The Modern .NET Show

Episode 63 - Being Productive With Jay Miller

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Episode 63 - Being Productive With Jay Miller
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Episode 63 - Being Productive With Jay Miller

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Hello everyone and welcome to THE .NET Core podcast - the only podcast which is devoted to:

and not forgetting The .NET Core community, itself.

I am your host, Jamie “GaProgMan” Taylor, and this is Episode 63: Being Productive With Jay Miller. In this episode I spoke with Jay about what productivity can mean to different people, with different backgrounds, in different technologies.

So let’s sit back, open up a terminal, type in dotnet new podcast and let the show begin.

The following is a machine transcription, as such there may be subtle errors. If you would like to help to fix this transcription, please see this GitHub repository

Jamie

So, thank you ever so much for taking some time out of your morning, my afternoon to talk with me. I’ve already said that, and we’ve already dropped off at that. That’s what I would say, because for those who don’t know, Jay helps out a lot with the transcriptions. There’s a piece of software that he wrote that we use for transcription. So there you go. Yeah, thank you for taking some time out. It’s super early in the morning for you. And I really appreciate that. Because it’s not very easy to get up and go. I know, I’ve got to talk to that Jamie, this morning. And it’s crazy. And I don’t want to talk to him, because everybody feels IRA.

Jay

Never man, I you know, it’s as much as we talk. I feel like it mean not talking to you on a regular basis, at least not, if not through voice through text. It would just feel weird. I think we’ve talked, we talked every day for like, a year. So that means just a normal day, except for it’s normally my day off. So yeah. You’re welcome, Jamie. You’re welcome.

Jamie

Oh, thank you very much. I didn’t realize the Friday was your day off. In which case, I’d have said why don’t we do it later on. But that’s fine.

Jay

It’s a holiday, which means it’s a workday for the other side of what I do, which I think is probably what we’re going to talk a lot about.

Jamie

Sure. Sure. Yeah, it’s the so for the people who are listening with a lot of time machine, or did I call it before time cast pod machine wibbly wobbly and is going on? We’re recording at the beginning of the Independence Day weekend. So Happy Independence day ever. Which I don’t know, I feel like I should feel weird about that. person talking to an American on the eve of Independence Day, but I don’t it’s like whatever, dude.

Jay

No, that’s See that’s a requirement in America is you have to call a British person, you know, and go, we’re number one. I’m kidding. To all of my all of my friends in the UK, we’re, we’re definitely not number one.

Jamie

So I was just gonna say we’re independent Maha. And then you can slam the phone down. But yeah, it’s up to you ready? Whether you want to do that, but there you go. Excellent. Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about the fact that you’re joining me this morning, but we haven’t really talked about kind of who you are. I don’t want to sound horrible or anything. But could you maybe introduce yourself to the listeners? Because this one’s going to be a bit of a different conversation to what we usually have, I

Jay

think. Absolutely. So yeah, my name is Jay Miller. I am a Python developer, which is going to be interesting, because the only thing I know about dotnet and dotnet core and all of that stuff is what I’ve learned through transcribing these podcast episodes. So yeah, I use Python a lot to do marketing for developer creators. And that’s not to mean people who built an app that is people in the tech space, specifically developers who are creating content for developers. So folks like Jamie and a few of the other podcasters, and YouTubers out there in the development space. Oh, yeah, I should probably also say I’m a podcaster. And, yeah, I’m the host of the productivity and tech podcast, this whole idea kind of spawned around that of like, helping to make folks in tech more productive. And then I got like, a reality shock from that. And we kept the name, but kind of change the perspective of what it means to be a productive person in tech, which I’m sure Jamie will not want us to talk a lot of help, because I berate him with that every single week.

Jamie

Just because I’m not a very productive person in the technology space. That’s all.

Jay

That’s okay.

Jamie

That’s all good. Now, I think I think that having the discussion about productivity is a very important one to have, regardless of whether you’re in the tech space, or if you are in the tech space, regardless of what technology you use, or technologies used to build things, right, because it’s not like productivity just kind of appeared when software development appeared, right? productivity has been a thing for millennia. So the things that we As a society as a group of people learn 4000 years ago, 2000 years ago, 200 years ago, a largely still going to be relevant. Right? It doesn’t you don’t have to be a developer, you don’t have to be a designer, a technologist or anything like that, to be able to really want to get into productivity and learn the productivity things, right?

Jay

Oh, yeah, definitely. And I think it actually helps to not focus so hard on being productive, to be productive. I think that those who tend to want to constantly adjust what they’re doing, in the sake of squeaking out an extra percent of efficiency, often wind up slowing themselves down in some other way. I’ve learned that comfort happens to be one of the biggest factors in the effectiveness of a developer.

Jamie

Show. Absolutely. I remember we, we had a chat only yesterday, at the time of recording about, I was feeling a bit down because I had a to do list and managed to finish one thing, but got, you know, two thirds of the way through another thing. But that other thing was taking 55 minutes of audio and producing text from it, which it’s not easy at the best of times. But yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. Some people spend way too much time trying to eke out that extra 1%. Whereas it’s like, it is the old phrase, work smarter, not harder, right? My feeling is that in a instance, that person is maybe, or maybe I am working way too hard chasing after that tiny, incremental addition. Whereas if I just work a little smarter and go, you know what, that 1% In this instance, that 1% of that task doesn’t really matter. Or it does, but getting it done right now doesn’t really matter.

Jay

I think a good, a good way to look at it is, say you’re writing code that at the end of the day, prints out a brick. And you have to write and now maintain another thousand lines of code to shave off one millisecond on that brick printing, is it worth it? They think think about that, like is it worth it is it is maintaining another thousand lines of code to shave off one millisecond. worth it. And I think that that’s, that’s the frustration that a lot of people in general face when it comes to how can I be more productive. I’m an analog productivity person, in terms of like managing my tasks, or whatever. So for me, everything starts in a notebook ends in a notebook. And when I’m, you know, people are like, Oh, you know, there’s this app, there’s this tool, there’s this thing, there’s that thing, trust me, I have an account for all of the things I like. I mean, I’m a productivity person by profession, like I even do productivity coaching for for developers, you know, on the side when people ask of it. So it’s one of those things like I know of all of the different tips and tricks and hacks and things like that. But feeling comfortable in my system, trusting my system, understanding that my system is going to work, in my opinion is more valuable than being able to say that I’m on I’m using this app, and it’s given me the the Wabi Sabi that I need to feel comfortable or to feel most productive in my day to day when what I’m really doing is I’m fighting against myself, to retain information to be able to retrieve information and to be able to ultimately the goal of productivity to accomplish more.

Jamie

Sure. I mean, I recently have become a convert to analog productivity tips. I do have a, a tablet that a lot of people I know in meatspace I guess people I know in real life can get upset with me because I’m like, hey, this tablet is amazing. And I’m always telling them because I use it literally every day I used to write out my to do lists on that problem was that it’s bigger than the size of a4 paper. And that means that my to do list is massive. And you know, I have gridlines on there, set them to the smallest gridlines possible. So I end up with a to do list for each day. There’s like 200 tasks. condom and that’s no good. So what I do these days, I was still like uj. But I’m going to tell the listeners anyway, get an a4 piece of paper. And I fold it enough and I’m going to show it to the camera and other people who are listening can’t hear it, I have a to do list there is maybe 10 items per day on it. Things just take a piece of a4 paper, fold it and use one of the folded sides to write 10 to 15 things. And we talked about that when we had a call yesterday. But yeah, I find that is a lot better. Like focusing on the 10 to 15 things that really, that I guess would give me the Wabi Sabi. I feel like you may have to explain that, so that I fully understand what I’m agreeing to.

Jamie

So something that can be explained.

Jay

So Wabi Sabi, according according to the great, no, Wikipedia, will give you a definition here. Wabi Sabi is like, the thing that makes something beautiful or like, wonderful, and it’s actually the imperfections in it. So it that that’s the thing is everyone has a reason why one app is better than another or why one system is better than another. To me, I think that where retention is held is often in the friction of things. When everything runs smoothly, we don’t want to understand why we just accept that it is. So at the end of the day, when you have 25 tasks sitting in your task manager, and they’re all in there, and you’ve added them and you’ve added them in like the blink of an eye. And now they exist. It’s it’s just there. And it allows you to, you know, just flood that thing with tasks, whether they’re important or not, whether you really want to do them or not, whether they really need to be done or not. But now you have them, and there’s a level of anxiety. Whereas, you know, when I when I think of the term of like Wabi Sabi, when you think of like the beautiful imperfection of it, a piece of paper is limited, it’s limited in space. So you’re only able to write down what will fit. Which means, as you’re filling up your day, you can see there’s a lot going on. And then even after that, once you start getting closer to the bottom, as more and more things are coming up, you can tell yourself, I’m not going to be able to talk to, you know, tackle all of this, and it forces you to start thinking maybe I should offload some of this stuff. Or maybe I should delay this or maybe I should just tell that person, I don’t have the bandwidth for it right now. And that’s kind of what I mean by like, the the Wabi Sabi pneus of it all. And, and we can even, you know, turn that into an idea of like, creating content for developers, one of the things that I often, you know, remind content creators is that they are looked at as the subject matter expert, but that doesn’t mean that they have to know it all or understand at all, they can take what they do know, and position it from a, from a spot of learning, and say, This is what I’ve learned. And I’m open to learning more. And it creates a level of empathy with your, with your listeners, you know, when I am doing a podcast, even like a podcast like this, I don’t want to assume that everything that I say is going to work for every single listener out there, it’s just not. I also don’t want to assume that what I’m saying is going to be gospel for all eternity. What I say is based on the experiences that I’ve had, and a lot of my conversations will recall from those experiences, but based on the experiences that I’ve had, these are the conclusions that I’ve drawn. And if there is a better way to do that, I invite the conversation to happen.

Jamie

And you see, I keep saying it, but that really does make a lot of senses say, I think I talked to Richard Campbell, Episode 18, I think of the podcast, and he said that he tries to approach life with ontological humor. humility, which is this ability to drain, take a step outside of yourself and go, I’m looking at this situation. But I may not understand all of the facts. And I may not understand all of what’s going on, and my perception of it is immediately floored, because I’m only seeing literally what’s in front of me, I haven’t seen what happened before, I don’t understand the feelings of everyone involved. And I feel like that kind of fits with what you were saying there on the lines of, you know, you said yourself my understanding of this task, my, my background in using this system, using this tool, using this, whatever this, anything has shown me that in the past, it has worked, or it has not worked, and here are the reasons why. But if if there is a different way to do it, then yeah, come and talk to me about it, because maybe I’ve misunderstood it, or perhaps, maybe the other person has misunderstood it. And they think that Oh, yeah, all you have to do is this, this, this and then you find out to them, Well, actually, this this and this doesn’t actually work in that in the instance that I’m coming from. So it kind of, I feel like it kind of helps both ways. If you can have that conversation, that composition of, I know that my experience is limited. So let’s talk about that. And I know maybe your experience will be limited, but perhaps in a different arena, or from a different angle or from a different direction. So let’s have a conversation about that.

Jay

One of the things that I learned when, when I started, I was in the US Marine Corps. And during that time, I learned that there was a lot of a lot of direction was given, and the reasoning why I was often left out. And I always kind of wondered why and and there’s often so much stuff going on, outside of what is visible to us, that leads to decisions that we have to make whether we like them or not. And it wasn’t until I was in a position of leadership that I saw that. And often, the explanation was left out because the explanation will take too long. And in all honesty, you know, when you you’re excuse me when you’re setting up, you know, a good example of this. And this isn’t classified or anything. I was I was doing a training exercise in Thailand. And we’re doing a joint joint training with the the Thai Marines and there was a typhoon coming. And we had basically 36 hours to set up an emergency comms network. And the process of doing that. Normally, when you go out on a mission, everything is pre prepared, you have all your keys and everything else. But you know, we went from, here’s all the training stuff that we’re going to be using with one another to flip the script. And now we have to support, you know, people in a whole nother country, setting up connections with them. And we’re on a time crunch to do that, like literally the training that we’re doing has now become the real thing. The only problem is we don’t have any of that information on hand. So then through a series of communications, a series of giving orders that may not make sense, like hey, go fill up sandbags, and you’re like, Well, we’ve got to get a network set up. And it’s like, Yeah, but there’s also a typhoon coming. So it’s like, we don’t really have time to go into the details of why you have to be the one getting sandbags filled. Because at the end of the day, if anything goes down, we’re not able to support our mission. And I feel like that’s the mentality that I want to avoid. In the developer space. I have always had the perspective of unless I am writing code that will literally save lives, or, you know, put out burning buildings, nothing that I’m doing. Is that critical that I can’t provide a little bit of thought and a little bit of explanation for and when it does, then by all means we’ll, we’ll change direction and we’ll we’ll start you know giving out orders and without any explanation. But ultimately, a lot of leadership wants to react as if there’s a typhoon coming when, quite frankly, there’s just not there’s just no typhoon

Jamie

Sure, I have always found that having a little bit of context behind whatever it is that I’m doing, if it’s some kind of tech work, if it’s some kind of, I don’t know something around the house, I’m playing in like a professional environment, maybe fill in a document or take a test or something or whatever it is, whatever task I’ve been given to do, if I have a little bit of context as to how it will help everyone achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve. That helps me to approach the task in it, I feel like I approach the task in a slightly different way, like, an example might be, I need you to create a component for a web view, that allows you to simulate items traveling left or right, an item traveling top to bottom. So imagine it’s just drawing a grid on screen, right? You may think Well, okay, fair enough, I’ll go make that. But then when I tell you actually, what it’s doing is it’s representing the warping and a wefting. of a of a weave, that is building some kind of fabric, or taking some, some raw materials and making like a rug or something, right, and gives you a lot more context as to why it’s useful to that person. And then that helps you to maybe make design decisions that maybe will help that person out when they’re using it or help another person out when they’re integrating it into a system or reading data from it or showing it on screen, right? Because let’s say that you’re doing this warping or wefting. And you have to help design some kind of pattern. And you’re, you’re, you’re helping someone who has color blindness, and you don’t know that it’s for warping or wefting, you just know it’s draw a line that goes left to right and draw a line that goes top to bottom, where you may do that with a black background and a white line or a white background and a black line. But that might not be useful to the person who’s using it. So I always feel that Yeah, getting some extra context in a task is always really useful. And I think that’s one of the things that we we have in our so to give it giveaway, a bit of a inside of baseball, I believe is that, you know, we’ve planned a whole bunch of topics out and one of those topics is Yeah, being able to talk about the problem beyond whatever equipment that you’re using. We use the phrase tech stack in our notes when we were planning this, but let’s say you are an engineer and you’re building a bridge, somebody says to you, why is it gonna take three days? Well, okay, here is why I need these tools, these frameworks these, this help. I don’t know about building bridges. I don’t know that you could tell. But yeah, being able to talk outside of your own expertise, right? If you take your car into the mechanic, and they start throwing lots of jargon around, you’re just gonna like you’re gonna nod and go, Yep, absolutely. That’s a lot of jargon, I can totally understand why it’s gonna take that much that much money to fix my car. Whereas if the mechanic says to like, Okay, so here’s the deal, okay, your engines broke. And I have to buy a new one and buy a new filter to make sure the gasoline going into it is kind of nice and clean. Because otherwise, it all gets clogged up my brakes, right? Who do you understand more a person who stands there and talks, jargon it for 20 minutes when the person says that this is a problem, listen what we got to do.

Jay

Yeah, and even with that we interesting enough, we call these disability kind of like part of the soft skill set. And it’s so frustrating I, we should not call it soft. I mean, I think we literally wrote in the notes like it’s harder than programming. Programming has a defined set, like you said, it has a defined terminology, it has a consistency to it that makes it relatively easy to accomplish once you’ve learned. However, communication is very fluid. It’s, I mean, the the type of conversation, the type of empathy and compassion that you need to show someone can vary based on the effects, the things that have happened to that person, whether it be that morning, whether it be you know, through hundreds of years of systemic racism or exclusivity, there is a lot that goes to how we convey information, how we communicate to one another. And a lot of that is coming to light now with the conversation of removing phrases like you know, master and slave or blacklist and whitelist There’s there’s a lot that goes into that discussion of why it’s important. And what I’ve often seen is to the people that don’t feel like it’s that important. It’s it’s almost, it’s almost as if they’re it, they see it as a waste of time. Where what really happens is it creates a position of comfort for another for someone else. And like I said, what what we’ve talked about now is being comfortable in the thing that you’re doing that is like the key to, in my opinion, the key to product productive development is a level of comfort. So if for some person, it doesn’t matter, and for the other person, it makes them an inkling more comfortable. Would that not be a better solution than to once again, write 1000 lines of code to shave off one millisecond? in production?

Jay

Yeah.

Jamie

You kind of caught me out there J.

Now, I Yeah, I agree. At the end of the day, it’s all about shipping, or building or reaching that goal, like you said, being productive. And so if you, if someone is, yeah, if someone is uncomfortable, they’re not going to be as perfect. So let’s change the whole, if it’s changed the whole system, if it’s changed this one thing that one person doesn’t care about, but everybody else does. And let’s change it, you know, let’s have that conversation. Because it’s all about meeting the other people out there. I don’t want to say level, I don’t want to put people on different levels, but meeting people where they are coming to them, or them coming to you and saying, Okay, this is no good. I hate to bring it up, let’s use them the master slave thing, right? We talk about in source control, we have a master branch, which is the sort of main branch where everything lives. But obviously, Master is a word that implies slave, which implies a whole bunch of really horrible things, right? So let’s just rename that, let’s call it main, let’s call it unicorn, let’s call it anything, right doesn’t have to be called Master, it can be called literally anything. And like you say, for the people who think that doesn’t matter, let them think it doesn’t matter. They will literally never see that name. But for the people who do think it matters, they’ll see that every day, right? And it will just be another little like, I don’t want to say microaggression. Because I don’t think that’s the correct word. But it’s another little thing that makes you even more upset, or whether it can make you less likely to get the work done to distract you from whatever task you’re trying to do. Let’s have that conversation, let’s change it if it needs to, you know, I am sitting here as you know, a white person, a Caucasian person going I I have no experience of these things. But let’s have this conversation. Let’s talk about it. Because if it means that, yeah, I don’t want to bring up the history and the the horrendous ness of humanity. But yeah, if if something is causing you harm, if it’s causing you to not want to, excuse me, causing you to not want to do the work causing you to be unable to do the work. Let’s figure out a new way, right? If if you’ve got someone coming into your office who is in some way, physically disabled, and you have four flights of stairs for them to climb up before they can get into your office, let’s change that. You know. And just and I’m using that as an example right there disability you can see words, phrases, one of the people that I talked to in an earlier episode of the podcast, john skeet, he’s a very big proponent for inclusivity and equality for everyone and all that kind of stuff, right? Or rather, he’s a very big proponent for inclusivity diversity and lovely things like that, because they are lovely things like that. And I said to him, you know, how do you feel about the use of the word guys because I feel it, I’ve stopped using it because I know that that’s can cause issues to certain groups of people or to people with a certain background or people who identify in certain ways. So I have stopped using it. I try to use the word folks, but then maybe that’s not the right word. And he said to me, what’s really interesting is, you see it more, at least from his perspective in America, and you see it more being used by people who are feminine in presenting in America, which is just that wonderful, weird words or words, right, someone like me who it doesn’t, it doesn’t hurt to hear that word is a word. But practicing that ontological humility, taking that step back and saying, well, is this situation even slightly wobbly? What could be going on here, I can see that maybe without trying without wanting to some of the words and actions and things that I do and say, could potentially hurt someone. So let’s take a moment to fix that, right.

Jay

As a cisgendered, black male, in America, like, I can’t speak to the position that, that and I use folks as well, or a good friend of mine, Kenneth love, gave a wonderful talk about teaching. and in it he he mentions embracing the y’all, especially when you’re, you know, a southern American, you can you can just say y’all, and it works. The, the thing that I have learned to do and then this is we’ve talked about this a little bit, Jamie and we can we can even use this to kind of talk a little bit more about like the podcasting pneus of things, is making the other person feel as comfortable as they want to be. And one of the things that I’ve done in my podcast, as as we get started is I verify a person’s name, how it’s pronounced, what they would like to be called, and then I also verify their pronouns. And I don’t come in with any expectation. I don’t say, All right, we’re talking with you know, is a Jamie Taylor and your pronouns are he him and his? And I say, okay, is pronounced Jamie Taylor. Yes. Okay. What pronouns Would you like me to use? And, and by doing that, it is, it is making it so that it is not a big deal? It is I, I am doing this, I’m coming in with zero expectation with zero. Implicit bias, it is just flat out, this is the process. This is what we do. And that, in my opinion, is the best way to approach many of these things, is, it is not a position of, well, this is my opinion, or that it’s like, Okay, this policy that we have adopted, is designed to make people of all types as comfortable as possible. And when we find that there is an issue, then we revise the process.

Jamie

That’s a race, like the the continual review of how, how you’re able to, I don’t want to say onboard a person, but the way that you’re greeting and behaving around other people, right? Whether I’m greeting and behaving around other people, I don’t want to put anyone else, you know, anyone else on the spot, let’s put me on the spot, continually reviewing how I greet and approach and communicate with other people can be hard. But in the end, it works out really well for everyone. Because once you get into the habit of doing it, then, you know you’re for some people, it will maybe come off as annoying to ask these questions. But you know, what, if it helps one person feel more comfortable, I’m all for it. If it helps one person be more productive in whatever they’re doing. I am all for it. Right? Like I said, I don’t Hello. But whilst I can appreciate some of the the issues that a lot of people face, I maybe haven’t faced them. And I’m really, I’m always really conscious of saying things like that, because I’m very aware of that. Let’s call it what it is that privilege, that ability to not have to worry about I will this person is going to call me this and this person is going to call me that and this person is going to expect this of me and this person is going to respect that of me. Don’t have to worry about that, I guess. But then that puts me in a in a worrisome position where I’m thinking, am I expecting this from someone? Am I am I behaving in a way that would make them upset because I’m expecting them to behave this way or I am enforcing this ability in our ability this? This this language? These these behaviors, these expectations on people?

Jay

I think we just solved the systemic racism and inclusivity problems in tech, didn’t we? No, no, not at all. Man. Yeah, it of course it’s always going to be an uphill battle until one day it no longer is but I think that at the end of the day, at least giving the effort and truly giving the effort but I think that’s the thing is like don’t don’t just say, Oh, well, I’m trying. It’s like, No, no, no. What are you doing to try? Let’s, let’s let’s really examine that because I think that until it is really examined, you can’t say that you’re trying. It’s like, Oh, yeah, no, I’m not racist. It’s like, Okay, well, yeah, not being racist sometimes isn’t enough. But again, I don’t I don’t think that, uh, we can, we can discuss winforms and config files and all of those other wonderful dotnet isms, and also solve the tech inclusivity problem in one podcast episode.

Jamie

Yeah, it’s the way the way that I always say it is, it’s for people who are way smarter than I am, to figure out and that’s not me trying to sound big headed. That’s, that’s me saying, I am going to help out whatever way I can. And I will try and present any ideas that I have many. It’s, it’s because I know that I’m from that background of having that privilege. I can’t I feel like I, I feel like I can be involved in the conversation. And I can be involved in the supporting of the ideas and the the actioning of those ideas, but I can’t stand here and say, Oh, well, you know, this group of people who are represented by this thing need to behave like this or need to be talked to in this way. No, I can’t do that. I’m not unless I’m in that group. And even then, that’s my opinion, is one person within a group. That’s not the group as a collective group of people. That’s one person, right? So I can’t I feel like I can’t be involved in that. Let’s change this. Let’s change that. For the people want to tell me you’ve got to change this. Okay, let’s change this. But, but perhaps early? Sure. At least that’s how I feel about it. Right? This is, for me, it’s a it’s a very hairy and scary situation. Although it shouldn’t be right. It shouldn’t be a scary situation. But I feel like it can be from people from maybe my background or my experience. But so one of the things that we’ve we’ve wanted to talk about in our little in our planning note is we did want to take a talk about how to break into the scene with you. Let’s talk about that. Or would you like to skip over that one for now? No, it’s just because I can see your Gil Kersey? Is he on the on the nuts? Oh,

Jay

no, no, no, let’s let’s jump into it. So and funny enough when we talk about breaking into the scene. Spoiler alert, for those that don’t know of my backstory, I am, by trade a marketer. Like my I report to a marketing department in my my day job. And I often use code to either automate processes, or expand on the capabilities of what my team can do. So when we talk about breaking in to the tech scene, it is is truly coming from a position of I am trying to break in to the tech scene like I am a person on the outside trying to make my way into the professional development space. And what does that look like? I think that there are a lot of folks out there that are not coming from traditional computer science backgrounds, there are people that are not coming from positions of higher education or higher learning. And when and I hate I hate that phrase higher learning. I mean, someone can continue to learn whether they went to college or not. But that’s a whole nother, again, whole nother problem that we don’t have enough time to solve today. The The idea is how can someone that is at a disadvantage for whatever reason, find a way to get themselves injected into the space. And I’m saying that as a from a position of trust. In a traditional sense, I would not be in the tech space. Although when you look at the when you look at the code that I write when you look at the the packages that I maintain, when you look at the people that I work with and sometimes for it is quite clear that I am in the space. I am a developer in the space. And how do you get there? Well, I like to think of it as kind of an ocean 11 type thing. A lot of people will say, Oh, you’ve got to market yourself, oh, a lot of people will say, Oh, you need to make sure your resume talks about this and these things. The thing that has been the most important factor in my limited success has been the people that I put around myself, and how we all work together to achieve a number of goals, not just my own personal goals, but also goals that help everyone. And I’ve learned that by having your own specific skill set, as Liam Neeson would say, you know, a certain set of skills and applying them in a way that you’re able to help those around you. It is often reciprocated back to you. And a good a good case of that is, again, the idea of doing transcriptions and editing podcasts. I mean, I’ve been podcasting for, ah, six, seven years now, five, six, I don’t know, some some some number of years. And I grew up with an audio background. I have family members who are in the music business, who are producers who, you know, I grew up on, you know, mixers, and turntables and things like that. So like, audio is a thing that I am comfortable with. So using my ability to work with audio allows me to help others in this space who aren’t comfortable working with audio all the time. And in return, they’re often in a position to where if they know that I’m looking for work, or if I’m looking for clients or something without even asking, they may say, Oh, hey, I know of someone else that you might be able to help. And again, it’s not the idea of I’m doing this to be benefited by the work that I’m doing. It’s I’m doing this because I want to be an effective member of the community. And this is the skill set that I can apply. Now, whether or not you’re putting a price tag on that that is entirely up to you. And that I mean, sure, I have no problem with people getting paid for the work that they do.

I also think that there has to be, we have to come at it from a position of we are all a part of this team, trying to accomplish whatever goal that it is, we all have our own reasons for accomplishing that goal. But we all have a goal that we are trying to accomplish. So let’s work together to do it.

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Jamie

Absolutely. So the way that I we have to, like you said it’s a community, right, whether that’s a community of Python developers and a separate community of dotnet developers and a separate community of C developers and a separate community of JavaScript developers, and a separate community if this than the other, or whether it’s, hey, we’re all solving similar problems. Because just like in storytelling, this like six stories, and you just jumble the details up, we’re likely all solving essentially the same problems every day. So why don’t we all sort of sit together and say, Hey, okay, so I mean, we brought it up at the beginning, right? I’m a dotnet, Dev, your Python Dev, but we can still speak the same language, we can still talk about the problems that we’re solving, and we could talk about how we’re solving them. And they’ve been times before where I’ve talked to you and said, Oh, well, how does this work in Python? And you said, I was like this. And oh, that is almost exactly how we do in dotnet. Here it is, right? Because spoiler alert, there’s only so many ways to solve the same problem. So getting getting that community there and not having I’m always a little bit upset when I see different technologists or different developers different tech people, being sort of like, ours is the one true way ours is the one true framework. And if you’re doing like this, then you’re wasting your time. And I’m like, not you what you’re doing there is you’re gatekeeping you’re telling people, they have to do it your way. Otherwise, they’re not a real developer. And hopefully you can hear those funny quotes. See it all the time in video gaming, right? There’s a conversation I had with my brother very recently about easy mode in video games. And you know, he told me that there are people have told him but you’re not a real gamer in bunny quads because To play on easy, and I’m like, What does that even mean? You know, you’re not a real developer unless you’re using vanilla JavaScript instead of using jQuery. What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything, what you’re telling that person is that in some way they are inferior to you, because they do it differently to you. Because we do it differently doesn’t mean that anyone’s inferior or superior. And just we’re having that inferior superiority. He’s no longer a community, it’s everyone has to like kowtow to this person, and then say, this person is better than everyone else. And that doesn’t help with bringing people together and and sharing that knowledge, I was gonna say upscaling, I don’t think that’s the right word, but sharing that knowledge, right? Because you have to remember that all of the things that we do, everything we do in tech, in this tech space all came from, let’s figure out if I put these two electrons together, what happens, right? It’s not, I’m gonna build the best thing ever. It’s like, Huh, I wonder what happens if we put this diode in the same circuit? Is this Can you tell it’s been a long time since I did electronics, but it is just that it’s Let’s mix all these things up jumble these things up and see what comes out the other end? How can we change it slightly to make it faster, slower? bigger, smaller, what can we do to it right? Everything we do comes out of experimentation. And just because some other person has read the documentation and gets the theory as to why it works, that doesn’t mean that they’re smarter or better than you or just because you’ve done it, or just because I’ve done it, it means that I’ve taken the time to go read the documentation doesn’t mean that I’m any better at something. Because it could be that I’m really good at applying the theory, but actually no good at doing it in real life. But the biggest thing, I think you hinted at it, there is get a bunch of people together, right? Get it get into a community, it’s so difficult to find one. Right? I’ve had conversations with people before about well, I want to get into development. But I know that there are at least three programming languages, which one do I pick? And that’s like the hardest thing, because once you pick this is like choosing your first car, right? You have a whole bunch of people say, Oh, well don’t buy this kind of car, because that kind of car is no good. Because I’ve had three of those in the past. And they’re all terrible. Go for this one. And you say, Well, why? And they go, because there’s no use, all right. But I do know someone who has gone from being completely outside of the tech space, and has

become really quite

prolific in the tech space. And that’s a gentleman by the name of Sean Wang. And he has, it’s just been it’s been a pleasure just watching his knowledge Grove last, I think four or five years, he went from being in banking to being this incredibly well versed, very, very knowledgeable gentleman who does a whole bunch of stuff. And is that and the way he did that was he was like he started quite literally, like you were saying, Let’s find a community to join and start asking questions. Hey, Jay, how does this work? Hey, Jamie, how does that work? And I mean, I can go back through a bunch of conversations in slack and Twitter, and all that kind of stuff and see those questions being asked and see all of the different people all sort of coming together to answer those questions. And that’s the important thing. It’s finding that community that’s inclusive, even if it’s just like three people are going Yeah, come on over. And, and just being able to answer those questions, or is it? I mean, I don’t know, I’m just, I’ve gotten done the university route. Right. So I don’t know whether that’s the right answer.

Jay

No, I think that it is, and I’m actually I’m a fan of Shawn as well. amazing work that he’s doing. But I think that the, you know, you talked about the idea of like, where do I get started? And to me like that is that is a question that you know, there is no wrong answer. Just start like, how do I get started? Just start, okay. Where wherever you want. Like, there’s there’s a lot of gatekeeping that’s done at the very beginning. That is, in my opinion, not so not necessary. We can have more developers trust me, there are plenty of jobs out there for developers. I see him every day. It’s fine. If that person doesn’t go and start as an intern at some company and is writing documentation out the gate. There is a conversation to be had about mentorship in the development space. I wouldn’t be where I am today, as As a developer, without the mentors that I’ve had in my lifetime, you know, the people that have taken time out to look at the code that I’ve written, and told me, you know, not this code is garbage. But here is where you may run into problems with this code. And the, again, it goes all back to those skills of compassion and empathy of like, the person who writes a blog post about something that they learned, doesn’t need your comment of, Oh, well, that’s so inefficient. In Python, you should really be doing it in go Lang, because go compiles and is faster and runs closer to the metal or, or you should do it in assembly, because assembly is the, the lowest of the, you know, it, all of all of that conversation is so unnecessary. To me. It’s almost as if programming is truly just storytelling. The the language that is used in storytelling can be different, but the stories can be the same. You know, we see this a lot in mythology, you know, if you look at like, Greek mythology versus Roman mythology, the many of the, the gods are the same, they just have different names. And, and some of those, those fantastic stories that are taught all throughout hit, you know, all throughout culture, and civilizations as a whole, are ultimately saying the same thing, but they’re using different language to convey the creation of a thing. And I think that that is what we are doing. as developers, we are storytellers, the code that we write, is the story that we are writing for our users. And when we look at it that way, it I mean, it makes perfect sense. Sometimes you have to do a little setup, you have to provide a little backstory, just to make sure that everything is going to connect properly. You have to tie things together using a little bit of structure. And I’ve you know, I’m not going to dive too deep into the the metaphor, because then we’ll all get lost in it. But I think that without the ability to let people operate in the comfort that they are in,

we miss out on the story.

I would much rather have code written in react, or go Lang or dotnet core, What are y’all on now? like five, six, something like that? or Python three, not Python two, Python two is dead. But I would rather have the story told in whatever language it is, and then later, maybe it can be translated. But I would rather have that story told in its language than not told at all.

Jamie

Absolutely. You can, you can learn the principles of programming in in any language, right? They all have four loops, they all have conditional expressions, they all have support for regular expressions, they all have all of the things that are required to make a programming language. Every single programming language has them. So if you start in JavaScript, really, you know what’s great about JavaScript, you don’t need to install anything, you open up your browser, you have to have you have a JavaScript environment, you start a Python, okay, so you may have to install Python runtime to be able to get it to work. And there may be some issues with that. They may not be completely seamless, I have no idea. If you want to start with dotnet, okay, you’re gonna download and install at all, and then you’re off to the races. You want to do C, it starts to get a bit difficult, right? Because if you’re on Windows, if you’re on Mac, if you’re on Linux, different tools, different tool sets, you produce a binary and one It ain’t gonna work on on another machine, right? Whereas JavaScript, Python dotnet. Yeah, okay, go all of these different languages, they are more or less cross compatible if you’re working on a Mac. And you have to then work on Windows or if you’re working on Windows, and then you have to work on Mac. You can just literally take your code with you and it just works, right. There might be some wobbliness around the edges, but it just works. And, and that’s what’s great about it doesn’t matter which one you’re in. And like you say, it’s so much better to see someone starting, because starting out is really scary to do. And then even and then you get past that point, right? So you got to learn JavaScript, and you start learning JavaScript and you figure out Oh, wow, okay, so I can split a program, it’s a functions, and I have to call the function to get the output. Okay, I’ve got that far, I would have wrote a blog post about it. That’s even scarier. Right? You go and write all this, but I’m starting my JavaScript journey. These are the things that I’ve done. And then, like you say, someone comes along and starts going, Oh, well, you know, you haven’t used arrow syntax. So your codes all useless at this level, that hasn’t helped that person to learn. All right. I remember watching a live stream of someone setting up a Linux virtual machine on their computer. And they’re they’re sitting there reading the documentation, and they were right, I can understand this, they pull down. an ISO file, which has a CD is essentially a CD, but as a file, they are the installation media, and they start going through the process, someone jumps into the comments to say, why are you installing this Linux distribution? or Why are you installing it this way, that way is really bad, you should be installing this one. And it’s like, dude, you’re not helping that person learn how to do the task that they are doing, right? saying that it’s like, it’s like you’re using, I don’t know, a screwdriver to drive a screw into a wall, right? You’re putting up some shelves, someone comes and goes, you know, that’s no good. You shouldn’t be using a shelf, you should be using something else as well, that doesn’t help me put the shelf up, does it? Well, that doesn’t help me learn to put the shelf up. And so that level of gatekeeping really, it like he says it’s not needed. And it really infuriates me when I see it as you’re not think about trying to help the person. And even if you’re not being that mentor person to saying, hey, that’s great. Did you also know about this? If not, give me a give me a Yelp. And we can talk about it. Right? One of my friend Zach Brody, he, I once saw him in our slack conversation, he was chatting with someone who was saying, I’m really stuck with this code, Can someone help me? And he sort of jumped in and when you know what, every five minutes, let’s start up a private conversation, and I will talk you through whatever it is that you’re stuck with. And that’s what he did. He didn’t say a lot of people were jumping in and say now that you shouldn’t be using this library, you should be using that framework should be using this language. And this person was like, Well, those are the things I’m learning, right? You’re not helping me to learn. If you’re not going to help me, then there’s no point me being here. And then yeah, Sacramento and rec, let’s go talk about this and figure this out. And that’s what it’s about is helping people, right, because I’ll guarantee that.

Even in my own experience, where I didn’t get to where I am today without someone helping me, if that’s a university lecturer, if that’s someone that I’ve talked to at a hackathon, someone who’s written documentation, someone who I’ve just turned to and said, I just don’t get it. And they said, Okay, take a step back. This is what this is how it works, right? You need other people to help you understand something, because at the very least, another person has created the thing. And they’ve tried to put it across to you in a way that you will understand. So you need other people to pay that back, pay that forward even right, find someone and say, Hey, do you want to learn how to code, let me show you how I learned may not be the best way. But let me show you this right, I will talk through this. totally get it. That’s what we should be doing. Right? share that knowledge, share the experience and share the excitement. Don’t Don’t upset someone don’t try and stop them from being excited about growing, or any kind of work that somebody is getting into design, somebody’s getting into manufacturing, or mechanics, or, or whatever it is, do whatever you can to help foster that excitement, that enthusiasm because that excitement, enthusiasm is going to pull them through. When things get difficult to figure out when things get difficult to do. You need that excitement and enthusiasm to get you to the other side. And if someone before you even start is saying, you shouldn’t be excited about this, you shouldn’t be discouraged about that. Or you never even get to get to the point where it gets difficult to do, you’re gonna get turned off from the beginning, right?

Jay

Absolutely. And I am I am just truly amazed at what people are able to do

Jamie

with

Jay

the knowledge that they do have. And I think that that that’s the thing is some of the best songs ever, in my opinion. were made with very little instruments. I mean, if you think about it, like if you look at the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which is three people bass guitar, and electric guitar, and a drum and then you look at like, the London fill like fill harmonic or something, you know, something like that, you know, you see inspiration taken from both. I tell people, the the first program that I truly made was one that just use regular expressions to rip URLs out of a chat log. And the excitement in the eyes of all of those other beginning developers, I mean, this was this was literally a user group for people who are just learning how to use Python.

And the the excitement that

someone who had literally a week of Python experience was able to create something that was useful immediately to the community, again, being able to give back based on the skill set that that you have. Was it inefficient? Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was inefficient. It was it was terrible, horrible code, horrible, horrible code. But uh, but at the same time, it was the code that I had, if I were to build that same thing, now. I, it would be completely different, it would be a completely different story. I mean, that that’s what happens as we get more experienced as we learn more things, but if you shut the door in someone’s face, because the story that they tell at the beginning at the infancy of their development career, then they never have time to to develop some of those those isms and those other things that will make their storytelling better. And and I think about that, from like, the idea of Look at, look at the stories that are told throughout history, and then look at what Disney has done to them. Like you have you have these amazing stories like Pinocchio and things like that. They were originally told one way over time, they developed into another story. And then you have someone that has a a level of storytelling that is rivaled only by like, the likes of like Miyazaki, that are that can take a story and make it feel like it’s its own original thing. And I mean, there’s a little bit of controversy in that of like, oh, why is Disney ripping off, you know, cultures and stuff. But, you know, we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about the skill set, had the story never been told, we wouldn’t have the likes of Pinocchio, we wouldn’t have the likes of The Lion King, although they say that’s an original story, I beg to differ. We wouldn’t have a lot of those stories that have been told, if the if the origins were never around. I’ve built things and then later on gone to make them better. I build things and then like later on gone to destroy them and build a stronger foundation for the thing that I built originally. That is one of my active projects now. Like I literally destroyed a web application that does transcriptions so that I could focus on building the framework for working with those transcriptions. It allows us once we have the knowledge, to then expand on that knowledge. And that’s when amazing stories are told.

Jamie

Absolutely. And the important thing to remember is, this is a scary thing to remember, because you’re gonna say, Well, I’m gonna learn everyday. But yeah, working in the tech space, whether you’re a developer, a designer, project manager, whatever it is, whatever it is that you do, as a technology worker, I guess working in this tech space, you are constantly learning. And if that means that someone’s got to constantly teach someone, then someone’s got to constantly teach someone, right. When you the reason that I go to conferences and talks and meetups. That’s one great thing to say, right? If you want to get into this business, unfortunately, we can’t right now, because there is a situation that is happening. That means that a lot of people can’t move about so freely, and can’t meet up in in huge groups. But when that whole situation has ended, go find a meetup group that is for new developers, there’s one. There’s one that I attend every so often in the big city near where I live, and it’s just literally, hey, if you want to learn a language or framework, and you want to get started with it, someone here will be able to do that. Or if you’re building something and you’re new to it, come over and we’ll try and help you the best we can. Wonderful, all these people just exchanging ideas and thoughts and teaching each other and mentoring each other and you get like, I walked in as you know, senior dotnet person, and I was like, I have no idea about WordPress, can someone teach me some PHP, please? This person who’s had a year of PHP experience, which is infinitely more than I’ve had. So in my eyes, they’re the senior, they but they’ve been involved in development for just over a year, they came and sat with me and went, Okay, here is how it works. This is the tool you need. This is, this is how the framework works. This is the language this is how it all fits together. You know, and anyone who has slightly more knowledge than another person can teach the other person or someone who has more knowledge than someone else can be taught by the person who has less knowledge, because we all have those gaps in our knowledge, right. And that’s what it’s all about to share those ideas. Share it all. I can’t remember the original point I was going to find I just love to talk about stuff like I share the ideas.

Jay

Well, speaking of sharing the ideas, I mean, one of the things that we both do, is we share our ideas through podcasting. And I know that like that is, you know, in our notes, we say like the person with the mic is the expert, like they are in whatever it is they’re talking about. Now, of course, that comes with a caveat of what is the message that they’re spreading. So that said, if you’re using your mic to spread hate, you’re the expert and hate. So yeah, there’s that. But what we do in the art of podcasting is we share the experiences of others, at least in the type of podcasts that you and I do Jamia as interviewers, we are really there to highlight the expertise of those within our community. And I would encourage anybody, like if you if you feel like you have learned a thing, and you don’t have an outlet to share that with your community, try to get on a podcast. And if you can’t find a podcast about the thing that you’re doing start your own. I mean, it’s I tell people that it is possible podcasts are easy to create and hard to be proficient at I guess, as someone who has had many podcasts that have come and gone and has done a few of them with Jamie that have never seen the light of day and many more, that will probably happen eventually one day, Jamie hashtag talking to Jay hashtag to happen. Hashtag, we’re gonna make it.

Jamie

That’s it.

Jay

But it’s, it’s like giving talks without the CFP process. No one can tell you that you can’t talk about a thing when you own the format. You know, when when it’s your show, no one can not tell you that you can’t talk about it. And again, that that’s kind of a double edged sword, because your whatever you’re talking about, you are now considered the expert on so if you can talk about something that’s wrong, you’ll be expert at being wrong, I guess. But at the same time, having in that place to be vocal and be seen, whether you’re seen by one or seen by 1 million, you know, both of us have had podcasts of varying success. And what I’ve learned is it’s usually the ones that are not as successful as, as the primary focus that I have the most fun with having conversations that I would not have otherwise, and putting myself in a position of I am now learning from the person that I have given control, not control over my podcasts, but like given the given the venue given the opportunity to learn from as a podcaster.

Jamie

Absolutely. I always so I always talk to people and say, talk to me about the thing that you’ve built, or the way that you’ve built something or some tool that you’ve used or some process that you’ve used. Because whilst like I am not an expert, I will never be an expert in Python, right. But I can I can say hey, I’ve built a string using Python. And here is how I did it. Right. I use f strings, right, which is a thing for I’m sure Jacob daga talk your ear off about it, but I’ve used an F string to build a string, which is fabulous. And this is how I did it. You know what, I’ve shared that knowledge now, I haven’t just now but I can then share that knowledge. And someone who has never used Asterix before will go, oh, cool, there’s this thing I can go look it up and find out what it is because 99% of the Battle of learning something is knowing that there’s something to learn. Because if you don’t have,

I think it was,

it was Donald Rumsfeld who said, there are known unknowns. Now there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, which is going to be playing, that’s going to play hell with the transcript Oh, but, but that’s the case of there are things that you know that you know, things that you know, that you don’t know, or things that you don’t know that you don’t know, it wasn’t his idea. But he got to that point really quickly, a lot quicker than I did. And the majority of knowledge about something, when you’re first learning it, you have no idea what it can and can’t do, what it is and what it isn’t. But knowing that there is this thing, you can then go up, I will turn to Google or turn to Bing or DuckDuckGo, or whatever, and I will go, or I’ll go and read a book or go get the book and read the book. If you really want to go that way. Knowing that there is something to look for, really helps. So I always say to people, you may I’ve had people come to me and say I’ve reached out to them. And they’ve said, I don’t feel like I’m an expert in in what you’re asking me to talk about. And I say it’s not about being an expert is tell me if you feel comfortable with it. Tell me what it is that you’ve done with this thing. And we’ll have a conversation about that. If I ask you a question you can answer? Fine, we’ll get rid of that question. Right, because that’s what is sharing your knowledge with everyone else. And then you can then use that to bootstrap your own knowledge, right? If I want to sit here and talk about Python and how you know how it’s compiled, but not in the same senses, C is compiled down to a binary that is like, that is for your operating system or for your architecture, your CPU architecture, and he’s compiled into almost like an intermediate language, I believe, I’ve probably got that completely wrong. There’ll be someone who comes to me and says, Jimmy, you got that wrong. And I’ll say, you know what, it’s good. I like it. I like the you’ve pointed out there, I’m gonna rank because that shows that there’s a gap in my knowledge, and I’m gonna go learn it. Right. So if I started a show on Python,

maybe hashtag Laszlo on paper.

But if I start a show on Python, and I started sharing, hey, this is what I’ve learned this week, then that serves two purposes. One, it’s helping to reinforce my own knowledge. And two, it’s helping someone else who wants to then start to learn Python. To know which direction I went down. When learning Python, it might not be the same direction they go. But hey, there’s this extra supplemental information. Why not write start your own podcast? It’s free? Well, it’s not free, there is a cost. But yeah, I’ve said it in a talk I gave not very long ago, if you have a laptop that’s got a microphone built in, it won’t sound brilliant. But hey, you’ve got 99% of everything you need, in order to create a podcast, go do it.

Jay

Yeah, and your love to get better like that. I mean, it’s not like it has to be perfect out the gate. And in fact, perfection is the was it perfection is the enemy of completion or something like that. Like, if you’re constantly just trying to make it perfect, it’ll never go out that it took me You know, my first podcast, you know, funny, a funny story. And I know we’re running kind of long here. But my first podcast that that I did the first podcast interview that I did, I literally ran out to non, I didn’t literally run, I literally got in my car and drove to the electronic store to grab $100 microphone. And on the way back, I noticed that a part was missing and had to drive back to the store, get it returned, get a new one, and then drive back and set up for a podcast that had, you know, no sound proofing and all that stuff. And I recorded in an office space and listening to it. Now, it’s kind of jarring. Whereas several years in, I’m no longer talking through that one microphone. I’m talking through, you know, much more expensive equipment. But I used that setup for the first like three or four years and slowly found ways to make it better over time. And now, I’ve, you know, again, I’ve used that knowledge in making purchasing decisions for continuing in podcasting. I’ve used that knowledge in ideas for how I can spin a show and What I can do with the show and the way that I promote it and advertise and do all those things, but I started out, just I mean, even finding people to interview shows literally me going on Twitter, where I’d had like a couple hundred people that followed me and said, Hey, I want to do a podcast about this. Is anybody interested in coming on and talking about it? And I got a few people that said, Yeah, let’s do it. And then those people wound up to later on be way more successful than I am. You know, it’s amazing that, you know, sometimes I’ve had one person say, hey, you gave me my start in the industry, by just offering me a place to talk. And that, to me, is the beauty of podcasting. Whether whether you’re talking to like I said, one or 1 million, you know, the, the thing that you do, can launch your career, it could launch the career of someone else. It could validate someone who feels invalidated. It could spark the idea of, of getting into the industry. I’ve had, I’ve had that conversation with someone before, where they listened to an interview that I did with someone else on their show, not even my own. And they said, you know, hearing your story of how you got into tech, made me decide that I was going to focus on getting into tech. And it’s like, wow, you know that that’s amazing, but denying the world of your voice prevents those things from ever happening. And, and maybe, you know, maybe someone else fills that space where that you’re leaving void, but maybe not.

Jamie

Absolutely, I mean, I have a similar story to the one you told about how you, you know, first interview, you said, You ran out, bought a microphone and eventually got it set up and use that for a while. I had to look it up while we were talking then Jay. The very first, the very first podcast interview I ever did, was for a show called The cynical developer, and it was episode eight, called dotnet. To the core, I remember it very, very well. And if you listen back to it, the host James sounds amazing. I sound dreadful, because what I did was I set up my Mac air,

plugged a pair of headphones into it and spoke

into the keyboard, because there’s a microphone under that because I have a microphone. And that’s literally how I did it went from that to buying a piece of hardware that that is a microphone and is not very good. And then moved up to the next one and moved up to the echo that continual slow improvement. And whether that’s in podcasting, and tech work in your day to day work in helping raise kids in doing the dishes in whatever it is that you do that you want to improve in remembering that is that that there’s a Japanese term called Kaizen, which is that continual improvement, but through tiny steps, don’t go from, I am not like another developer to I want to write the triple A title that will be released by the biggest companies and I will make millions of dollars, that chasm is way too big to jump across. But if you want to go from I have no development experience to I have written a JavaScript game that runs inside the browser that I can send someone a link to, and they can have loads of fun playing it. That chasm is not as big as jumping straight to I’ve released something on the PlayStation and it is a bestseller, and I’ve made millions of dollars. It’s still a big chasm, but it’s not as big. I think you break that down even further. Okay, so I’ve got to make something that runs in the browser. So I gotta walk ahead and get something running in the browser. so tiny, improve improvement steps, tiny, incremental improvement steps. That’s how we get to where we are.

It’s not

how do I put it? People always see the end result, right? big story in podcasting over the past few weeks has been Joe Rogan makes a million dollars or a billion dollars or some insane amount of money by moving his show over to Spotify. And that’s all people are focusing on is this one window in which a person has moved something and made loads of money. They don’t realize that there’s been years of work gone into it. And there’s a whole team with that person, right? They don’t see all that they see. The person at the end has done this one big thing and they’re brilliant at it. But they don’t see is the blood sweat and tears of figuring out how to get it working or figuring out who to hire to get it working. Right. A lot of the A lot of my favorite podcasts who are done by or you know, really famous people are big names. In the industry, always at the end of their shows always go. Okay, so the tech person for this episode was this person, thanks go out to the producer and the director. And they literally list every single person who was involved in making it. And it’s never that one person, it’s maybe a tape team of four, to 10 to 20 people. And then there’s even the people who are doing the socialist class, don’t worry about, I have to be the best at everything. Start small and work up. Don’t look at the final, like, don’t like, pick your favorite musical artist, don’t don’t look at the final, the most recent album or whatever, and go, Wow, I want to go from zero to that. Because you can’t, you’ve got to go, you got to rewind 30 years, and watch them at talent shows and see them being really bad at what they do. But then maybe they’ve recorded it and listened back to it and gone, right any change this and he’s changed that. And those tiny incremental changes have made them into the person they are today. It’s not I was born with some ability, or some talent or some skill, it’s this. I’ve slowly made it better. They may have been bought. They may have been built with a hat they may be built. They may have been born with some kind of skill or talent that’s in built, but then improved on it. No one wakes up one morning is just able to speak in other language. I mean, okay, so there are some neurological issues that can lead to that, but no one is just wakes up and goes, right. Today, I’m gonna learn Mandarin Chinese, and then they do it. Right. No one is going to wake up and go, I am going to be the best podcaster ever. And I was going to wake up and go, I am the best developer ever, and just do it. Because it doesn’t work like that. And so slowly building towards it, is where you want to be. That’s what I think anyway. But yeah, allowing yourself to get better is the important thing, allowing yourself to not be as good as maybe you think you want to be recognizing that and looking for ways to improve. I think that’s that’s the important thing.

Jay

Definitely, I mean, I, I couldn’t say it any better.

Jamie

I mean, I said it in about 5 million words and used about 12 examples there. I’m sure that a bunch of people could,

yeah, write in and let us know how many examples I just

Jay

used. Just Just start. That’s the thing. Just start. Yeah, you know, the I think it’s one of those things like a habit is a thing that you you do unconsciously. A routine is a thing that you do deliberately make it your routine of sharing the information that you have in whatever method I know, we talked about podcasting, but this is coming from the perspective of perspective of two podcasters. You know, if we wrote blogs and maintained blogs on a regular basis, we would say write that blog, or if we did YouTube videos, we would say, make that video or if we did, you know keynotes we would say do that keynote. I mean, I mean, okay, I’m getting out of control here. But the, the idea is, Whatever method you use to share knowledge, share it. I’ve talked with people who use Tick Tock to convey key points in the developer journey. And it resonates with with a certain group of people, I’m not one protect talk, but I enjoy those videos when they show up on Twitter. But it’s, it may not be for me, and that’s okay. Everything you make doesn’t have to be for everybody. Again, I my my traditional story is I didn’t start making money from podcasting and I you can’t hear the the bunny quotes in that one as well because the quote unquote money that I make from podcasting goes right back into my podcasting. But I didn’t start being paid to make a podcast until I stopped trying to make my podcasts for everybody and started making it for the people that it was for. And that’s, that’s fine. You know, if you want to make a podcast about my my example is always, you know, yodeling in normally I would say La, but since we’re an international podcast now, if you want to if you want to yodel in Leeds go yodel in Leeds and then do a podcast called doodling in Leeds, and if you want to, you know do something called tap dancing and, you know, Scotland, tapping Scottish, sure, whatever, whatever it is that you want to share, just share it. The format isn’t important. The topic isn’t necessarily important. As long as it’s important to you just go do that thing. Make it your routine, make it be cognizant of I am I am deliberately doing this thing, because I want to share it with whoever it is intended to be shared with.

Jamie

Absolutely. And that that’s, I think that’s one of the hardest things to do is to, to to

find, I don’t want to say it’s fine that it

is because that’s so difficult to do anyway. But yeah, to create the thing and continually create the thing and keep pushing it to the people that you think you want. Now, let me rephrase that. Don’t think about monetizing, right. I’ve had conversations with people in the past who are like app developers, and, and they’ve made products and stuff. And they’ve said, I didn’t create it, write this book. I didn’t make this thing. To make money. I made this thing because I wanted this thing. Right. And then at some point in the future, after it was made, I then went to someone who said, and said to them, is this a thing that you would pay money for? And they’ve said, Yeah, let me give you some money, right? Because I want that thing, right? If it’s a book, if it’s an app, if it’s some art, if it’s, I don’t know, computer mouse or something, you know, go make it because you want it. Because if you’re the core customer, you’re gonna see where the good points are, and the bad points. And then you’ll be able to iterate on it better and make it better. Whereas if you’re focusing on I need to make all the money in podcasting, or I need to make all the money in app development. Well, those two arenas where a lot of people create lots and lots of product, and hardly anyone gets paid for it. You know, I talked a lot about Joe Rogan, right? He, he has a whole team of people around him. I think we talked about it the other day, Jr. Like he’ll wake up, and he’ll go, I got to interview someone, and then that’s the end of my workday. Right. But then there’s a whole fleet of people around me who helped him out. And yeah, he might read the same ad read out 15 different times. And he’s always talking about mattresses or headphones, or microphones or whatever the new thing is, right? He’ll always be talking about that. But then that’s how he gets his money. Or maybe it’s not, maybe he just uses that to get his gigs for the things right, because that’s the other thing as well, right? You can use podcasting, blogging, app development, to book yourself gigs in other places. I think we kind of generally touched that earlier on about how if you have a network of people, you have a community of people, and you’re constantly putting out stuff to that community of people? Well, guess what? You said it yourself comes back around towards you. Somebody then goes, Oh, I this Python thing, right? I know somebody does that. I better go talk to Jay. Because this other person needs help with it, or this person has an opportunity. Or, you know, this person knows someone who wants to talk turkey on a podcast. Well, guess what? I know, JJ does podcasts, or Hey, I know Jamie, Jamie, those podcasts. Right? It’s all about that network of people.

Jay

Definitely.

Jamie

So with that being said, then Jay, what are some we’ve talked about a lot of things right? What are the what are some of the things that you would like people to take away from this conversation? What are some, maybe some places to go visit some things to think about? What are the key things, the key points that you want people to take away from this conversation? I think,

Jay

I think the key point is, stop trying to be productive. Just Just start doing a thing. You’ll get better at it over time. As the more and more that you you try to hack your way to success. And I again, air quotes, hack, the growth hacking movement, the knowledge hacking movement, like all of these, all of these things that people do to make themselves more whatever. I mean, you got it, you got to think about it. There are there are productivity professionals out there who literally get paid, they don’t get paid to be productive, they get paid to tell you how to be productive, and they get paid to tell you the exact same thing that they tell a baker or they tell a butcher or they tell a C level executive. So the lessons They teach you while being valuable, also have to be very general. And you know what you need to do, you know how to do the thing that you need to do. And there will always come a time when you can go. Maybe I can fix this, maybe I can make this better. But don’t, don’t do it. Don’t be constantly trying to improve it. You know, Jamie and I talked about this a lot. Productivity isn’t the idea of being better. It’s the idea of producing that I mean, that’s the root word of productive is to produce. So if you can’t produce anything, because you’re too busy trying to hack the act of producing it, then you’re not being productive at all. But I will say this, when you do a thing, share it. Learn from the others that are doing similar things. Be open to connecting with those people, create a community around the things that you enjoy doing. That’s how you’re going to break in. And at the end of the day, you have to share that knowledge. And that will help you to get better. That will help you learn things that you may have missed. And then of course, if you need help sharing it, you can always reach out to me because again, that’s what I do. I help I help people share stuff. That should be my should be my new tagline. I help people share stuff.

Jamie

Chief sharer person Yeah,

Jay

that’s what you should be. Chief chief wisdom in parter.

Jamie

Well, I like that. I like that.

Excellent. I once had someone call me a hex Wrangler. Because, yeah, it’s, I was doing some hex editing and they’re like, hey, you’ve wrangled that you’re a hex Wrangler.

Okay, fair enough.

But yeah, okay, so what? How about getting in contact with you, then? How do people go about getting in touch with you whether they want some help with productivity, or they want to help get some help sharing something or they just want to find out more about you? what’s the what’s the best place?

Jay

Well, if you if you want to hear from me on a regular basis, again, I do a podcast. It’s called productivity in tech podcast. We also or I should say, We, the Royal we here. We, as I said, Alright, I have a business where, again, I help developer creators, with their projects, whether it’s a YouTube, podcasting, or just general marketing. So if you need help with that, you can go to productivity in tech.com. Or you can email me info at productivity in tech.com. And if you just want to chat with me, Twitter’s probably the best place for that. You can reach me at KJ y Miller, but remember, it’s pronounced j, the K is silent.

Jamie

Excellent. Okay. Um, any other sort of websites or posts that you want to point people at?

Jay

Oh, man, uh, let’s see, there’s a few. There’s a there’s this whole thing that we did called J and J dot media. Like I said, before, Jamie and I are good friends. We’ve we talk on a very regular basis. And we’ve, we’ve done some shows together, we’ve done some shows apart. And you can actually find most of those shows at j&j dot media. And there’s a blog there. I think it only has a couple of posts on it. But one of those posts, I really enjoyed reading again, just recently, when I was, you know, preparing for this episode, and it’s called your voice, and it’s really good. And I’m sure there will be a link in the show notes for that. But, uh, yeah, I mean, it’s, it was one of those things that I think I wrote just being silly. And at the end of the day, it was, I mean, it really was something that reminded me of why I do that thing that I do.

Jamie

I think that sometimes the best way to put something across is to be a bit. So you know, I’ve brought him a few times. But my good friend Zack, he says that he likes to communicate almost entirely in memes, because it’s kind of silly. And then you get the point that he means right? It’s, it’s why we have comedy TV shows, right as well. We have all sorts of entertainment, it’s communicating in the same way gets the point across faster. And if you can remember, the silliness, then you remember the message.

Jay

I mean, that’s why they usually tell you in like any type of public speaking. You start out with a joke. You know, it lightens everyone up, it disarms them of their criticism.

Jamie

That’s exactly it. But unfortunately, we may have to make public speaking a topic for another time. Yep. I’m not so good at because I’m always saying, um, which is a Bane for the the podcast editor.

They Excellent.

Well, thank you so much for spending some time with me this morning. I think we’ve, we’ve spent a lot longer than we were originally planning to do on this conversation. But I always have loads of fun talking with you. And I hope that your family aren’t too upset about having monopolize your time so much this morning.

Jay

I mean, I think they just woke up, I heard I heard some stuff happening in the background. But you know, at the end of the day, again, this is this is what I do. This is who I am in my family.

As much as they may not appreciate.

I gotta go, I got a podcast I got to do, but you know it. I think that it’s a wonderful way. And they often hear stories of the conversations that I have. And again, I don’t know if they appreciate it or not, they’re going to hear him anyway. So

Jamie

as long as you’re not forcing them to listen to you talking on a podcast in the car instead of music that I’m sure that

Jay

I mean.

I think I’ve done that maybe once or twice. It’s like, Oh, hey, I need to I need to review this before I publish a

Jamie

family based QA I like Exactly.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, like I said, Thank you ever so much. And I’ll make sure to put all those links in the show notes. And you have a wonderful day, stay safe and continue to be awesome.

Jay

Thank you. Take care.

The above is a machine transcription, as such there may be subtle errors. If you would like to help to fix this transcription, please see this GitHub repository

Wrapping Up

That was my interview with Jay Miller about the ways that you can help to foster productivity and creativity with your colleagues. Be sure to check out the show notes for a bunch of links to some of the stuff that we covered, and full transcription of the interview. The show notes, as always, can be found at dotnetcore.show, and there will be a link directly to them in your podcatcher.

And don’t forget to spread the word, leave a rating or review on your podcatcher of choice - head over to dotnetcore.show/subscribe for ways to do that - and to come back next time for more .NET Core goodness.

I will see you again real soon. See you later folks.

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