How to Mentor Mid-Level Engineers - Engineering Manager AMA

All right, folks. I am just getting connected here. Make sure the streams are streaming. Just checking Instagram. Checking all the spots. Apparently my head's not center. Instagram tells me it's very obvious. And I think I think Substack's going for real Z's. My chat's broken, so let's fix that. Cool, cool, cool. I'm just checking the Substack one. Seems like it is doing the thing. Cool. Welcome. Uh, for folks that are new to these streams, they are an AMA format, so um, definitely feel free to ask whatever you want. I have a topic on all of the live streams. This one's going to be about mentoring mid-level engineers. And specifically, this topic came up because someone was more curious about how to do mentorship and approach this when you're working with people that you feel like they're already doing pretty good. Like, what the heck are you supposed to do if they're already doing good and how to approach mentorship? That was kind of the um the background for it. So, we'll be talking through that, but like I said, of course, um don't cross the streets. Um like I have uh Devon, you made me lose my train of thought. That was good. Um, mentorship. Oh, um, yeah. No, I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. Uh, this, yeah, it's an AMA format. So, if you have any questions that you want to go through or totally throw me off guard with, uh, questions in the chat like Devin just did, please go ahead and do that. Uh, I personally really enjoy being able to do the live streams because then people get to actually engage in the chat and talk. Um, there's folks that come over from Code Commute, which is my second YouTube channel, which is, uh, awesome. I really enjoy, you know, that community that's being built up where people are, you know, engaging in the comments, asking questions, and then they head over to here and we get, you know, that live kind of feedback. So, um, yeah, that's that the topic today, midlevel engineering mentorship. I'm just going to put a link in the chat to this newsletter where this is going to be coming from. And I remind folks every time that if you enjoy the live streams and you want to see the next topic, you can head over to weekly.devleer.ca. That is my newsletter. No, you don't have to subscribe. No, if you don't want email newsletters, don't worry. It's totally fine. But, uh, that website, it's a Substack blog basically. and you can see on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday, uh you can read the latest newsletter issue totally for free. You don't have to pay anything. And then you can see basically what the live stream is going to be about. So if you want to tune in, you can check that out ahead of time. Um okay, the first question actually is coming from Instagram. So um I don't think I can pronounce your name or handle here. a seam con I think maybe how to find work as a web developer or clients hunting. So uh basically I'm assuming that you're doing uh like contract work. I'm assuming that's the case like a freelancer kind of approach. I think for this kind of thing personally I don't have tons of experience doing it. In fact, I have never done freelance work. But, um, I would say this really is going to require that you put yourself out there and network and advertise your services. It's going to mean that you're reaching out to people. It's going to mean that you get rejected like crazy and that's just part of it because that's selling your yourself, right? So, uh, there's certain things like, um, you know, you could do like Fiverr or anything else and try to look for clients that way on on these sites. Uh, totally an option. I'm sure there's more sort of what's a word for this, not archive, like um, hubs, if you will, for like looking for work like this and advertising services. I would register for anything you can and then I would really focus personally if I were doing this. I would focus on posting stuff to social media advertising services uh you know showing off things you've built and then reaching out to people like crazy. Um and I think Twitter's a good spot for that personally, but um you could pick any social media platform probably and and approach it that way. Reddit is probably also another good spot. As much as I hate using Reddit, uh I think there's probably a lot of people. Um Deon saying it's always an option to go pound pavement in your local area and talk to business who have non-existent or terrible websites. Yeah. Um I think I even think I recorded something like this on Code Commute today recently. Um, and one of the things I was saying was that a lot of the time when we're talking about software development, we think about I'm working at a software company. We build software, but like software is really awesome because it's everywhere. And it's even in places where you don't think that people are using software because any company that doesn't have a website today, uh, I don't know how you're surviving. And there's companies like Devin just said in the chat, they got websites and they probably need a new one. So, um, you could definitely look around for this kind of thing. Um, depending on what your skill sets and stuff are, that might be a really awesome opportunity. Thanks, Deon, for this suggestion. Brucey Bit says, "With two years of experience and two internships in Fang, that's at Amazon and Microsoft, would I now be considered mid-level? I've been applying for several roles where they attempt to give me entry level." Um, it's it's hard to say based on just that, right? Um, so what's a good way to look at this? Let's use Microsoft as an example. I'm picturing the numbers and the levels. So, uh, an entry like absolute entry level at Microsoft would be like aside from an intern, right, is going to be level 59. Level 59, level 60 are SDE. And you could absolutely have, you know, a couple years of experience and still be e still be at an SD. There's too many e sounds. Um and that wouldn't look weird or be off or whatever. That would be maybe totally normal, you know, hard to say, but um that could absolutely be entry level. Um it could be that you had two internships in um two years of experience, two internships in a fang company like were was all that experience in fang? If so, um that might be helpful. I think that depending on your skill sets, you may be able to argue more like that you are at mid-level, but um it's it's it's a it's a weird thing because it's not like a year of experience is not the it's not the metric for deciding this kind of thing, right? You could have people that are they have more years of experience and there is certainly not equipped to be going beyond that. Um it's entirely possible. or the other way around, someone who's, you know, relatively new and they're a fast flyer. So, um, could that be mid-level? I think the answer is yes, that could be considered mid-level. Um, is that going to be considered mid-level everywhere for everyone? No. There's too many other variables, right? I think uh depending what your resume and stuff looks like, what things you've worked on, like just to give you an example, um maybe maybe you are someone who has excelled a lot and you've done really awesome work with the two internships and two years of experience, you know, at good companies and everything. All of this stuff is suggesting that that could be mid-level and then how you've demonstrated yourself on your resume may be giving a different impression or how you interview might be giving a different impression in which case these are other things to go work on. It's a really difficult thing to try and answer like with that much detail that you provided. Um but I I do think that it could be answered either way. So if someone were to offer entry level I wouldn't be like oh that's insulting. It might feel that way based on things you know about yourself that maybe aren't coming across to them. Um but anyway, I think that that's something to consider. You said, "I've been applying to uh several roles where they attempt to give me entry level." Yeah. So, if you're if you don't like that uh and their offering or something, maybe you could counter and say like, "No, I want to be considered at some other level." Um makes sense. I should be able to articulate why my skill set deserves the role I'm applying for. Yeah, of course. And um someone was even saying in I think in a code commute video, it doesn't matter, but someone was uh saying that they were applying for something. Oh yeah, it was a code commute video. They hadn't I thought that they I realized like partway through answering in the video, but they hadn't app um they haven't interviewed yet, but when they were talking to the recruiter, the recruiter was considering them at some level. And they were like, "Okay, if I go to this other company, that recruiter is offering me at this other level that's technically like lower than where I'm at, but the pay was going to be way higher." But their concern was more about like if they're going to be downleveled like that doesn't feel quite right. It's like two levels down or something comparatively. So they were saying like should I go to the recruiter and say I would like to be interviewed at this level and like that's an option right when I was interviewing at Microsoft uh like principal level is level 65 and to start principal's at 65 but there's 65 and 66 right and 67 I think is still principal I think and anyway the point is like when they were interviewing me I remember them saying like this role is for 65 or 66 6. And in my head, not knowing much about how big tech works and coming from a startup where your titles don't mean anything. Uh I was like, it doesn't matter to me. I don't know, whatever. Um and I probably should have tried to push harder for something higher. Um but just the way it is. So I think if you have the option and you and you truly feel strongly about your skill set, I would try for it. And at the end of the day, if you're if you're finding an opportunity where you feel like the fit is good, maybe maybe you're coming in more junior than you're hoping for, it still might be a good opportunity for growth and you can, you know, use that job to prove that you are, you know, uh, and at a higher level and kind of do it at an accelerated pace. But it's going to be different for everyone. So, hope that helps. Sorry that was kind of long-winded, but if you know me, then by now you know I talk a lot. So um mentoring for mid-level engineers. This topic like I said came up from a code commute question where someone was saying they are a I think a senior level software engineer and basically their manager was like hi there's two people on the team that are mid-level and I would like you to mentor them. Okay not a crazy thing to ask. And in this particular situation, this person was like, "Okay, these people seem to be doing pretty good. Like they're pretty independent, they don't really have any ideas for what they want out of mentorship. So like I also don't know what the heck I'm supposed to do here, right? Like I'm supposed to mentor them, but there it's not like there's some glaring problem or they have something specific they want to work on. So like what do I do?" And I figured that I could talk through this and I could even use some of my early management experience to to talk through this exact same problem or challenge from a manager's perspective because I had this with some of my employees when I was new to management, right? And I became a manager very early in my career, not because I'm amazing, but because I was working at a startup and this is kind of what they needed. So um we'll go into that. I'm just checking the comments of eight years of experience at .NET developer, worked one year as a tech lead, but sometimes I don't see myself as a senior since I feel there's uh still much to learn. And the reality is like the years of experience um it not every year of experience is going to be equal. Like I and I I stand by this and I'm going to say this and not to like you know not complain about my current job or anything. my eight years of experience working at a startup before Microsoft. Um the first the first five years of that have been I've learned significantly more than I've learned in my five years at Microsoft in terms of like growth. Significantly more. But my five years at a startup were like non-stop work. Everything was new. Everything's on fire all the time. Growing a startup from like seven people to like over 250. It's a different world. It just is. And realistically, I I probably thrive in that kind of environment compared to like big tech, which is it's going to be slower. It doesn't mean doesn't mean the problems that we're solving aren't as impactful or anything like that. The problems are like planetary scale, but those years of experience that I gained there, I would say completely outshine my Microsoft experience. are different but a lot more growth during that time. So not every year of experience is is equal, but I can I can see what you mean and like uh you know Brucey's there supporting you, but the uh the imposter syndrome is real too, right? Like you might actually be someone who is kickass and you are definitely operating at a senior level and um you have imposter syndrome that's always going to be there even when it starts to go away it comes back for something else and it's going to feel like you know how do you how do I call myself a senior if I don't really you know if I don't really believe that because there is so much to learn. So, um, you might want to, you know, check in on the imposttor syndrome, too. That could be part of it. Devin says, "I'll try this again because YouTube blocks greater than symbols." Nice. Okay. I don't think I have anything set up for that, but um maybe um you can have 10 years of experience or you can have one year of experience 10 times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh that's exactly it. So, yes. Okay. So, in this type of situation where you are trying to and actually I'm curious, there's not too many people in the chat yet, but if you are in the chat and you're active and you're willing to to engage, have you been working as a software engineer yet and had a manager ask you about mentoring someone? So, has that come up or have you had the opportunity to engage in a mentorship opportunity, you know, with a a peer, a colleague, whatever it happens to be. Has that come up for you? I'm curious to see for whoever is willing to engage in the chat that's on the stream currently. You know, what does that look like for you, if at all? Um, would be very curious to know where people are at with this kind of stuff. Um, but this is it's a weird spot to be in when you are trying to help other people get better and you look at them and you're like, they're already doing good and they don't even know how they want to improve either. So, what do I do? Right? Um, the first thing that I wrote in this article was really about clarifying expectations. So if you've been asked to do mentorship by your manager for you know a peer, a colleague, someone else, multiple people, maybe the juniors on the team, whatever it happens to be. Uh I have uh like we do like intern buddies and stuff. So when we have interns, we'll have an intern buddy that's on the team and that's like a mentorship relationship for the entire semester. And I think it's really important to understand uh if you come from code commute, you know that I say this in like every single video, get aligned expectations with your manager. So clarifying expectations. Step number one. The reason I say this is because if you're going into this situation and you've been asked to do something and you haven't really understood why, there is a gap. You can make assumptions. Those assumptions might be spoton. um they might be off and you still might do a good job. But my point is that there's this opportunity or you can reduce the ambiguity and you can get aligned on what the goal is. So in a situation like this, you might actually have a manager who's trying to set you up for growth. They're saying, "Hey, at your level, you know, as a senior software engineer, someone who's trying to go for senior, um, you know, we expect that not only are you contributing technically on the team at this level and, you know, participating, helping with partner teams and that kind of stuff, whatever it is, but they're going, we also need to see some like some more leadership and we need to see more like mentorship so that you're demonstrating that you can guide other people and grow other people on the team. You can be a multiplier." Some places will expect this, right? I know that anywhere I've worked and even my own philosophies, there's some element of being able to help bring up those around you. However formalized that is can look different, but that's always a common part as you're growing in seniority. So, your manager might have picked a couple people on the team, not because they specifically need help on something, but because they're going, I want you to work with these people because I want you to be able to demonstrate mentorship. I want you to demonstrate leadership skills so that we can use that for helping you with promotion, you with rewards and things like that. So, that could be one part. Um the other part is like maybe the more obvious one is you might be tasked with helping mentees because they're the manager's trying to get some extra growth and opportunities for those individuals right so manager might have identified some areas for them or might just say in general like hey these people are operating at some level doing a good job but like it would be great if you know they can follow in your footsteps can they emulate some of the behavior you have can you guide them and give them, you know, some extra insights and perspective that will help them grow because as managers, yes, that's part of our role to do that. But it's also great if they can learn from peers, right? And sometimes the best people to to learn from are going to be peers where especially if a manager can say like, "This person's really like the you know, we want everyone to emulate this kind of behavior because they're awesome." You could be a great mentor to go help the more junior people, junior or mid-level, right? more more junior than you to grow into someone who is like you. Um Deon says at my current job uh informally yes I do a lot of mentoring in terms of design and generally getting people pointed in the right direction. Very nice. We also have a former uh a former dev who spent several years in QA is now back in dev as a junior. Very cool. Okay. Who I've been asked to mentor. He's a smart guy. So it's just about reawakening his skills. Super cool. Um so dev back to QA and then back to dev. Um that's awesome. I know where I was working before there were a few people that were interested in doing moves between roles like uh different like you know like basically like QA to to developer um just not necessarily QA we had some other roles too and um you know I was volunteering to help guide them and coach them and you know it's really nice when you work at a place that facilitates that because we were able to carve out some work for him it meant that he had to do that on top of his normal work so he had to kind of go above and beyond And it wasn't like he had to operate at the same level as every other software developer, but he needed to be able to show that he can start doing this kind of stuff so that when we transition him over to that, it would be like we could hire basically hire him as a junior developer because at that point we have the confidence that compared to someone else we'd hire as junior, he met the same expectations. So um that worked. I think that worked really well. I thought it was a cool opportunity. Um, Bruce Eye B says, "I've been trying to get mentored. Actually, I'm still a junior mid-level, but I think mentoring new engineers interns is criteria for promotion, so I think I can learn here." Yeah. Yeah. Um, the the video I recorded on Code Commute on the drive home today, like literally minutes before getting onto this live stream. I don't know if you realize how hectic my Mondays are sometimes when I go into the office. Um, and I'm on call this week from noon till 6 and I was at the office. So, basically, I have and it shouldn't take me an hour to get home, but sometimes it's just crappy with traffic. But I was like, I need to get home so I can start this stream on time. But that was the topic for today's video was um uh was around finding mentors. And the person who had uh wrote the comment for the question was saying like they're a solo dev, you know, a junior at a company and they're the only developer like what do I do for mentorship? So, that's what that one's all about. Um, Deon says, "Bruzy, sometimes you need to ask your manager and just generally be seen as somebody who appropriately takes initiative." Yep. Um, tomorrow I start as a team lead developer after two months of interviews. Very nice. Any advice on how to approach and connect with the team from day one? So, I approach this kind of stuff the same way that I would as a manager. And the difference is that the stuff that you spend time investigating or like you know doing a deeper dive on is going to be more technical I would say. Now you say team lead developer and I always like to clarify that I see titles or or roles that kind of look like team lead or tech lead and people will debate these are different things because they very much can be depending on where you work. I see team lead developer here and I'm assuming that means tech lead and I don't mean to um conflate that and assume the wrong thing but the fact the fact that it says a lead developer I'm just assuming it's like a tech lead. The big difference there is going to be that you're not managing people. You're going to be having uh you the goal is that you're demonstrating technical leadership for the team. Right? It's um I find these types of roles are really interesting because especially if you do have an interest in management or if you have an interest in becoming an architect, this could be a really good stepping stone into those types of roles because it's uh a little bit more formalized that you are being looked to for guidance in terms of uh you know technical excellence. So any advice on how to approach and connect with the team from day one? The parts that I think are the same as a manager joining a new team are one is that I would try to get one-on-one time set up with absolutely everyone. It does not mean that it has to be um doesn't have to be recurring. Uh I think I wrote the reream chat feed. H interesting. Devin, can you see it on YouTube? Like is it going through on YouTube and just not reream? Because reream is a piece of junk sometimes. Um, so yeah, I would try to set up time to meet everyone individually and learn about them. I don't mean necessarily get their life history, but like depending on how like comfortable people are chatting with you. Like I would ask about like their work experience or team experience, that kind of stuff. Just get to know them a little bit. See what their biggest uh, you know, pain points are on the team. See like their the things that they're most excited about on the team, that kind of stuff. And just honestly like don't book the time with them to make it like a you know check the box kind of exercise like book that time because you're trying to learn about them and approach it genuinely like that. It's part one that I would do. Part two is the that's the same as a manager joining a team I would say is like observe. Step one with this kind of stuff is not to jump in and say, "I'm going to change everything." Oh, and Devin, I think I just saw on my side like I have a different chat window and it says the chat's busted. To activate chat, please enable channels. I'm just going to refresh it again. I wonder if Reream is just crapping out because it's really good at that. Um, but yeah, I would I would approach things uh as an observer. And that doesn't mean that you slack off for the first um I don't know, you join a team and you just slack off and do nothing. I just mean that you don't rush into making changes because if you haven't observed how things are, you haven't learned from the team where the pain points are, it's not going to be, in my opinion, it's not a recipe for success to go changing things. So don't. It's really difficult to change things if you don't know what you're supposed to be changing in an effective way. So don't take the time, learn, observe, learn from the people, learn about what's going on, and then observe. And then you can start to see where there's alignment on what people are telling you. Can you observe the same things that they're calling out? Do you see that maybe someone's calling something out and you're like, I see what you're talking about, but you know, you might be um a little bit more sensitive to that area or something for whatever reason, but like you need to kind of form your own observations and learn from the team. But you need to do both of those things before you can take really effective action. So I would personally approach things that way. The one of the big differences is from a manager joining a team to like a team leader, tech lead is I would say you probably want to spend more time getting into more specific like technical details. So when I join a team uh for me it's really important to understand system architecture high level. I need to know the different pieces how they interact. I don't need to know the different classes in the codebase. I don't need to know you know the different areas of code specifically. Will I learn some of that over time? Sure. Are there going to be parts of the codebase and like a majority of it that I just don't know? Yeah, I'm just not going to learn it to the same degree. But a tech lead will need to spend more time doing that and get into those technical details. So, as a manager, I would spend more time diving deeper into people and trying to see their strengths, weaknesses, things they want to grow into, that kind of stuff. And then as a tech lead, probably shifting gears more towards similar beginning and then jumping into more technical stuff. So hopefully that helps. Um, let me know. But congrats on the new role. I think that's super exciting. We got lots of questions in the chat. This is awesome. It might just be a whole AMA and not even screw the article today, but that's the whole point of these live streams. So um Adidia says, "Can you give me some advice as starting from the next year? My college placements um my college placements are going to start and yes, I'm not that prepared. I can tackle easy questions of DSA but not the medium and hard. Uh they're talking about full stack. Um hey Andreas, good to see you. Thanks for joining." Okay, so some advice I'm just reading this again. Can you give me some advice? Starting from the next year, my college placements are going to start. I feel like I'm confused by this sentence. It's going to start. And yes, I'm not that prepared. I can tackle easy questions of DSA. Okay. When I say DSA, this is lead code stuff, I'm assuming. Um, I don't know what your process is like for at your college. Um, but, uh, couple things. I have made multiple videos on this before on my main YouTube channel as well. Oh, I am on my main YouTube channel. I I was coming from code commute. So, I've talked about it on Code Commute. I've talked about it on Dev Leader. Um I think that when you go into this kind of stuff, you need to be able to a few things, right? I don't know. Do you I'm assuming you need to have resumes and stuff put together. So, you need to be able to show off on a resume or some other type of thing. If it's not going to be résumés for the placements, maybe you need portfolios or something. You basically need something that you can stand out on. Because if this works in the same way where you're going to be like someone's looking at your resume to even give you the interview, if it's anything like that, it doesn't matter if you're the best interviewer in the world with the most experience in the world and you are literally the best fit ever for the position. If your resume sucks or whatever they're using to get you to the interview stage, if that sucks up front, you will be completely bypassed. So, I'm saying this in in an exaggerated way to make you think about this, but if your resume or whatever packaging you're putting forward for the college placements, um, if if that is not up to par or like, you know, showing off for you, that's going to be something you really want to focus on. I can't stress that enough because it almost doesn't matter how good the rest of the stuff is if you don't have that. It's not, unfortunately, that's not like my my personal belief. I think everything else when it comes to you know how you operate on the job and all that that is the most important part but it's not going to help you get seen and that's the first part. So you need to spend time in this case I'm I'm making an assumption that it's a resume that you need to have put together and stuff. You need to have make sure that that's nailed. You need to find ways that's going to make you stand out. Part one. Part two is I think where you're starting to talk about is around like uh tackle easy questions for I'm assuming that's lead code. Um if you're just starting out I wouldn't you probably don't need lead code hard. Medium might be cool but like the reality is lead code style questions are going to be a gamble no matter what. Um I think they're the personally I've said this before I think they're the worst interviewing tool that exists. I think it's the most pointless thing that we could be asking software developers. Personally, I don't think there is any value. I shouldn't say any. I think there's extremely little value in asking uh lead code style questions, but you do have to practice them. I would make sure that you feel comfortable navigating them. That's my biggest thing, especially as someone who's more junior. Um I would say you know and this is also like my personal preference coming into play here but when I interview people if they get stuck on like a you know a coding question I don't jump to well this person must be stupid like can't get them a job. We're all like I have things I get stuck on in my normal programming. My screen just turned off. That was super weird. Like today, right? Like so it's not like every day in our careers we solve all the problems like instantly. It doesn't work like that. And you can get tripped up in an interview. You can get tripped up on a certain question. The most important thing to me is that people can explain what they're doing and that when they get stuck, they can navigate it. Right? I've I've definitely finished coding interviews with people where they didn't get to the final question, but I'm like, "Hey, they got stuck early on. They were navigating things. they were trying to get out of this hole and they could communicate clearly. They could explain their trade-offs and stuff like that. They just couldn't see like how to get to the next step. Totally fine. We pivoted, whatever. And I've definitely been able to say like I felt comfortable with that person in terms of their coding ability. So, at some point, I feel like the the lead code style, like even just general coding questions, um I don't know. I don't use that as a I don't know like a thing that's going to be a complete blocker. Now some places are unfortunately like that. And I've I've been in interview loops where other pe and I've said this before many times but been in interview loops where people were like hey my candidate didn't like nail the the the lead code question and like therefore no. And when you dig into it, it's just like they couldn't figure out a trick and like whatever. They're just like therefore no. Um, okay. And then they're saying, "So, new to your channel. Uh, what advice rookie developer?" Okay, let me let me finish up this thought because I'm a rambler. Um, I think what becomes even more important is that like personally is that once you're able to like feel kind of comfortable with some of these lead code style questions because they come up unfortunately is that you can talk about if you know that you're going to be working in web development, what are concepts in web development that are important, right? Can you talk about server side? Can you talk about client side? Do you have can you understand like what it means for like roundtrip request times like all these things like different browsers maybe not all the nuances but like how how do you what what things you have to consider when you're working with different browsers if you're doing mobile development and you know it's going to be iOS like I would say can you brush up on some stuff so that you can talk about iOS development this is the kind of thing that ties in a lot more into like the real world experience because even if you don't have that real world experience professionally. You can go build that experience because you can go build things. So, I don't know like it's unfortunate because I can't say as a blanket statement, don't worry about lead code. You're going to have to worry about it at most places until this industry changes. That's out of my control though. Um Deon says, in most instances, I can quickly identify the correct data structure, understand which algorithm would be best. No way I can implement it. That's what BCL or Nougat is for. Yep. It's just it's just the like I don't know we're as software developers it's almost insane to think that we're going to have to to like derive this stuff from like scratch right and that's why like I don't know there's a lot of reasons I don't like lead code. Now, don't get me wrong. I think that there are aspects like when we're talking about data structures and algorithms, forget lead code. I think there's a lot of value in understanding data structures and algorithms. I don't think that you need to be able to like, you know, always be able to create these things from from scratch because you're just not doing that in real life. But the characteristics of these things, I think, are valuable to have a general understanding about. Um, and then yeah, I'm going I'm just going to keep reading Devon's comments because they're very on point here. But even if they ask a questions you know nothing about, don't be afraid to say you don't know, right? Um, and then exactly as Devon said, try not to leave it there. Don't if someone's like, "Hey, could you explain this?" If you're like, "Yeah, I don't know that. What's next?" Like probably don't do that, but you it's totally fine to be like, "Hey, I don't know, but um there is something similar." like try to make sure that you have a follow-up. Uh the last time I was interviewing, I can recall that I had questions like behavioral interview questions even and I was like, I don't have an experience like that specifically, but here's how I would do that. Would you be okay if I navigated that or here's a similar, not the same, but a similar experience that I can talk through? And if you understand behavioral interview questions, you can generally try to see like what they're trying to ask about and maybe it's a different scenario you can use to explain that. So different ways you can address that. Um, okay. The other question you had Adia was, "What advice will you give rookie web developer only knows the basics? Should I create uh projects AI based or go with e-commerce website?" Um, the specifics don't matter here. um e-commerce. I've I don't care if people want to build to-do apps, whatever. I think that when we talk about building things, you have to understand what your goal is for it. And I see that you wrote AI in here. I'm not going to tell you like you can't use AI, but I need you to think about what the goal is. If the goal is just to have running code or like lots of code, sure you could just use AI and say like you could vibe code it and keep saying no fix it, no fix it until you have something that's running. But like what again what's the goal of it that you can say hey look I have code because if someone says great explain to me how it works and you can't then what was the point? Maybe you're trying to say I just want to be able to blast a bunch of stuff onto a portfolio and show it off. Sure, you could do that. That might help in terms of populating a portfolio, but if you don't know how any of it works, not a good spot to be in. You might be able to trick people with that. Just not a good spot to be in. So, personally, when people ask about building projects for the sake of building experience and getting jobs, I always will say my preference is to use it to learn. That means if you're going to use AI, I wouldn't go to chat GPT or Claude or Copilot and sit there and go, "Hey, Copilot, build me a website that does X, Y, and Z and has these features and uh make a pull request and put it on GitHub." Click, sit back, you know, scroll on YouTube and watch Nick's live stream while your website's building because you'll probably learn close to nothing doing that. And what I would recommend you do instead is if you want to use AI tools, use them for idea generation. Use them for asking questions back and forth. You need to get stuck when you're building stuff to learn. It sucks. It's just like literally anything else that we want to get better at. Okay? Like if I wanted to be big and strong in the gym, I don't just, you know, watch YouTube videos about going to the gym. I don't just read social media posts on people that go to the gym. I can't just go pay someone to go to the gym for me like AI might do. Like, you don't do those things. You have to go to the gym. And it's probably going to be uncomfortable. If you want to get better at playing basketball, you have to suck at it for a bit. And if you're like me and you're like three feet tall, then maybe it's going to be difficult for a little bit longer. Short people problems. But um the point is that if you're trying to learn, you have to get stuck and it's uncomfortable and that's okay. It's expected. So you can use AI, use it to ask questions to, use it to challenge your way of thinking, use it to get different perspective. U you can use it to generate code, but I would not rely on it for the code generation. If that becomes the only way you're building, you are probably skipping a lot of learning. just going to say that we'll see in the next 10 to 20 years if a lot of people that are just like, you know, blindly vibe coding if they end up being better developers overall because the AI tools are so good and people are just that spent more time only using AI can use it more effectively. I might be wrong and that's totally interesting. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think that's going to be the case though. So, I hope that helps. Um, I saw where where's I saw Scrotto Bag. Scrotto Baggins joined. Hello. My favorite username of all time. Um, CMDR Tib, howdy howdy. How's it going? It's going good. Thanks for being here. Um, I'm not sure if I've seen you on the stream before, but I appreciate you being here. Um, Brucey B says, "Getting more comfortable with Leo, but starting to see more system design interviews." Yes. um definitely going to be the case where you'll see more and more of that as you get more senior contributed to design discussions and implementations of work but still feel pretty new to it. Any tips? Yeah. Um it's like so I like system design a lot more than lead code. Now people that ask system design questions can still try to trick you with stuff. Uh I feel like interviewers in general can try to trick you with stuff and I think that's a stupid thing to do and waste everyone's time. I don't see value in it. But um what I like about system design stuff is that you can take systems that on the surface seem similar and change constraints. You can change things that you want to optimize for and that might change the technologies. So with system design, forget the specific like brand name things, but think about the components as building blocks. I think what's really important with system design, a couple things. Uh probably like the most important in the beginning with like a system design interview question is to understand like what it is you're doing for the user. What kind of system are you building? That means you have to ask the interviewer for these details. Almost every single system design interview they will leave things open and expect you to ask because if you just start building it tells them that you're not looking at the different constraints for the system. You're just building stuff because you're picking components. So try to understand the constraints of the system, the goals of the system, how users are using it, the scale of it, all these types of things up front. It's not to say that you can't ask more questions as you're going or maybe your interviewer will say great now let's change this constraint how will that change things to do is not to trick people but to say great solution so far how would you change this if we said we're not optimizing for latency at all now we're optimizing for something else so I think it's important to understand different types of databases so whether that's relational databases or like object stores I think it's important to understand load balancers. It's important to understand different uh you know uh what's the word I want? [Music] Round robin is an example of this like basically uh well like election algorithms almost like I think that's important to understand. Uh cues um are super important. Um you want to think about again my words are failing me. Uh not a good time to lose all of your words when you're live streaming but that's okay. uh like circuit breaker patterns things like that. So like fault tolerance, thank you. Uh redundancy, uh concepts around um latency, throughput, availability, all these types of things. Understand how different components affect those types of things at a high level. Because if you understand that when people are giving you constraints, you can say, okay, well, if I know that we're optimizing for latency, okay, like these are different tools we have for that. Or um we can't drop any messages. Okay, so I need to have like a durable Q system with dead lettering. Like if you understand the building blocks and the the different capabilities they have, then you can do that more effectively. Um, but that's the kind of thing that I don't personally think you have to build tons and tons and tons of different systems to understand that stuff. I think building lots of different systems can help tremendously, but if you approach it like building blocks and understanding what they do and practicing even on paper putting systems together, I think that can help a tremendous amount. Um, sorry. Um, how many years of experience uh would a dev need to be considered mid-level in your opinion? We talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the stream, Andreas. It is going to change dramatically. It could be like, I don't know, two to five years somewhere in there. There's a range for a reason because uh it could be very different. Um someone at 5 years maybe was going slower than someone with two years that was going really fast. But somewhere in that neighborhood um this also will change completely depending on the company. But I would say somewhere in that neighborhood is not completely ridiculous, but someone will correct me if they think it's ridiculous. Um, Lord of the Rings, shortcuts lead to long delays, gym work, etc. Had an interview working through distributed transactions. A bit painful to solve the two generals problem on a whiteboard, but we covered a lot of bases. Yeah. Um, distributed transactions a lot of fun. Um, Devin says, "I'm building a to-do app as a Power Toys command pallet plugin using Win UI on a device." Oh, cool. Uh, radically outside my normal tool is what I'm learning a lot. Yeah. Yeah. This is the thing. Like this example I love. So, everyone rips on to-do apps. Okay. every single person who is like creating content or trying to help other software developers, it's like, "Oh, you you know, there's a million of you all competing and you're all building to-do to-do apps and like no wonder you can't get jobs." And it's like, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I don't think that I look at anyone's junior developer portfolio and go, "Oh, like look at these amazing things that people have built that are going to make them billions of dollars." you are an entrylevel developer, I don't expect you to be building stuff like that. I do expect you to be learning about stuff. And if you want to build a to-do app and you want to build it using crazy technology to go learn about something or you were working in, I don't know, like mobile development and then you wanted to go learn web development, so you built a to-do app in a totally different tech stack. Hell yeah. Awesome stuff. You probably learned a whole bunch. Boom. Write that on your resume about why you did it and what you learned. That's awesome. So Devon is a developer. Devon has been building software. He just said that he's going and building a to-do app. Devon doesn't need to spend time building to-do apps to show off his resume, but he can go use that to go build something simple in a different completely different tech stack and environment and he's going to learn a whole lot, right? It doesn't have to be a complex like app that you're building. Diego, uh, do you think we can build AI agents that connect to Jira or Azure dashboards to develop user stories automatically? Um, yeah. Diego, have you been watching my YouTube videos? One sec. Come on. Come on, Diego. One sec. I'm getting getting on the YouTube's uh videos. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. One sec. One sec. I'm a I'm an amateur streamer, right? So, give me one sec. Okay, here we go. I even put the timestamps in here. This is this is co-pilot with a bunch of uh Azure Dev or this is GitHub. I use this well, we have it at work in Azure DevOps. Um, and I gave it issues and it did the pull request for me. Right, there's the code. It's a long video. Holy. But this is it making my website for me that built this website. It's not the prettiest website, but it did it. Um, so yeah. Um, absolutely. AI agents connect to Jira, Azure dashboards, develop user stories, 100%. It's real. I've been using it. Um, now your question is an interesting one because the other part that you said, and sorry, I'm not trying to pick on you. I'm just trying to use it as an opportunity to show my YouTube videos. Um, the second part you said, how long before developers start being replaced? Um, I still think it's a tremendously long amount of time because um, it doesn't do these things automatically. AI is good at producing code. And I'll say it again maybe a different way. AI is good at creating code. It makes code. It puts code into files. It can organize them. It's good at making code. I will tell you that one of the first programs I made was a textbased role playing game where you could fight skeletons and other monsters by pressing a button that just said attack. Okay. And that program was over 10,000 lines of code. Not because it was complex or good. It was just crap code copy pasted a million times, but it was a lot of code. Absolutely didn't have to be that much code. And so AI is good at making lots of code. Now AI tools are getting better, right? The models are getting better. the way that these systems integrate to provide context. I think personally that's the biggest game changer so far is that any of these tools that it can effectively provide context to the model to carry out the work makes the world of difference when I use or it's getting better and it still will when I've used cursor when I've used co-pilot in visual studio vs code or in the cursor IDE they disappoint me a tremendous amount they have all the context they could possibly need my codebase why are they disappointing me. I don't know, but it feels like the context that it's trying to use is inaccurate or I have to be hyper specific about providing it context. Sometimes it gets to the point where I have to be so detailed with how I'm prompting it in terms of using an agent mode to go build things. I have to be so specific that I might as well just go do it myself. Like that's how much time I'm spending. There's other things like in my example for building my Blazer blog site, I used chat GPT to guide me through the steps to go build the basis of it. By the way, I know how to do it. I just used it to vibe code. It was a fun fun thing to go through. And then I used GitHub Copilot to go, you know, chip away at um at issues and it was it was successful with small issues. Um I'll show you. Can I demo this? Let me see. We're going to try it. We're going to try it. I'm going to show you the most complex thing that I've had AI oneshot for me. Okay, this is real. Um, does it work? I have not tried it yet. So, you're seeing something that I have not even tried. But here we go. This is a SQL workbench and I'm calling it squeal for SQL but said really funny and um oh you can't see cuz my stupid head is over top. Give me one sec. Give me one sec. So I had this idea and I talked about it on code commute. I said when I've been working with chat GBT and optimizing SQL queries, what I've been doing is I give it my schema. So I copy paste my this isn't for work by the way. This is just like stuff outside of work. I give it my schema for the database. I have a query that I'm running on running to try and optimize and then I give it like the query plan explained results and I'm like optimize this, optimize this and then I tune it, run it, give it the results and I basically vibe code the optimization of SQL queries. And I said this is so stupid. Why am I doing this? Like, why isn't there just a tool that does it? And to be totally fair, I didn't look. There probably is already, but I figured this would be a really fun one that I would like to build and literally could not carve out any time at all to go build it. So, I gave an agent swarm, and I have to make a video on this because I'm terrible at this stuff right now, but I think it's really cool. I gave an agent swarm a set of instructions to go build this app. And I don't think I have the actual prompt for it anymore. Let's see. Sorry, I'm going off the rails from the the original thing, but um okay, this is this is my prompt and it built this. Okay, I said create a WPF application that serves as a workbench for SQL databases and then I said supporting different types of SQL databases like MySQL, Postgress, SQL Server, etc. One of the key differentiating feature sets is that this application will have an LLM powered performance optimizer. This will allow an LLM to understand the schema, understand the query plan for different queries, and iteratively refine them so they're maximally performant without breaking the resulting data sets. The LLM support should be entirely configurable so that users can use any LLM that they'd like, which means we need to have a plug-in architecture. Now, did that work? I don't know. New connection. Cool. SQL Server. There's a dropdown. Cool. I don't have a database to go connect to. Um, it's like it's not great. Like, why can't I scroll down to get this buttons cut off, right? Like, it's not perfect. Um, I haven't tried running anything because I it generated it and I haven't had time to actually go connect it to anything. But, you know, it's got the chat here. I need to go actually set up the um there was a config somewhere for this stuff. But it built the parts that I was interested in, right? This button works, too. So, I don't know if the code behind it actually does anything remotely close to what we see in the UI. I think that's pretty cool. But is it going to replace developers? No. I I have to go poke through this and figure out what the hell it did. I still have some work to do. Now, I might go back to the the swarm of agents and say, "No, go fix all this stuff." I probably will do that cuz I don't want to spend any time building this. I was just really curious to see if it would go make it. So, anyway, um short answer to that question is I think we're a long way off from having AI replace people. Um, I know that's the big thing that we're seeing in the news, right? All these companies are they're firing developers because AI is replacing them. I don't I think the only places I hear doing that are the same places that are rehiring developers. So, I'm not sold to be honest. Um, but anyway, I think it's a really good question. So, thank you for asking that. Um, oh, little misunderstandings trying to ask about projects having AI integration website or basic creative e-commerce website. Yes, sorry, Adika. Um, absolutely. I think that's actually a really cool differentiating thing, especially now. I have not been going for interviews. Um, so I don't see this coming up, but I imagine um I imagine this is going to be more and more and more popular, which is how are you using AI, right? Show us. So if you if you can be building things and integrating with LLMs or MCP servers, do it like that's sort of the the new hotness. Everyone's going to be doing it and I feel like it's it would be a missed opportunity to not. So to give you an example, I'm I just said I am not interviewing. I am also not writing code at work. I am absolutely exploring how to build MCP servers and different functionality with integrating AI into development. Not just to use the AI tools, but how do we make it part of the things we build? So if I'm doing it, I think it would be like ill advised for me to not suggest other developers do that. So um hope that helps. Um, and sorry about the misunderstanding. Thank you for clarifying that. Um, yeah, Andre says, "Good luck having AI understanding business requirements from POS and PMs." And it's it's interesting, right? Because on that, it's it's funny. Um, I don't disagree with Andreas on that, but here's another thing. Um, I have also seen people be really terrible at this. So I think what's really interesting is that if you want to use AI effectively, it still comes back to communication. All these things in software engineering come back to communication. If you are working with other soft forget AI, you're working with other software developers. If your communication is poor between the software engineers that you're working with, odds are there's going to be friction. You're going to move slower. you're going to build crappy things or you're going to be having, you know, just issues with getting things put together. And if you have really good communication, you can avoid a lot of issues. It doesn't mean that it's always going to be bulletproof or the first solution is always perfect that it'll be a lot easier and more smooth to do. I think the same thing happens with AI so far because I've given AI prompts like the one I was reading out to you when I said go build this. What I didn't say was that's the third attempt at that. That's attempt number three. The first two it very confidently told me that it built it and added tests and it was amazing. It was all done. So, I opened up the solution for it. And it had two test projects with no tests. I said, "Okay, I'll add the tests after. That's fine. I'll get AI to make them. But let me run this thing. I'm so pumped to see it. Play." And guess what? Doesn't even compile. Hundreds of errors. So, what the heck did it do? It said it built it and tested it. You literally could not do that because it doesn't even compile. The second attempt was the exact same crap. Um, I don't know what changed when I did it the third time. I think I expanded my prompt to be a little bit more specific. It's still pretty high level. Um, I think that I had put some other files in the folder to give it a bit more guidance and that probably helped, but it's it's not it's not perfect. We're a long ways away and honestly, I just I still don't see it replacing developers. I think it changes how developers work. I have a lot more thoughts on this if people want to keep going down that route. Um, but let me keep reading here. Um, yeah, it makes it even harder to automate. That's right. Uh, Scrotto T. Baggins says, "Is it feasible to move into principal or staff engineer at a company that doesn't have a whole lot of mid or senior developers?" Um, feasible, yes, it's it's always feasible, right? Um, the the reality is it's going to depend a lot on the business. You might have people that are like it doesn't make sense for us to do that because it's not justified by the business to do so. They might also do it and say like we want someone if you're demonstrating those characteristics like sure uh it's like assume the role exists. Uh I worked at a place where we didn't have anything above senior because we didn't define it at the time. So, where I used to work, if someone was like, I want to be a principal developer, we would be like, we don't even know what that means because it doesn't exist here. But, um, you know, if the if they have that role, uh, if it's not if it isn't defined yet, could you be part of defining that role if you're like a startup or a growing company, maybe that's a possibility. It's definitely possible, but I would say a lot of the time this is going to come back to is there a business need for it? which is unfortunate because it might be a good career move for you, you might truly be ready for something like that, it would be a good stepping stone, all these things. And if they can't make a business case for it because it's not justified, then they're like, "Well, we're not going to do that." Um, to give you an example, I've been mid-level I've been a mid-level engineering manager for 13 years. And the last five years at Microsoft, I've been at the same level. So, no promotions in five years. When I left the company I was working at, they were going to be moving me into a director level role. I have essentially moved backwards in career progression over five years um technically. So if I'm at Microsoft now, if they do promote me, it doesn't they wouldn't just be like, well, now that you're promoted, we're going to give you managers to manage because there wouldn't be a business need for it, right? So truly like and I'm saying this like um not to suggest like I'm taking this action but if I were like I need to be hyperfocused on achieving that goal in my career where I can be a manager of managers and kind of move in that direction I would have to change teams. I would have to because if our team hasn't grown into that and there isn't that opportunity it just will not come. I would need to go seek that opportunity out. That might be the same for you, Mr. Baggins. Um, but it also might not be. So, they might very well entertain that. It's totally feasible. That was your question. Feasible. Yes. But what we always say is talk to your manager because they will be the best person to talk to about that. Um, yeah, Devin says it doesn't compile. Uh, so far you've been just you're just describing some of the sample repos I've gotten for people we've interviewed. Yeah. Um, that's the nature of it, unfortunately. Um, Andre says, "Found a video of Linus Torvolts being told that an AI agent was going to replace him." He sarcastically replied, exhaling finally. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's interesting though, right? I think with this, this is my personal take on it. with this stuff. I my statement here is I 100% believe it will replace things that we do. I I hope it does. There's lots of stuff I don't want to do. The example that I gave before that I'm doing with my team is we have to do package upgrades. We we regularly have packages that need to be upgraded, you know, whether it's vulnerabilities and like different libraries and it's like got to close them out. We got to update packages, no problem. Okay. But no one likes upgrading packages. It sucks. It sucks. So, I'm using C-Pilot to go upgrade packages. Let me go take care of doing that once I get good at doing it. and I'm like, "Hey, I have the recipe for it." Sure, I might go offload that to some of the people on the team and say, "Hey, I can teach you how to do it, how it worked for me effectively. Now, you can too, but you also don't have to waste time. You just tell co-pilot, go do it." I actually want to go tell the team that identifies things like this and say, "You go kick off co-pilot." None of us should have to do this, but I want to do a good job with it before I do that. But I'm that's one example of stuff I never want to do ever. So let AI do it. I can think of a million things like this. There are parts The one thing that I always come back to is like our code bases erode over time, right? They grow in complexity. We're adding features. There's architectural patterns that we didn't think about. you know, you can do as much boy scouting as you possibly can and try and you can do your best and over time your code base will erode. It's just the nature of uh of just things growing uh entropy, right? It's just going to over time it's not going to be perfect. And I don't know if this is actually a solution, but hypothetically I think it would be so cool if we had AI that worked well enough that we could let it roam the codebase and constantly keep updating the patterns that it sees to make sure they're the latest and following the best, you know, readability guidelines and do like anything just to basically be constant maintainers so that people don't have to do that. So that people can be thinking about the next feature sets we're building. so that people can be, you know, guiding co-pilots and agent swarms to go build stuff for them and stuff that they want to get their hands on and actually go build themselves because it's interesting and fun and engaging. They can go do that instead of focusing on all the crap that sucks. Because if we can start removing that, then I feel like that makes things way better. I just feel like we're a long ways away. It's changing rapidly, but I'm hoping it replaces all the stuff we don't want to do. Um, yeah, exactly. It's a change of paradigm, but that doesn't mean an aggressive reduction in the workforce. For the places that are doing this, I feel like they're making a mistake. Um, I have some annoying error in the mod I'm making for Factorio. It's being very stubborn. Wow. I don't know what you use for making mods in Factorio to be honest. U and yeah, Andreas, I knew I knew what you were saying. I knew it was a little typo. It's all good. Um folks, we're past eight. Um I don't I feel like this stream um we had a lot of good questions and I don't necessarily want to bore you with the topic that I had prepared for today and we're over time. So, I might wrap it up there, but I'll remind you that if you're interested in this, this is the topic that was for today. And I'm saying this being genuinely happy that people had questions. So, thank you very much. This is the topic that was planned. Um, if it's in Lua, by the way, I think that you might have a lot of success asking AI to help with that. if you're having issues, you could explain what the issue is and you could give it your Lua and see if it does it. Um, but yes, this is where my newsletter's at. Like I said at the beginning of the stream, totally free uh to subscribe to it. And if you don't want to subscribe, it's totally free to read the latest issues. It's paywalled for the older issues. So if you want to catch up, there's over aundred newsletter issues. I'm at 102 now. So that's basically like two years of newsletter articles if you want to check them out. That is a paid subscription to be able to have access to that. But if you're like, I don't like newsletters. I just want to know what the topic is for the live stream. Boom. There you go. Weekly.devleer.ca. You can see that's my face with my bald head. Look, I got some hair on my head right now, which means I'm due for a shave. Okay, so next up, we got my YouTube channel. This is here. There you go. Just dev leader. Um, this channel is my main one. So, for a bunch of you, that's where you are right now. And it has resume reviews. It has C programming tutorials. It has a podcast. It's kind of hidden in the top here. One sec. All right. It has podcast episodes. Um, it's got some of my dumb faces for YouTube thumbnails. People need to click the dumb faces. That's how YouTube works, apparently. But, it's got a bit of everything for everyone. But um the only things that aren't edited on this channel are the live streams. But definitely check it out, especially if you're a .NET developer or want to learn.NET. Um it's my pride and joy. Code commute is the other YouTube channel I have. And Code Commute has been a ton of fun. Um I've explained this before, but the way that I generate a lot of my content is that I use Code Commute to talk about software engineering topics. I basically stream of consciousness discuss them when I'm driving to and from work. Uh they're a lot of the time submitted by uh viewers. So if you want check out code commute, leave a comment on any video with a question. I will make a video response for you. I recorded three of them today. Um and I will post them on YouTube. Otherwise, you can go to codemute.com and use the form to submit your questions anonymously. Code Commute is also on Spotify if you want to check that out. Um, some of the viewers were saying that they don't have YouTube Premium and because my podcast episodes are basically just me rambling for, you know, 20 to 50 minutes, then they don't want to keep their phone unlocked. So, they said, "Could you put it on Spotify?" So, I have, I think, 200 episodes uploaded now. Uh, so I got a hundred more to go before I'm caught up. It's another five to six weeks left of doing 20 episodes every week. So, we're getting there. But you can check that out. Um, otherwise, I have courses available on Dome Train. This is the part where I pitch my courses. Yes. Yes. Yes. If you want to learn C, I have two courses that uh are 11 and a half hours in total, and they teach you how to get started. It's available as a bundle for a discounted price. It looks like we're doing a sale still. This is not my website. This is from Nick Chapsis. So, looks like he's running sales every time I'm doing live streams. But if you don't want to learn C# and you want to learn some other things, I have courses for uh career management, getting promoted, behavioral interviews, and soft skills. These were done with Ryan Murphy, who is an engineering manager at Yelp. We had a lot of fun making these and kind of draws from both of our experiences. Um, and finally, Brand Ghost. So, Brand Ghost is the thing that I am building on the side. Uh, a lot of stuff that I make content about, uh, if it's not questions that are submitted, it's a lot of the time it's like lessons I learned from building stuff like Brand Ghost. And Brand Ghost is a social media scheduling and crossosting service. And there's a lot more advanced features, but it's literally free, which is cool. The advanced features are paid for, but Brandos allows me to schedule all of my content. Very far out in advance. If you give me one sec here, I can show you that I perpetually have content scheduled. Right. So, here is my calendar. There's July. Here is August. If it ever loads, maybe there's a bug. Wouldn't that be funny? Oh, no. My feed is loading. There we go. Right. So, September's all scheduled. October is all scheduled. I think you might get the idea. But it is perpetually scheduled. I never have to schedule content ever again on social media. Best feeling in the world. And that just means that I can focus on creating content. I make it. I put it into Brand Ghost. It schedules it and it will eventually recycle it. Now, if you're someone like me, I have over 300 short form videos. I have over 300 blogs. I have 600 YouTube videos. you're not going to see my content repeat because I will keep making it. But if it does, you probably won't remember because it would have been a year ago or two years ago. So, Brand Ghost is awesome. If you are interested in starting out with content creation, like I said, it's literally free to use to sign up. You don't need a credit card or anything to get started. Promise, we want to keep it that way so that people who want to get started have a very low barrier to entry. If you're trying to take it more seriously and you want some more advanced features, like I said, that's where it's paid for. And if you have a business that you're running and you're like, man, social media content creation is a pain in the butt, but that's how we need to advertise. By all means, um, you can absolutely use it for that reason. We have people that are advertising all sorts of different businesses using Brand Ghost. Um, it just saves time. So that's my goal with it is to help people save time with content creation by scheduling and crossosting effectively. And then we have advanced features for engagement. Like there's a unified social media feed so you can see all of your comments and stuff in one spot. So I don't have to flip between Twitter and YouTube and Instagram and well LinkedIn's a little bit special because it's a pain in the butt. But anyway, that's what I'm building. It's a lot of fun. Check it out. And if you have any questions on that, please reach out to me. happy to answer any questions and guide you through it. Especially if you're just getting started and want to try posting more to social media. I see you all those people on X. I know that you you're out there posting. You can't hide from me. I can see the stream count. I know you're there. Cool. Okay. Thanks everyone for checking in. I appreciate you being here. Next stream, same time next week. Maybe not. Hold that thought. I have in-laws visiting. I should not live stream. Oh, shouldn't do it. We're not going to do it. That's the right move. Okay. The week after that, we're streaming. So, I will see you back in not next week, but the week after, same time, 700 p.m. Pacific. In the meantime, if you really want sort of that live stream experience, go over to Code Commute, check out the vlogs. It's the same format. It's just that there's no chat. So, you can leave questions in the comments. Thanks for being here. See you next time.