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/developer advocate: more than a cheerleader
46 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of The Forward Slash, James sits down with Guy Royse, Developer Advocate at Redis, Guy shares insights into what it means to be a developer advocate—helping engineers solve problems, teaching new technologies, and building communities. He and James dive into the world of conferences, discussing the value of in-person events, networking, and staying ahead of industry trends.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Updates
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello and thanks for tuning in to the forward slash podcast. This is your host, James Cartman. And before we get into this week's episode, I have some news to share. After a great run, my co-host Aaron has moved on to pursue new opportunities.
00:00:16
Speaker
While we will miss him around here, we are very grateful for his insight and the energy he brought to every episode. Never fear though, you'll still get your same dose of interesting technology topics combined with groan-inducing dad jokes.
00:00:32
Speaker
and the endearing banter you've come to expect. Like, what do you call an alligator in a vest? An investigator.
Guest Introduction and Background
00:00:52
Speaker
Welcome to the forward slash, where we lean into the future of IT, t I'm your host, James Carman, and today we have with us Guy Royce. Guy works for Redis as a developer advocate, combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for learning and for sharing what he has learned.
00:01:09
Speaker
Guy explores interesting topics and spreads the knowledge he has gained around developer communities worldwide. Teaching and community have long been a focus for Guy. He runs his local JavaScript meetup in Ohio and has served on the selection committee for numerous conferences.
00:01:23
Speaker
He'll happily speak anywhere that will have him and has even helped teach programming at a prison in central Ohio. going to have to talk about that.
Software Defined Radio and Redis Projects
00:01:31
Speaker
That sounds pretty cool. It was cool, actually. yeah In his personal life, Guy is a hard-boiled geek interested in role-playing games, science fiction, and technology. also has a slightly less geeky interest in history and linguistics. It seems like a common thing for tech people.
00:01:45
Speaker
uh, in his spare time, he likes to camp and studies history and linguistics. Guy lives in Ohio with his wife, three sons, and an entire wall of board and role-playing games.
00:01:56
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, welcome guy. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Happy to have you. ah I was, uh, really enjoyed our conversation other day we were preparing for this episode. um the one thing and I gotta, I gotta get into this cause there was something you brought up and i I, I don't know anything about this world. Usually I know a little something about most things enough to be dangerous, but I, didn't I didn't know. So you said something about software defined radio and aircraft tracking. I got to learn more about that. Absolutely. So, um, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm into radio as well. So I have other nerdy hobbies beyond, you know, um,
00:02:33
Speaker
Beyond just software and role-playing games, you know I'm also ham radio. And if anyone sees a picture of me, I've got a big gray beard and long gray hair, and I totally don't look like the kind of guy that would be a ham radio guy.
00:02:47
Speaker
If you are a ham radio person, I'm Whiskey 8, golf uniform Yankee. and So that's for the extranary nerds out there. Well, software-defined radio is basically a radio. It's a little dongle. It's got a USB port on one side and an s SMA antenna port on the other.
00:03:01
Speaker
You hook it up to an antenna and then you can control it through libraries and sample the spectrum at ah a frequency range that the radio will operate on.
00:03:13
Speaker
a lot of the the commercial ones you can Amazon for like 35 bucks. And they'll usually do a range from like ah like somewhere down below AM radio. So ah like a medium frequency, medium wave, as they used to call it back in the day, all the way up through to about like two and a half gigahertz or about around two gigahertz.
00:03:32
Speaker
And so you can then just sample that and then feed that data into whatever. This is raw sampling. It's like sampling an audio file, except it's spectrum.
00:03:44
Speaker
And then there's a ton of software called software that is that interfaces with the device. which will then decode it. And so you can listen to like just broadcast radio if you want, which is a lot harder than just turning on a radio.
00:03:58
Speaker
Or you can sample different pieces of data that are floating around out there in on the airwaves. um There's lots of interesting data. One particularly interesting data is aircraft transponders.
00:04:10
Speaker
They're constantly broadcasting their heading, their location, ah their ah flight ID, their aircraft number. And you can pick that up and then consume that data. And I did a fun project where I consumed that data, put it in an event stream in Redis, and then use that to populate a bunch of JSON documents in Redis, and then created um a GUI in front of that, a map that showed where all the radios are, or where all the aircraft are within a, that I've picked up from their transponders.
00:04:36
Speaker
I have a 25-foot mast on my house attached to my chimney. I do not have an HOA. Of course not. Otherwise, I would not have that at all. And from there, where my antenna is mounted, I can pick up aircraft.
00:04:51
Speaker
down in Northern Kentucky, in Southern Michigan, um all the way up near Cleveland. And I picked up stuff in the Indiana suburbs or Indianapolis suburbs.
00:05:01
Speaker
So you can visualize where like on where the planes are and all that. That's cool. now Now, obviously, you've got like a low-flying helicopter near Indianapolis. It's over the horizon. I'm not going to see it. But you've got some you know Delta Airlines flight flying at 35,000 feet. Then I have line of sight because it's it's it's in the air, right? Right, right. That's cool.
00:05:19
Speaker
Yeah, and there's all kinds of cool data that you can pick up. like your water meters are putting out data. And so you could read it. ah You can, I think my, my, the most random one, I think is the most fun is that you can read the tire pressure sensors of cars because the little pressure sensor, you can't wire it because it has to move. Right. Sure. Yeah. And so you, you can use a little radio and then when the the the pressure goes low, then the car says, Oh, you know, your tire's low.
00:05:48
Speaker
um And you can intercept that and monitor that and do, I don't know what with it, but it's kind of fun that you can see it. um In fact, when these first, these things first came out, if you parked next to someone else that had a low tire, your sensor would go out.
00:06:03
Speaker
If you had like the same sensors in your tires. Oh my gosh. So yeah. So there's all this data flitting about and, you know, the aircraft transponders, it's probably the most tangible data that anyone really can look at and understand and appreciate.
00:06:16
Speaker
But there's there's all sorts of data flitting about. Some of it's submitted by amateur, it's broadcast by amateur radio operators. ah Some of it is just IOT devices. ah Some of it's stuff like aircraft and watercraft.
00:06:28
Speaker
And you can, yeah, there's all kinds of stuff being out there. I can i can i also read all my neighbors water meters. Hey, taking too many showers, Bill. You might want to cut down on that. I can't figure out who they are, though. I just have numbers, right? We just know.
00:06:40
Speaker
Although I'm pretty sure the guy who has the really high usage every yeah every so every yeah ah summer, the beginning summer, probably the guy with the pool. Yeah, the pool, the the nice green grass, that guy. yeah All right. So that all right that is adequately geeky. I love it. Okay. the ah You work for Redis now as ah as a developer advocate.
00:07:01
Speaker
how and How did you get there? What what was your path? ah You know, and like, you know, everyone likes to think that I have a plan for their career.
00:07:10
Speaker
as i think i'll get everyone likes to tell people they had a plan for their career. Sure. And I mean, I did have a little bit of a plan in my career. I've always wanted to be softer nerd. I always, I always liked computers. I was like science fiction and stuff like this. I was little kid.
00:07:23
Speaker
And when I was in elementary school, I read a little book called It's Basic, which taught you how to read, you know, how to do line number basic, you know, 20 print guy, 20 go to 10 or 10 go to 10 guy, 20 go to 10 kind of stuff. Right. Oh, yeah.
00:07:38
Speaker
And um I read that and I'm like, oh, I and like it clicked for me what programming was. And I'm like, this is easy. It was my, you know, obviously, you know, a lot to learn. Yeah.
00:07:49
Speaker
You had it all figured out by then. Yeah. But, but the, the concept of it clicked immediately. Yeah. And, um, you just give it a series instructions. They just had to be really structured. And so fifth grade, me figured this out and I decided then that I was going to be a computer programmer when I grew up and then I pursued it deliberately.
00:08:04
Speaker
So to that extent, I had a plan. Right. Um, and then I took things in school that to facilitate that. And then, um, early in my career, I ran into a lot of people who, uh,
00:08:17
Speaker
were later in their career and they all regretted getting out of the technology. And so I decided i was I'm going to stay as an individual contributor. I'm stay coding and not make that mistake of going into management and then wishing I could and pining for the days of old when, uh, back when I used to code and life was simpler.
00:08:34
Speaker
Now in hindsight, now that I'm in my fifties, I can't look it. was like, well, that's a little bit of nostalgia that they were experiencing there. Cause, but I made a decision to stay an individual contributor and that's what I've done my entire career.
00:08:46
Speaker
Um, I've worked at various consulting companies, enterprises, lots of stuff over over the years. About 10, 15 years ago, I started getting into public speaking as part of just, I got enamored with like the the conference scene and the meetup scene.
00:09:03
Speaker
And I started speaking and I found that I really liked it and I had a knack for it. And so I was just doing that as part of my consulting job, just on the side, I'd speak at a conference like when they'd let me and,
00:09:14
Speaker
and um I would go to meetups and and then I started running the Columbus JavaScript meetup. um And. At some point, someone reached out to me and said, hey, would you be interested in the role as a developer advocate to start up here in Columbus?
Redis Capabilities and Applications
00:09:32
Speaker
And i i so I wasn't pursuing this job, you know i know, it didn't occur to me that I should do it. um And I got this opportunity and apparently with the CEO, it was a little startup with like 15 people.
00:09:44
Speaker
What the CEO had done is um he had gone into the, he'd found me online just looking around for a developer advocate for their company, went into their, the room where, you know, the but war room where all the, you know, so all six of their developers were coding and asked, does anyone here know Guy Royson? Five people raised their hand.
00:10:04
Speaker
And then I got the job. That's a good sign. Yeah. And from there, then I just continued on that path and that company is bought by another company. And then I eventually ended up at Redis. Doing dev role there.
00:10:14
Speaker
And that was actually there wass a lot of the the man who, the the gentleman hired me. He had seen me give a talk at a conference. It was called ah Machine Learning for Gamers, Dungeon Forecasts and Dragon Regressions.
00:10:29
Speaker
And we'd been having this problem where a lot of developers didn't understand the kinds of problems they could solve with machine learning. And so it was just a here's the kind of problems you can solve with machine learning. And I talked about like classification and regression and those sorts of things and using Dungeons and Dragons examples.
00:10:48
Speaker
And so he reached out to me because he liked my talk and wanted to know if I wanted to work at Redis. And at the time I wasn't looking to make a move, but then, you know, things lined up later and we and we made it work. And so now I'm Redis.
00:11:00
Speaker
Fantastic. all right. Now we're going to have a real problem because you keep bringing up cool things that I want to dig into and talk about, but we have an agenda on our our little thing that we need. Screw the agenda. like Like now I want to hear about machine learning and and Dungeons and Dragons, right?
00:11:12
Speaker
Now, all right. So Redis, ah some people are familiar with Redis. I kind of just generally know it as, you know, it's a cache, but as it am i is my understanding there flawed? is ah is it and Is it naive? Is is it limited in what Redis really is?
00:11:29
Speaker
ah So Redis, I or always like to use the sort of elevator one-liner of Redis is a memory-first NoSQL database. o but um It's memory-first because everything is stored in in memory. Nothing is stored on disk.
00:11:43
Speaker
It can be stored on disk, but that's confi that's a configuration. And so because everything is in memory first and disk second, yeah everything's in memory.
00:11:54
Speaker
So of it's stupid fast. Right. And of course that would make a fantastic cache. And so lots of people use it for that. It's in fact, it's primary use case. Well, I like to joke that it's, it's that's its secondary use case because it's primary use cases plastering over crappy architecture, but that's fair. That's fair. with you You know, fair enough. Right.
00:12:14
Speaker
um But, um but so it's memory first, but it's also no sequel. And so you're not, you know, it's, NoSQL is not the buzzword that it used to be, but it was a big buzzword back in the day.
00:12:26
Speaker
um It's not a relational database. It's a key value store. And so everything in Redis is a key and that key has a value in it. And that value could just be a string, like maybe an ape the JSON from an API call that you want cache to make it that API faster or cheaper.
00:12:43
Speaker
um Or, you know, that key could contain like a hash table. yeah And then you can, you know, that's really good for like sessions, ah session management. Sure. or that key could be a linked list or it could be an event stream or it could be a JSON document or it could be a probabilistic data structure. So there's lots and lots of data structures that you can store here.
00:13:02
Speaker
So it's in memory, no SQL. And then it's a database because it can persist things. It can be clustered. It can be scaled. And you can use it as ah a way, a primary store for all all your data. Now, most people don't. Most people just use as a cache.
00:13:16
Speaker
or use it for PubSub or use it for session ID. ah Those are the common use cases. But yeah, that's sort of a super brief introduction what Redis is. You take all that, put a wire protocol in front of it, and that's what Redis is.
00:13:29
Speaker
Okay. It's funny because like, i I'm just kind of like laughing to myself here. When you explained Redis as an in-memory, basically database, you know, memory first, right? remember I remember, think it was back in like the early 2000s. There was this guy, I don't even remember the guy's name, but he was like from South America. And this was his, he was like, we can do databases fully in memory. Memory's cheap. It was started and starting to come down where memory was actually cheap. And this guy was advocating for this whole notion of like, and we just have an in-memory database. Yeah, we'll persist it on the side. But like, fundamentally, this thing's in memory and it's lightning fast and we can do this. We can actually have an in-memory, complete in-memory databases.
00:14:04
Speaker
And blowing people's minds. and they were yeah But when you said it just now, i didn't even blink an eye. Like, yeah, of course, that's what it is. It was so funny how controversial that was back then. And everybody like, what are you crazy? What is this black magic? Well, in some ways, it still is a little controversial because, you know, most people do use Redis as a cache. And so if I come out and say, hey, you can use a database, I'm like, yeah, but I'm going to pull the power out. and It's all gone, right?
00:14:27
Speaker
And that that does feel that way. Right. um But it it totally, totally can work. and We have customers to do that. I mean, honestly, the bulk of our use cases is caching. yeah true But I remember actually in the early 2000s reading about this product. I was a nationwide at the time.
00:14:46
Speaker
It was called Prevailer. And it was like this object serialization thing where you would just constantly write to these object serializations and it would like And it would persist at all disk when the the process shut down.
00:14:58
Speaker
then when it spun back up, it would just keep the state in memory all the time. um I think the mistake, because RAM was getting cheap, but at the time, still wasn't like, like your computers didn't have as much RAM as they do now. Right.
00:15:13
Speaker
Wasn't web scale cheap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of where where I'm getting is this, it was sort of naive in the sense of how much data you actually could, would want to store once, once disc and, and flash got, so got cheap enough and large enough.
00:15:28
Speaker
Right. You know, it's like, no, no, we want to record the entire click stream of each user that hits our website and keep it for six months or whatever. Right. ah Yeah. That's a lot of RAM. Right. Absolutely. And it wasn't, yeah, those numbers weren't that big, big back then. i But yeah, you're right.
00:15:45
Speaker
and Whereas back then it was like, Hey, you know, we need to, we got 300 people in a call center and we have an application for them and we need to keep track of who they're calling today. Okay. Yeah. you keep all that around. That'd be easy. Right. That would work. Yeah.
00:15:58
Speaker
Okay. so Redis is fun. You know, primarily people use it for a cash. um But you know, working for Redis, I'm sure like you've come across,
00:16:10
Speaker
clients, you know, clients will find a way to use things in weird ways that the authors don't intend. Has there any been anything that ever came up, you know, in your, in your travels and, and and speaking with people who use or customers, I guess you would say um anything like that, that jumps out of you?
00:16:25
Speaker
um That's a good, that's a really good question. um andm I'm trying to think of any ah really interesting examples of people that have sort of misused Redis or used it in an unexpected way. Um, I mean, I, I know some stupid Redis tricks to, to paraphrase David, uh, David Letterman's stupid human tricks thing that he used to do.
00:16:44
Speaker
like Um, ah like you can use sort of sets to add numbers together and stuff like that. Yeah. Which is, you know, it's a, it's a trick, but no one does it in production. Right. It's just, you know, um,
00:16:57
Speaker
Yeah, I'm actually struggling with a good answer for this because ah the the vast majority of people are using it as a cache. PubSub is a popular option. I remember one guy used PubSub. This is when the pandemic had just started and he had built an online deck of cards.
00:17:12
Speaker
So you could like play Euchre or something like that. Oh, cool. I'm sorry. For those who aren't from Ohio, Euchre is a card game that's popular in the Midwest. Look it up. It's a lot of fun. or Michigan. Apparently I didn't know Michiganders. Yeah. Yeah. they They do as well.
00:17:25
Speaker
um But they do crazy scoring. They did just two, two fives, which come on. Yeah. It's gotta be four and six. Come on. one Six. Yeah. All the way. Um, but he, he had built this thing and he was using red as pub sub to do it.
00:17:37
Speaker
And he was running into scaling issues because pub sub has a, uh, when it starts clustering, you start, it creates too much chatter on the cluster and he's starting to run it into issues with it. Um,
00:17:50
Speaker
There was one user that's like they were getting upset because they were running out of connections to Redis. So they couldn't couldn't get any more connections to Redis because Redis is just a TCP socket, right? Sure.
00:18:01
Speaker
um And they were upset that they had hit 65,535 connections and couldn't add any more he on one server. It's like, well, you know...
00:18:14
Speaker
That's not Redis' fault. Where? Okay. I got to know, like, was this like direct connect from mobile phones or like, what was what was going on here? I just, I don't remember. I just know. that the i don't I don't know if they were like pooling them or they were just trying. to Yeah.
00:18:30
Speaker
i mean Maybe ah that this seems crazy. and That is a lot. I mean, when I actually, cause I do, I do a lot of JavaScript stuff. I do a lot of node. And, um,
00:18:42
Speaker
Redis is single threaded in the backend and node is single threaded. And so ah generally I don't have more than one connection open at a time ever because not more than one thing's ever going to happen.
00:18:53
Speaker
Right. you don't need um And ah but I mean, if I need to do something in an isolated fashion, I might create a separate connection for that purpose. But generally, you know, so you never have more than a single node process is never going to have maybe two, three tops ah connections open.
00:19:12
Speaker
So it's 65,000. It's 64 K. Yeah. Wow. And and well, it was really funny about that is they didn't realize that that's just, it's a restriction of Linux. Right. Yeah.
00:19:23
Speaker
That was, that was the funniest part about it. Um, just like, well, well um, well, let me explain something to you and I'm going to do this as delicately as possible. There's a thing called file descriptors. and Yeah. Yeah.
00:19:35
Speaker
All right. Everybody, of course, you know, and all the product companies in the world, everybody has their flavor of AI. So what but I don't really think of, you know, when I think of AI and brett like ah Redis wouldn't come to mind as like a thing that could be, you know, leverage AI. So, but there is a use case that that they are supporting AI in a certain way. What's what's what's going on over at Redis with us respect to AI?
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah. So um I actually, in in some ways, they wouldn't say that Redis is doing AI, strictly speaking. ah We are doing, we've added a vector type to Redis. Okay.
00:20:12
Speaker
And so um so it can be a vector database. um There's a lot of vector specific databases out there that they're all about just working with vectors and nothing else. And a lot of the database vendors, including Redis, are adding a vector type and then allowing to search on a vector as well.
00:20:27
Speaker
um The vector, i mean, is generally, you would create an embedding using an AI model to then, and store that as a vector. yeah And then you would see how similar the vectors are.
00:20:38
Speaker
But the AI has kind of already happened. Right. Yeah. the The model has done its thing. You get in an image, it's turned it into a pile of numbers. And you put that pile numbers into Redis. And then then you do a query and gets that query gets turned into a pile numbers. And then Redis just looks at the two piles of numbers and says, which are how similar, find the the pile numbers most similar to the one that you gave me.
00:21:02
Speaker
And that's a very simplistic way of explaining vector search. But I would imagine since it's memory first, it's pretty doggone fast, I would guess, right? Yeah, it is. We have a we actually did a ah benchmark.
00:21:13
Speaker
And by we, I mean other people on the team, yeah not me, um against ah a lot of the popular databases and some of the vector-specific and non-vector-specific.
00:21:24
Speaker
And, you know, I mean, it's a benchmark. So, you know, right there. There's there's ah I haven't looked at the details. so I don't know that this has happened, but benchmarks often are a little selective about what they show. ah Shocking. I know this is me being a developer and being honest, right?
00:21:40
Speaker
All the qualifications, because my boss will probably be listening. Right. but But, I mean, the we kind of smoked everyone, honestly. The numbers were extraordinary.
00:21:51
Speaker
um Wow. We did a vector set with 100 billion vectors. Wow. Yeah, right? that's That's a lot. Okay. yes that's That's a ton. yeah and um yeah And then they are our numbers well exceeded ah all of our competitors. Yeah.
00:22:07
Speaker
So that's in some ways, I think that's I think that's one reason to use like Redis as a vector database and do the ai thing with it. I mean, some of it is just kind of you've kind of most people have it already.
00:22:20
Speaker
yeah Yeah, it's already there. And so, ah you know, you know, if you're like at a big enterprise, you don't have to go in and say, well, we got to go through the process to get a new piece of software into the company. And six months later and, you know.
00:22:32
Speaker
Oh, okay. I like that. Yeah. That's good to keep in mind. but and This is actually why a lot of the database vendors are also doing the same thing because it's the same story for them, right? Yeah, absolutely. won't mention any names, but you know.
00:22:45
Speaker
So is it like you just need a ah newer release of of Redis and it's going to have it kind of baked in from the factory, all turned on, ready to go if you... You just want to use it. Okay.
00:22:55
Speaker
Red estate's coming out here in just a couple of weeks. Okay. It may actually be out by the time this goes live. Okay. I'm not sure. Not sure of our exact release date, but it'll be here in a couple of weeks.
00:23:09
Speaker
And there's a couple of milestones you can play with now, ah releases that you can play with if you want to kick the tires on and out. And they've added the vector search and a whole bunch, a ton of capabilities actually. Okay.
00:23:21
Speaker
I should check that out. We're doing an internal project where we're, we're doing, um, you know, you know, as a consulting company, we have a lot of content, thought leadership content blogs. Well, this, this podcast is, is, is one of them.
00:23:32
Speaker
And, uh, you know, just indexing all of our content and making it, being able to ask a chat bot, Hey, what, what content do we have related to, you know, Redis in this podcast episode? So that might be something, maybe we, maybe we check out Redis because right now we're using, you know,
00:23:46
Speaker
another vendor for that um one that's just a normal database with vector things turned on inside it. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. um But yeah, that's but that's cool. I'll have to check that out. but yeah i did not realize that. I mean, whole vector stuff is is a ton of fun. It's really it's really interesting. And it's it's actually way easier than developers think it is. I mean, the algorithms to create the indices and the search these things are...
00:24:09
Speaker
you know, the black arts, computer science stuff that I don't really look into that often. um And I don't really know how they how it works at the lowest level. But the actual comparison is is actually remarkably intuitive.
00:24:23
Speaker
You just have to think of the pile of numbers as coordinates. And then it's literally draw a line to the next thing, which which one's closest. or take the angle from origin but to the two things and which one has the narrowest angle. It's it's those sorts of comparisons.
00:24:36
Speaker
It's geometry. i mean, it's fine geometry in 512 dimensions, but yeah yeah which sounds hard, but it's not hard for a computer to do. No, yeah I mean, if you can if you can visualize it in two dimensions and then just kind of extrapolate it in your brain, um it makes sense. I mean, the stuff we learned in you know linear algebra.
00:24:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's what a lot of it is. i mean Absolutely. Absolutely. You mentioned you're in Columbus, Ohio, near you know oh Ohio State. And I'm down here in Cincinnati, Ohio. Actually, i live across the river in northern Kentucky. You mentioned that earlier.
00:25:07
Speaker
and That you can see planes down here. yep Yes, I can. The Cincinnati airport, Cincinnati, Ohio airport is actually in Kentucky. So you're seeing planes probably in Kentucky. Yeah, out of Covington. out of Yes, exactly. I've actually flown into the airport once.
00:25:22
Speaker
just once just like once well i mean i'm always flying out columbus right yeah um but this is i remember this is but just a story i'm going to tell it that's fine um i i was coming back from from a conference in florida it was orlando code camp actually which i'm going to in two weeks and which is always over spring break so the flights are always just a total mess um And my flight got canceled and they wanted to rebook me, but there aren't any seats on anything.
00:25:48
Speaker
And so they're like, well, we'll take you from ah Orlando to Atlanta, Atlanta to Boston, Boston to Columbus. it's It's these kind of crazy flights. I'm like, I'm not doing that. Right.
Ohio Tech Scene
00:25:56
Speaker
that's great. So I find a flight direct with a seat available to Cincinnati.
00:26:00
Speaker
I'm like, I'll do that. And then I'll just rent a car one way or take an Uber or something. Right. Yeah. The problem was it left in 12 hours, and I had to spend 12 hours at the airport. that's fun.
00:26:10
Speaker
But i I could spend 12 hours at the airport or spend 12 hours flying all over the East Coast to get back to Ohio, and so the airport's more comfortable. Sure, absolutely. ah You don't like airplane seats? You know, um i'm I'm kind of fat.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think it matters who you are. They're just not not comfortable. They're not comfortable in general, but, you know, everyone wants more leg room, and I you know i don't really need more leg room. I need more ass room, right? Yeah, gotcha. ah So, you know, you do what you do, right?
00:26:40
Speaker
So I ended up spending the day in the airport. um i mean um I remember working on a bunch of WebAssembly stuff because I was playing with WebAssembly at the time. ah So I land into Covington. I get out. I'm like okay, this is slightly weird because I'm you know Ohio, but I'm not in Ohio.
00:26:54
Speaker
Right. And I'm almost home, but I'm not. And then I go to the rental car place and then do the math and say, I'm pricing an Uber right now. Can you beat it? And then for one way car. And then they did. And so I drove home.
00:27:07
Speaker
Um, that was my one time in Covington. It was actually the awful thing was, is that I then proceeded to drive home after being in an airport all day. And then, you know, and then taking about a two hour flight, uh, direct.
00:27:20
Speaker
And then I, uh, I'm heading up 71. And Waze is telling me to get off on some country road and go around. I'm like, nah, that's stupid. I'm not doing that. And well, it turns out it was smarter than me as these things always are. And um there was some sort of accident and the traffic was backed up for miles.
00:27:37
Speaker
And I was just sitting in parking lot in the middle, like between two cornfields. And I'm like, it's like 9 PM at night. I'm halfway home. I'm like, I'm just exhausted. I want to go to bed. and just sitting in a rental car, which I then had to proceed to return the next morning.
00:27:52
Speaker
That drive is so boring. My one experience out of Covington. Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't sound like that was a fun experience. The airport was fine. you know So you, ah so you're in Columbus.
00:28:04
Speaker
um There's a kind of a cool tech scene up there. You know I mean That's one of our markets that we operate in as well. And you know, there's, there's a lot of, so, and and you're a part of that local tech scene up there. So tell us a little bit about the, you know, the Ohio tech scene in general, I guess.
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah. It's, you know, it, it's sort of It's sort of like a regional pride thing, right? um I feel like Ohio is sort of underappreciated in some ways when it comes to to technology.
00:28:30
Speaker
Like in a lot of my career, and you've probably experienced this too, is there's been there's sort of a coastal bias, right? Oh, sure. And Ohio's flyover country, even though you know we've got like 12 million people here. ah you know And you know col Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati are all like over 2 millions and in the metro area.
00:28:47
Speaker
And then you add in like Dayton and right. Oh, and Akron. And it's, there's a lot of people here. And, um, there's actually ah surprisingly strong tech scene between, particularly between Cincinnati and Columbus.
00:28:59
Speaker
Um, cle Cleveland has a tech scene, but there's not, I don't find as many meetups up there and stuff. Right. I remember several years ago, someone was doing a startup up in Cleveland. They said, yeah, whenever startup's in Cleveland, get ah a round of funding, they moved to Columbus.
00:29:12
Speaker
Sorry, Cleveland. Um, And, but yeah, it's, it's kind of surprising. Like I was at, I was at a conference in Lithuania and we had three speakers, myself included, that were from Columbus wow in Lithuania. And there were only like maybe five Americans at the entire conference amongst all the speakers.
00:29:34
Speaker
And three of them were from Columbus. And so, and I, and I run into this, there's, you know, mean maybe it's that astronaut thing where everyone jokes is something about Ohio makes everyone want to leave the earth. Right.
00:29:45
Speaker
Right. And you know maybe something about Ohio makes everyone want to leave and go to foreign countries and give talks. I don't know. i can do but ah But yeah, there's actually a really healthy tech scene here. It's not that sort of high tech tech scene.
00:29:58
Speaker
Like it's, it's not, it's not generally those sorts of startups. It tends to be more, um ah it's more business in the sense of like, like I remember the first time went to San Francisco and I went to meet up and everyone talked about where they worked.
00:30:12
Speaker
And yeah, It was all, you know, it's like, oh, I work for ah Google. I work for Netflix. I work for, you know, there's a bunch of tech companies. And then I'm but i'm like, well, when we do meetups in Columbus, and we ask where work. It's like, oh, I work at Nationwide or i work at Huntington or I work at Brands or, um the you know, the Gap, you know, things like that. It it tends to be.
00:30:34
Speaker
All of our, and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about here too, because I mean, you know, uh, Caliberty is, you know, ah who are your customers? Well, there are a lot of these enterprises. It's sure. It's probably like Kroger. I don't know who your customer list is. I'm making stuff up, but it's Kroger, Procter and Gamble, maybe down a Louisville, you're you're dealing with Humana, that kind of stuff.
00:30:50
Speaker
Um, um And so it's it's really concrete stuff that's, you know, and when I worked for Pillar, we had clients like AEP and we did a lot of work in Iowa as well. And it was like John Deere and stuff like that.
00:31:04
Speaker
I don't know. Actually, it probably wasn't a allowed to say that, but too bad.
00:31:10
Speaker
We can edit it out. that what John Deere was always kind of funny about their being offered as a client, but it's been a lot of years and Pillar was acquired by Accenture, so probably doesn't matter. um But...
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, there's there's there's really tangible companies like it's food, auto, yeah insurance, banking. And a lot of the the tech companies on the West Coast tend to be more ephemeral. Like if Netflix went away, I mean, a lot of people would be sad. Right. But, you know, no one would starve.
00:31:38
Speaker
Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and ohio but Ohio's got a lot of companies like that. It's it's it's that sort of fundamental things that everyone needs. um But at the same time, there's just a lot of really talented developers in the area.
00:31:54
Speaker
and And I mean, there are data centers here. There's, um you know, i think some of might just be the universities. um Some of it, I have this theory, actually, some of it is that it's a choke point geographically.
00:32:08
Speaker
Yep. So ah because you got to go around Canada, Ohio is like the lowest northern state. Right. And so all the wires physically have to go around the Great Lakes and all the freeways have to go around the Great Lakes and all the railroads have to go along the Great Lakes. And so that creates a little cluster here in Ohio.
00:32:25
Speaker
and Good point. And and because all the data is flowing through here. And half the United States is east of the Mississippi, and so it's a good call center and it becomes ah cluster for business. And then when they're where there's business, there's software and where there's software, there's nerds.
00:32:41
Speaker
And so there's a lot of good nerds here. Yeah. A lot of nerds. And, and I think like, isn't there, is it? Intel is building a big thing up in Columbus area. Is that right? Yeah. I'm i'm hoping that I'll increase the value of my house so that I can sell it and and move out.
00:32:53
Speaker
So it's one of those Intel millionaires, right? It's actually not terrible. I'm i' in, in Westerville on the Northeast side and and that's what they're building that out in new Albany. Um, last I heard, so there was some scuttlebutt, but maybe that won't happen because Intel had that thing that that happened that I didn't honestly pay that close attention to in the news, but they had like a defect in the chips.
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, and so I don't know, you know, and I know their stock dropped after that. Uh, I bought, but why not? I'm a bad news buyer, but, um, but you know, um,
00:33:31
Speaker
You know, that's still it it hasn't been canceled yet. So we'll we'll see what happens. But there was enough interest to say we should invest a lot of money here. um So, yeah, it's it's, you know, Ohio's pretty good place. um ah I'll take a little bit of civic pride here and say I think Columbus is the best out of the three, of course, you know.
00:33:54
Speaker
how how is your pro football team? Yeah. How do they do it? Yeah. I can't really throw many stones because, you know the Bengals. Well, I actually grew up in this year in Northern Ohio.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah. And I, and, and so I moved to Columbus and I'm like, why does everyone care about college football? Yeah. And then, cause I just grew up watching the Browns lose. Yeah, sure. Exactly.
00:34:15
Speaker
And so I didn't, I just never really developed much care for football at all. And I moved here and I remember I worked at a hardware store and, um ah in college, and they had me work the day of the Ohio State Michigan game.
00:34:28
Speaker
And I'm in there, and I'm like, you know, Saturday on ah in ah and a hardware store is, like, busy, right? And i'm I'm in there, and I'm like, where is everyone? It was just empty.
00:34:40
Speaker
It was so weird. ghost town And I'm like, so it's the Ohio State Michigan game. I'm like, what's that? Because I just didn't know. i just i've I've never really been a sports person, honestly. But I did watch the Browns when i was a kid oh with my dad, but they are they lost a lot.
00:34:56
Speaker
So did the Bengals. Yeah. Very cool. but but Yeah. Yeah. So I think Ohio is a cool place. so i mean What I meant to say, actually, for everyone is now considering moving to Ohio is Ohio is terrible. You should totally stay where you're at.
00:35:09
Speaker
Well, you mentioned something the other day about like some the like tech conferences. Like we've actually got three pretty good size, pretty well-known because you're you're in the conference, you know, speaking circuit and everything. So we've got three pretty good size conferences here in in Ohio.
00:35:25
Speaker
Was it like Sturtrek? Yeah, there's Sturtrek, which is here in Columbus. It's a one-day event. ah This year it's on May second Uh, it's there. There's shtick is that they you get a lot of really deep technical talks and then you watch a a nerdy marble ish superhero kind of movie.
00:35:42
Speaker
Uh, after, afterwards and eat popcorn and and go home. Um, And it's, it's, it's good time. Uh, there's a, down in Cincinnati, there's momentum, which has been growing quite steadily over the years. Um, it's usually at the Hollywood casino there.
00:35:57
Speaker
It's a Hollywood casino or no, the hard rock casino. Yeah. It shows you how much I gamble. Um, I just buy Intel stock. Yeah. When you hear bad news. Yeah.
00:36:11
Speaker
Um, and, um, and, but yeah, it's a great event. I've spoken at it many times. Um, A guy named Mike Richardson runs it, and he does a fantastic job. It's not just him. There's a crew, but he's the he's sort of, the I think, the spearhead of it.
00:36:24
Speaker
Yeah, he works over at Kroger. Yeah, he does. yeah Good dude. Yeah, he's a really good dude. um And then probably the the really big one that's here in Ohio is Codemash, which is in Sandusky.
00:36:36
Speaker
And at its peak before the pandemic, it was about 3,500 people attended. And, um, and it just, it's in Sandusky was like, Oh, why are you doing the Sandusky? I remember got that from one of my bosses initially Sandusky.
00:36:49
Speaker
It's like, we wait, haven't you seen Tommy boy? You know? Yeah. Callahan auto parts. What are you talking Exactly. Right. Um, but um But it draws people from Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland and Columbus and Cincinnati and Indianapolis and Louisville and Pittsburgh. And it just draws all these people into this area. And it's, you know, it's in January on Lake Erie.
00:37:14
Speaker
you know People there really want to learn. right yeah But the don't they do it at like the what is it is it Kalahari, yeah they do it at the kalaharri which is one of those like indoor water park places? For me, that just didn't seem like... because i mean I've been in the tech industry for a while.
00:37:30
Speaker
I don't know that I want to see a bunch of tech geeks in their bathing suit a Kalahari water park. I don't know. That just doesn't seem like that's... Yeah. So it's always a little awkward, but you know, yeah I get in the hot tub anyhow. And I'm like, well, we're in the same boat.
00:37:43
Speaker
We're all, we're, we're, we're kind of an ah odd bunch of software engineers. well the hot tubs have the swim up bar. And so a few beers in, you don't care. oh yeah. There you problem. All right. Very cool. Yeah. I, I've loved the the tech scene here in Cincinnati. We've, we've got a pretty, you know, a lot of, a lot of meetups and that sort of stuff. And I know Columbus is big.
00:38:03
Speaker
Um, so it's cool. Yeah. um I know you had some, uh, thoughts about the the scene. Well, it's, it's, you know, um'm you know, I'm, I'm from Ohio. I don't know if you're from Ohio originally, but i grew I was born and raised here and I've never, I've, I never moved out.
00:38:16
Speaker
You know, I moved to Columbus to go to school and stayed in the Metro area. And, um, and there I don't really see any reason why I would ever want to leave. It's, uh, it's, Ohio's got really like a really diverse economy. I mean, we've got a good agricultural sector.
00:38:31
Speaker
Uh, you've got, you know, like here, uh, down in Cincinnati, you got a lot shipping on on the Ohio river. You've got, um, you distributors, we have a lot of distributors up here in Columbus as well.
00:38:42
Speaker
There's so still a fair bit of manufacturing and there there is a movement for manufacturing on shoring or reshoring. Yeah. good You know, Ohio is very in a good position to take care of. We've got good resource extraction. you know, there's like natural gas resources and,
00:39:00
Speaker
Most of the coal is gone, but yeah, but that's just across the river in West Virginia. um But it's got everything you need for making steel and all that kind of stuff. And so there's I mean, these are dirty industries, but they don't have to be. You can clean them up.
00:39:13
Speaker
Sure. And but there's just a lot going on here. And then we've got all these universities. It's just sort of like a little microcosm of America.
00:39:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
Agile Methodologies
00:39:23
Speaker
We, we, something for everybody in Ohio, that's for sure. Um, and yeah, I was born here, but I, I claim to be a Floridian. I grew up in Ocala, Florida. So that's okay kind of where I, you know, the majority of my life has been here in Ohio.
00:39:37
Speaker
Um, right. You mentioned pillar. and and I do remember pillar. They were actually a fantastic company. I think Caliberty and pillar would, would have a lot in common if pillar was still around today, for sure. of Very, very heavy in on the, on the craft at angle.
00:39:50
Speaker
Uh, so yeah, it was a fantastic company. We we would be kindred spirits, uh, companies. Um, so yeah, I'm sure you've been involved in, you know, the big buzzword, the the agile transformations and stuff working at pillar. How how was your experience with, with those?
00:40:02
Speaker
Uh, you know, it was, it was a mixed bag, honestly. Uh, I mean, you you could do a lot in the micro, but it was hard to do things in the macro. Okay. Um, So if we wanted to like smaller or medium sized companies with a transformation, we'd be very successful and the entire organization would would go along and buy in and then they would start delivering software at a greater cadence and would spend less time, waste less time on things they didn't really need.
00:40:28
Speaker
And you get that all that agility. There's a reason we called it that, right? wow um So that, you know, it's like, well, you know, but next week our business requirements are different. That's fine.
00:40:39
Speaker
Yeah. You know, we can we can adapt to that because we're delivering just releases every two weeks. and And we're delivering features continuously and you can change your mind. That's one of the big powers. That's one of the superpowers you get with agile.
00:40:54
Speaker
um In larger organizations, it was a struggle um because, you know, if you go into like a large insurance company or a large healthcare care company, i don't want to name names.
00:41:06
Speaker
yeah ah They're just big enough that you're never going to be able to transform the whole organization. you know, that has to be come down from like the CEO and it needs to be a mandate coming all the way down.
00:41:18
Speaker
And they, at that ah companies that are that large, just have a lot of other things that they're worried about over that. Right. Yeah. I think some of it, honestly, is just the economies of scale that you get when you're that big can cover all sorts of sins.
00:41:29
Speaker
And so the, we're good at, we're really good at covering up sins. We've got that at scale. And, and so it's, it's not actually the most important thing for them to focus on optimizing.
00:41:40
Speaker
Yeah. Right. It's like, well, if I spend all this time optimizing this, like yeah I could get my cost down. But then that comes at the opportunity cost of other things that we could do.
00:41:51
Speaker
but So I'm not even I mean, i mean, not even like criticizing them. man It's like it is probably the right business decision. Sure. Absolutely. But within within an organization, you can make teams and and and and small organizations within it.
00:42:03
Speaker
We had success there. Uh, sometimes what I would see happen, honestly, is, uh, I get a lot of people that were on board with the idea, but then they would be frustrated by their, their employer and then they'd go get other jobs.
00:42:16
Speaker
but So you'd train them up and say, Hey, you're now this, and this agilist, agilista. And, and, uh, Oh, thanks for that. Now i'm going to go find another job. that That wasn't the intention, of course. but Right. Right. Yeah. i Yeah. You know.
00:42:27
Speaker
And I do see them at like but in the meetups and stuff here in Columbus still. And, you know, um and some of them are still at the play at at the customers and some aren't, you know, but yeah, that did happen occasionally.
00:42:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's when it comes like the the the big organization, even even within big organizations, trying to do that top down thing is it's just hard because they to see the payoff, to see the the results and and, you know, that that success and get that a little bit of momentum going. It's hard because you're you're trying to do it all at once.
00:42:57
Speaker
we We found even in the big organizations, kind of that grassroots and getting, getting one little group going and getting some, some buzz going around it and, you know, get people to a little bit of success, right. Going on there. Like, what's going on over there?
00:43:10
Speaker
Like, oh, they're doing a natural transformation. That that seems to be more effective of a, of a means of actually getting the organization to transform. Yeah, that's where, I mean, we have more success oh from the bottom up and in large organizations.
00:43:23
Speaker
Um, One thing that I always, I always, i always kind of was just baffled why people would struggle against an agile methodology. Now agile has become a little bit of a bad word and it's, it's got some dysfunction in it.
00:43:37
Speaker
um But there's like one key thing that I think that most people have adopted that they, that has come out of agile, even if they don't realize it is that it used to be, you'd have a big upfront plan and this is the scope and you're all going to deliver it on this date and Right. Sure.
00:43:56
Speaker
and And then, of course, everyone everyone knew that that wasn't going to happen, but everyone pretended like a would. um And if I think about how I do things in my personal life, that's not how I manage anything in my personal life. I don't have a big project plan that says, OK, well, this is what I'm going to do. And then at this point, I'm going to be saying I have a to do list.
00:44:16
Speaker
And I just wrote my to-do list. And then occasionally I'll learn that, hey, actually this thing doesn't matter anymore. And I learned something new and I need to add two more things that are more important to this thing here. And so that gets pushed down.
00:44:27
Speaker
And so I'm just bouncing things around my to-do list and removing things and putting things off to later because it's not as important as something that's more urgent. That's all Agile is. Right. and And I've seen a lot of companies actually sort of embrace that aspect of it.
00:44:41
Speaker
um Like everyone's using Jira. Right. And so they're all working very task oriented and to-do list oriented as opposed to big upfront plan oriented. And so there's lots of other things that come along with an agile transformation, I think that are important.
00:44:55
Speaker
Like if you don't have some of the engineering practices, then you still run into that problem where I've got a big ball of mud for some software and my rate of change for that software slows down because I didn't test drive it or I don't have a unit test or anything.
00:45:09
Speaker
Right. That sort of stuff. Sure. Yeah. but and And companies vary in how well they do that. But I think the the idea of just breaking everything out into tasks and working the list is something that most companies are doing.
00:45:22
Speaker
um And they're more amenable to changing that list midstream. um and did You know, not everywhere, not consistently. Maybe your mileage varies here, but this is I think this is the one thing that everyone kind of learned from Agile, even though it's in some ways companies are sort of –
00:45:42
Speaker
a pushback against it. Right. Oh yeah. Because people do the ceremony without realizing why it works. Right. And then it just becomes a ritual as opposed to, it's like, well, we have standup meetings every day.
00:45:53
Speaker
Why?
00:45:56
Speaker
Well, because we do. and Because that's what we do. We did it yesterday and the day before. So we have to do it today. Right. Yeah. um Yeah. that's That's, that's absolutely been, been our experience as well. And it's interesting. We had a, um,
00:46:10
Speaker
We a guest on few weeks back, a few episodes back when she was was talking about, you know, she had a conference talk that she did about like, stop saying agile. Cause it's, it's gotten a point, like you said, it's almost like a dirty word in our industry, but you know, as you pointed out, well, we're not going back to waterfall, right? Like, like we know that doesn't work.
00:46:29
Speaker
We've, we've fundamentally proven that that just does not work. And it's, it's just incompatible. with building software and in just the world, right? Well, you're sacrificing, what are you sacrificing when you go to agile from waterfall?
00:46:43
Speaker
You're sacrificing the illusion of certainty right to get more performance. I have a theory that Waterfall is particularly bad for software engineering because people a lot of people who are good at software engineering, because you need that like that flow state, that that that you know heavy concentration, being able to to get into a task and just like latch onto it.
00:47:08
Speaker
A lot of folks that have like ADHD, right? Yeah. Where they you know normally you you you can't focus on it, but you can do that hyper focus. So a lot of us software engineers actually are, you know, a lot of them are ADHD. And one thing about ADHD folks, it's like almost like a a driver for them is to wait until that last bit, that procrastination thing. So if you do a big upfront design and you say, okay, we're going to finish this next, you know, in 18 months.
00:47:31
Speaker
well guess when they're going to start you know what mean because it's like you look at it like that sounds like a problem for future guy yeah yeah exactly what has future guy ever done for me literally nothing no yeah he's someone else yeah i i i just and even outside of that i just it just has never proven to be an effective uh way to do it because everything changes like crazy because you can't right with with software you can change it well while the thing's running.
00:47:56
Speaker
We used to, do at one point, we we coined the term, so when you apply ah waterfall practices to your Agile teams, ah we would call that waterboarding.
00:48:06
Speaker
but Water. what That's a good one. I've never heard that. I've heard like agile fall and waggle and all that, but I've never heard waterboarding. I think I like that. it's a way better joke. Yeah. Yeah. I like that a lot.
00:48:22
Speaker
It works. That's um if if that's open for me to use, please do. I stole it from someone else. I'll i'll give credit. Like all all good jokes. They're, they're, they're stored and forwarded. Yeah, that is fantastic.
00:48:34
Speaker
All right. um Now with Pillar, back in the day, like you know when you know they were ah there were a they weren't small, but they were smaller. They weren't like a big box kind of a shop or whatever. So you know what was your experience when you when you worked with some of the you know, the clients that maybe they had worked with a big box, uh, firm and, and, and you go to engage with them. How was your experience there with, you know, how receptive were they to the more lean mean kind of style of like a pillar?
00:49:04
Speaker
Um, yeah, that's an interesting question. Um, I think a lot, I mean, this is probably a brag for, uh, the people I worked with, uh, which I think is fine.
00:49:16
Speaker
It's a compliment for everyone. I worked with a pillar. is I think that a were surprised to just the the amount of talent Pillar was able to attract. Like a lot of the really good developers were a Pillar. ah They let me be there because I talked really good.
00:49:31
Speaker
and and and And because I had a beard. I actually literally had someone one time I was working on a project and they they're like, we should listen to the guy with the beard. He probably knows something. because my beard, it can phase intelligence. I don't know, but regardless, um, I literally, people have said this, they give me credit that I don't deserve, uh, just because I have a beard and I look like a wizard.
00:49:52
Speaker
Um, the Gandalf effect. Yeah. yeah I call it the wizard geek actually. Oh, and yeah. Um, I get on stage and I'm, you know, programming is kind of magical and then, you know, it's sort of like the wise old man archetype.
00:50:06
Speaker
And, uh, But, um, I, sorry, I started talking about myself as meaning to talk about how good the people at pillar were, uh, but you were, it was self deprecation. So yeah yeah, it was, yeah. Yeah. yeah Um,
00:50:18
Speaker
But yeah, so a lot of those just, I think they were impressed with the quality the people that we can bring bring to the table. We tried to sell ah projects, not individuals. We we didn't want to do staff augmentation. Right. ah Because that's, I mean, if you're trying to transform companies, staff augmentation is not how you do that.
00:50:35
Speaker
Right. you You don't send one person to be inundated with the culture of a company. And, you know, just sit there and take those slings and arrows, you know, ah week after week, right? That's a good, that's a recipe for burnout and you lose an employee.
00:50:50
Speaker
And so we tend to do teams. um And um yeah, you know, I, but i yeah most of my experience with the big box consultancies was when I worked in nationwide more than anything. And cause we would bring in like IBM global services and big companies like that.
00:51:08
Speaker
And they had a lot actually, and we had Microsoft with professional services there for a while too. And ah there were, there's a lot of great people. mean, I think they were overpriced honestly, but, um but I mean, they were, know, they were talented and, and some of the people from Microsoft are really, really good. Microsoft tires smart people.
00:51:26
Speaker
Oh yeah. Yeah. Um, but, uh, it is kind of funny in a way that, uh, pillar did end up getting purchased and acquired by a big box consulting company. Um, cause they were, um, I had gotten recruited developer relations before this happened.
00:51:41
Speaker
Uh, but they got acquired by Accenture. Um, which, um, you know, it was kind of came out of nowhere. And a lot of the people that worked at pillar weren't very happy with that outcome.
00:51:53
Speaker
Um, because it's, you know, you go to somewhere where it's very agile and then you get something little more process oriented. Right. Uh, one of the quotes, um, and you know,
Redis in Real-time Applications
00:52:01
Speaker
not not to disparage, uh, uh, Accenture terribly, but, uh, one of the quotes from someone was they posted a meme with, uh, Anakin and Obi-Wan saying you became the very thing we swore to destroy. yeah yeah Um,
00:52:14
Speaker
Which is maybe a little harsh, but I can i can certainly appreciate why they posted it. um Yeah, I know for a lot of people that was ah a difficult transition. Some of the people are still there, actually. and they They're still with Accenture and and enjoying themselves and ah working on projects in the region. And others have moved on to other things. Yeah.
00:52:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think one one of the things we experienced and, you know, again, not to extent not to disparage companies like Accenture, of course, right? and They're a great company and they do great work. ah But the where we kind of, you you know, when we when we come into ah an organization that might have, you know, engaged with one of the bigger box kind of companies, that it's it's kind of a refreshing change for them to to really have, you know, like the geeks, you know getting down and dirty and actually building software and getting things done. And um So that's, it's it's kind of a fun experience for when we engage with those companies. and know You know, there's a place for the for the strategy and all of the the things that, the you know, you get from the big box type of folks for the price tag.
00:53:14
Speaker
But at a certain point, you got to put away the PowerPoints and actually open up your IDE and and and start creating the actual software. So like that can be a refreshing change for for some of our clients. All right.
00:53:26
Speaker
Fantastic. Man, this has this been really cool. deep Diving ah a lot of really interesting topics. I never knew there was a thing for software radio. it's It's good fun. It's really a ton of fun.
00:53:38
Speaker
is there Is there GitHub for that? um Well, you need you need to get a hardware device first. Well, maybe $35 at Amazon. Yeah. I'd recommend getting, there's a little kit for $45. They include some antennas and stuff like that.
00:53:50
Speaker
I did a, actually CodeMash, I did a workshop using that, which of course featured Redis, you know, because of course that's my job, right? That's fair. it's fair um I call it plucking data from thin air with software-defined radio.
00:54:08
Speaker
I think that's the name of it. So like when they when they founded Redis, it feels like that it's almost like designed for this, right? Like that was exactly what they made it for, right? That's ah that's how you're talking. That's totally what Redis is for, yeah. yeah yeah Actually, my and my angle with the talk, and then and, you know, I mean, to be totally fair, some of this is is I have a hobby, and if I can incorporate that into Redis, then that's more fun. But I'm also more engaged, and then then I get more excited, and and that comes through, right?
00:54:35
Speaker
Absolutely. And so there's value in doing that. But it actually is kind of a really good yeah example because a lot of Redis is like, I mean, putting everything in RAM is going to be at a higher cost than putting stuff on disk.
00:54:51
Speaker
Right. I mean, memory is more expensive than disk. Sure. Now, you know, Flash is getting to the price point where they're kind of meeting with. slower ram is kind of meeting with faster flash and your price points are starting to merge a little bit yeah and so that's becoming less true um and so you know it's getting to price point where you you know uh ram's getting cheap enough that it can compete um but you know actual spinning iron is always going to be cheaper um
00:55:24
Speaker
And so, you know, if you, if your performance requirements, you don't need like lightning fast performance, then, you know, you can just not, you don't you don't necessarily need to use Redis as a database. um The thing that we, you know, one of the things we really excel at is this idea real time database.
00:55:40
Speaker
Like, you know, so if you need it to be super fast, like even if you're just using it to cache like tables, that are, you know, you prefetch the cache and it's like, well, here's my state dropdowns here in Redis and here's my, all my like billing codes or, you know, whatever whatever sorts of dropdown things you need to populate.
00:55:57
Speaker
That's low hanging fruit that you can put into Redis and get a lot of performance scans. um But, but anything that needs to be real time, like, like gaming, like, like you need, you want like video game ranking into gaming, right? ah You know, who, you know ah you need, or,
00:56:13
Speaker
Just the communications and gaming. There's a lot of gaming scenarios here. Fraud detection is another popular one where you want to happen as fast as possible. You can't wait. You want to catch the fraud as it happens. um So Redis is great for those sorts of options because it's real time because the speed is is mission critical.
00:56:31
Speaker
um Displaying aircraft tracking data is actually really on brand with that because it's it's real time. i'm I'm showing the aircraft as it, you know, the signal comes from the aircraft at the speed of light.
00:56:43
Speaker
And then I pick it up and it goes to my computer and it's into Redis in milliseconds. And the the things are doing like, you know, 600 miles an hour or whatever. in Yeah. or So, yeah. And so, uh, in fact, it's kind of funny cause I'll look at my demo and see where the aircraft is at.
00:56:58
Speaker
And then I'll look at like flight aware. And, uh, my aircraft is the one on my demo is showing me actual location aircraft or flight aware is lagging by a couple of minutes. No kidding. Okay. So that's big for aircraft. It's a couple minutes. I can move. Yeah. Yeah. This is actually pretty significant.
00:57:14
Speaker
Yeah. um And so, um so the radio stuff is very much a real time sort of use case. I love it. ah yeah So it fits better than I could have ever hoped.
00:57:27
Speaker
Well, I'm definitely going to check it out for sure. going have check that Yeah, absolutely. Let me know if you have any questions. I'll help you out. Yeah, for sure. um So let's do our our next segment of
Remote Work Challenges
00:57:37
Speaker
of what we do here on the forward slash. We call this Ship It or Skip It.
00:57:45
Speaker
Ship or Skip. Skip. Ship Skip. Everybody, we got to tell us if you ship or skip. All right. So the first one, we we came up with a few based on our conversation the other day. We had a ah really interesting conversation. So what about like,
00:57:58
Speaker
um It was kind of a um an interesting thing related to remote work, but related to time zones. So what do you what like?
00:58:09
Speaker
You're doing remote work. I'd say you're probably like a ship it on that. Tell us about your opinion when it comes to like the you know time zone, disparate time zones with ah with with teams. What do you think? Is that a ship it? Is that a skip it?
00:58:20
Speaker
Uh, if this, the time zones are far apart, skip it. Okay. You just can't coordinate. You, you end up in this vicious cycle where someone does a bunch of work all night and then you look at it first thing in the morning and then it's wrong.
00:58:32
Speaker
And then you tell them it's wrong and they're like okay, well I'll do that tomorrow. And then you, uh, you know, and then you wait 24 hours to find out whether they did it right or not. And it actually just slows you down. Um, there's another, uh, skip it as well that I related to this.
00:58:48
Speaker
is the idea of everyone needs to be remote or everyone needs to be on site, but you don't have a mix. Okay. Because if you have, I ran into this where you'd have rooms of people with a phone link, you know, back when we get in a conference room and then, you know, we didn't have TVs everywhere. We just had, you know, the phone systems and you'd literally watch the people in one room, mute the phone, have a side conversation and then unmute it and then say something.
00:59:13
Speaker
even though we were quote one team. Sure. Yeah. We weren't one team. We were two teams. And because the, the bandwidth of communication you had with that individual, metaphorically speaking, um,
00:59:27
Speaker
needs to be comparable for you to feel like you're all on even footing and are all on one team. And if there's a disparity there, then that, then you ah just human psychology drives out to be two teams.
00:59:39
Speaker
Sure. So everyone's gotta be i'm totally down on a remote ship it. I I've been working remote for the last five years. Love it. I don't want to go back. Um, uh, working with people that are very far away in time zones, skip it.
00:59:55
Speaker
Um, and working, having sort of this hybrid remote, not remote, skip it. I can't argue with any of that. We, I know it at Caliberty when we do our, you know, we'll have like these meetings where we do, you know, kind of an all hands sort of a thing. And even though, you know, I'm at the corporate headquarters,
01:00:14
Speaker
and I'm doing a presentation or whatever, we will we might have people in a room. i will do my part from my desk so that the experience is the same. Because if i I'm in the room with a bunch of people and we're co-located, they'll ask a question and I'll i'll answer it just directly instead of, I'll forget, oh, I forgot to answer, you know, re-ask the question, yeah repeat the question to everybody. so But I think it does make for a better experience when, you know, all the presenters are are definitely going to, you know, treat basically everybody remotely.
01:00:40
Speaker
i think that evens, as you said, that kind evens the playing field. So... I like it. Now the the time zone thing is qualified by the working the same time zone, not being physically in the same time zone. Yeah. So I've had coworkers in the, in the UK, for example, that just work second shift.
01:00:55
Speaker
Yeah. That's perfectly fine. I had, there was a gentleman I worked with at a second gauge learning when I was there and he was, ah I thought, you know, he was, he was,
01:01:07
Speaker
just worked in town or just worked remote. He was in the Eastern time zone or something. Cause he was always with us. And, uh, he, he mentioned something one day he's like, well, well I'm in India, so, you know, I can't, I can't do that. Or i don't remember what it was like, we were going to go to one the happy hour something And he's like, well, I'm in, I'm actually in India. I can't it. I'm like, what you're in India? Are you kidding me? What? So, so yes, I I'd say that would be proof that work as long as you work in the same time zone, it can definitely work. We should all just work UTC. That's, that's the correct answer.
01:01:34
Speaker
my family gets the whole thing about, you know, cause we just did daylight savings time recently, of course. And that argument comes up every time. And and every time they say it and the the geek, the computer geek in me is like, well, if we're going to let's get rid of the data science, I'm sure. Yes, of course. But if you want to really do it right, just make everybody go to UTC and we'll solve the problem. We don't need time zones. We don't put everybody on UTC and we're, we're good to go.
01:01:58
Speaker
Yeah. yeah um We always have the joy to, I don't know if you work with a lot of European customers, I'm i'm guessing probably not a ton. Not, not a ton of our customers, but but I work with people that work for those customers over in, you know, like different areas. Yeah.
01:02:11
Speaker
And you get that joyous time that I think we're in right now, or we just missed, uh, where, uh, America changes their time zone and Canada changes the time zone, but Europe doesn't. Yeah. we And so, and that mean creates all these calendar conflicts that weren't there before.
01:02:24
Speaker
No. And I have one of my, one of the weirdest things that ever had. We had a, one of my colleagues, lives in um is it newfoundland and they're like like half an hour there i was like a half hour thing there and i'm like what are you talking about it's 8 30 or whatever i'm like that doesn't make any sense to me it didn't my brain did not want to compute that so india's like that too they they have one time zone for the entire uh country but it's half an hour off oh wow because because otherwise they just split the country in half and it would be half in one time zone and half the other oh i see but it's only a time zone wide So it just made more sense to just go on the half hour.
01:02:57
Speaker
I got you.
Programming Languages: TypeScript vs. JavaScript vs. Ruby
01:02:58
Speaker
All right. So remote work, we kind of covered a couple of things there, ship it or skip it, but i couldn't I couldn't disagree with you. I loved all that. All right. um This one we may not agree on.
01:03:08
Speaker
TypeScript. Skip it. Say more words. um i will completely own the fact that I'm wrong.
01:03:20
Speaker
i'm good I'm going to be steadfast in my wrongness. I love it. um So, um yeah, I just I spent a long time getting out of Java development to do a lot of JavaScript.
01:03:31
Speaker
And one of the things i liked about JavaScript was that the types were loosey goosey and um and now TypeScript is making them not loosey goosey again. And so I just sort of fundamentally have a visceral reaction against it.
01:03:43
Speaker
ah I acknowledge completely that if I come across a existing code base, it's poorly tested. that the types are a thing that I can lean on. Sure. Like I've done this in Java where it's like, well, let's make a change and see what breaks. Okay. Well, this isn't being used.
01:03:59
Speaker
Right. You can't do that in JavaScript. Right. TypeScript will let you do those sorts of things. You can find mistakes like coming out of this class. Oh yeah. Someone is using it. um Now, but TypeScript is kind of does a mediocre job of this because the types aren't real. Right.
01:04:16
Speaker
They compile away. They transpile away. Transpile away. And so um it's one of those things where I have to know JavaScript in order to be a TypeScript developer. Anyhow. and ah and And I've built libraries for TypeScript ah that are up on or in TypeScript that are up on ah NPM.
01:04:35
Speaker
Yeah. And ah the big thing that I found with TypeScript that I get when I do my bonny build these in TypeScript is they give me a false sense of security because I'm assuming that because I have a type, that means I don't have to validate my arguments.
01:04:49
Speaker
Right. But I totally do because some of the people are going to call from JavaScript. And they're not goingnna get they're not going to get the red squiggles that tell them they're doing it wrong. Right. um If you're building like just a website and you're not building libraries, I think TypeScript is actually the correct choice, even though I don't like it.
01:05:06
Speaker
Right. Because, I mean, theory, if you you properly test all your code and everything, you should be able to make changes with confidence. But we all know how often projects are consistently and properly tested.
01:05:20
Speaker
And so it's foolish to rely on that because you're relying on someone to do the right thing. And any plan that requires humans to do the right thing has a flaw, which is humans. Yes. um Yes.
01:05:31
Speaker
And so i I prefer JavaScript, but I know I'm wrong. Well, I, am not a strong JavaScript. That's not been a language that I, that I excelled at It's funny. Cause I think I loved Ruby. And I know we mentioned that they when we were talking, you were a big Ruby fan as well.
01:05:52
Speaker
And i loved Ruby for that. Lucy goosey. I kind of I don't know, maybe i learned it at the right time in my life where I like, Oh, this is refreshing. ah So I, but I, but I'm not that way about JavaScript. I think I've, I'm, such a long time Java guy that like yeah that, that, that types.
01:06:06
Speaker
And I, I think it's for me, it's more about, cause a lot of stuff I do now with my role, I don't get to work on teams anymore, but I, my, I envision like if I was working on a team, like i don't think I'd want to work on a team in Ruby because of all the loosey goosiness.
01:06:18
Speaker
One thing that I discovered in Ruby that I always bring up to people is like, you can change the method or the, you know, what, what happens on, on, on, ah on a specific object, not on the class, but on an object. So can have, you know,
01:06:30
Speaker
a list of ducks and you can go down the list and then it would go quack, quack, quack, woof. And you're like, wait a minute, why is one duck woofing? Like, why are, how did a dog, you know, you can do it on one object.
01:06:41
Speaker
You shouldn't, but you can. And that's, those are the things that just blow my mind and and make me never want to use that language. But, but I do, I think TypeScript for me, I would have to lean on TypeScript. Otherwise I'd have to give up saying that I can actually do front end development because I don't know what was doing.
01:06:56
Speaker
so So I'm going to hold on to it, yeah right? yeah like Because you know I actually do like React and and TypeScript with React. In the case of Ruby, the metaprogramming model was really sophisticated. And honestly, I think that was a terrible thing.
01:07:08
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of Rubyists who love it. And I get why it's fun. Right. But it lets you write some of the most glorious spaghetti that I've ever seen. Way worse than anything you can do in JavaScript. And JavaScript actually has a lot of metaprogramming things that you can do. Oh, it sure does. Because classes are a lie.
01:07:25
Speaker
no They're just a fiction that's created by the ah you know the syntax of the language. And you just have prototypal inheritance where I just have a hash and I look in the hash and if it's there, then I use it And if it's not, I go to the next thing in the chain and the next thing in the chain and go up and up and up until hit the top.
01:07:40
Speaker
um And at any point, you can take any of those instances because there are no classes in JavaScript. There's only instances. um There's a class keyword, but it's not a class. Right. Not in the sense why like we would think of it. It's syntactic sugar on a function, which creates an object, which has a particular prototype.
01:07:58
Speaker
And, and then you can, you can modify any of those prototypes in the chain. And so you can have an instance of a thing, the thing that you think is an instance, and change the value of it, change a function on it in the same way you could in Ruby.
01:08:10
Speaker
yeah Or you could change it on the prototype that is in, I'm air quoting here, the class, right which is really just another ah object with properties. And so, yeah, you can do some terrible, terrible stuff in JavaScript in the same way that some terrible, terrible stuff in Ruby.
01:08:26
Speaker
ah But Ruby's got more more capabilities there. And you really get this code where, like I call it, you know, you got the dry, right? Don't repeat yourself. Right. Ruby lets you do things where your code becomes arid, where it's, it's arid really isn't dry.
01:08:43
Speaker
That's what arid stands for. And where it's so dried up that you can't understand what does anymore. And, and that's not good that, you know, sure. You've abstracted away everything.
01:08:58
Speaker
and now everything is configuration yeah yeah but that now I can't read it right you know you you always have to write something down somewhere right before anything's going to happen it's like and so and there's this tendency to to dry overdraw your code and metaprogramming is usually the preferred tool for that and nice it's that right once uh code yeah
AI Chatbots and Redis
01:09:23
Speaker
All right. So we had down here, AI chat bots on ship it or skip it.
01:09:29
Speaker
Oh, that's a good one. um Oh, I think skip it. Okay. ah Because they're annoying. yeah You go to some website and it's like, you know, it's, it's like, it's, it's like a,
01:09:45
Speaker
it's like Clippy comes up and helps you. and Everyone hated Clippy too, right? yeah i You know, i go to website, I don't want a chat bot to say, hey, you want to ask me about these things here? Whether it's AI or there's a human mind, I don't i don't care, they're kind of annoying.
01:09:59
Speaker
um Also, I think a lot of people are, i think we talked about this the other day, uh, back in the nineties when the internet was new, everyone had to have a website, but no one knew why.
01:10:09
Speaker
Right. And I think now everyone wants to put an AI chatbot on their website, but they don't know why. And, and so I, and the reason I say skip it is because I think a lot of people are wasting money on this when they don't need it. Um, that that's, that's really the, and they're annoying.
01:10:26
Speaker
Yeah. I think that the, the bulk of the ones that we've seen are, are are definitely done poorly. You know, it's like, yeah i want to do this. And then it says, oh, I understand you want to do these three things. One of these three things is like, the none of those are related to what I'm trying to do here. Like, if i think if done well, that's a big if, right? yeah If done well, I think it could it could be great to help, you slim down some of our call center, you know, needs and all of that. I get it. Yes. But yeah I don't know. the the The experience thus far has been
01:11:01
Speaker
don't less than stellar, let's just put it. Yeah. So I'm i'm with you on that. I'm skipping for now until the the, you know, state of the art becomes a little more compelling. i would I will say that if you've, you're doing like some sort of rag implementation how to make your interrogatable documentation, that's my term, not a term of art.
01:11:19
Speaker
um That, that's, that can be very useful. but then that's just using an LLM that's got additional information. And that's like, know, which is kind of what I do every day with chat GPT anyhow. And you always need to check that though, you know, because yeah it'll make crap up. And yeah um it's like, I feel like the LLMs are like two year olds.
01:11:40
Speaker
Uh, like if you are a two or three year old, you ask, you ask ah like a really little kid questions and it hasn't occurred to them that they could say they don't know. They just have to provide an answer and they just start making stuff up. And um like, like when i when my kids were young and I do this with kids, when I get a chance as I'll ask them very open-ended questions that don't have really clean answers and just to see what they say, because it's endlessly amusing and, and it's good for them actually, because it helps them to think. Right. Yeah. Um,
01:12:07
Speaker
and But yeah, they'll they'll ill butll come up with some really funny ideas. It's it's quite delightful. and the the But LLMs are kind of doing the same thing, but they sound like adults and they sound really confident. Yeah, they're very confident in what they're saying. And they're not very forthcoming when they're guessing, right? Like, right now like I'm going to say this in a very confident way. And it sounds very compelling because i use fancy words and stuff. But I have like 30% confidence that I know what I'm talking about here. But I'm going let you know that.
01:12:31
Speaker
I will do a shameless plug. If you are building a AI chat bot, then Redis is a good candidate for a semantic caching. but but you So you can take the query that someone asked and create an embedding off of the query and then send that to an LLM, the query, not the embedding, and then take the answer you get back and cache it with that embedding.
01:12:52
Speaker
And then you can go in and look into Redis and find out when someone asked a similar question, ah you can say, well, let's go look in the cache first to see if there's an answer to this question.
01:13:03
Speaker
soant So it's almost like like almost like a like a knowledge base kind of a thing. like it's It's literally as someone asked this question already, but it's different enough that... Like normally you would cache off, but just like, like if you're caching, like a patient ID, you just look up the patient ID number and then it's like, either it's there it's not. Right.
01:13:19
Speaker
But if someone's asking a question of an LLM, like, why are my photos blurry? Yeah. ah Then you, you the LLM answers that question. And then you put ah that answer in the cache and Redis along with the embedding of wire ah that you get out of asking the question, why are my photos blurry?
01:13:36
Speaker
Then when someone comes around and says, why are my pictures out of focus? Then you create embedding and you'll look at Reddit and say, well, this matches. It's close enough. Yeah. The embedding. And then we just similar. We return the answer.
01:13:47
Speaker
And now you don't have to hit the LLM. So it's it's actually a good way to. to improve performance for one, but also just to reduce cost because that one of us, they ain't cheap. Yeah, especially if you're, you know, that all that generation and even if you're running it locally, it's going to cost computer and stuff. that But if you're, you know, sending tokens over the wire to some of the big guys, you're paying for that.
01:14:08
Speaker
That's cool. That's a neat approach. I hadn't thought of that before. You put that in front of a RAG implementation of as well, of course. sure Yeah. I like that. All right. Fantastic. So one thing we always like to ask um our folks, are our guests is what what do you see as the the future trends and opportunities in the industry? You know, kind of that vision. What are what are you seeing you know coming up here in the and maybe the distant or not so distant future for our industry?
01:14:36
Speaker
um I mean, it's it's actually a really unpredictable time right now because so this is a sort of a sea change. AI has sort of changed. it is a change on the scope of when the internet happened in the nineties.
01:14:49
Speaker
Like I graduated from college in 94. And so perfect time to graduate, right you know, just ride. I've been riding that way for the last 30 years. It's been great. um And we're going through another change like that. And there's just, you know, I don't think that we're going lose programmers.
01:15:05
Speaker
um You know, don't, I don't think that that, that that job's just going to go away because, know, there's still this thing where you have to like the act of programming is actually just creating the detailed specification.
01:15:19
Speaker
I need to think of all the permutations. This is why I like a four GLs always failed or like those drag and drop programming solutions that would always come up with. It's Hey, if we just drag and drop the business people could do instead, except that they don't think of all the edge cases and all the, all the conditions and all the permutations you can run into.
01:15:36
Speaker
And I think that in some ways we may end up using, and I'm just spitballing here. Um, and we may end up, yeah AI can' is kind of like those tools in a way, except you type at it. and It'll generate a bunch of code and it's pretty smart. It's a lot smarter than that.
01:15:52
Speaker
um But there's still this thing where it's letting me build big chunks, but it I need, to as a developer, I still need to compose those big chunks. And I need to look at that code and vet it to make sure it's doing an okay job.
01:16:04
Speaker
um What we should have added to our skip or ship the list is vibe coding, which is total skip.
01:16:13
Speaker
um
Global Tech Workforce Shifts
01:16:15
Speaker
because there there's always there's going to be a human in the loop. And ultimately, this is it's kind of like IntelliSense on steroids.
01:16:27
Speaker
um i i but um I betrayed my early Microsoft days by saying IntelliSense as opposed to autocomplete. And I knew exactly what you're talking about yeah because I was there with you. but But it kind of is that, where it's like, well, I can just create the entire class by telling you what the class needs to do.
01:16:41
Speaker
Um, as, but I'm still, someone said, uh, it just expands my scope. This is how you actually get 10 X developers. You use AI. Um, does that mean that we don't need as many developers? Well, I don't know. You know, maybe we'd just need more software, right?
01:16:57
Speaker
um these are not mutually exclusive right ah well historically whenever we had big technical innovation it just reach leads to more plenty right um as as opposed to you know not as many people farm now but everyone's fat
01:17:13
Speaker
so we run out of food right Well, that's kind of where i my my my take was on the the AI thing. like is Because it's never really been, you don't really hear a lot of software shops that are like, you know, or people, you know, shops that are developing software. They're like, man, what are we going to do with all these developers?
01:17:32
Speaker
You know, I just don't know what to do with all that. We've got developers coming out our ears, right? And so it'd be great if we could actually catch up, you know, and so we could do more and make me and and I love the way somebody phrased it at a a conference I was at. They were like, you know, we can kind of make our our humans superhuman and and we can, you know, do more with with folks.
01:17:50
Speaker
I think the, for a little while, there's going to be that dip, like you're saying, it may be a little bit of a dip where people are like wait a minute, we can save money. But I think once people, that light bulb moment comes on. I think it's going to be, we're going to be able to do more. We're going to be, yeah you know, so anyway, I'm with you on I think a lot of the dip that we're seeing right now here in the United States and and in and in Europe ah has more to do with the fact that we've, we spent a couple of years proving that remote work totally works.
01:18:14
Speaker
And everyone's like, you know, you're right. We should do that. We should totally open up a shop in, in, in Costa Rica and Bulgaria and Poland. And so what's happening is is a lot of jobs are shifting. I think that's more of the impact because we you can pay someone in Costa Rica a lot less and they can use chat GPT just as well as I can.
01:18:34
Speaker
yeah And then all of a sudden it's cheaper, right? and And while that kind of sucks for developers in the in the US because the market is kind of, it's a little tight right now. sure But um but as as a business, that is the right decision to make.
01:18:50
Speaker
um you know, I mean, it sucks for me as an individual, right. But, you know, mean, that's what businesses are for, right. You know, you need to, you know, um, maximize shareholder value, right.
01:19:03
Speaker
That's their job. There are machines that do that. And so, uh, yeah, so but I think that's actually some of what we're seeing, uh, with, uh, some of the layoffs that we've had over the, over the last, uh, six months or so is absolutely, I know we have openings in Costa Rica, um,
01:19:21
Speaker
but we don't have any developer openings in the U S you don't live in there too. Yeah. Yeah. You know, ah it's kind of funny. Actually, I met a couple of the people that are working on the, on the, on the Costa Rican team and they're both expats. Neither one of her are Costa Rican.
01:19:39
Speaker
but So and yeah, there's something except for that. It's gorgeous down there. But when we were pillar, actually, we talked about opening up a shop down there. Cause you think about it. You could do like a big retreat, fly everyone down to Costa Rica. We were, there was like some resort for sale on the beach and we're like, we're looking the price. i Like, yeah, we can buy that.
01:19:56
Speaker
That like a developer center to me. That's what that yeah We've got to do a development center and a developer center. And then, you know, we can bring clients down there and say, we're going to spend the next two weeks pounding out your requirements and figuring what you want to build. And you know,
01:20:07
Speaker
This is our training center. We're going to fly everyone to Costa Rica. Man. Yeah, it was a solid idea. We never did it. but That sounds really cool. man We wanted to have a forge in Costa Rica. It would have been would' have been glorious.
01:20:20
Speaker
i would I would have went down there for six months to to help. Of course. ah yeah Take one for the team. you know Yes, yes, yes. It's the cross you bear. Yeah, yeah. yeah all right. um So I know for me, after our conversation, I'm going to absolutely go check out. So tell me your GitHub again. What is your, like, where can I get some of the cool things? My GitHub account is Guy Royce, github.com slash Guy Royce.
01:20:46
Speaker
Royce, like the, the, how'd you start phrasing it earlier? It's Royce, like Rolls Royce, but without the money. Okay. um But it's not spelled that way. um So ah hopefully my name's in the title and you can just look the title and and spell it. But most people spell Royce, R-O-Y-C-E.
01:21:03
Speaker
i spell it R-O-Y-S-E, which has been the bane of my existence because I have to always stress the S when i spell it for people. I have to spell my name even when I do spell it. So I have to, mine my name is car man, C A R M A N. Even when I do spell it to people, they're, they're on autopilot and they type it into computer systems, N. And they'll be like, well, I don't see your appointment or I don't have your reservation or I don't whatever.
01:21:28
Speaker
I'm like, okay, you probably just misspelled the name, put A N and I'll be darned. It's there. ah You can also go to guy.dev and then that should have, I think that has links to ah my GitHub and stuff.
01:21:40
Speaker
Honestly, if you type Guy Royce into Google and you spell my last name wrong, it will correct you. Nice. Those computers. i'm For the ne the real nerds out there, it's ah ah Romeo Oscar Yankee Sierra Echo. That's how you spell it.
01:21:57
Speaker
Nice. so And I have a joke about someone else's name, but we'll do that after we're done recording. Yeah, yeah. We'll have to do that off mic. um You mentioned also that Redis is going to be having
Closing Remarks and Announcements
01:22:08
Speaker
the release eight. Is that correct? That's coming out very soon. So that's something that absolutely you should check out. It's coming out in a week or two, maybe even by the time this this recording is released.
01:22:18
Speaker
Yeah. ah So definitely check that out. All right, we're going to do our lightning round.
01:22:40
Speaker
for the lightning round. This is a super serious stuff, right? these This is the most important segment of that we do. i can tell it's going to be really serious. This is where we get into the really, the the hard hitting, right? The stuff that is very provocative. People are going to be, they're they're thinking differently after this. You know what i mean? Like this yeah this is really good stuff.
01:23:03
Speaker
Okay, I'll go through 10 questions and there are correct answers. So be careful. Number one, if you were really hungry, would you eat a bug?
01:23:16
Speaker
Um, yes. In fact, I actually almost ate a stink bug once because it was in, in, um, they got in the glass that i was washing my pills down with. So, Ooh, that would not be fun.
01:23:26
Speaker
Okay. Um, LA or New York.
01:23:36
Speaker
Can I say none of the above? None of the above. Okay. All right. i will I guess if I had to choose, I'd probably do. Yeah.
01:23:47
Speaker
and Probably l LA if I had to choose because the weather's nicer at least. Okay. I like that. How do you feel about cranberries? I love cranberries. Okay, good.
01:24:00
Speaker
And the band too. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I didn't even think about that, but that's a good point. They are a good band. What's your favorite car? um
01:24:14
Speaker
ah Once with wheels that go round and round. So you're very specific and is what you're saying. Yeah. Um, actually, actually I've been kind of, uh, uh, thinking about buying a Jeep lately, Jeep Wrangler. So I think that could be fun.
01:24:28
Speaker
Nice. Mostly cause I want to trick it out as my, uh, ham radio mobile. When I, so Ocala is horse country where I grew up in Florida. So it's like, it's like I almost took a, took a chunk of Kentucky and dropped it in the middle of Florida.
01:24:41
Speaker
So there were a lot of, don't Rednecks, right? yeah I grew up with the people that they, they led their CVs and stuff and they would have these big, huge antenna. So they'd go driving past your house and all your speakers in your house, if they're not guarded or, you know, shielded yeah very well, they'd start, you know, CB is actually really bad about that in particular.
01:24:58
Speaker
Yeah. And, um, Wake you up in the of the night. And the bandwidth, the, the, the wavelength and such that you actually have to have a really big antenna to do it effectively. So, and they would love that. They would just keep you up and wake you up the middle of night. Okay. we're on, I think question four, this will be the fifth sourdough or wheat sourdough.
01:25:19
Speaker
Hmm. I'm working on that.
01:25:23
Speaker
Uh, if you could travel back in time, what period of time would you go to?
01:25:32
Speaker
I think I'd go all the way back to the Stone Age, ah just because then I could just be a caveman and just live very hand to mouth in in a sort of hunter-gatherer positive sort of way.
01:25:49
Speaker
If I ended up in any other like historical period, like ancient Rome or something like that, I'd probably just get killed. Yeah.
01:25:58
Speaker
Or enslaved or something like that. And those don't sound like good outcomes. No, yeah I like that. That's a good answer. Okay. Kind of would be, you could, you could be, you could choose to be ah loner and you'd probably have enough, you know, knowledge about the world based on Cause it's not like you have to go back to being a stone age.
01:26:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, it's not like I forget how to make gunpowder. Right. Exactly. That's like, that's like the science fiction fantasy. Everyone has their head. It's like, I'm going to go back in the past and then I'm going to make gunpowder. Yeah. I'm going to be the warlord.
01:26:26
Speaker
Yeah. Nate Bargatze had a great bit about that. He's like, you know, I think if I went back in time, you know, see somebody, you know, and, and I'd be like, you know, Hey, one of these days you're going to be able to talk on a phone. You'll be able to just carry a phone in your pocket. And they'd be like, really? How's that? And like, I think I'd be terrible at that. Cause I, I don't think I've made a difference in the world at all. I i wouldn't know. Yeah. My second choice would be, let's go back to the seventies.
01:26:51
Speaker
Okay. Um, um, And then, because I would know everything to invest in. and Yeah, the Back to the Future thing. Yeah, yeah. All right. We're at six, I think.
01:27:02
Speaker
ah Favorite childhood TV show?
01:27:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:13
Speaker
when I was really, really, really little, uh, I liked that cartoon that had grape ape in it. Uh, so that that's going way, way, way back. Like all the people listening to is like great, babe. What the, what the hell is that? yeah Um, things that I remember watching avidly is I really liked the $6 million dollar man.
01:27:29
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That was good. Especially the episode Bigfoot. Um, and, uh, Bigfoot, uh, fun fact was played by Andre the giant in those episodes. Was it really? Yeah.
01:27:40
Speaker
No way. Okay. Now gonna have to go watch that. I liked Wonder Woman. That was out at the same time. Yeah, yeah. Well, they did some crossovers, too. Yeah, they sure did. Didn't they? Or am I? eight That's correct. Or is that the Mandela effect?
01:27:51
Speaker
Probably. Let's see. <unk>oo luoooo Name one of the seven dwarfs. ah Sleepy. My favorite.
01:28:02
Speaker
That checks out. ah
01:28:08
Speaker
I think this may be, is this our second last? ah Sour Patch Kids or circus or fresh circus peanuts. This this is specific here. ah that That actually matters a lot. They they need to be fresh circus peanuts. I read it wrong.
01:28:21
Speaker
Stale Sour Patch Kids or fresh circus peanuts. That's no-brainer, fresh circus peanuts. I would have chose those over fresh Sour Patch Kids. Okay, fair. All right, and our final question is,
01:28:33
Speaker
Drumroll, please. Let's see what ah ah Do you know how to salsa dance? No.
01:28:45
Speaker
I don't either. You can dance if you want to. You can leave your friends behind. That's right. I picked up what your pick you're putting down. there Yes, that was what I was putting down. Okay, good, good.
01:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's possible that we're both Gen Xers. Yeah, we we are. we are. I think we were more near the same time for sure. This has been the forward slash. I'm your host, James Carmen. and again, thank you to our guest, Guy Royce. You've been a fantastic guest and can't wait to hear the episode.
01:29:13
Speaker
Thanks for having me.