FIRST BIRTHDAY For Dev Leader Weekly - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

get these platforms up and running all right chat and I didn't turn on the chat here there's chat awesome one sec I'm just joining on to my own stream so I can make sure it's coming through okay and we should be ready to go in just a moment so far so good whoa that's not what I want I had a sound coming through on my side cool well let's get started here so uh yeah it's been a it's been a little rough I had to I had to go for my another covid vaccine yesterday so I am just ending the sort of the fever stage um it's been pretty rough uh didn't get a lot of sleep last night and then um was at the office had to leave a little early just like waves of being feverish so I think should be okay for now um and then very unfortunately went to go do a software engineering interview uh hey there on Twitch yeah uh yeah I thought the covid vaccine stuff was done um but I I need it for one of my uh sort of medical checkpoints I had to do so anyway not really not really up to me kind of had to get it done but I was I was shocked um and a little bit of backstory so I'm from Canada I'm in the US and I didn't get a lot of my my medical stuff transferred so there was a couple other vaccines or were're like hey like do you have this and I'm like I know I know I've been vaccinated for that but like I I don't have it on record here so give me that too but uh yeah Co was one of them they're like hey you're kind of uh kind of overdue for another one of those so whatever um I'm not going to get into like vax or noax kind of thing I just got to get it done so um but yeah the it's funny I've had covid before which is pretty pretty rough but surprisingly if I just if I literally for me if I just took Advil I was totally fine um and as soon as the Advil would wear off and it was like pretty bad fevers and uh like you know shaking from having fevers and stuff so this was a pretty bad experience overnight just and I knew it too um was good all day as soon as I laid down to go to sleep as soon as I got into bed I was like oh no like I feel I feel the fever so it's pretty crappy um but the worst part is that like you know obviously when you're in bed like that's when I'm trying to sleep I'm trying to rest and kind of recover for the next day so it just makes the whole next day really rough so anyway doing a lot better now which is good um isn't having Co and covid vaccine the same and what kind of inter said it the same yeah I mean I don't really know I just know that on paperwork I don't have a choice I have to show that it's done so uh but it it feels the symptoms that I have from the vaccine are the exact same as when I had covid so um just been trying to stay on top of Advil and Tylenol um and I literally the same thing I can tell as soon as it wears off because it's like I'm instantly like sweating and cold and it's just it's awful um but um we're around in the end of that I'm pretty sure overnight I'll wake up tomorrow and be totally but really sucked too I was supposed to do I was uh really looking forward at a software engineering interview for the podcast I do um so uh had someone uh Emily from uh LinkedIn one of my connections we were meeting up and my internet was just crap um and I'm not really sure what I I haven't really diagnosed what was going on so I'm hoping that the stream and everything is is going okay uh thanks Sadam appreciate it so yeah we're going to we'll get into the topic but you know just I was it's been just a kind of a rough day overall so I'm hoping to end on a high note with the stream kind of sit down and chat with you guys and then uh tomorrow morning actually I'll be uh live coding so it's 7: a.m. bright and early that's why I'm really hoping that I have uh uh you know I'm recovered I guess and I'm just realizing some of the LinkedIn comments did not come through in the chat um oh actually no they did they're just they were from before the the stream so we're good we're good okay so I hate that when I'm trying to watch chat and I can't tell what's going on so cool topic for today though is going to be I hit a bit of a milestone and this is kind of like a it's a bit different than than normal but I still want to kind of make it relevant for software engineering so the Milestone that I hit was for my newsletter was 52 uh issues so I was pretty proud of that so I wanted to spend some time talking about um like kind of what that looks like and why even bother making content in the first place so like anything I'm doing with streams and stuff like that um you know it's always going to I'm going to try and tie it back to software engineering and things like that so while the topic itself is very much about uh kind of hitting this Milestone at the same time I want to make sure that if you're watching or listening to this you're like well why is that relevant to me right that's the whole whole point is to try and have something relevant that you can take away so um I'm gonna kind of walk through uh what was going on I have to mute another speaker enough of that got too many computers um but I'll walk through like kind of why I started creating content um and how that's relevant for software engineering or for for even for me in my role as a as a software engineering manager so um let's see okay so I actually I've shared this before but um so obviously if you're watching this you know that like I'm creating content my brand Dev leader and this actually started back in 2013 and I started creating content for a reason that I actually encourage a lot of other people to make content and that's so that uh you can kind of learn in public right and there's a lot of cool things that happened as a side effect of this um on my on my podcast I had um Alex Z jaac who is the author of hungry Minds newsletter one of the things that he was sharing and it kind of resonated with me kind of because it's similar to like early on in uh when I started Dev leader was like for his newsletter it kind he does a lot of like curating of interesting articles especially related to Ai and stuff like that and it it kind of forces you to to go out and learn and to stay up to date with things and like you kind of you create this responsibility for yourself where you're like hey look like I have to deliver the newsletter right like I have to I want to be able to put out content and be uh consistent with it so you have to go do the work to go uh to be able to support that so it was it was cool to hear him talking about that because it reminded me like when I started Dev leader that's exactly what it was so for context um it was my first job outside of uh my internship so in University I had I was very fortunate I had uh hey Chris from Facebook um I had six internships in University so two full years of work experience by the time I graduated but when I started working at a startup outside of University it was like right um I don't know like a few months into it it was like Hey look like we need you to start leading teams right and it's very odd for me because like I've never done that I'm just started working right so um kind of an interesting experience and I said like there's a lot of stuff obviously that I don't know about managing um like how to do one-on ones or um one big like really common sort of challenges when you're an individual contributor how do you like how do you go from being someone who writes code to like feeling like you can be effective with with managing teams um hey big Wally Wiggy on Twitch good to see you so this is a a big like transition phase that if for a lot of engineering managers a lot of them do start as I like individual contributors ic's and and go through this so for me I was like I have a lot of work to do here and I have no idea what I'm doing so it was like I was really fortunate I had a great HR leader and she kind of pushed me in the direction of like hey here's here's resources here here's Concepts to go learn about and I was like you know what like I'm going to start I'm going to start blogging about this and the goal like I said was like well two twofold right it was I'm going to kind of force myself to go learning um and then beyond that like obviously if I'm learning and there's there's other people that are going through the same Journey as me so um for on Twitch there so a quick summary you haven't missed too much just kind of giving a recap for and I should share this in the chat actually so this is the newsletter article I'm referring to um I was kind of mentioning the the topic for the stream is a little bit unique because I always try to talk about software engineering but kind of uh reflecting on basically 52 weeks of having a software engineering newsletter go out and I want to share why I started creating content because like it's it's probably I'm assuming if you're watching this you're into software development or some sort of related field maybe you just kind of stumbled upon my stream but um I want to share why I think there's value in being able to put out content and and for me at least I'm going to talk about how that really transform my life even though I feel like I've been pretty s successful in my career already so um so I started this Dev leader blog and I was just you know trying to write some thoughts down um sometimes it was code sometimes it was uh awesome Brad good to hear that um sometimes it was code in my article sometimes it was like here's what I'm thinking for organizing teams and stuff but like you know total transparency like I don't really know what I'm doing I'm just writing my thoughts down and I it's like it feels kind of embarrassing to say but like I gave up on it and this is in 2013 like this is a long time ago uh I started blogging and I gave up on it after a few months and I was like you know what like it takes a lot of time and effort I'm trying to curate these articles put out a blog post on like my you know my notes on the Articles and stuff like why you should read them and I'm like I kind of started to feel like why am I doing this because there's no um there's no like feedback on it it's like I don't know if anyone's even reading this like what's the point and in hindsight like it's easy for me to say now but it's like Nick like that wasn't that wasn't the right motivator right like if if all that I was looking for was you know people to be able to like comment on it and like and follow and stuff it's like that's not that's not the right motivator so for me the reason and I I want to share this with people because like I'm going to talk more about the benefits and stuff but at the end of 20122 I don't know exactly what it was that kind of triggered in my head but um as a as a c like I C developer by you know at at heart I am a software engineering manager but if I'm coding I'm coding in C at home and stuff so there's two YouTubers that I really like to watch and one's Nick chaps and one is uh Milan javanovich and both really awesome uh net YouTubers I really look up to them you know great you know huge channels a lot of success and and I and I've shared this with both of them and I'm every time I say this I always feel like it's going to come across the wrong way but I remember like at the end of 2022 I was I was reflecting on it and I was like you know what like if they can do it like I can do it and the reason I I don't like saying it because it sounds like it's kind of backwards like it's not that I don't think they're talented like I think they're amazingly talented right they do great work um it's not that I think that it's easy but I'm like I'm like I think I can do this like it's for I think it was just eye opening for me that like these there's two examples of these guys and what is it that they're doing well they're showing up regularly putting out content and I just remember being like I I can do that like if there's one thing that I feel like I'm very good at it's doing boring repetitive stuff like one of my hobbies for as long as I've been programming has been bodybuilding you know what's really boring bodybuilding you eat the same stuff every day at least I did right it's like you're going to the gym all the time eating the same things all the time and I'm like I like the routine I'm I'm very good at being consistent with this stuff so I was like I I'm going to set a goal and I was like I'm going to I'm going to put out three YouTube videos every week three long form YouTube videos every week I'm going to do this because these guys have been very successful at it and I think I can do this too Now spoiler alert it's been real hard it's been very hard to do that but uh it's also been extremely rewarding so with these guys you know like I said they've been very successful they've been on it for a long time though and I think this is the biggest misconception that people have is like and certainly why I kind of failed the first time through but like you need to be consistent you just have to be consistent if you're not like you're never going to get anywhere so people I think people fail because they give up too soon because of uh their expectations on it so I decided I was going to do this and and uh you know partway through the year I guess it would have been roughly one year ago right now I kind of I started adding in more content right so it was I'm going to do three uh YouTube videos a week and then it was I'm going to post a short video every day on Tik Tok I post three short videos a day um I was I'll talk about this in a little bit but I was getting to the point where I was putting out six blog posts a week plus my newsletter plus all the posts you see on LinkedIn so I basically started ramping up content like starting by struggling to get my three YouTube videos a week to now uh I I've taken a step back on the blogs because I'm writing more software um at home but really the point that I'm trying to get across here was that it's been a year or I guess like 18 months now of just trying to be consistently building up how much content I'm putting out so the the newsletter part has been very interesting um I feel like I've had feedback on my newsletter I've had other creators that will say like hey like you should structure your newsletter differently and um and it's not that like I don't think the feedback is valuable but at the same time I think I don't want to just be another cookie cutter do the same thing everyone else is doing so I kind of like having um um I I just like making sure that I'm doing it the way that I want to do it and if that means it's going to be a little slower okay okay but I just don't want to end up being a copy of someone else um and then yeah big Wally wig I think that's the max more then that content quality will drop yeah so and I'll by the end of my stream here I'll be talking about ways that I've been trying to work at at optimizing all of this because throughout this journey it's been every time that I find that I can get time back by by optimizing my process I end up trying to create more content different content or go onto a different platform so I've been doing that as a system for like 18 months now and that's what's allowed me to scale uh to being able to create the content that I've been creating so certainly what I don't want to say is like I don't want people to hear me saying this like I I think I'm a master at creating content like there's plenty of people out there that have uh like what I would say is like more call it like viral cont content for for the sake of Engagement like they're way better at doing it or people that might explain Concepts way better than me and that's okay like um I think for me what's really important is that I've been able to do more and be consistent uh over time so that's really what I've been after okay so the newsletter part like I said has been challenging because like I I don't know for for those watching if you try to grow a newsletter it's um it's tedious right it's um it's really challenging to get people kind of bought into like want to subscribe and like and read what you have to say every week um it's hard to grow a YouTube channel it's hard to grow on any platform and I think one of my really big takeaways that's been kind of like I want to say it's been demoralizing in some way like it always catches me where and even recently seeing like seeing people have a lot of success in a very short period of time it stands out to me because I go like I've been trying so hard and putting in so much work like why like it feels so unfair but it's a really dangerous trap to get into so I wanted to share this with with folks as well because if you're like hey I want to start I want to start creating content I think it would be fun I've had people reach out to me and say like hey I'm thinking about learning this language and I was thinking about like documenting the journey uh with making videos or writing posts about it like absolutely I I highly encourage it but when you start comparing your own um your own sort of growth then it's really challenging right you compare your growth to someone else's and it's just not going to you're setting yourself up for disappointment and I just realized I was ignoring the Instagram chat I see I don't know if Brad you're still on the chat Trident fine finishes good to see you Brad miss you buddy um I see dark devil 1922 I might have missed you might have already left sorry but what is git um git is a Source control system so it's arguably the most popular uh tool used for Source control to be able to take snapshots of code push it up to a a central repository people can clone it down and stuff like that so that's a a tool that gets used sorry I realized that that Instagram chat's not shared in the in the common chat so sorry if that seems super random okay so the whole point here was content scaling right and that's what I've been doing the past 18 months and kind of going to the next part um in my newsletter here was like I think on the surface someone might say like hey ex coding good to see you someone might say like why are you bothering with this like uh I kind of said you know I feel like I've been successful in my career I I I'm happy working at Microsoft like you know I do interesting work I have challenging work I love the people I work with they pay me well like all these things are good right there's these are good things so like why why am I going out and spending time creating content and for me like again kind of going back to the roots here it lets me stay sharp or sharper than I would otherwise and the other thing is like it's fulfilling for me and this isn't going to be the same for everyone right but like I get a lot of fulfillment out of being able to help people and sometimes as a content creator like and I say sometimes most of the time I have no idea if what I'm putting out there helps and that makes it really challenging because you know I'll spend however much time um you know recording videos to go make tutorials and stuff write articles um I've part of my content scaling was I hired a video editor so every month every month on YouTube I lose like BAS basically $400 to $750 a month like I don't make money from YouTube I make $2 I made it up to $2 a day on YouTube um but I spend you know like almost half a thousand dollars a month uh having my videos edited so I am literally losing money on YouTube but I'm doing it because like I want to create my brand I want to reach more people and I want to help like that makes me feel good so a lot of the time when we're creating content you don't have such feedback right it's not like you put out a video and as soon as the video's out it's like oh here's a million people being like oh thank you so much this changed my life it's like it's it's pretty rare it's pretty rare you get that kind of feedback but it's it changes everything like it only takes one person to be like hey like I watch that and like that's what I needed to hear I've had I've had colleagues um at Microsoft like I don't even work with them directly but you know on different teams and stuff that I you know I'm I don't want to more than acquaintances with like they're kind of partner teams and I've had someone reach out to me and said like hey like I accidentally like found myself like going down the rabbit hole like binging your shorts and um I remember they were like they they emailed me and they were like hey like I just wanted to let you know like I I needed that like I needed to hear some of the things he were saying and I was like man like it you always like for me I always kind of feel like is it worth it like should I give up but it only takes one person to say like thank you so much um and it's like you have momentum for another month easily um so Ira simple uh humor you mentioned learning in the open so create content like you are the audience instead of others is it better to create detailed and big posts or small and short um okay so couple couple things here right so I I do highly recommend obviously this is different for individuals right but I highly recommend learning in public um the one thing that I like to add is a disclaimer is that what I don't encourage is if you're going to learn in public you don't want to act like an expert so I'm uh our simply here I'm not sure you know maybe what your focus is but just to give you an example right say say you're like I'm going to Learn Python great okay so what I don't recommend is you start learning Python and then you go write post like you are a python expert because what happens is people that are very good at python would be able to see right through that and what happens is that you should expect you're going to make mistakes this is the way that we learn is we make mistakes they get corrected we go oh okay we learn from it we move on but when you're trying to act like an expert you're kind of like it's you're masquerading as an expert and someone's like hey man like that's not that's just not right like you will have people on the internet that will tear you apart for it so instead because there's no there's no benefit to acting like an expert and I think that you can go a really long way if you're just like here's the the things that I'm learning and like here's my take on it and you can literally leverage the internet to be like here's my learnings and then have people be like hey like that's great that sounds like it makes sense really cool or you'll have people that are like I don't think so here's a different perspective on it and when you you you can't avoid the trolls and the the mean people right it's just it's going to happen um and when they show up the nice thing is that you're like I'm just giving you the example of what I think that I'm learning I'm not trying to tell you it's this way only right so um I think you can really you can leverage it to learn a lot from the people that will engage with your content and what's really cool too and I don't know a really good way to explain this but if you think about your journey on something if you're always kind of you can do this many different ways but if you're setting your audience to be like the people that are a couple of steps behind you let's say what's really cool is like there are a lot of people that are a couple of steps behind you so it's really cool that you can put some content out aim it at a people a couple of steps behind you and then that way they're like hey this is very relevant like I feel like I I can uh tag along with this so hope that helps um the next part was is it better to create detailed and big posts or small and short um depends what you mean by better right so what's the goal if the goal is engagement um depends on the platform and I would also say that um oddly enough what can make a really big difference especially if you're thinking LinkedIn for example um if you're going to make a LinkedIn post the shape of your post sounds weird to say but the structure and the the shape like there are tons of things and I'm not very good at this I understand the concepts but like I'm still not great at it uh the shape can go a long way so of course one of the most important things for any post is like the very first line that you have like this is It's kind of challenging because this starts getting more into like marketing kind of things uh and like creative writing but the the goal of your first line is to capture people's attention you want to make them have some type of reaction to it so they're they feel like they're pulled in to go read more um so and sorry I see uh Dev Davies on on Tik Tok has a question so I'm gon to come back to that in just a sec I don't want to ignore you um but the the post shape can make a lot you want to capture people's attention and there's a concept of like reh hooking people right so I often find that like LinkedIn is getting more challenging in my opinion like the educational cont content the value of that on LinkedIn seems to be dropping rapidly um and it's kind of frustrating so like I noticed there's like posts that will be they call them Carousel posts right a carousel post on LinkedIn is a PDF that's all it is but it it allows you to kind of swipe through it and I've seen these Carousel posts get recycled and they have like the most trivial things in them and for some reason the engagement is like is obscenely High um I had I've seen people posting pictures of like very like extremely basic programming Concepts and again the the engagement is extremely high so it's like depends when you say best are you talking about engagement if so it it's almost like you you kind of have to play the social media game and I struggle with that because and I I'll get more to this in my in my article here but like I'm not I'm not an influencer my my goal and my career and my life is like I'm not going to be a social media influencer I don't like spending time on social media so for me it's not a good strategy uh for you if you're interested in getting engagement and stuff like that you kind of have to put a little bit of time into seeing how uh really successful posts like look at how they're structured look at how people are hooking the reader what what got your attention and there's like sort of patterns that you can pick up on so I just that's my my take so uh small or big it's like a variety right um different platforms like the type of content you po you post will have different sort of uh impression rates so for me like on LinkedIn I will post pictures text I will post videos um links don't do well you get penalized for putting a link in the post um LinkedIn says no but everyone who's collected data says yes uh I can attest to that anecdotally if I put a link in I get crushed for Impressions um so there's lots of little strategies and things like that but ultimately at the end of the day I would say create the content that uh that you would want to read that you feel like you know makes you feel good to put out there I think by being true to that you will find that you'll grow an audience of people that are interested in in what you're putting out there there's little tweaks and hacks that you can do to try and capture more engagement though so hope that helps um yeah okay so Dev Davies on Tik Tok is saying I heard someone say that you learn something by building a project with it how do you do that so yes um so I think this is one of the best ways to learn and the reason why it ends up being a really good way to learn is a couple reasons one is that you're going to be getting stuck which you might say well I don't want to get stuck that doesn't sound fun but that's the point if someone was just giving you the answers you don't actually learn um will you make progress on things sure will you learn them well probably not as well as if you got stuck and had to kind of unstick yourself so that's one of the reasons why it's very beneficial to be trying to build things um another one is that by genuinely building things and not just watching videos or reading articles um you're you're practicing actual software development so this is one of the reasons why with like lead code for example right I'm like lead code you can go solving problems that people have laid out for you but I'm like that's a very different skill set than building an application and then like trying to maintain it and support it like it's just I find a lot of like Elite code stuff does not translate well into um more General software engineering stuff so building projects in my opinion is the most applicable because it's what you're doing doing when you get a job and the other thing is that getting stuck process so um handful of different ways to do it um if you go on my YouTube channel which is just uh Dev leader on YouTube you can search uh just on my channel search projects I have a couple of uh videos on how like couple example projects you can get started with uh same on my website Dev leader.com projects uh someone I love giving a shout out to on here is uh John Cricket he has coding challenges as a newsletter very awesome for getting you set up for just like here's a a thing to go build right doesn't matter what language here's an example of something to go build try it out um trying to think if there's anything else on that uh something worth mentioning is that when you're focused on this kind of thing I I like reminding people like what your goal is which sounds funny but your goal with building projects is not I guess it depends on the person but if you're trying to learn your goal is not to make money with it your goal is to learn right so I think a lot of people get caught up and they're like well I don't know what project to go build because I don't have a business idea and like you know I have to think of something novel and I'm like no no no you know hit the braks like it's not um it's not like what am I going to build that's going to make me money that's not your goal your goal is to practice things to learn things um uh John vanir who has latterly IO uh he when I was interviewing him one of the things he said really resonated with me because it's how I approach learning in my own projects uh He suggests um if you think about a few variables that you have to work with right so say you know a programming language and you're comfortable with it and you know a text stack or you know a database uh you know that you can interact with I highly recommend you pick a couple of those types of variables and keep them fixed and then one or two other variables that are different so for example for me it's like I know C I know asp.net core and I'm familiar like I've used postgress in MySQL and more recently I guess it's a few months back I was like you know what I don't know a lot of mongod DB so I'm going to make sure that I try building my next project and I'm going to use mongod DB as the database like why it's a personal project I'm just trying to learn with so I keep a couple variables consistent C so that I can program effectively asp.net core because I can navigate it and the database will be the weird thing for me so I'm going to spend some time learning that um on Twitch I messed around so long worrying about my idea if it was novel when I was a student when I should have just Clon Reddit or YouTube Yep this is 100% uh the recommendation right so I don't know it was on one of my last streams uh I I told someone like clone Instagram and I said the the thing you'll probably say is well Nick I don't know how to build Instagram that seems really complicated and I go okay yeah break it down into pieces right like you're going to need a UI you're probably going to need a database you're going to need authentication like you keep breaking these things down into smaller pieces and maybe the first thing you go build is just like I'm going to make a a console application that can read and write records um to a database right that's that's not Instagram but it's a piece it's a piece in your Instagram that you're going to go build cool or you might start with the front end you're like I just want to be able to kind of lay things out design it see if I can get some interactions and I'm going to fake all of the data and everything else like cool just break it down into small pieces and play with it because the goal it's different if you're trying to have something in a portfolio and you want to like show it off but um even for me like okay number one is like if it's for learning spend the time learning the thing I don't care if you finish the project or not like if you're getting the learning out of it that's what matters when it comes to building portfolios even for me like if I if someone had on their resume like they were building some things and I looked at their GitHub or something and like they weren't finished working products I would still like want to hear about them i' go hey it was really cool that you picked react and uh this other thing like tell me why you um you know why did you want to use this as a database or like why did you pick react or like why did you you know I notice that you were using this kind of thing in your design like why did you do that and I just want to like learn right I don't care I don't care that you don't have a million users on your on your app that's a calculator right like I just want to hear about how you were thinking through things and stuff so portfolio kind of stuff that's what I'm interested in but ultimately for building projects I think you just want to focus on you know getting the learning out of it so I hope that helps uh any advice transition uh for someone transitioning from primarily proprietary stack think cobal to a modern sofware development job um been doing portfolio projects not sure how to present interview as I feel two years of experience here is not comparable to two years experience elsewhere okay okay IDs continuous uh integration deployment agile unit testing yep all these things are good um so the thing is like I think like any any programming language if you're if you understand the fundamentals like it's going to be applicable in another one so that's my first piece of advice is that maybe don't don't worry too much about that I think you'll have um you know you're not going to have an issue picking up something else especially if you get the the fundamentals down so I wouldn't worry too much about that I think there's a couple other challenges you have to navigate here um one is just like the job Market's extremely difficult right now so that is uh something I don't have a lot of great advice on because it's like kind of like outside of our control so volume can be your friend there uh networking can be your your other friend there so I think there's some things you could do around that um like I said don't worry so much about I'll give you an example I love sharing this but like I work at Microsoft um I'm on I managed two teams in deployment within substrate before and now I'm uh managing one on our on our roading and sort of like uh firewalling and dos protection side of things and on out of those teams I think I've had that was a new hire I've had one person that knew c one and like I didn't I didn't even interview these people right so it's not even my own bias of like oh don't worry like I'll have no problem teaching them not even my own bias Microsoft said these people are great they have prior programming experience they'll pick up C and they're totally right it's it's totally fine so I don't think it's about the language in my opinion right does it help sure especially at small companies when small companies are like look it's it's a really big risk for us to take on someone if they're not a good fit or we have to spend a lot of time ramping them up like that could be catastrophic for a small company right um yeah so as you're saying focus more on what uh software development life cycle tooling yep all that kind of stuff all of it is critical right and I think one thing I'd recommend is like so the the other sort of challenge that you're going to be facing is is how do you how do you kind of stand out right that's the one of the biggest challenges um and there's different parts to this but I would say like standing out on a resume the big thing that you can do there is talk about impact that's my my recommendation right so um some things like uh the Technologies and stuff like that they can be great keywords when they're being run through filters but if a human's reading your resume like if you say like I worked on this system and they're like okay cool I don't know what that system does sounds sounds neat like kind of make it so that someone has no question about the impact you had right even if you're like I optimize this process like okay like why does that matter and how like how much did you optimize it you know I saved 30% on our bill time which ended up saving us uh you know hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and got developers back this much time in their builds which happened every day for all of these developers across these teams so like the you know developer agility was improved by this much like that's pretty cool okay and then another thing too is like if you're saying I worked on this team and my team did this it's like okay well what part did you do because it might be very obvious to you you might be like oh yeah I worked on this cool team and you know the stuff you built or that you were responsible for but the way you end up writing it is like my team like we built this thing and you're not wrong like your team did build it but someone reading your resume like they don't know that and you might be able to explain it in an interview but I would say like try to you know hyperfocus on like these are the impacts that I had so hope that hope that helps let me know though um and then okay so I'm looking for a new laptop um uh I don't I'm not sure on laptops to be honest um I have an Alienware one here and I'm not sure if I'm ever going to buy an Alienware again I had a lot of uh audio issues surprisingly um but yeah I think you could there's proba I think it's Prime day tomorrow so maybe hop on Amazon and just look I don't know what the the latest stuff is but there's usually a sweet spot right if you want something that reasonably performant if you if you look at the most expensive stuff you can take a couple steps back for the latest tech and like save like I don't know like 50% off the latest stuff and go a couple Generations back and it's a it's a really good sweet spot to hit um I've really feel like creating content for me would be to get feedback Network nodding as I'm reading this have conversations jump start problem areas personal projects um is there something better than creating content um okay well I think this is a really good question kind of comment um Let me let me move a little bit further ahead in my in my newsletter here um so on this point I think it's so good because it's like what what are the benefits out of getting it right so in my newsletter I wrote learning I've already kind of talked about that the other the next point I said was networking and in the article I said I can't stress this enough I've met an incredible number of awesome people in the last 18 months um I I kind of gave a shout out to some of these people I'll explain a little bit more um I wrote income so depending what your goals are and stuff like yes you can make money from posting content online I shared with you that for my YouTube stuff I literally lose money like purely on YouTube uh fortunately like I I'm not in a spot where I can't afford to do that so I am very fortunate that I can sort of take my own money invest that into my own YouTube um production so that's going to look different for different people I'm not trying to not trying to brag about it I'm just trying to give you some insight into how I get some of my time back I was editing my own videos and I was like um to give you an example I'm going to I'm live streaming right now for two hours and I'm live streaming in the morning for two hours I'm able to do that because I pay someone to edit my other YouTube videos so spent some money to be able to get more time back and it's only because I'm fortunate enough to be in that situation um there's you can post articles on medium medium has a $5 a month uh $5 a month yeah $5 a month fee if you go for the the medium like sort of Premium paid version but what's really cool is that like so I haven't written articles in months now because I've been coding more and my my Roi on an article it's a lot of time to write and not a a lot of sort of side effect that's positive it just takes a lot to do and I I still am profitable on medium and we're talking like it's not a lot of money but like I think last month just for transparen I don't like talking about money because it sounds like I've see people do this and they brag about how much money they make and it's like feels kind of gross but like I made $15 in profit for medium right and I didn't write an article last week or last uh last couple months so making 15 bucks a month from not doing anything cool like you know it doesn't do much but still still profit and it's passive um courses are another one so for me personally the the income that I have from social media is is my course creation and I'm going to kind of you know a Move Along through here but uh for I wanted to share with you on the networking side of things right I wanted to share how impactful this has been for me personally okay so it's been 18 months creating content um you know 52 weeks or 52 issues of a newsletter there's a couple times I think I had to miss just from I think when I was getting married I don't think I put a newsletter out my wife probably would have had a comment about that and I think on our honeymoon I think I might have scheduled one but anyway um it only took me a couple of months of making YouTube videos and again you you guys might not know who this is um but I I mentioned earlier like Nick chaps is one of the people that I looked up to a lot in YouTube uh cuz he's got like 300,000 subscribers you know does all the net and C stuff you could think of and it only took me a couple of months of making YouTube content and Nick chaps has messaged me and he said I I'd like you to consider making courses for me and I I remember vividly being like oh great this is like when Elon Musk you know messages you on Twitter like you know it's not Elon and you know he had said like hey you want to get on a Discord call and talk about this and I just remember thinking like how is like how is this person going to scam me that was what was going through my head is how is this person going to scam me because it's no way it's the person I think it is and I was thinking more and more and I'm like I can't really see like I can't see the risk and also like what if it is really him and sure enough I got into a Discord call and it was him and for me that was super cool because this is one of like I said this is one of the people that I was like I'm making YouTube videos because I want to be able to do what this guy is doing because it's so awesome that he's been successful at it and he's one of the people that reached out to me to make courses so and I should to kind of Link this all together my core sales are the only reason that I'm able to keep making content that I can pay for my YouTube stuff every month right the the only reason I'm able to do that is because of core sales and it's thanks to to Nick chaps is for doing that um sorry I want to go back I I I don't want to leave uh Dev Davies hanging here on Tik Tok with his question so my question is really on how to start so his question earlier was if you have a pro you want to get started on a project because projects are good ways to learn um say you don't know Java for example how do I move from the point of not knowing anything in Java to building a project in Java so this is kind of tricky um and this is where I would say depending on the person like if you know other programming languages already um it might not be so bad uh if you don't know any programming languages and you're just getting started you might have to go through a couple tutorials to see the syntax and build like really really simple things just so you can practice like writing Loops if statements and things like that but I would say like if you know like one of the ways that I learn really well is taking something that exists already clone a repository down you know get it to build go it and then start changing code and for me personally that works really well because it's already working and I can start tweaking things and saying like well I can tell by the syntax here what here's what this looks like and you know what if I just want to change the text here like is it really as simple as you know changing this string or do I want to change it so that I you know I'm showing content on the right side of the screen or you know just playing around with working code for me is one of the best ways that I learned so again if you're not familiar with the language that could be a great way is that you start with something that is functional mess around with it um or if you're starting from scratch you might have to kind of do the very Basics um and then yeah so on Twitch uh in my opinion taking some programming courses at College will get you bootstrapped yeah um oh paid to go to Community College forers there you go nice so yeah I think it depends kind of on your point uh in your in your learning process right but um I I personally like when I create content I try to cover try to cover as many angles as I can so if you're the per kind of person that likes to read about things like I have articles if you want to watch tutorials I got tutorials uh courses I always feel like a little slim me with courses because it's like I want to help people and it's like well then why are you pushing courses and trying to take our money if you're just trying to help and I'm like look some people some people need an accountability piece I've shared this before and I kind of said earlier on the stream like bodybuilding has been a really big hobby of mine and I've been in the gym as long as I've been programming which is kind of funny right it's I don't look like Mr Olympia unfortunately but I've been doing it just as long as I've been programming so that's over 20 years and even for me like I in the past few years like I hired a coach not because it was like oh this person's going to teach me all these things that I've never even thought about and revolutionize how I think like that's nice if they can give me some different perspective Ive but it was an accountability thing for me so I think courses can give that kind of thing for some people where it's like look I paid for this I want to I want to make sure that I'm doing the work for it so bunch of different angles there um so on content creation the networking part has been tremendous like I said that relationship with Nick chaps is in the beginning um just really helped right I I feel like if I wouldn't have had that it would have been hard for me to you know fortunately I I am I'm paid well and I can support my own kind of content creation but it would have been more challenging and kind of felt like like is it really worth it so uh that was really cool to have um I I mentioned earlier like Milan javanovich is one of the other big uhet YouTubers and like you know it's really cool because like I message him on LinkedIn and stuff and we have conversations and I never thought that that would be the case like I am I am not I'm trying to say this like I'm not special what I'm doing is not special I have experiences everyone who's watching this has different life experiences right my experiences are not better than yours they're different all that I'm doing is being consistent and putting out content and sharing what I'm learning so just by doing that I'm trying to tell you that that's all that I'm doing being consistent and it's led to these opportunities where I get to meet these people um if you're on LinkedIn a lot in especially in the tech space there's uh it's funny I just said Milan javanovich there's also Milan milanovic there's too many milans um but Dr Milan milanovic is very big on LinkedIn for the tech creators um but you know I've been able to kind of uh chat back and forth with him he let me be a guest on one of his newsletters like that was super cool I've already gave a shout out to John Cricket for his uh coding challenges newsletter but I've been able to interview him he's interviewed me like you being able to chat with him is really cool um I don't know how many people are are net Enthusiast so it's kind of funny I'm like I'm kind of about to name drop some net people um but you might be like kind of like my wife where she's like I don't know who these people are I don't care um but Scott Hanselman and David Fowler are two huge um huge names from Microsoft and they both agreed to come on my podcast separately um and like again I'm not I'm not special I'm not doing something that other people cannot be doing right I'm just taking my life experiences and applying them to the content that I'm creating so you can be doing the exact same thing the biggest thing is consistency if you're just consistent and you keep putting out content and you keep trying to make it a little bit better you will absolutely do well I'm still very early in this process I'm not trying to say like I've I've won at creating content I am my channel is small like I don't have a ridiculous LinkedIn following like I'm trying to do all of these things but like you just have to be consistent um question for on YouTube uh so what engagement uh do you do outside of content creation you talk at conferences and hackathons yeah so I I actually one of the things that I I wrote on my newsletter is I just got a speaking opportunity so I'm actually this another one of those things like it's not paid for uh but I'm going to use uh you know because my my core sales are you know I have a business to be able to do that now so I will take proceeds from cor sales I'm flying myself out to Dallas I live in just north of Seattle so I'm paying to fly myself uh out to Dallas to go speak at a uh at a conference uh or I guess it's like a a Meetup right so it's not even like a a huge huge event um but that's on the 23rd so next week and I'm going to be I haven't revealed the topic I did a poll and it's a bit I should be transparent about this I did a poll about the topic and it was a bit of a social experiment and I asked people because these are two things that I really love to talk about I said what do you want my talk to be about do you want it to be about plugin architecture or testing now what do you think people picked um yeah people don't like hearing about testing it's kind of funny it's like ah testing again um so more more people it was pretty close actually more people did vote plug-in architecture so I'll probably I'll probably do that um so to your question on YouTube there like I haven't done a whole lot but that's sort of the next thing I have been focused on different forms of content creation so live streams are new for me live streams are a very new thing so I've been doing these talks on Monday nights it's uh you know started at 9:00 p.m. PST um it's what three 3 months now is um something like that four months maybe so that's been a new thing and then I was periodically trying to get some coding live streams and I think uh last week or the week before was my first one where I said you know what Tuesday mornings before work that's going to be my official coding live stream day so that's how I've been approaching things it's just different forms of content I am going to try the public speaking thing um I should you know make note like historically I have been afraid to public speak and I did a lot of negative selft talk like hey I'm bad at it that's why I don't do it and I've been learning like you know the the more you tell yourself that you're bad at something the more the more you're going to be right because you're going to avoid it and not practice it so um I think from creating videos and live streaming and stuff like do I can I sit here honestly and say to myself now like hey Nick like you're bad at public speaking I think the answer to that is no I'm not bad at it does it make me uncomfortable like yeah but when's the last time I did public speaking like not not to a camera like this right when's the last time I did that I couldn't tell you it's been six years more eight years somewhere in there give or take a couple years so like yeah like if you don't do it you're not going to be comfortable with it so for me that's going to be my first kind of attempt to try and see how I feel about it um I'm going to see so we'll um that'll be my first attempt and I you know might look for more uh unable currently I'm unable to travel outside of the US uh just on some on some Visa stuff so I'll wait and see if there's more it would be really cool to go over to like there's some some cool conferences in Europe it'd be cool to go speak at those so we'll have to see um I it's funny you said looked into attending that conference it's funny because like every time I saw that on Twitter I'm like I don't know what this is and it I I never really looked into it but it just from the name I couldn't tell if it was serious or not so um I don't know the details about that conference so uh might be something I have to check into okay um now what was the other thing I'm getting close to I like kind of switching over to Reddit around halfway through the 2hour Mark um so I'm going to wrap up the the newsletter piece but the the other thing I wanted to mention and this is like sort of value for Content creation and I want to I think it's important to share this because I don't think that people realize like how valuable it could be depending on the individual but I I said earlier on this stream like I feel like I've been successful in my career like I could have just St not done the content creation part and like the financially like things would be fine they'd be great like I don't have to worry about that I could work on other stuff sure but um I was I was pretty I was surprised by this myself which is why I want to share it with you so um I strongly believe that um my content creation afforded me the opportunity to switch teams at my Microsoft and I say this because um up until my team changed I hadn't really been going to the office much been basically remote work because my previous team basically everyone worked remote so there's no point as a manager going into the office just to call people it seems kind of silly um but there were people like there were people in leadership positions that would comment about you know the videos that I would put up on LinkedIn like people that I rarely interacted with because they are in leadership positions uh there was one situation where someone in a leadership position started a meeting with like 50 people and said hey look Nick's on the call like everyone if you haven't gone and watched Nick's videos you should go watch them and she ended the meeting the same way right like it was telling me like you know even if you're not getting viral videos and stuff like people are watching this stuff people that you don't think are watching this stuff they're watching and that was like a you know a little seed up here where it's like okay like you know this this is valuable uh I'm looking sorry I'm reading this Tik Tok message hey Nick who is talking behind I don't know what that means uh sorry you may can you change the can you rephrase the question I can try to answer so when it comes to creating content like you're going to have the the obvious audience which are the people that are interacting with your content but there's there's lots of people that are seeing your content right uh I responded to a Reddit Thread about uh rust Microsoft using rust for some things because someone took a job posting in in their defense like the job posting maybe wasn't worded so well but there was this thread on Reddit where people were like oh look Microsoft is jumping for.net and I said no said I'm literally I have one of the teams that's going to be using rust and like no we're not jumping ship from.net we're building something that's specifically going to benefit from using rust I was trying to elaborate on this this Reddit thread reddit's a totally toxic place which is why we're going there real soon and I I got an email from like an executive at Microsoft my work email like literally someone one of the executives was reading Reddit and saw my comment and to say like thank you for like you know for trying to help uh deescalate that and it's like people read your stuff people watch your videos so I I think that basically uh I was was kind of scouted for the team that I'm on now because people were able to to see that I was putting out content they could identify me and they were like hey it seems like this person would be a good fit right so I share this with you because i h I've before content like I've been able to do well in my career and this was something that even on top of that even just from making videos and being consistent someone was able to say hey look like look at this guy like he's talking about interesting things we're aligned with that we should talk so again I'm not special I just got a camera and I get in front of it regularly so you could be doing the same thing um okay oh G glor Beth it's good to see you I didn't realize you're in the the chat here sorry started watching your YouTube content started with some of the interviews and the intro to software engineering since I'm new to C do you have suggestion on which playlist to start with good question um how new to C um because I don't know if I have I have this playlist that is a it's kind of like be it's called you know uh I think it's called beginner programming um I'm looking it up sorry but there's some stuff that's kind of leaked into there that maybe isn't like super beginner it's kind of hard to classify um but let me I'm going to put this in the chat hopefully it comes through properly I think this is the one that I would recommend um there's probably like I said some things in there that are maybe a little bit more advanced but I think if you go through the playlist you can probably jump around there's some stuff in there like using uh different collection types so like why would you use a dictionary versus a list versus an array uh how do iterators work so if you're using four each loops on top of I innumerables some of that stuff might sound like it's a little bit of sorcery but like these are some Concepts you'll see pretty early on um something I recommend you do and I'm going to let me just switch over to this briefly so I'm not I always feel gross like pitching courses and I'm not I'm not saying I think actually you did buy this course so I'm not um kind of like forcing you to buy another but I would say if you I'm just going to put this in the chat too um what I would recommend is if you go through this like expand the the different things that are on here um what you can do is if you search for these things on my channel if you're like hey like I want more information on this and I don't see it on your channel like just message me I'll go make videos on it right I'm not I can't repeat my exact course can't repeat my exact course but maybe I'm just going to pick something right um what if we wanted to learn more about um I don't know like switch statements and switch expressions like hey Nick could you go put together another video on this like demonstrating how we could build an application like that like just message me and I'm happy to try putting more content together like this okay so hopefully that helps uh but that other playlist I linked is what I'd recommend there uh okay so oh okay so the final thing this is a bit of a this part's a little bit of an ad but so for me content creation um I I said this earlier like my goal is not to be like a social social media influencer uh I don't like spending time on social media despite how much time kind of have to spend on there to create content but I don't like doing it because all the time that I spend on social media is time that I'm not building software and like that's what I'm good at uh I am not good at these other things and I shouldn't say that shouldn't use the negative self talk that's not something that I feel like is the best use of my time best return on investment I think build software truly is my best return on investment so um for me I I mentioned this at the very beginning of this stream but it's like I've been focused on systemizing my content creation so every time that I'm able to save time I don't just take the time back and say oh thanks I get a breather I can just do nothing I take the time and I go do more or I do different I try to optimize and over time it's meant that I just keep doing more content things so I I've been building this system and I'm I'm saying building a system because I mean like kind of it hasn't been codified until very recently so I was building out like automation for being able to publish to different places at different times and stuff and I said you know what like this needs to be a full-on thing so the I started building this tool called brand ghost and this is what I've been spending more time on recently so I'll put this in the chat as well um brand ghost is the tool that I'm building that I am it's it's literally the system that I use for for getting my content out there so when people and I I get this pretty frequently where people are like how do you put out um oh it says my chat died what's going on chat hopefully we're still there um sorry chat I just sent that link again I don't know why I restream said the chat was gone but yeah um I use brand ghost to be able to publish all of my content across platforms right so that's what I use um it's been a more ad hoc system but I I'm sort of porting over all the logic to be in brand ghost because I was hitting limitations with the other things I was doing so using a bunch of like no code Solutions and just kind of being frustrated like beyond belief it's worked up until a certain point and then I'm like well I need to make changes and I'm like well now I got to code it so uh like I said I'm using brand ghost if you are uh interested in being able to to publish content more regularly um at least I'm not saying saying like hey go buy this go sign up for it um it's great if you're interested but uh ultimately this comes back to being able to create valuable what's called Evergreen content so instead of trying to make viral videos and viral posts if you look at my content you you might have noticed you're like hey Nick why are you talking about content you've never had a viral piece of content ever you're right I don't try to write viral content I don't try to make viral videos it would be great if any of them went viral but it's not my goal my goal is to be consistent and put out helpful content does that mean that it's going to be really slow for growth sure perhaps but am I going to burn out from trying to trying to go you know make a new viral video every day like no I'm able to stay consistent because I'm just putting out content that I think is helpful yeah the profit motive for viral content in the tech sector is incredibly depressing yep um yeah this is uh so the if you're reading in the chat right as of right now seems to be people who worked in tech for two years now to make clickbait that's generally depressing so yeah um you know this is kind of what I was saying earlier about the you know if you're going to go learn in public like that's great but I've absolutely seen people that will say Hey look I I landed a $100,000 Tech job and now you can buy my course for $11,000 that will help you land a $100,000 Tech job and it's like I don't know man like I'm not saying that you can't teach people about that but like truly truly should you be doing that the the example that I love going back to with this I'm going to use the bodybuilding thing again I've been I've been in a gym interested in bodybuilding powerlifting for a portion of that but you know going to the gym consistently between like six to seven days a week now I've kind of taken my foot off the the gas a little bit metaphorically so I have had people say to me hey look I'd like to get stronger I'd like to lose weight could you help me with the meal plan could you help me with training if I put my my money hat on yeah sure no problem it's going to cost you 100 bucks for a training plan and then I would just go to Excel and I would go print out the you know the um the training plan I give everyone thanks for the hundred bucks but I don't do that I don't do that because it's like that's not number one that's not who I am as a person but number two like I don't feel like even though I have the experience like I don't feel like someone should be paying me for that like I'm not a professional at it um a lot of its anecdotes my opinion and I'm like I'm happy to help you but like taking your money for it is just like morally I'm not there and I get it people have different morals we're going to have different outlooks on life but when I see people that have like not really done and I want to be careful how I say this but when I feel like someone's not an expert acting like an expert that really kind of turns me off from from what's going on so um Integrity goes a long way thank you that was the most succinct way to put what my rambling was so it's just yeah I feel like there's not a lot of Integrity in that that's my personal opinion if you feel offended by that I'm sorry um just you know I get it people are looking to make money every which way they can like totally I get it um it just doesn't just doesn't feel right to me okay um I think that might be it for the newsletter stuff I kind of you know told you guys about brand ghost um and this is why I stopped writing blog articles just for the record so I when I started saying you know what I'm going to take brand ghost more seriously and build the the code and the service the infrastructure for this I don't have time to write articles anymore so uh my blog articles have taken a backseat for a few months when it sounds funny because like isn't brand go supposed to get you your time back like yeah but I got a build it I have to take my no code solution build it in code so that I can relever it more effectively and then will I be able to go back to writing blog articles yeah but like I'm I'm currently making brand ghost I'm making another course I work a full-time job I'm about to start making another course on top of my course um there's like there's a lot going on so um blog articles are the one of the things that take the most time and have the least sort of return on just the impact I have in the content space so those are dropped out for a little bit but I think it's time to jump over to Reddit I haven't actually looked at what the topics are at the top of experienced devs but um yeah I I'll put the link to the newsletter back in the chat just in case people are um you haven't checked it out but yeah it's been it's really cool it's been 52 weeks or 52 issues um yeah it's been it's it's been a journey it's a lot of work so it's kind of cool to see that it's uh it's slowly getting there okay let's jump over to Reddit I will get my screen shared here in just a sec I want to refresh what's going on um this is the time where I remind people on uh Instagram I'm very sorry if you're watching this because it starts cutting things out but let's go over here uh by the way folks as I'm going through stuff on Reddit I I I just I'm going to be giving you my opinion on different things as we go to read through it but if you have questions like you've been doing the whole time just like ask them in the chat I will you know I'll pause what I'm talking about to go answer your stuff okay I haven't literally have not seen any of the topics for today um another disclaimer like I hate Reddit it makes me feel like uh I feel very anxious so this one seems kind of cool we'll pull that up should I make multiple resumés yeah sure let's pull that up I don't want to talk about that that seems kind of weird yeah let's look at this one and this one seems pretty good too okay if you guys also if you're if you want to share an article and you're like hey like can I get your opinion on this one just put it in the chat happy to switch over um for the new course I actually someone asked this the other day on Twitter and I've never actually confirmed if I'm allowed to share what the topics are it's not like it's not top secret but at the same time uh from like a competitor standpoint I don't know if it um is something I can share but what I mentioned to people was like I only make courses about stuff that I talk about a lot if I can put it that way so I'm not going to make courses on topics that I like don't have experience with or that I'm not posting about so it will be if you're reading my content or watching my videos like it'll be related to some things that you're seeing there um this one I can probably add it's not uh it's not framework specific it's going to be a c course I I'll so I'll say that's a c course it's not like a text stack or a framework it's a some Concepts from C I'll say that so um it will be in terms of like beginner intermediate in advance it's it's not going to be super Advanced um but it's certainly like not uh if you've never used C ever before like it might seem like a bit of a stretch but it's probably at the like you know uh early intermediate level because I don't think the concepts are that complicated once you get into it so sorry I'm not trying to be mysterious I I really need to ask Nick chaps if I'm allowed to talk about that kind of stuff just so I don't have to be weird about it okay so this Reddit post does changing specialization Doom your career your future career recently got a new job but in different specialization majored in computer engineering that's what I did uh electronics embedded system knowledge but definitely a software engineer by profession so that sounds exactly like me yeah started by spending one year programming prototypes for medical software literally I did this this is did I write this one of my uh earlier internships I had two internships at a company making medical software um I spent the last 5 years an embedded Linux developer this is where it changes that's not what I did but I've recently gotten a new much better paying job as a devop systems engineer okay sound different but a lot of my skills actually carried over pretty well I am not shocked by this a lot of skills with Linux communication networks and various tools are universally applicable to a lot of roles absolutely so Shi is going to be excellent for me but what happens after that have i neutered my of getting better jobs in the future by doing this I me I was stuck being either a mediocre devops or embedded systems guy for the rest of my life um this he's I don't want to you know read this word for word but most of the time when you think of a senior engineer you think of someone who's an expert in their field okay um I have thoughts on this so and I will you like I have my own biases right so I have to use my own my own personal experiences but um I've shared before that I am pretty conservative when it comes to taking risks just kind of how I am as a person um which sounds kind of funny like I don't the thought of being complacent makes me nervous like I don't just want to settle and get complacent but at the same time like it's comfortable right so I have in my career I've had a lot of forcing functions that have made it so that I'm focused in a new domain and every time it happens it feels so uncomfortable because I'm like oh no I'm I'm Junior again right I'm right back in the beginning but that's that's how it feels it's not actually what's happening and every time it happens the like you know I stick with it for a few months a year two years and then I go right back to this point of being like hell yeah like this was good this was worth it and when I read this person's post about like is this going to kind of screw them over um no I think the only thing that screws people over is getting complacent personally so they called it out right they're talking about how some of these skills are transferable I think that's absolutely the case right this is why we talk about like fundamentals not Frameworks so he's kind of calling out some things that seem applicable it's like when you learn a programming language you can go learn another one so when you think of a senior engineer you think of someone who's an expert in their field like yes but like the domain knowledge is is one part of it right um you know just to give you an example the two last positions that I've had including my current on sorry I've had at Microsoft I got hired into Microsoft as a engineering manager over deployment I have never worked at a company with distributed systems ever and they hired me on to do deployment for hundreds of thousands of machines across the world so like the point that I'm getting across here is like there's a forcing function and like they hired me as a principle software engineering manager so it's not like you're screwing yourself over because you're able to take all of these other skills and experiences and go apply them to a new domain you build up that domain knowledge that takes some time for sure but like the more of these experiences that you have the more that you pick up a new domain faster because there's you know the unique things about it that you can pick up on and you do that you build expertise and you either stay there and you go super deep or you repeat the process right so I think this person like might be hyper like focused on do I have to go super super deep and I think the answer is just like no you don't have to um I think there's a lot of things that you can take out of something you can extract your learnings and then go apply them to the next situation so um you know I like to hear stories from people who haven't just done one thing forever so you know I'll I'll share with you folks on the stream like for me um my first job out of University was building digital forensic software I had never built digital forensics software my life I didn't even know what digital forensics was when I took that job um one of the first meetings the founder of the company um pulled three of us that were hired in roughly the same time three new engineers and he's like okay I want to do you guys know about um like NTFS and fat 32 for file systems and I just remember being like Oh man like what have I gotten myself into I'm like I have no idea what this guy's talking about no idea right and then it took a little bit of time and then I was building forensic software I ended up prototyping with one of the other Engineers there we built a like a a mobile digital forensics tool it ended up being a competitor to a company that has the Monopoly over mobile digital forensics like you know I had a team of five people competing against a billion doll company and like I didn't know anything about mobile forensics before and we started to become like you know leaders in this space like we were coming up with you know leveraging exploits and things like that to be able to get Rude access to recover information forensically like it's you you put yourself into these new spaces and then you're like I have problems to solve I'm going to go solve them right so then I mentioned the whole thing with deployment um so that was a very new thing at Microsoft now I work in routing and firewalls and uh caching and things like that it's a big big proxy that we run and that's extremely new territory for me extremely so it's still going to be some time before I feel like I if I can call myself an expert in this area but I think it's all just about like once you once you start getting complacent with something like to me that's where it's dangerous so it's almost the opposite of what this person's concerned about that's my thought on this one Let's uh let's jump over this one might be beneficial for some folks just wanted to ask whether I should make rums focusing on a a particular role while applying for jobs so yes I think the answer is yes um I'm gonna shout out John vvir of vly IO he's probably a good person to ask about this but um my understanding from his perspective Ive is like for job applications he recommends it the number sounds astronomical I think but he was saying like up to 80 applications per week like 8 Z is like what he would recommend for people that are um that are basically trying to land their first job that's a lot of resumés but one of the things he says is that if you're trying to tune your resume like it's really difficult to get any meaningful like statistically meaningful data on your resume unless you have volume like that so if you want to be tuning things like you might not even know what's working what's not unless you have that kind of volume um you might find that if you're very Junior it's hard to go tailor a resume to different companies because you're like my experience is pretty limited might be zero so you can talk about projects and things like that that you've worked on and if you have to go tailor that to each company like that might seem very difficult but um yeah I think in general I would say if you have the the material to be able to back that on a resume that would be be helpful to be able to do that to to tailor them that's a quick one we'll move on from that one how much of a pay cut would you take for better Dev culture um okay and the the tldd all other things being equal would you take $60,000 pay cut for a better Dev culture this is a difficult question I haven't read the body of this yet but it's a difficult one because $60,000 could be lifechanging for people right so I'm a senior devit a publicly traded company C job's a dream job in a lot of ways fully remote I honestly don't work that hard don't do crunch time I can take care of appointments during the day no problem it's pretty chill cool okay good seems like good work life balance kind of thing going on here the problem is work culture okay I like my co-workers that's a good sign but processes are totally broken often I'll work on a feature for weeks submit my poll requests and then some high ranking designer or product Le will scrap it or request enough changes it's essentially completely new design things can end up getting fully designed and implemented two to three times okay it work full year on three different projects where we got 90% of the thing done and then some guy I've never heard of dropped into our team CH to tell us there was a change of Direction okay at The Other Extreme sometimes we'll have arbitrary deadlines and they push us to do shoddy code into into production so they just demonstrate velocity to the CEO okay some balance line go up and that's all that matters we're practicing share price driven development company's also getting more evil but that's a different topic okay there's a handful of things going on in this one um part of me like there's a part in the middle of this one that seems like it's uh seems like it's relatively addressable but it's a culture thing for sure as this person calls out so they said I'll work on a feature submit poll request and then some high ranking designer or product lead will scrap it or request enough changes so okay I've talked about this kind of thing before on poll requests if you notice that this kind of thing happens a lot so say the first time you do it you spend 3 weeks on something and this happens right someone's like hey scrap it and you're like man that sucks like I just spent three weeks on this that that was a really crappy thing to have happen Okay so not a good feeling we get that okay so the next time you go to do something 3 weeks in put it up for review same thing happens again they go hey scrap this thing it's garbage redesign it what do you think you might do differently number time number three like do you just go repeat the same thing where you're like okay I got my new project I'm just going to go off for three weeks and go build it and then put it up for review like personally I would say probably not unless you enjoy being disappointed like my my recommendation here would be like what can you do differently and this person's talking about work culture and I get it like that sounds like a Prett crappy thing but like you're not you're also not helping the work culture if you're not trying to change it so what I would recommend to this person and obviously I don't work there so I'm making assumptions about things but like what I would recommend to this person is like well why do you have conversations with these people sooner I don't know if they're open to it but I would at least start with that and you could literally be something like hey like I just wanted to reach out I'm starting on this new thing um I know last time I got pretty far in and it seemed like you wanted some redesigns I think that it would be beneficial if I could sync with you early we could get on the same page uh as much as possible and that way maybe I can give you some earlier Fe or get some earlier feedback from you so that we can make sure that we're kind of Designing things in a way that you want to see like I I don't know why those types of conversations aren't happening right and there could be many reasons maybe it's like maybe that person is actually a buttthe head and they're not open to conversations and whatever else but like I I don't know I feel like most people don't just try to be you know buttheads they're usually most people are trying to to help progress things so I just feel like there's this opportunity where instead of feeling like oh like it's always people coming after me and everything sucks it's like I I don't want to diminish you know these experiences you're having like you literally can do something about this kind of thing you could be the you could start being the solution of the change you want to see right so um I think that's what I would say for this part here is like maybe be more proactive instead of constantly being disappointed by waiting too long to get that feedback do something sooner that's part one um this part's interesting and this I feel like I've seen some things like this um I'm trying to think of good ways to kind of communicate this the there could be a couple different things going on okay so let's let's assume that this person's spot on right where like they know a lot about the business and it seems like they're just wasting time because they go to um or maybe it was up here sorry uh shiny features press release sorry I was thinking about this part here uh where they're basically canning things right change of Direction I wanted to talk about the change of Direction part so for the change of Direction thing let's assume this person really knows like hey we're working on something and like it's going to be it's going to be really good and then someone says change direction like this can be frustrating because you see the value in it and you're like I know that if this is delivered to customers this is going to you know make a difference now that feels frustrating when people are saying hey we're changing direction because you start to feel like well you're not you don't value the same things we do like we're so close we know this is valuable why would you tell us to go do something else when we were so confident there was value here so I think that can be frustrating for people but here's the other like sort of spin on this I would mention is like we're talking about a business right so people people have a hard time with this especially like a software developers and I say this being someone who likes to write code right the first eight years I was an engineering manager I was I was also a software engineer at the same time I did both and it can be really challenging when you're working on stuff and the needs of the business change now I think people have to be open to that and the sort of the risk is like if you have like dumb people running the business and they're pivoting all of the time and nothing ever gets done like yeah that's that's not a good spot I it's just not a good spot to be in right you never get anything done as a result but like is that actually happening or is that an exaggeration I don't know we can't tell from this article or sorry this post so I like reminding people that it's entirely possible that a business does have to Pivot right I I spent a lot of time prototyping in my career before Microsoft I had internships where I was prototyping I had the at the forensics company I basically ran the team that would prototype things and we'd go hell yeah this is cool like we should build a product team around it and then they would go spin off a product team but there were absolutely things that we would build and it's like that's not not going anywhere like toss it and you need to be ready to toss things so I think something here is like it's really hard to know the truth of what's going on here um and I totally want to say like I can get why this would be frustrating when you know you're getting most of the way through something and then there's a pivot I get it um I think if you want to feel better about this kind of thing like communication right like go back to your manager and ask see if there can be more clarification on this kind of stuff like you would at least I would hope that if someone's like hey change a direction we're going to go this way now sorry we got to can this thing that yeah it's going to feel like a little bit demotivating but at the same time like if you're hearing the New Direction hopefully you're like I could see why we're doing that I want to give you an example right like Microsoft two huge things at Microsoft right now co-pilot security co-pilot and security these two things make a lot of sense and when we have plans if someone's like look we should be prioritizing co-pilot and security I can rationalize like hey look the thing that we wanted to do that has value literally as an as a business we're saying we want to be more invested into security and co-pilot as an entire business and I can rationalize that that makes sense so like if you're unable to see that that's okay but I think you want to be asking questions like how can you get to the same spot and it takes communication from both sides too so like if leadership at this guy's company I believe this guy I don't guy or girl I don't know um that this person's company if they're not communicating they're saying hey we're canning it do this next thing like yeah that's a really crappy way to do it so don't get me wrong I there's effective ways that you can communicate this but yeah it's it's really hard to tell from this um oh man this this thing's way more um I guess the original part here was like about the pay cut right uh incoming offer from smaller pre-ipo company got a good feeling with the dove culture okay so just on without going into the detail about this stuff I mean total compensation 250k new Rolls 190k base there's the 60k drop right um the way that I look at this is like and how do you answer this for anyone is like well and I can't speak on this person's behalf but it's like you know if you were to lose the 60k a year is that going to change the quality of your life as in like you need to downsize your house you're not going to be able to afford car payments you're not going to be able to to live the quality of life that you are used to having and that you enjoy but if you're like yeah we like you know we were investing a ton and like or saving a ton now we like we won't be able to put as much away but like we can still live and kind of live the lifestyle we want I might say okay well look like is your work is your literally you know your eight hours plus a day that you're spending at this place if that's going to feel better for you and you're like again I know the number for some people like 190k like seems like a lot and I mean that that is great pay for sure um but some people like they're kind of spending what they're making at the same time too so it's situational if this person's okay with that pay cut it might be a really good move for them to get sort of that I don't know what they're what they're looking for in that Dev culture now are they actually going to get that Dev culture they want like who knows they might switch and being enticed by it and it's truly not what they were hoping for so it's hard to say I think it's a gamble in either case um but yeah I think for a lot of people and like I said it's situation I think for a lot of people 60k a year could be life life changing that could be a pretty big impact so you might say hey you know what like maybe work is a little bit less enjoyable maybe I don't know or only in some cases but like the 60k a year outside of work is going to make that much more of a difference for us that it's worth it or you might say it the opposite way where you're like look if we're going to lose the 60k a year we're still making enough we're happy and and truly my my time at work will be more enjoyable so out of my 24 hours in the day eight of those hours won't be like oh I hate this it'll actually be like hey this is pretty cool and exciting so I think those are personal questions that people have to ask so that's how I would approach that one though that's my thought um at this point in time for me it's tricky because for okay for for 60k a year I probably I'm probably not um rushing to make changes at this point and I think that's because if I ask myself this honestly like let's say there was another job that was going to pay well I'm I'm okay where I'm at in terms of work so the opposite situation there's 60k more to go work somewhere that was promising even better work culture I'm like you know what like I don't have a problem where I'm at right now so it's almost like the 60k extra if I say it the opposite opposite way right that 60k extra is uncertainty so it might be really good if I was in a similar situation that I was at the beginning of the year where it's like hey look I'm ready for a change cool like more money and it's a different environment like I'm ready for a change I'm personally not though and I'm enjoying what I'm doing so is 60k going to make me move like for me personally no but that's just because of my my current life situation that's it's going to be different for everyone so I think these are questions you have to ask yourself ask your partner so hopefully that helps okay this one seems funny I feel like I resonate with this one and I haven't even read it um keep getting more and more responsibilities but I'm reaching my limit okay join my current company during the co hiring spree uh with seven-year-old 3ish of those as a software engineering manager oh sorry 7 years of experience three of as a software engineer manager however I worked very niche in house software don't have much experience marketed myself effectively so okay so they have an entry level role as a result um they said within six months manager realize indeed competent okay oh okay then manager left shortly after he was able to and financial Independence retire early congrats okay great so and I got promoted to manager given my past experiences cool okay so this person took an entry-level job now they're the manager I'm now sitting at about 10 years of experience with about four to five of that as a manager okay I had that three extra years of being a manager basically at the beginning of this year the size of my team doubled yeah our department recently had a bit of a reorg new VP um add more teams I'll be appropriately compensated and since I was just promoted it be tough squeeze for another promotion I don't want to do this okay that's the problem I don't want to do this until now I've been able to do all this work with minimal effort my company particular engineering departments like to blow out s out of proportion act like things take longer than they do I'm just going to have to do more and more and I just feel like my boss and his boss are relying on me way too much so this is interesting because I think some people especially earlier on in their Tech careers are like got to chase the higher level got to do this got to do this got to level up got to got to become principal staff distinguished engineer like you know just chasing these things and even from some podcast interviews I've done I realized there's more and more people that are like look we're on about that life or I've you know people I've interviewed are saying like they've had colleagues where they're like some people were saying that they're they have colleagues that were turning down promotions because they didn't want the extra responsibility and that blew my mind I've never heard that I I believe this was uh in India this was some situations like this where people were like no no thank you on the promotion no I'm good like I'm like what do you mean uh so that's pretty interesting this person is saying just feeling overwhelmed because of how fast everything's been moving and getting squeezed too hard by the people above me okay so first of all just to answer their question I think like you got to be open and transparent with people right what's going to happen if this person's not communicating that effectively is like they'll be in a situation where like they have expectations put on them and they're kind of crumbling under them they're unable to to meet their current expectations and like what do you think's going to happen it's going to look bad they're going they're going to have their management confused and concerned like so instead of like waiting for that to happen like I think you need to have a conversation about it which sounds it's obviously easier said than done but I think like a lot of things I will always come back to where communication like if you're if you're sitting here asking the internet you just wrote a mini novel you're asking people on Reddit of all places what should I do here I think if you're doing this kind of thing you're probably in a position where you should be having a conversation with your manager and trying to be transparent about this kind of stuff and I I say this like I said knowing it's far easier said than done but you're like you're going to talk to people on Reddit and you're going to have to take some course of action based on what they're saying and at some point you're probably goingon to have to talk to someone about it so like why not why not lean into that um and you know they kind of say it in here right I don't think that I really want to be a director at least not yet I think I'm okay with being a director in fiveish years but right now everything's moving too fast I would tell your manager that because what's going to happen is if they need someone in that position should they be going to hire it they might be able to keep you as a manager keep your responsibilities the same hire in a director do something but otherwise they're like hey this guy's doing great he's the best fit we got right now like let's do it so I think you have to be transparent about that stuff um that's my thoughts I thought this was kind of interesting though because like uh this it resonates with kind of some experiences I had so um when I started at Microsoft I had eight years of of managing teams uh if you count my my internships because those were in Industry that was like 10 years of uh being a software engineer in eight of those years being a software engineer managing teams so kind of like similar amount of experience but had for me eight years of managing teams and then uh this I thought was funny at the beginning of this year the size of my team doubled so on the deployment team at Microsoft I inherited a whole second team they just said here you go like here's another deployment team so I had two deployment teams and I I should clarify when I say deployment team um my my manager had the overall umbrella over deployment but I had had one of the deployment teams plus another deployment team that was given to me so that's slightly just you know for clarification there um so I doubled you know I I I just had a whole separate team they had a whole different Tech stack it was just a different deployment team so let's see they keep challenging with more and more okay so and then I also had a reorg too so um basically before that happened my my manager left and I I don't mean that in a negative way he had a really good opportunity so he moved over to that so I didn't have a manager I was reporting my skip level I was given this extra team then I had a new manager brought on and then a few months after we reorg so I had this new team I have a new manager like I've been working with her for a bit and then we switched VPS like a lot of change um and this person says I I'll be appropriately compensated and since I was just promoted I didn't get I basically got another team and did not get promoted did not have a compensation change um so I don't know like I'm the kind of I'm very much opposite to this person where it's like look like I would be loving to demonstrate this uh this person's like uh you know I don't want to a director at least not yet uh fiveish years but I'm like I'm at the point now for me where uh personally like I'm I'm managing engineering teams but I think I think I'm at the point where if I could be managing managers like that's where that's my next step I'm kind of looking forward to being able to do that so it's it's hard for me to read this because I've had some similar experiences here and I'm like man like this I'm I'm way too lazy for it right I don't want to do all this work uh I'm way too lazy for it uh but yeah like so glor Beth you're saying like seems like a nice problem to have it's like that's my take on this is like I'm like like dude like i' I'd be okay with this um but I think the the part that I want to convey here to the the audience is like not everyone's like that that's okay it's it just it seems kind of funny so yeah I I have a difficult time resonating with this this one which is fine but I do think the takeaway that I have reading what this person wrote is like you're going to have to have a conversation with someone and the longer you wait the harder it is because it seems like someone's not observing that about this person right they're not observing that this person is getting stressed out like it's not working well for them they're probably like hey like this is going okay here's more responsibility so like maybe that's not maybe that's not what you want to keep encouraging so I would just tell this person maybe speak up um yeah I think that's my take okay folks it's 10 minutes left in the Stream before I got to sign off for bed uh I haven't seen many questions coming in the chat but maybe I'll take this moment as I'm kind of wrapping up what I have to say uh if there's any last minute questions I'm happy to take them um but yeah this uh I know this stream was a little bit different cuz I focus on the content creation stuff uh but I have been trying to do my uh my Monday night streams related to my newsletter just to kind of tie it together it's been kind of a a theme I've been doing so that one was kind of celebrating my 52 uh weeks of newsletter stuff so sorry if you are watching this and you're like ah that doesn't feel relevant to me but you know my REM reminder there is like I do think that uh content creation can be a very interesting opport opportunity and it does not have to be about how am I making money directly from my content or how do I grow the biggest audience honestly the networking part alone can be tremendous but the overall the biggest sort of barrier with content creation is just being consistent with it so that's my my piece of encouragement there if you are on the fence about it I would say just start and and don't don't stop you know start take it slow you don't want to burn out from it and then once you're the groove of it try to add a little bit more do you think a degree is necessary if someone has two years of experience I currently have uh as and CS but I don't have a lifestyle allows me to finish at a a well-ranked university I'm in the USA could do something like the U but if it's not going to be necessary for jobs I'd rather self- te and do more at work yes and no right um I think one of the problems or challenges okay a couple things going on here so I think in a good way I think that there are more companies being open to not uh sort of setting the bar as like you must have gone to University or college I think that's a positive thing because it means that there's more people from different walks of life and stuff are able to get into software development I think that's overall positive so I I want to kind of uh clear that up I think one of the big challenges is that it's extremely competitive right now extremely so and whether whether or not you think this is right or wrong I'm not saying it's good or bad just for the record I need to be very transparent about that whether or not you agree right or wrong good or bad I think what's happening at a lot of places is that because there's so much volume of resumés do you think that people who need to get through more volume of resumés are going to set the bar higher right and what I mean by that is like if someone and I'm I want to keep reiterating I'm not saying good or bad right or wrong um but if you're if someone has college or university that might stand out more than someone who is just self-taught and I'm not the person who's looking through the resumés and sometimes it might not even be the recruiters it might be the automated systems that are looking for these things so I do think depending on where you're applying that can make a huge difference because say um say it was some of the bigger tech companies they might be using systems that are like when you're submitting and you're going through their portal if you're not checking off postsecondary education they might be like well there's a there's a thousand other applicants that do have it so like the we've just we've just set the bar there um so what worries me is that I'm working full-time so unable to finish at a well-ranked State University um my I want to share this with you and I don't I don't think I'm necessarily alone in saying this but like I have never cared what school someone went to like ever uh I've never never looked at grades I've never looked at which school um like I I will be doing interviews at Microsoft um like I have to do interviews on Wednesday uh I don't know any of the US schools that's not true I know I know a couple of them that stand out like Harvard and MIT like I know some schools um but that's like I don't care it's like does it stand out to me if someone went to college or university sure um I I'm not opposed to people that go to boot camps and stuff like that either but my point is like it's just nice to see that someone did further learning right someone's like I'm investing myself into this that stands out to me so um I wouldn't be concerned about going to a well-ranked state University I do think again I'm going to lean on John vanir Vader Le iio I do think he has some stats that indicate that that can be beneficial but at the same time like I don't think that that's one of the things you want to like hyper optimize and try to be concerned about like if you don't have time for it it's going to be too challenging like okay I would say like Park that thought and like what else can you be doing you only have so much time and resources what could you be doing to try and and stand out more right so whether that's taking that extra time whether it's you know if it's minimal like you're going to build some stuff and document it like that could be an option but uh or you're going to do like some people like to do like certifications and stuff online right um some people say well shts are useless like I don't know like I'm not hiring people for their certificates but if you were getting them again it shows me that you're trying to learn stuff so like personally that's what I'm kind of interested in is that people are just trying to constantly learn and improve because that's what we need to be doing as software Engineers any quick advice to those trying to get their first software engineering job um so I think it depends on what part um thank you uh Minaj uh Mano I'm sorry I don't know how to pronounce your name properly um but I appreciate it uh any quick advice so it depends what stage you're at and I know you're saying first software engineering job but what I mean by first uh what state is are you at the point where you are trying to get recruiters to respond to you because if you are this is like the very first stage and I've I'm I'm going to put some links in the chat I have three live streams that I did on this uh three weeks in a row and I'm just looking for them so give me pardon me I can tell my uh the covid vaccine like makes me feel like I can tell my Advil is wearing off because I'm coughing and like not sick I don't know what's up um this one so there's three live streams I'm going to share the links so this is stage one and so this one I speak about trying to stand out so like if you're at the stage where like I'm not even getting people to respond to me like this is me talking about things that you could be doing uh to stand out the next part is if you are getting noticed and you need to do your interviews this is the second part and the third part is here common rate up and I broke these into three different discussions because I think the focus that you need to have in each of these three phases is different as much as I would love for that third stage is once you're actually working what should you be doing I would love if the first two stages were essentially the same thing right just do the software engineering stuff it's going to help the problem is for stage one like you're trying to get notice so like what do you need to be doing to even be visible to recruiters and getting your resume through stuff like that's a different set of skills then even the next stage which is like you're as much as I don't like it you're probably doing something like lead code problems in your interview right like a system design question or like a lead code style question uh behavioral interviews make a lot of sense to me um but sometimes you you you have to like skill up on these interview questions so um I think to you know to answer your question I think it kind of depends on what stage you're at but uh even if you don't want to watch those live streams all the way through you can watch them at 2x speed maybe whatever uh I do think that I still recommend uh the approach kind of looking at these three segments so I hope that helps clarify but it's about getting noticed step one step two is like how you go about practicing for your interviews and the different skills you need there and then stage three is you got the job how do you start doing uh that job effectively um but I think that's it folks so I hope uh I hope that was informative and if I get to bed on time I should be able to stream at 7:00 a.m. PST I'm going to be building in C I'm going to be using quartz.net I have used it briefly before I feel like I am not experienced enough at using it effectively I have um I have to refactor a large part of code and I need or I shouldn't say I need I in interested in using uh quartz.net for job scheduling so before I go do a big refactor to put courts.net in I want to be able to try it out so that's what I'm going to be doing in the morning if you're able to join that's great if not all of these get uh recorded they're on YouTube um so you never have to worry if you're like miss one of these and you want to catch up no big deal that's what I'll be doing in the morning so thank you you so much for joining in like I said I hope you found it helpful if you don't join tomorrow morning I hope to see you next Monday so thank you so much enjoy the rest of your week don't have too much fun but make sure you