 I've avoided LinkedIn for so long. I was like, I should probably work on my profile. And then I was like, you know what? No, I'm just going to scroll Twitter instead. And then like an angel from heaven, your face rolls into view. And it's like, hey bud, time to start that LinkedIn profile. What was it they put you in the position of being like, hey, I'm going to make this free LinkedIn tutorial to just like coach people through making a profile? Because I think it's, I don't know, it's one of those things that I haven't actually seen a lot of like developer focused content on. The first like light bulb when I realized this is a really valuable tool, I was still working in the gas station at that time. And the thing that I realized was the chances of having somebody kind of have a conversation with me from a hiring perspective was zero. Like there was no way that was organically going to happen. So I needed to put myself in an advantageous position to where I can at least give them a more vocal voice than a resume when I don't have tech experience, when I don't have a degree, when I don't check off these boxes of what they're looking for, how do I showcase some of my value to them? And so what I realized was majority of these recruiters and hiring managers and technical managers, they're all on LinkedIn. And especially people that are in the recruiting position to source candidates, they're on LinkedIn Monday through Friday, every single day of the week. So basically, and I've said this a million times, if they were at a bar, I'd be grabbing a drink. If they were at a restaurant, I'd go grab dinner. If they were at the gym, I'd pick up a workout routine. Well, they're on LinkedIn, so I might as well stand out where they hang out. It just makes sense in that respect. Yeah, I love that, stand out where they hang out. That's good, that's good. I mean, that's basically where the first idea came from. And then I started helping people get jobs and overwhelmingly it seemed as if technical developers just lacked LinkedIn profiles. And what I ended up finding was when I started helping people, that LinkedIn profile lands you in those job searches. So it's doing a lot of the legwork for you. So to give you an idea, on an average week I land between like 2,000-3,000 job searches, right? That means for 2,000-3,000 companies to know I exist, I have to fill out 2,000-3,000 applications. If 90% of them ghost me, how much effort did I just lose in that? But because that LinkedIn profile is putting me in those searches for me, that's a lot of time that I'm saving. It's almost like automating my effort. Yes, that was my key takeaway from, as I haven't finished the material, I really wanted to actually go through it because I think that you do such a wonderful job of acting like a coach, like, hey, you can do this. It's easy, like just do this one step right now and we're gonna move to the next one. But the thing that was transformative for me is the way that you talk about it, like an automation. And I think that that is where I felt like this was a developer-focused type of thing because it's like, I think developers need to feel like, oh, I'm automating something. I'm not making a profile. I am automating a conversation that's gonna do the work of lining my next job up for me. Absolutely, and I think the other thing, if I'm being completely honest with you, is especially when it comes to developers, we get so caught up in our thoughts and our abilities that right now I get on constant calls with senior developers, tech leads, et cetera, where they can't learn an interview. But when you look at their resume, you look at their LinkedIn, you look at how they're talking about their achievements, no one from a non-technical standpoint has a clue what they're talking about. And so for me, I'm like, you can utilize your LinkedIn to kind of set that up for you as well so that way when you get in an interview, they're kind of asking you questions based on that information. And now you can kind of keep the interview in an area where you feel the most confident, comfortable versus trying to think on the fly in a non-technical capacity, it's probably isn't gonna work out for you in that regard. Yeah, that is another key point that's like really fascinating is like finding that balance when you talk about your technical achievements, but not in such a way that it just makes, not in such a way that it's gibberish to the people who are actually looking for it. And I think that that mismatch of like personal looking, who you're trying to talk to, like makes a lot of like just cross paths. You're just like missing each other. So I'm curious, now this is where things get a little bit personal for me. I'm curious, now you made a huge transformation in like, like you were saying, you were cooking fried chicken in a gas station, right? And then used, utilized linked in to break into software engineering. How do you communicate that transformation when it's fresh? Right? Cause I think it's, you know, like right now it's easy to look in the rear view mirror and be like, oh yeah, like this is the way it was always gonna be. This was the inevitable future. Like this is how talented I was gonna be all the time. But like people can't see that. You're the only one who can see that. How do you transform that vision in your head into something that recruiters and hiring managers can get? It's not easy to be completely honest about it. It's a lot of iterations. You know, I must have iterated over things multiple times before I finally found a formula that kind of worked. And I think that's just, that's development in general. Like no one ever gets perfect code the first time around. You're always gonna have to refactor. Based on new information on new APIs, you're gonna have to, you know, bring in new info. But I'll say this, I think every single person, whether they have one follower or one million has a story that they can tell. And based on how you describe it, obviously people will be in your corner or they'll be against it, right? And so I think it's really important to make sure you're laying an entire story instead of what I often see people doing, the beginning, middle and end, one part is it being omitted. So either you omit the beginning and you give them the middle and the end, but they don't necessarily know why you're telling them this thing. Or you talk about the beginning and the ending, but they don't understand what it is that you did to get from one point to the next. Or you do the beginning and middle and there's no ending to the resolution of what it is that you're trying to do and they don't have a clue where it's taking them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is real. Cause I think that's a struggle that I have all the time. It's like, I like opening a story, but then I don't necessarily like finishing it. And so sometimes it's like I leave that open and then it's open to interpretation by someone else instead of me trying to tell the story that I'm trying to tell. And I'll be honest, there's stuff that I do that I constantly feel like I'm running myself thin, but when you ask the average person, they don't have a clue about it. And so sometimes it also takes me understanding where am I channeling the most amount of my energy and is it being fruitful in that regard? Like right now, prime example, I'm doing an open source project with my local meetup group that we're doing. We're trying to help a lot of beginners get into open source. It's really starting to go well. Like, you know, it's hard to scale this because especially cause we're making you so beginner friendly, the code reviews, like one code review we just did the other day was like 14 commits. So it's like back and forth, back and forth. You need to do this and you gotta change it. And you don't want to give them the answer cause you want them to learn. But then if you ask the average person outside of that, they don't know that I'm leading this open source initiative and trying to get more people in. They don't know that I'm working on a whole technical course right now as we speak or that we just finished teaching at a boot camp and we're doing these cohorts and stuff like that. But I don't necessarily know how to tell everything. So it's like when you focus on the relevant bits and you already have them invested in who you are, then you can start sharing more and more and more. They give you that benefit of the doubt. But, and this is something that I tell people all the time, like I know that you're amazing and you know that you're amazing. But if your goal is to get a job, you not have this audacious task to convince the person on the other side of desk within 45 minutes that you're amazing. There's gonna be things that you omit. It's inevitable. But what you do omit should not be relevant and they're deciding or decision-making process for you as a candidate. So you need to focus on how do you convince someone within that time block that you're incredible at what it is that you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think how little time we have is something that I underestimate a lot. Like I think in your course, you say that you know, people are gonna make a decision in like six to 10 seconds of clicking on your profile. And that's wild. Like you have to be so focused in order to take advantage of that time. So like, you know what's funny is this adage has been around for a while. Like if you look at the resume, they'd look at it for only six seconds. And that's not true. But what they do is they skim all this stuff, right? And I've noticed my own habits when I look at like information. I skim it first. And then if I feel like it's worth reading, I check it out. Same thing with the tweet, same thing with the LinkedIn post. I skim it first before I invest my time. They're doing the exact same thing. When they got people applying to jobs, especially in today's market, there's thousands of people applying. They're not gonna read every single application in detail, especially if they see immediate things that like knock somebody out of the running for it. They're gonna take six to 10 seconds to scan and if they see something valuable, then they invest more time. And it seems like the second stage is around 30 seconds or so. And then after that, it's several minutes. And that's when they're reaching out to you for a phone call. Gotcha, yep, yep, yep. So it's almost like that YouTube, what is it? Thumbnail and title, right? Thumbnail? Or it's like, they serve different purposes, right? Like the video is gonna be one thing, but the thumbnail is really just to like transform that original intent to like a click. And I mean, I think that's really hard sometimes to feel reduced in that way. But I mean, that's just the game, right? Like you gotta play the game. I've talked about this before. You know, even when it comes to making a tweet, a lot of the times my strategy is the first six words needs to convey something that makes sense and invite somebody to read this. Cause the way that I look at it, especially when it comes to tweets but also job applications, there's a thousand other people fighting for your little time block. I'm one of them. So if I'm not incentivizing you to check this out, there's no reason for you to do so. And so I look at job application in the exact same way or interviews. What have I done to incentivize them to wanna have a conversation with me? And if I've lacked something in that regard, what am I doing to make up for that now? Yeah, dang, that's good, that's good. I literally just made that up. I'm like, I need to write that one down. It's so good. I'm glad I was recording because that's good stuff. When I started talking, I was going in a different direction and then I realized that idea and I was like, oh yeah, that's good. You're like, no, the gold's over here. The gold's over here, I gotta go get it. I love that. Hey, I think honestly, that's probably a great place to end. Just short and sweet. I think anyone who's following along with my journey through this, I think this is a gold mine. Go check out Danny's course. It's freely available. It's super awesome. I had a feeling going through it where it's like I was a junior dev again and I had a parent with a senior and they're like, yeah, no, that's cool, but you really wanna do this. And I love that you brought that energy to it. You're so enthusiastic. I love what you're doing. So yeah, just thanks. Anything else you wanna pitch or tell people where to find you? I'm D. Thompson Dev on all platforms. And to be honest with you, even that course, it was a hard requirement of mine for that to be completely for free. They were gonna put it behind the paywall. I said, if I'm gonna do it, it has to be out there for everybody. So no matter your location or income bracket, you can have access to this. And so for me, that was a very, very big deal. The best part about this too, it's testing out a teaching method that I've been trying to trialize. And so the entire course is only like 33 minutes. But each minute is jam-packed with value. But to one other point that you said, I definitely come in there with a lot of enthusiasm because I said, if I am enthusiastic enough for the both of us, maybe you'll do something with it, right? And so I'll manufacture enough enthusiasm for all of us. But the one thing that I'll say here is regardless of you're a junior dev or you're a tech lead with 20 years of experience, it all applies. And now more than ever, I'm jumping on calls with people with over five years of experience that can't land an interview. And so I think it's very, very relevant as the first time that I've ever seen where it hasn't been a full-on developer's market to where now you have to advocate for your skills. And a lot of developers don't have a clue on how to do that. So this course will definitely help you out with that in my opinion. Highly, highly recommend it. Beyond the lookout, we got some technical content coming out as well. A lot of it actually, if I'm being real, if you see all the stuff that we've been working on behind the scenes, a lot of big stuff is coming out. So I'm kind of excited about that. I love that, I love that. Well, I think that probably the likelihood of someone following me and not already following you is probably very slim. But if you're not already following Danny, some great stuff and honestly, just the encouragement, just being that friendly, like I got energy for the both of us is so huge. So thank you for being out there doing what you're doing. Look, I'm gonna be real with you. If you're not following me, your time line is probably better off anyway. I run my mouth a lot on social media. So there's no hate if you don't follow me at all. I totally get it. I totally get it. Go ahead. Thanks for your time today. I'll see you again soon. I mean, like honestly, we were talking before this call, like we had an opportunity at RenderATL to be like hanging out and like really getting to know each other. And we just totally squandered it. So like the universe is still holding onto that one for us, I think. Brother, if you send me a call in the link, I'm there, that's it. Something's up. Thanks Danny. I'll see you soon.