Looking Back on 20+ Years of Programming - Engineering Manager AMA

Rock and roll here. Just getting set up. Got to wait for the tubes to start sending the data through. So, give me one moment. We'll be ready to rock and roll. There we go. Instagram is up and running. Welcome to the stream, folks. Thanks for being here. Um, I'm going to refresh my chat. Do me a favor if you don't mind. If you're in the chat, come say hi. helps me know it's working because there are always some interesting technical issues. Um, if you're new to these live streams, these live streams are very much like an AMA style. So, you're welcome to ask questions in the chat. I am happy to try my best to answer, you know, software engineering andor career related. Hey Devin, looks like YouTube chat's working. Thanks for being here as always. I very much appreciate it. And so I got a topic for today. It's a reflection from code commute which was uh an interesting one to go do. I think the topic came originally from Reddit and it was good. I felt like it was actually kind of good timing because I when I write my newsletter, which is generally how these live streams come together, I was like this is the 100th newsletter that I put out this past weekend. And so I was like, okay, I should probably think of something to write about like a 100 issues. And then I was like, but I don't know, people don't I don't know if people really care. Like I think mostly my readers are software developers. They probably care more about software development topics. But then I was thinking there's probably this cool opportunity to to blend these two things together, right? So because that topic from code commute was the most interesting which was reflecting on things that we really valued as junior developers and how that kind of changes throughout your career. I was like hey that's a good reflection opportunity because on code commute I was talking about some of those things just tried to put it all together and came up with the topic for today. So I'm just going to put the link in the chat. Like I said if you're new to the live streams the link in the chat is weekly.devleer.ca. CA. Um, if you're depending on what platform you're on, you're not getting um either the chat directly to the chat or you may not even be able to see it based on the video format if it's vertical like on Instagram. Sorry. Um, but weekly.devleer.ca is my newsletter. You absolutely do not have to subscribe if you don't like the idea of email newsletters. No worries at all. I mention it because these live streams are generally based on topics that you'll find there. So even if you don't want to subscribe and I don't blame you, we get lots of email. Um you can check it out, you know, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and see what the topic is. That's where it's going to be. So the one the link that I put in the chat is just the the latest issue and it's just you know it's 100 issues of Dev Leader Weekly but it's titled looking back on 20 plus years of programming because this is going to be about um at least for me reflecting on some of the things that have changed that I value and I thought this is like an interesting exercise to do. Right? So on code commute I kind of encouraged for you know listeners and viewers to write back in the comments like if there are things that you think back on where you're like hey this was really important to me or this is how I structured code or this is how I thought about my career that kind of stuff I encourage people and I want to do the same thing for this live stream if people are comfortable sharing in the chat like if you do that reflection and that could be throughout this live stream you know if you're taking some time to think through it. What kind of things have changed for you? Right? Like for me it's been like 20 plus years of programming but professionally like in the industry uh about 13 years. My chat just dropped on my side. It says no. Um so there's been you know a lot of growth opportunity for me and different things that I value. So like I wrote down a few of them but you know if you go through the exercise you know for yourself and even if I were to keep thinking about this I'm sure there's plenty of things that I could think of where when I was more junior I was very interested in them and uh same thing goes for my career and all that. So anyway encourage people to do that but of course it is an AMA as well. So if you just have general questions ask away. With that said, I'm going to start going through the newsletter portions kind of because it kind of is in an order that I can follow a little bit for bit of a theme. So, um I think before getting into the the reflection part, I will take just this brief moment, especially if people are new to the channel and these live streams in general. But this is yeah like this was a milestone weekend for me doing 100 newsletter issues which is pretty cool. Um and for you know if you're new around here then you may not know that back in 2013 is when I tried to start this. So in 2013 I said I'm going to start a blog. Um, this was when I was realizing that maybe I should try focusing a little bit more in my engineering management career because early on I was prom like at a startup I was put into an engineering manager position and as an individual contributor like I have literally no idea what I'm doing as a manager at all. Right? I was very fresh out of school at a startup. they're trying to scale teams up. And so I was kind of doing this pendulum swing of like, let me just code. Oh wait, I'm not managing the team. Let me go manage. Um, which isn't like a sustainable thing. And then after a while, hey Danny, good to see you here. Uh, after a while, I had to figure out like the right balance. And I decided pretty early on, I said, I'm going to start blogging about this stuff. Like I'm going to learn in public. Basically, I have no idea what I'm doing. There's got to be more people out there that also don't know what they're doing and maybe this could be of value to them. But I gave up. I gave up a long time ago. I gave up in 2013. I was writing my blog for a few months and I think I said like this is a lot of work and no one's reading it. It's been a few months and I'm not really getting a lot of views. Maybe I should stop. So I gave up. And then the start of 2023, so a few years back now, uh I guess it was the end of 2022, I said, at the start of 2023, I'm going to start making content again. I want to be just like Danny Thompson. Just kidding. But Danny's pretty awesome. But I said, like, I really need to do this and I need to be consistent because I was looking at other people that had been successful in content creation, especially like in software development. And I said, "These people are offering so much value." You know, if I look at how they've progressed and stuff, I'm like, "This is I always feel weird saying this cuz I don't mean for it to sound like minimizing, but I said to myself, like, if they can do it, you can, too. It's not because I'm better. It's because they've been so consistent and they just keep getting better and better." And I said, "I can be consistent, too. I know I can do it. I know I can keep showing up." And that's what I started doing. So, at the start of 2023, I said, I'm going to make three YouTube videos a week. I'm going to write on my blog. And then I started piling on more and more social media stuff, which is depending on how you came to this channel, you might have seen me on LinkedIn or Twitter or other places. And it's because I try to put my content everywhere that I possibly can and try to build systems around that so that I can keep creating content and not focus on the publishing and the scheduling. I can just focus on creating because for me that's the part that I really enjoy and I think that's where I can add the most value. So 100 issues in I think on YouTube 12 and a half thousand subscribers which we got to come back to that because that's actually not great for for how many videos I've got in. Uh quick note, this is a little bit of behind the scenes. I am going to go talk to a YouTube coach again. Um, I use Vid IQ sometimes when you see me screen share uh on YouTube videos or if you've seen some of my YouTube videos on Dev Leader if I'm sharing, you might see some things like in YouTube and you're like, "What is that?" It's it's Vid IQ and it's basically like um analytics and some sort of helper things that I can have in YouTube. And one of the things that they offer is coaching for for YouTube creators. And I didn't realize, but part of my plan has like two free video reviews a month, something like that. And I said, "Hey, I I haven't been using this. Like, I should take advantage of this." And so they watch your video and they give you like they send you a video doing a review. And I have this one big challenge on my YouTube channel. By the way, we're going to get into the main topic. I just wanted to to kind of get this out there. But I sent over one of my recent videos and I said, "Hey, my click-through rate on my channel is like really low." And basically, I've been hoping that over the past two and a half years that I would start to see some like, you know, some growth that kind of looks like a curve going up. And instead, it's kind of just like maybe flat, maybe up a little. And if I stop posting for a week, like when my video editor's out, my subscribers drop. So, it's not a good spot to be in given how much like how much content I'm putting out. So, he did a quick look and he was like, "There's something odd about your channel." Because he was he couldn't figure it out. And he was like, "You like he even said outright." He's like, "I'm not just trying to like sell you on uh YouTube coaching." He was like, "If you want," he was like, "Go do like your own research outside of this." this, but he's like, I think there's something weird going on with your channel um based on like the analytics he's seeing. So, anyway, I might dabble in that because I don't know, for me personally, like I put a lot of effort into YouTube and uh it's kind of a bummer that it's like said the same thing about my LinkedIn post. Like my LinkedIn reach is down like 70 to 80% over like the past month, which is nuts. So creating content is hard, but um this is why a milestone like a 100 newsletter issues for me is very important because it's not always going to be sunshine. There's going to be sometimes weeks where it just feels like I'm putting out content and no one's seeing it or anything. Um which sucks, but at the same time I have that voice in my head that says like, "Remember that time over a decade ago you gave up? Don't do that again. So that's that's my story. That's where we're at. So let's get into the meat of this. Right. So um if we go through this reflection exercise, I wanted to remind people too that if you are a junior right now, it's not that you can't participate. So please, please do like have a have a think through about the things that you value. Right? So the some of the things I wrote down especially I think pretty common for juniors like choosing the right programming language to start with right this is one of the most common things I get asked hey I'm interested in software development I want to get started I need to know what the best programming language is to start with right what's the answer to that it's C obviously no but the the reality is like there there isn't just a best and I think people get caught up on this. They want the best language. They want the best tech stack to like I need to know what the best one is so I'm not wasting my time. But then people get stuck. They don't they don't start because they're trying to ask around what the best one is. They're not getting good answers. They're getting conflicting answers. And the reality is like pick something and start because you're going to start building those skills early on and they're going to be very transferable. But there's a lot of focus on the right language. I think uh I wrote down like perfecting your text editor setup because like once you get going it's like I think there's this feeling of like okay cool I can create things and like you want to make everything perfect but like at some point does that really matter maybe not um getting your code running using that new framework right everyone's always chasing new frameworks and stuff especially when we're getting started because we want to be working with the latest and greatest right how how crappy would it you know, if you were to start your career off and you're using something that's already 10 years old, like no way. There's you're never going to be hired that way. You must have the latest. The companies are going to want the latest and greatest. It's not just not the reality, right? Um there's it's not that new frameworks are bad or something like that, but there's something to be said about frameworks that have stood the test of time. So I think early on people put their attention into these areas that um maybe over time they they realize like maybe these aren't the most important things, right? So I said for me like one of the things early on I was like I don't know if this is it's a pretty strong word but like pretty obsessed with like like kind of like you know reinventing the wheel. So, I would love to go build like this. It's such a weird thing to say, but like build my own UI framework. Why? I don't know. Um, but I liked trying to like recreate things so that I could understand how they work, right? So, on this stream and other videos and stuff, I always say like when I was starting out, even you know, before working, I mean, one of the things I like to do is build a role playing game, right? So, it's never going to be finished. It's just kind of served as this playground for me. Um, the Whoa, whoa, Devin, about the rice in your car. Have you Have you seen my car? One sec. It's got its own website, right? That is definitely ricing your car. It has underglow and it has Lamborghini doors. So, I take personal offense to that, Devon. Um, hey Ashley, good timing. Welcome. Uh, I'm just kidding, Devon. You know that. But the for me like building this this game was sort of like this this playground that I could keep trying out new patterns, practices. I could go try some new package to go play with and see how I can go incorporate that. It just gave me something that I was personally very interested in and then I could experiment with all sorts of different things. Right? So for me like at one point it was like okay like I'm going to try using port my game over so that it works in Unity and then I can do some actual visual stuff because it was really I I said it was a role playing game. At one point it was just like a textbased role playing game. At various points it was almost like headless. So I could just build the role playing game systems cuz that's all I cared about. Not actually playing it. I didn't even care what it looked like. I just wanted to build these complex systems. And um you know the UI framework came up part way because I moved stuff over to Unity and I said I don't like Unity's UI framework. But I'd already spent so long working in like wind forms, which that might date me a little bit, but I knew how UI frameworks work from that. Not web UI frameworks, desktop ones, but I had that experience and I said, I'm I'm going to go create my own inside of Unity. And why? Like, why didn't I just go find one that was already done? Because that's not fun for me. I wanted to be able to go build it myself. right? I wanted to go understand these things. So, that was a really important thing for me early on. Uh, and I kind of wrote like it's like taking things apart um that concept, but really I'm I'm dissecting them to be able to put them back together. Yes, Danny. And I owe you a message. So, Danny says, "Are we going to see you at uh what's Danny? What's the full name of the conference? I'm so sorry. It's I'm I apologize. I should know this. I'm trying to like search it while you're trying to type a response. Hopefully trying to type a response down the link. I'll get to it before Danny responds. Oh, but it just says CYC 2025. Danny, I'm sorry. Uh, yes, and I owe you a DM because it's in Yeah, September, I did confirm with my wife. Commit your code. Thank you so much. I feel like an idiot. I should have known that. But, um, yeah, you will see me there. I will send you a message. I apologize for not doing that. Also, Danny, I need to get you on the podcast. So, I'm calling you out for that, but I I'll send you a message. I did ask my wife. She said that I should be like we don't have plans that late in September. So, it should be good. I will message you and we'll make arrangements for it. That means I got to come up with a topic for presenting. So, no pressure. Um, but yeah, Danny, thanks for the reminder and I will message you. Um, I think that, you know, like when I reflect on that stuff for me, like building things, I I don't regret regret spending time doing that. Like it maybe wasn't a good use of time to create something that could be shipped and sold, right? I already said like that game I was building, it's probably never going to see the light of day. That's okay because for me, it wasn't about getting it done. It was about building and learning, right? I don't I think that if it would have gotten finished, I don't think that I would have enjoyed that. Like the the joy came out of putting things together. Awesome. Thanks, Danny. And I'm down to be on yours as well. So, thanks very much. Thanks for joining in. So, you know, if you're thinking about this reflection for yourself, right? If you're just getting started, what are the things that excite you in your career now? And if you haven't started your career, like when you're thinking about building software, like what's exciting about that, right? Is it the promise of of the career and things that come along with it? Is there some element of building things? Like I think for me, if I were to go back in time and think about this, I think the most exciting thing about programming for me was that, and I've used this reference before, but it feels like you have an infinite number of Lego bricks of any shape you want. And I loved building Lego. I used to like my, you know, huge thanks to my parents, but like Lego sets were like my favorite thing to be able to get a Lego set. I would follow the instructions, build it up, and as soon as it was done, I'd show my parents, and I'm sure they were like, "Okay, we've seen enough of these. Please stop." Um, but shortly after it was like, "Okay, I've built it. Let me take it all apart and let me go put all the bricks with my other bricks and let me build something even bigger and crazier." Because I just like building. And I think that when I first got to experience programming, you know, 20 plus years ago, that was when I first realized like I can make things. It feels like Lego and there's unlimited bricks of any shape. So for me, that was um kind of what I was thinking back. And then the other note I wrote here is for people that are, you know, further along in your career or software development journey, how about you? What was something that you were thinking about way back then where you were like, "That was the thing that really got me into it." The chat's totally open. You already saw Danny sending messages. Devon sent some messages. Ashley said, "Hello, Evil Eye Interactive. Good to see you here." Yeah. And thanks for thanks for your thoughts. I'm using blueprints in Unreal Engine. I have lots of fun. It feels like Legos. Yeah. Oh, and you said for you it's automation. So, you found that when you and correct me if I'm wrong on this, but you found that when you could start to see things getting automated, that was like an exciting like aha moment for you. Uh, I'm assuming that's what you mean, but that's I could see that being the case where all of a sudden you're like, "Wait a second. A computer can do this for me." That's awesome. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. But I haven't used Unreal. I probably should. I wish I had infinitely more time than I do, but um last time I checked with Unity, things weren't going so hot. Um so maybe next time I am in a position where I don't need to worry about how I'm spending my time and I want to play with building games again, I'll try out uh Unreal. So thanks for sharing. Um next thing I wrote about was around career goals, right? So, I think for me when I started out um Oh, let me read what Jason's comment is here first. I'm just a few years in a career changer. Awesome. That's very exciting. Congrats on the journey. So, but I just wanted to feel accomplished and keep learning and leveling up. Eventually get to the point to make a game engine for fun without losing interest. Yeah. Um I mean, I feel I I had this conversation on LinkedIn before. I've had it on Twitter before. There are tons of people, tons of people that started into programming because they wanted to build games. Like, you know, we were younger, we were kids or whatever, like even maybe not as kids, but being like, I like games and then realizing like, wait a second, like I can make my own. Like that's a that's possible. And then playing with code a bit and going, hey, like I can actually like, you know, you have logic, right? you can make the rules for your game and stuff. So, um, yeah, like Jason was saying, eventually get to the point to make a game engine for fun without losing interest. So, when I was talking about building games, like that's I was making like really rudimentary game engines. Were they good? Like, absolutely not. They were probably terrible if I were to go look at the code. But, um, but it was fun and you get to learn a lot. So, I think that's really awesome. Evil Interactive says, "My career started after registering my business. It's been a lot of fun building it." That's great, right? I think that some people are nervous about that kind of risk. They don't want to take it. Uh I think other people, they see that as an opportunity early on. So, I think that's great. It takes a lot of work to be able to do that. So, congrats on that. So, the next part in my newsletter, like sort of the next kind of phase of this conversation for me, I was thinking about like career goals. So, not just like what I what do I like to program or why is programming interesting, but what's what's going to be in my career? And I remember thinking um I remember thinking like startup because in my mind, this is just how it looked. I said I don't want to work for a huge company. I had a lot of my classmates from university. They ended up going to Silicon Valley. I didn't think there was anything wrong with that. Like that's exciting for them. They're, you know, brilliant developers. I said, "That's great, but I don't think I want to do that." Like, I want to I personally want to feel like I'm having a bigger impact. Which, hear me out, because if you're hearing that and going, "Well, dude, if you go to a bigger company, the impact you have is going to be greater because it's like, you know, the impact of the software is greater." I just mean like I wanted to feel like my impact was felt. I don't know if that makes sense. So like my contribution isn't like a tiny piece of the puzzle. I want to feel like it's significant. And so startup felt good for me, right? The other idea that I liked about a startup was that like I could be part of something much bigger potentially. Of course, there's a lot of risk when it comes to startups. You could be at a startup that stays small for forever. You could be at a startup that doesn't exist a couple of months after you're there. Many startups fail. But in my mind, I was like, it would be so cool to go to a small company, help them build it, and then I have this like delayed gratification of like some point in the future like I could be part of that. I could be the person who was at that company and helped along the way. So, um I think like that's really what went into like career for me like when I was thinking about what do I want to do that was it. Um so the challenge though is like I mean a lot of things right if to to replicate that experience like I think I got very lucky. I I ended up working at a company that was called Jad Software at the time. It became Magnet Forensics. Um it was an incredible ride, right? But I don't know like I feel like I did get lucky. I worked at a place that you know they they already had they didn't need investors. They were already profitable with customers and they were scaling. So it they were like you don't have to worry about us like not being able to pay your salary like next month or something. They're like we're totally cash flow positive. We're trying to scale. Marketing and sales team's growing. So and and there's no investors. So there's like the founder and the the CEO are able to kind of make all the decisions which is really cool. And it was in digital forensics. So that for me was sounds interesting. I knew nothing about forensics and hearing how the product and stuff was used. Like everything just lined up to be like, "Okay, so drisked startup. I'm in near the beginning and part of their mission is being able to help save kids." Like, yeah, where do I sign? And I didn't know anything about forensics, but it was all those other pieces that really made it come together. And now because this whole conversation is about how things change the that part of my life allowed me to take different kinds of risks right so you know a few years into that I was like this like this isn't risky this is a like a this is a high-speed train this is super exciting but the risk was all in the beginning being like this is a startup the founder and the CEO tell me it's nothing to worry about. But we're a tiny company. Our competitors, there's like two companies that had a monopoly over the whole industry. And then as we were growing, there was another company that have had a monopoly over all of mobile digital forensics. So like we were always the small player. And so in the beginning it was like kind of scary and then once I saw the momentum I was like there is nothing that's going to stop this. So the it it just changed, right? So at some point then it was like lots of long hours. Again, when I tell this story and talk about it, no one forced me to do it. I never want to talk about like my my previous work experience at that company like someone made me work a lot. I just did it because I loved to do it. And that like all of those things wouldn't fly right now. So, for example, I just talked about how like the startup idea was very interesting and exciting. If I were to I'm just making this up so don't take it out of context. If I were to walk out of this room and tell my wife like I want to go work at a startup and like it's a sevenperson company, she might look at me like what? Like are you sure? Because I have what feels like and I know in big tech nothing's truly stable, but it feels like a very stable job. I have a good income. Things are comfortable. I enjoy the work I'm doing. And it would seem like a very large risk in comparison. It doesn't mean that I could never do that or anything like that, but the risk profile is very different because I would need to be able to have a conversation with her and say like, I don't know. I don't this is probably going to be riskier than where I'm at. I may be in a position where I'm not making the same income I'm at. Is that comfortable? Maybe at some point in my career I will need something like that. But then the other part that I've already mentioned is that I don't have the time and energy to put into someone else's startup like I did before. And that's because I have other priorities in my life. So things for me have absolutely changed over time. I think that you know Nick whatever like 13 years ago different risk profile I had you know was single had just paid off my student debt because I had internships and my responsibilities were like make sure you get groceries make sure you sleep and go to the gym there was nothing else right so I could just work that's just not how life is these days Um Devin says, "Yeah, that makes sense. At my last place, I was on small team building software for 30 plus internal business units. However, the impact felt minimal since it was slowmoving org that hated change." Yeah, like that. That can be really challenging, right? Um Jason might have to sell the car. No. Yeah, she hates that car. Um, it's very loud because it's modified. And the the issue, well, there's a lot of issues with it, but sort of the one of the primary issues that she doesn't like is it's manual and our driveway is sloped. So, when I come home in that car, it hasn't driven in like over a year. When I come home in that car, I have to back up this driveway in a manual car and it's loud and the exhaust is facing the house. So, she thinks that I come home and I'm like stepping on the gas to rev it. And I'm like, I'm literally just backing up like as gently as I can to go up the driveway. She can't stand it. So, she would love if I sold that car. Um, I would just like to see it driving again because it's a lot of fun. Like it's uh I'll have to I'll have to do something on code commute for it once it's driving again. But it's uh I don't even One sec. Do I even have Can I do this? One sec. One sec. I just wanted to see if my website's actually working. It's not kind of one sec. No, these are like old YouTube videos and stuff, so I can't really pull it up. But will this work? You can see if I pull this over. I see like this is a lot of fun. It was all purple. The entire motor is purple. We pulled it out. We powder coated it. There's me cleaning my car. Yeah, she wants that thing gone though, for sure. So, I need it back on the road, though. It's a lot of fun someday. Um, Evil Eye Interactive says, "My challenge has been vetting the candidates. Every person has baggage that I didn't want to include in the final product. Interesting. Um, do you care to elaborate on that further, Evil Eye Interactive? Because I think that's an interesting sort of challenge to walk through. Um, I'd be interested in hearing more personally. Okay. So, these days, yeah, stability is pretty important for me, right? I need to make sure that I have a stable job. I feel like at least my perspective on my own life. I'm not sort of uh casting this to to say this is how you need to live yours, but for me, I want to make sure that I can provide for myself, my wife. Um I always want to be in a position where I can provide for both of us. Um of course, if she just made tons and tons and tons of money and I didn't have to work, that would be cool, too. But I like being in the position where I can safely say like I have us both taken care of. So that's important to me. Um, but like the other thing too is that I need to be doing work that I enjoy. Like that hasn't really changed. So it's not like it would be really difficult for me. I think I've said this I'm thinking about it now on up a live stream probably a good few months back now. I think the topic of the live stream was like talking about software developers and money and I was saying like basically if someone had enough money presented and it was like work that I didn't love like the number would have to be pretty high but I would probably switch to something if I was going to get paid a million dollars a year or something like yes sign me up. Uh, I don't know how long I'm going to last, right? But like that might afford me some freedoms to be able to do other things perhaps, but long term it's not a sustainable thing. And I know that about myself. I whenever I talk about money and software development careers, I always remind people and I ne can never show it properly because it's super awkward, but I have a tattoo on my arm that is to remind myself when I look down that if your goal in life is just to make a number in your bank account go up, it's going to be very unfulfilling. So, there's nothing wrong with trying to make more money, but you want to be doing something with that, not just making a number go up. So things are a little different for me these days. Um I think the thing that I wanted to remind people at this point when I was writing my newsletter and great opportunity in this stream is like I think it's important to figure out like what motivates you. And you might not know that right now. You might have some ideas but you might not really know right. I think for a lot of people especially getting started out it's like I need to get my job. like I need to have something so that I can start to get some stability. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But once you have that, I'm genuinely curious. Like this kind of these our goals change, our values change, like the next step looks different. So I kind of encourage you that periodically you pause and do a little bit of a reflection that's like what do I actually care about? Right? And there's no wrong answer. one of the last live streams. I don't know how long ago it was now. It's one of these newsletters. Um, yeah, this was on June 16th is when I put that one out. Sorry, I'm just checking. Wasn't sharing my screen. But that one we talked about motivation for developers and the whole topic was like that will absolutely change for you in your career. So, I encourage you to do that reflection. Uh, this one I thought was very interesting because I never understood this until I came to big tech. Job titles. I never understood this. So, when I worked at a startup, we literally didn't have the systems and stuff in place to be able to have levels and roles and stuff like we had, sorry, we had different roles for us. We had like developers, we had testers, we had um because it was a digital forensics company, we had some roles that were like data generation to be able to help collect data that we could go use for um digital forensic purposes. And I just remember like we didn't even have like a senior developer role. That took a little while before we got that. And we introduced it because we were like people are starting to ask and like we should probably have something for this. But it was from from a development sort of career trajectory. It was like developer and senior. That's it. So we didn't really have like a a career progression with titles. It was really just like you keep doing better, your compensation goes up, you get more responsibilities. I at this point like I've been gone from there for five years. I know they have more titles and stuff and that's been a lot more formalized, but we were just a startup. We didn't we didn't have these things all figured out. And I don't think it was the wrong thing either. I think that we consciously made that decision because we didn't want to inject a lot of titles and then go oops. Like we have these people at different levels and nothing really makes sense. Like undoing a title change is way more complicated. But I can remember towards the end of my time there it would come up more where people were asking about job titles and I didn't understand it and I think that for me my world was like I was working at this startup I was there for eight years in my mind it was like if I work harder I do better work I get more compensation I get more responsibilities like the good things just happen if I do the work. What do I care what my title is? But I had only ever worked there full-time, right? I had six internships before that title's intern. And that was my my first full-time job. And I never understood titles or why people would ask. And then I think it was just towards the end where I started to get a glimpse of this And it makes a lot more sense when you start thinking about people changing jobs whether you're someone coming from a different company into a role that doesn't have something like senior like imagine you are a principal engineer a staff engineer senior engineer and you're now like this role sounds interesting but I'm just coming in as developer or for someone who's like staff or principal like am I being demoted to senior. Well, no. Like that's our highest developer title, right? It's it when you start thinking about how you're moving between jobs now. You might have on your resume. It looks like staff or principal. Now you're senior or senior down to just like normal developer. Um that might start to feel kind of weird and mess with people's minds. And then of course they're thinking about their like what their resume looks like and how that might be applicable for their future job because they're thinking about their career overall and it's going to look like a step back. Or you have people that are at the company and they're like in their mind they're like I know I'm not going to be here for forever. So if I've already been here for like four or five years like wouldn't it make sense that I should be getting promoted to some title? Like isn't that what happens at companies? Because if they're looking at other places and other places are now posting like these levels and roles, they're like, I don't know what I am. I would like to think I'm probably supposed to be senior after five or six years, but I'm I'm still just a developer here. I don't know. So, it's started to make a little bit more sense to me. I'm just going to pause and read some of the comments. So, Jason says, "I feel awkward since I don't find much out there that's personally interesting or noble." Okay. My only motivation is skill growth and do not care about career growth. Yeah. And so that totally makes sense. Um I don't it's it's funny because when it comes to being noble I I don't know this might be kind of weird to say. I don't really think that I had that consideration before where I was like I need to find something noble to go do. That's why I said I feel like I got very lucky because when I like got into digital forensics, I realized, oh crap, like I have a noble thing that I'm doing, right? I can anchor part of my own personal mission. And I will always say it like our software was used for helping save children. And one of the sort of the crappy things about not doing that work now is I don't know for me personally, again, I'm not trying to cast this for anyone else. I don't know if I will ever find anything more noble than that in my entire life, right? to be able to do that. I had sort of stumbled upon this and it was like, holy crap, like that is that feels like very different. So, I'm a little bit biased because I had something like that, but I don't think that I was ever looking for something that was super noble. So, I think that's okay. Um, I think when it comes to finding something that's personally interesting, you know, for me, if I could take all the money and whatever outside of it, titles, responsibilities, I think the most interesting thing would be to make games that are fun to play. I would love to do that because I like playing games. I think it would be so much fun. It would be so interesting. I say that as someone who's never had to go ship a game. So for anyone who's watching or listening, you might work in the game industry and you're like, "You would hate this, man." Um, totally fine. That's why I'm saying take all the other things out. I would just love to build games because that feels like a fun thing. So maybe it's just being exposed to different things or different industries even, right? Like for me, digital forensics, that was never a a concept that applied uh for any of my thought process at that point in my life. And I had a message that came in from LinkedIn that went right to my spam folder. And I was coincidentally checking Gmail spam and I saw this LinkedIn message and it was for digital forensics at a startup. Very coincidental, but I never thought that I would have got into that. So, might just be different domains or different industries too to explore. Um, people care about titles if they're looking towards moving someplace else. Yeah, so that's kind of like one of the things I started to notice for sure. Evil Interactive says they gave me a title CEO when they are not even part of the company. That is a title these indie devs gave me. Very nice. There you go. Sometimes you need to try several things in order to find something that clicks as the right fit or something you can really believe in. Yeah, I like I I believe in that, Devon. Um, Paul says, "If you're looking for purpose, there are so many options in national security and public safety. No greater mission. Shout out to Magnet Forensics." Yeah, Paul, I just realized Paul Britain because we haven't chatted in a little while. Good to see you, man. I had to do a bit of a double take there. I was like, "Wait a second." I just went to the LinkedIn profile. Like that's the the Paul that I was thinking. Yeah, I got to catch up with you sometime soon. Jason says, "Yeah, when you mentioned you were in digital friends, it sounded like something I would actually have pride in working." Yeah. Right. Again, I'm not I'm not saying like that's what you have to go do, but I think that I will always say I feel like I just got very lucky and kind of like fell upon that. And I would I would love to sit here and tell all of you like I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I graduated university and I knew that I was going to change digital digital forensics and help save the lives of children. I had no idea. Uh that was not that wasn't even the place I was planning to go to work. I literally interviewed there because I was like I'm already lining something else up. This will be an easy interview. Like why not go do it? And then I interviewed there and I was like I think I'm going to stay. So, thanks Paul. Let's catch up though for sure and thanks for joining in. I appreciate it. Um, so this changed a lot for me though because when I came to big tech, I realized that everything everything is based on levels and titles. Absolutely everything. And it's kind of weird. It's a weird transition for me because I went from being someone who's like, I just don't care at all because I know if I put in hard work, good things happen. I get compensated. I get more responsibility. Like like I said, I got very lucky that I was in an environment where I could, you know, effort in is like compensation and responsibility back and getting a lot of autonomy like a very good recipe for like a a positive feedback loop. And in big tech, and I'm not, this is not to bash Microsoft or anything like that. I enjoy working at Microsoft, but the the difference I find is that everything is is titlebased, right? We have annual performance reviews. Why are we doing that? Well, you want to make sure that you can get your bonus. You want to make sure your stock rewards come in. And you want to make sure you're progressing because if you progress to the next level, you get more compensation, you get more responsibilities, right? Your salary goes up, your stock goes up. So it's very much and this is obvious for a lot of people, right? It wasn't for me because I never had to go through that, right? I never had to go through that. So, and I've talked about this very openly on like on code commute. So like this next thing I'm going to say if like again I'm not bashing Microsoft or anyone or anything but it's been a weird journey for me because I've been an engineering manager for 13 years in like a month and a half from now. It'll be 13 years and the weird thing about that is I have been a middle manager for 13 years. There were employees that I used to manage that are at Magnet Forensics now, some of my best friends and they are directors and I am still a middle manager. And even for me to be promoted to the next level, I will literally have to switch teams in order to be put into a position where I can be a manager of managers. like truly have the next role, never mind the next level, the next role of being able to do that. So, it's been a very weird experience for me because after 13 years of middle management, I am even further away from a director style position or being able to manage managers. And if you're like, well, that makes sense, Nick. like you need to have the experience like okay but my point with saying all of this is like if you notice the content I put out I'm trying to help other software developers right why did I start my blog in 2013 it was to help other people going into management and leadership roles from individual contributors so you might imagine that over the past like 13 years or 12 years however long it's been because that was 2013 when I actually started that over the past 12 years I've been trying to shift my focus and like it doesn't come across this way necessarily in content but I want to be able to help other managers that was the goal right so like it's kind of weird for me in my career it feels like very very much stagnant because of that and it's so awesome to see some of the the people that I used to manage manage like in director roles absolutely crushing it and like I remember when they were individual contributors on my team and I'm like I think that you're going to be an awesome manager. No, I don't want to do that. You know, people not for me. I just, you know, happy to mentor people. And I'm like I think you're going to change your mind someday. And now they're director level. It's it's amazing. So, um, it's a it's a big focus in big tech and I I struggle with that because the it's always because it is always the central focus. Sometimes I find that that can actually take away from what feels like should be like an engineering or product or service focus because you're always going to have some internal motivation to do things. Makes sense, right? You want to excel in your career. Like for me, I've said this before too, I need to make sure that if I want to be promoted, I have to have significant visibility across an organization. And I have found in the past 5 years that even if I have significant impact, if that has not been communicated out, the other people in other parts of the organization might not know that I was a person that was responsible for that. So, I have to go spend even more time being visible, right? So, these are all things that I'm not personally aligned with, but I kind of learned that in big tech, like that needs to become a focus if I want to excel in my career. If I ever want to get to the point where I can be managing other managers and kind of helping out at that level, I need to be able to do those things. So, uh, Evil Eye Interactive says, "The only way you save children is by shutting off the internet and starting over. No internet access till 18. Hold parents accountable." I disagree with that fundamentally, personally. Um, I don't think that that needs to happen. I think that when you start, this is my personal opinion, if you start restricting things, people are going to look for ways to access it. I think we need better education for people that are using internet. That means if you're going to have, you know, younger people using internet, they have to have better education around it. I think that restricting it just creates a bigger problem. Uh Devin says, "It's a weird quirk of big tech. That's probably why I see people working for Microsoft than Amazon, the meta and back to Microsoft." Yeah, it's called a boomerang, right? It's exactly it. And one of the things is that you can go just to make up, you know, a scenario. You could be a junior developer, right? And then at Microsoft, you get your two years of experience and then you're like, "Okay, like I'm going to go to Amazon." And you kind of you could be bumping up levels each time you go back and forth and stuff. And then you're like, "Okay, I'm just making this up, but like, okay, I like Microsoft the best, so I want to kind of get back to Microsoft." And like now I've kind of leveled up faster by going back and forth, right? So, it's a real thing. Um, I feel like it's a lot of work, but Paul says, "Internet safety should be taught in school." It absolutely should. I haven't been I haven't been in elementary school in a long time, but I I think that that would make a lot of sense, right? Um, that's again personal opinion. I I strongly agree with that. Um, but that is an entirely different topic for sure. So yes, for me I went again the reflection here is I went from being like I couldn't care any less about titles. You can call me literally you make it up, call me it to like a title's pretty important to me now, right? So if I if I wanted to switch to a different company, I need to be able to say like at Microsoft I was a principal level engineering manager because that will carry some weight going to a different company. I had never even considered this before. Um to to the point just to to say it when I was applying to Microsoft and was able to get my engineering manager role. Engineering managers at least in my part of Microsoft I don't know I can't speak for the whole company. It's huge. Um they start at principal level. So I I'm not thinking anything about this. I'm like I want to be an engineering manager. I don't care what the prefix is on that. Again, I don't care. I just want engineering manager role. So, when to be brought in as principal, I realized after I'm like, hey, principal is actually like a that's a pretty significant title. I didn't know. And again, I'm saying this out loud because I didn't care. I just I wanted I want to be an engineering manager. That's what I've been doing. Um, how do I get the title of king in the United States of America? Yeah, it's a it's a great question. I don't know the answer to that. Um, so I wrote in here uh curiosity projects to business outcomes. So, I've already talked about earlier um that I like kind of building things from scratch and take them apart, learn how they work, make my own things. Not because it's effective in terms of delivering something, but I think it's actually like in hindsight, I kind of learned this for myself. It's a really effective way for me to learn about things and that was the whole goal, right? I was having fun and I got to learn and I will always say that building side projects for me is one of the best ways that contributed to like at least my programming skills. So, no regrets there. But these days I do that a little bit less. I do that less because my motivations are different, right? And if you've watched these live streams before, uh, I always close out kind of going through the the products and services that I offer. So, you know, I will be talking about courses at some point. So, stick around if you want to learn about courses and have me pitch you on that. I talk about Brand Ghost as well, which is something I'm building on the side. And if you think about it, I'm building Brand Ghost on the side. It's a little side business. I use it for all of my content posting and social media. It does not make sense for me to go rebuild things that like are packages that exist from scratch. If I'm trying to deliver a product and service to users, unless I want that to be a core part of my business that I own, it does not make any sense for me to do that. Why? Because the goal is entirely different. I don't want to use Brand Ghost purely as like a learning opportunity. Yes, there's going to be learning in everything I do, which is the great part about software development, but I don't want to go like, hm, like I really need a job processing framework. I should probably write a job processing and scheduling framework from scratch. I should do that. Like, I'm not going to do that. That would be nuts. Or I need to like I need to go send email. like let me go oh and I have to think about like how I'm going to handle delivery me like absolutely not there I'm using Azure there's services in Azure for that I'm not going to do it the last time I did something pretty significant was like building from scratch was caching which is probably the dumbest thing to try go building your own um and that was on my previous uh sort of side thing that was called meal coach and I did that because we weren't doing a good job of like selling and marketing. I was just focused on technical stuff and I was like, I want to build a caching layer. Don't do that. It's a terrible idea. My caching was awful. Um, there's other things that do that for you. And I'm a .NET developer, so I will always shout out Fusion Cache. Jody Detti has built an awesome library called Fusion Cache. I think he just posted it. It's got like 18 million downloads or something. or 13 million. It's in the millions. It's pretty awesome. So, I didn't know about Fusion Cash. I probably should should have just used Fusion Cache. I use Fusion Cash and Brand Ghost now because I'm not going to go build it myself, right? It's different. The goals are different. My goals are being able to support our users and make sure that I can ship value to them faster, not how do I go build my own caching layer so I can learn about it. So different goals at a different stage in my life. Before, like I said, I wasn't shipping that video game, not going to make money from it. It was purely learning, right? So, um, I think that when I talked to some more junior developers, one of the things that comes up a lot is like we talk about side projects, this idea of, and I should check Instagram. Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't see your question there. Um, let me come back to your question on Instagram if you're still there. But when I talk about side projects with juniors, one of the things that comes up is like people will say like I I think they have in their mind like they need to build something that they can ship and get customers and have paying users. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. like we need to ask oursel what the goal is because that will change how you approach it entirely. So for example when I talk about side projects for resumes I'm talking about creating your own experiences. So, for example, someone's like, "Hey, I want to do mobile development, but I either I haven't worked anywhere yet or the company I'm working at is only like front-end web development. How am I ever going to have experience that shows mobile development? I'll never get hired anywhere." Uh, and number one, you don't necessarily have to have mobile development on your resume. But if you want to improve the odds and that's not happening at work, side project, right? Go spend time building stuff for mobile development. Invest the time into it. Learn about it. You need to create those opportunities for learning and getting that experience. It's not going to be the same necessarily as building, you know, a mobile product on a team professionally, but at least to go learn it and understand it, get familiar with it. Heck yeah. Like that's still a valuable experience. So for me, I'm always encouraging people, use it for learning. Use it for learning. If you happen to come up with something and you're like, hey, I think that I could monetize this. That's great. You also might go into it being like, I just want to make something to monetize because I don't care about beefing up a resume. I don't even care about applying to jobs. I want to be like an entrepreneur and do that. There's nothing wrong with that. But these are different goals. Right? When people, especially with AI now, people talk about vibe coding. Like, imagine this, right? You're trying to create your resume and you're hearing Nick on the YouTubes talking about building side projects and you go, "Okay, I need side projects for my resume." Okay. Okay. So, you go to chat GPT or your cursor, whatever you want to use, and you're like, "Build me side projects." And then it spits out all this code. Let's let's pretend it's good code. and it works and you go, "Excellent. Now I will put this onto my resume that I built the fanciest to-do app. I built an ecommerce site. I did it. It's on my resume now as a side project." But you didn't actually learn anything in this example. Okay, hear me out. In this example, if you were just like, "Okay, output the code. Now I have it." You didn't go through the learning process. That was the whole point at least when I talk to people is go learn the things and that way when you're getting interviewed or at least on the resume they can see that you have an interest in it. You have some experience building with it in the interview. You can talk about it. You created that opportunity for yourself. Very different goals. Evil eye interactive goal equals control other people's actions. Shame game. someone has to be the boss and currently there is no boss culture I'm not totally sure the direction of that if I'm being honest. Um the goal is to control other people's actions. I don't know. Um, so I think that for side projects when you're building stuff, especially if you're junior, do um do make sure that you are like understanding what your goal is because you can almost like self-sabotage this way in the example that I was giving. It's like you're not going to the finished thing is that there's code. Yes, but how did you get there? Like that journey of how you got there is what changes it. Um, Handsomeman always says, "Make your own luck." It's funny you mentioned that, Devin. Devon's awesome, by the way. Give me one sec. Give me one sec. Because there was this one time where I actually got to chat with Mr. Hansselman and One sec. I'll go full screen. Boom. I had hair on my head. Wow. But yeah, there's Scott Hansselman running away. Right. So, I got to do this interview with Scott Hanselman. And the the entire thing, the theme of it, you can see right here, like it's be the luck for other software engineers. He always talks about creating your own luck. And I think that's a really interesting message, right? So when Scott talks about this he was he was framing some things up as in like the examples he gives are really good. I'm going to put the link to this in the chat by the way if you want to check it out. But um and I still owe someone a response on Instagram. My apologies. I'm coming back to Instagram. Um, so when Scott talks about it, he was saying things like you need to be you can't just have an opportunity. You need to be prepared. So like your preparedness alongside creating opportunities or being exposed to opportunities is what makes you lucky cuz you could you imagine if an opportunity comes up and you are woefully unprepared for it. you were going to feel very unlucky in that situation cuz you'll say there was this moment, this opportunity and I couldn't do anything with it. That's going to feel super crappy. So preparedness so you can create more surface area for luck. Okay, on Instagram, I think I missed you, so I apologize if you've already dropped off, but anything but designing UI once I just starred a Figma's empty design page for five minutes and gave up. Okay. Um, uh, this one says, "How do you comprehend the usage of AI tools? I feel like it's reducing productivity." I think this depends largely on a handful of things. What tools you're using, how you're using them, um, that sort of thing. So, for example, you will hear me um, complain a lot about agents because I am terrible at using them and they are absolutely slowing me down currently. Um so in terms of how I am navigating this kind of stuff like I am absolutely like in my own development I use chat GPT for bouncing ideas back and forth designing systems and things like that. I use GitHub copilot in my IDE while I'm developing. So obviously with the autocomplete um I will also use it for understanding more context of my codebase to ask questions and things like that. Rarely am I using agents in the IDE because I find that I have to do a lot of handholding. But this goes back to the point I was just trying to make, which is like I am probably using them ineffectively. Like I am a big part of the problem. And the only advice I've been hearing is like, oh, you need better prompting. You need to spend more prompting or time prompting and tuning things and getting it set on the right track. And I'm like, okay, but if I'm going to do that in the IDE and then wait for it to go finish, I might as well just go code it. So, it seems like it's the wrong form factor for me. But there's a couple of times where like smaller tasks. If I'm like modifying something and I'm like, okay, I wrote like a skeleton for a test, I might say like, hey, like co-pilot in agent mode, go, you know, scaffold out the rest of these tests based on this pattern. And that might be okay. I can kind of context switch, go check social media or I can go check GitHub co-pilot doing poll requests which this one for me is a gamecher for AI and productivity um because the way the agents operate that way is very much more aligned with um I think how I'm expecting agents to work very much hands off very much um getting appropriate context for the task at hand. But that means like if I if there's other people that are out there and they're able to tell me I can be extremely effective like using uh agents like in a swarm fashion and I'm sitting here being like well I can't use any agent effectively like it's a me problem. So, I'm kind of taking that on for myself and I'm trying to do a little bit more research on the side um for how to use agents like in a console app in a swarm letting them go run. I think after work today I had my first success. It took me like eight hours to get this thing set up like an embarrassingly long time. Uh and then I found out it's like it doesn't actually just like work out of the box on Windows like anyone I've talked to. And I'm like, you're telling me this whole time I thought it was like a one-click thing, except just not for Windows. Anyway, I had it output something, but the problem is that it chewed through $5 worth of tokens in like 15 seconds. Like, I think I need a different way to go do this because that's going to be nuts. If I could prove to myself that it's delivering good things, might be a different story. But I don't even I'm doing a proof of concept like give me a crappier model or something. Let it go slower. I don't know. Like that's way too much money. Um yeah, but I think to answer the question on Instagram uh in terms of reducing productivity. I think it's just about like refining how you're using the tools and finding the ways that they can make you more effective. Jonathan Baron says, "Vibe coding. It's not you, it's me." Uh Deon says, "You need to use better prompts. use this tool combined with this MCP in this particular VS code for can make an offering to a photo and the AI will work. Yeah, there's I joke like the AI bros, right? Um it's like if I make a comment anywhere that's like hey I'm not finding that this is effective. It's like well you must be stupid then. It's like I don't know, man. Like, it's not at the point where if I have to handhold it so much and spend, you know, seven days crafting the perfect prompt, it doesn't feel like it's there yet. But I want to challenge that for myself. I want to say I do need to be better at prompting. I do need to be better at giving these things guard rails. I need to play with the tools more. They're only going to get better. It's we're not going to like wake up in six months from now and it's like oh all the all the agents and models got worse like that's not happening. So instead of me sitting here like complaining and I'm not saying other people are right I am complaining about this stuff I want you to stop complaining and start saying hey if it sucks for me I need to go improve that for myself. So, I'm trying to use that as like an internal motivator. Okay. Um, let me see what else I wrote about. We're after 8:00 p.m. I try to sign off just after 8. So, um, I think the last thing I wrote about here was like, um, I kind of just talked about like how I'm spending my time and energy, right? So, like the fact that earlier on I was doing like hobby like like building video games and stuff like I'm trying to make what I feel like is more meaningful stuff in my time now. And that's not to say that if you just want to like kick back and build other things or do something completely outside of programming, that's totally cool. Part of this reflection process that we're talking through is like that's for you to decide, not for me. you're able to do anything that you'd like and I'm not trying to make you feel guilty about it. But for me personally, I have tried switching more of my time so that I can do what feels like it's more productive or more helpful. So that does mean content creation, right? I I spend a lot of time making content. It doesn't just happen. If I have to record a video with my face on it, that's going to take my time. Um I am trying to build products and services on the side. That also takes time. But I'm enjoying being able to do those things because of where I'm at now. I don't I don't think that if I go back like 15 years, like 20 to 15 years, I don't think that I would have enjoyed these things the same way. Clearly with the content creation, um it just wasn't there, right? Like I gave up very quickly. So, I just like these kind of things change over time. Um, so that was probably one of the last things in here. So, you know, to to leave people with a thought, it's like kind of like the the live stream we did on your motivations and stuff like that. These types of things will change, right? So, I thought this was this is all from a Reddit post, by the way, right? It's from a Reddit post. I talked about it on code commute and I thought it was pretty cool to be able to take this opportunity to kind of go back and reflect on on different things that I cared about and you know I'm hopeful that for people that tuned in either on the live stream now or if they're watching the recording they can kind of look back and see like how did this stuff change for you over time and if you notice like oh it did try to be more in tune with that. What do you care about now? Maybe in a year from now or six months from now, do that exercise again. It's not just about like getting older or anything like that. You might have changes in your life. You might do a move. You might have, you know, a significant other come into your life. You might have kids, a new pet, new hobby you pick up. There's like your life is going to change along the way, right? So the things that you value and how you want to spend your time, those things will evolve, too. So that's it for the main portion of the event. And this is the time where I show you all the stuff I got going on. So, this is where the newsletter is. It's got my dumb face at the top. I took that right here. I took that right here. Um, it's just the other way around. So, so that's the newsletter. I will put it back into the chat if you want to check it out. Thanks, Evil Interactive, for joining. Hopefully, I will see you next time. Uh, if you want to see the next topic, I would check out weekly.devleer.ca. CA. Again, you do not have to subscribe to the email newsletter. Don't feel pressured into that. Um, it it's actually worse for me. If you subscribe to it and you don't open it, then like the metrics in the terms of the value I'm delivering, they go down. So, don't. But if you want to see what the next live stream topic is, check out weekly.devleer.ca. I put it out every Saturday. Right? So, if I scroll back up here, you can see like there's there's a live stream from last time. Um, but yeah, there's 100 issues on there now. Uh, they are archived. So, that is one of the things I offer. I don't talk about it a lot, but if you want to go catch up on all of the previous ones, that is a monthly subscription. So, um, you can check that out if you are interested. My main YouTube channel is Dev Leader, which I will put that into the chat as well. Um, my video editor was out on some personal stuff for a bit over a week and I think he has like 12 videos from me. So, I'm going to I count the live stream as a video that I put out every week. I'm going to put out five this week. So, I put out one today, which is this Blazer one. This was building code commute through chatgpt. So, the code.com website, just to show you briefly, a forensic analyst should know the dangers of clicking random links. Yeah. Well, you can see the whole URL there. It's not that random. Um, let's see. Let me pull this down for one sec. Um, get that there. Okay. um code commute. It's not pretty, but this is a chat GPT website. And then the next video I'll put out is how I was using uh GitHub Copilot to build some other pieces of it. Right? Not pretty, but it is what it is. This is all like truly I tried to vibe code this as much as possible, which is what uh this video is right here. Uh, it gets frustrating at some point because chat GPT like is clearly doing the wrong thing and I'm trying to like vibe my way out of it. Annoying, but it was a good experience. Fun to to go through and I'll build more in that series as well and document it as I'm going. So, that's my main YouTube channel. Code Commute is my other YouTube channel. Um, this one here is basically entirely driven by user submitted questions or I go to Reddit if I'm out of questions to answer and I pull topics from experienced devs generally. So, um, let's see. This this one here is the one that was based on uh or sorry, this live stream and newsletter topic was based on this one. So, usually what I do if you're curious, I just go see what was either most viewed or most engaged with. Um, and that way I have a topic that I'm like, at least people seemed interested. So, that was this one. You can see the the Vid IQ stuff I was talking about at the beginning of this. So, I am going to reach out to that that YouTube coach and see because like I got to drive more views to this channel, right? Look at that. I have almost a thousand videos. I think some of them are shorts though. I think that counts in there too. But there's a lot of videos on this channel and uh that number is a little bit too low. Code commute is also available on Spotify. There's almost 300 episodes on um yeah 290 videos on YouTube and I'm doing 20 of them up to Spotify every week until I catch up. which means every day there's three code commute episodes that go up. Um, it's a lot. Saturday only gets two. I'm sorry, but I will keep doing that until I catch up. And then I will try to keep Spotify uh basically a week lagging behind YouTube. I'll just catch up on Saturdays to do it. So, you can check out Code Commute on Spotify if you're interested. And then I do have courses available. I am working through the next one. And I'm trying to put the sort of the outline together for Nick Chapsis to sign off on. It could be I I realize it's like a typical thing to say, but I think it could be my very mo like my very best course that I put out um for now. These two are currently my best ones getting started in deep dive in C. They are available as a bundle too if you want to check that out. So these should start you off if you know nothing about C or programming. These two will kind of guide you through. It's 11 and a half hours long kind of starting from nothing and uh building stuff in Visual Studio. Um so you can check that out. And there are also some other courses that are for non C developers like if you want to learn about you know getting promoted. There's soft skills, behavioral interviews, that kind of stuff. Uh all available. I paired up with Ryan Murphy who is another engineering manager. He's at Yelp and that was a really fun experience for us to put those together. Otherwise, I've already shared code commute. Brand ghost. Sorry, flashbang warning. It's super bright. Brand ghost is the thing that I am building on the side. It is a content scheduling and cross-osting platform. Yes, there are plenty of other tools that do this. We give away the crossosting and scheduling for free. So, um, the the business model is that we think that that kind of stuff should just be given away for free because there's too many other people that do it. Good. Those businesses don't have to exist. It's free from us. But we have advanced features that if you're more interested after time with scaling up your content creation, then you can use the more advanced features and pay for that. So, for example, I always like showing this, but if I go over to one sec, if I go to brand ghost. If I go here, my content calendar, right? This is perpetually scheduled. If I go to July, all of my content is scheduled for July. It's already scheduled for August. It is already scheduled for September. If you see the pattern, it's scheduled for forever because it's just taking the content that I have posted. I've built up an archive of things that I have posted and it will recycle them over time. Now, I have hundreds of YouTube videos as you've already seen. I have hundreds of blog articles. Um, so I just keep creating content and I add it into Brand Ghost and it is perpetually scheduled. I could take a year off from social media and on some types of content you will not see it repeat a single time and because I create educational content that's my focus that means that hopefully if I make it today and post it two years from now it's still valuable right the same type of advice that I want want to guide people with should still be valuable in the future so that's the idea behind Brand ghost if you are not a content creator, don't sweat it. You might want to try building in public. If you want to do that, you can use Brandos. If you want to try learning in public, like I said, it's totally free to crossost and schedule, right? You can sign up. You can get going on that. It's free. You have no excuse, no excuse to not go learning in public now. Go add your stuff to brand ghost and send it out. And then if you have a side business and you don't want to spend time on social media scheduling and sending things out, don't like use brand ghost. So we had one of our earliest users like a real estate agent. So he was using it because he does really good like cinematography and like walkthroughs for houses and he also makes shorts and educational content. So he can add that stuff into Brand Ghost and now a lot of his social media content he has a pipeline for it, right? And if he has to take a week off cuz he's busy, he's got stuff that's going to post. So you can leverage this for your business as well. And that's why I wanted to shout it out for other folks that may not seem or see the immediate value for it. That's what's going on. Hey Andreas, good to see you. You did make it pretty late. I'm really sorry that I'm just about to sign off. I apologize, but that's the time it's at for me. So, I wanted to say thanks to everyone for joining. Um, again, I'm proud of my 100 newsletter milestone. It's a good reminder for me that, you know, back in 2023 when I started taking this more seriously and committed to doing it consistently, that we're basically two and a half years in, hundreds and hundreds of videos on YouTube, you know, thousands of posts on social media. So, it's been it's been fun and we're not stopping. So, thanks again for being here. I do appreciate all your support and I will see you next week, same time. Take care.