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20 Years of Tech with Pete Johns
22 Plays1 year ago
For this episode of the Basement Programmer Podcast, I head back to Perth, Western Australia, to catch up with my long-time friend Pete Johns. We talk about his career in tech has changed and evolved over the past 20 years, the impact of social media, and moving countries. We also talk a little about the importance of connecting with your customers.
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Purpose
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello basement programmers and welcome. This is the Basement Programmer Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Moore. The opinions expressed in the Basement Programmer Podcast are those of myself and any guests that I may have, and are not necessarily those of our employers or organizations we may be associated with.
00:00:28
Speaker
Feedback on the Basement Programmer podcast, including suggestions on things you'd like to hear about, can be emailed to me at tom at basementprogrammer.com. And I'm always on the lookout for people who would like to come on the podcast and talk about anything technology related. So drop me a line. And now for this episode.
Meeting Pete Johns: A Blast from the Past
00:00:50
Speaker
Hello Basement Programmers and welcome. This is the July episode of the Basement Programmer Podcast coming to you from Perth, Western Australia. My guest this month is my long time friend Pete Johns. Welcome Pete. Hey Tom. Can't tell you how good it is to be in your company once more. How are you? Pleasure. As always. So you and I met in 1999 in Abingdon, England.
00:01:14
Speaker
We did, yes, two young men, a few haircuts ago now. Yeah, back then, year 2000 problems were a thing of the future. Yes. And yeah. And you get lesser and I've got more gray, so you know. Yeah, yeah, we were there when the Millennium Bug failed to bring the world to a halt. Yes, that's more about it.
00:01:43
Speaker
explosion. Yeah, that's because lots of software engineers work to make it not a problem. So an Irishman, a Scotsman, a Japanese person, an American walk into a pub sounds like the start to an offensive joke. But that was our crew for 10 years. I've got very fond memories of those days, as we've talked about today. Yeah, and that
00:02:07
Speaker
pub that we walked into after we all walked out there for the last time they knocked it down. Yes, it's now expensive housing in the middle of Abingdon. Here
Tech Talk: Influences and Directions
00:02:17
Speaker
we are on the other side of the planet. Yes, I do think we actually paid the mortgage on that place. I'm convinced of that. We definitely gave them a fair few pounds over the years. So when I started thinking about the podcast
00:02:31
Speaker
Obviously, I started thinking about tech because that's normally what I talk about, but I had a few other thoughts. We all met up in 1999 and all of us, except for Chige, were recently out of bad relationships. We spent a lot of time hanging out in the pub and being supportive of each other, which, especially 20 years ago, isn't something that guys tended to do a lot.
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Friendships & Fatherhood
00:02:59
Speaker
I'm not sure that we always dealt with our issues in the healthiest of ways. Um, but we did have a lot of fun together and you know, I'm grateful that we got to spend that time of our lives together and form the friendships that we did. Hmm. Yes. And they've been, they've been going well, yeah, as, as strong as they can considering distances and things. Um, we both moved countries several times and, uh, yeah.
00:03:30
Speaker
Now, I know looking back on it, you know, my life especially was a bit of a mess at the time, but being able to have that connection with you and Roy and Chige and having it followed on from that really was kind of helping me to get to the point of living again.
00:03:51
Speaker
The interesting thing is that I'm only now starting to hear a social thing about guys having that sort of relationship beyond just the fist bump and, hey, how's it going? And sports and beer and telling bad jokes. Yeah, we can still tell bad jokes, right? Yeah, guilty. Yeah.
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think if anyone had told either of us in 1999 where we've been now, I don't think we would have believed them. No. Life doesn't always turn out the way we plan, but we make the best decisions we can with the information and the support we have at the time and try not to have too many regrets along the way. And I'm glad that our kids are growing up in a world where there are more strong role models.
00:04:44
Speaker
beyond the machismo that we witnessed when we were growing up. We see the kindness and thoughtfulness and empathy among the younger generations and that gives me a lot of hope for their future. And you've moved all the way across the world, so that's another big change as well. Yeah, kind of your fault.
00:05:12
Speaker
And then I moved back to America.
Social Media: Adoption and Retreat
00:05:17
Speaker
So you're not a big consumer of social media these days, are you? No. So I used to be. I was probably one of the first of my peer group to sign up for any new platform that came out at one point. I was not the first one. Well, you actually got me into LinkedIn.
00:05:39
Speaker
Right, there you go. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. I was, you know, an early adopter of Myspace and Bebo and Friends Reunited and LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave, remember Google Wave, Google Plus, Instagram. Yeah, I, every once in a while I get an email saying I've got an Instagram account that I've totally forgotten about. Never Google Wave, Google Plus briefly. I think I signed up and that was about it.
00:06:08
Speaker
Oh, there was Google Buzz at one point as well. I think that was like their Twitter killer. Let's be fair, Twitter is doing a good job of killing yourself. Absolutely. You don't have Twitter anymore, are you? No, no, no, I deleted my Twitter account. I think that was one of the first ones to go back in
00:06:36
Speaker
So yeah, either those networks died or grew into basically huge marketing machines and I found them increasingly interesting and increasingly noisy for want of a better word.
00:06:51
Speaker
high noise to signal ratio um and then you know through the pandemic um i yeah i started to feel less and less engaged with what was going on on social media they do seem to be a lot less social and a bit more yelling yeah yeah yeah there was a lot of people shouting each other and telling each other that they were wrong and because they didn't
00:07:17
Speaker
necessarily agree that you know they couldn't be friends anymore sort of thing and yeah so like like many things in life there was no one big reason or root cause for me deleting my remaining accounts but there was a lot of different contributing factors I started deleting stuff and didn't regret it you know the promise of social media was bringing people together
00:07:46
Speaker
And what I was seeing was quite the opposite. It was a lot more like the XKCD comic where the guy can't go to bed because there's somebody wrong on the internet. And you've got to set them straight. So there's the old saying about would you rather be right or be happy. Yeah, you chose being happy. I chose being happy.
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah, I'd much rather have a conversation like this than a drawn out Twitter thread. Yeah. Yeah.
00:08:23
Speaker
I found that I had a lot more spare time after I deleted my social media accounts and started spending more time with my kids and rather than looking at pictures of other people's kids on Instagram or people's coffee. I can now read a book about science rather than learn about the pros and cons of vaccinations on Facebook. I can go out for a run rather than look at Strava and see
00:08:48
Speaker
how fast other people are. So yeah, life's too short to spend staring at a small screen full of opinions and advertisements.
Career Journey: From Antivirus to Management
00:08:57
Speaker
Go ahead. Being in tech, you spend your time looking at small screens anyway. I do spend a reasonable amount of my time staring at small screens. So let's talk a little bit of tech. So when you and I met, you were a programmer at Selfoss. And I was doing, was that like one of your first? It was my first job out of uni, yep.
00:09:19
Speaker
And I was tech support, so I spent my days banging my head against the table. Where has your career taken you over the past 20 years? It's been a journey. I'll see if I can give you the potted history. So yeah, I've enjoyed a really privileged career. And one of the beauties of being someone who loves to program is that you get to work in a variety of sectors.
00:09:42
Speaker
And so I started off, as you know, working on antivirus software. And I don't think in 1998, 1999, there was such a term as full stack developer. But I really did get to work on
00:09:56
Speaker
really low-level file driver stuff and also front-end GUI design. So that was pretty full stack and it was really enjoyable. And then from there I went into mobile telecommunications, cell planning and microwave link planning, which was excellent because I got to do lots of pretty heavy mathematics and also some front-end work.
00:10:26
Speaker
which I enjoyed, but I was never really good at. And I also got my first taste of team leadership in that role. It was really funny. I was one of the best people at fixing bugs. That was where I used to excel in that particular role. And back in those days, the top performers were rewarded with promotions and given
00:10:49
Speaker
People people leadership roles, which is in hindsight just a terrible idea and
00:10:59
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't really recognise that at the time that without any management training or any people leadership training, I was a pretty poor people manager, but that's what I did. I moved into the payroll sector next and did more of the same, more kind of C++ on Windows and team leadership stuff.
00:11:23
Speaker
One of the cool things working in that payroll company was that I got to spend more time talking with customers and that was a real revelation that spending time with your customers and seeing the people who don't have any technical expertise using your software.
00:11:37
Speaker
actually teaches you about how people interact with your systems. That's been a thing that I've carried with me since then. And then I had a conversation with you after you moved out here to Perth and I was looking at coming to work with you, I don't know if you remember, but I actually had a
00:11:57
Speaker
an interview with your manager over MSN messenger. It didn't work out for a couple of reasons, but that was the catalyst for me moving to Australia.
00:12:16
Speaker
I ended up, not in Perth, but in Melbourne and took the first job I was offered there. After a bit of a trip around Australia in a very dodgy car. Yeah, we took the beast on the road and we got to see a lot of Australia and I still think I've seen more of Australia than most Australians. Definitely more than I have. I've lived in Perth for 16 years and you saw more of Perth than I did.
00:12:45
Speaker
Yeah, I love WA, it's great to be back in WA. But yeah, also as I changed hemispheres, I also changed the kind of software that I was working on again, and I was working on Linux and Unix-like systems for the first time, which I really enjoyed having, you know, use FreeBSD and Red Hat for hobby projects, but it was nice to actually do that stuff professionally.
00:13:14
Speaker
I was also leading a team again but I found that I was missing the hands-on development work more so I ended up changing jobs again and I moved into the financial services sector and I got to work on some proper real-time
00:13:34
Speaker
systems, algorithmic training and that kind of stuff. I learnt a lot about software development in that role, about things like TDD, test driven development, automated acceptance testing and that really
00:13:52
Speaker
I got me excited about programming again. I also got to learn Python, which was a beautiful programming language. It's one of the few programming languages that I would describe as beautiful. I also got to learn Perl, which isn't. Funny enough, I actually worked in Perl at one company here in Perth for a while.
00:14:15
Speaker
And Python has been on my list of languages that I have to learn for ages. Because there's a lot of stuff that happens in Python.
00:14:27
Speaker
Yeah, I was talking to someone just yesterday who's learning Python moment for machine learning stuff. And he said it was really easy just to get up. That's actually one of the reasons I was looking at Python was everything in machine learning and data crunching, data science, it all seems to be done in Python.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great language. I think you'll love it. But yeah, I ended up back in another team leadership position, which was a blessing and a curse. I loved supporting the developers I worked with, but I was also exposed to a lot more of the politics.
00:15:08
Speaker
multinational financial services company and I didn't enjoy that so much. And thankfully I got made redundant from that position and that gave me some time out with young family and gave me time to think about what my next move might be. And I ended up going back into like straight software development without the people management and another change of tech stack. I took my first job in web development with Ruby on Rails.
00:15:40
Speaker
And I remember in my end of probation review, my manager saying, hey, you can teach an old dog new tricks. And I like to think I showed some of my team a few tricks as well. But I absolutely loved that role. It was great to be learning new stuff all the time. And I found myself gravitating towards the DevOps movement and learning more about the operations side of
00:16:07
Speaker
of technology and learning about infrastructure as code, which was a pretty exciting time for me. I was never an infrastructure person but
00:16:23
Speaker
When I combined it with code, I thought, okay, I can see how this stuff works now. And I was getting to play with the tools that the ops people in previous roles used to get to play with. And I've always enjoyed that kind of those fast feedback cycles and in a web environment, that's pretty cool to be able to deploy stuff and
00:16:51
Speaker
see really quickly whether your change has been successful or not because you can actually see people interacting with it. Going back to that lesson I learnt much earlier in my career about spending time with your customers, if you can't actually be physically with your customers you can actually see how they're interacting with you. Your software using observability.
00:17:13
Speaker
Oh, and you and I kind of started programming in the same sort of era when it's like, do everything on your laptop and do your admin on your laptop and everything is there and you can screw things up really bad.
Leadership and People Management
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And deploy to production and wow, it didn't work. It works on my machine. Yes, yeah, it works on my machine. Well, back up your email because your laptop's going into production. Yeah.
00:17:43
Speaker
Where was I going with that? I was going somewhere. So I ended up again finding myself in a people management role because it turns out that I actually quite like supporting people and developers particularly and thankfully I was in a better position
00:18:05
Speaker
at that organisation than in previous ones and I was actually supported in that people management role with good people and culture teams and that kind of stuff. So it was much easier to set the teams up for success and I really found that I enjoyed having career conversations with people and being able to celebrate when they got promoted and that kind of stuff.
00:18:25
Speaker
And over a period of years at that organization, I was there for a while. I shifted my focus away from the tech and onto the people and that's where I am. I get my kicks now is seeing people deliver greater results than I ever could. And these days I'm a manager of managers and that doesn't bother me as much as I thought it might years ago. I'm another step away from the tech and I have to scratch that itch in different ways.
00:18:56
Speaker
There's no shortage of, you know, projects that you can fire up on your laptop and still do for fun. 100%. Pete's one of these nerds that is actually social. Not all of us are anti-social fungus. Yeah, I do quite like other humans. They're nice occasionally. They are nice. Yeah, people are good.
00:19:23
Speaker
Now, I would be totally remiss if I did not mention your lovely wife, Kirsty. Kirsty's also an engineer, but in probably one of the most socially impactful areas, I mean, not like us with bits and bytes, water here in Australia, which is hugely important. How is she doing in her endeavors?
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, we we moved to Australia at a time where we're in a drought. Yeah. And obviously that that made her skills desirable. But and you know, she used to often
00:20:02
Speaker
Remind me that she was the real engineer, and in fairness, she is. But these days, you know, we both spend much more time in Outlook, Excel, Word, Mural, Miro, video conferencing. So I'm not sure, I guess, finally I'm a HerEqual. But yeah, she's thriving in engineering consultancy. Kirsty, are we...
00:20:30
Speaker
that my memories, my vision of her is always she's got this larger than life laugh and like super friendly burst. Like you walk into a room and you know you're just instantly friends with her. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Industry Evolution: Teamwork and Diversity
00:20:50
Speaker
So you've been in tech for ages now and you've sort of mentioned this a lot of the changes you've seen in the industry.
00:21:02
Speaker
some for the better, some for the worst? Yeah, it's interesting to kind of reflect on how far we've come and you know I've been fortunate that I've worked for some pretty progressive companies and especially here in Australia and as an English speaking, university educated, straight, white, able-bodied, cisgender male, I've had a pretty easy
00:21:26
Speaker
path to where I am. But in those early days, it was the programmers who were working late into the night that were considered the heroes, the ones smashing out features at a million miles an hour and squashing bugs. And these days, there's a much healthier focus, I think, on teamwork and sustainability.
00:21:47
Speaker
The heroes are those who ensure that their colleagues don't get paged when they're on call and the people who leave early to attend their kids' school assemblies.
00:22:00
Speaker
Yeah, that was back, I mean, you know, back in the early 90s, that was sort of like, you're leaving before 14 hours is up here. Half day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think back to that first team I was on there, there was only, I think, one female developer on that team.
00:22:26
Speaker
These days, obviously, there are many more. And I don't think it's a coincidence that our teams are kinder and more thoughtful than they were ever having. Certainly a lot more healthy. I do remember at Salfos, where you and I met, and you'd see some people that were in it, like, ridiculously early, and at midnight, they'd be like, okay, you have to shut the building down now. Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, God, that takes me back, going out and having cigarettes with the security guard. I'm having cigarettes with Matt Malcolm. Thankfully, you and I have both kicked out a lot. Yeah, that's a long time ago now, thankfully. I think we're both a bit healthier for that. So, you know, the industry, I think, like you said, there's been some improvement socially. Where do you think we could improve?
Tech Responsibilities and User Experience
00:23:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a tough one. I think, you know, technology has always been a great enabler. And, you know, that's why I learned to program in the first place. I wanted to use computers to make life better. I'm not sure if I ever succeeded in that. But, you know, in the early days, we had to think really carefully about the resources we were consuming because processing power and storage and memory were finite and expensive.
00:23:54
Speaker
Now we have cheap, elastic, invisible computers in the cloud and more processing power in our pockets and on our wrists than we had in entire programming labs when I was at school, which is just incredible to think about. It also shows how old I am. But I think the challenge now is to use that responsibly and to think about the kinds of data that we're collecting and why we're collecting it, how long we're
00:24:22
Speaker
storing that data for and how securely we're storing it. And the power we're consuming and how we can use that less. But yeah, and also direct consumption. That brings me back to talking about Kirsty and her job, the amount of water that gets used in these data centers. Cooling. Yeah.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yes, I think there's a lot of work that we can be doing there and people look at their cloud bills and someone was telling me recently that the best way to get developers to bring down their cloud provider bills is to actually point out the resources that they're using and
00:25:08
Speaker
The energy that they're consuming, that's a great motivator for developers these days to, oh yeah, I can do a better job of that and be more efficient. Socially conscious or environmentally conscious.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yeah. But also, you know, going back to the earlier lesson again that I think spending more time with the people who interact with our tech and understanding how we can improve their experiences. I think that's that's an area where we can do a lot more. I see people who are consumed by notifications of appearing on on their devices. Do you need to know about
00:25:55
Speaker
Look at that white. And I think too, like back when we were, when you were starting off, it was like you built something and then it was like, oh, that dumb end user who used it this way. And now it's more that, oh, you're using it that way. Maybe we need to do something different. You know, there's not as much hostility towards the end user, I think.
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think we can still get better. We're still told you're holding it wrong. But yeah, when you sit down with your customer and you see the way that they're navigating your software using their keyboard, you're slowing them down because the controls are in the wrong order.
00:26:53
Speaker
that kind of thing. I could save you minutes a week if I just make this small tweak that will take me a minute now. And that sets you up for future successes.
00:27:19
Speaker
And back then it was the developers built something and kind of threw it over the wall and to the testers and you know Mmm, and it was all that hostile Maybe not hostile. I mean hostility is probably not the right word But you know, it was kind of that us and them and it was a bit of rivalry is probably not the right word but it did feel like you were on two very different teams and there was a back-and-forth between the developers and the testers and let's say so we all blame the network people
00:27:49
Speaker
It was often their fault. The network is still not reliable. It's one of the great fallacies. But yeah, I think going back to what I was saying earlier about learning about automated testing and test driven development, we're the testers now. The developers are the testers now.
00:28:13
Speaker
We learn from the people who have done that manual testing for years.
00:28:21
Speaker
but actually having those tests in mind when you're writing your software and writing your software so that it can be tested easier, leads to a better user experience, I think. And deployed easier. Yeah, with that thing about DevOps, the whole idea is to get out to production hands-free. Yeah, I remember the days of taking a master CD down to rich in the,
00:28:48
Speaker
production room. Yeah. We cut hundreds of CDs to go out in the post. Yeah, software production at Softbox was quite the experience back then because none of they had the vault. You had to go into the vault to get everything. The room was like going into a safe. Yes. Yeah. And yeah, we'd send people an update on CD once a month, whether they needed it or not. Yeah. Now you don't even notice your software being updated.
00:29:20
Speaker
I can't remember the last time I used a CD. No, I was just saying to you earlier, I don't think my youngest would know what CD is. My kids are slightly older, so they grasp the idea of CDs, but VHS cassette tapes is a whole foreign concept to them, and media has changed quite a lot.
00:29:47
Speaker
You think about 1.4 megabyte floppies and now we've got 100 giga on a USB stick usually. Do you remember we used to have LS120 disks? Yeah, I remember those. And the zip cartridges.
00:30:10
Speaker
And magnetic optical disks, our Japanese friend Shige used to have those MO disks. That's right, yeah. I don't think they ever took off outside of Japan. Japan had their own set of technology that seemed to go really stellar there, but nowhere else. And video CDs, too.
00:30:38
Speaker
Yes. Back before DVDs. Those big 12-inch video discs. Laser discs. Oh yeah, the big laser discs. You try telling young people today that and they won't believe you. Well, you can't stream the video discs. So, Australia is now your home for how many?
Australian Life and Career Aspirations
00:31:01
Speaker
Gotta be close to 20 now? Yeah, I think...
00:31:06
Speaker
would be 18 years this year, something like that. So yeah, it's kind of strange that you moved out here first to be with the one you loved and I followed on a few years later. Now you've taken your family back to the other hemisphere and I'm here with an Australian family of my own, been here longer than you were. But yeah, life here isn't better or worse than life in the UK, it's just different. And I'll always smile when I see a kangaroo or a kookaburra
00:31:37
Speaker
That's one of the real pleasures of being here. The kids have really good lives. They're happy and they're healthy and they spend their spare time outdoors playing football, both the Association and the Australian variants, which I think is wonderful. They have really active lives. I can't imagine wanting to take that away from them. I hope that
00:32:03
Speaker
they get the opportunity to live in another country and future like you and I have experienced. I think it's a great way to take yourself out of your comfort zone and learn about being a good human. But yeah, this is home. I often recounted this story. I think I was in the UK for, I think I had been there maybe two weeks or something like that. And I was sitting in the tech support office
00:32:32
Speaker
and I started talking about my pants and everybody sort of bust and laugh, I'd bust out laughing and I was like, what? I was talking about the jeans I had bought now and yeah, pants is a very different meaning in England. Yeah, there are some cultural differences. I also remember my first trip to Australia with you and we were going to the casino over here in Burswood. Now the Crown Casino.
00:32:59
Speaker
Your lovely wife said to us, you need to dress up nicely to go to the casino and you can't wear thongs. That caused some consternation. They're going to check.
00:33:15
Speaker
Yes, that's one of the entertaining differences as well, yes. Thongs belong on your feet here in Australia. I had a list of things that I, I stumbled on every once in a while and it's like, yeah, thongs can be underwear or worn on your feet, but not both at the same time. Something to that effect. Yeah.
00:33:44
Speaker
So one of the favorite questions I like to ask, and this goes back to interviews I was doing internally at Amazon as well, is you won the lottery or whatever, and you were doing something entirely different to what you're currently doing. Nothing involved in tech. What would you do? What would your dream job be? I don't know. Outside of tech, it's really hard to say.
00:34:13
Speaker
When I was a teenager, I used to walk past a hydrotherapy pool at the local hospital. And I used to see the smiles on the patient's faces, big glass windows as you walked past. I used to see the smiles on the patient's faces as they got into the warm water. It was really hot. It was like you could see the steam in the air. And I used to think that people want to, or many people want to retire and sit next to a swimming pool.
00:34:42
Speaker
I often think how cool it would be to be a hydrotherapist getting paid to spend time in the pool and helping people to smile. Yeah, but then your fingers would turn into dicks. Yeah, I'd probably be a bit pruny, but I think that would be a nice way to spend your days.
00:35:06
Speaker
You know, helping people and, you know, it's the sort of thing where they hopefully feel better when they walk out. It's a good feeling. Yeah, and it's completely unrelated to tech. Yeah. I had a former boss who was saying, and I was getting involved with, I do this thing called Hour of Code, and it's a volunteer effort.
00:35:33
Speaker
going to schools and you help kids understand tech. And he was like, you know what? That's the stuff that's really important. The stuff we do helping multi billion dollar corporations. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's important too. But that stuff is really impactful and it's, and you're really making a difference in people's lives. So yeah, I mean, something you can do to make somebody smile, I think is a good thing. Yeah. Yeah.
00:36:01
Speaker
I don't know if my kids will get into tech, but. My son is mad into tech. In addition to, you know, we were talking earlier, in addition to history, he's like into tech and you're talking about getting involved in Linux, his laptop runs Linux and he's doing all these things. He's rebuilding computers in the house to run all sorts of stuff that's, I mean, he's gone beyond me and a lot of different things in areas in tech.
00:36:33
Speaker
It's interesting. Yeah, it is interesting, because they're starting at a different point than we started. So you'd expect that they'd overtake us pretty quickly. Well, high tech when we were little was Buck Rogers. I made that reference in a class. I was talking to school students. I was like, ask your parents, no, ask your grandparents what Buck Rogers is, and they'll probably win it.
00:37:01
Speaker
Seems so futuristic then, doesn't it? Yeah. And now you've got, you know, phones that do everything and... Amazing. And, yeah, you can talk around the world by video chat. Yeah. Yeah. And you were one of the first people I knew to use video chat. Yeah. You were certainly the first person I knew to have a webcam. Yeah. Well.
00:37:32
Speaker
Yes, well because, you know, Ant was in Australia and I was in England at the time and that was our, it was our only way of communication. Long distance phone calls that really racked up the bills. Yeah, having to buy international calling cards to save yourself a few pence. I remember
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, signing up for different services to try to get the lowest rate to call because it was outrageously expensive back then. Yeah. Yeah, these days we just take voiceover ideas granted. Yeah. Yeah. And everyone has a.
00:38:17
Speaker
multiple webcasts Skype or zoom or yeah, I mean your laptop is a actually you've spent more time now trying to block it out just in case somebody acts So What would you say I mean, yeah, you spent a lot of time in the UK which favorite memory the UK That's a big one
Cultural Reflections and Podcast Closure
00:38:47
Speaker
It's hard to make a favorite memory. Okay, what's your favorite memory of the two years we spent together?
00:38:56
Speaker
You know, I think I was probably learning about what my memory should have been, such as the time that I tried to take a shortcut to your house. There is no shortcut between the place that you were living in and, yeah. But Pete got into a fight with a pavement and lost.
00:39:19
Speaker
Yeah, I tripped over a wire fence and ended up going face down and ended up on your doorstep some time later. And out came our mutual friend Roy, wearing a towel. He says to me, oh, who did that to your face? He's like, I'll go and get him. I was like, you're not gonna get into a fight with a pavement wearing a towel. So, yeah.
00:39:49
Speaker
Yeah, they were good days. Seeing, like I said earlier, the turn of the millennium and that feeling of hope of what was to come. Yeah, and just having my eyes opened, what a wide world.
00:40:15
Speaker
We live in, I remember you coming to Australia. Australia seemed like such a long way away and just this otherworldly kind of place that you were going to and now it's my home.
00:40:34
Speaker
makes me smile, you know, when I get reminders that I live on the other side of the planet from where I grow up, you know, it makes me smile to think, you know, we've got all these opportunities available to us and the kids have all these opportunities available to them too. Yeah. Not really a memory as such, but more a
00:41:03
Speaker
facing forwards, thinking about the good things that are still to come. Well, Pete, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks for spending the last 40 odd minutes chatting with me and the rest of the weekend. It's gone very quickly. And yeah, I will publish this and get you on the podcast. Fantastic. Thanks a lot. No, thank you.
00:41:34
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Basement Programmer Podcast. I really appreciate you tuning in, and if you have any feedback or comments, of course, send me an email. Also, please consider subscribing. It lets me know that you're enjoying this production. I'm looking forward to you joining me for the next episode of the Basement Programmer Podcast. In the meantime, take care, stay safe, and keep learning.