 Hey, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat interview and I'm here with Rocky. Hey, good morning. Hey, how you doing, Chris? Good afternoon, I guess. Yeah, that's true. It is good afternoon, isn't it? Well, Rocky, why don't you introduce yourself? Who you are, where you are and what you do? Sure. I'm Rocky Lovka. I am the CTO at a company called Magenic and we're a big, well, I don't know if we're big, but a reasonably good sized software development consulting company and also over the last long time I've been doing writing books and speaking and building open source software in the dotnet development space. And we were just chatting about before we started recording. Rocky and I, I think we've so we've been in the same room a few times and I think I've seen you in passing and crowds, but never really chatted before this. But you're pretty steady on the regional director, the RD email lists and some interesting topics to go in there. I usually when people are getting so in depth down the weeds of what's going on with Azure, I don't really weigh in. If there's any discussion that's around the collaboration technologies or more the front end or on the partner side, then I mean, I'm right inside those conversations. But yeah, so the, so with everything kind of going on now, a lot of the different discussions. I mean, it's, I mean, how are things going for you? How are things with Magenic? Is business still hopping along? Well, it's definitely a different time for everybody. And we're doing quite well. But there's definitely an impact. And I think the longer this goes on, the bigger the impact will be on our clients and therefore on us, right? It's because we exist purely to build software for our customers. And so when our customers are struggling, obviously that has a ripple effect. We were fortunate in that our company was our consultants were already, man, I got to say over half of them were worked remote, either always or sometimes prior to all of this. And so for most of our technical staff, it's been as easy as it could be. I wouldn't say easy, right? But certainly for our office staff, this idea of working from home for accounting, HR, ever marketing, it was a big adjustment for a lot of folks. And some people like it and some people are struggling. And I think it's microcosm of the bigger world. The group that's really struggling the most is our sales group, probably on a couple different levels. One, because if you're in sales, almost by definition, you like people, right? You enjoy interaction. And all of a sudden, you're deprived of that. And then it's just it's playing hard as you can probably imagine to get anyone's attention about, you know, you want to build some software, you solve a business problem, and everybody's kind of hunkered down with bigger things on their mind. But then we've got some customers too that are in industries that are under how to put it. But they're very busy because of various aspects of what's going on right now with COVID. And so some of them are scrambling to build software or complete projects that were in process that can help. So that's good too. Well, I'm interested to know, speaking of that process, obviously going out and I felt the impact is an independent of closing deals of meeting with people like that side of things. So talk about it. So, you know, Majenek, and I'd like to hear a little bit about your methodology and CSLA.net and the process that you work with clients to build software. Is that something that came out of the company or was the company, what's the background of Majenek, you know, was it more built on some of this process of methodology that you've developed? Well, it's kind of interesting because they're actually in parallel. I started working on CSLA back in the 90s. It was a comm-based deal at that point in time, you know, predated.net. And at that time, I worked for a different consulting company. And I'd started writing books and speaking at conferences and building this essentially open source software, but the internet didn't exist back then the way we think of it now. And my employer at the time was like, hey, that's really great. Yeah, if you want to speak at a conference, you know, take some vacation, go for it. Yeah, if you want to write books, you know, that's a nice hobby for your evenings and weekends. And to start with, that was fine with me. But then after two or three years, the company started benefiting greatly from both the sales and recruiting perspective. And they were unwilling to recognize that, I guess, or at least in a way that I had little kids at the time. And so ultimately, I was getting coaching from another gentleman, you know, how in any given city, I think there's a relatively small community of active tech people, right? The ones that go to meetups, user groups, and so forth. And so, and I knew that this guy owned and ran a competing consulting company. But, you know, he's a smart guy and was giving me, literally giving me advice on how to succeed where I was, even though I was working for a competing firm that didn't go anywhere. So eventually, I went back to him and I said, so Greg, you know, all that stuff you've been telling me for the last year and a half or so, you really believe that? And he said, bye. And I said, well, because maybe I should come work for you. And so I switched, that was the year 2000. I switched and started working for Majenek. And so, yeah, so for a while, Majenek did quite a lot of work, CSLA based just because my writing and speaking brought in a bunch of business around CSLA. But it's always been a minority of what we've done as a company. We've always had our own sales force and brought in a wide array of different customers. Sometimes they do CSLA and sometimes they don't. And we don't pressure them one way or the other. You know, CSLA when the over the last 10 years when people largely quit writing smart client apps in favor of writing web apps, especially Angular and that sort of thing, CSLA, I can't say that it's not with, it doesn't have value, but it's value proposition is limited or is lessened if your client isn't a smart client, basically. If your client is written in JavaScript or TypeScript, you obviously can't share that code with server side code that's C sharp, right? And now there's the blazer in particular, but also Xamarin resurgence. I'm just, I can't express how excited I am. Now by the fact that we're looking at, you know, we can build apps that run in the browser, but we don't have to, we're not limited just to JavaScript anymore. We can use, you know, C C plus C sharp Java, maybe Java Ruby go. What's driving a lot of that change? I mean, what's different now? Is it just a lot of the, because I know that there was a kind of a delayed response for a lot of enterprise organizations with their kind of legacy solutions that they've gone and built. Is that part of what we're now seeing the change happen? Because these companies that have this massive investments in prior technologies saying, how do we actually move these things over to the cloud? And they just weren't willing to go in and completely re architect, build them from the ground up and then want to leverage or, you know, what is driving some of the shift that's happening now? I think a lot of it, I give credit to a technology called WebAssembly, which has been, comes out of the Mozilla originally, but now it's an internet standard and it's built into all of the modern browsers and it allows the browser to run JavaScript like normal and also now all of the browsers have an assembly language engine that, so instead of JavaScript or in addition to JavaScript, you can now run compiled code. So like take C or C++ or Rosti or whatever, compile it into WebAssembly instead of like x86 assembly and it will run in any browser anywhere. And so that's the technical thing that's happened. The business driver to your point is that there's just a massive amount of, especially Windows forms and WPF applications out there that have never been migrated onto the web, I think in not in small part because the early web couldn't do what those apps did, the rich interactivity, but as we now know, the modern web, like you look at Word, who would have ever thought Word or Excel could run in a browser? And okay, so all of Excel doesn't run in the browser, but a pretty good chunk of it does, right? And that's even without WebAssembly. So now you take the fact that modern web development really can create smart client apps comparable to WPF or Windows forms. And then you tell all of those developers that they don't have to switch their entire skill set to JavaScript, but yet they can continue to do .NET and C-sharp. It's like, okay, maybe the dam is breaking here. Maybe now I can, I've got a path forward that still lets me do smart client development, give my users the same type of experience that they're accustomed to, let me use relatively familiar development tools, but I've got a complete deployment and a web deployment without all of the complexity of installing software. But it certainly opens up just the job field so that you're not, again, looking for that specific skill set, you've got more, a wider net you can cast for solutions that you need to build for an organization. Yeah, I think so. And then there's a lot of, I don't know, angst, whatever. It's like, oh man, is WebAssembly going to completely replace Angular? That's not the way this industry has ever worked. A technology becomes successful, enterprise apps get built in that technology, and the technology then often lasts for like 20 years. Now it might not be the forefront of our thought process. And for all we know, Angular, we were at the inception of all this, so it's hard to sit here today and look forward five or 10 years, and oh man, in 10 years the world is going to be X or Y or Z. All I can say is that as somebody who has never been particularly excited about JavaScript web development, this WebAssembly stuff makes me very excited. But I work with people, tons of people at Magenic that absolutely love building Angular and react apps and use TypeScript and JavaScript. And we're going to be able to continue to that for many years also. So I don't. We were just talking, somebody posted out on a group that they were looking for help with a client, and they were looking for people that had COBOL skills. And I was just joking that back in the early 90s, I was working for EDS. I was a business analyst, and I got pulled aside. My manager said, hey, you've been identified as somebody that we'd love to pay for, go through COBOL training, become a COBOL programmer. And I declined. It was all, you know, as they were starting to ramp up for, it was like 94. They were, I think, ahead of the curve a bit on Y2K stuff. And so I had friends that went and went through that process, and they financially have done very well. Both of them have retired early, you know? I have no doubt. Well, and now that's been in the, certainly on Twitter, but I think in the news a little bit too about how some of these unemployment systems at the state level, like in New Jersey, are all written in COBOL, and they're falling on their face because the unemployment claims are, what, 10 or 100 times? I've just massively higher than they've ever been before. And so there's this huge cry. It's like, hey, you know, anybody who knows COBOL, please come help us out. Well, that was it. The project I was on, it was a California MediCal, so massive systems and all built on COBOL. But yeah, it depressed me then to think about going that direction down that path. But financially, it would have done okay. But to your point, it's, you know, you have these massive enterprise systems, these legacy systems, someone has to maintain those. There's going to be, it's not the exciting sexy new technology that the kids want to go and study in school. And yet you have massive investments that are still made in upkeeping these systems. And, and while we can, it's nice to sit and talk sometimes about upgrading, re-architecting, moving things over to the latest technology. And some of these systems, it's like, it's just not cost effective to go in and do that. It's actually cheaper to maintain and then build new systems on new technology. Well, another question, I know that you're still doing a lot of events, a lot of speaking. So what, what are some of the topics? Like, what are you out there talking about what, what's kind of the latest exciting stuff that gets you off the couch to go and speak in an event? My focus is really, I would say, been on three areas. I'm interested in a lot of things, but you can't get deep enough in all of them to speak credibly, right? So the three things that I've been talking about moving from .NET framework into .NET core, .NET standard, and .NET five is around the corner. And then the, and that's part technology and a lot of its process though, it's actually, right, it's just like any software migration thing. There, there certainly are technical tips and tricks and approaches, but at the end of the day, it's a lot about process. Not surprisingly, I've been talking a lot about WebAssembly and Blazor and a similar technology called UNO that both are UI frameworks for .NET running in the browser. And then the third area is Kubernetes and container based server computing, because I have this picture of the near future where modern, you know, like new software that gets built, all the server stuff gets written in, to run in containers and probably runs in either Azure, AWS or Kubernetes or maybe both. And the client software is all running, is written using WebAssembly and is running in the browser. And so you've got portable code on the server and portable code on the client. And you know, the only, the only place that even like Windows ends up being relevant in this whole picture is the Visual Studio runs on Windows. So I, as a developer, use Windows, but really my end users, they're using a browser on any device and they're talking to containers that are almost certainly running in Linux and then are running on some cloud somewhere. What are your, what topics have you written about, like your books? I'm sorry, don't know your stuff. Don't live in the dev world. You know, other than, I've known your name for years. I've seen you inside occasionally when you, and then of course, I've become an RD and within the program, I see you there, but you're not familiar with the body of written word that you've put together. Yeah. And I think about that. It's almost sound like a broken record. What I've been writing about for years is how to architect enterprise software using Microsoft's tools so that you end up with maintainable scalable software, primarily in a distributed setting. And so I've been, you know, all this time talking about how to create app servers and talk to them efficiently. And so I think things like containers and Kubernetes are just an extension of that. And similarly, I spent all of my books have focused on whatever kind of UI technology is current at the time. So it's gone through Windows forms and web forms and ASPMVC. And I wrote a book using Silverlight at one point, which Silverlight was so nice for the whole year and a half we had it. And, you know, so, so really, I guess it's been a consistent theme, which is basically how do you create maintainable software that hopefully as the UI technologies change over time, because they will, they always have. How do you not have to rewrite your entire app just because there's a new UI framework? And how do you have to not rewrite your entire app just because there's a new app server technology? That's kind of the core focus of the things I've written over the years. You know, it's just observation, too, with the community stuff that I do. And here is where I live in South Salt Lake City. I'm in Lehigh, which is kind of the tech hub for the region. They call it Silicon Slopes. And there's a heavy investment, a lot of startups in the fintech area. And there's user groups on various technologies and so much of the training. And in fact, there's a couple of the schools of the software schools, kind of the new flavor of trade school for technology development that have kind of sprung out of this area here in the Bay Area. But you see a lot of them where they go in and do this, do these rapid programs in specific languages and technology areas. What guidance would you give to people that are still in school or that they're looking to add to their career? That's more, I guess, I look at it as more of the kind of the DevOps training of there's the specific shovel in hand, how do I go and dig this trench versus the, let's step back and look at how you organize DevOps inside of an organization. One of the best practices. Is there, what guidance would you give to students that, of how to approach development in kind of the modern era, rather than just go focus on a specific technology? Because again, my perception is a lot of these students, this is certainly true when I was closer to the DevOps space in the late 90s and early 2000s, that students came in really smart in coding and solve these specific problems, but then had absolutely no idea how to apply that in real world scenarios and then had to be kind of re-educated on how companies built software. So what guidance would you give of where people should start and what they should consider? Well, about 10 years ago, a little maybe 12, Mugenic started a thing that we call the delivery center, which is, because normally all of our consultants have maybe 10 years, 7, 10, 15 years more experience. But we created the delivery center with the intent of hiring folks right out of school or that had just made a career change. I think initially our vision was, oh, it's just all going to be right out of school, but it ended up being kind of a mix. But some of the people we've hired are like 40-something, and I've switched careers. So kind of the same, but the idea of being coming in without a wealth of pre-existing software development experience. And the way that what we've, I guess, found over time is like those boot camps or other quick, kind of quick hit coding camp type deals vary in quality a lot. And also individual people vary in their attitude and aptitude a great deal. And so, and these two in my mind are synergistic in that what makes somebody successful is in part, like if you go to a boot camp that teaches you Angular and you never learn JavaScript, which we encounter people like that, you're not useful, at least not in our world because you got to build software and just creating the UI is not sufficient. You have to be able to talk to servers and so forth. And so some, you know, some code camps are better about that than others, right? So they take a slightly more holistic approach that's good. But then a lot of it ends up coming down on the student too. As an individual, do you do the minimum necessary to get your certify, you know, pass the class, get the certification, whatever it is, or do you really follow love with this stuff and dig in and, you know, you not only do the homework assignments, but you decide, I'm going to write a little game on there or whatever. I don't know. I'm going to write a recipe tracker. I basically have your own little projects. And so by the time that you're done with the class, you've learned all the things your program has to offer. Plus, you've actually tried to exercise it on your own. Now, those people are like gold, right? Right. Well, yeah, the people that go in and get their hands dirt. I mean, look, there's a, so I, when I started at university, I was an industrial design major. And part of why I changed my major two and a half years into the program was because I had friends that were older, that were graduating, were having difficulty finding jobs within that space at that time in the late 80s, early 90s. And but then also looking at what kind of jobs and things were possible and what those roles actually looked like. And I started getting feedback that you'll get the kind of the comparison here, but the, you know, that I didn't want to do the jobs that people were actually getting jobs doing with that training. And so it sounds like your advice is always like, look, that's why doing fellowships. That's why doing, going and, you know, between your, you know, generally between the sophomore and junior and before your senior year of university, that you go and do these, you know, these fellowships and other projects, go get, you know, feet on the ground, experience real world experience, even if it's, you know, for hourly or even some, some cases, free projects to get that experience and get a taste for it. Is this something that I actually want to go and do? That's exactly right. You know, and I mean, it's just, it sets the, sets people into two different categories, right? The category of folks that learn, that they assume that whatever they learn in those classes, and this is true if you go to university too, right? You can go through and just learn what you need to get good grades. And that's fine. Or you can actually be applying that, you know, that information and knowledge and trying to, like you said, contribute to the, there's all sorts of, especially now, right? There's open source projects you can contribute. There are internships or fellowships or, shoot, you know, especially if you're in the US, the odds of you having your own laptop or something is almost 100% if you're in this field. And so the ability to just pick something and say, hey, I'm a comic collector. Can I catalog all my comics? Or, you know, and in the end of that software may or may not be something that's useful to anybody or even you. But in the process of building it, you will have learned way more. And it kind of comes back now that comes back to your DevOps question, right? Which is I have yet to see any educational programs that focus on the software development as a process and the actual mechanics of like, what is it like to really build, debug and deploy a piece of software, right? Classes usually are like, oh, here's some algorithms or here's a web page or, but as a positive example, my wife is the executive director for Missing Children Minnesota, which is a nonprofit that, as you might expect, helps find missing kids. And a, one of these boot camp teachers approached her and said, hey, my students need a project. Can we do something for you? And she said, well, why it'd be really great if I had a way to just type in a bunch of this data and get some reports out of it. And, you know, very small focus problem. And so they did. They built a website. They used Angular and Node.js on the server. And, you know, was it fancy? No. Did it end up really solving the problem? In the short term, the answer is yes. Actually, it got used. But in the long run, you know, it's not enterprise software. But my point being, those students that built that software, built real software, debugged it, actually had to get a user, get my wife to approve it. It had to be rolled out and running on a real server. I mean, they got the end to end story. And so I got to believe that I have no way of knowing, but I got to believe that every one of those students got snapped up by somebody and who was very happy to hire them. Yeah, just to make you think too, so I was, I started, I got into technical project management and, and, and so I built for a number of years, I built out project management organizations for companies. And so I was always, you know, side by side and those roles with IT, with, with development teams. And then I got into and started building out and supporting software configuration management systems and helping build the process side of that. I remember having a conversation around 2000, 2002, somewhere right there where so my, I had a company, I sold my software company in 2001 and, and went to another startup, but was also doing advisory projects for student run startups coming out of UC Berkeley and out of Stanford and, and we had some client projects and things. But I remember talking with an undergrad student at the time, I think at UC Berkeley was just like, well, what are your recommendations? What do you see? Like, where do I have the best chance of making the most money in this role and coming out of it? And I said back then, I said, look, you know, if you go and focus on SCM and focus on this, the operational activities around it, we didn't, you have, of course, the phrase, the term DevOps back then, but that was all those, those tools. And if you go in this, everybody's going and again, learning that program that they want to go build this other thing, there is a bleeding need, you know, behind the scenes for all the operational aspects in support of every like every single company needs to do this, whether you have a dedicated IT team or not, or you provide it as a service to these smaller companies, they need those capabilities. And like, you know, I've not ever seen a program develop specifically looking at those things, I have to believe there's something out there. And, you know, now that's focused on, I've not come across that. I'll certainly tout it if I, if I find a company, an organization, an educational institution that has a DevOps focus program. And as soon as I hit publish on this video, I'm sure people will email me and point out all the ones. I have no doubt. I'm not aware either. I do think it's challenging, right? Because true DevOps is really, it encompasses the process of everything to do with development, everything to do with QA, everything to do with security, everything to do with deployment, release management and operations. And, you know, so what we just described is like four different careers that people make their entire living in. And somebody who's a DevOps expert may not be an expert developer, but they have to understand development. And they may not be an expert ops manager, right? Or Linux, you know, system admin, but they have to have a pretty good grasp of how all that stuff work. It's, you know, it's a tall order. It's a very broad skill set that can't be too shallow in any of those areas because they are, they have to be able to at least interact intelligently with the experts in each one of those spaces, right? So it makes me a little skeptical to think that DevOps itself is an entry-level position, you know, just just because there's so much there. Yeah, you're right. You're right. It is. And look, and I'm not trying to, like, suggest there, say, hey, what's the quick fix solution to come in and take some of these more senior roles? I think the reality, you're right. You need to get your hands dirty. You need to have that experience. You need to kind of, you know, earn that education out in the real world. For whatever discipline that you're coming from, you need to have that real experience. And I mean, there's plenty of opportunity. If people, I think it's, it is good to have people, to have that focus, to know that there's that need and go in with the intent of learning these different parts and being in that DevOps space. The reality is most people develop into that, those roles through those, those different disciplines from different areas. I mean, my, look at my background, I used to work in the space was building your project portfolio management solutions. That's how I got into information management. And that's how I found SharePoint kind of got into the micro system, Microsoft ecosystem, that direction. I was a, I was a big rational software guy. I wrote a book for IBM, you know, like I was in that world. And it was your SharePoint that kind of sucked me in and I've stayed. But that, you know, again, it was one of those things where, you know, I started down one path and saw that there was a need. There was a, you know, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the need of the collaboration technology and support of all these things, project portfolio management. I did a deployment of project server back in 2005 and got introduced to the SharePoint, but again, all those different pieces. And so in fact, I started at Microsoft in 2006. So I was an employee for three and a half years. And like two months after I started, my IBM book was published finally. And they wanted me to promote it. And I'm like, sorry, can't. I'm no longer in the SEM world and I work for Microsoft. No, I will not be able to go and do any other things in support of the book that you just published. But thank you for the book. I think what you just touched on something though, that to me has always been a big, a big deal. And that is careers are, folks get focused on a job. But realistically, if you're going to be in this industry, you're going to, you need a career and a career lasts, it transcends jobs, and it lasts probably 30 or more years, right? 40 years, whatever. And you can be intentional about that, or you can stumble into things. And I think most of us do some combination of the two, especially early in, like in my career, I graduated from university in a recession. And so I just took the first job I could get. I'm like, just get me out of the part time jobs I was doing to pay the rent and let me have a real job. And my second job was actually kind of accidental, but I got it through a relationship that I had developed in my first job. But from there, my career became a lot more intentional, or by that point, I was six years, seven years into my career, I kind of had a pretty good idea of what I did and didn't enjoy doing. And so as I moved further in my career, and it's not like I didn't go do some things that I found out I very much disliked, but I did it by choice, right? For example, I took a job managing a group of about 40 consultants at one point. And dealing with sales, managing the consultants, all this stuff, I hated that job. And what I discovered out of that is I don't, I do enjoy aspects of sales, but I don't particularly enjoy being the manager over a large group of people. And, you know, I don't know if 30 is a large, but 30 was large enough that I'm like, eh, that's not what I want to do. We know the magic number for direct reports is it's only five. Yeah, I know. Well, and I had people, yeah. But in consulting, it's, yeah, at least the companies I've worked with, usually you have some sort of a manager that manages maybe like 20 people and then they report up into a unit manager. And so I was at the unit level. So I actually, I did have a couple folks that helped, you know, manage this, but then the unit level, it's like, well, now I've got a, I own the profit and loss for these people and I have to keep them billable. I have to work with, you know, and I know people that thrive on that. I work daily now with people that do that and they thrive on it and enjoy immensely. Yeah. And I don't. And I guess that's my point is that as you get in far enough into your career and those first couple of three years, it's difficult to know, I think. But when you get into the five to seven range, you probably start to think, ah, you know, am I going to be happy writing code for the next 20 years? No, I'm not. Or yes, I am, right? But that should inform your decision. You know, I mean, I work with people and have over time, you know, like a literal rocket scientist who got tired of rocket science, he stuff and wanted to write software. Yeah, you know, it's like, why would you give up what seems like such a glamorous career path? And he's like, it was fun for a while, but I just didn't, you know, it turns out that what seems romantic to one person, you start doing it on a daily basis. And it's like, yeah, this is kind of a grind. You know, one of my favorite management books, you just reminded me, what's that guy? He's the YouTube star that was a NASA rocket scientist. And now he does videos, one of the best ones that he does. Do you know who I'm describing? I don't know his name, but he does these video YouTube videos where it's all science-based. He created a tracking package to solve some of the stealing packages off front porches, and it does a glitter bomb, and it sprays auto sprays, fart spray, and that guy, he was a NASA scientist like that. Yeah, that's that's a guy that's just like, yeah, it was a cool job. But this sounds a lot more fun over here. You know, there's a one of my favorite leadership development books is by Marcus Buckingham. In fact, when I was at Microsoft, and I was part of the, probably not familiar, but it was the management excellence community mech inside of Microsoft for people managers, I was part of the leadership team for that. And so we got to meet with Marcus a couple times. He was out there advising bomber on something and had some extra time. And so like 10 of us got to go meet with him for a couple hours and talk about it. His book called First Break All the Rules. I don't know if you've ever read that. What are my all-time favorites? And it's my management style, but it kind of speaks to what you described. It's the best, the most highly functional teams, the highest successful teams are those where the manager is able to understand, to discover, understand the strengths of the individuals and team and to build teams based on their strengths. And when you can do that for yourself, like I had a team where I had an analyst who was just had just a brilliant mind for data analysis. I then had a PM who didn't have a technical bone in her body, but was fantastic people person. And paired together, they crushed every single project put in front of them. And because you had one that had a deathly fear of presenting, standing up in front of an audience and sharing the results. But then a PM who thrived on that and could make it just look, you know, those people that are good at PowerPoint and it's beautiful and functional and all of that. That's a gift to do that. But going paired together, I mean, it was just, it was fantastic. And so I've built a couple teams based off of since reading that book and that philosophy. But when you understand that about yourself, I know what some of my core skills are. I know what my weakness skills are or my non skills. And so I will, like I've gone, as you said, I've kind of built my career where I gravitate towards those things where I know those are my strengths. And I've been blessed that I've been able to do that. You can't always do that, obviously, we all have. There's a reason they call it work. And I think in our industry in particular, and by our industry, I'm including BAs, PMs, developers, designers, right? I mean, that's the people, these are the types of roles that I work with on a regular basis. And so I think all of us are so fortunate in that we there's enough variety in the software development industry that you can almost certainly find something that lights your passion, and that's going to pay well. And so we get to go to work. And for the most part, we probably get to do something that we actually enjoy and get paid well for. But it's not, I mean, it's also the real world. So even if you're in the middle of doing something you truly love, bad things happen, right? I mean, deadlines get cut or missed or you end up with somebody working with you that you're just butt heads constantly. And so that's why it's called work, too. But I do think though that and so I think I've been in bad spots a few times where working with people I didn't like or whatever it was. And sometimes you just kind of push through it or sometimes it's like, well, there's enough opportunity out there that I don't have to, I'm not trapped, right? And although I get it, everybody's, as soon as I say that, no, you're going to get stuff on this video about how well I'm trapped. And I get that. I understand, right? Everybody's got different life circumstances, but I do think that we are generally very fortunate in our industry to have the just I used to work for a company that so many people would would get out of the tech space into management because that was the kind of the way that was the path, right? Well, that was to move up and make more and do that. But yeah. And that was true, I think, broadly in our industry for a time back in the 90s and maybe even early 2000s. But nowadays, like developers and designers, a lot of these roles pay so well that from a money perspective, becoming a manager isn't necessarily an up. It's more of an over. And so I think that's awesome because then you can look at that and say, hey, maybe I'm tired of being a developer or a designer. Maybe I don't want to do this for the next decade or more. Maybe I want to and that this is the mind shift, switch careers and become the best manager, the best leader. And I think that's the key because if you think, oh, I'm a technologist and I'm just going to manage people and you don't like to your point, right? You start reading books and you start studying and you really start learning the skills about what it is to be an effective leader. It's a different skill set. And I think because a lot of organizations and like this was a problem when I was at Microsoft and I know that they've been doing a lot of work on their culture, recognizing this, but creating a path for individual contributors. We're all technologists. I mean, that's part of it. There has to be that path there. And then this idea that just because you're really good at technology does not equate into a good manager. They're horrible managers that never should have been in charge of other human beings. I had a couple and just shouldn't have been in the management. We're fantastic at the technology at the work itself, but you can't as a business owner, you cannot move people into those management positions because they're good at the technology. I think you're right. Some things have changed within the technology space just because I think companies have started to recognize that and then created those paths where they can continue keeping holding on to their their best tech people by providing that icy path for them. I agree. I think whatever path a person chooses, I'm pontificating, I guess, but it seems to me that whatever path a person chooses, it's important to strive for constant improvement. And, you know, like I just was talking to somebody not that long ago about public speaking because I do a lot of that. I have for over 20 years and I've been speaking and teaching and presenting and I said something about using a speech coach and they said, why would you use a speech coach? I'm like, am I as good as I could be? I don't think so. We all have our little ticks and quirks and patterns that you fall into. And sometimes just sticking on the public speaking trend, sometimes you watch yourself in a video and you're like, oh my God, is that what I really am doing? Or sometimes if you have the chance to avail yourself of a coach that can listen and give you directed feedback, that's how you get better. And I think that's true. That's like code reviews, right? If you're a software developer, and a lot of times code reviews are not treated this way, but they should be treated as a coaching, mentoring, career, skill building. Yeah, we're improving the quality of individual bits of code, but we're also improving my quality and the other people's quality, whoever's reviewing my code. I just, I don't know, I think it behooves all of us to take advantage of that sort of thing whenever we can. I agree. I mean, whether you're writing something, having somebody go in there, and you know how this is, I can read through something that I've put together a detailed article, 2000 word paper, and then somebody else looks at it and points out like a dozen typos, like that word doesn't pick up or it's just odd wording, and it's all right in your mind. I was going to advocate for, well, you know, the PowerPoint online has that coaching, that AI based coaching tool, so you can actually go in there, hit the record button, it will actually track all of the pregnant pauses, the ums and aws, it'll look at, you know, like gender specific languages you're presenting and make recommendations, just a bunch of really cool stuff that's coming from that. There was a guy that spoke of, trying to remember his name escapes me here, but was speaking at a conference that I put together back in like 2002, 2003 in the Bay Area, and he did something which was, I think just brilliant, but he is a keynote that he had given a couple other times. He had the entire thing down in a binder, so all of his slides, the points he was going to make, the jokes he was going to tell, and what he gave the presentation, there was a guy that he hired sitting in the audience with this binder and was taking notes, and after it was like, what was that all about? He said, yeah, so I've gone through it, I've gotten feedback on it, he gives this same speech to large enterprises and audiences like ours that we had about 500 people in the audience, and he says, he's going through, this is a relatively new talk, and so he was writing notes like, this joke didn't land, this one was great, this wording, it didn't, like when you expected people to be nodding, no one was nodding, you know, just took those kinds of observational notes, I'm like, that's brilliant, because you can get the record, have the recording and watch it, you're going to still attach some of the same biases that you have, you won't hear some of the feedback, but to have somebody go and specifically like this, you know, when you said this, this like, it resonated, you know, hey, there could be other opportunities within that. Anyway, that's, that's phenomenal. I'm fascinated by that kind of stuff, you know. It makes me think of a book, now I can't think the name, but Neil Stevenson, he wrote it with somebody else and it was about the perfect candidate where they put a chip in this guy's head, and then they were doing real-time polling or had mood monitoring things in crowds as he was speaking, and of course, he was undefeatable, because in real time, he was able to, it's fiction, right, but yeah, so you say. Not that fictional, right, if you think about the short feedback loops that we have now with media. It's happened to all of the, all of the devices that we're wearing, it's like, you know, I said, heart rate went up across two-thirds of the crowd. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly. It's just IoT, Rocky, come on, you know, we go. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There you go. It's like the new thing. Yeah, I don't think we're too far from that world, but, well, here, Rocky, really appreciate your time today. So I'd like to wrap all these by just asking, though, people want to find out more about you, get in touch with you, kind of, where can they find you through social channels? Where are you active? How can people reach out to you? I tend to be probably most publicly active on Twitter. I also have a presence on LinkedIn. And those are probably the easiest you can go to about.me slash Rockford Latka. And I've got all my contact information and socials are there. So that's good. Yeah. And I tend to be out there a lot. So I'm pretty easy to find. Well, Rocky, I won't be seeing you in any Microsoft events here for the next 12 months, but stay safe, stay healthy. And hopefully, we'll see you sooner rather than later at one of these events. This thing's open back up. I look forward to it, Christian. Hey, thank you so much for this. I appreciate it. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot for taking the time and have a great weekend. Bye.