College Developer Struggles - Principal Engineering Manager AMA

All right, folks. Just getting started here. Just making sure that the the streams are streaming. Cool. I think that's working. Um, we're doing something a little different today. If you're on Well, if you're on Instagram, you're not watching this. I'm not streaming Instagram today. I'm I got my Tik Tok access back. So, um, if you're watching this or you're watching the recorded version if you're a Tik Tok user and you would prefer to watch on Tik Tok, the stream should be available again on Tik Tok. Um, I'm just making sure the Substack one's going. And it looks like it's going cool. I like pulling that up because I don't get the chat unless I go to Substack. Thank you for letting me know the stream is working on YouTube. I appreciate it. Uh, awesome stuff. Okay, cool. Um, welcome folks. If you're new to these live streams, these are very much like an AMA kind of format. So, um, if you have questions and stuff you want answered about career development, software engineering, things like that, please jump in the chat if you're comfortable doing that. Cat here. Um, ask away anything you want. I would much rather spend time answering questions in the chat. If there's anything I can try and help with, I would like to do that. And uh of course I do have a topic for every live stream and it's always based on the newsletter article that I publish the weekend prior and that newsletter article is almost always based on code commute. So if you watch or consume my content on different channels and stuff code commute I vlog basically every day uh whether it's CrossFit or like my drive to CrossFit or to work and I try to answer questions that way. Then I take that content, I make it into a newsletter article that goes out on the weekend and then I do this live stream. And so hopefully if you if you consume the content somewhere, you'll know the topic. Otherwise, you know, happy to have you just on the live stream. But I'm going to put the link to the newsletter article into the chat. It's just at weekly.devleader.ca. So if you don't have access to the chat, that's where it's at. It is a email newsletter and I remind people every time no you don't have to sign up and get the email. You can treat it just like a blog post. So if you want to know what the live stream is going to be about generally you can just go to weekly.devleer.ca and see what's going to be posted up there. And um yeah I think that's all the logistic stuff. Um I guess one more quick note that I'm super excited about is uh today was the day on my main YouTube channel which is Dev Leader. Um because I have several YouTube channels. The the primary one, my my main original YouTube channel just reached 14,000 subscribers today, which is pretty cool. Um it's taken a long time. I think some people do it much much faster than I do. That's okay. Uh but yeah, 14,000 subs. It's almost been like just under three years of actually producing content regularly. I'm a little behind on videos for that channel, actually. So, I sent some over to the editor after this past weekend, and I'll have more that I'll film uh this week as well. So, very excited about that. Like I said, it's uh slow moving, but it's uh it's cool to see the progress. So, with that said, today's topic is going to be about a code commute topic that came up, and someone was asking about, what's a good way to say this? like they had a handful of different things that they were thinking about for how they want to spend time and energy in college as a software developer. And so in the newsletter article, there's a little bit more general advice, but um the motivation behind this one was uh I just want to give a little bit of background so that people understand like why the newsletter article was kind of framed maybe a little bit of a certain way and um maybe some of the things we'll talk about today. not this individual actually was um getting a little bit of income from like freelancing and stuff like that. So, I thought that was super cool. Um I don't think a lot of people realize that like, you know, it's it's one thing to be able to say like I can, you know, I can program things or I can write code. It's a it's another thing, you know, to be doing that kind of work full-time, building systems and teams and stuff like that. And that's awesome. And it's another whole completely different set of skills to be able to uh to do freelancing successfully. Um I don't like again I I just think that people underestimate you know the the amount of effort and the skill set that that requires. So for example when you're freelancing you don't just like sit down and write code and then like money shows up. [laughter] That would be cool. um I would just be sitting in this room writing code and uh letting the the money pile but it's not really how it works. um you have to do a lot of like selling and marketing and stuff like that and it can be uncomfortable but it's a set of skills that you have to go build and so when I talk to individuals um that have some freelancing experience I just like reminding them like hey you know I know that for a lot of them that I talk to at least they're like yeah I do this but I'm really you know trying to get my first job or I'm trying to do this I'm trying to do that and I just like pausing them for a moment to remind them like hey Just so you know, it's super cool that you actually have like clients that are paying you money to go build things. Like, not a lot of people will do that. And I I am transparent with them. I'm like, I've been programming for I don't know what it is now, like 22 plus years, 23 years. Um, whatever, like 15 of those professionally. And like I don't have any freelancing jobs ever. And like for me to go do sales and marketing for myself to try and get clients like that, like that's that kind of scares me. Like I'm not skilled at it yet because I haven't spent a lot of time doing that. But the thought of it kind of makes me uneasy cuz I'm like, "Oh man, how would I do that?" So just, you know, reminder for folks if you are doing that or that's a thing you're pursuing, like kudos to you. That's that's super awesome. So yeah, this individual was I don't know if I'd say crossroads like they were they seemingly at a crossroads or they're kind of looking for some advice and it's really like you know I'm in college how should I focus my time and attention? They were kind of concerned about getting their first job. Um they were saying that and I think they're outside of the US so unfortunately like I'm from Canada originally have a better understanding of Canada. Um, but they're also outside of the US. And I I don't really know what country they're from. So I I need to acknowledge up front that, and I said this in the code commute video, that like I can't give you very clear advice if I'm not wellversed in, you know, um, some cultural or geographic differences and stuff like that. So, I kind of have to do as best as I can, right? But they were saying um you know internships like they're they're not really sure how they're going to do that. Um and really like how do they balance their time, right? So [clears throat] I'm going to I'm going to talk through this kind of at a high level. Uh but that was sort of the framing for why I wrote about this. Um I think first things first I want to acknowledge that um you know I I think it's it's sort of there's a lot of evidence around this now like it's not it's not a requirement that you go to college or go to university to be able to see success in software engineering. Um I know that was like years ago more perpetuated. I think there are still things today that perpetuate that, but it's not I think there's just enough examples to to know that that's not a requirement. Do I personally think that it's a great option? Yes. I you know I think anyone that's interested in furthering their education, I think that's great. If that's um when we talk about like boot camps versus college or university and stuff like that, I'm like they're just different. Like college and university is going to be like years of of school. Um, boot camps are generally not like that. So, I'm not sitting here saying like one is necessarily better than the others like universally, but I think we're just talking about different things. So, if you are pursuing going to a boot camp and you're enjoying that and you're learning lots, like I think that's tremendous. If you are in college or university or considering that path, I think that's that's awesome, right? Um, I just think that it's important as software developers, like you want to keep an open mind that in a career like this, you're going to be learning for the rest of your career. Um, things move really fast, technology changes, there's always new problems to solve. There's plenty of things that you will build up fundamentals and a foundation for that you can apply to different domains. But like throughout your career, you will find yourself in new situations and you go, "Oh crap." like I don't know what this thing is, right? But here I like you know here I am. I'm gonna learn. I'm going to be successful at this and you will. And um this is why we talk about imposttor syndrome a lot in this field. There's just because you're you're always learning and putting yourself into scenarios where you don't have all the experience for it. So again I just like reminding people that you know furthering your education whatever that looks like for you I think is is a great option. So the first thing I wrote down in my newsletter around this is kind of like an order of operations and this is based on a highlevel sort of reflection of what I would I don't I I kind of want to caution myself from saying this is what I would recommend because it's general advice but this is how my brain kind of thinks through it. So I I said like I think if you're in school I think it's important to stay in school, right? Like you're there you're you're on a a path to go do extra learning. Like I think that's important. I do think that if you need to pause, right, if you're going through stuff where it's like it's difficult financially or whatever else, um, if you need to pause and your path in school doesn't look perfectly linear, like I think that's fine. But I I think, you know, getting a couple years into it and then and then stopping entirely and being like, I'm just never going back. Like I I wouldn't recommend that. I do think that it's it's a good option if you're there and you've already committed some time to it. Like try to finish. So that's part one of this. Um the next thing is like I I just feel like I can't [laughter] I can't overstate this. Um just like internships. Um, I I recognize that not every person has, you know, a school system or they're in a program that that enables that, right? Um, [laughter] sorry, I I can see my stream playing back to me on a delayed feed and I just watch myself closing my eyes thinking like that. So, I was laughing at it. But I I I just think that from my experience, I had internships and I I sort of think that I don't want to say like the only reason I am where I am today is because of internships. I think that's a bit of a stretch, but I I feel like I owe a lot of where I've gotten to in my career and what my early career looked like because of internships. I say this as someone who and I've kind of talked about this with a few other people that have shared you know some similar um experiences but I don't like I went to university for computer engineering and I felt like when I was in school like taking my classes I remember like regularly telling myself like why are you doing this? I didn't enjoy the school part. I didn't enjoy classes. um you know there was a lot of math there was you know physics chemistry like some of the concepts like you know I didn't mind chemistry I didn't mind physics but like the stuff that I was doing I'm like I don't enjoy doing this this isn't like it's not for me and then when like the math was really hard I'm like man like like am I in the right spot and then what would happen is because I had six internships it was every other semester of school. Um, it was just this super, you know, vivid, uh, experience for me where I'm like, this is definitely the line of work that I want to be in. So, every time I had the opportunity to be building software in the workplace, I was like, hell yeah, this is absolutely the right spot. And then internship would wrap up. I'd go back to school and then, you know, I get a few months or yeah, couple months into the semester and I'm like, man, it's not for me. I got exams coming up. I hate this. Um, and just like wasn't for me. Um, sorry, I don't know if I can get your name right from Twitter. Ebear, is that right? So, sorry if I got it wrong. Um, but they say, "I've come to enjoy the theoretical part of compsite, but I still prefer implementation." That's awesome though, right? I think so. So, this is a I appreciate you saying that because what I'm talking about is a a thank you for trying to help me say it. Uh I have like a bit of a a fear of getting people's names wrong and I try to take the opportunity on live streams just to try. Um the reason for that is because you and I aren't in the same room and um you know, if it's really that bad for me, I can just hang up this live stream. But um I appreciate you [laughter] you trying to help me out with that. But yeah, I I I want to acknowledge that what what I'm talking about is purely, you know, my experience in college and university. So it's great if you go and you're like, I really enjoy this, right? If there's parts of it that you love, um I'm sure there were classmates of mine that I had that that did enjoy physics and math and and chemistry or uh a bay. Oh man, I'm so sorry. I'm I'm trying. Um uh as they're saying like you know the theoretical part of computer science like I don't even enjoy that. [laughter] So I think it's great if you can find those things um because it makes the learning so much more effective. So much more effective. So anyway, I just wanted to to call that out like um you know that was my experience but internships I found were tremendous. And I also like reminding people that like sure I went to a school where um and my program was specifically a co-op program. So internships were literally a mandatory part of what we did. You had to take an internship every other semester. There's no choice. It's part of the program. So it's a little unfair when I speak about this and I'm like, "Oh, like internships were it was an easy thing to get internships." First of all, it wasn't easy, but second of all, the reality is my program had that kind of built in. So, I'm talking about it from a place of like uh I don't know, it's like definitely kind of privileged in terms of what the program was like, but um there are opportunities for internships. There are uh you know, your school might actually have relationships with Sorry. Yeah, your school might have relationships with companies. um they might not be advertised as such because you don't have a co-op program. That's obvious. That might be the case and you can still reach out to like guidance counselors and stuff like that and they can help you with that. It might be that your school doesn't have any such thing, but there are absolutely companies that have internship programs and you can go apply to those. And the one thing that I just really wanted to hammer home for talking about internships, I mean, there's a bunch, but uh one thing I just wanted to make sure I had some time to say is that I absolutely recognize that uh job market is very tough right now, especially for people that are new to the industry. There's a lot of competition. You have a lot of people that are that have more years of experience that are whether they're laid off or they're switching jobs. Like, it just feels like you're competing against the entire world. And then then there's AI and it's like, "Oh, are we going to even have jobs? Why am I doing this?" Um, when it comes to internships, this is literally companies saying, "We want students. We want the people that don't have the years of experience. We want to bring on students." And that's a signal, right? So, for all the folks that tell me like, "No, company's hiring juniors." Oh, and I like I get that it's challenging and it's frustrating. There's a lot of competition. Yes, they are. And look for companies that have internships because they are literally saying we want students. Okay, so that's just something I wanted to say. If you can't find them, I'm not saying it's trivial to find, but even if you look at big tech companies, a lot of them, if you go searching for big tech company and internship, they'll have something. You could reach out to um you know large to medium-sized companies and ask them if they would do internships. Lots of things to explore that way, but specifically internships are for students. If you are a student, that is a signal that they're looking for students. Um interned at AWS last summer, which is a document heavy company. I found that using theory to prove the importance of my design decisions helped Cool. Yeah. helped my communication to stakeholders. That's that's really that's really valuable, right? So again, that can look different for different people, but the key point in that statement is like communication with stakeholders. How are you going to do that? It's not just my opinion. I think this is cool, so we should do it. Like, yeah, good luck with that. That's not engineering, right? Um, and then goes on to say, I don't enjoy it if I'm not using it to implement a project. Interesting. Right. So, it's kind of like a means to getting you to that implementation foundational block for my project and I enjoy the research. Very cool. I think that's awesome. Right. Um, so thank you for sharing that. Um, I think that's awesome. Okay, the next thing that I wrote down in my list of order of operations, and this one's kind of funny because, uh, maybe I would put this arguably at the beginning, but because we're specifically talking about, um, you know, being in college and stuff. I I wanted to underscore, you know, staying to complete it. I wanted to underscore internships, but building stuff. build build. Write software, build stuff, keep doing it. It is the ab in my opinion the absolute best way that you can skill up. Um, this is applicable for the rest of your career. If it's like, oh, I don't have experience doing X and I want a job doing X, you know, I'm I'm at work and my company doesn't teach us X. Like the thing that's absolutely in your control is that you can go build something with X. It might not be professional experience necessarily, but you can go create some type of experience using thing X. You can learn about it. Okay? And then especially when you are more a junior and you don't have you know all this professional experience to put on your resume in my opinion and I talk about this on my one YouTube channel called code or my goodness there's too many uh dev leader path to tech I do resume reviews it's just my opinion but I do think that having projects as a way to talk about the things that you are trying to learn is hugely valuable. Okay. So if you are junior and you don't have, you know, all of these years of experience like all these other developers that have been in the industry for 10 years, the thing that you can do is show that you are interested in learning. You're taking initiative. You're building things. You're trying these things out because you can create some relative experience. Relevant. Relevant is the word I want. Not relative. Maybe both, but relevant. Um, and that's in your control to do it. Uh Baron Bite says, "Open source is an option. I've been contributing to a nonprofit with open source Docker and databases so far." Awesome. Love this. I have talked to a handful of people. I think this is so great. So, thank you for the reminder on this. Um this one often slips my mind because I will be totally transparent. I don't find myself contributing to open source. And that's not because I think that I am better than it or something, but there are a lot of things that I would like to do and I don't have infinite time, but I think that's awesome if you can do it. The few people that I've talked to that do this, I think whether it's open source or uh not for profofit, that's the other sort of bucket of things here. I've talked to a bunch of people that have done this where they're like look I haven't got my first like full-time paid for job and you know I've been trying to build stuff on the side and like you know that's great and then they end up finding something where uh if it's open source they can contribute to it and that's great because you start to have a little bit more like community and team around the things that you're building. So, as much as I will keep shouting from the mountaintop like build, build build, you need to be building software and having projects, um the the next level of like making it more real compared to work is like do it with other people. [laughter] It's gonna it's extremely likely that when you are working in your career, you're going to be building software with other people. So, if you can contribute to open source, awesome. someone's probably going to be reviewing your code. There might be an opportunity to chat with people that also contribute to it to be able to discuss what you're building, right? So, these are real types of experience that will have a, you know, really solid overlap with work you'll be doing in the workplace. Um, the same thing for the examples that I was just mentioning for, uh, not for-p profofit work, right? Right. So, I've talked to a couple people that were like, you know, I started volunteering for, you know, whatever place it happens to be. It's you different places and they needed a website built or they have some stack and they needed help on it. So, they have a couple developers helping. And like, don't get me wrong, because I think sometimes people hear this and they're like, "Well, those developers should be paid." And I'm like, I'm not I'm not here to debate. This is like debating tips and stuff. Like, I'm not not debating that. I'm just saying if you are looking for what feels like very relevant experience then building things with other people is tremendous. So try doing that. Um the thing that I wrote after just building software was around freelancing and I wrote that here and I've talked about this on code commute a lot. I I don't think personally that if you have like whether it's freelancing or if you're like I built an app and I have you know there's a thousand users that to me is not like a oh well I got to definitely got to hire this person like they have an app with a thousand users like that's cool but like I don't um I'm not hiring you for your thousand users or I'm not hiring you because you are a freelancer like that's not why I'm hiring you personally. I do think that those are really great for building up experience and different kinds of experience. So, hell yeah, like do that. Um, but the freelancing part in this context, I wrote it down because this person like I mentioned at the beginning of this of this talk, this person who wrote to me for code commute originally was saying, "I do freelancing." So, they do have clients and they were talking about balancing their time. So, in my opinion, I told them in my code commute video like I think it's really really good to be able to keep up with the freelancing. You know, I would prefer personally, if it were me, I would if you needed to stop freelancing and you had enough money to pay for school and you had to stop so you could study or finish projects and stuff, I would prioritize school first. That's why I put finishing first. But I do think that if you are freelancing and you have that opportunity and you need the income because you're in school, I think it's a great thing. It's just that I wouldn't I wouldn't put so much energy into that if like you aren't really strapped for the money. Um because it's a different set of skills, right? I personally would much rather you spend time building software and finding an outlet for that versus like okay how am I going to market myself like that just might be more time spent and I don't in my opinion it might not be the best use of time but if you can do it hell yeah that's awesome um hey Emanuel welcome from LinkedIn great to see you kaleidoscope quick question how do I scan the memory for specific undocumented kernel function Um, I don't think that's like a a one [laughter] it's not a oneliner kind of thing that I'm going to be able to respond to on a live stream. Um, I think if you want some interesting answers for that, if you give uh something like chat GPT a little bit more context and ask it, I can probably give you some some direction around that. But uh you have to think about this for a moment like what's going to be in memory. If it's an a specific undocumented kernel function, how like that alone is kind of an interesting statement, right? Which one is it specifically if it's undocumented? How do you know that it exists if it's not documented? Right? I have lots of questions on this, but um I would personally recommend that you go honestly, and I'm not saying this sarcastically. I mean it uh I don't know what PS Gatani is to be honest. Get I don't know what that says. Uh I would and I'm again not sarcastically. I would highly recommend if you haven't tried this already. Oh yeah, there we go. Uh [laughter] get next process. Okay. Yeah. Um I I'm not saying that as a certain I hope it didn't sound like facitious at all. Like I think that you could probably have a really good conversation with like uh chat GBT on that and and say like the reason I'm saying this is because I find with that kind of stuff it's like uh the creative exploratory kind of conversations I have with AI are really really valuable. Um sometimes like and for I don't know be interested in people's opinion on this but uh like do I use AI for writing code? Yes, absolutely. Um, do I get frustrated when I'm expecting perfect code from AI and I don't get perfect code? Yes. Um, but the most valuable time I have with AI is generally if I'm like, okay, I have some ideas like in this case that we see in the chat, I have an idea. I want to accomplish, you know, something. I have a challenge in front of me like how do I explore this problem space? And I think it's a really good tool to be able to just like generate ideas and and kind of bounce things back and forth. And if you go off the rails with it and like it starts just giving you like the same garbage over and over, start a new chat, right? Kind of pick a different direction. But I I I would recommend that. And sorry, I don't have a good answer for you on that, but that's what I would suggest. Um after freelancing in my order of operations, I said like apply to roles um and and make a habit of doing it. So, we talked about um we talked about internships and I would still say like even with internships or outside of that like I would be applying if you're okay if you're um I have to kind of add a little bit more context here. If you are in school, okay, and you are unable to get like an official internship, if you're going to apply to places, I wouldn't like mislead them. Like if you don't have the capacity for full-time work, do not do that. [laughter] Um so let me just clarify that. I don't I don't want to sound misleading like hey like you should apply for full-time work and then slack off and then just like do your degree. No. Um but I do think that if there's a way that you can balance these things out, this is also why it's at the end of my list while you're in school, that's great. Um maybe that's you approach it that way and it turns into an internship anyway and you're on there whether maybe it's contractually I don't know or the other thing is if you're towards the end of your school I would be like applying and being like hey like I'm available in you know a couple months or whatever and just apply apply apply. The reason I'm saying this is that this is there's a lot going on when it comes to job applications. Number one, you have like where do you want to even work? Like what type of work do you want to be doing, right? When you're trying to survey this kind of stuff, like that's good feedback for you to look at the job descriptions. Like what what should I even be like what project should I be building? Because if you're looking at the job descriptions, I'm just going to make this up and every job description is like you need Next.js and you're like, I don't even know what Nex.js is. Like great, go start reading about it and like trying to build stuff with Nex.js. If everything is like, you know, the world going forward is MongoDB and C. Like, okay, you've never used those things, start building some stuff, right? If that's the area you want to get into and that's what's being suggested for all of the job descriptions you're seeing, this is a great opportunity for side projects. So, you can get that kind of feedback loop. The next thing is that your resume is probably not going to be perfect because nothing's ever perfect. So, this gives you an opportunity to try things out, right? Are you getting any kind of call back with your resume? If not, maybe you need to tune it a little bit, right? Say you start getting interviews again. Hell yeah. That's awesome. Is your first interview going to be good? Probably not. Most people's aren't. I think even like I've interviewed a bunch, but like I think if I walked into an interview right now, I would probably be like wildly unprepared for it. Like it is a skill. It is a thing that you need to practice. So this could be an opportunity for you to be practicing these things. So I say apply and and to be doing this regularly because this is the type of thing that you need to be practicing. It's literally new sets of skills being like making your resume and application visible. How do you stand out and be unique? How do you actually interview? Right? And I guess the first part I wanted to mention was like researching the jobs, right? But you need to be doing this stuff to to improve at it. I just going to check the chat. Um, if I were younger new grad, would you prioritize job security or brand name in terms of the company you work for? Um, this is a I think this depends on the person first of all. So, um, there's your typical software engineer answer. It depends, but I'll uh I'll qualify it. Um for me personally um I am I feel like I'm pretty conservative and if I reflect on my own journey I didn't go to like a brand name. So not that uh for me personally that's not what I did. I did go for something that it was a startup but it was a startup that um they were profitable without investment and there was a pretty good indicator that like you know they're they're in a position where it's not like hey next month we don't know if we can pay you kind of thing. So for me that was like felt like like good job security at least at that time for me. And I think if I take like I would still lean into that. And the other thing I would prioritize is like um I found working at a startup was insanely fastpaced compared to I'm currently in big tech. the rate of learning even though it's like chaotic and stressful and it's all over the place for me that worked really well. Uh the rate of learning is like unparalleled. At least that was my experience. So, um I would recommend you know something like a startup that doesn't feel like they're about to, you know, burn through all their cash the next day kind of thing. Um and I would prioritize just like the ability to go learn stuff and move fast personally. So that's my advice. Um, and next comment was, "Yeah, right now I'm trying to do that all has low new grad openings, so it's hard. Hoping gets better in the winter." U I don't uh could ask if you don't mind answering. Are you I'm from Ontario originally. I know there's lots of schools that that have internship programs out there, but you're talking about uh new grad openings, right? Like after after school, like you've already graduated. Um that might be a little different. And again, I've been talking about internships a lot in this talk so far because it was like in school kind of framing, but the benefit of the internship is like it's for students, right? So, if you're a student looking for a job, look for internships. Um, it can be a little bit more challenging. Um, but again, if you find a spot that has internships and you're not sort of a you're not a student anymore, so you don't like you don't match the criteria for being an intern, um, that might still be a good signal of a place that is willing to hire juniors. So, um, yeah, I I don't know. It's it's I that's why I said I acknowledge it's really challenging right now. So, um, you know, w wishing everyone success in their job search. It's not easy. So, that's my priority order. Um, I kind of I'm going to go into a little bit more detail on some of these. Um, oh, interesting. Can only work internships in summer since I'm an international student. Is that I mean, we might be going off the rails here, but um I mean I I'll start by saying this where I went to school that didn't matter. Um there was a lot of international students in my class, but um it was also a a co-op program. So like if you were an international student, you were you were doing the same like school uh internship, school internship as everyone else. But yeah, uh you know, wishing you success with that. Um yeah, fingers crossed, man. So yeah, some of the other parts of this newsletter article that I'm going to dive into are are things I probably already said because I went into a little bit of the details along the way. Next part was around why internships matter. Um I think I've already kind of talked about that. Um, [snorts] I think one of the things I didn't talk about is like if you're looking for internships, um, I've mentioned this a couple times, but I think there's a [laughter] what I might call a right and a wrong way to reach out to people. By the way, is the chat legible on Substack? It looks like it's like two pixels. You guys want that a little bigger or something? Is that helpful? Should it be like over my face so you guys can't see me? Um, yeah. Let's make it a little bigger. I guess you still still see me. Um, people don't have to look at my head. It's bald. I think with reaching out and stuff, I think one of the challenges that people do this in a way that's like pretty obvious that you are [laughter] like you don't care. um or it really really feels like you don't care. What I mean by that is like and I get this a lot because I make a bunch of content and like I try to be present on social media and stuff but people will they'll say hey there's a guy talking about software engineering or there's a guy he works at Microsoft and he's got manager in his title. I'm gonna message them and I'm gonna give them my resume and say, "Give me a referral." And it's like it just no, [laughter] that's not a good way to do it. Um, will that statistically work if you do it like a ton? Like perhaps. I just think that you could have a lot better success not doing that. Um, so what I would recommend is like if if you're looking specifically for um for a job or like for an internship is that look for like managers or hiring managers or recruiters that are actively posting about jobs that are available. Okay? Talk to them about those jobs. Reach out to them about those jobs if you're unable to find. So say you're like, I see a recruiter. I'm just going to use AWS because we were talking about in the chat. So, okay, there's there is a recruiter um or sorry, there's what how do I want to say this there? Okay, you can't find job openings for AWS, but you see a recruiter that works at AWS, you could reach out to them and instead of being like, refer me to a job, you could say, hey, like you know, noticed your recruiter for AWS. like, could you, you know, could you show me where to look for the job postings or are you aware of any that are upcoming? Like, thank you for your time. Not here is my resume. Like, go do the work to put me into the pipeline. Like, they're busy doing their stuff. I just don't recommend that you approach reach out to people in a way where you're telling them to do something for you. People do not owe you anything. And I think if you treat the conversation differently, you will have better success. So if again replace recruiter with hiring manager or just manager in general or employee in general, right? Instead of going, "Oh, that person works at Facebook. I'm going to send them my resume and say, hey, Facebook person, refer me to a job." Don't do that. instead say, "Hey, Facebook person, I noticed you work at Facebook and I was curious if you're aware of where I can check for the opening open roles." Now, they're probably going to tell you the career page if you're at a big company. So, when people reach out to me and they say, "Can you refer me?" I'm like, "I literally don't have any magical power to do like, you know, oh, let me just give your resume to soand so when it's done." It's go to the careers page, right? Right? If you have questions about the careers posted there, message me. Let's talk about them. If I can help, I I'll help answer questions. But this works, I think, especially well if you're at companies that may not be advertising as aggressively with, you know, their own career page and whole like system like that. Um, there are tons and tons and tons of companies outside of just big tech. Tons of them. Some of them are really big. They're just not, you know, big tech. So you can find people working there on social media like on LinkedIn for example, especially if they're actively posting and stuff and you're like, "Okay, like it's not like this person has a LinkedIn profile that they haven't logged into for 15 years. You know, they're active. Cool." Like you could reach out to them and just say, "Hey, I'm interested in applying or interested if there are openings. could you tell me where like you know is there a recruiter you can connect me with or like a careers page I can look at because I am interested right that's a lightweight ask you're not making them review your resume or recommend you even though they don't know you so just you know slightly different spin on it and I think you'll have a little bit more success with that um next thing I wrote about like I know we talked about freelancing Um I think yeah I don't know if there's any more I want to add to that to be honest but maybe okay maybe this is worth talking about um earlier I was talking about freelancing and how like there's sets of skills in terms of sales and marketing and that kind of stuff and I still true I didn't change my mind on that but the other thing I want to add is like and some people that that are watching this will maybe have one experience, some will have another, some will have both. But not every software engineering role has like um interfacing with customers or end users. So for example, the last like five years that I've been at Microsoft been working on platform teams. I do not interact with end users at all. This might sound funny again depending on your experience with this kind of stuff, but like I don't work with end users. My platforms that I work on absolutely affect end users. Like right now I'm, you know, managing part of the routing plane for Office 365, specifically the firewall. If I do something and I do the wrong thing, I could have a really big impact on end users. But a lot of the time we talk about our customers of the routing plane or other platforms. They're the other teams that are internal that we work with, right? We route traffic for those teams, right? Those are the services that are running. We route the traffic for them. Those are our customers, but end users are also our customers. My point is that a lot of software engineers may go their entire career where they've never actually had to have sort of like product conversations where they're listening to customers trying to understand their challenges. Not just having someone say like here's a technical challenge, go solve it. But when people are like when you it's it's really interesting because if you've if you've worked with end users or you worked really close to product teams what they're doing is listening to the pain points that customers have and then they are sort of like massaging the message that they're hearing and they're like okay well what's you might have like I'm just making up numbers. You might have 10 people that describe a problem in in 10 different ways, but you start to realize like there's a common piece here and like that's the thing we should be going to solve for. Like product people are very very good at that and engineers can be too, but this is a thing you have to spend time doing. Now when you understand that more effectively and you work in teams where you're building software for users like that in my experience at least you will find it like less frustrating or less confusing when you understand part of that process because you might be going hey like the technical thing we need to do here is X and you have a product person being like we got to build Y and you're like oh we can't see eye to eye but like if you understand that they're trying to like interpret the end users's needs to solve their problem. This becomes a little bit more clear. So when you're doing freelancing, you are very much working on behalf of a client, right? You are working on behalf of the end user. You get to be the product manager. So that is absolutely a really cool set of skills and some engineers don't spend a lot of their career doing that. On the LinkedIn topic, uh this is from Baron Bites. Um, I've noticed many engineers, junior, mid, senior, zero post, yet they have solid career histories. How is that possible in this day and age not to have social presence? Well, Baron Bites, I know that you are not a plant in the audience, but I will talk I'll talk about brand ghost. Um, it's it's interesting, right? Um, I would say I would say that maybe some people just aren't really into social media, and I think that's okay to be honest. But I I do think that if you are if you're someone who's looking for work and you're you're like, I'm trying everything. I'm trying everything. I'm reaching out to whoever I can and you know, nothing works. Nothing at all. And if I were to ask you like, are you are you posting about things that you're learning about online? Are you engaging with other other software developers in some type of community? Even if that's online, on social media, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, having conversations about stuff, like if you're not doing that at all, like you're not trying everything, that's still something you can do, right? And I think that there are I'm a little biased, but I I think there's so many benefits to being able to post about software engineering topics in public. I think that uh a mistake people make, this includes me, especially early on. A mistake people make is that they go, well, two things. One is like, well, what would I post about? Like, I'm not an expert. I'm just learning. Yes, you are. Post about what you're learning about. This is an opportunity to get input from other people. This is an opportunity. You might be a couple of steps ahead of someone else, and they can go, "Oh, oh, Nick's learning about that thing." Like, what? let's let's see about that, right? And then they can go, oh yeah, okay, he Nick's trying this, Nick's trying that. Cool. Okay, like I'm going to go try some other variation of that or I'm going to try that, too. You don't realize that sometimes the experience that you have, even if it's you're like, oh, it's minimal, it's nothing. Sometimes that experience is just a little bit further ahead of someone and it's very helpful for them. Other times, you could be posting stuff and getting feedback. I think one of the biggest mistakes though is that when people are genuinely inexperienced at something and they go, "Well, I'm supposed to be posting so that I look like an authority on a topic." Everyone else knows. It's very obvious when you do this. If you are sort of not experienced in an area trying to, you know, masquerade as an expert, it is very very obvious. And then what happens is that people because it's the internet, people will probably be mean to you and you're going to feel very discouraged, but you're you're sort of you're I don't want to say you're doing the wrong thing. That sounds quite rude, but like I don't think it's an ideal approach. Like if you are genuinely learning things, post about what you're learning, right? I think it's such a good opportunity. It's it's free. And speaking of free, if you want to post on social media, use Brand Ghost. You can crossost to every platform. Literally, just go make accounts on everything and then register a Brand Ghost account, connect them, and then just post. You can crossost everything. Um, I'll give you an example. Okay, one sec. Give me one sec. We're doing this. Um, where can I pull this up? LinkedIn. Can I pull up LinkedIn? One sec. One sec. One sec. Sure. I'm going to pull up my my business my business page on LinkedIn. Um, just so I can show you an example. By the way, business pages on LinkedIn get like they're terrible for impressions and stuff. It's kind of wild. One sec. Okay. Um, so this is a post I made. This is from Brand Ghost. So, I mentioned at the beginning of this live stream that my main YouTube channel hit 14,000 subscribers. Yeah, milestone. Um, but this is a post I made. If you follow me on social media, so if Substack I had to post manually because I don't have an API, but there's folks that are watching this on Twitter. Go to my Twitter account. Do you see the post that says Devleer 14,000 subscribers? If you're on LinkedIn, you might have seen this one, but did you see the one that also went to my personal account? There's not many other people in chat from other platforms, but basically I made this post to like like 15 social media accounts or something ridiculous because I posted it to all my code social media accounts, too. And I could do this. I mean, I do it for free because I make brand ghost, but that's the kind of thing that you can do for free. So you could write about some software engineering topic you're learning about. Hey, I'm learning about Reddus. Here's a cool thing I built and like or here's a thing that I'm struggling with, right? Like I'm trying this out, but I I'm getting stuck. You could go take a screenshot of that, write a little post and post it to like as many platforms as you use and it's free. So So do it. That's my recommendation. Like I said, I'm a little biased, but um yeah, I I think I think it's a good opportunity for folks to be able to like to learn in public. So, I I do recommend it. Um let's see. Trying to see if there's anything else that I haven't really talked about that I want to. Um we talked about like trying to pick projects. So, if you're looking at the roles that you're interested in, look at what's in the job description. Try to if you're reading it and you're like I don't have that skill that programming language that tech stack like while you're waiting air quotes waiting while you're not working there and you would like to be working there start building stuff relevant to what they're doing and I think that will help a lot um worst case the worst case is you don't end up working there but the thing that you're doing is building up all the skills and learning about the things anyway so you should be doing that you might find along the way you're like I'm just making this up you're like oh I wanted to do Android development so at this company so I'm going to build stuff in cotlin and whatever and you might start doing it being like wow I hate this I don't enjoy this at all great like now go look for other companies and some other domain and see if there's something else that you could be learning that's more enjoyable right so again these are just opportunities for you to be practicing and refining Um, I think probably the final thing that I want to talk about here is like because this whole thing was around how you spend time while in college. Sorry, my nose is getting stuffy [snorts] and then I can't breathe and I can't speak. So, um, this topic was about or stemmed from a code community conversation about being in college, how to spend time. I I didn't want to write all of this or talk about all this without talking about like setting some boundaries for yourself. And this is I think very applicable even outside of like you know going to college and university and that kind of thing. I I feel like a lot of people in this field and this includes me like I'm I am very guilty of this. It's always like you know what's the next thing to learn? How do I get better? how do I level up? Um, you know, not every single person is like this, but I find it's very common. And part of me, um, again, biased, but part of me, like I really appreciate that. I think it's really cool that people want to be better, but I'm using a an important word there, and it's like want to be better. I think it's really awesome if you're like, "Hey, I'm trying to improve myself. I'm trying to learn more. I'm trying to be more skilled at something." Like trying to gain more experiences. like what's not to like about that? What's not cool about that, right? I think that's awesome. But um the challenge is like when that becomes everything, right? When you're like, "Okay, well, all you know, all that I can do in my life is like I need to be to grind side projects or I need to get like um you know, more freelance clients or I need to go apply to more jobs or like I need to be networking. can't do anything else when it starts to become like the only thing you do. And I I just think that that starts to become a little bit dangerous. And dangerous maybe sounds like a strong word, but I say dangerous because it goes unchecked. And I think that's what makes it dangerous. Because I think that it's fine if you are consciously making decisions like that, being like, I'm going to pour a lot of time into this. This is a period of my life where like I I am consciously saying I need to spend more time on something, right? It's going to be a few months I'm going to be working on side projects. It's going to be a few months I'm going to be, you know, spending a lot of time on my resume and reaching out to people like, okay. But I think when like the weeks turn into months turn into years and you're like, "This is all I do." and you kind of come up for air and you're like uh um you know that's where I think it's dangerous right it goes unchecked so I think it's really important that you realize that this is not a sprint right I think that it's important that you this is why I said earlier in the in the talk right like you're going to be learning your entire career you're never going to know everything hate to break it to you it's not going to So, you're always going to be learning. You have your entire career to do this. Remember to pace yourself a little bit. What you really don't want to have happen is that you're trying to do all these things. You get overwhelmed. You stretch yourself too thin. Then you have things like, well, everything falls apart, right? Like, you're you're not getting any freelance clients. You're not making any progress on your side projects. And you're failing at a school because you're not giving enough time for that. and then like your your social life or your relationships or your family life is falling apart because you're not giving any time for that. Like you don't have infinite time. So try to make sure that you are coming up with a balance for yourself that is it's reasonable. And like I said that might mean for a shorter period of time that you are, you know, putting more time into one bucket than the others, but that's a conscious decision. Just be aware of it. So, um I wrote down some ideas like um you know blocking off focus time right throughout the week. Put some focus time in your calendar. Block that off. That's where you're going to focus on, you know, doing a side project for a bit or if you have some freelance work doing that or reaching out to uh potential clients for freelance work or, you know, researching jobs to apply for like just, you know, block out the time and block out time for other things that are important to you outside of that. And so like what I do for myself now is like I have periods of time where like I I feel guilty about playing video games for example and I need to remind myself that like I cannot be if I try to be productive like for you know 16 hours a day straight or something like it's just not going to work. I need to have breaks. There's nothing evil or inherently wrong about playing a video game or you know stopping to watch a video or something. So like consciously schedule time to take breaks as well and I think that'll help. But the the moral of the story on that is really just like set some boundaries for yourself and try to adhere to them. U you don't want to burn out from it and you don't want everything to fall apart. So that brings us to approximately the top of the hour. So, thank you so much for being here. Um, I am still going to be taking questions because this is the point in the in the talk where I try to sell you on a bunch of stuff. So, stick around for that. [laughter] DJ Neil's here. Hey, DJ. Um, I'm curious about your perspective on including unit integration and to end test in a project. Yes. Um, testing adds quite a bit of time. So, [snorts] mainly done on smaller projects. For context, I only have freelance experience so far and some volunteering. No degree. No worries. Lovely question. Uh huge fan of this. So, um I am a big fan of tests. My perspective on what types of ch tests have changed over time and so I'll elaborate a little bit more. Um I try to write code in a way that can be and I try to be clear about this. it can be unit tested or requires very little work to make it unit testable. What I mean by that is espe and I come from a net background right so I program a lot in C# um you'll hear people that program innet like uh you know over abstract everything there's interfaces for everything um I'm going to explain a little bit about my philosophy here so I try to write code that can be unit tested when I talk about a unit test I mean that I can exercise like a method on a class generally we're I'm not saying only a single method meth but a public method on a class and I want to treat it in isolation and that means that that that method should not be touching the environment so that means that there aren't side effects like writing files to disk making web requests um this uh and this is where it's going to deviate a little bit that often means no um database interactions like I'm just testing what's in the method and that means that the boundaries to the other things outside of that method are generally mocked out. I don't use fakes or stubs or anything else that's mocked out. The reason I use mocks is that I completely control strict mocks. I completely control what is being touched. And people will say, well, what if the mock drifts from the real behavior? And I say, that's not the point. That's where integration tests come in. My mocks when I do this kind of stuff is I'm trying to cover the logic. And it's why I've shifted more to doing more integration or like end to end type of testing. I've shifted more to that because I can write um I can write more coverage in a test with more real pieces coming together and things like you know test databases and stuff to spin up. We can do that so fast now with Docker. so fast um that like you just do it. Um I've written tests before and I've seen tests before where people are writing um hey Joseph on Substack, good to see you. Um I've written tests before and seen them where it's like the database calls are mocked and then what happens is like people are checking that the query matches the query like it's not testing anything at the database. So you can get that coverage for free or or near free because we have so many good tools for doing that. So really I find that almost like I still write code that can be unit tested that might mean that I'm not putting an interface on everything but if I'm like a crap I really want to write some unit tests on this and get really get into the weeds of of the implementation details which everyone will freak out about. But when I want to do that, I might say, "Cool, what are the dependencies passed into this thing?" If I need to make them an interface to mock it in .NET, then I'm gonna do it. It's more and more and more rare though because a lot of the time I can get away with some end to end or functional integration test and the only things I'm mocking are the services that I do not control. So in Brand Ghost, for example, we post to all these social media platforms. I don't write tests that go post to LinkedIn or post to Facebook. So when I'm about to touch their API, that's mocked. Even in an integration test, it's mocked. And the point is that I'm not actually testing that. If I need a test that tells me, am I properly integrating with the Facebook API in Brandos? I don't have tests like that. In digital forensics, we used to write some tests that would actually go, we'd have some phones, I did a lot of mobile digital forensics. We'd have some phones that would update and some phones that would never update. And we'd [snorts] have some that would update because if there was a breaking change, we would update the phone. We would recover the information from it. And if it stopped working, we're like, ah, update broke the behavior. But that's something where it's like that's a really like a a pretty complicated test. The more complicated these tests get with the setup and sort of the environmental variables, harder they are for reproducibility, uh the more brittle they are. People talk about tests being brittle with like unit tests and refactoring code. My god, let me tell you about writing tests that are like covering, you know, user interfaces and things being clicked and stuff and someone moves something by a pixel and the whole test breaks or like there's a race condition to click a button because it takes a little bit longer to render or something. I don't like if you're writing really big long running tests like that, they really cannot be asserting on a lot because they'll be such a pain in the I don't I don't swear much on this channel. They'll be such a pain in the butt that it's not worth it. So, um I like having them mixed, but I generally find myself more integration tests with real databases and uh unit tests when I have complicated logic that I really want to make sure does what I expect. Um SQLite and dev is fine. Superbase and prod uh if they are um I would say pick database engines that are the same if you can and that also means I've seen this this is great um I've seen people if you do SQLite for example if you're using SQLite even in prod because like even mobile apps and stuff do that um I've seen people try to do like you can do an in-memory SQLite database and it will still use the SQLite database But I've seen other people being like, "Oh, I'm like for entity framework, I'm going to use like an in-memory provider." And then what happens is like their uh their link doesn't get converted into actual SQL. So their test pass and then they go to use it in production and like it doesn't work because it's completely different. False sense of confidence. But yeah, um I would say when you start doing like integration tests and stuff like that's your opportunity to use as much real as you can because that's testing the pieces working together. I like a mix though. Hope that helps answer. Uh DJ, if you want like if that doesn't make a lot of sense, I have a handful of YouTube videos on that on Dev Leader and if you watch them and you're like that still doesn't help, I don't know what you're talking about. Just message me on Twitter or LinkedIn, whatever. Tell me and tell me honestly and I'll just make more videos. Um if that's helpful content. So please do. Would be happy to help. Um let's make that chat a little smaller. Okay. Uh I'm going to flip over to here. Um, so for folks that missed it at the beginning, uh, weekly.devleer.ca is where my newsletter is. So this is generally what the live stream topic will be. So this is the one that I read through. That is uh an AI picture of my face. So it looks really close to me, but it's not actually me. Um, thanks Nano Banana for that. But yeah, you can check this out for uh what the live stream topics will be. don't have to subscribe. So, please don't if you're not interested in that. Um, I think for folks that are watching the live stream on YouTube, you are at Devleer Podcast. So, thank you for being here. Um, this is my podcast channel and so on this channel is obviously the live stream, but I also interview other software engineers, do a lot of uh career journey kind of conversations. And so there's a couple people like um where where where where um so a couple if you watch YouTube videos especially fornet development so like Derek Kobart's here he's code opinion um Dan is code wrinkles he's awesome they're both awesome everyone on here is awesome um Ethan Evans uh he's he's pretty he's blown up a lot since I went on not because of our podcast but since the podcast. He's uh he's blown up a lot. Uh Rita makes a lot of uh like short form content and stuff. A lot of skits and stuff in software engineering, especially on uh Instagram and Tik Tok. Her videos are they're really funny. Um who else? There's uh Scott Hanselman. I think a lot of people know Scott. He's uh he's amazing. But yeah, lots of really cool people. Hanib, also another uh YouTuber. But um yeah, it's a lot of fun to be able to chat with folks. I recently just interviewed a former classmate of mine, uh, which was super cool. I'm going to see if I can get a couple more classmates from university on. [snorts] And then, of course, a live stream every Monday, 7:00 p.m. Pacific. So, thank you for being here. This is my main channel, Dev Leader. I'll put that into the chat. Um, this is the one that just got to 14,000 subscribers, which is pretty cool. But uh primarily like I've moved this channel over to being just programming tutorials and AI development. So historically it had um like the podcast and everything else on there. My live streams are done from here. So if you want my programming content it's devleader on YouTube. Then there's code commute. Code commute is the channel that I was mentioning earlier. So the live streams and stuff the topics generally come from code commute. So, if you're curious about how it works, code commute or you can go to codecommute.com. Um, submit questions. I make vlog entries and answer them for people. This is my way of sort of uh kind of doing a couple things at once. One, if I have to drive to work, I hate commuting, first of all. Some people like it, I don't. I find it's a huge waste of time. So, I'm like, I want to be productive because I'm obsessed with trying to be productive. And I have this other thing where I get a lot of people and I'm thankful for it, but a lot of people reach out with questions and I found originally I was spending a lot of time like replying in a chat message and I'm like this doesn't really scale. So I said why don't if people are comfortable like why don't I just make a video answering their question. That way I don't have to sit on my phone trying to type back responses to people and I can potentially help other people. So, um, that's how Code Commute was born. And so, I generally look at the previous week. I look at whatever video had the most views or most comments and engagement and then write a newsletter article on it. So, this one was um here, I'm a developer in college. What path should I focus on? Right. So, this is just me driving to work. My internet connection terrible or something? It's a little shaky. Uh, I'm not speeding or anything. I don't do that. Um, so that's Code Commute. And then my other channel is Dev Leader Path to Tech. This is where I do resume reviews, so you can check that out. Uh, ré reviews are totally free. Uh, for now, I don't plan on changing that, but you can, uh, submit a resume. Just watch any video. I explain how to submit them. They're not ré grilling sessions. They're not me making fun of résumés. Uh, they are me trying to provide, you know, uh, honest feedback. So, if there's stuff I think you're doing well, I'll call it out. If there's stuff I think you can improve um based on my opinion, I'll call it out. But that's me trying to help. And then brand ghost is the last one. Actually, no, I have courses. I got to I got to talk about courses, folks, because I have not that page, not that one, this one. Courses. Um so, I do have courses. I think most of my courses now are on dome train pro. Um so do tame I can't speak dome train pro uh there is savings there are sales like at the top of this 40% off but I think the courses I have um I'm just going to put the link here. I think the courses I have are on pro now. Um, but I have like the intro to to programming courses for C and then I have a couple other C ones. I have some uh more like soft skills career development stuff that I paired up with Ryan Murphy on. So, you can check those out. And I am I haven't started recording it yet, but I have another course that I'm going to be starting. I have official approval and sign off to do it. I am very excited. I just have to uh start. And I was not starting yet because my lens broke. The lens that you're watching this through, let me go back to this silly view. This lens broke. Um, actually, long story. This lens that you're looking at originally broke like two years ago or a year ago. So, I got another lens and it broke. And when I say it broke, I mean it stopped focusing. So, this Will it even do it? Yeah, it wouldn't change the focus. So, I would have to like keep my head in the right spot. And I was noticing there's some videos I'm doing and I'm like, "The whole video is blurry." So, I went to go get it repaired or ask about getting it repaired. And the guy was like, "Look, he's like, "This lens is totally bricked." He's like, "You have to send it back to Sony." And I'm like, "Cuz that's going to take forever and cost another whole lens." and I brought this lens that was broken before and he tried it on a camera and he said it works perfectly. So now I have a working lens again even though it was broken for like a year. So anyway, um I'm going to start recording that course. Um I'm super excited to share that one when it's ready. Um it it will be my my best course um ever. I'm not sure, but it will be my best so far. Um, brand ghost. I'm not sharing my screen. There we are. Uh, brand ghost. We are running a sale. Running a sale. Give me one sec. Um, I got to move some stuff over. Yeah, there we are. Um, so Brand Ghost is the social media and c like uh scheduling and crossosting platform I mentioned earlier in the stream. So there's Brando going into the chat. It's just brandost.ai. This is what I use for posting all of my social media content across every platform. So if you read or watch my content anywhere, it's posted through brand. So this is a system I build originally for myself and then uh I give away with my team the uh crossosting and scheduling. It's unlimited. The paid for features are some of the things that I use. So things like what we call topic streams that allows me or you if you're interested in it, it allows you to create content, add it into like a queue and it will eventually repost that content over time. So um spoiler alert if you see me posting blog articles that are not my newsletter, I haven't written a technical blog article in over a year. So you're seeing posts that are being repeated. Uh, but I wrote those blog articles and hopefully they are still valuable a year later. So, I use Brand Ghost for that kind of thing. If you are a small business and trying to get better at posting more consistently with your social media, please reach out to me. If you know someone who has a small business kind of struggling with that or you think they could do better, have them reach out to me. I'm happy to have a conversation with them. I'm happy to, you know, we can set up trials and stuff that are extended and discounted. I am a strong believer and I I've said this even with my team that's building this with me. I said, look, you know, this is it's a business. Not all businesses will be successful. I said, I can accept that. You know, maybe Brandos isn't something that pans out as a business, but I said brand ghost can and will never die because I cannot operate social media without Brand Ghost. So, as long as I am posting content on the internet, Brand Ghost will exist. I can't do content any other way without it now. And I'm very much a firm believer in how that works. And I think that if people are struggling with being consistent or trying to post content regularly because they're burnt out from it, they're not feeling creative, it's too much of a pain in the butt to try copying and pasting the same post to LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, you name it. Um, you know, you could do it for a week maybe and then you're like, I hate myself. Um, there's a better way. Use Brand Ghost. We'll post everywhere for you. Um, happy to help if you have questions. And like I said, there is a sale that's going on right now. Uh, 10 bucks a month gets you the essentials package. Jump over to the pricing. Come on, website. I feel like my whole internet's not going so hot this morning or this evening. There we go. Oh no. Why did that happen? That's so weird. Anyway, um, essentials package. It's right here. Instead of posting, it's downloading. Nice. [laughter] Very cool. And see what you could do is you could use Brand Ghost to post about your personal project on the internet across all the socials. But yeah, so it's uh we got a discount on for the essentials package. But otherwise, if you're like, "Hey, you know, I don't know if I want to pay for this because I don't make money from social media or I don't know what I'm doing yet." Start with the free. There's a trial. You can try everything out and then go from there. So, I think that's it, folks. Thanks for listening to what I got to say. I appreciate you being here. And of course, every Monday, 7 p.m. Pacific, we'll do the same thing. So, reminder, if you cannot wait because you're so excited for the next live stream, which is all of you, I know, join me on code commute. Same type of thing. It's just that there isn't a chat because I can't respond in the chat while I'm driving. That would be absurd. Uh, but the same type of topics and stuff. Um, and you can submit questions and stuff and I'm happy to answer. So, again, thanks for being here. I appreciate all of you and I'll see you next time.