Different Communication Styles in Software Engineering - Engineering Manager AMA

All right, let's see what we got going on here. It's Instagram. I think we're all set in all the places. Um, welcome, welcome to the live stream. Happy Monday for folks. It's going to be a good week. Starting strong. Was in at the office again today. We had an awesome time last week. We had people traveling in on my team to the office from out of country, which was super cool. So, I got to meet some people in person for the first time. Really enjoyed that. Um, on my previous team, it had taken like three years or something before I met some of the people on my team, which is crazy to think about. So, um, that was just, yeah, awesome. It was a pretty busy week for me because I was on call as well only as a backup but was still helping with that and then we had people traveling in so it's kind of all over the place but it was it was still a lot of fun. So back to a little bit of normaly this week and then I'm going to be on vacation at the end of uh this week and then it's really back to normal no more vacation. Hey Justin Bentley, good to see you. Thanks for joining on the YouTubes. So welcome folks. Uh if you're new to the live streams, um glad to have you here. Get a lot of people coming over from Code Commute, which is the vlog YouTube channel I have. And then of course, Dev Leader is the YouTube channel that I'm streaming to, but you might be joining from one of like the eight platforms I'm streaming to as well. Usually there's a lot of people from Twitter uh joining in. So, it's really cool. But if you're new, uh these live streams, I primarily like to make like an AMA format. So, I have a topic I'll go through that's kind of the base of what we're chatting through. But if people have been here, they think they can uh back me up on this that, you know, if you put stuff in the chat you want to talk through it, we'll do that instead. I would much rather do that. Uh for folks on Substack, I apologize that Substack is not yet a like sort of like first class kind of streaming platform. So, you're being streamed from my phone. There is a chat, but the text is like I can see one line of text, so it's kind of crappy. So, apologies if I miss stuff. If you're on Substack and you want a better experience, please head over to YouTube. Just look for dev leader on YouTube or go to LinkedIn. Go somewhere else for now. I apologize, but Substack has a little bit of ways to go. So, yes, uh definitely interactive. I'm happy to answer questions but the topic for today is going to be about communication in software engineering and in particular uh some thoughts around different communication styles with meetings and things like that. So I just put a link in the chat that goes to uh my weekly newsletter. Um I generally shout this out every time. No, you do not have to subscribe to the newsletter. I'm not trying to trick anyone into that. If you're like, I don't want to get emails, don't subscribe. Totally cool. But if you like the the live streams and you're interested in what the topic's going to be, you can just go to weekly.devleer.ca. That's going to be every Saturday I put out a newsletter. So you have Saturday, Sunday, and all of Monday to figure out if the topic's going to be interesting or you can check out the recording. Um Ryan says, "I finally have a Monday that I can join the live stream again." Welcome back. Good to see you, man. Can't wait for tonight's discussion. Good. Well, I hope you came with lots of questions then. I'll be looking to you for all the the good questions. Uh, no, great to have you back. Um, yeah, it's it's super cool to see people that come back on a regular basis. Justin and Ryan both uh both definitely do. So, awesome stuff. Well, um, the topics usually come from my second YouTube channel, which is called Code Commute. So, just for a little bit of background, I vlog any day that I'm driving in the car. So whether that's to CrossFit or to the office or both and uh I try to take these stream of consciousness topics so either people submit them or I go to Reddit and just answer questions and stuff and I reflect at the end of the week when I go to write my newsletter. I pick whatever had the most interest or engagement, write an article on it, and then I try to do a live stream. So by the time I go to do a live stream, it's something I've thought about a little bit more. Uh which makes it a little bit more coherent. Um, no promises though. The last time I did a live stream, we actually tried vibe coding and sort of wanted to do like a bit of a public apology for that. I actually put out a couple of uh vlog entries talking about it, but I don't think that I did that justice. I'm kind of uh disappointed in myself. And um I am going to follow up on the on dev leader like my main YouTube channel and I'm going to not stream it live but I'm going to set out to do what I wanted to do which was to use you know agentic AI in Visual Studio to go build the landing page for code commute. And the idea behind that is that people can go to codecommute.com and then they can submit the questions they want answered on the channel. So, pretty basic stuff. It just didn't work out so well on the live stream. So, uh I kind of felt like I was just in this um spot of like, oh, like blame the tools, blame the tools. But like I wasn't well prepared. Um I didn't pivot that well. Time management was off. So, like it's not I don't feel proud about that. So, that's my promise back to you folks is that I will do a couple videos on on YouTube for that. It will make it better. Okay. So, communication. Um, the idea for this one came from a Reddit post and the original poster was essentially saying like curious for other people like if you are a software engineer, do you feel like you're being like slow uh compared to your colleagues when it comes to meetings and conversations and meetings? And they went on to say that like they feel that they're not like effectively participating in meetings, but like they kind of have to play catchup, but then they've been told or like praise that their written communication like documentation and stuff is like really topnotch. And uh so they were kind of asking for some feedback or thoughts from from other developers. So I did my my code commute vlog on this and from my observations from being an engineering manager I feel like there's there's so many different sort of personality types and different things that that people do. Some of them are kind of themes across people, others are, you know, not just people are individual. Um, but I think that there's a really good opportunity here for a little bit more awareness. Um, sometimes for the individuals themselves. So, for example, the Redditor who was asking about, you know, hey, look, I feel like I'm being slower. But like I think that him posting that and then getting some, you know, feedback and perspectives probably opened up his eyes a little bit that like you know he's not alone kind of thing. And so understanding that from that perspective but then the flip side as well. So let's say you're not like that person. Let's say that you have no problem um you know jumping into meetings, getting into conversations, sharing your thoughts and opinions and all that. That's just always been kind of a natural thing for you. And um what you might not realize is how you're approaching things might be making things a little bit more difficult for others. I'm going to use the word inclusive. It might not be inclusive. And that doesn't mean that you're actively like rejecting people's realities or anything like that, but you just might not be aware that there's more optimal things you could do. And that individual might not even be aware. So I think that if we can kind of raise awareness on both sides then um we can try to improve some effectiveness for for people running meetings and just different styles of communication. So that's essentially what that article was about that I wrote and then what we'll talk about today. So um the examples I wrote um were uh Ryan said if you do vibe coding I highly highly suggest using prompt boost. What? I've never heard of this. Vibe coding can be tough if you don't respond back to the agent in a good structured way. Interesting. I've not heard of prompt boost, but to be totally transparent now that I have the normal Visual Studio with agent mode, um not going back to VS Code ever again. Uh no, that's not true. I'll I'll be probably be filming courses out of VS Code, but the um interesting. I haven't heard of prompt boost, but sounds sounds helpful. I'm assuming it helps you with the structured approach for how to respond back to the agent, but um I had pretty lousy results in VS Code. Um cursor was bad, but like a little bit better. I don't know why. And then VS Code. Um what happened with VS Code? Oh, I don't think I had agent mode or something or I can't remember. Anyway, by the time I got over to VS Code, I think I was just using the chat and then um trying to get some results. But anyway, I will refilm all of that, but um my success with vibe coding has been quite limited. And I guess I always try to clarify this. I'm told that it's not actually vibe coding what I'm doing because when you're vibe coding, apparently, I don't know, I don't make the rules. I'm just being told when you're vibe coding, you don't do anything except like take the errors that come out of your IDE and just give them back to the the LLM and then once it's all working, then you just ask for the next feature kind of thing. Like you're not actually doing any intelligent work, which I think is ridiculous. Like yeah, no one should do that. But um you know especially if you are a software developer like why would you not put some type of valuable feedback in. But anyway I digress. Um I think I kind of started the article off by saying like you maybe you fall into one of these two categories, right? So if uh you know if you're in a meeting and you're thinking out loud, you can jump into debates. you can, you know, you're sort of helping navigate the conversation, going with the flow of stuff. Like maybe that actually seems like you. That's pretty natural. And um other people maybe like in meetings like you're pretty quiet. You um you need data before you can be effective in a meeting. Um sometimes like jumping into a debate on the fly doesn't really feel comfortable. You'd rather go like take it offline and kind of think about things, have more time to process. So I'd be curious. Um you know, obviously no pressure. Uh, there's not too many folks in the chat today. It's a pretty light one. Again, dominated by by Twitter, which is funny. Um, do I have anyone? I don't have anyone from LinkedIn here. What the heck, man? LinkedIn is like it hates me for some reason. When I post a LinkedIn live link, it's like it's literally hosted on your platform. It gets like two impressions. I have like 27,000 people that follow me on LinkedIn. I don't understand. There's I think 5,000 people on Twitter that follow me. Thank you so much, by the way. I appreciate it. I just don't know why LinkedIn why it's so impossible to get any impressions on LinkedIn. Uh it's nuts. It makes no sense to me. But anyway, um if you're in the chat or you're comfortable, um you know, I'm curious like what what side of that are you on? Are you someone who is comfortable in meetings and speaking up and sharing thoughts or are you the kind of person who's doing more observing sitting back more calculated? You want time to process stuff maybe afterwards or beforehand so you can be prepared. I think I'd be curious to hear if there's like a you know different groups of people and again no pressure if you don't want to answer while folks are considering whether or not they want to answer. I think for myself, I'm a little bit situational on that. I think um I think I'm the kind of person that prefers having data. So, if someone were to get me to go into a conversation and I had no context, I probably wouldn't like that. If there was like a document to review or data that I needed to understand before we could make good decisions, like I would want that ahead of time. Um, I think that if I'm pulled into meetings and I'm not familiar with the audience, I kind of get more reserved. So, um, I think my personality type, like I'm pretty introverted. Might not seem like it, but I'm pretty introverted. And I think that when I'm outside of my element a little bit, it's very easy for me to get quiet. So my preference is being more calculated, having information ahead of time to process, time to process after. Um, but if I'm quite comfortable with the audience, right, like for the the small teams I manage, like I have no problems speaking up in those forums, very comfortable, right? Um, I'm pretty used to being pulled into conversations with like no upfront information, no data, that kind of stuff. It's not what I like, but I think from the nature of the job for doing this for almost 13 years. I don't get to pick. So, I think a lot of the time I'm just kind of pulled in. So, kind of curious. Ryan saying, "I love to speak up, ask questions, and play devil's advocate. It's how I learn and challenge people's thoughts and opinions." Ryan, I'd be curious to hear from you on this. Um, I have not worked with you, Ryan, of course. Um, I personally love the idea of playing devil's advocate and I like doing that because my goal is not to put someone on the spot to be like, "Oh, you don't know this?" Like, "Oh, you must be dumb." But it's more like even when I'm agreeing with someone, right? Like we could be talking about something. I'm like, "Yeah, man. that sounds like a great idea. We should go do that. I like playing devil's advocate literally just to get us to think different ways, right? If someone else is in the conversation and they have a different perspective or opinion, you're you're getting that opposite perspective to try and chat through. Um, if we don't have that, like again, if we're like violently agreeing with each other, then I like like in especially in that case playing devil's advocate to be like, what what are we maybe not considering? So, Ryan, I'd be curious like how do you approach that so that or I don't know. Um, let me ask you, when you play devil's advocate, do you find that people are receptive to that or do you find that people feel challenged and they're being dismissed or I don't know, like some like positive or negative sort of aspect to it? I'd be very curious to hear that. Um, and if you have examples of both, like, you know, maybe what did you have to do differently to kind of get the different uh results, right? So, just to to clarify what I mean, if you're doing playing devil's advocate, sometimes people get defensive and it can kind of like shut a conversation down and they're like, "Well, this person's being mean. Like, I don't they're just trying to single me out." Or you might get the opposite where someone's like, "Oh, I didn't think about it that way. Hm." And then they start going through things. So, would love to hear from you, Ryan, if you if you don't mind typing. Sorry. I appreciate it. I think others would be uh interested in hearing that, too. So, let me know. But yeah, uh if folks, especially if you're watching the recording of this, if you want to leave a comment on maybe what you feel like your style is like, it's recorded on YouTube for forever, right? So, um other people coming across this could learn as well. So, I think generally what happens is that I don't have stats to prove this, but I think a lot of the time when we're talking about meeting settings and getting together, I have to yawn really bad. I was holding that in and I could feel like my like throat was tightening up like trying to hold in this yawn. I'm like, you just got to do it, man. Sorry. Um, I think that the sort of default way that people approach meetings is probably for the more outspoken crowd. And I say that because I think it's I I feel like it's rare that someone who is organizing a meeting that is of the other sort of style where they want data ahead of time, they need more time to process and stuff like that. I feel like if they're organizing a meeting, they probably take some steps that those types of individuals appreciate. I find I'm rarely in those meetings though in my career so far. So it leads me to believe that the other sort of perspective where it's like I love just talking and debating and very outgoing and stuff. I feel like that's a more common thing just based on my experiences which is sort of one of the interesting challenges here. So Ryan's saying um or better yet getting a person to be aware of their of different opinions. Yeah, just being able to include that. So he says in order to play devil's advocate you have to make sure you have a good rapport with the people. Yeah. If you don't know the person, then it can shut a conversation down. Absolutely. Right. So, and like for folks that I don't know, if you haven't done this before, you could probably imagine a situation where if you're like talking to someone, they're explaining things and you don't know them well and you're just like, "Hey, like what if you just think about it this complete opposite way?" It can feel like that person is basically saying like, "I'm dismissing your perspective. Like, here's a different one." And you might be like, "Screw you." Like, like, "Did you not hear what I just said? Like, obviously I have this perspective." So, um, you have to be able to read the room, you have to make sure that people understand where you're coming from. I find in situations like that. If I have not built up the rapport with someone to be able to feel super comfort, like there's some people I talk to and they know it's coming, like it's just part of the conversation. But there's other times where if I haven't built up um that work experience with someone, I will say like, you know, disclaimers, you know, left, right, and center before I start speaking. Hey, like really like that approach, like that train of thought. Um I'm in agreement with you and and I think it might be helpful like what if we thought about this a different way for just a second just to see if we're missing anything. I think it would be good to get some different perspective. like probably spend an hour just trying to give a disclaimer because maybe I'm Canadian and I'm, you know, pre sorry before I'm about to disappoint someone. I don't know. But I like trying to just make sure like, hey, look, I'm not trying to dismiss you or say no. But I think that there's value in considering other opinions. Um, if you haven't seen other material I have, like I think I try to do this a lot on Code Commute. I think it is so important as a software engineer to be able to look at different perspectives and like I don't just mean like letting someone say something you're like okay thanks stupid idea let's not do that but I listen to you like I heard you but I mean genuinely looking at things from different angles and why I think this is important is when it comes to design like you might be like oh that's just a a people thing like I don't care. It's a soft skill. I just want to work in my my code and work with my fun tech stacks and whatever, right? Um if you're trying to create designs for things, if you're trying to do software architecture, any like basically everything in software engineering comes with trade-offs. And I think that personally, if you're not considering other perspectives on these things, then you start to miss out on opportunities. It might not be an opportunity you take, but it might be something that gets you thinking about the problem in a different way. And personally, I think that it's wildly valuable. Um, I think that's why we try to make sure we're working in diverse teams and hearing people's thoughts and perspectives. And if you have a team that's all thinking the same way, sure, you might be grooving together and it's all awesome, but like you want to make sure that you're bringing in different perspectives as much as possible just to challenge how you're thinking about things. So Ryan had a bunch more context. Thank you, Ryan, by the way. I appreciate it. I work in healthcare and one of the things that I have run into and heard is that people like to drink the epic EMR. Drink the epic electronic medical record. Oh, Kool-Aid. Okay, I had to finish the rest of the sentence. Like people are drinking a what? Uh, drink the Kool-Aid. In other words, they tend to want to do everything in that one system. I like to challenge that viewpoint and to respectfully, and that is key, respectfully ask countering questions to make sure we are truly considering all of the appropriate solutions before making the final decision. This is part of engineering. Yes. If in the end you go do uh sorry in the end you do go with the epic me solution that's fine but at least I made sure to allow them to be aware of other options opinions that I've done my job and okay with the decision. Yeah I love that. Um there's all without disclosing details I had a principal engineer on my team who was recently uh he's built a system that we use extensively. It's awesome. U I use it on a regular basis. um and he was proposing something within the last couple of months. And it is part of the system, but it's kind of changing how we do some things. And I'm fine now that I've been on the team for a little over a year. I'm like I feel pretty not confident in the code for this because I'm not coding it, but I feel more confident in the domain. Like I finally feel like I have opinions and I can express things and I've been using the system and it's not just like, you know, totally blackbox to me. Um, and I was kind of doing this thing on his design review where I was trying to play devil's advocate where I was like, "Hey, what you said makes sense, but like have we thought about it from this other perspective? Now I have hiccups. Like what's going on today?" Um, so the goal of that was to essentially be like, I agree with what you're saying. Everything that you're proposing here makes sense to me. If we look at it through a different lens, from a different users perspective, is it go and the the gist of this was like, is it going to be as obvious to them? Is it going to be as user friendly to these people, this group, if you go with this change versus what there is today? Like we might get it as more power users, but for the non-power users, do we think that that's going to be comfortable for them or or what? So, wasn't my intention to be like, "Oh, no, like you better change this." It was more like I don't know, like he's really smart. I'm sure he's thought about it, but like I didn't see it called out in the document. So, I was like, I would just want to raise awareness and, you know, chat through this in the dock and make sure we have it covered because if he did miss it, that's okay. It's a it's a it's one of the small things in this whole big thing that he did. So I think it would be good to to talk about it. That's all just different perspective. So I think that the default that people do with scheduling meetings is that it's very much uh sort of set up for people that are super comfortable with little context to go jump in, have conversations and all that. But um we have to acknowledge that people like have different ways of of like working together, right? So uh again another compare and contrast like some people like I just I'm just kind of reading out parts of the article, right? Some engineers are energized by live discussions. So, being able to whiteboard stuff, brainstorming sessions, open-ended meetings where you're like, we got together, we're coming up with ideas, the goal is kind of maybe a little bit more nebulous, but you're like the work that we're doing like you feel a lot of value in that and the conversation is like flowing. So, the conversation is like is one of the things that you're prioritizing. So some people are like that and then perhaps other people are more like uh the writing side is more effective, right? You have more time to process. So uh being able to go through a document together and having like thoughtful comments that you're leaving on that or or reading through from other people, right? The how documents are actually put together. So again, more structure, more time, maybe you can read this ahead of time and then being able to do things asynchronously as well. That's another big thing, right? If you're on a call, that's a synchronous meeting. Obviously, like it's a Sorry, Nick, that's not news to everyone. Yes, it's a it's a synchronous meeting, but some people pref much more prefer having asynchronous meetings because how they're thinking through stuff is just not the same as other people. And that's totally fine. It's not bad. It doesn't make them dumb. It doesn't make them smarter. It doesn't. It's just different. Okay. So, one of the challenges that we have going on here is that and I'm I'm talking about like two I don't know. I'm describing these things as like two very like separate like you know very distinct things. It's not my intention. I'm just because you can have a I believe in like hybrids and spectrums of all these different things that come together. So, I don't mean to make it like binary, but when you have this kind of stuff going on and people take one side more extreme and they're not considering the other, you can run into really big inefficiencies, right? If you imagine that you have one of the engineers that you need to collaborate with and uh they're a subject matter expert in something but your style of trying to navigate meetings is that you are much more like let's just get this schedule let's just you know brainstorm and talk through stuff if they're much more the opposite way where they're like I got to read through this I want to prepare my thoughts I want to come you know prepared with ideas to talk through if you don't give them that opportunity the way that they perform in that meeting might be subpar. They might be like, I don't I have a difficult time participating in the conversation because I haven't been able to prepare my thoughts. And if you're asking them for their opinions and stuff, they might be like, look, man, I don't know how to give you a good opinion on this or good perspective because I haven't had time to even consider it yet. But other people might be very comfortable like diving in and just like kind of expressing their thought process and stuff like that. So, we really need to think about the differences between how people operate. So, um I think a couple points I wrote down. Um I think developers who don't think out loud may seem disengaged in meetings. I think that's a common thing that can happen, right? Someone's not actively participating. So, we start going, hm, like Jimmy hasn't really said anything this meeting. Like, they must just be disengaged. They must just not care, right? Junior engineers may hesitate to challenge ideas without time to prepare. This is a big thing, right? Um I was kind of describing this a little bit even for myself. I'm not a junior engineer, but if I'm not comfortable with my audience, I might really need that prep time. If I don't have it and I'm not comfortable with my audience, I might be more reserved because I'm like I don't feel totally comfortable like jumping in and sharing ideas because I just I don't know my audience very well. But if I could follow up and stuff or had time to prep, then I might do a better job. Uh people with high written clarity often feel rushed or drowned out in fast-paced discussions. Right. I don't I haven't heard from any other people in the chat. Ryan, it's just you dominating this one. So, thank you. Um, but I'm curious for if there's any other folks that are, you know, very much the opposite way on this. Do you find yourself rushed? Do you find that like, you know, everyone else is talking and you're like, "Okay, I finally have a thought I want to share, but like I don't even know how to like jump into this." Like, it's it's almost overwhelming, right? I know for me, if I don't have um if I don't if I had to review a doc and offer my thoughts and stuff, if I don't have time to review it ahead of time, I will feel rushed because I feel like someone will be saying, "Hey, go make this like we want a decision from you and we expect one." And I'm like, "Oh man, like like I'd just been in this conversation. I need to like have some time to think about it." So, I feel rushed personally. Um, and then the other thing that I wanted to mention here is like when you have people that are like this, it might be that they have valuable contributions and they're delayed because they're not giving them in the meeting. They might be doing it as follow-up or those people might not share things at all, which is even worse. Right? Part of building an inclusive team and an inclusive environment. It's not just like gender and race and levels of experience. It's all those things. You have different styles of communication, right? Every person is so different. And I think that if we like if we're not acknowledging how that plays into what we're doing literally every day as software engineers, there's so much missed opportunity. Um, Epic Video Game Life from Code Commute. Welcome. Uh he asks I think yeah it's a it's a question. Hey Nick as an engineering manager how do you shift between talking to your engineers versus talking to stakeholders and how to balance your requirements and feasibility. I asked because I'm transitioning towards senior. Very cool. Okay one sec. Um I just want to catch up on Ryan's comments too. [Music] Um Ryan says I love these topics. I've been trying to grow and become more of a team lead and eventual supervisor manager. Awesome. Cool. Okay. um and epic video game life. Just to make sure I understand your question, you're saying how do you shift between talking to your engineers versus talking to stakeholders? Um do you mean how do I balance spending time on those or do you mean how do I if at all talk to them differently? Right? Like do I approach talking to my engineers in a different way that I talk to stakeholders? I'm curious if that's what your question is. If you can clarify that would help tremendously. And then the second part is how do you balance requirements and feasibility? Oh man. Okay. U that's a good one. Really good question. So let me start with the second one and if you can clarify the first part for me I would greatly appreciate that because I want to do a good job answering. Um requirements and feasibility. So, this is going to come down to I talk about I I didn't coin this or like invent it or anything, but there's like three things that we have control of. And um you can only pick two at a time. Your scope, your quality, and your timeline. If you're most companies ever, um we were like, well, we have good quality. We're not we're not dropping quality. So that means scope and time you have to pick one uh generally. So the other thing that I'll briefly mention is like sometimes we can talk about quality in terms of quality of like the feature that we're delivering. I think that this is not something that people um are willing to skimp on. Usually, if we're talking about quality being skimped on, it's usually like quality of of the code base, right? Introducing tech debt as a result, conscious decision to do it, right? Um, okay. And then your clarification, not necessarily balancing time, but the actual communication like I find shifting towards a demo to product owners is very hard because they don't understand to fill in the blanks in a prototype versus um I think there's more to the message coming. Oh, there it is. versus an engineer who may uh digress too deep into details, lose sight of the overall priorities. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. Cool. Okay. So, on the feasibility part and requirements, um this kind of ties into the stakeholder part too. So, I need to understand from the stakeholder like like I was saying, it's it's probably given that they're like, well, we need to have the highest quality. I'm like, okay, at least from what's facing the end user, it's going to be high quality. Um, we also want to keep the bar high for our code quality. But like I said, there can be technical debt introduced on purpose. So to give you an example, if I walk through this, if they're saying, look, like we are on a tight timeline, right? These are all the things I want, but that timeline, we're shipping on this date. We have to. In my mind, what that means is if I understand which of the two they really care about, their scope or their timeline, they're going to tell you both. Everyone like they always want all three. You don't get all three. You don't. Sorry. Um you don't unless everything lines up and it fits in perfectly. But we don't live in a perfect world. So the conversations that I have when trying to balance these things are like truly what is the thing that you're not budging on. You have a hard release date where you have to ship something maybe. So where I used to work, we would line up our software releases um at certain times of the year we would have really big conferences and we would like to basically demonstrate that we have a really big release around the conference. It's a great opportunity. At that point in time, there is a there's a hard deadline. We're shipping stuff. We don't just go, "Oh, we're having a conference and then we don't have the new software to show off." So, what does that mean? It means the other thing, which is scope, we can miss. Not that we want to, but if that deadline is not moving at all, the only thing that gets to move is the scope. Or sometimes, like I was saying, I'll give you the example. Sometimes we will sacrifice a little bit of code quality to be able to do that. So what that could look like is if someone's saying, look, we have this timeline. We have to get these features done. We're talking about one important feature, and we're like, how we want to go build this is down path X, and that's going to mean that we need this much time to go do it, and in order to make that happen and design it and architect it this way, here's what we do. Blah blah blah. when you're having these conversations, someone might say, "Look, well, we want that other thing, too." And if we go to do it the way you said, we're not going to have time. We'd have to cut that scope, but like I don't want to drop that other feature. So, we could say, "Look, if you really need both these features, like we need to understand that because we could take a hit and introduce consciously some technical debt. We will not design this thing the way that we intended to originally. we can use this alternative path. It means we have to pay down this debt later. It's going to make us a little slower if we keep staying on this path without paying it down. But if we do that, we could do it more quickly in theory and we could potentially get this other thing done. Now, of course, with all of these, there's risk, but these are conversations that you can have with the stakeholder around like truly what do you care about? Because they want everything. they can't have everything. And I think this is one of the reasons why I'll always say if you're working with uh you know from the engineering side, if you're working with product owners and stuff like it's a collaboration um you need healthy tension between the two. I feel like if you have a product owner who's like, "Oh, no, it's fine. Like, we don't have to do anything. Like, just, you know, get the one feature if you can, or you have the opposite where the product owner is not budging, right? You can have these things going both ways, but I feel like having a solid working relationship between a product owner, so maybe it's a product manager, whatever role you'd like to call it. I think that it's critical that you have solid collaboration between the two, that you can challenge each other, right? You can say like, "Here are the trade-offs we make." Um, and when people push back and they say, "But can you do it another way? Can you make it happen?" like don't as a from my from my perspective as on on the engineering side as an engineering manager if I have good rapport with that person I don't take that as like you're not listening to me you have to go get it done it's a genuine like look if we fix these constraints right we really want this thing we really don't have the uh the ability to move the timeline if we really needed to do that could we and I think sometimes s when you think through these things with more solid constraints, you come up with really interesting solutions. So, um I just think that it has to be a very healthy balance. Um I'm going to talk about the communication style differences. I just wanted to catch up a little bit on the chat. Um Ryan says, "The best suggestion I can give uh give you is to make sure you know your audience and tailor your presentation them accordingly." Yeah, you can't do the same presentation to two different personas. Yep, agreed. But I I'll I'll kind of add into that. Hamza, definitely a great session to be part of. Of course. Welcome. Glad that you're here. We got someone from LinkedIn joined. LinkedIn shared it to at least one person. Um, thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Each presentation should be tailored and explain the terminology relation to each persona. Executive leadership wants to know financials and more 5,000 foot level information. Engineers want specific details deep into the weeds. Yep. Make sure you tell your presentation way you show information to them. how it works. Best for them. Um, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Yeah. Except I want cake and I'mma eat it. I love cake. Cake, brownies, cookies. I've always said like my willpower stops and starts in the store, right? like I won't buy it, but if my like just as an example, if my wife knocked on my office door right now and she said there is a box of cookies downstairs or box of brownies, I would wrap up this live stream pretty quick and there's nothing that's going to stop me from eating almost all of those. I have no self-control when it's in the house. It's not okay. Um, the good news is that if she doesn't do that, I won't buy it from the store because that's me. Like, I consciously have to be like, do I really want to spend money on a box of 50 cookies? Like, no. No, that wouldn't be a wise move. But if 50 cookies happen to show up in my hands, I'm eating literally all of them. It's I can't do anything about it. Um, cake and brownies. Yeah, people. It's funny. People on my team at work have started to pick up on that. Uh I jokingly drop it here and there and some of them uh one of the principal engineers I work with she said she picked up on the fact that like I really like chocolate cake. So there's been a couple of times with like team like different team events and stuff where someone has brought in cake to the office and she's like oh Nick did you check if it's chocolate cake or anyway it's it's good fun but cake brownies cookies can't can't not eat them. Okay. Um epic video game life. The second part to your question is kind of what Ryan was kind of discussing, but in terms of tailoring communication, I agree with a lot of what Ryan's saying. Um, so I'm trying to think of how to paraphrase it in my own words or if there's anything else I'd want to add. But I think like I was taught from the start of my engineering management journey um like situational leadership and I I try to bring that into everything and that means that not just from like a leadership perspective but everyone is different. So, not only do you have individual people who have their own ways of doing things or their own personalities and stuff, but Ryan's absolutely right in terms of personas. This is something that I think engineers struggle with a lot. Um, I and I, by the way, I don't know people I don't know if you realize this like I am an engineering manager, but the first eight years of engineering management for me, I was an engineer like software engineer writing code and also managing the team. So I don't I'm trying to be relatable like I don't write code with my team right now but I still very much think like a software engineer. So when you hear me say oh software engineers I'm in that I'm I'm in the club. Okay it's just that my role happens to be an engineering manager. Um, I think that generally engineers struggle with this and one of the things that I always think about is when I see or hear engineers complaining about tech debt, right? The classic example is like if we introduce tech debt, it's going to stay that way forever because the product managers, they will never prioritize that. We're never going to get the time to do it. Never. And I've had enough of these conversations with engineers and product owners where I'm like, "Okay, engineers like I hear you. Thanks for the feedback. I see that work not getting scheduled to make like I your perspective makes sense. So, let me go see the other side." And then I talk to the product owners and they're like, "I would love to schedule tech debt. I would love to, but the engineers file the tickets and then they expect that I know what I'm supposed to do with it and prioritize it against bug fixes and feature work. So like I'm just going to keep prioritizing the bug fixes and feature work because that's what the customers care about. That's their job. They're trying to make sure that they can help get the features, the value to the customers. They're a lot of the time not intentionally being like, "We don't do tech debt here. screw you. They're just like, I don't know. So, very often there's this gap. I'm just using the one example of tech debt where it's like the engineers do not understand how to convey the value to the other stakeholders that are making decisions about prioritizing this. So a lot of the time they just omit it or they'll try to explain it but they're not thinking about what their audience cares about. Right? If we hey look stakeholder if like product manager whatever if we don't go refactor this code there's like these 10 classes that we have to go touch and like five of them the code is super brittle so it's always breaking and like we're definitely going to get bugs from that and like the other five we can't even write tests on. there's a couple, but like we don't even know if they work and like we're not going to be able to work with that. And then you keep going down these rabbit holes of details where they're like, "Look, I need to understand why it's important we go fix this." If you said something like, "Hey, look, we have tech debt that we want to pay down in this area. We see that coming up you have a bunch of features that you want us to keep working on here or you know we found from doing maintenance over the past two months that we have to keep going back and touching stuff here. It's always broken. We're wasting tons of time trying to fix this stuff. If we could refactor it and add tests, we would honestly pay down a little bit of debt. It's not going to take that long and it's going to save us so much time when it comes to being able to do more feature work, time savings, reducing risk, right? Like these are the things that those stakeholders care about. They like, no offense, they're just people focused on different goals. So if they're like, I don't care if you want to go refactor that like what what does that matter to me? You're not you're not selling them on it. So, it's always going to be about coming up with how you're articulating different ideas um to different stakeholders in different ways. So, I'll give you I I see Epic Video Game Life um put a few more comments in the chat. I'll read that in a sec. The most recent example that I have is when we were doing a big presentation to our CVP. So, uh, for folks that were watching code commute, uh, I've been sharing like I I wrapped up this really big project, but I was working on a project for about five months. It's, uh, pretty draining. And, um, we had to have these readouts that we would do with our CVP. And so, we would put this document together and we're doing all this work and we need to find a way to be able to present it to an executive, right? So, she is incredibly smart, but she's operating at a leadership level. Like, she she can absolutely get into the weeds and she will ask you questions where you're like, "Oh man, I wish I prepared for that ahead of time." But, so she's very in tune what's going on. But when we started putting these documents together, um, we had working with me, we had objective owners for the different areas of this project. And what we found is that when we sort of outsourced doing parts of the work on this document, some people very much from the engineering perspective would write like detailed like you know not quite this specific but like committed this code and like we had to roll back this change and like it's like dude thank you but like she will not care about that. It's it's just the wrong audience for, right? Like what is the outcome of that? If there were challenges, what were the lessons learned from that? But when you're giving all of these little details, so we'd have to go through this and basically say, great, like you gave lots of details. Thank you so much. We have to go uplevel this now so that we can try articulating it in a way that's going to be digestible because we had like, you know, tens and tens and tens of pages. like I think it was like a 60 plus page document or something ridiculous. It's not going to make sense for someone to go through when we have like an hourong meeting to talk about it like it like think about the format of the meeting. Think about the audience. It's not going to make sense. Now, to be fair, she surprised me in every single one of those with questions where I was like I like I said, I wish I would have I wish I would have wrote that one down ahead of time and prepared for it. Um so again just uh knowing your audience knowing what their interests are because um if you understand what they value then you understand what they value understand their their domain at least you don't have to know the details of it but understand what it is and maybe clarify with them where their technical understanding of your domain starts and stops you can have really good conversations. So just to give you one more quick example, one of the best engineering leaders I had in my career was not a software developer. So everyone who's like, "Oh, managers have to code." Like, uh, pardon my language, This guy couldn't code at all. No offense. I don't I'm sure he could if he really tried, but he couldn't code. One of the best engineering managers I ever had. And the reason that he was very good at it was he was a very very very good product manager. I think he actually might be the VP of engineering there now. But um he's very good at what he does because he's very good at communicating. So what he would be able to do is if we were having conversations, we could meet each other at the right level of depth and technical details. if I was going a little bit too deep into the weeds, he'd be like, "Hey, I don't get that." Like either could you explain it or could you like say it in a different way? Okay. Like level it back up. Cool. And then he would talk to me and then if if I was like I need more detail so that I can be more effective, he would try to drill in a little bit deeper, but we could meet each other, you know, at the right level. And I feel like that's the most important part versus like can someone code? At least for me, I didn't need my my leader to be able to go write lines of code like that's what I was doing. So, it's fine. Okay, let me catch up on here. So, uh epic video game life. I was pulled into a meeting to demo a feature. We spent 20 minutes explaining to the product owner that the copy doesn't matter. It's managed in a CMS. Marketing can change in a form. Okay. We're testing the function versus uh the engineer trying to rewrite the whole experience for no reason when we need to focus on customer impact and timelines. Yeah. Okay. and lately they've been a senior for about three months and faces multiple times. Makes 100% sense. Cool. Um, thank you for the explanation. Great. Okay, I'm catching up on the messages so it's delayed. Cool. I'm glad that helped. Um, thanks for asking, Epic Video Game Life. Thanks for being on the live stream asking questions because I know you've had good questions on Code Commute, too. I appreciate them there as well. So, yeah, hopefully that's helpful. Um, and yeah, if you have any other questions, just ask away. It's an AMA. So, like I said at the beginning of this, I don't know for folks if you join later, the beginning of this I said it is an AMA. I have a topic to go over, but I'd much rather just answer questions that you have. So, no one there's almost the entire like not everyone but almost the entire audience is from Twitter and no one from Twitter saying anything. Twitter, is the chat working? Is anyone on Twitter able to say something? Like now I'm nervous. I want to go on Twitter and join my own stream. Can I do that? I can. I'm joining. How do you even Can you even comment on Can you not comment on Twitter? Maybe. Maybe that's why I've never even used the Twitter live stream thing. That's embarrassing. Okay. Well, Twitter people, if you wanted to say something because there's a lot of you watching, just go to YouTube if you don't mind. I'm sorry. I thought Why don't they have a chat? Ryan, where did you find the chat? I I joined it. I can't even see a chat. Epic video game life, I made a video for you for that question. Um, wait. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It is It's on the same thing. Yeah. Um, my message is put on there is from Twitter. Yeah, but where do you type it? I'm on the I joined the stream. Oh, I shouldn't have pressed that. That's full screen. Okay, hold on. Let me Can I I think I can do this, right? One sec. Okay, let me move the chat. Look, that's code right there. Where where do I type? Am I do I have to press play first or something? I feel like I'm I should close that. It's like people's message. I hope there's no like code giving me messages there. Sorry. Um am I Oh, what? There it is. It was just cut off. Wow. Can I chat to my own chat? Oh, man. Okay, now I know chat's working. So, all of you that are watching on on Twitter. You got to participate. Cool. Okay, let me put this back. Yoink. And then let me get back to my face. Um, okay. Thank you for the lesson on Why couldn't I see that? Interesting. The I'm not going to move the window back, but I think that's what it is. Okay, there's a funny UI bug and I'm just double checking. Um, okay. There's nothing in the messages that I think is like is weird. Let me pull this back. I just want to make sure there was no one who was like asking code commute questions, but they're all explainable. Oh, and my head's blocking it. Okay, so let me move the chat back. I know this is a distraction from the main topic, but okay, now that I've opened the chat, it's here. But this chat was like this. Okay, so it was closed. This is what I saw before. I've scrolled all the way to the top and the buttons for the chat are at the top of this. So, if I close this chat now, I can reach the top. So, the buttons were literally just hidden. How great is that? Good. Good UX. Someone should Someone who works at Twitter should fix that. Not me. I don't work at Twitter. Okay. Sorry for Substack people. You can't see anything that's being discussed right now, but probably for the better. The UX ain't great. Um, okay. Let me let me scroll through the Yeah, the vibe coding versus figure out Twitter chat. Oh, the vibe coding. I feel bad. I got I got to record that. Um, I'm not going to stream it. I got to re-record it though. Okay, I'm going to jump to the Yeah, inception mode of me chatting to myself. And I realize the YouTube chat is very delayed. So, apologies because you're probably there's probably like three minutes between the messages and me saying something back to you. So, sorry. Um, okay. So, actions. I'm just going to get to wrapping up the stream here because we're almost at eight. Okay. So, a few things that I wanted to call out that I think are like honestly simple things that you can do to make a big difference. Um, one is like always have a goal for your meeting. Um, not only does this help the people that want the details and information ahead of time, but like I mean this genuinely if you're scheduling a meeting and you can't articulate what the goal is of your meeting, you legitimately might not need a meeting for whatever you're doing. Oh, good to know. Thanks, Ryan. Um, so that's the like the first thing. You may not even need a meeting if you are unable to say what the goal of the meeting is. Now, it helps to have a goal for the meeting. Epic Video Game Life has got it down. He's got number one. Always have a goal. That's number one. Um, number two is if there is material that you're going to be reviewing and talking through, whether that's a document, it could be data, it could be context that you're going to be discussing, like send it out in advance. Not like right before the meeting starts. Send it out in advance, as early as you can. I would say honestly like at least 24 hours if you're able to because giving some people 24 hours to try and fit it in their day to go read what they need to read is hopefully enough. Sometimes it's still not, but at least it's better than nothing. Um, and YouTube chat isn't 3 minutes late. It's like 30 seconds almost maybe. Okay, that's better than I thought. I thought it was like pretty rough. I read that message a couple secondsish after it came in. Um, but you might be able to tell based on I don't know how the the chat's working in the stream. I don't know. You're smart. Um, I trust you. So, yeah, send material in advance. This is absolutely going to be helpful for the people that don't want to be caught off guard, right? It's not hard to do that, right? These are two things that should be basically trivial for you to do if you're organizing a meeting. If you have stuff you're going to talk through, send it in advance. Easy, right? Um, I think this one needs a little bit more thought, but I think it's helpful. Um, carve out asynchronous space for feedback. So, that means that you might want to be a little bit more cognizant of the people that are attending the meeting. So, if you have a document to review, like open it like send it out ahead of time, open it up for comments, right? People can do things asynchronously, have your meeting, discuss the comments, whatever else. You may want to keep that document still open for comments for people to follow up on. So, put some thought into this how you can approach whatever you're doing with some asynchronous element if you're able to because for the people that feel uncomfortable in those situations, you're just giving them another opportunity to be able to participate. The other thing that I just wanted to mention is like a lot of what I've been talking through today is it it might sound like oh you're catering to people that you know they're different like why aren't they catering to me like like shouldn't shouldn't these individuals like practice and being able to participate more actively in meetings like shouldn't it be on them to drive some improvement and I just want to say like I always think there's some element of like we should always try and adapt and improve in situations that we're not good at. I I think that that's I think that that's a fair thing to say like we should try to improve. We should try to practice at those things, right? I told you earlier in this stream I am not personally like I don't do as well if I don't have time to prepare. I feel rushed in meetings. I feel like I can't give good answers because I haven't thought through them like effectively. But I've spent a lot of my career, maybe not, you know, on purpose, but like by side effect of I'm called into meetings all the time with no prep and have to be able to operate. So I' I've built up that skill. I don't like it, but I built it up. So I would say for for other people, if you're like, I'm not really comfortable speaking up in meetings, and I'd like to have some opportunity to follow up after, I think people should try to create opportunities like that. But I also think that you should try to practice. You should try to build up that muscle a little bit. I think that um I've talked about this with public speaking from my own experience. I think there's things that we say that we're not good at because we don't actively practice them. And I'm not saying that that's going to be the solution or the reason for everyone and everything. So please don't misinterpret that. But I think that there is this opportunity where if you're like, I don't feel that I'm good at this and I need to operate a different way. Right? Clarify that. But I would encourage you to try at the thing that you are not good at. Doesn't mean that you have to live your whole life like that, but try, right? Try to put in some effort so that you can practice those things and be more effective. The reason I say that is because yes there will be individuals who will say great thank you for explaining that you want you have some you know different things that would be helpful if we could cater to you because it's easy to go send out material in advance right but there might be some situations where people can't make exceptions for asynchronous communication like afterwards we got to send this document out right after we review it right just making up a random example you don't get the async follow-up and if you're like well that's always been given given to me and I've never practiced or been willing to practice like how to participate in the meeting. It's it's going to suck. So, try not to give up on the things like but just acknowledge it might need a little bit more effort as well. Ryan said Chad uh of course lost the ability to respond in chats on YouTube. Now it's back. Okay. Side question. Oh yes. Okay. Um, did you use Aspire with your Blazer project when you rebuilt your website? Um, so not for my blog if that's what you're asking about. Um, when I did my devleader.ca blog, I did not. But when I go to do and I think at the time it's cuz like I didn't even understand what Aspire was. I like why would I use Aspire? I don't know. just going to use blazer. Uh I'm doing it for the code commute vibe coding attempt. I'm going to deploy the thing with uh Aspire and Blazer. And I want to do just for context uh some people not know what these things are. So Blazer is a net text stack that lets us C developers also write the front end in uh C, HTML and like Razer pages. And Aspire is I mean one part of Aspire is has a really cool dashboard for you to work with but it's essentially um codifying what you can do in YAML files. So with respect to setting up your dependencies in a cloud environment. So you can say like I want to use a MySQL database and it will sort of orchestrate that for you. Um so when I had set up things basically in every situation I had already set up infrastructure in the cloud. So I was like why would I use Aspire? I've already already done that. The dashboard alone is reason enough but for code commute when I go to build the landing page I'm purposefully starting with nothing in Azure. I'm going to use Aspire and I want to see firsthand how cool it is. So I'll make a video on that. Um, then Ryan says, "I've been struggling to figure out how to use Aspire when building my Blazer program I'm building and just struggling to understand how it's supposed to benefit me." Um, yeah, but so Brian, I don't know if the it was delayed, but I see two major benefits to Aspire. One is like just the dashboard alone. Um, so and I didn't realize this. This is so embarrassing. And I'll talk about Brand Ghost in a moment, but when I was building Brand Ghost and we used Aspire to get the dashboard, I was like, man, it's like it's nice because we get the structured logging there, but I'm like, it's just structured logging. I'm like, these other tabs don't do anything. Then I realized I didn't hook everything up. It was like partway hooked up, but not all the way. And then literally in the last two weeks, I think right before maybe it was even last weekend, I don't know, I hooked up the tracing, the open telemetry tracing. I like I I just feel embarrassed that I wasn't using it and like didn't know. And the health metrics also weren't hooked up somehow. So there's these two tabs on the Aspire dashboard that show you tracing. And so what I mean by that is when you send a web request to the server, you can get a breakdown of like where it's spending time. So I just like I just feel very silly that I hadn't done that. And so the other day, this past weekend, I was like I'll just briefly tell you about some functionality inside of Brand Ghost. We have this functionality where we give you a aggregated social media feed. So I post a lot on social media. I post on like every platform and because I post everywhere all day every day to respond to comments is very tricky because it means I have to go open up each individual app and go scroll through what I posted. Go look for comments or go click through the notifications and do that. It's like it's daunting. Not because I have like a bajillion followers and I'm so famous. Like nothing like that. Um if you want to leave more comments, please do. But it's a challenge for me because going between the apps is like I'm I'm not doing that. It's like it's chaos. So, we built an aggregate feed that for your posts, there's different versions of this, but the first sort of flavor is that for the things that you've posted, it will give you a feed of all of the comments that you have not responded to. Pretty cool. Fun fact, it shows me more comments in Brand Ghost on my YouTube videos than YouTube Studio shows to me, which is terrifying because I've looked in YouTube Studio for comments and been like, "Oh, a couple comments. Okay." And then I go to Brand Ghost and I'm like, like there's three more comments here. They don't even show up in YouTube Studio. Like, if I wouldn't have built this, I would never see these comments. They don't exist. Anyway, the way that that works is that we block the people from Twitch. Bye-bye. Um, the way that it works is that you have your social media accounts hooked up to Brand Ghost and we use the different social media APIs and we go out and we ask for the post. Every one of them is a little bit different. We ask for the post and then the gist of it is that we have to get associated comments and then we have to filter them down to see which ones you've replied to. Get those out of the way and only give you comments you haven't seen. It's not really that crazy. It's not some lead code algorithm. But I noticed after I hooked up the tracing cuz it's pretty slow because I think I have like 20 plus social media accounts hooked up to it. So, I'm definitely like an extreme case on brand ghost, but I was like, it takes a while. It takes like sometimes it feels like 20 seconds. It's a long time to go pull all this stuff. Um, once it's cached, it's instant, so it's fine. But I'm like, this sucks. And I was like, wait a second. I have the tracing hooked up now. I have it. I can see it. So, I went over to the tracing and there was just like some ridiculously blatant optimizations to make, like doing things in parallel. So, for example, it would like on some platforms, it would be like you have I'm just making this up. You have 10 posts that you've done recently. So, it would be like for the first post, go get the comments. Once you have the comments for that, go see if there's child comments. So, it's like water falling out. And then it's like now do the next post and do the same thing. And I was like, why don't I just do the posts in parallel like with some threshold like some uh max limit for parallelism. So it went from like 20 seconds down to like 3 to 6 seconds depending on Facebook is I think the biggest offender for API calls but just embarrassing. Um yeah I think uh Ryan the the thing that I would mention for Aspire is that and I don't I have to try this with the code website. Um I think that it's going to be my first attempt like getting the cloud pieces deployed with Aspire. Uh it should be like first class stuff in Azure, but we'll see. Um and good point. I will check the sorting. I've seen I know uh LinkedIn does that. I haven't tried it in YouTube studio, but LinkedIn is awful for the if you put a comment sorry if you put a link in your post, you get nuked. No impressions. So people put them in the comments, but then LinkedIn was like, "Oh, we're smarter than you." So if you have a link in your comments, they filter it out. So you have to sort the comments by most recent. I'm like, "Dude, why don't you just like not be so terrible to the creators on LinkedIn? Um I just to prove a point. Okay, so I'm going to look at my live stream post. I just I want to see. So I'm running this live. It's streaming to LinkedIn directly, by the way. And let's see. Let me click. Why is just open the thing, man? Sorry, it's going slow. Okay, I'm not making this up. Let me Just so you understand when I talk about like me being frustrated with LinkedIn and content creation. Ready for this? Okay. This number, this isn't me boasting, by the way. I spend a lot of time to try and do this over years. Uh, and there's creators that grow way faster than me, but there's almost like so 27 almost 27 and a half thousand people that follow me on LinkedIn. Look how many impressions this got. Less than 500 impressions. And yes, if you like your own post, it actually boosts the number of impressions. It does work. Um, but apparently not well enough cuz that's 500 impressions with 27 and a half thousand followers for me to stream to their platform. I'm trying to bring people onto the platform. so they can watch it. It's nuts. Like I don't I don't break more than a thousand. I got to like my own post. We'll see if that drives it up. Um see like there's like not even 500 impressions. Something like this got more, but I find it absurd. Less than 500 impressions. So, what's the math on that? Of like 27 a half thousand followers, it's a small small fraction of people even even know that I'm running a live stream that follow me. Um, Aspire from KSM. Yes, Aspire is awesome. Um, Ryan, I don't know how LinkedIn has her live stream. I absolutely hate how LinkedIn doesn't live. Yeah, it's their live streams suck. Um, I got a new job post got 10,000 impressions and only have border connection. Yeah, the uh if I look at like my memes and stuff, this is the thing like I don't like it, but my my whole account is like driven by memes now to get any impressions. I can't post anything and get any visibility. Um, and even the memes now are trailing off. They're uh they're pretty hit and miss. Like this weekend was pretty bad. Okay, here's here's an interesting one. I wrote a LinkedIn article. So, that's my stupid face. But this one did way better. Like 8,000 impressions. If we scroll up though, look like not breaking a thousand, just breaking a thousand. This had like almost a hundred people like it and it had less impressions than this. Did I do the math on that right? Yeah. Crazy. I don't understand. But I'm just at the point where I'm like, I post I post a lot. I try to offer content. People will find it eventually. I'm not going to stop posting it. So, okay. Um, let's get back to this though. I'm going to sign off. Um, Epic Video Game Life. Yeah. So, this is actually funny. So, uh, Epic Video Game Life followed me from from Code Mute. Um, and it was on YouTube when I had less than 200 subs, right? So, yeah, YouTube the content relevancy like that's their jam. It just is. They do it well. Even like I say that as a creator where I'm like, "Oh man, like my main channel has still under 12,000 subs and there's hundreds and hundreds of videos there." And I've had people say like, "Oh man, like how aren't more people like subscribe to your channel?" And I'm like, "I don't I don't have enough thumbnails." Like um I guess I need to do that more. But the um the reality is like even as someone who gets frustrated by it, I know that YouTube does a good job tailoring content to their audience because their entire algorithm is designed to give you the next thing that you want to watch to keep you there. It just is. So, okay. So, for folks that aren't familiar with the stuff I got going on, uh my newsletter, which I mentioned at the beginning, that was sort of the focal point of some part of this conversation today is that um it's at weekly.devleer.ca. Uh it's an email newsletter. No, you don't have to subscribe for the email. If you just want to see the topics, check it out. Substack, folks, I still remember you. You know where the newsletter is because well, you're on Substack. That's where it is. So, uh that's that. Let's see what else we got. I'm gonna open it on other channels here. One sec. YouTube. Um, depending on how you got here today. Oh, no, Ryan, I didn't fix that. I did fix my website, though. There was something else I fixed. One sec. I have to do the mobile thing. I haven't gotten to it, but I fixed this on my website. This is annoying me. These social icons. And yes, there's a little bit of overlap. It's kind of silly, but they used to be over the the banner, which I didn't like, but if you zoom in, like there's more text on the banner. Um, but now these icons will like not be in the way. So, they used to like overlap the text and it was pretty dumb. But yeah, the I still have to fix the the blog post stuff on mobile. Haven't done it yet. Lots of other stuff. Um, sorry. Read it on on your computer. Uh my my YouTube channel is Dev Leader on YouTube. That's where the live stream is for some folks watching it. There are seven of you. Just seven. It's crazy. Once this is done being live, though, I'll get a few hundred views like over the next day. But I don't get a lot of views on my videos. Sucks. So, if you'd like to help me, just share videos. It makes a tremendous difference. Um if you find them helpful, thank you so much. I do appreciate it. the the sub counts and stuff don't mean anything at the end of the day. It's like people sharing stuff. I can't share stuff to Reddit, for example. I'll get banned. I'm banned from two Reddits already. I'm banned from the LinkedIn Reddit and from the learn they banned me from learn programming because someone asked for like some videos on something and I was like, here you go. And then they banned me. I'm like, okay, I'm not going to help anyone learn how to program anymore. That's that's that. But um I do have uh there's nine now. This is out of date. Um the uh one thing that's sort of a new offering on my YouTube channel is ré reviews. Uh I think that this started from code commute and I said I'll just do it on my main YouTube channel. If you want your resume to be reviewed or an opportunity for it, uh go to my main YouTube channel, watch one of the ré review videos. I explain in the first 60 seconds how to do it. I recommend that you watch the whole thing so I get the view counts and you get to learn how it all works because I think you should understand if you want me to review your resume what you're going to get out of it. It's free for you. Cost me money. I have to pay the video editor. He does good work. Um but it cost me money. So I want to make it valuable for you. But that's my main YouTube channel. Code commute is the other one. Let me just pull it up. It's actually I forgot. If you just go to codecommute.com, that's where it goes. But this is code commute. Yes, it's just me driving in the car. Um, we're catching up. We're 2.4K, but yeah, a lot of this stuff dropped off. I had some really good I had some really good views early on out of nowhere, but it's pretty rare now. That's okay. Um, but I always like showing off these 360 videos. I think they're super cool. I don't know why the quality is so low. It's like literally 4K. You would not believe it. It's because this still don't think it makes it. It's like not good still. But anyway, you can like look around while I'm driving, right? How cool is that? And I have to fix these stupid seams. There's not supposed to be a seam there. It's literally 360°, but apparently I don't know what I'm doing. Uh Ryan, I do. It's been rainy and when you use the 360 camera when it's raining, it like doesn't do anything useful. So, um I haven't been, but now that it's getting warmer, I'll use it more. Um Yeah. And then if you're watching it on your phone, like Ryan's saying, like it's to move it around. It's weird. Yeah. If you're on your phone, you just move your phone and it like looks around. It's It's neat. But, uh, whatever. Right. Uh, the other thing I'll mention cuz some people were asking for this and I feel like I haven't, uh, done a good job like pitching it. But one sec. That redirect. It does work. Wow. Spotify.codemute.com. You saw it. Boom. Anyway, I know that's not the same link, but that's the if you want to watch or listen to Code Commute on Spotify. Um, people were saying like, "Hey, I don't have YouTube Premium, so I kind of have to like just listen to your 40inut vlog and like I'm doing chores. I have to keep my phone open. Could you please put it on Spotify?" Yes. Um, so I'm 60 episodes in. I have 190 still to upload. So, it's lagging behind, but if you if you like Code Commute, you want to watch it on Spotify. Um, you can start by catching up on the old ones. I don't think they're lower quality or anything. It's just there's been a lot of videos. Um, courses. So, I do have courses. I'll put those in the chat here as well. Um, wouldn't be a live stream if there wasn't some person trying to sell you stuff, right? Um, but I do have courses on dome train. So, um, I found the blocked from learning in public thing very ironic because like I literally have courses for starting from scratch with C. Like I'm just trying to help people learn. But I wasn't even advertising courses by the way. But so getting started in deep dive, it's 11 and a half hours for learning C. But there's more than just C. If you're not a .NET developer and you just don't care about it, uh, I worked with Ryan Murphy to put together some other types of courses for career management, getting promoted, behavioral interviews, there's a soft skills one as well. So, check those out. The sale is Oh, what? This sale is still going. This is ridiculous. I feel like this banner is like stale or something. I thought they had a different sale going on. Apparently, this has been on for like five weeks now or something crazy. So anyway, you can go get everything 40% off, which is cool. Um, go buy courses. I'm not a great salesperson. Uh, last thing I'll shout out is Brand Ghost. So, Brand Ghost is a thing that I'm building on the side. I like talking about it because I think it's super cool and I use it all the time. So, uh, Brand Ghost is a social media content creation platform. does crossosting and scheduling and basically when we finish the new UI it's like a content creators IDE. Um I do also use the podcast platform on my main channel Ryan I didn't do that for code commute though don't know why but uh for my main channel that podcast is on uh YouTube podcast so Brando is built in ASP.NET NET core for the back end. It uses Aspire. The front end is built in uh Nex.js and Typescript. Um I don't touch that stuff. Just the the good parts, just the C code. Um just kidding. But I like Brand Ghost. I use it all day every day. So Brand Ghost is how I post to all my social media platforms with all my content all day every day. To give you an example, I like using these as anecdotes because I'm going on vacation. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. It's five days. I'm going to have a little bit of downtime where I might jump on social media and do some stuff. If you don't believe me that Brand Ghost is doing all this, I don't know why you wouldn't believe me, but if you're looking at my social media over Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I'm going to Arizona. I'm going on a vacation. I'm going to be with my wife. I am not going to be sitting there writing LinkedIn posts and Twitter posts. It's going to Brando is going to post for me over 200 times over that period. The planned things that I'm going to write on my newsletter. I'm going to upload more YouTube videos that the editor is doing, but everything else you see is already automatically scheduled from Brand Ghost. And that's why it's so freaking cool because I don't have to do anything except create content now and then engage in comments and that kind of thing. But it's all automatically done for me. So if you are interested in starting with content creation starting at all, it's literally free for you to use for crossosting and scheduling. You don't have to put your credit card in or anything. You just got to hook up your accounts and schedule some posts. Okay. So there's that. If you have a business, okay, so if you have a business and you are of the mindset where you're like, hey, like getting on social media, advertising the business is a bit of a pain in the butt. Um, I would say like I recommend that you try using brand goes to schedule your stuff. And if you're doing that, if you focus on content that can be reshared, like it's not timesensitive, you can essentially put it into if you're willing to pay for the the paid tiers, which I'll scroll down. Um, so 30 bucks a month. If you're willing to pay for the paid tiers, you can basically get this infinitely recurring content I'm talking about. You create the content, you create enough of it, and once you have like your library full of content, it will just keep reposting it for you. Right. I have hundreds of YouTube videos that I'll share links to, hundreds of blog videos. I could stop making them and you won't see them repeat like ever because there's enough of them. Uh, any reason you don't allow us to sign up with your social media accounts? Yeah, we need like we don't need to. We just we we use Ozero for the main account entry, but you have to hook up all of your other social media accounts anyway to use it. So the the reason is that Nex.js is terrible. I know everyone loves it. We we use Nex.js to help us with the OOTH for all these social platforms. Oh my lord. Awful. Um but yeah, Ryan, if you're if you're willing to try it out and look into it, like just you know you know where to reach out to me, right? if you have any questions. Um, but consider like I I say this like literally as someone who's like I would love to be able to make more money with Brand Ghost, right? That's the goal. I mean it genuinely if you're just trying to get started like this is why we created this, right? The other guys I'm working with, they're not content creators, they're software developers, product managers. But one of the things that we felt was really important and some of like one of my sort of pillars with this is that I know that for content creators, the most important thing is like getting content out regularly. And if you're like, I want to post on LinkedIn or I want to post on Twitter, I want to try both. I can promise you, you will feel overwhelmed very quickly even having one extra platform when you have to copy paste posts between things or you don't schedule anything because sure, okay, you're going to schedule all your posts in uh Meta Business Suite on Facebook and Instagram. Okay, now you have to go schedule that same post on LinkedIn. I don't think Twitter has a scheduled functionality, but if it does, great. You got to go do it there. How about threads? Yeah, good luck. Tik Tok, good luck. Blue Sky, good luck. So, we do it all in one spot for you. And I think that should be free. No one should have to pay for that because it should just exist. It should be trivial. So, that's what we offer. If you want more advanced features, especially if you're in a position where you're like, I'm doing this for my business or I want to be a creator, so I want to invest in my ability to create content more easily, then I feel like 30 bucks a month isn't that crazy. Um, to give you an example, when I was using Zapier to go build all of this stuff for me, uh, doing a lownood code solution, I was paying over $1,200 a year and it was broken all the time and it didn't support half the things we do. So, um, so I'm like, I'm building Brand Ghost instead. But anyway, Brand Ghost is the thing. Check it out if you're interested. Ryan, um, by the way, how do you Oh, yeah. Um, did you when you signed up, was there a Slack invite? If you use Slack, there should be a Slack invite. If not, you can send uh anything that you're finding on LinkedIn. Anything's fine. We uh we're no stranger to bugs. I mean, we write perfect code all the time. If it's a bug in the front end, it's not me, someone else. You gota remember with no blame culture, the secret is to blame everyone else, right? Um, no, but happy to get feedback if there's like bugs and stuff like that or feature requests if you're like, "Hey, this is good, but I wish it did." Whatever. I've said this on um Oh, interesting. Okay, I'll ask the other guy who set up the email notifications. I don't know if you get Slack invites when you pay. Maybe maybe we changed that. We had a point where there was a lot of people that were like spamming and like signing up and just like it was not a good time. Uh we've locked that down a little bit, but I think that Slack should be open for even free tier. I'll uh I'll follow up and get the invite link and send it over to you. But uh Slack is really good because it's more of like a community focus. like if you're running into stuff, other people might be too. If you have requests or you see other people requesting stuff, then we can share it there. Um, but I've said this on other live streams, like when people are like, "Oh, why would I use Brand Ghost or whatever?" I'm like, like I said, I got to be a better salesperson. I know that, but Brand Ghost needs to succeed for me to keep creating content. And I I mean that seriously because if Brand Ghost just wasn't a thing and stopped working, you would not see me on social media anymore. I would just stop because that's how like instrumental it is to my content creation now. I cannot move away from Brand Ghost to something else. So, I plan on continuing to create content, which means Brand Ghost cannot go anywhere because I would be so overwhelmed that I couldn't do it anymore. Oh, okay. Slack invite comes in the verification email. Send it on Slack. Um, there should be a support channel and stuff. If you got screenshots of the things or repro steps, awesome. Um, we'll get it fixed. So, I think that's it, folks. I'll be signing off for the night. Thank you so much for being here. The live stream next weekend is cancelled or next week, sorry, because I'm going to be on vacation. It's a holiday, which doesn't usually stop me, but I'm going to be on a plane. So, uh, unfortunately, see you two weeks from now. Code commute episodes will still be going out. YouTube videos are going up this week and content out every single day. I will see you next time. Take care. Thanks for being here.