 Hey, everyone, and welcome to today's podcast of The Freelancers Show. Today's guest is Daniel Rosehill, and I am Joel Schabert, your host for today. And we're going to be talking to Daniel about some products near and dear to our freelancers' hearts and how to take care of some of the skills besides the fear of death, which is your major skill that you're selling. Daniel, what have you been up to lately? Hey, Joel, how are you doing? Thank you, firstly, for having me on the show. It's great to be here. I have been surviving. I feel like that's the best that one can do during the coronavirus pandemic, no? Are you building applications with ViewJS? Then you need to check out the Views On View podcast. Every week, we bring in a guest panelist from the View community and talk about the interesting things being built with View or the changes coming in its ecosystem. You can find it all at viewsonview.com. Yes, it's been quite a change for all of us. It's been crazy. So I'm based in Israel and we have been fluctuating between it's actually the lockdown started pretty early here and now we're sort of in 50% lockdown. But I'm trying to avoid mentioning virus or checking the news about it. That's my wellness tactic. That's the top wellness advice I have to offer your listeners. I have my head in the ground, in other words. Yeah, yeah, definitely. It does. Everybody's had to have some mechanism. I know for myself, when it first started, I went through one day and I didn't really have a plan and since I did, it's two of my clients needed to shut down their work, like almost immediately. And since I didn't have a lot to do, I realized, oh, this is not going to work. And so after one day, I realized I was going to have to set some goals and make some plans. So I actually set goals to start two new hobbies when the day after the coronavirus lockdown hit, I know I need something. So yeah, yeah, everybody's kind of had to come up with their own way. So, you know, we could start out and talk just a little bit about we've talked to a lot of our guests about this recently, about what kind of changes you've had to make in your business kind of post-corona and how that's affected your business and what you've done. And we've actually found lots of guests with different approaches and and they've all been informative and kind of I think it helps people to hear what other people are doing. Yeah, that's a really good question. So without trying to be flattering or, you know, pandering to the audience here, I think what this has made me realize the whole coronavirus pandemic is how resilient technology is. And I would say basically, so what I do in terms of my work as a freelance writer is I don't have the exact percentage, but let's say 80 percent on the technology side. And it's just made me kind of think that that's really the future. It's been I've seen basically in terms of my own clients, the technology clients, anything in any way related to remote work, I'd say right now is a good area to be in. So I would include in that something as simple as a VOIP system could be, you know, a SaaS application taking on Slack, for example, anything that's connecting people together remotely. I've seen, you know, just and I also think we've seen just the benefit of cloud computing, you know, speaking in very, very general terms here that, you know, my friends that work in, let's say, more old fashioned offices and they basically haven't been set up at all for what's happened. They've been kind of caught with their pants down and they're having difficulty. So it's made me kind of really appreciate some of the work that I do. And yeah, I just think that that's really I mean, in terms of what I'm doing, I'm studying for AWS is quite practitioner certification. And that really has no direct impact on my day-to-day life as a freelance writer. I just want to understand more about the mechanics of cloud computing because I think that that's basically just where, you know, this nobody saw this coming, but I'm sure there's going to be other crazy business continuity situations where it just seems like a smart place to be right now. That's my thinking about this basically. Why we've seen a lot of that here, it's, you know, and some people called it not so much of a game changer as an accelerator. So some trends that were happening started to happen much faster. Like I know the stores here that sell any device related to working from home, like extra monitors or mice and modems and things like that, which just practically sold out over two or three years. International dynamic. So I decided back in March when this hit that it was finally time to upgrade to a 720p webcam. So I started looking for a very basic Logitech webcam, you know, the most common, can't remember the exact product name, but I gave up after three months of trying to find this webcam. I was talking to like the weirdest suppliers in the country, like places that that had never had a inquiry from a member of the public before they just sold to businesses. And they're like, we don't have this webcam and we have no idea when we will. It was crazy. So I ended up getting it from this eBay webcam ironically. And that came in a couple of weeks. But yeah, and anything is the same situation here. It's like getting a webcam is like is like gold dust at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's some there's some real big trends that people suspect that we're coming along like I know over here in the States, there's been a lot of talk about how the cost of university education has gone so high that it's considered maybe not really supportable in that same model. And a couple of the bigger universities here, the real big universities have been experimenting with online courses. And that's really the virus made that trend accelerate dramatically. So I think it's something that wasn't like invented because of Corona, but massively accelerated by it. Yeah, I think examples of that. I think acceleration is just the perfect word to describe what's happened. It's kind of funny because I mean, I've been using Zoom for, you know, I'm going to say three years. I use Linux as I've talked about in several of my online blogs. And actually I started using Zoom just because their Linux client is comparatively speaking, not complete garbage. So that's what got into it. It's just kind of funny because it started out as this relatively obscure, you know, people use Skype and they're like, what's Zoom? And now everybody's like asking me, do you have a Zoom account? I'm like, what do you mean to buy the Zoom account? I mean, using Zoom for three years. So yeah, it's just kind of changed the game. And I mean, I would say this, in my opinion, I kind of have a hard time feeling sympathetic for anybody that, like my friends, companies that have not been ready for this. Because as you say, it's been, you know, we've had, you know, if you just slack and we've had VoIP and we've had video conferencing, we've had, you know, easily affordable cloud storage is basically I feel like there's very little excuses really for a company to say, oh, we only have a local server. And we haven't really thought about how people can connect to the server. We don't have a VPN. I feel like those kind of companies, the really legacy tech companies, it's hard not to feel like a judgmental person at the moment to them. But I do think this acceleration will completely, as you say, accelerate things that, you know, if there's another situation like this, that we won't have this kind of like discussion about working from home and how do you do it? Because that's very much a discussion that's happening now, I think. Yeah, I think it's going to be really interesting to see, like, you know, let's say there is a vaccine that comes out this winter, which seems now to be fairly likely. I know we've got our director, our country's director of medicine, Fauci, said that there are now currently as of recording this, which is mid July, that there are already two drugs in stage three trials to different companies. And so we said it seems likely one of those will make it all the way through the end, possibly by December. So it'll be interesting to see, like, if there is basically a way for it to be inoculated, does it really go back to anything like it was, especially in terms of working from the office when people find out, oh, I can get so much more done from home. Is there really necessary for all this to drive in and be in the little box? Right. I think I think that's just such a big owner's all question. I mean, I guess I've seen the people that have started working from home. I have seen a lot of people that have not really enjoyed it and they're saying, you know, this isn't really great. And as soon as I can get back to the office, so I've been kind of working from home for about two years. I worked from home, I try to mix it up a bit. And to be honest, mixing it up less has been really tough by mixing it up. I just mean stuff like working from coffee shops and then maybe working from a client site. And I think it was back in February where I cancelled the meeting with the client because I was like, there's really no reason for, you know, at this point in time for me to do this because we could just talk on the phone or talk on Zoom and is there really any point? And that was that was I have asthma. So I was freaking out for the first two weeks about that, that I was going to be I was a super high risk coronavirus person. So I calmed down a little bit as, you know, the data came in and said, it's not necessarily such a big deal. And I think I pretty much in the same position as anybody else. But yeah, I mean, it was kind of it's it's a lot of people are saying they don't like it, but I would say it's actually taken me two years to sort of master in inverted comm is the process of working from home, by which I mean, I don't think it's surprising that people just start forcibly. And then they're like, oh, I actually hate this. This is depressing, because I think it takes a long time to figure out, you know, you need to schedule time to meet people. There's a lot of things that it just takes time to get into that flow. So I don't think it's surprising that people are having a tough time. And I do think it's kind of there's a lot of jobs where you say, do it it shines a really hard light on a lot of jobs. And do we need to be together for a lot of things? You know, yeah, absolutely. Can we can we find another way to do this? That's more effective takes less, less downtime, driving back and forth. I think all those things are in question, moving stuff into the cloud more and more. So tell me about how your studies are going on the AWS cloud partition. How did you decide and how did you pick that and and how's that going? The selection process. So I was basically, as I said, I thought it was a smart idea to do a technical certification. I actually started with the LPIC certification, which is for those who don't know Linux professionals, Institute. So I was cocky. I thought I'd been using Linux for so long on the desktop that it would be really easy. And then after about three lessons of, you know, grappling with CLIs and graph and all this, I kind of said, I mean, so what it would say is my interest in technology has always been more conceptual. So I worked at companies where people are like, you know, what are you doing wasting your time in marketing, you know, become a developer. And it's funny because, you know, I've done, I've taken a couple of Python courses and I've tried that and I just think it's a very different, different brain that I don't have that brain. I don't have the hardcore brain for development, the really, you know, logical mathematical left-sided brain. I'm more of a creative. So I was surprisingly bored by the Linux coursework. And so I clicked on to AWS because I just because I've been using AWS for a few years, just, you know, S3 buckets and stuff like that. And a few lessons then I was like, God, this is really, really interesting. It just, it's more conceptual. It's less, you know, dealing with, as I said, the command line interfaces. And I just find it much more engaging. So I'm using the cycle Linux Academy. This is clearly not a, you know, push for their, for their lessons. But I found the AWS stuff interesting. And yeah, that's it. I did their practice exam today. So I think it got 70%, which is okay for first attempt. So I need to get that up and then I can actually take that certification. But yeah, I mean, this all comes back to just what I'm saying for freelancers about this is my way of deepening my engagement with the technology sector. Because there's this, there's one line of thinking. And I think that it's really problematic that, you know, I see this, by the way, a lot in Israel. There's this phenomenon of coding boot camps that kind of are very glitzy. And they'll say, you know, we'll make you a back-end developer in three weeks or, you know, a front-end developer or cyber sack or DevOps or like whatever the trend at the moment is. And I just know having worked in tech startups, like I'm always in awe at how much like the developers, the places I've worked have always been a really kind of like take me under their wing and showed me a few Linux commands and they've brought me up, but they just have that theoretical underpinning that I think it's kind of ridiculous to claim anybody can become a DevOps professional in six weeks. So yeah, that's basically why I've taken this approach. If I think it's a bit more modest to say this is a little certification than I understand cloud computing. And if, you know, in the future, I'm working for a company in the cloud space, you know, I'll just be able to maybe demonstrate that I know, perhaps a little bit more than some other people, it'll give me a competitive edge or so I hope. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah, that's great. I mean, one of the things really interesting about the whole, I work with both AWS and Azure, the Microsoft cloud system. And one of the things that's really, really stunning or surprising to people is how giant they are, literally how many products are available in each of them. And a lot of what's out there now is, I'm not sure about the cloud particular practitioner in particular, but a lot of what's out there is just to become familiar with simply the breadth of what's available. So if someone is interested in moving to the cloud, you can at least have a conversation with them and say, oh, yeah, this thing you're doing here in your server room, that could be mapped to this piece of the cloud services. And this piece over here could be mapped to this other piece. And that and a little bit of pricing are all sitting here into some very interesting discussions with the company thinking about moving to the cloud. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating. So I'm not so familiar with Azure or Google Cloud. I've just used AWS, as he said, a small bit, but I kind of had this epiphany moment, you could call it when I was doing this and I was speaking to a friend who I used to work for the company's called it's just a SaaS company. So I was like, you know, I've just been learning about this and learning about how all these pieces of the cloud fit together. I've used EC2 and I've used S3 and I understand that they need the network and I'm like, so I kind of said to my friend, so you're on a SaaS company. So does that mean you basically just build software on this and then you sell it to people and he's like, that's exactly how it works. So it was just interesting to me that the mechanics are kind of, you know, you could almost say they're a little bit boring learning about knuckles, you know, the details of how clouds work, but when it got into it, I realized that this is the let's call it plumbing that makes the whole current craze of cloud computing and everything is a service that that's basically how it works. So yeah, I mean, I do think it's it's it's it's very it's very interesting. I don't really have thoughts on Azure versus AWS versus Google Cloud, but, you know, as you say, that just the sheer volume of the internet and everyday services we use that are being hosted on stuff like AWS, it's absolutely mind blowing. Yeah, it's it's been an ongoing revolution for some time. Yeah, I see that you've got a new book coming out. Do you want to give us kind of a high level intro to that and tell us what's what's happening there? Sure, the book is called The Confused Freelancers Guide to Technology and I'm waiting for the point when somebody leaves their view on Amazon saying that after reading this book, I now am a confused freelancer. And wait, I'm waiting for that review hasn't happened yet. But so basically, it's it's a book I wrote because working with a lot of writers over the years, I think a lot of writers are have kind of a very basic understanding of some people are just really not technically inclined at all. And just, you know, fielding queries and writers, Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups and various groups about how to do certain things. I decided that no one, you know, there's a lot of entry level books for technology and dummy's guides and that kind of thing. And I thought it would be good to write something specifically for tiny businesses. I mean, how much, how much more how much tinier can you get than a one person freelancing shop? So I tried to strike a balance between, you know, enough information and also giving some detail. So I talk about stuff like hosting, cybersecurity, just things like that in order to, I guess, prep freelancers for scaling that if they don't want to just, you know, do the typical thing of setting up a website on Wix and it takes them two minutes and they don't really actually understand or learn anything about what's going on. So I thought I'd write this book that it could give them the basic, you know, to go a few steps beyond that, that they would be able to understand technology for a few years into their growth and maybe make that scaling journey a little bit easier. Hey folks, this is Charles Maxwood and over the last few years I've gotten to know a lot of great people within the Microsoft community and specifically in the .NET area. One of our guests from JavaScript Jabber, Sean Claibor actually reached out to me and said he wanted to start a show on .NET and there are a ton of people out there that I feel like sometimes get neglected in the .NET space. So if you're one of those folks, you've been listening to maybe one or two of the other .NET focused or Microsoft focused podcast for a while and thought, well, where's the devchat.tv style podcast for me in .NET? You can find it. It's at adventuresin.net.net is spelled out d-o-t-n-e-t adventuresin.net.com. Go check it out today. Yeah, that's great. Is this is this the kind of thing where you threw on personal experience, like learn from what I did right and from what I did wrong? Yeah, there is definitely a lot of personal experience starting from setting up my first account on a Bluehost shared hosting. About 10 years ago, I used to run a student news website when I was back in university. So yeah, I've just been doing that kind of store for a while. And yes, definitely stuff has gone wrong, such as getting hacked by WordPress malware. So that was an interesting experience of why you shouldn't do things like host a different websites on a shared hosting provider. So yeah, there's definitely been a lot of calamities, disasters that have shown me what not to do. So hope I'm not leading other people down the road of disaster or becoming confused freelancers. A couple of those stories are just, you know, a lot of times just knowing what's possible and what you're looking out for is half the battle for people. So I think that's the that's the great the great help in something like this. That's great news. Can we go like a little deeper into maybe some of the challenges that we face in a new freelancer, especially one who you're seeing maybe a bittersweet is not a little technical. What are first one and not some bold things they might end up having to deal with? That's surprising. I think there are quite a few different. I think it's easy to underestimate the type of challenge they will have. So I know a lot of people, there's a common line of thinking of do things that don't scale. And I'm very much on the do things that do scale aside of things. So I mean, I mean, the basic bare bone technical requirements to get started as a freelance writer, let's say the example you chose are pretty simple. I mean, it's easy. I could I could throw out things I think you should have and you could throw back saying you don't really need that. So, you know, I could say you need a website and you could say not not you, but you know, an average freelancer might say just set up just set up a wicks on their subdomain and have it branded. So really it's about, I think, professionalism and putting in place good systems in terms of what I recommend and, you know, speaking to a lot of freelance writers, what I see people need, the essentials would be having a website. If you're not using one of these build it yourself website builders that I'm really not such a fan of. Of course, you're going to need hosting. You're going to need a domain name. You're going to use, I mean, G Suite, I think is greater office 365 or some kind of managed collaboration suite. A CRM is very, very helpful. And there's, you know, CRMs and there's some people like these cold emailing solutions, which are a small bit different marketing automation and email newsletter solutions, such as MailChimp, for example, Google Analytics. I mean, the list really goes on. And the one thing that people always forget and that people don't like to talk about is a backup, some kind of a backup functionality. So a common one I see all the time with writers is, and this, this has happened to me, is that, you know, they write stuff for websites or they do a podcast like this. And, you know, they forget to say you passed or, you know, something like that, like they move hosts and they forget to migrate over files and it's gone forever. So that's really important, because I'm a big advocate for being extremely particular about backups. So I recommend if someone writes something on a website that they their mind should immediately go to backups and taking an onsite copy and ideally migrating that up to a cloud source as well, just to keep two backup copies. So that's a, that's a common one that people like to not think about. Wow, let's, let's get into this even a little deeper here. So someone was just starting out. What would you tell them about why a website is important enough that it's worth their time and how they, how they should get started with that? I'm sure. I mean, if someone's building a website as a freelance writer, I mean, I think WordPress, WordPress is the CMS I've used most. I don't think that WordPress is beyond most people in terms of, you know, getting to grips with. I mean, there's other choices for CMS too. But, you know, I think generally a basic shared hosting package running WordPress, I think Cloud Flare is great. I strongly advocate anyone building even a shared hosting site uses Cloud Flare just for, you know, CDN and for security and stuff like that. An email, I mean, I've written, I've described in, in the book about how you can use just basic cPanel email, but I don't think that's a good solution for most people, you know, setting up using some kind of managed managed email provider makes sense. And that's those really the bare bones. I mean, you don't need a CRM, but it does certainly make life a lot easier. So I think it's sometimes my personal philosophy is, you know, setting up stuff that you're going to need. If you're looking at freelancing for the long term, I think it makes a lot of sense to set up a CRM, setting up a email, email automation system, marketing automation systems, those kind of things, because it's very difficult to do things like scale substantially, if you're just using a, you know, a flash, some kind of a flash website that you've you've built to one of these, what you see is what you get editors. Right. And how would somebody know, like, if they're getting started in this, and they're like, okay, I'm doing the freelancer thing, I need to get some nice systems down and all that, you talked a little bit about the fact that it's good to pick something that actually can scale. Tell people a little bit about what that even means to scale and how you would tell us something will or won't scale when you're looking to pick in your different tools. Sure. I mean, in terms of scaling, I would say it's a good idea to, you know, just to do something that doesn't have a low cap. So I mean, it's easy to talk about stuff in terms of, you know, let's just say web hosting is a very simple example. So obviously, if you're on something like a shared hosting account, that's not really the ideal environment. If you're, let's I mean, let's say I think a lot of freelancers and I would include myself in this category aspire towards bigger things. So I don't permanently intend to be a single person freelancer. I would like to morph towards being an agency one day, ideally. And beyond that, who really knows but, you know, if you're thinking like that from the very outset and you want to become, you want to scale up to become, let's say an agency, perhaps bringing in a couple of other partners, certainly, you know, I don't think a Wix website is a good idea. I think if you do something, and I'm not trying to hate on Wix here, I mean, there's plenty of other square space that, you know, they have their own competitors, but doing something like shared hosting and, you know, a thing I love is a good staging environment. So if you're going to be pushing updates to your site a few times a day, and maybe you'll bring in a web design resource, maybe you'll bring in a grasp of design resource, you know, it's a nice thing to do to, to create a staging environment for, let's say, a WordPress site, or you can stage through GITS, you know, just, these are just the technical nuances, as you know, but I think just thinking like that in terms of striving, having the infrastructure at your disposal to get bigger and better, you know, that might mean moving up from shared hosting to VPS hosting, maybe ultimately moving on to as we talked about something like AWS, but just kind of planning for the next step and looking as well when you're signing up to, I always look when I'm signing up for a new service, let's say Miljim, I like to look at the limits. I also like to look at the backup because that's just my kind of pet peeve. Is there a way to export this data if I want to leave and move on to something bigger and better? And, you know, what's the limit? Is there, if I'm using SMTP through my hosting company, what's, what is there a limit of messages or that they're limiting per day? So I like to think about all these things and, you know, try to put in place systems that are going to serve me for, let's say at least a year into the future. Yeah, that's, that's great. It is this point when you set something up and you find out it just all that time in you find out won't even actually do what you need. And then you're, you're really kind of Oh, whatever time you put in is kind of lost and you're starting over. Right. I mean, I was looking for a CRM. I've used these open source CRMs for quite some time. Sugar and Espo and VTiger. And, you know, they're great. You can just run them on your own server. And you don't, you know, you can do workflows and automation and everything is basically possible. And when I started looking for SAS CRM, so he's just looking through the various options and it was it's difficult. You move between providers and they have certain tiers and the tiers can change. So I think there is, you know, I think the cloud is great, but there is a lot of there's there's a lot to pay attention to. And it's easy. The problem is that if you're if you're using something like a CRM and it becomes an integral part of your business development workflow, when you have to leave, it's a real, real pain. So I think it's, you know, this coming back to the scaling thing of picking systems that scale from the outset, so you can you can defer that pain as much as possible. So do you talk much in your in your book, we are advising people about it seems like one of the big themes we have over and over on the freelancer show is a lot of people can probably figure out how to do the work that they do, how to how to coordinate with people, a lot of people, at least that they've worked somewhere else, they've seen some systems like that. The one thing it seems like people are always unfamiliar with coming from working full time and getting default freelancing is how to find customers and how to deal with that. What kind of things do you talk about in your book for with regard to just being able to find customers and how your systems will help you. So I mean, what's probably more more relevant is on the iPhone side. So you know, we talked, we talked a few minutes there about CRM and marketing information. So I do have a section when discussing inbound marketing and the various, you know, typical parts of an inbound marketing plan. I also like the open source stuff a lot just just from my my interest in Linux and open source. But you know, there's a lot of closed source tools on the market too. So in terms of those tools, I talk about in the book, you know, keyword research on external platforms is not something that I talk about but that would be important, you know, an email system and a CRM. But I don't think beyond that you actually need, you need a lot in terms of technology. Yeah, so for outbound, as you said, CRM and email email marketing automation tool and for inbound marketing, I mean, I think technically doing the hard work of keyword research and blogging is is not really so much a technical challenge as it is just a manpower challenge. I mean, it's an awful lot of work. And this is something I do mention. I think a large part of the difficulty of being a freelancer is being the person responsible for, as I said, the backups, the IT, the business development, the sales, the marketing and then finally doing what you get paid for. So you have to wear a huge amount of different hats. And I think that actually just gets exhausting. I think it's part it's very hard to do it all well. But you know, in terms of the technology, I think that that you've been certainly put in place the basic stuff for both inbound and outbound marketing. And you certainly have choices within each product category as well. Yeah, it does become the one man band. I know there's this Tom Petty song where he actually sitting at the drum has a harmonic he can grab on to. He sings and he's got a guitarist. It's that that one. I can't remember because you don't know how I feel. I think it might be that video. It's always that always reminds me of being a freelance, just seeing him trying to play all those instruments at one time. Yeah, I'm very much trying to figure this out as well. So it's not it's not easy. And I think recently, I just realized this week that it's basically, you have to realize that you're fighting a losing battle in terms of trying to do everything. I mean, outsourcing. So I don't I don't outsource work in terms of the writing work that I do. I outsource bits and pieces of, you know, ancillary work like business development, you know, getting a VA to look up leads and stuff like that. But if you're if you're struggling with burnout, and I've certainly the last few weeks felt badly in need of a holiday, I think you just have to realize that it's an impossible battle to try to keep it all going just, you know, and particularly when you get busy, it just there's no way you can really do it all yourself. So you have to just get good at get good at stepping back. And take getting a bit more hands off some things. Yes. So when is the new book out? Is it is out now? Or is it pending? Yep, it is indeed out in paperback and ebook format on Amazon.com. So you can download that on your Kindle and it's actually on when you publish on Amazon, it goes through all the Amazon market places. So it's on Amazon UK and Amazon Germany and et cetera, wherever, wherever Amazon has a marketplace, it's it's on there. Great. Is there anything else you would like to cover before we go to picks? No, I think that's about it. I mean, basically what I would say to somebody setting up technology is, you know, spend just a little bit of time going through the various product categories. Think if you are tempted, you know, I know you have a more tech savvy listenership. But I sometimes question my own decisions in terms of, you know, going with doing things a slightly harder way. But I do find that it's a lot of work at the start that if we're, you know, building a WordPress website on WordPress or Drupal or Jumla versus just using a template on one of these quick, quick solutions. But, you know, that's just a specific case of a general thing. It's a little bit of work at the start. But if you're in it for the long term, I think it makes sense to go with these kind of solutions because when you do scale, when you start moving from one client to four clients to 10 clients, you've got a business development development machine and you've got an in-band marketing machine running when you get to that point of overwhelmed to have these good systems already in place makes a big difference. One of the biggest pain points that I find as I talk to people about software is deployment. It's really interesting to have the conversations with people where it's I don't want to deal with Docker. I don't want to deal with Kubernetes. I don't want to deal with setting up servers. I don't, you know, all of these different things. And in a lot of ways, DevOps has gotten a lot easier. And in a lot of ways, DevOps has also kind of embraced a certain amount of culture around applications, the way we build them, the way we deploy them. And I've really felt for a long time that developers need to have the conversations with DevOps or adopt some form of DevOps so that they can take control of what they're doing and really understand when things go to production, what's going on so that they can help debug the issues and fix the issues and find the issues when they go wrong and help streamline things and make things better and slicker and easier so that they'll more generally go right. So we started a podcast called Adventures in DevOps. And I pulled in one of the hosts from one of my favorite DevOps shows, Nell Shamrell Harrington from the Food Fight Show. And we got things rolling there. And so this is more or less a continuation of the Food Fight Show where we're talking about the things that go into DevOps. So if you're struggling with any of these operational type things, then definitely check out Adventures in DevOps. And you can find it at Adventures in DevOps podcast.com. Great. All right. Let's move to picks. So this is part of the show where we just talk about something we're interested in. It can be a hobby, it can be something technical, just something our listeners enjoy just hearing the various picks. So what are your picks for the show? So one thing that I that I got recently in my life is a never get that storage. And I thought this would be a good one for a technology centric podcast. So I got the new Synology NAS the DS920 plus. Now, if you're doing video, so I'm trying to do some more YouTube work myself at the moment, because as a ghost writer for the last three years, it's appeared that I don't really exist. So I'm doing everything in my power to avoid that. So that is that is basically made a big difference in terms of just basically, you know, what when you start doing video work and putting out a podcast, you could be easily generating one or two gigs of data per day. So that NAS is brilliant. I don't I don't have to be economical. I have like, you know, 20 terabytes on my local network, put stuff on the NAS, back that up to the cloud. I talked about my obsession with backups. And yeah, that's just being great if, you know, doing doing things professionally way and just instead of storing stuff from my control point, it doesn't, you know, the hard drive doesn't fail in the middle of the night or something like that. Yeah, definitely. Great. All right. Now we're going to tax storage. For me, I think it's going to be this is going to be interesting pick. It's something that kind of helped me get through the COVID. The kind of need to do do something new. And it is lessons. I've found that I'm a person who really clicks with having somebody show me how to do something. And so if I start a new hobby or something that I usually look for a good teacher and go get a few lessons. And so I started tennis this year and found this fantastic teacher out out just outside the kind of the suburbs of Minneapolis area out there towards still water. And I've been getting tennis lessons. And it has really been fantastic. It's been just so much fun to, you know, progress along that progress along the hobby much more quickly than it would be if I was just watching videos or trying to guess what to do or just playing with friends. So that's my my pick for the week is lessons in general. And I think you said that you had taken up two hobbies during the pandemic or did I did I hear that wrong? Yeah, I did. I need it. I knew I was going to need something to do during the during the pandemic. And so I picked up a whole new hobbies. I picked up tennis as a new sport. And I bought a bass guitar and decided to learn an instrument. So that has definitely been it's been nice not to just, you know, sit around and think about the things that I can't do and actually have all the all that I needed to do between the two new hobbies. Right. I think I think creativity is really important to anything that really gets me going. My other hobby has been eating watermelon. So I'm definitely not not not as healthy as you putting tennis balls back and forth across the net. But I guess I have time I feel like this kind of period is going to be going on more than either of us really wanted to. So I have I have time to get into the tennis. That's right. Yes. Great. OK. Well, let's talk about the ways people can reach you like your book title and reach out to you. What are the ways you can get all of you? Sure. So the book title is the Confused Freelancers Guide to Technology. And as I said, if you do read the book just and you don't like it, that's that's fine. Just don't leave a comment saying you're a confused freelancer because it will ruin it'll it'll it'll ruin my day. And in terms of getting in touch, people can contact Daniel Rossell.com. There's two hours in Rossell and that'll just forward to a contact forum or something. So that's probably the best way to get in touch for anybody who wants to. Great. Well, thanks, Daniel, for coming on the show. And this was Daniel Rossell was our guest today. And I'm Joel Schavert, your host for today. And on behalf of Charles Maxwood, I'd like to invite you all to come over to Check.TV, check out all the latest podcasts. There's a lot in your way. I think we've got two, both of the new ones in the last couple of months. So always a new one on there. We will sign off and see you all next time. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for having me on Joe. Bandwidth for this segment is provided by Cashly, the world's fastest CDN. Deliver your content fast with Cashly. Visit cachefly.com to learn more.