side uh that I'm helping build that has paid users which is a really cool experience right like I I've never had that before so um I I think it's some point in my life that'll be a a goal of mine um because I love building stuff and I I'd like to be in a position where it's not it's not about like oh look at me I'm the boss but I feel like I I'll put it this way when I when I worked at Magnet forensics I didn't own the company right but um I felt like I was given a lot of autonomy and there was a lot of trust given to me and that was such an empowering feeling to to be like I know that like when I go to work hard I know that it's going to have like huge impact and um I'm not saying like where I am now I don't have autonomy or like I don't have impact because I I certainly do um but you know I I would say being at a startup early stage and watching it grow I feel like I was direct like genuinely feel like I was directly responsible for a lot of the success that happened and that feeling of being like Oh if I just work my butt off and I can see results and be part of that um I think that's one of the reasons why I think I'd like to do a software company in the future future is a long time so I don't know what that means um Dev crafts on Instagram is saying hi Nick have you ever considered writing a book um I have been approached about it um I don't know if I could ever do it um the publishing companies that have contacted me want more technical books and to be honest uh this is this is just my perspective it's uh because you're asking a personal opinion of mine I will share it uh so that's not this is not me trying to pick on people's different opinions on this um so I think writing a book is a ton of work I think that people that have done it like especially technical books like hell yeah good for you I think that's so cool um I've written lots of technical blogs like I have hundreds of blog articles on dev leader.com were and again this is just my experience they were the the worst return on my time investment they cost me nothing to do like financially but they took so much time I had to make sure that I was driving traffic there so optimizing like SEO and stuff and really like all that seemed to come out of it was that people would just like nitpick them like that's how it felt so I was like I don't like it's the first thing that drops I would love to go back to writing more blog posts but um in terms of a book I I don't know um a technical one I can't ever see that happening and um if I I think if I were to write a book it would be about software development in general and my experience is doing it a sort of guidance um because I think that aligns more with naturally what I like to talk about like conversations like this right if I could put that into book format that was structured in a way that was useful that might be fun but from a Time perspective I simply don't have time um maybe there's some options with AI and ghost writers and stuff like that I don't know but it's uh it's not on my list of things to do at this point thank you for the awesome questions I'm going to go back to the article um and talk about the Vicious Cycle because now we're going to talk about it from the other side but please don't hesitate if you have other questions and stuff like you can see I'm answering them when they come in the chat I'm happy to talk through them I'm not happy to be coughing but let's look at it from the other Angle now okay so you are the more senior developer okay you're the person that people are coming to to get help now I know I know there's a few of you in the chat right now I know there's at least one cuz infected FPS said this right at the beginning and infected FPS is here every week so I know that they have experienced this and are experiencing it and I think it's very common there we go from Ryan book titled Dev leader software development from my point of view I think we need to say sorry in there somewhere because I'm Canadian so I have to apologize that I've written a book and I could say Dev leader uh what would say Dev leader uh a book a boot software development a and then I would say in bracket sorry um maybe something like that would be good so um if you are the person that people are coming to for help let's let's kind of go back through the situation okay so at the beginning of the stream I talked about when I found myself in this situation I'm trying to be helpful I'm going around helping people and then I'm like I don't have time so I had to go invent more time I went to download more time.com no I I basically just started working more and it took me a long time to realize but the answer was not to help people the same way the answer was certainly not to stop helping but I had to approach things differently and the the way that I frame this is like if you're feeling overwhelmed because either one person is constantly coming to you for for help or multiple people are and you're like oh my God don't have time for this like you know you're starting to feel burnt out or overwhelmed just because like it's nonstop like I got to get my done I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on here is a swear word I don't know sorry for saying it um I got to get my stuff done so if um if you're feeling like oh no I'm getting overwhelmed the the thing that I want to say is like I'm sorry but it's probably going to get a little bit worse before it gets better and that's because we're going to have to spend a little little bit more time with someone before they're going to start getting the help they need and leaving you alone so what does this look like you might already know where I'm going with this K just says k k and KK awesome I don't know I don't know what that means but I hope it's good maybe they're maybe a cat's walking on their keyboard um so that's just distracting now stop it um when people are asking you for help instead of just giving them the answer right there are literally times I can remember early on where I was walking around helping people and I would type the code in like on their keyboard I would type the code right and if you think about if you're in this situation where someone's constantly asking for help and they're I'm going to have to mute this person put them into a timeout nice I don't even know what that means sorry khil you're in timeout in the corner um if you can imagine that you've had especially Junior people coming to you asking for help and you're just like screw it man like I'm just like here yeah let's go to your keyboard here like here's the answer here's how you type the line of code Doom done and you're thinking finally go away I can get my work done right cuz you're you're stressed out now you're like I just want to get my stuff done the problem is that you've now taught them that when they're stuck all they have to do is come to you and their code will get written you've reinforced the wrong pattern unfortunately and I don't think people look at this like consciously they're not like oh great that's Nick he's the he's going to be the one that codes all my stuff I actually think it happens more subconsciously I'm not an expert on this by any means um I'm just a dude that writes code and manages teams but I think what actually happens is that people they're getting stuck for some of the reasons we talked about earlier and they go I I feel like again I think it happens subconsciously like I'm just going to ask for help because you know when I ask for help things get done so it trains them the wrong way it reinforces the wrong thing so the way that I think you can help with this is using the same cue that I said earlier which is someone comes to you and asks for help and then you say what have you tried so far and if they say well I haven't tried anything I don't actually know what I'm supposed to be doing here great now you know it's a Clarity thing get them unblocked get them sent away right if you're not the one to offer Clarity you should say oh like go talk to the product owner about that oh you don't know but someone else assigned this work to you go talk to them about it no worries but if you know like that's something that you can easily clear up and tell them to go okay there are some things we could do here which are like for example depending on how this is done if it's a pattern you might be able to have conversations in your team about hey when we're giving out the work items and people aren't clear on them maybe it's because people aren't putting enough detail in the tickets right like I don't know there could be a million different things here but in my opinion this is a queue that has worked so well and it's so simple and I want to share One More Story and I've talked about this one either on stream or on code commu or both but I want to talk about it because it's a real story and it sounds kind of made up but it's like it was so ridiculously like helpful for reinforcing just how important this is okay I'm not going to say anyone's names I try not to ever on stream unless someone like literally wants me to talk about something and that's a different story but at some point in my career I had a junior developer that was on my team and I can literally and this is like we were still in the office this is before you know the the remote work days we're in the office and she's very smart person so I want to start this off by saying this has nothing to do with her not being intelligent a very smart person and I can remember that she would we would you know get our work assigned and I could sense her she sat beside me I could sense her she would turn in her chair and I could sense that she was like she was waiting for me to like feel the presence and inevitably I would kind of like turn and and she would say hey like um I need help with this and I was like okay like no problem right I'm sitting right here I can help no worries and we go through it okay and then inevitably either shortly after the next day whatever it happened to be inevitably I would I would sense the same thing I would feel someone's looking at me and I would do the thing in my chair where I'd turn and she'd say hey I need help okay yeah no worries I don't know why she never like yelled at me and said hey Nick help me um but you know she's trying to make sure that I had space but she she would constantly ask for help and then I realized and this is again this is like years into being a manager before I realized this is going to sound silly when I say it this is why I say it sounds kind of made up but I literally realized that she had trouble problem solving or at least taking initiative to do it not because she's not smart she's a very very smart person but I was like oh crap like I realized the pattern every time that she asked for help she had never done anything yet and every time the way that she got unblocked was that we would just get her to do stuff and what started happening is this is where I came up with the what have you tried so far thing was that after a while cuz I'm not going to lie I would start to get kind of fed up from it not because I don't want to help her but because I'm thinking like why is this not getting better like why why does it seem like it's it's not quite the same question but it's almost the same style of question like why is she just not trying things so I would say hey what have you tried and I would literally catch her going I haven't I haven't tried anything yet and I'm go in my head I'm like well what do you mean what do you mean haven't tried anything and then it was like well do you understand what to do yeah like no I think it makes sense and then I'm going like okay yeah go try something like it's fine and I don't know like in hindsight maybe this was like she was nervous she wanted to like ask permission if it was like okay to try things so I don't really know but I do know that this Q worked so well okay so I was trying to give you the visual of like her like turning in her chair and I could sense it because this is what started to happen after giving this cue enough times I could sense her turning in her chair and I kind of learned this right so I would kind of see it out of the corner of my eye and I could literally see her turn and go and she would be sitting there thinking and go and she knew I haven't tried anything yet the first thing Nick's going to ask me is what have I tried so far and she would she'd think and then she would turn back to her desk and start trying something and it seems silly I get it it seems silly but like it literally taught her that she needed to try doing some things on her own and then she would turn to me and then I could sense that she wasn't doing the thing where she's thinking and I would turn to meet her and say what have you tried so far and she'd say well I've tried these couple of things and I'd say great what are you stuck on and she'd say well this one isn't working or this one is or both of them are working and I would say this is great and it taught her throughout the time that we worked together just to try problem solving on her own first and it like I said seems like a silly thing but it worked so well and it really reinforced something that I've been sharing with people for years now from both sides so that you know that was an example of teaching her how to ask questions effectively but I use this advice when I'm talking to more senior developers that feel like they're not getting time back because this is what I needed to hear when I was going through that phase in the beginning of my career when I was trying to help people is stop giving the answers to people this is the Vicious Cycle part stop giving the answers directly to people get them to try doing things first get them to try problem solving try exploring try getting stuck so if you are the person getting asked the questions this is the coaching for you right stop giving the answer right away ask them what they've tried so far if they haven't tried anything send them back maybe recommend some time boxing depending on your comfort level with that right maybe you need to talk to the product owner the manager figure out what's expected there easy conversation to have please do it but send the person back go try something make sure they know that like it's a safe place to fail right let them know like this is a time for you to go learn and try this out it's okay go try something come back but send them away to go try things don't tell them I don't got time for you right get them to try some things out so this is why I said it takes a little bit of extra time because the reality is you're telling them come back right you are them to come back and it is going to take more of your time you're going to have to have some deeper conversations with them but what ends up happening when you do this is that it starts teaching other people how to go problem solve how to go navigate ambiguity and then try things out this is literally the experiences that we need to build up as software developers you end up unfortunately short circuiting some of that experience just by giving away answers I'm gonna go check out the chat because there's a whole bunch of stuff that came in here um so give me one sec infected FPS says I don't know where I picked it up because I never really had a mentor past my first three years but I never write a single line of code when helping someone I direct them yes so on on this note if you're par programming and you're a more senior person guiding a more Junior person uh I don't know what the there's a funny phrase for it but basically like you know get them get the person you're helping to be the driver and it sometimes it might feel like a pain in the ass cuz you're like just let me type the line of code like it's the line above where you are right now just let me do it don't let them do it let them try things out you can offer value in different ways and you can also practice patience but let them drive with the keyboard and mouse let them do it it's really important so that they learn we notied this type of thing happen um I'll give you another quick example for on Call qu I have worked with amazing engineers and site reliability engineers and I have seen the difference between an amazing site reliability engineer helping someone by saying oh no I know you're stuck on this like I'll go run here's the commands and I'm going to go run them for you and it feels good because you're like oh hell yeah like you know crisis averted we got this yes I have the expert coming in but you know what happens next time you say oh what were those commands again the ones that you never actually had to go run the ones that you're not really familiar with because you've never actually typed them and used them and you reach back out and you say hey like that thing came up again like um could you tell me the commands again and they go oh yeah no problem I ran it for you and you're like awesome this is great it's the same problem right we need to be able to try doing the things ourselves to learn them and reinforce um choose reality I had a lead that would answer dumb questions with a let me let me Google Google thate link I caught on real quick to be actually uh to be actually stuck before asking yeah um I hope in that case I mean it sounds hilarious but um I hope in that case that person had a really good like radical cander relationship with you or other people on the team um because I think with the the wrong receiving end of that could be like catastrophic where people are like well I never want to ask a question ever again in my life and I'm going to go you know back to my desk and die now um but I think you know depending on the relationship that could be it could be a funny way it could get people to realize like as you said you know get stuck first um M I don't know what your name is there m Jacker qu 3 too well that's actually a good way to ask them I I find it to be extremely effective it's very simple I don't know if that was sarcasm or not but um I I find it just works really well Ryan says I have recognized I am a senior getting asked all those questions I need to create more documentation this is something I haven't talked about yet um so I will oh let's just answer right now but I struggle to find the time so your advice is super helpful for me so yes in this case there's another trick we can do here which is when people are stuck on stuff you get them to go navigate it you can actually help break the cycle even more and one thing you can do is you can create the documentation for it so the next time someone comes to ask you a question you can say I'm so glad you asked here's a link by the way a lot of the YouTube videos I make on dev leader I know that I'm making them for you but a lot of them are made for me and it's because I'm doing something I get stuck and I go you know what next time I'm stuck on this I'm Googling for myself so um but one extra hack you can do here is when people are stuck and they come back to you because they've tried some things out and you say excellent this is so good let's go through the analysis together and now that you've answered this for yourself by the way great job it would be so helpful of you to contribute back to your peers and if you could document this in some way way that would make it nice and searchable for them they could understand this I think that would be an awesome Improvement that you could give back to the team and guess what now they become the expert they get some documentation put together they become the expert on it so the next time that question has to get asked you can say oh I'm so glad you asked that not only is their documentation but Jim Bob over here wrote it and he can now help you so documentation uh I've also talked about this a lot on code commute or in general depending on the post and stuff you might read for me uh I love in hate documentation I think in theory it's very helpful I think in practice uh it is an absolute nightmare of a tax to maintain so I think if you can get the right maintenance mode in place that feels like it's uh not a heavy tax then it can be very valuable so things like hey as you use it and it's out of date update it um but I've seen people also go out of their way to document stuff and go crazy into it and then it's out of dat immediately and then it just rots so it needs to be low cost to maintain Ryan says one trick I like to do is all the person questions back sorry like to do is and one trick I like to do is all the person questions back and use the questions to guide them oh ask I'm assuming ask the questions back uh doing so makes them feel like they came up with the answer yes this is actually a coaching technique um so and it's related it's not the exact same but basically you can have conversations with people almost exclusively by asking questions and then they solve all their own problems and they actually do come up with the ideas which is really cool so I definitely recommend that one so if people are coming to you to ask for the answer you can push back and say like so someone's like hey I need to pick um you know which database Tech to use so you say oh what have you tried so far and they go they actually have they're like I've tried out MySQL and postgress okay cool U so what did you find well seems like on the performance blah blah blah and you go oh interesting and you just and you keep asking questions if you just keep asking questions even when they ask you a question and they're like so which one would you pick you might say oh which which metrics did you go collect oh like you know latency you know database size oh interesting so which ones of these are more valuable right you you keep asking more questions and a lot of the time people will you it's almost like rubber ducking but you're kind of like doing the guiding for them it's really interesting but I highly recommend you try it out it's a bit of a a mindset shift like I feel like if you haven't done it before you actively have to think about doing it because our instinct is probably just to answer stuff but try asking questions when I have done a little bit of management training and coaching specifically they made us do exercises with other managers and they said you get to only ask questions back it's hard but try it um do you have any good resources for that senior lead coding best practices or architecture design patterns um kind of um I have I have a bunch of blog articles on design patterns um I have a an ebook on it but I also have them in blog posts um I have videos on design patterns but these ones are like the gang of four not like like distributed system patterns sorry um oh sorry I I was just reading the next comment but I think it's a LinkedIn tag um I I don't know when you when you ask about do I have content or re I think I like to think that a lot of the stuff I put out could be valuable but um if it's programming specific then a lot of the stuff I do for examples is in C so um someone might say well that's not you know relevant to me but um I have courses that I think would be helpful for seniors um I talk about a lot of this stuff on dev leader a lot more on code commute code commute and I'll maybe maybe let me get through the questions and I'll plug some of the other stuff that I got but I'll come back to that one maybe maybe code commutes a good a good um example of this stuff but I don't feel like I have I don't have like Technical Resources for like senior leads on like architecture and things like that I think there's lots of stuff like that out there um I still think personally a lot of that stuff just comes with practice I think there's good resources out there still but uh practice um I think James was tagging Greg is my impression of that um it's impressive to see someone at your level sharing so much on social media what got you into it I'd love to hear what inspires you to engage like this um yeah so the short answer to that is in 2013 maybe this isn't short I ramble a lot 2013 uh I had become a manager at that point uh and as I was trying to take management a little bit more seriously I was like because I was still uh this is worth mentioning if you don't know my background before Microsoft for the eight years I was at Magnet forensics I was a software developer and engineering manager at the same time so when you hear me talking about things from an engineering manager's perspective please keep in mind that I've been writing software the entire time until Microsoft and then I still code every single day outside of work um so I in 2013 said I'm going to learn in public because it's a really weird shift to go from being an engineer to an engineering manager no one knows what the hell is going on so I said I'm going to start collecting resources sharing this stuff out started writing my blog which is Dev leer.com that 10-year break because I was looking at other people that had been on social media for half the time and having tremendous success at it and I said all that they did was they stayed consistent they just kept posting it's not that they're not good at what they do but I'm sure the first few things they put together sucked because that's the case for everyone and they just stuck to it so I said I'm going to do that I'm going to do it this time it is extremely rewarding for me like fulfilling to be able to provide some help something that I hope is helpful and for someone that's like hey man like that really helped me it doesn't matter how much you know crap I get from trolls and stuff like it only takes one of those for me to be like doesn't matter you can say anything you want I help this person so too bad um so that's really rewarding but yeah I just told myself that I'm just going to stay consistent and I knew that to do it I had to systemize how I post content on social media which is why I built brand ghost on the side we'll plug that in just a moment but uh James says I love that someone goes to someone's desk and writes code but we have to continuously improve the root cause of why we need communication yeah write down a list uh of blow to try where to look for information ask if the business question talk to rubber ducky best thing that ever happened to me yep TCC schedule a meeting or ping me we should always keep ourselves open to communication but let them know we are going to work on how they can help themselves yep that's a critical part it's not about telling people like go away my door is shut it's about hey look I'm trying to help you help yourself and when you're helping yourself and you're still stuck I'm absolutely here to help you but you need to make sure they're familiar and comfortable with helping themselves it's a skill they have to practice it and you need to practice telling them that because otherwise you're not developing a skill which is your boundaries I also work with a guy that does the heroic time thing and gives the answers to people I've had to stop him from doing that for me when I asked him about a domain he uh he was an expert and yeah it's uh it's challenging right I don't think people do it to be malicious in any way I think they're just trying to help right um so I think it it's if you can have that conversation with someone and saying like um sorry I'm behind on the chat I'm I'm so sad yes uh it is an AMA so yes as upu um yeah I think if you can have conversations with people and say like hey look I know it's going to take a little bit of extra time but I'm trying to learn like can you point me to the resources if they exist I'll go read and come back with questions but you know something to say like hey I'm just trying to learn right please don't rush the answer for me because then I will never learn um James says what about those who has someone's scheduled time when they are blocked something that really grinds my gears yeah feels like we're blocking teamwork but rotating a role who's helpful who handles G is great yeah um yeah I I don't know I I've suggest this to people block time in your calendar for Focus time and um I still have people that will block and I'll reject it I use the block as a default to let people know like this is I plan to be focused here if something critical comes up I realize as a manager like a lot of my career is just like accommodating other people so that I can help and get stuff done so I get it but I try to use that as the default and I'll you know if I'm like I don't think this is as important as me getting my focus time on something I'll reject it and I'll have people message and say hey why why you know what's going on I'm like Oh my calendar's blocked oh so sorry like didn't know okay um and then they'll reschedule or they'll say if you're blocked this is the only time we could get like here's what we're going to talk about and I go great thank you you know I'll follow up but yeah I think it's important you know boundaries block stuff in your calendar so you don't get consumed by tons of other stuff um oh and then chose a reality was saying the let me Google that for you was funny fit is humor I'm really bad I got to read faster sorry um so sod I don't see your question coming up but it is an an AMA uh infected FPS says literally had that happen where I had a weird Edge case uh with some i setting commented on a Blog about it had same issue a year later and found my own Post Yeah I had a funny story where there's a there's a woman that I I Mentor at work on a different team and uh I don't think in her role she has to use C and I think something came up where she had to start learning C for whatever reason and um she's like I I was Googling something about or binging uh I was searching there we go that's the more general term I was searching for something online about how dictionaries in C worked and she sent me a screenshot and it was like my name at the top of the Google search with my face on a Youtube video um so I thought that was kind of cool but I've definitely you know I I find some of the best reasons for me to make content if I'm ever like going through a dry spell of like I don't know what to write about um or or to make videos about it's like if anytime I have a problem and I'm trying to I'm searching online or asking llms for answers I'm like this is actually a great topic because the next time inevitably this happens I get to ask me that's the position I want to be in um choose a reality I wrote that kind of document just the other day as I explained to someone how to do a thing I love that idea and should have asked them to do it as a new hire yeah especially as new hes um I I'll share this briefly too I switched teams at the beginning of this year and I had a bunch of new hirers start with me uh or shortly after and they did such a tremendous job with keeping documentation up uh up to date um and it was almost like scary that they they took that that behavior on so easily and so rapidly and so effectively because they were like it would come up in like sync meetings where someone was like oh I was stuck on this but so and so pointed me to the documentation they wrote and like walked me through it and I was like did I just have all of my junior or new Engineers like on board each other like seamlessly somehow like it worked really well but it worked well because they leaned into it right they they said hey look documentation was a little rough in these areas we'll get it going and inevitably everyone else on the team like followed in their footsteps it was super cool um the great wow the reason why I'm asking is because sometimes I struggle with giving advice because of all the new technology coming out and wanted to start the group out on the right foot yeah um so yeah for sure though in terms of I'll kind of repeat that part though in terms of like architecture I do not um just because a lot of the content I put out is not really like architecture um I talk about plugin architecture but again my my C or my examples are in C for basically everything programming related if you're looking for more like um career or role Focus kind of information I think code commute is a good example um I cannot review resumés um I I'll share I just want to share this with you so you can understand that it's not because I don't want to help you um this is a perspective I share it on code commute actually um which I will I'll plug these in just a moment I I'm the kind of person that will um I take on a lot of things so I have my job I have my wife we have three dogs we have two cats we don't have kids um I want to go to the gym every day I used to be into bodybuilding I've kind of retired from that I've been sick recently so I've been going every day um I am trying to launch a SAS business on the side that has real paying users I try to put out three YouTube videos a week I write a newsletter every week I post every single day on social media live stream try to do twice a week I do a lot of stuff and I don't have enough time for even the things that I want to do I am operating at over 100% capacity unfortunately I do this to myself and I'm not telling you this because I'm trying to brag about how much I do I'm telling you this because I would love to be able to dedicate time to being able to help at a granular level of reviewing resumés but I simply cannot I simply do not have time to do it um so I apologize for that but that's the sort of the reality so at some point I need to make sure that I'm focusing on my things because I just do not have capacity to do all of the things that I would like to do so that's my my reason so I do apologize for that but I cannot accommodate um I think I got through all the questions somehow uh I wanted to see if there's any anything else that I wanted to add for the seniors but I think we ended up covering it especially through some of the questions um yeah I do think that's that's it so let me go ahead I'm going to plug some stuff so thanks for being here um thanks for thanks for waiting me for me to get through all the questions that was a lot uh I'm going to switch over to full screen mode um so by the way this is the article that I was mentioning so depending on when you join the stream I will just link it again this is my newsletter and if you enjoy the live streams for this session that I do on Mondays at starting at 7 Pacific I will generally be kind of walking through my newsletter article not always but like 95% of the time that's what it's been this is not me telling you that if you're like man I don't want to subscribe to a newsletter newsletter suck I'm not telling you got to subscribe it is totally free if you want the archive that's paid for the archive that's paid for comes with Discord access so that's a private Discord where you know you can ask questions and stuff if you're like I don't care Nick but it would be kind of Handy to know what we're going to talk about just go to weekly. dead.can you have Saturday Sunday and all of Monday to check up on it and see what we're going to talk about even if you just want to pull it up during the live stream to read through it weekly Dev leer.com so the course that just launched that I did with Ryan Murphy is this new soft skills one so you'll notice that on dome train this has been a a big thing for net developers C developers on dome train okay almost all the choruses are net and c and Nick chaps has allowed Ryan Murphy and I to create um choruses that are for career development which is awesome so it's super cool because because this is the stuff that I like to talk about I like talking about software engineering I like talking about Career Development this is what I do all day every day for the last 12 years so um the one that we just launched is about soft skills so I'll pull that up here I will also put it in the chat if you're interested so there you go um but if you're not on Twitch YouTube or Facebook um unfortunately you have to type doet tr.com um so if you're interested you can check that out I realize sorry if you're on Instagram this is clipped it's annoying I understand but um you can see this is the curriculum we do try to make sure in our courses that we're going through some practical examples too so that way and it's cool because since Ryan and I do it will actually act out some of the things and the the part that may not be obvious to you is in the parts that we act out together we actually don't give each other a heads up which is pretty crazy so we actually get on camera and we say okay like in this one where where is it it's um is it here yeah so this one exercise and constructive feedback example okay so we know it's about constructive feedback and we both give constructive feedback but we don't tell the other person what even what the scenario is we just start the conversation so you're seeing what's obviously it's not like the scenario is not real but the interaction is like you know it's not um it's genuine how we're like trying to respond to each other it's pretty fun um so we try to make sure we include stuff like that so that you have examples of what these things actually look like because yes theoretical conversation stuff is valuable but um like we say with the programming stuff you have to practice this stuff so we try to give you some examples there also some worksheets that you can use in this course as well so try to do more of that as we go forward but we have this new course so that's the soft skills one getting promoted as a software engineer me and then nailing the behavioral interview this one is not about coding and system design this is about the other types of questions like tell me about a timewar so completely different focus and then of course if you're interested in learning C I have um I have the two courses on don't train this is such a cool honor to be able to have the getting started in Deep dive ones so getting started literally takes you from I have never coded in my life before and I'm going to start learning C so um I do think that that's a like I you know I spend a lot of time if you've seen my YouTube channel a lot of the tutorials I have are for beginners so this is a cool way for me to try and channel that into something more organized so um bunch of courses here but again I want to be very clear with people yes these courses are for sale yes they cost money but I always want to be in a position and I hope that you feel this way about what I do on social media I will always put out as much free content as I possibly physically can because I want to be in a position where you see the free content and you go I like what Nick has to say I like how Nick explains it and if there are things that feel applicable that you were like I want it more organized and I want the accountability because there is a cost associated with it then you feel comfortable paying for it I don't want to be in a position where I'm like hey go buy this stuff and like I can't wait to steal your money and I hope you learn nothing like I'm not trying to trick anyone I want to demonstrate with all of my other content like you're about to get the same type of stuff just in a very organized way that's my goal so I hope that helps um yeah and uh so on Ryan I actually don't control the the prices so on dome train and stuff the um the Black Friday stuff uh ended but there is a sale right now it's kind of unique so you can see at the top until January 2nd when you have more than one item in your basket the cheapest one is free so that's pretty cool uh the Black Friday stuff stuff was 40% off so Nick chapsas who runs Dome train does run sales so if you are like hey this is cool I don't want to pay out of pocket I understand like I'm not I'm not here to say again go you know spend the money that you don't feel comfortable spending but if it's discounted and you're waiting for it there's options that come up there's also the the pro subscription so if you're like screw it I'm going to go in and I'm going to pay and get courses you can get a pro subscription and you can watch all the courses so something to think about um and and maybe back to what we were saying earlier in the Stream about training maybe you talk to work and you say hey work wouldn't it be cool if I could get some training and I know just the site for it there's an idea um then everyone wins right so there's something to look forward to um if I jump over to my YouTube channel um this is probably the one that people know this is Dev leader this is my main Channel it has all of my edited videos with my stupid face on the thumbnail um these are tutorials they are conversations like this that are generally more polished right they're edited and I get fancy thumbnails um so this is I suspect most people that are here probably know me from this channel um you should sell it as a video book James what what should I sell as a video book maybe I will um so the chor is a video book is that I can't I don't the courses are I create the material and then it's it's uh licensed so I don't actually the course material is not mine um but yeah this is my main YouTube channel if you aren't subscribed to this and you like this kind of stuff um there you go and the other YouTube channel so this is the one that I've been doing on the side um so this is you can see it this is crazy it's growing a lot in the past month if I refresh it so it says subscribers come on internet we're already over 800 that's cool um this channel is outperforming my main one for a reference okay so um this you can see every video every thumbnail is me in a car I literally just put the camera up in the car and I film myself driving to and from and the conversations are very much like what you're watching right now except without the chat it's not live so if you like how I'm talking through things um I basically I tell people submit a comment like is there something we can check that has a comment on it um I don't know maybe this one right so right here this one came in today so I'm going to basically go make a code commute video for this person so when I drive into work on Wednesday or maybe on the way home from Crossfit tomorrow if I can actually make up this person's asking about transitioning um saying code commut is hilarious to you rage at traffic yes you also get to see the real Nick um you see me get mad at uh traffic but um tomorrow for me is not an office day um Monday and Wednesdays are but the other the other week was pretty hectic with a lot of commuting um but this person was asking about basically moving to a product owner role from a developer role so I'm going to spend one of my commutes talking about that and um so this channel is basically driven by people asking questions and if I happen to get through them I go to Reddit and I just pick a Reddit topic from experienced EVs and talk about it so um definitely check that out if you like this kind of thing it's just that it's not live because that would be totally Reckless and I'm not living my life like that so uh folks I think that's it though my voice is about to expire so uh thank you so much for being here I appreciate it um I still haven't figured out when I'm going to resume my coding live streams I apologize trying to get back in the groove of that I don't think it's going to um it's not going to be tomorrow especially because I've been sick and I really want to get back to uh to getting to the gym but we'll see um but those will resume at some point uh otherwise though I will see you next Monday same time 700 p.m. Pacific and uh if you can't wait then join me on code commute uh people have been saying that they just turn it on when they're uh I've heard people say they turn it on when they're cleaning the house when they're commuting to work or when they get to the office and they just have it kind of playing and and listening through it so um choose a reality I'm glad the algorithm through here too that's awesome uh but it's funny I I think that people are really liking code commute because they can just it's almost like you're hanging out with me and I rant a lot more um as sod was saying I rant a lot about traffic there's really stupid people driving out there like there's people that drive at night without their lights on just like I don't even know how you see and it's terrifying because when they're behind you it just looks like there's nothing there's no Road there's no other cars on the road cuz there's this black thing blocking all the lights like how are you driving like that you should probably turn your eyes on I don't know it's weird but um if I don't see you next Monday I hope to see you on code commute thanks for being here and I will see you next time take care