Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Developers Hangouts podcast.
Speaker: My name is James, and today I have a special guest.
Speaker: Why don't you introduce yourself and then let's hang out.
Speaker: Right on.
Speaker: Thank you, James.
Speaker: I'm Will Button.
Speaker: I run the YouTube channel DevOps for Developers.
Speaker: I also co-host the Adventures in DevOps podcast.
Speaker: And I'm a senior DevOps engineer for a company called Polygon Labs, which if you follow the blockchain cryptocurrency space at all, you might know.
Speaker: be aware of them.
Speaker: And yeah, so I do DevOps stuff.
Speaker: So for the people at home who may not know what DevOps is, right?
Speaker: Some of us developers like to avoid DevOps as much as possible.
Speaker: Oh, same.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Can you give us a quick rundown of like what a DevOps engineer would do or what they do in like a team overall?
Speaker: Just so people have an understanding.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so my goal is like I treat the software engineering teams as my customer.
Speaker: And so my goal as a DevOps engineer is to make it as easy as possible for them to deploy their applications the right way, even when they don't know what the right way is.
Speaker: So like whenever they merge to main and it kicks off the deploy, I want that automated.
Speaker: And they may not know what high availability and fault tolerance are or that it needs to be behind a load balancer and it needs to run over SSL.
Speaker: They may not know any of that.
Speaker: So I try to build the infrastructure that makes all of that happen automatically for them.
Speaker: Which sounds great.
Speaker: So like people can think of DevOps almost like what Vasell does for your like side project or your website or whatever, where you deploy it, you push to main and then all this magic happens and then it's high availability and it's there on the edge in some cases, depending on what you're using.
Speaker: It's kind of the same idea, but much more complex and much more bespoke to a company.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like, um,
Speaker: It's like a curated version of that specific to your organization.
Speaker: Cause like Vercel and Heroku and a few others like that.
Speaker: I still strongly recommend those, even though it takes away from my work for smaller teams and startups just getting started.
Speaker: It's a no brainer to go with them.
Speaker: And then eventually you'll outgrow that, which is where I can come in and help.
Speaker: Yep, yep.
Speaker: And that's like what we do at Clark.
Speaker: Like we have some stuff on for sale and then we have some other bespoke like GitHub actions that push out to like AWS and some other stuff.
Speaker: So yeah, we're kind of in that space where we're not big enough that we need AWS for everything or, you know, Google Cloud for everything.
Speaker: We're kind of in there.
Speaker: We can still use for sale for some stuff, but the rest of it that we need like high availability and everything else has to go over in this special world where we can replicate and add and drop.
Speaker: you know, uh, images as, as needed to, to when there's spike in traffic and things like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But we're not here to talk about work.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Work's boring.
Speaker: Like we, we talk about work all day.
Speaker: Uh, and we talk about content all day, uh, on our YouTube channels.
Speaker: Uh, let's talk fitness, which we'll, we'll knows.
Speaker: And I know about will is that we're both very passionate about fitness.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Why don't we start with why?
Speaker: Why do you do whatever you may do, whether you do functional strength or you do cardio?
Speaker: Why do you do this?
Speaker: Why is this part of your routine?
Speaker: Because I like to see other people's opinions on this because I have a very strong opinion.
Speaker: But I'd love to know why you kind of have it in your routine and why you do it.
Speaker: Yeah, for me, there's there's a couple of main driving factors.
Speaker: I think the main driving factor for me is despite being physical activity, it's actually a mental activity for me.
Speaker: It's a chance to get away from the keyboard and.
Speaker: just go and do something that's hard and physically taxing.
Speaker: And for some reason that just unlocks my brain, it lowers the stress level.
Speaker: And it's kind of like shower time a lot of times where a lot of times you'll be grinding out a hard workout and then have this idea that comes through for something that you set at your keyboard or your desk for several hours.
Speaker: banging your head against the wall trying to figure it out.
Speaker: So I think the mental aspect is one.
Speaker: The other is, you know, obviously the physical aspect.
Speaker: I like being in shape.
Speaker: I kind of treat my body like it's a rental car.
Speaker: And so like when you get the rental car,
Speaker: The speedometer goes to 120 miles an hour.
Speaker: I'm just like, well, does it really do that?
Speaker: Or is that just the number on the dial?
Speaker: So just kind of pushing the limits, seeing what is possible.
Speaker: Yeah, I feel like we're very much aligned there.
Speaker: So, yeah, mine is very for mental health more than anything.
Speaker: I mean, like physical health, that's one thing.
Speaker: Like, you know, I feel like we live in a very shallow world where physical appearance is a big driver and blah, blah, blah, which has no effect on me at all.
Speaker: I couldn't care if I had abs, but if I can, right.
Speaker: But if I can squat 450, that's way more impressive to me.
Speaker: And I'm the only one that sees it.
Speaker: Um, but yeah, it's very much a mental health thing for me.
Speaker: It allows me to, to sort of stop thinking, um,
Speaker: Because as soon as I wake up in the morning, if I wake up at 4 a.m., that's it, I'm awake.
Speaker: There's no going back to sleep.
Speaker: There's no like, oh, yeah, I can go back to sleep for two more hours or three more hours.
Speaker: No, that's it, I'm awake.
Speaker: My brain immediately is like, hey, you've got like 2,000 ideas and they're all in here.
Speaker: Let's fire them off and think about them.
Speaker: Let's work on them all right now.
Speaker: Right now.
Speaker: Head is hot, brain is going.
Speaker: So I spend my morning.
Speaker: So whatever time I get up, usually I'll sort of lay in bed and just not move because we have two dogs.
Speaker: And once one of them is awake, that's kind of like an indicator that I'm getting up.
Speaker: So I try and stay in bed as long as possible, just so that they are not running around at like four o'clock in the morning.
Speaker: Uh, but then I go straight to my gym, which is in my garage and I work out before I even touch a keyboard, look at a keyboard or even look at my phone.
Speaker: Um, in the hopes that all that mental clarity will allow me to either center on a single idea of like, Hey, this YouTube channel or Hey, this, you know, thing at work that I've been working on, here's the solution.
Speaker: Um, and that's how it works.
Speaker: All started for me.
Speaker: That's how I got into fitness.
Speaker: It wasn't about, you know, being stronger or fitter or whatever.
Speaker: It was just that I needed something to stop my brain from going a mile a minute.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: How do you like working out alone?
Speaker: I absolutely love it.
Speaker: So I've never really worked out with a partner.
Speaker: I think the last time I worked out with a partner was when I was like maybe 18, 19.
Speaker: So it was before I came to America.
Speaker: So it was quite a while ago.
Speaker: And that was when I was in like the best shape of my life.
Speaker: And I worked out like seven days a week and all I did was work retail.
Speaker: So I had all the extra time to be in the gym and working out and, you know, you'd spend two, three hours there and it's not a big deal because you want to be social.
Speaker: And that was kind of my social hangout.
Speaker: I didn't really...
Speaker: do much else.
Speaker: Like I'd go to the gym, I'd go to work, I'd go to the club, I'd go home, repeat.
Speaker: That would be my life.
Speaker: And as I got older, I just don't find a workout partner useful.
Speaker: And I don't think it helps...
Speaker: me like i'm there to like my my goal is to get working out get heavy weights on whatever i'm doing push myself to absolute limits and then two three minutes of recovery and then just do the whole thing again right um which i found is very hard to do with a partner who may not have the same exact feeling as you do
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would agree with that.
Speaker: Like a generic person in a gym is going to be a distraction, but I've worked out, I've got a few friends who are very, very like-minded in our workout routines.
Speaker: And so we do work out together a few times a week and I find myself actually going a little bit harder when I'm with them than what I push myself to on a normal basis.
Speaker: But I do like the variety of it.
Speaker: I find that, yeah, that can really help sometimes is that if you need that extra push, having a partner can help you get that extra, maybe it's an extra five pounds on the bar or whatever, just because you're like, oh, he did it.
Speaker: He did two reps.
Speaker: I can do three reps.
Speaker: You get that mentality of like, I could do one more than you.
Speaker: But I train very differently than most people.
Speaker: I squat three times a week.
Speaker: Which is very unusual.
Speaker: Like not a lot of people will squat three times a week.
Speaker: They'll do it once.
Speaker: Oh, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I squat three times a week and I deadlift once a week and I bench once a week.
Speaker: But at every session I go to, I squat and I squat heavy because I find if I don't squat heavy, then I just feel crappy all the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I like to squat heavy.
Speaker: I change my routine up a little bit.
Speaker: Some days it's three by five.
Speaker: Some days it's five sets of five and then a drop-off set of eight.
Speaker: I have a very strict routine, which is why I'm in the thousand pound club.
Speaker: Woo!
Speaker: Which is a goal that some people have.
Speaker: But what kind of working out do you do?
Speaker: So I think you do more CrossFit, right?
Speaker: Than...
Speaker: I used to do a lot of CrossFit.
Speaker: The last, probably the last year, maybe year plus, I've been doing kettlebells.
Speaker: Oh, interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'll do kettlebells in the morning and then I'll do, it used to be walking in the afternoon and over the last few months it's turned into running.
Speaker: How do you like running?
Speaker: So I've never been a big fan of running, so I cycle.
Speaker: That's my, yeah, like I have a stationary bike.
Speaker: I don't cycle outside because I don't trust people in America to not mow me down.
Speaker: That's fair.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, how do you like running?
Speaker: How does that make you feel?
Speaker: So I've been running for about three months now, and the previous 52 years of my life, I was not a runner.
Speaker: Even just a few months ago when I first started this, I'm not even sure we could call it running.
Speaker: It was probably more like watching a polio patient with Tourette's.
Speaker: But over the last few months, I've gotten better at it and actually gotten to the point now where I can't say I enjoy running, but I enjoy the suffering aspect of it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: That sounds like my dad.
Speaker: So my dad is...
Speaker: 59?
Speaker: Yeah, he just turned 59 and my dad's run... I don't know.
Speaker: It feels like since I was a baby, but it's not.
Speaker: I know it's not.
Speaker: It's like when I was a teenager, he started to run.
Speaker: So it's been 20 plus years.
Speaker: And he's at the point now where he's like, I just want to make it to 60.
Speaker: I've done it this far.
Speaker: I just want to get to 60 and then we'll figure it out.
Speaker: But my dad still runs marathon and half marathons.
Speaker: No problem.
Speaker: Just like...
Speaker: absolutely insane to think you know my dad at 59 runs nine minute miles for 26 and a half miles i know which is nuts which is nuts to me like i i run occasional 5ks then i'm like yeah i'm done i need like a week off i need a week off or something my dad's just like yeah back to training i'm like okay good luck um yeah absolutely insane people that run just insane but then again like i've
Speaker: ride 50 plus miles on the weekend.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No problem.
Speaker: Well, I think there's that endurance aspect of it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In the early 2000s, I was a sponsored 24-hour mountain bike racer.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And so I got the endurance...
Speaker: aspect of it there.
Speaker: And there's just something to be said for taking off.
Speaker: I don't like running or even riding a bike in town just for the same reasons that you mentioned, because I don't trust anyone behind the wheel.
Speaker: But in just about 10 minutes from my house, I'm out in the middle of the desert.
Speaker: And so it's cool just to get out there because it's just you and, you know, the rattlesnakes and the coyotes and whatever else is out there.
Speaker: And you can just kind of kick back and grind it out.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Anything, you know, it's funny, we're seeing more and more people turn into fitness.
Speaker: If you look at like devs in general, so very specific to us, like more and more devs are now figuring out that like fitness helps you just like switch off your brain.
Speaker: It helps you write better code.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You can write some serious code.
Speaker: If you've had a really good workout and all the endorphin rush and everything, it's incredible what you can do after a good workout.
Speaker: Yeah, so that's what I spent the last couple months doing.
Speaker: I went off on this tangent because...
Speaker: You know, given my trade of being a DevOps engineer, one of the things I do is whenever I get an application from a software team, we load test it to see how it's going to perform in production at scale.
Speaker: And I just had this idea, like, what would that look like if I applied that to my fitness training?
Speaker: And so I started thinking this through and it's like, okay, so we get an application and we're expecting, you know, 10,000 concurrent users on it.
Speaker: So the first thing we do is hit it with a hundred thousand users and see where the seams start to come apart at.
Speaker: So I came up with this idea.
Speaker: Like I mentioned, I wasn't a runner a few months ago.
Speaker: I would run...
Speaker: maybe well a year ago, my average number of miles I would run per week was zero.
Speaker: Three months ago, it was probably three with the longest run being a mile.
Speaker: And so I thought, well, if I'm going to load test this, I need to throw more at that.
Speaker: So I signed up to do a 100k race in 100 days.
Speaker: And so I spent a hundred days training for this and, um,
Speaker: It was kind of eye-opening.
Speaker: I mean, it was really eye-opening.
Speaker: So you did a 100K race.
Speaker: So what's that in miles?
Speaker: What's that in miles?
Speaker: 62 miles.
Speaker: I haven't done it yet.
Speaker: It's coming up on Saturday.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So after this podcast has aired, he would have done it by then.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's interesting to sort of load test.
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Speaker: I kind of feel the same way.
Speaker: It's almost like that one rep max, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Where you're like, yeah, I can get, I swear I can get to 500 pounds.
Speaker: where I can do it.
Speaker: And then you try and you push and you push and you push.
Speaker: It might be a grinder in, you know, kilometer 50 to 60.
Speaker: But getting to the end and that endorphin rush and being like, yep, that challenge is done.
Speaker: What's next?
Speaker: Like, bring it on.
Speaker: That was for me why I made it to the thousand pound club was because I was like, that's like the gold star.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Speaker: If you can get a bench, a dead, and a squat, and it equals 1,000 pounds, that makes you a gold star.
Speaker: So when I hit that, it was...
Speaker: last year, I think, or maybe even the year before.
Speaker: It was a while back, and then I got COVID in November, this year gone, and it's taken me until last week to get back to £1,000.
Speaker: No kidding.
Speaker: So did you do the video, the official video to submit your £1,000?
Speaker: No, I haven't done it yet, but it's on my list of things to do.
Speaker: Like, if you saw what you saw in my garage, there's no way to do the official recording.
Speaker: LAUGHTER
Speaker: There's no room right now, but it is on the list is that, yeah, I'd like to submit it so that it's just there.
Speaker: So I can say I've done it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you get the, you get the t-shirt.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So I want the free swag, every developer's dream.
Speaker: And then two is the, it's just, yeah, I'd like to submit it.
Speaker: So I've got it cemented, but I remember hitting that for the first time and thinking,
Speaker: holy shit, I remember when all I could lift was the bar.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, like, wow, I could only do like the bar, maybe like a 25 pound plate max for some of these things.
Speaker: It's insane to see like, oh yeah, now I can casually put like 315 on the bar and squat that for 12 reps and do it again in two minutes.
Speaker: But yeah, it's insane.
Speaker: Your body is, what a weird thing your body is.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's, yeah, that's what I was just going to bring up.
Speaker: Like to go from just the bar to 315, you know, if you were to try to have that conversation with yourself when you just had the bar on,
Speaker: it's not something you can comprehend.
Speaker: And so now what's the next uncomprehendable goal from three 15, like how far can you really push this?
Speaker: How far do you have to push it before like the wheels come off the bus?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, and, and it's probably more than your mental model will let you think about, right.
Speaker: It's always a thing I say that, which is, um,
Speaker: when you hit a wall in weight training, at least like for the bench, for example, maybe your max is 225.
Speaker: And every time you put anything more than 225 on, you crumble.
Speaker: And I'm always like, yeah, in that scenario, it's like instead of 245 plates, you put a 25, a 10, a five, a two and a half, like to get you down to that level of like your body is no longer, your mind is no longer the problem.
Speaker: Because your mind is like, oh, yeah, that's less weight than I normally lift.
Speaker: Easy.
Speaker: I can do that.
Speaker: And then you just spring it up and easy, it's gone, which is a lot of the way I crawled my way up to some of the weight that I'm at was that mental model of like,
Speaker: well, if I take this 10 pound off and put like a two fives on, my body thinks that, my mind thinks that that's less weight so I can lift it.
Speaker: And that was very much my thing.
Speaker: And it's the same with development, right?
Speaker: It's breaking those things down and getting through that mental block.
Speaker: And that's why, you know, I just love lifting weights.
Speaker: Lifting weights the rest of my life, I think, at this point.
Speaker: Oh, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I can't see a day where...
Speaker: I won't do some type of physical activity, you know, knowing that I'll, I'll have to scale as I get older, but, but quitting's not in the cards.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So go ahead.
Speaker: No, please.
Speaker: I was just gonna say on the whole mental model thing, you know, um, I went to, I was in the Philippines a few years ago working for a company and,
Speaker: And I got my free diving certification there, but to, to do it, you have to go down to a certain depth.
Speaker: And I can't remember what the depth was right now, but I was struggling and struggling and struggling and couldn't get down to it because they dropped this plate on a rope down in the water, you know, and you're out in the middle of the ocean, just clear blue water, no land in sight.
Speaker: In my mind, I'm thinking the whole time,
Speaker: You know, this is the place where the whales come and give birth to their kids and they're big enough that granted they don't eat people, but one could swallow me accidentally and feel really, really bad about it, but that's not going to help me out.
Speaker: You know, so having all these thoughts running through my mind.
Speaker: And so the diving instructor,
Speaker: said, okay, look, you're struggling here.
Speaker: And I know this is all mental.
Speaker: So I tell you what I'm going to do.
Speaker: I'm going to pull the weight up to the depth that you hit before, go down, touch it, give your brain a little, little mental boost, you know, get some success back in there.
Speaker: And then we'll try again.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, go down, touch the weight, come back up.
Speaker: And the guy's just howling, laughing.
Speaker: Like, what's so funny?
Speaker: Because we're just out in the middle of the ocean hanging on this little buoy and he's just cracking himself up.
Speaker: He's like, yeah, I didn't actually raise the plate up.
Speaker: I actually lowered it.
Speaker: And easy, right?
Speaker: Like, easy in air quotes to say, you know.
Speaker: That like, yeah, your mind usually is the biggest blocker.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Your body is incredibly flexible in the sense that like pushing it to its absolute limits, there's probably more there.
Speaker: And mentally, it's what's actually blocking you from being in your absolute limits.
Speaker: Just more for protection more than anything else, right?
Speaker: Your brain tries to protect your body.
Speaker: But usually it's a lot more than you need.
Speaker: It's a lot, lot more than you need.
Speaker: Like, yeah, when I was a kid, I used to swim and I did my whole lifeguarding and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: And I remember we did like a charity swim where it's like, you know, every lap you raised one pound, which is like, you know, a dollar.
Speaker: Let's call it a dollar because it's just easier.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, yeah, I can do like 50 laps.
Speaker: No problem.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Because, you know, I'm young, like, you know, 12, 13, reasonably fit and swim a lot.
Speaker: And, like, you get to, like, I think it was, like, 25 laps.
Speaker: And I'm like, there's no way I can do 25 more.
Speaker: Absolutely not.
Speaker: And then you start to take it one lap at a time instead of counting.
Speaker: You're literally counting.
Speaker: Where's one?
Speaker: There's two.
Speaker: I'm doing it.
Speaker: And you do it one at a time.
Speaker: And I think that goes to show that, you know,
Speaker: mentally it's more of a mental block than fatigue or tiredness.
Speaker: It's just like, I've done so much.
Speaker: I can't physically do more, but there's so much left in the tank.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's why we're using micro goals really is effective.
Speaker: Like, okay, I can't do 50 more laps.
Speaker: I'll break it down to one lap and whenever one lap gets too hard, okay, I'll swim to this point, you know, and just keep setting smaller and smaller goals and then setting new goals as you achieve those.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And that carries over everywhere, right?
Speaker: Like we're talking about fitness here, but, you know, in my day-to-day, like I have a very small, everything is broken into like almost micro goals of like, hey, I know I've got to get this done today.
Speaker: Can I break it down further than just I need to finish this one-page of documentation?
Speaker: Okay, we need a new image.
Speaker: We need this props table done.
Speaker: We need this.
Speaker: We need that.
Speaker: Okay, let's break those down into micro goals.
Speaker: And that dopamine here of like, check.
Speaker: Boom, like that one's off the list, like the dopamine here is enough to like get you through the next one, even if it's something that you don't, maybe you don't enjoy it as part of your job, or it's just rough and taxing, like being able to break those things down into micro goals is, is the is the winning ticket, or at least it has been for me for the last, you know, 15 years or so.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it works for procrastination too.
Speaker: Like when you just really don't want to do it, if I have a small task identified, like, okay, I'm not going to put a lot of effort into this today.
Speaker: I'll just do this one thing and be done.
Speaker: But then you do that one thing and you're going to, well, I'm going to do another one now.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're always like, oh, okay, I can do this.
Speaker: I'll do another one.
Speaker: Another one.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, this is great.
Speaker: So outside of just generalized fitness, is there anything else you do for your mental health outside of just working out?
Speaker: Do you do any meditations or any of that kind of stuff or any... Go ahead.
Speaker: Yeah, I used to meditate pretty regularly in the morning, but over the last few months, as I've been taking on longer and longer runs to train for this 100K, I've kind of been wrapping the meditation up with the run.
Speaker: Yeah, that's definitely one way to do it.
Speaker: That's how my dad does it.
Speaker: He's like, I don't meditate, but when I'm running, it's just me.
Speaker: So I can almost have that mental model of like, I can just breathe and breathe.
Speaker: that deep breath in and all those things to help, you know, center yourself for the day.
Speaker: Um, yeah, I don't really do much meditation or like deep thinking anymore.
Speaker: Cause I think it all comes under, yeah, if I'm riding the bike, my brain is switched off and I'm thinking about my breathing and everything like that.
Speaker: And when I'm lifting weights, that's the other side of that.
Speaker: It's just like push my body to the absolute limits.
Speaker: It gives me a lot of clarity.
Speaker: Do you listen to music when you ride or work out?
Speaker: So I'm a weird person.
Speaker: Hi, I'm weird.
Speaker: So for the last few years, I listened to a lot less music because I'm partially deaf in both ears.
Speaker: And so the noise becomes too much if I listen to it.
Speaker: So when I work out at the moment, I'm listening to podcasts because it's just something.
Speaker: So it's not just silence in there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But occasionally I will put music on, but I have to put it on pretty low.
Speaker: Otherwise it like will cloud the mental clarity I get a lot because it's just a lot of noise and being partially deaf causes that kind of problem where
Speaker: you know, it's still like roughly noises and I can't hear anything.
Speaker: And the more noise there is, the worse it gets.
Speaker: Um, so yeah, I don't, I don't listen to music too much anymore.
Speaker: Uh, but what about you?
Speaker: So when I'm doing, um, strength trainings in the mornings, there's always music at the gym, but I pretty much just block it out.
Speaker: And then on my runs, I don't listen to anything at all.
Speaker: I know a couple of people that do podcasts when they're, um,
Speaker: they're working out and I've, I've tried that and I can't do it.
Speaker: I, I don't think I can multitask.
Speaker: Like I'm either going to listen to the podcast or I'm going to work out, but I can't do both.
Speaker: And then on the runs, just having that silence, like you said, you know, you think about your breathing and there's a lot of stuff to do, you know, like, oh, I need to check my form.
Speaker: Am I, is my stride length okay?
Speaker: Have I relaxed my shoulders?
Speaker: Am I standing upright?
Speaker: What's my breath?
Speaker: Is my breath disconnected from my cadence?
Speaker: And
Speaker: Oh, it's time to drink water.
Speaker: It's time to, you know, eat something or all of this other stuff to do that music is just a distraction.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I can totally see that.
Speaker: I think it took my dad a good number of years of running before he could listen to music again while running.
Speaker: Um, now that's, that's how he gets through like the real long, you know, when you're doing a really long run, you need something to, to let the brain just be stimulated a little bit.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: When you're on mile 20 of 26, I think you need something to get some dopamine that isn't just like this pain is going to end at some point.
Speaker: But yeah, I'm also kind of strange just day to day.
Speaker: I don't listen to music.
Speaker: I don't listen to podcasts.
Speaker: I have to have a television or something playing video formatted content.
Speaker: So the only time a video is not playing in my office is one, when I'm recording a podcast or two, when I'm recording a video.
Speaker: Oh, no kidding.
Speaker: Yeah, rest of the time, there'll be something playing, whether it's something I've seen like 200,000 times and it's just on in the background.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Or it's something I like.
Speaker: If it's in the comedy genre, there's not, you don't have to pay attention.
Speaker: So I don't have to worry about like, oh, I've never seen this before.
Speaker: Like, I'm going to miss the story plots.
Speaker: Like, I don't have to worry about that too much.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I just, yeah, I have to have it playing constantly.
Speaker: A lot more now is focused around YouTube and content creation and things like that.
Speaker: So I consume a lot of that content during the day.
Speaker: It just helps me.
Speaker: It just helps a lot of the noise in my head because I have so many ideas all the time.
Speaker: And I'm thinking about a million different things.
Speaker: And my job is very creative because obviously I'm DevRel and in Dev Advocacy.
Speaker: That means I've got to be thinking about YouTube and tutorials.
Speaker: Like it allows me to be like, OK, cool.
Speaker: That thing is on right here.
Speaker: And I'm focused on this one thing that's on my screen right now.
Speaker: You don't have to worry about 600 other things.
Speaker: And if I have an idea, I just pick up my phone, put it in Notion, put it back down and don't have to think about it.
Speaker: And that took me like half my career, I think, to figure out.
Speaker: Right on.
Speaker: Even at work, when I used to work in an office, I'd have my phone by my keyboard with television playing.
Speaker: And people will come to my desk and be like, you're watching television right now?
Speaker: I'm like, yeah, otherwise you're going to get zero work out of me.
Speaker: And, you know, my manager was like, yeah, whatever it takes to get the job done.
Speaker: Like if that's what you need to keep your mental clarity in that position, go for it.
Speaker: And then obviously now I work from home and have for the last three years, like it's not a big deal.
Speaker: But before that, yeah, had to have some sort of video playing.
Speaker: Otherwise, I just can't concentrate long enough to get stuff done.
Speaker: Yeah, for me, I find that I need something in the background, but it has to be something that's not going to pull my attention away, like videos or movies or podcasts.
Speaker: They'll all pull my attention.
Speaker: So I listen to either like binaural beats or lo-fi hip hop or like old 80s hair metal where I've heard the song like millions of times.
Speaker: Like a million times.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Has to be one of those.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's kind of how I treat the videos, is that it'll be a lot of stuff I've either watched before or listened to before, so that I don't have that much of concentration.
Speaker: But yeah, I used to be able to listen to white noise or brown noise or...
Speaker: Green noise, something in that range, or just music in general.
Speaker: But because I'm slowly going deaf, it's just come to the point where it just takes away so much.
Speaker: A lot of people, if you ever meet me in the world and outside, you'll notice I'll be probably wearing headphones.
Speaker: Even if it's just like I'm going to a conference, I'll be wearing headphones.
Speaker: And I'll wear headphones throughout the whole thing because the amount of background noise that happens at the events causes me to just be like, I'm done.
Speaker: I'm out.
Speaker: Can't hear anymore.
Speaker: Can't concentrate anymore.
Speaker: If you want something from me, text it to me or email it to me because I can't hear what you're saying anymore.
Speaker: Which is hard, you know, in your 30s.
Speaker: People don't expect you to be like that.
Speaker: But I think, you know.
Speaker: At one point, sooner or later, one of my ears will go fully and then I can probably get hearing aids or whatever and then it'll be easier.
Speaker: But right now it's just lots of noise causes a lot of problems.
Speaker: Yeah, hearing aids is a whole strange place because I found just as I'm getting older, my hearing is getting bad too, mainly because of...
Speaker: choices of how I listen to music.
Speaker: That's what mine's from.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And when I was young, I played in some bands and we set all the amps to 10 all the time.
Speaker: But hearing aids, they just seem to amplify the noise.
Speaker: And the thing I've noticed is really good earbuds are
Speaker: that have noise canceling in them with pass through.
Speaker: I found those to be so much higher quality and more helpful than the best hearing aid on the market.
Speaker: And so I'm waiting for this whole industry to flip where the earbud manufacturers realize, Hey, we can be working with insurance companies and get that sweet, sweet insurance cash.
Speaker: and then just completely upend the hearing aid industry.
Speaker: So I saw recently that Sennheiser, I think it was Sennheiser, have released a hearing aid style Bluetooth earbud.
Speaker: Right on.
Speaker: That's exactly for that.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: I think it was Sennheiser.
Speaker: It's either Bose or Sennheiser.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure it was Sennheiser.
Speaker: And yeah, that's exactly what it's built for.
Speaker: It's built to increase maybe the audio and pull away the rest of it so that you don't have all the background noise.
Speaker: But it was really expensive.
Speaker: I think it was like $800 or $900.
Speaker: for a set and you're like, well, I can hear, but also $900.
Speaker: And like, you know, AirPod Pros do a really good job of that.
Speaker: Like the, if you have your phone, I think it's if you have your, put your phone somewhere, you can use your AirPods to hear around you where the iPhone is.
Speaker: And that does a really good job.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've always found like, I'll just wear,
Speaker: isolating headphones all the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then that allows me to hear everybody, but pull out a lot of the noise that, that drives me nuts and really makes my ears, uh,
Speaker: sad and my brain's sad yeah yeah because your brain's working overtime trying to pick out the relevant parts of all the stuff coming in through the ears yeah and and people don't understand until you've if you've ever had like water in your ear where as as a teenager or as a kid and that's what you can't really hear everywhere it's all like muffly and like you can hear the water motion around that's what my ears sound like all the time
Speaker: And then on top of that, you get tinnitus, which is just the ringing in the ears, which is even worse.
Speaker: So imagine those two things slapped together and that's my life every day.
Speaker: And it is pretty rough.
Speaker: So yeah, I'm hoping there'll be some tech whiz out there that'll be like, hey, we've turned these earbuds into great, you know, ways to have without having to spend a million dollars and have these crappy, you know,
Speaker: Hopefully that'll come, but we'll see.
Speaker: So we're coming to the end of the episode.
Speaker: It's been 35 minutes already, which is wild.
Speaker: Why don't we'll tell people where they can find you, where they should be coming to find you if they want to talk to you or if they want to watch your content or maybe even listen to your podcast.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: So my YouTube channel is all about DevOps and I focus a lot on like the...
Speaker: like the how and why you would do DevOps.
Speaker: There's not a lot of content on there on like specifically open up your editor and type this in.
Speaker: It's like the approach of like, Hey, I need to solve this problem.
Speaker: How can I use DevOps principles to solve it?
Speaker: Um, so that's on YouTube, it's called DevOps for developers, which was my original goal there is to share DevOps principles with people writing the code every day so that they know what things are possible.
Speaker: The podcast, I'm the co-host of the Adventures in DevOps podcast, and we talk a lot about the emerging trends in DevOps implementation and then interview some people who are building DevOps type products.
Speaker: And so that's if you're into podcasts, that would be useful for you.
Speaker: If you want to talk to me directly, ask questions, hit me up about anything.
Speaker: Probably easiest to find on Twitter, 0xWillButton, and my DMs are open.
Speaker: You can follow me.
Speaker: I don't post a lot of technically useful things there, but I am a pretty competent shitposter.
Speaker: Which is like the key to Twitter, right?
Speaker: At this point, it's just shitpost and occasionally deal with some DMs.
Speaker: That's about it.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Will, thank you so much for spending the time.
Speaker: I had a blast.
Speaker: I love talking fitness, which you know, because obviously we talk about fitness in Discord.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker: I really, really appreciate it.
Speaker: No, thank you.
Speaker: It's been a blast, and I'm glad we did this.
Speaker: Absolutely.
