 15 years ago at logical housewares and t-shirts. Spent a little bit of time there, and the next logical thing after housewares and t-shirts, which was as the director was hearing about what is now called contextual covers. About a year ago, there's more people than this page. 20 years ago, I went home to a store. The first job was stack of shelves. And just on that, first jobs, and so, anybody ever worked in the supermarket? And I think that is as far away as the British life we had at Degra. It's good to remember what you read when you came home. We'll come back to that. Yeah, so I worked for agencies over the years. About 10 years ago, I started working for myself as a freelancer developer. And any freelancer developer is here. And what is a freelancer? Saves! They all work for Wayne and Charlie. Yeah. So, well, a freelancer doesn't do stuff. Did you ever do freelance stuff? Yeah, stuff, because you might not like to write code, but I think it was actually convincing people to give you money. No, because in the end, people come up with all sorts of bullshit excuses. Oh, check this in the poster. I wouldn't give you those credit. But yeah, a freelancer developer didn't start a small-bed shop. Five people. Mostly starters. Product for starters, as it turns out, is a hard work for a freelancer to start a small-bed company. I'm trying to get paid for them. Like, you know, even if they happen, it's not guaranteed that they're ran next week. Anybody build product for starters comes up. Diversify. Get into the enterprise. So, after that, we tried to build a bunch of products. I failed miserably. The next product was a URL short. Remember when that shit was all credit? URL short was what I wrote. It was the first in the world to offer analytics on the number of clicks he got. But that was basically it. Just after many clicks. That was it. And then Benji came along, they raised him, and then we were like, we don't even know how you can monetize this shit. Okay, next. So, the platform was a service called Forgister, which was for Ph.D. He joined engineering, and went to an office hired some people there, and was VP of engineering and talked about relationships of an engineer for three years. And kind of needed to go in and think about what I was going to do next. And so, I started with this thing a few years later called Cohort, and PJ very highly led me to sponsor, which wasn't much, but I appreciate it. And Cohort is just kind of what LinkedIn would be from the start of the day, but without all the crap, so just focusing on relationships, not comics, focusing on how well people know each other, so strength of friend-to-friend relationships, and then what people can do, and the opportunities. And you've never lived with Cohort, it was a long time ago. So, with that aside, where should we start? I'm going to hand this back to you now. Do you want to start with a little bit of coverage? Sure. Thanks for asking. PJ very hopefully provided us with some cards and some prompts on that, that might be interesting topics of conversation. There were some not-so-good ones that we left on the table, and what's your favorite band? What is your favorite band? My favorite band is Thanks. My favorite band is a band out of Philadelphia from the 80s and still around. Just to get a sense of the audience, hands up if you write code on a daily basis. Hands up if you test code on a daily basis. Not your own code. Anybody do support? Anybody not do any of those things? Are we talking customer service? Design? Of course. Designers. One designer? Seriously, one designer? No. He's joking. Well, this will make this the first question, which is kind of a loaded question from PJ. What is the right programming language for startups? What is the right programming language for startups? So, on the Obama campaign, it was kind of like this our 18 months beginning to end going from 0 to 300 deploy products. The only thing that really mattered was that we could get more people in to help. We just chose easy things. We had a bunch of things that were Ruby, a bunch of things that were Python, a bunch of things that were PHP, and anything else. We didn't have those decisions that you made at the beginning impact as the campaign progressed. So, the reason for that was in our case what we needed was to be able to get people up and running as quick as possible. So, making sure that there was something that anybody that wanted to work with immediately, and also sort of fundamentally having this core idea that we're not clever. We're not trying to do the coolest, most intense technology, but like solving real problems with straightforward code. So, we don't necessarily need anything beyond what we did. The team itself, like how do we make sure that people can access this stuff and actually be able to understand it quickly. It worked out pretty well. Of course, we had a couple of things that were far more special ones that we needed to branch out, but really, not much at all. We got to do some pretty serious I think we processed our processing stuff. And all the little stuff that we had to be working on. To accept the language in my opinion doesn't matter so much, so long as you can get people in the chair. Yeah, that's kind of an observation I've witnessed myself first time. I mean, it's pretty interesting to think about that particular project as it was actually started. And you go from like zero to 200 million in donations or a family. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What period of time were you talking about? That was about 12 months. That's apparently when it started to go from zero to 200 million in 12 months. And yet there is this is one thing that people, I feel though these days it's probably people who don't know a long time and they obsess about the technology that's going to be built in is a pretty good argument for earning generalists and taking your right to over the job approach. And it kind of correlates with the rise in just the general coming out approach for the last three years when I started out. And the EHB developer is kind of your entity. And I think for some people it probably still is and that's fine but those people are also probably like core of the EHB project. They probably say it's included in languages. Does anybody agree with what we're saying here? I don't want to do that for you. Sounds good. Sounds good. So I think that the Swiss army knife approach is like all the tools that are out there to probably try and solve it. That's way more important. We work on the right thing. Is it something that you could create value from? What are that is a profit if it's a start organization or if it's a main project social entrepreneurship or a social operation and will create value what is the shortest path to create something that starts to create value to solve the problem. And at some point in the future if you require specialists or if you really need to use a particular technology or two or aspect of the staff if you don't get to the point where you can prove them that something is useful or valuable. Yeah, so I'm probably going to say exactly the same thing but essentially if you're not actually focused on the end user and like making sure that you're solving the problem instead of focusing on what's the right technology or what I think the problem is then you just end up doing this path and you're building for all the wrong reasons based on my experience which is sort of riddled with failure along the way. If you're not actually focused on the customer and the problem itself and get to on down how do I want to solve this how can I be clever and come up with a good solution instead of actually focusing on what's going to help these people that you just illustrate the failure. I mean, the funny thing is that's just like a modern version of the customer is always right just apply it differently and at the end of the day if you pay attention to your customers you probably figure something out and we're probably not saying something that's not what you said before. Sorry about that. So far no official question. Why does it really matter why does it use the matter actually because you could write a peer's code you just do what needs to be done versus what they think because the job market right now is actually huge so you just go get another job I don't think I understand what you're making of me. So I think I'm going to try to parse this. The job market is such right now that you don't, as an engineer, you don't really need to focus on that because it's like if you join a startup they focus on the wrong things, it fails but you have a great time building this amazing peer's code and it fails, you can just go get another job which is a great short-term approach to how to live as an engineer but if you want to grow your career at all, if you want to make sure that this industry stays alive then you have to take a little bit more long-term view because in the end we're here to solve problems I think I get really reductive when I talk about this I think that the point of being an engineer the reason I got into it was to be able to solve problems and make things better and the purity of the code that we all love is sort of in a reaction to that but if we do that like if we just sort of follow the best practices and ignoring the actual problem that we're trying to solve then we're not actually doing what we should be doing which is applying those best practices inside of solving those problems so you're an engineer and you're in the 18 months or so that you were active in OG Comic Political Enterprise Software Do you have any thoughts on what things are today? Does everybody know the comic called Countryman which is the business buying dog? There is a word inside that says Countryman Do they have the internet there? We only got electricity so we're trying to catch it to be sure so I'll talk super briefly about this I'm going to try to pull it back into technology which is much the same way that we sort of separated out how we do things from why we do things in technology I feel like we have a lot of that same thing happening in the world in general we're becoming more polarized about the winning instead of being right to moving things forward so that's about as much of a stance as I'm going to take with a microphone at my end quite briefly Well, you know and it's heavy US investment is something you're meant to go and make the fastest exit No, it depends heavy US investment is not just skills and experience and expertise Yes, you're probably otherwise will have access to I am a huge fan of this country I've been to the United States more than any other country to conversations that happen is not Americans some of the nicest people I've ever met it breaks my heart the country is so heavily divided because I agree with that this country has been divided for a long time in different fronts and you could see the hurt in his eyes this is a genuine question why are people made all the next day which is one of the things we're just talking about is the separation I think we have that we're seeing that politically in the world but we see it a lot in our lives in our small scale roles engineers are going to focus on the code and other people are going to talk to the customers and you build this wall between every single part of your life whether we're talking about politics on a grand scale or we're talking about just inside of a small team you focus on the things that you think you need to focus on and you lose sight of the big picture it becomes really easy to just focus on yourself and bear with me where this logic makes no sense but it cares but they just forget because they don't have to interact with everybody completely unintentionally if we give up on if we see everybody's an asshole we know not everybody's an asshole not even when you do an entire life like I did I was an asshole last night you know we need to be surprised where the effectiveness of teams working together because when you don't see the other thing you can have a big impact on your relationships but more distributed what are the types of things that people should be thinking about when it comes to this disagreement so I mean like just sort of inside of a team like there's a lot of things particularly I mean a lot of social media I started was 50% for all things to make sure that there was like real human connection it's a hard thing that you strive for in a team while being sort of spread out across the country or the world you're remote people and you don't it's hard but there's a lot of sort of easy things that you can do Slack is more communication conversations than it's like Slack is not working we need to think that we need to actually see faces for this and hang out and support things exactly and being able to do that kind of stuff and building that into the culture so that we have not only the communication aspect of it but also because there is no substitute for us last night but it's the how do we make sure that sort of inside of the the industry inside of our goals that there is that humaneness built in so I work with a lot of new engineers because you're an engineer that's what you do as an engineer so I'm smart with you no, totally, hands up who's smarter than everybody else seriously though, hands up who's smarter the tools aren't coming in soft it gives us a bias that makes us think oh, you know, I'm just going to I wrote this it's a it's a workbook and managing widgets I'm going to advise medical software now because I know how to fix people there's great technologists in the world who talk to us and say, well, did you go into the campaign management office and tell them that you're an engineer? like that is the answer like, I don't know, we're engineers and so and the other thing that we talked about related to that though is that this is the kind of tone that has been set part of the industry nobody has checked that perception along the way what are the things such, you know you can do as a team member with that person or as an elite with that person or just as somebody you can do a bit more experience in their organization what are the types of things you can do to kind of check that perception engineers get all of these perks but like, oh, you want support? sorry, work Fridays doesn't apply oh, you want to be on the level you can't do that for support those things sort of exist constantly there's a lot of things that you can do to the organization to sort of fix that but one of the I keep going back to the like so when I started it, it was super smart and they were like, can we're going to store for a long time? I know this is about making the warehouse just shipping work so that you actually you know what the problem is and you see how hard everybody's job is I mean, many people do just saying that thing so many times over the last 20 years especially if you're building something that's more developed there's marketing you can do you know, PJ has never said that because they have a job to do as well but this type of attitude is what feeds to siloing and walls and locking down conversations and leads to toxic culture and makes remote work even harder because if you've got multiple components of the team regardless of the roles they don't apparently trust each other to do the job that they're hired to do it's not a race internet but how much time do we have? we don't understand that you need one where you don't have to find that we couldn't have that decision to make ourselves to the bottom and to mobile companies we covered as a mobile interface and we had to go native or go hybrid and at the end of the day whatever one got us as far as we could in the shortest space of time we went with knowing which was Ionic so knowing full well that it would be a bit of a learning curve and really when you talk about it we might want to go native if we don't get to the point that matters so the pragmatic decision for us was well 9% of what we needed to do on mobile device that's mostly compatible with Android let's just do that I'm sure there were things that were going on like well we should have to react but to make a decision you go with it and in the day it's a race to create value in the shortest space of time prove that there's something useful there and that's valuable to people and then I don't think it's a problem the expectation should be that two years from now all that code is going to be gone anyway so taking that pragmatic decision now so long as one of two things is going to happen you're going to demonstrate value you're going to grow the team and you're going to reinvest in something that is exactly what you want based on actual usage or it's not going to work out and you're going to fail so I'll give you a question about the ship that if the ship is built and then the plank on the ship has changed when after each other is it still the same ship or not and it's kind of like how the human body works themselves but it's imposters that it's up to people to stretch it it's your chance to react to PJ's head you just chose