 Hey everybody, it is Christian Buckley doing another MVP Buzz Chat, and I'm talking to David, hello. Hi, how's it going? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. And for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? I'm David McCarter. I live in San Diego. I've lived here ever since I was 19 years old. I've been an MVP for 17 years now. I have my own website that's been around one way or the other since 94 called DonnetTips.com. I write many books and I go all over the world speaking and I even host my own show called Rockin' the Code World with Donnet Dave, that we do twice a month now that's run out of India. And that show is super popular. Season three ended at the end of September and we had close to a quarter million people watch. Wow. One season. Yeah. Season before was pretty much the same way and I had one, I was really happy. I had one episode this year. My guest was Carl Franklin who everybody knows pretty much in my world. And we had over 40,000 people watch that single episode. Wow. Yeah. And so I'm really proud of the show and how it's going. And I have just amazing guests on my show and I love doing it. It gets me, you know, talking to experts every, you know, Saturday mornings. That's, you know, we hosted twice a month now on Saturday mornings. Yeah, I often tell people too with my podcast and the interviews that I do. It's fantastic to, one, I mean, help spread folks that maybe don't know you that are interested in that space. It opens up the doors to any new people coming through. But just hearing the life stories and the work experiences, I mean, just it's one of my favorite things. Yeah. And that's, and that's what the, you know, the show, you know, when I was approached to do the show by C sharp corner, you know, I, because, because of the way I am, I like to do things different. I like to do something that somebody else isn't doing. Right. I don't want to do the same kind of show that everybody else is doing that. That to me doesn't get a lot of traction. And so I decided to do more of just an interview show, right. We don't really show code. Right. It's just me and my guests talking about whatever they're passionate about. So I, I encourage guests. I mean, sometimes I do have topics, especially if I do a panel show. But I really encourage a guest to come on and talk about whatever they're currently passionate about. And let's talk about that. It's a little different, of course, when I talked to, you know, pms and Microsoft and things like that they have their agenda. But usually, but usually it's, it's just talking. And we usually have a great time. Sometimes, you know, the show goes off on a tangent, especially if the other person's a musician like me, you know, then we definitely end up talking about music. And so sometimes we do go off. But that's okay, you know, because I want to have people, you know, know that, you know, there's more to life and coding. Right. And, and so I try to bring those things into, you know, the show like the get the question I ask all my guests the first time they're on the show is what do you do for fun. Right. And because I want to, you know, tell code, especially the younger ones who might be coding a lot and, you know, not doing the fun stuff in their life. You know that, you know, there's a balance we need to do and, and you need to have fun and work at the same time. And, and for me, my fun also improves my coding, right, because to me playing music. Anything creative helps coding. Yeah, right. Especially when you're architecting applications, I think, you know, you need to have a very creative mind to create applications and so those kind of things. All add up one of the best questions I was asked and India wants it. This young woman stood up she was very brave, you know, because women usually in India don't speak up very much. She was very brave and she had, you know, she had a piece of paper with a question she goes Dave, you know, you're a, you know, you're a award winning developer you're award winning photographer, you know, you play, you play music, you work for rock bands. You know, how do you find time to do all that, you know right and, and, you know, my answer basically boiled down to well all those other things helps my coding to me. And all of that all helps my coding and my coding helps the other things, right. It's to me it says a loop. Well there there's something to around. You know, there's data that shows that when you move away from you're trying to solve a problem you get stuck or you know and you're just you find yourself repeating yourself kind of retracing the same mistakes and that going and doing something completely artistic. For me, it's like reading and I'm a huge sci-fi and fantasy I'm a Tolkien CS Lewis, you know, guy and to go and read some of that or play a game whatever and then suddenly like a pause, like hit me just something where, you know, you think too hard about something you're not going to solve it once you kind of let go, you're able to go back and or approach it in a different way. Yeah, yeah, I even had a, I had a role once when I was in charge of a software team that, you know, if, if any of the members of my team got stuck on something for 20 minutes, I told them stop. Right, and come talk to me, you know, because not only I might know the answer but I'm trying to give them away from the screen for a little bit. Because you're totally right, you sometimes you walk away, go make dinner, take a shower and the thing pops in your head right away, just to get away from it, right. So, yeah. Well, so what's what do you so for folks that don't know what you're writing about like what are your books about what are you writing about what do you what are you been working on. So I know we were talking just before he started, you've got something on the verge of being completed. Right, so right now I'm maintaining three books that I keep updating. One is called Rock your career surviving the technical interview. That's all about getting through the technical part of the interview process because and you know to me if you can't get through that you're not getting the job right. And that book actually comes out from I wrote that book because it came from my frustration, working at a company here in San Diego, and we were mandated to hire beginners only, because you know they wanted more butts and seats and you know so that was a really difficult thing and and I just saw all these people mostly you know straight out of college you know just totally flubbed the technical interview. They weren't prepared, you know they they thought they just come come in and and wing it and that doesn't work, you know in most cases. So the, actually the conference talk came first and the conference talk was so popular. Then, then I did the book. The book I've been maintaining since 2005 which I'm going to come hopefully get out a new version. This month is my rock your code coding standards for Microsoft on net. And that's been a project of mine ever since 2005 to do consolidated coding standards in one place. That we used to have before done that but we didn't really have any more and so the book. The book kind of for that. The next book, the other book I'm maintaining which I'll hopefully get a new version out early next year is called rock your code code and app performance for Microsoft on that. And that comes from a lot of work I've been doing in the last. I would say close to 10 years all revolves around performance and especially in today's world with the cloud. You really have to worry I mean performance was always a thing that we should worry about and I brought it up many times when I've been in teams but now in the cloud and since you get most of the most of the charge you get in the cloud is from execution time. Right. And so if you can shave off even milliseconds of something you do thousands of times a day or maybe millions of times a day that really dramatically can you know lower your cloud costs and so we think of that too. And a lot of there was a movement I know with as mobile usage started increasing and smartphones and companies realizing that you know hey we're we're seeing more and more of our users I mean you know like I I've been writing on my blog for almost 20 years and like 60 some percent of them are mobile readers and I've got a dismal mobile reading experience I mean I mean the process of fixing it actually this month but but so that's something where a lot of application providers realize hey we need to do more here I mean even look at how trim windows has become over the last couple releases. Yeah even windows is a lot better like I even have a Mac and you know my feeling the last couple years is windows is so much better than a Mac now you know it used to kind of be the other way for me because you know the Mac OS was really great the apps are really great but it's to me it's and installing things were easier and things like that but now it's the complete opposite to me the Mac is harder you know the updates mess everything up every time they do a major update. I will say that Vista ran beautifully on my wife's Mac. Yeah. With all the hardware problems that was it was at the was at the height of bloated. I think it was. It was pretty much best. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it was it ran error error free on on my wife's Mac and so I was like what are people complaining about Vista experience is fantastic but on that hardware. So so talking about performance the one thing I want to bring up real quick is I have a somebody I mentored when I worked at Verizon. And she had a friend who I think he just got out of college or something like that work for Facebook his first job at Facebook he's making 250,000 a year. And I said what the heck what what is he doing. You know, how do you get that much money straight out of college. Number one I think it's too much money for somebody that young. You had how do you make that much money and I found out it was because he was doing performance and in Facebook. And he was working on performance and and Facebook and Facebook basically believes that you know if we pay this guy 250,000 but he saves us millions of dollars a year it's totally worth it. And so they actually hire people just specifically for performance to get that cost to get the performance execution time down. So they pay less in the cloud right and so it's so performances is a big deal that you know the not only do we have to worry about the users right because users will get bored and go to the next web page. But now we have to worry about costs in the cloud. Yeah, and because someday you know I think someday I'm not sure when it will happen but everything will be in the cloud you know we won't host servers at all anymore. I mean some people will. But I think most everything is going to move to the cloud in the near future. Yeah there was a I just had a conversation with Jeff Teeper is the president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft now and the father of SharePoint and he was at this conference over in Amsterdam the ESPC event and talk about how he felt that it wasn't until he thought it was 2017 was the date when he felt like the majority of people that he started speaking to were now embracing the cloud or recognizing that now that's you know if you look at the number of systems I mean still there's a huge on there's still a net new being installed in there but I think you're right at some point I mean just not going to make sense. Yeah, to do that at all especially with all the tools, especially with the AI everything else that we're now requiring of our systems, you can't do that without the scale of the cloud. Yeah, yeah and and but you know I do want to everybody listening because I've run into this with a couple companies including Verizon. That some companies believe that if you just put a VM in the cloud that's the cloud and to me that is not the cloud. That's just co location basically like we know we've had for a very very long time right. That's not the cloud and I worked at a company last year they were they were in it they were working on a three year project to move their their apps from done at framework to done at core and into the cloud and just be ends. And you know it was the tail end of a three year project, but they were just going to be ends and I was saying this is not the cloud, because the cloud is using the services that the cloud offers. And that's where you get the huge benefits, especially if we're talking about performance. That's huge benefits and for an example. I was hired for a company just north of me a little a little bit like 20 minutes, and they had a problem because they were trying to onboard sports teams and unfortunately their mobile app was sending 600 K payloads their back end system. And that was taking anywhere from seven to 70 seconds to get into the back end system. And so they were trying to onboard the Houston Astros and the Houston natural said that's way too slow. We're not we're not going to do it unless you get that because Houston Astros wanted to do batting practice, walk to the team room and have everything analyzed by them and that wasn't happening when it takes. 70 seconds to ingest one swing, right of the bath. And so using I didn't change so the solution that I came up with was I didn't change any of the code that process this data. All I did was stand up the cloud in front of it by, you know, putting the message, you know, into a queue, and then have events fire and process the messages as fast as it came in, right. And so I got that seven when I left. We were in testing to go live and I got that seven to 70 second processing down to 200 milliseconds or less. And that to me is the power of the cloud, not virtual machines, right. That's where you get the performance is when you start using more of a disconnected way of doing things, right, instead of a big monolithic way and and that pros, you know, that, you know, creates challenges too, of course, but, but for if you were just talking about performance, it's just hugely huge difference. Yeah, I'm interested in your answer to this, like, I know with the mentoring and the stuff that you that you do. I used to advise and I've done, I've spoken at a couple, you know, community colleges and universities, and, you know, somebody who like my marketing degrees but I've been for over 30 years I've been in it. I've been in technical management roles. I was at the Pacific Bell for for a long time and then, you know, number of other startups. And I would talk about software configuration management and DevOps and, you know, code management like these are roles which, you know, people that are in computer science programs are, you know, data platform programs. They're not excited. They're not sexy jobs or sounding to college students. But that's something where you go in, you can have, you know, college years part time experience but say, Hey, I've been in this space for a year or two. And you can make maybe not Facebook crazy money, but you can make really good money, you know, you know, 140 160 K a year, doing that stuff, you know, for with one or two years out of college. And I saw I tell people this and there's always shortages of these of those kinds of roles DevOps roles, especially, what do you advise people say like well what what to go look into like, here's an example I've got a son that graduated from University of Utah with his degree in atmospheric sciences. I kept telling him because he was capable of doing it like do a computer science minor. And his senior year he's like Dad, and he didn't do it he's like he thought to be too busy. His senior year he's just like I should have done that because he got into data science learn Python and are loved it is doing that is day to day job now. I keep telling get out of government you can double your salary by. Oh yeah, get out of the government working government, but he wants to work for NASA he wants to go do all that stuff so so anyway. But those those kinds of opportunities. What do you advise people like where where do you see like the underserved areas are where there's opportunities for people that are coming out of college that should they should be looking at. Well, you're right it you know the DevOps is is a role that you know I think more companies need to have, you know unfortunately, at least in my book I think too many companies are having that you know the developers do DevOps, which I think is mystic huge mistake. I think that should be should be a completely separate role just like, for example, database, you know administrators and designers are completely Q&A. Q&A and everything so I see a huge. If you look at the roles that I find. I have a hard time finding really good people DevOps is one database is another one. And to me, if you're really good at either one of those you can make good money doing those two. The other thing I've been recommending since the 90s basically is you know what are the problem people have and when I taught at the university here for 18 years and you know a lot of students will come up to me and say okay well now I've taken the course you know that that you run and we got the certificate that I was you know on the board of and and what how do I get a job and I go well the problem is you need experience. It's a whole chicken and the egg thing. And so, one of the things I recommend people who want to get a software engineering job is to pick a job similar to it. Right, work there, you know prove your good at that and then start moving into what you really want to do. Right and so back in the 90s, because I saw people do this successfully actually I recommended people go into QA. Right, because that's kind of like the first thing you learn a lot about the application and and our works and and the feet patterns of mistakes that are being made what people are doing wrong right. Right and so go into QA first. Yeah, most people QA is not sexy right it's it's it's it's something a lot of people don't really want to do, but it's a really good place to get your feet wet. And, and the story I used to tell at the university is is of this young woman who was at this company that I used to work at just up the street. And that's exactly what she did she got a job at QA. She was really good at that job and then she slowly started coming over to us the programming department, asking for small little things to do. And we gave them to her and she was really good at it and then we hired her we hired her straight out of QA into the our programming department and so that's a really I mean if you like dev ops you can stay there but you know I think doing those jobs that may not be a software engineering job gets you into the company especially if it's a large company like I won't use a NASA example but maybe like you know I worked at Verizon for two and a half years once, and maybe that's a good way to get Verizon is just start doing something else. Yeah, software engineering job because that because then you can start getting experience, you know, that way. Well and I was I served for many years first half my career first 15 years were in project in program management roles. And if you're coming over with again a couple years of dev ops and or s debt experience you know test experience QA roles over into project management to have that technical knowledge. The best pms always had that technical start. Oh yeah that was a marketing guy. I had different skill set, but the ones that did the best and moved up quickly on the management side were those that had just even a couple years and had that that technical undergrad so there's a lot. There's a lot of opportunities. If you go in and you get into find that you're just coding is not your passion there are other paths with skill set to and you know I'd like to point out again that you know if you do go into something like dev ops or QA or databases, and you really like it, and you're really good at it. To me you can write your own ticket because those roles and project managers to those roles to me are the hardest to find really good people. Right, that really know what they're doing and when I do find somebody in any of those positions that are really good I keep in contact with them to try to bring them into another job I'm on and things like that because they're so hard to find. There's lots of software engineers you know not everybody's great but but finding really great people knows other roles is, is to me is pretty tough. Yeah. Yeah, and, and, and because it, I think it's more of a minority kind of role as if you compare it to software then, like I said you can write your ticket, you know, you, you can demand more money because there's less of you. Right. Right. I think that's actually part of the problem with software engineering right now is there's too, there's too many people, you know that, you know, I know people get into it because they heard they can make lots of money and things like that but right now it's just to me it's over saturated and it's it's really tough, you know, to get through that, you know, and to show the show why you somebody should hire you because there's so where we're competing against people all the world now we used to compete just with people locally right but now we're competing all over the world and this David is we're venturing in like a whole we could talk for an hour on that topic and I know with you like you're interviewing so maybe we should schedule and do a collab talk podcast a regular full length because that's something again going back and talking with students groups and I've got four adult children I've get I gave them like outlined here's what you need to be doing to stand out while you're still in your undergrad. This is what you can be doing. It's more work, but you will stand out and unfortunately none of my kids listened. They've never listened to their parent. Of course, you know, but I don't. Yeah, my oldest who's also in the data science side of things, who did listen and kind of got out of the academia government side and went and is doing very well over and again a data science person in the health care industry, but she listened, and she's now late. She's now starting to write and build her social profile around a lot of that and great content. And so it's great to see but I just like see you could have been doing you could have done this started down this path, 10 years ago, and you would be further ahead than you are today. And you bring up another subject that's important about getting your name out there right and and there's there's lots of ways to do that I mean that's one of the reasons I write books, you know, I have a blog, you know since 1994. I speak a lot, you know, I used to teach teaching university, you know, I did a lot of things, especially in my beginner years, because I start, I, you know, I founded and started running user group the first year I was a software developer. Right. And, and that, you know, and I've written all about this and I've talked about a lot but that single thing to dramatically improve my software engineering life, and my personal life. Yeah. You know, I did a talk when I hit 25 years on just how much speaking has has dramatically changed my life. And, and, but part of that is writing and things like that too right and getting your name out there and and when I, when I mentor young people, I tell them the same thing that I need to start writing on blogs. If you want to write on my blog. Fine, I will be happy to host you. But you really need to start getting your name out there somehow it could completely agree. I saw a similar path that started writing, selling articles in the late 90s. I'm a 501 C three a nonprofit around user groups in 2002 in Northern California, like it so I'm a big advocate for writing sharing your knowledge, getting involved in the local regional community, getting on the speaking circuit. You know, all these things, anybody can go do that it's, you know, we are our own, you know, biggest roadblocks to do things. There's plenty of people there. There are people that would surprise you out there that are listening, listening, watching this, that are big names that still feel like throwing up before they go out on stage. They're so nervous. Oh, I was in the beginning. I was definitely like that. I'm not. I don't get nervous anymore. But in the beginning, I did want to speak. This is another thing we should talk about because also I was in music and I sang in a rock band for years. I always tell people I don't get nervous on stage because we did all originals. And I was the lead singer, like you kind of burn that out of your system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this reminds me of, I just published an article and Donna tips.com today about the importance of attending in person conferences now that they're back, you know, after COVID because, and I wrote that article because before I went to left the way to build stuff, you know, I started hearing about the low attendance at conferences. And so I spent a bunch of time, including when I was in Lithuania trying to think about that, going, okay, why is that right. And so I did a Twitter poll asking people why aren't you going to conferences, right, because to me, I started going to conferences the first year as a software engineer. And that dramatically changed my, my, my career too is good by going to conferences. And, and the number one answer in the poll was the company won't let them. And so I, I, you know, in the article I'd say why I, what I get out of going to conferences but then I also tackle the four, the four issues that I asked in the poll, and that why aren't people going and I feel that because of, you know, the company's not letting developers go the younger developers aren't getting exposed to this and they're not understanding, you know, the value of going to in person as opposed to watching a video. Yeah, well definitely I'm going to go grab that link often find that article because I wrote a similar post a week and coming back from Amsterdam wrote something similar saying like, Hey, the it's not about like the content is the easiest part you go find the content you don't have to follow it with the speakers, you don't have to attend and you can enrich yourself that way. It's you can't replace the, the face to face the interactions that the serendipity of walking through the conference hall, finding like one of your favorite authors or speakers, having a conversation making a connection like it's the networking huge. Yes, I tell people all the time that most of the time when I go to conferences I don't even go to sessions I spend most of the time I'm either talking or I'm networking, I'm resting. Right. Right. And, and, and I rarely go to sessions, especially since they're all, most, most everything is on video now I can watch it later. Right, but the personal interaction. Now that's different, you know, depending on the conference and the location, for example, you know, when I speak in India, I'm inundated with people, they won't leave me alone. Right. Sometimes I have to go hide my room just to get away from it for a little bit. And in contrast, you know, when I spoke in Lithuania, it was the complete opposite I had a really hard time getting people to network there and even know that, you know, the conference had networking lunches and things. People just weren't just culturally different. Yeah, it was like, like my first conference speaking in Germany, like, no, no questions. I thought I did poorly. And I had one of the top scoring sessions for the conference. I'm like, what? Yeah, no one came and talked to me at all, but people loved the content. It's definitely a culture thing. That's for sure. Well, Dave, I really appreciate your time. Of course, I've got all the links. So I'll have it. You could find it out in the YouTube. You can find it out on buckthrottle.com on the blog. We'll have all this out there. So thanks so much for your time. And I will. Let's reach out. Let's connect. I would love to get in to talk about this side about the finding a job conversation. I would love to have that with you. Yeah, and I'd like to talk about why I like being an MVP too. Yeah, yeah. That's, you know, to me also, you know, being a Microsoft MVP has really, really helped a lot. You know, mostly by networking, right? Like my producer for my show goes, how do you get all these people on? How do you get all these important people on your show? And I go, well, number one, I just ask. Yeah, that's the hardest thing to do for a lot of people. But number two, I've spent at least 17 years now networking with Microsoft people and I can reach anybody at Microsoft. I've even reached Guthrie. Yeah, I was at a company and I asked them, why aren't you looking at Azure? And the lead developer said, because Microsoft's not giving us any love. And I go, oh, I'll fix that. I emailed Scott Guthrie the next day we had two managers for Microsoft on the phone with her. Yeah. Right. And that's the power of the MVP that I really, really, really do like. And I'm also an RD and I would say that I've witnessed that as through the MVP and RD networks, that exact same thing too. So that's advice for anybody if you're struggling with legitimate issue or concerns with Microsoft. I mean, that's one of the things that the MVPs and RDs can provide. So definitely, if you know one, have one of your network reach out. Yeah. Well, that's what I feel that's part of my job. I always felt that, you know, I'm kind of like the first line of defense between the regular developers of Microsoft, right? Yeah. Because I've gone to a level where I can talk to both sides. Yeah. So I every time I went to Microsoft for the MVP summit, I always felt it was my job to bring, you know, the issues that local developers are experiencing to Microsoft. And to make things better, right? I do that. I always feel like I'm selfish. I'm like, here are my customers' issues. And I do that. But no, that's what they love. That's what they want you to do. But they love it. Not all. It depends on what it is. But people just need to reach out. Don't be afraid to ask. You might get rejected. That's okay. But you're not going to get anywhere if you don't ask. Right. Well, Dave, really appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you so much.