050: Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years?
This week on the show, the crew talks about where they each see themselves in 5 years. This is not an easy thought-experiment, especially in a technology landscape that changes so rapidly. Are we getting better at the things we do today? Or, are we changing our focus, our role, and maybe even our job? Do our personality traits of introversion and extroversion influence our career trajectory? Or, can we learn to lean into and enjoy any type of position? Should we be following our "passions"? Or, should we be focusing on our natural abilities and affinities? Is it even worth thinking this far into the future? Or, should we just concentrate on making the next few weeks as effective as possible? All of us (hosts) love what we do today. But, we each have different perspectives, passions, and insecurities that affect how we look forward into the future.
Notes & Links
- Adam Tuttle: Challenge Breeds Stability
- Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages
- Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement
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And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.
With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Adam: it's normal for a career to have different cycles, right. And maybe you're in one of those cycles where you'll go five or 10 years at a stretch. And the primary way that you're growing is in just honing your skills and maybe adding on little skills here and there. Maybe like learning how to test.
[00:00:22] Carol: Learning to tolerate lint
[00:00:25] Adam: yeah.
[00:00:26] Carol: tolerate, not love
[00:00:27] Ben: Come this is not a fantasy conversation. This is
[00:00:31] Ben: real.
[00:00:32] Adam: I thought testing was, within your, the possibilities.
[00:00:35] Adam: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:00:36] Carol: Sorry.
[00:00:37] Adam: bridge too far.
[00:00:38] Ben: that's a bridge. Yes.
[00:01:00] Intro
[00:01:00] Adam: Okay, here we go. It is show number 54, November the 24th. And what I don't usually mention the data anymore, but this is going to be released the day before Thanksgiving here in America. And so for those of you who celebrate happy Thanksgiving,
[00:01:14] Ben: Happy Thanksgiving.
[00:01:15] Adam: we are fortunate and,I'm personally happy that we have a pretty international audience, so happy Thursday to the rest of you and,
[00:01:23] Carol: Let's just move into our dream center and fails.
[00:01:26] Adam's Triumph
[00:01:26] Adam: And this week I'm going to go first. and I am just going to kind of build on my triumph from last week, which is last week when we checked in, I was, I'd gotten to play with spelt all day that day.
[00:01:35] Adam: and I was having a lot of fun with it. It was really exciting thing for me. I went on and on for probably too long about it
[00:01:41] Carol: no.
[00:01:42] Adam: for the last week I have been playing with felt all week.
[00:01:45] Carol: Nice. Like all day long.
[00:01:48] Adam: for the most part. Yeah. unless something super important or urgent comes up, but let's just say like 90% plus of every day.
[00:01:55] Carol: That's awesome.
[00:01:56] Adam: Yeah. And it's like, I've been basically building out a prototype of one of our projects because of that project is just so old and decrepit that it needs to be rewritten and it's not a huge app. So it makes more sense to rewrite it than to try and fight all of the ancient dependencies that it's got and bring them up to speed and make them all work together.
[00:02:16] Adam: and so, yeah.
[00:02:17] Adam: I spent the week kind of building a prototype of that and figuring out how to put it all the puzzle pieces together and proving to myself and my team that it could work. and it has been a heck of a. also, if I'm being positive and excited about things it will have already happened.
[00:02:32] Adam: So the, what does that past participle, whatever, I don't know. Um,it will have happened by the time that this episode airs, but this weekend is Saturday into Sunday. I'll be doing extra life, which is a charity where I stay up for 24 hours playing video games and board games and stuff to raise money for the children's miracle network.
[00:02:50] Carol: Yeah. I'll go sponsor. Yeah, I'm excited.
[00:02:53] Adam: so it's been a lot of fun.
[00:02:54] Carol: What year is this for you?
[00:02:57] Adam: I think this is my seventh or eighth year participating. and for the last like four or five years, I've had one of my brothers who lives nearby and my best friend from college come up and join us. And my kids will play with us, during the day.
[00:03:09] Adam: And then they go to bed and the old folks stay up all night and drink beer and play games and try to stay. And, actually this year, my, my oldest is going to be 13 soon, a couple of weeks. So, we are giving him permission to stay up all night or to attempt to stay up all night with us this year.
[00:03:26] Adam: I don't think he'll make it, but,
[00:03:27] Ben: No, I can't even make it up all night. The latest I've stayed up in the last decade is probably like
[00:03:33] Ben: midnight
[00:03:34] Carol: Oh boy.
[00:03:36] Ben: and that's a stretch that's like, I probably took a little bit of nap at 10:00 PM and then rallied for another
[00:03:41] Ben: hour after.
[00:03:42] Carol: yeah. Nope. That's not me. Sometimes I code at 4:00 AM because I'm still awake and I'm like, let's just keep going. I don't want to stop right now.
[00:03:49] Adam: I can remember the days when I used to laugh at people who ate dinner at 6:00 PM and now my whole family, we eat at 6:00 PM every day
[00:03:58] Ben: heck
[00:03:59] Carol: even sign off by then. Yeah, no.
[00:04:02] Ben: Yeah. So a quick side story on college and meal plans. So when I was in college, I was on this like platinum meal plan, which meant there was a main dining hall where I could have unlimited meals. And then there was sort of a, a side cafeteria where you could only go once a day. So me and a couple of my friends had this whole schedule where we would go to breakfast and then we'd go to lunch around noon.
[00:04:23] Ben: And then we would go to dinner at like 4 45 because the cutoff for unlimited lunch was 5:00 PM. so then we would eat another dinner at like seven and then go to. External cafeteria, which you can only go to once a day, at like nine. So we were packing meals like
[00:04:41] Carol: Oh, my goodness.
[00:04:43] Ben: by eating dinner at our first dinner, 4 45 was,
[00:04:46] Adam: So eating like five meals a day,
[00:04:47] Ben: was loving life. it was good times. It was good time. when you were young, you could do that.
[00:04:52] Ben: I can't do that now. I feel disgusting
[00:04:54] Ben: all the
[00:04:54] Ben: time.
[00:04:55] Carol: that's a lot of say.
[00:04:59] Adam: All right. All right. Let's get back on track here. So Ben, trying for a fail this week. What do you got?
[00:05:02] Ben's Triumph
[00:05:02] Ben: I'm going triumph. I, I've been working on the mechanics and the underpinnings of my blog for the last week or so, modernizing the code essentially. It's been running on ColdFusion, 2018 for the last maybe year or two, but I've, the code is really ColdFusion, 10 code, which is gotta be like a decade old at this point.
[00:05:21] Ben: So I spent the last week going through and trying to clean up a lot of the old cruft converting tags into script-based components, converting, I added Rollbar for error logging in, so I'm no longer emailing myself errors as they happen. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Although it was a little bit of a letdown because it's a blog, it doesn't do anything.
[00:05:40] Ben: So it doesn't really get a bunch of errors. So I get like an error a day. So the, my implementation of the roll bar, I essentially created a ColdFusion wrapper to the roll bar, Java SDK. And I don't quite know what I want it to look like, and I'm not really getting any, like a sufficient amount of volume to understand how I would even use it to debug anything.
[00:05:59] Ben: Plus like every air that's coming so far is related to Chrome and safari extension. So it's not even, I don't even quite understand why they're having those errors,
[00:06:07] Carol: interesting.
[00:06:08] Ben: don't know. I've just, yeah, I've just been really excited about, keeping it clean and, and I've been having a lot of fun with it.
[00:06:14] Ben: I, yeah, trying to think of anything. Oh, here's something that's interesting. So, because it's rather old technology and it's not professional. I, I FTP files up to my server when I'm done working on them. And, I know that's like gonna make a lot of people listening, cringe, but you know what, it's hella fast.
[00:06:32] Ben: and I, I edit a file and then I uploaded and it's done. There's no continuous integration. There's no waiting for a build process to compile things. and I'll tell you. And I think this is maybe part of why I look at testing very differently is I make a lot of tiny changes. And so you make one tiny change and there's basically no way it can fail.
[00:06:52] Ben: And then I uploaded it through FTP to my site and it's ready to go and nothing breaks. And it's, I don't know, in the same breath, I hate the fact that I still FTP files, but I also it's
[00:07:02] Ben: so easy.
[00:07:02] Adam: Ben's views and opinions, not necessarily representative of the entire podcast.
[00:07:11] Carol: We have this sandbox thing that we do at work so that everyone doesn't have to have ColdFusion running on their machine. So if you're working on a ColdFusion project, we do, it's not FTP, but it's something like that. We have this app or this extension and I use vs code. So I have an extension called the poli reloaded.
[00:07:32] Carol: And every time I saved a file, it saves it to my local, like to my Mac book. Right. So my hard drive. And then there's a process in the background that grabs that file and puts it on the server. I don't know what it is, honestly.
[00:07:47] Ben: Yeah, but it's
[00:07:48] Ben: in your
[00:07:48] Carol: Yeah. Yeah. So it puts it up on like my server sandbox. Every time I hit save on the file.
[00:07:54] Carol: And then when I hit the URL, it's not running my actual code for my machine. It's running the sandbox code and that's just so that nobody has to have CF running on their machine. We just basically put it on the server and then go hit it. And then at any point I can hit anyone else's code when I'm helping them.
[00:08:10] Carol: So I can go like to the new developers and go hit his sandbox and be like, okay, here's what's going on with it. Here's what you need to do. And it makes helping each other really simple. At first I was like, this is so convoluted and so weird. But then once I started using it, I was like, oh, okay,
[00:08:26] Adam: So it's like geo cities.com/tilda K
[00:08:29] Carol: Yeah. Two 40. Don't get the two for two. That's important. Yeah, pretty much. But yeah, so, it's not so bad to, you know,
[00:08:36] Adam: You're giving away your birthday, you're, everybody's going to know that you were born on February 42nd.
[00:08:41] Carol: I mean, still tell anyone. February, 2040 2, 19 42. There we go.
[00:08:49] Ben: that one of the interesting things, just when you're talking about deploying individual files is when you FTP files to a server, you have to actually think about the order of the files that you upload, because you could upload a file that depends on state that hasn't been created yet.
[00:09:05] Ben: And suddenly it explodes you. You have to do
[00:09:07] Ben: this dance for like, well, I'll up. Well, it is easy, but it's X, there are caveats. but you, it's funny, even though you're on a single server, you do run into some of the same kind of issues that you would with a distributed deployment model, where you might have a client that has rendered old code, but it's making an API call to a server that has a,a new implementation of the API endpoint.
[00:09:29] Ben: And you run into all these interesting backwards compatibility issues or forwards compatibility
[00:09:33] Adam: version your API.
[00:09:38] Ben: But see, it's like, I'll have to update my application CFC, and then reinitialize the application so that it creates new state, but it doesn't have the new views yet. And then I'll upload the new views that start to use the new state that was sitting there dormant. And you do this little dance.
[00:09:53] Ben: I don't know. I've just been having a blast.
[00:09:54] Ben: It's been a lot
[00:09:55] Carol: I hear Ben likes to tiptoe. That's what I'm hearing. He likes seeing a dance around that Barry like lightly and yeah.
[00:10:01] Ben: you got to tread and tread
[00:10:02] Carol: To do around Mikiko.
[00:10:04] Ben: when you wield as much power as I do with ColdFusion,
[00:10:09] Ben: You
[00:10:09] Ben: have
[00:10:10] Carol: can go hard. Go easy. Yes.
[00:10:14] Adam: I have no comment.
[00:10:16] Ben: anyway. Oh, I actually, you wouldn't be proud of me. So I did
[00:10:22] Ben: sort of write a test, uh, which is, I don't know if you could call it a test, but essentially, I said, Two or three different emails from my blog. One for comments, I sent one, I send a hello email for people who have never commented before, or, after they comment for the first time I send a special hello email.
[00:10:37] Ben: and I rebuild those emails to you as my, custom tags solution, which I think I've talked about several many shows ago. and then I created a test file, which essentially creates a mock data structure and then includes the rendering for those emails. So I can, I can look at what those emails will behave like without actually having to go through the process that sends out the transactional email.
[00:10:59] Ben: And, I mean, it's a visual test, right? There's nothing automated
[00:11:02] Ben: about it, but it is nice to be able to, yeah, it is nice to be able to hit a file and like, this is what the emails are gonna look like before I actually have
[00:11:09] Carol: Yeah. I called that a test and I call that a win.
[00:11:13] Adam: Where'd you partial credit?
[00:11:17] Ben: I showed my work.
[00:11:17] Ben: I get some credit
[00:11:18] Carol: Good job.
[00:11:20] Ben: anyway, Carol, what
[00:11:21] Ben: do you got.
[00:11:22] Carol: I
[00:11:22] Carol's Failure
[00:11:22] Carol: am going with a failure. Sorry. I ruined it. I got home this morning. Okay. When I left the gym, I ran by the grocery store and this was at six o'clock this morning. So I grabbed just a couple things. Two of those being lunch, meat, some nice freshly sliced Turkey and ham and another being eggs.
[00:11:43] Carol: And then just some random things. And I got home and I was so excited to get the puppy out of her crate and go play with her that I forgot to get the groceries out of my car today. So I got in the car this afternoon and popped my trunk. I was like, what is that smell? It was the Turkey and ham and eggs that I left in my trunk for the day. So yeah, not another good smell going on in my garage right now, but I threw it out and, whatever I got to play with the puppy. So that's a win.
[00:12:16] Ben: I'm super paranoid about deli meats. I trust deli meat for like a day. And then after a day I'm, very aggressive smelling it and touching it. And sometimes it gets a little, like a
[00:12:28] Ben: slimy consistency to it.
[00:12:31] Carol: Or I hate when you buy a ham and it has that like greenish gold, like shine to it. I'm like this can't be good. Trash. It's probably fine. No, can't do it. Can't do it. Even if it smells great. Nope. Not doing it anyway. So yeah, I fell that putting away my groceries or even bringing them in to do.
[00:12:52] Ben: did you say that you were at the, you were leaving the
[00:12:55] Ben: gym at 6:00
[00:12:57] Carol: I got to Kroger probably right at 6 0 5 because they don't open til six. Now everything here has went on. so I'm kind of Georgia. I don't know if it's a lockdown they're doing or what it is, but everything like, nothing can open before six and everything closes at 11. So like all of our grocery stores and stuff now are no longer 24 hours.
[00:13:16] Carol: I don't know if it's COVID or what they're doing with it, but yeah, we're going six to 11, but yeah,I get to the gym right before five, sometimes at five, I get up at 4 30, 4 45. I try to be at the gym working out by five 30, but I was there
[00:13:31] Carol: earlier this morning. Yeah. Gotta be these giant muscles.
[00:13:35] Carol: Don't grow themselves.
[00:13:38] Ben: but you were just talking about how you'll be up at 4:00 AM.
[00:13:40] Carol: Oh yeah. On those nights. I just go to, if I, so if I code through the night, then I'll go to the gym and then I'll sleep during the day sometimes. Or I'll just go two days without sleeping and just work because I can go, I can easily go 48 hours with no sleep and I'm fine.
[00:13:55] Ben: Oh my
[00:13:55] Carol: Yeah. Thank you. I'd like to be fascinating.
[00:14:00] Ben: yeah. If I lose like an hour of sleep,
[00:14:03] Carol: No, I have been told by multiple people. I can function at any hour of the day, pretty effectively, so I can be early. I can do nights. I can do multiple days just after 48 hours. I'm kind of on autopilot and you can't trust my decisions at that point because it's just coasting. Right? It's moving. It's no longer thinking.
[00:14:25] Adam: you probably should have been a crab fishermen up on the deadliest catch. Those guys stay
[00:14:30] Carol: sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Pass on that. I just write software at 4:00
[00:14:37] Carol: AM when I can't sleep.
[00:14:38] Adam: Maybe that's where you can see yourself in five years.
[00:14:40] Carol: Maybe let's see. Let's talk about that.
[00:14:43] Adam: Yeah. And actually, so I didn't, I didn't mention that at the top of the show, but that's going to be our topic today. We're going to talk about the future and where we see ourselves. And maybe even we can dig into the question itself. Like when somebody asks you that. in an interview, where do you see yourself in five years?
[00:14:59] Adam: what are they looking for? as an interviewer? What do you want to hear? Sort of thing. But Yeah.
[00:15:04] Adam: I mean, that's the thing. let's talk about the future. So Ben,
[00:15:06] Ben's Next Five Years
[00:15:06] Ben: I have a real hard time looking forward. I think at most I can look like a
[00:15:13] Ben: month
[00:15:13] Ben: ahead and if there's a big event coming up, I can't look past it. It, my brain gets so preoccupied with like having to go to Thanksgiving and see people and be social and in room with other people.
[00:15:27] Ben: I won't be able to plan anything beyond Thanksgiving at this point, just because of the social anxiety to it that has, that's not really like a, where do you see yourself in five years career wise? but career wise, I also find that incredibly
[00:15:38] Carol: It's hard. There's so many unknowns. Yeah.
[00:15:41] Ben: I look at it like the same thing I am
[00:15:45] Ben: now, the
[00:15:46] Carol: Yeah. And that's
[00:15:46] Ben: And the better is like hopeful, but I do,I love the type of work that I do.
[00:15:51] Ben: I don't think I would want to move into management or anything like that. I think I just would want to continue to get better at sort of a, an individual contributor level. it's so challenging though, too, because everything is changing so fast.
[00:16:03] Adam: So
[00:16:03] Adam: that's how You know?
[00:16:04] Adam: you're getting old.
[00:16:05] Carol: The change happens that change happens in your life. Yeah.
[00:16:10] Adam: And when you start to be like, I can't keep up with these kids today.
[00:16:13] Ben: Yo for real, like you're talking about svelte and I'm feeling bad and I'm looking into this felt now. and,I work in ColdFusion, which a lot of people probably never even heard of ColdFusion and there's all the, the modern JavaScript frameworks and then different databases and all kinds of build systems and compiling and continuous integration.
[00:16:32] Ben: And it's, I want to know all of it and I know I will know all of it. So sometimes I just throw my hands up in the air and be like, oh, I'm just going to focus on this one thing and try to get better
[00:16:42] Carol: That one thing being ColdFusion cell, or are you saying pigging up? Maybe
[00:16:45] Ben: I don't know, just like the one thing being like the things I do right now. just staying on course with how I work today, but hopefully getting better, but it's very sad and disappointing to
[00:16:56] Adam: so I think that.
[00:16:57] Adam: it's normal for a career to have different cycles, right. And maybe you're in one of those cycles where you'll go five or 10 years at a stretch. And the primary way that you're growing is in just honing your skills and maybe adding on little skills here and there. Maybe like learning how to test.
[00:17:20] Carol: Learning to tolerate lint
[00:17:22] Adam: yeah.
[00:17:23] Carol: tolerate, not love
[00:17:24] Ben: Come this is not a fantasy conversation. This is
[00:17:28] Ben: real.
[00:17:29] Adam: I thought testing was, within your, the possibilities.
[00:17:32] Adam: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:33] Carol: Sorry.
[00:17:34] Adam: bridge too far.
[00:17:36] Ben: that's a bridge. Yes.
[00:17:38] Adam: Yeah, but like, if for anybody else, that's sort of feels the same way, Right.
[00:17:42] Adam: Like the, it's a totally normal thing to, to have these periods of your career where you're like, I'm satisfied with the technology stack and it's, I can feed my family.
[00:17:52] Adam: And so all that matters is that I can continue to get better or grow when the opportunity arises or when the need arises.
[00:18:01] Carol: I feel like if you love the stack that you're on, it gives you the opportunity to, like you said, make your skills better. You learn how to ride it better. You learn how to utilize what is good in the language that you're writing. And a lot of those techniques and a lot of the processes, those carry on. So other languages you pick up like understanding models and understanding data like that, that just transfers over.
[00:18:24] Carol: So if you're always struggling to learn a new language, then you don't get to hone in and get those skills really like big and broad. And I think.
[00:18:33] Ben: Absolutely. Do you think I'm a very introverted
[00:18:37] Adam: that you're a very
[00:18:38] Ben: w
[00:18:38] Carol: I agree. Second, all in favor, say,
[00:18:42] Introversion & Extroversion
[00:18:42] Ben: and I wonder if introversion versus extroversion affects the way people can see themselves in the future in terms of career growth, because I think there's part of me that could think I'm an individual contributor, but my career path could be. Moving into a director role and then a CTO role, and then maybe starting my own company and becoming a CEO and dealing with people.
[00:19:09] Ben: But every one of those steps really starts to skew more towards the
[00:19:15] Carol: got to have a lot of it with those
[00:19:17] Ben: Yeah. So it's hard to picture myself as being more than an individual contributor because just the concept of it puts me so far outside of my
[00:19:27] Ben: comfort
[00:19:28] Adam: I think that you are probably capable of being comfortable, doing things like mentoring and like the social, increased social scope, I think is one sort of track for career growth. The other, or the most obvious other would be moving more toward like architect. Right? So you're laying the groundwork for things, but not necessarily seeing the project all the way through you're kind of more big picture technology, proof of concept type stuff. And then.
[00:20:01] Carol: yeah,
[00:20:02] Ben: I think it's also interesting and I don't mean this in a diminishing sort of way, but going towards architecture versus going towards leadership, I think are very different technical skills. Meaning I have to grow my technical stills in a different way when I want to become an architect.
[00:20:22] Ben: Whereas with director and things like, VPs, CTOs CEOs, you can be technical, but you don't have to have that super low level concept that you might as an architect, you'd hear more about. Yes, I know technology, but more. I know about people and organizing people around technology and removing frictions and roadblocks
[00:20:44] Ben: that kind of stuff.
[00:20:44] Carol: that's one of the things that we emphasize a lot when at my last job. And we would put people in a lead position, Billy position. Wasn't. You're the lead of the team, because you're the smartest person as, because you have the ability to bring a team together and get them working and you know how to get the right people to do the right job. And you know, when to say, something's too much and you will be vocal and like protect your team and protect the people around you. It's not that you're the smartest person on the team because the smart people in my experience are very quiet and they don't want to deal with people. They want to just, like you said, they want to be their individual contributor.
[00:21:20] Carol: And they're very happy doing that. And when you push them into the go help, a lot of other people, they, they close off and they don't do so well. So the lead and those positions don't mean that you're the smartest person, or you have the best tech skills, it's that you know how to utilize everything around you to the best of your
[00:21:36] Adam: That's like, you're the team's big brother or big
[00:21:38] Adam: sister
[00:21:40] Carol: Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much see. Yeah. And I think that's okay. People got to do that job. Otherwise we all kind of get screwed sometimes. So.
[00:21:47] Ben: here's a terrifying thought when I was in my twenties and I was learning about object oriented programming, and it was very confusing to me. And I couldn't really relate it to any of the work that I did on a day-to-day basis, especially cause I wasn't really building anything that had business logic.
[00:22:03] Ben: It was all just take the data out of the and put it on the page. That's basically all the things I built and I just thought to myself, all right, I'm going to give it 10 years. And I know that in 10 years I'll be master of object oriented programming and it's okay that I don't get it now. And it's confusing now, and that's fine, but as long as I put in my time and I progress and I practice and I learned like in 10 years, I'm just going to be a master of this.
[00:22:28] Ben: I'm not going to worry about it too much. And it's like 20 years later now. And I still don't know basically thing one about object oriented programming. So I had all these assumptions about where I would be if I just put in the time and you could argue that I probably didn't put in the time to really learn that stuff effectively, but clearly just letting time pass was not nearly sufficient to get me where I thought I was going to be.
[00:22:53] Ben: So I've definitely had some grand visions of what I would know and what I would understand, and those did not come to fruition. So it makes me a little hesitant to get to bully on, on the things that I might know in five years, because. Older and wiser and more, I dunno.
[00:23:09] Carol: I'm going to challenge you five years. Will you know? Oh,
[00:23:15] Ben: no, definitely not. I've just like, I've given up on it.
[00:23:19] Ben: I don't, I've embraced the idea of working, just sort of with data and with components that manipulate that data and not really thinking about
[00:23:29] Ben: object,
[00:23:29] Carol: don't need
[00:23:31] Ben: and
[00:23:32] Ben: and
[00:23:32] Adam: I think that the big difference is that from my incorrect and wrong understanding of, oh, is that instead of just working with primitives and passing those around to all of your service layer and Dao and all that you have, like, everything is a composition of objects, Right. you have beans and they contain collections of other beans.
[00:23:56] Adam: And it just seems, at least in the stacks that I work in, that would be wasted computation. to make that happen for little to no gain.
[00:24:06] Ben: That's what it is to me is that the type of application that I build has not so little business logic, but the business logic is so really not complicated that the idea of really driving towards encapsulating it into objects that contain their own data feels like overkill from a performance standpoint and from a maintenance standpoint.
[00:24:31] Ben: But then also from just a readability standpoint, sometimes it's just easier to look at a piece of data and then look at the things, acting on it without having to understand how all the objects relate together.
[00:24:44] Carol: I like it. I like that. Whenever I pull in an object, I know exactly what it's doing. And if I extend that and I get years on it, it's going to do the same thing for all of them, because it works the same. And I don't want to have to go reprogram anything. So I like having the top layer.
[00:25:00] Carol: So.
[00:25:01] Ben: I dunno. It's stuff. one of the canonical examples that comes up often is you could have an, a user object that has a first name and a last name, and it could have a method, get full name, which concatenates name and the last name under the hood. And I'm always like, all right.
[00:25:17] Ben: Yeah, I guess I could sort of see that, but then I go to have to actually implement stuff like that. For example, in an email where I have to output the user's first name and last. And all I do is I'll put the first name and last name. Like, it's not complicated to squish that stuff together. And I, then you can tell, well then how do you know you're going to do a consistently all over the place?
[00:25:37] Ben: I'm like, maybe I won't, I don't know. But is that a
[00:25:39] Ben: problem? I don't think It's a No, one's dying. I don't know. we're way off topic here, but, but you know, I bring that up because one of the things that I'm really interested in learning is distributed systems and event based systems and message cues and, event buses.
[00:25:55] Ben: it's so cool. And part of me thinks like, oh yeah, in 10 years I'll just be a master of that stuff. But like I learned that lesson already. and I don't know, I'm that's my ideal would be to be better at distributed systems in five years would be awesome. That'd be, I think
[00:26:10] Ben: time really well spent.
[00:26:11] Jumping Into New Things
[00:26:11] Adam: I'm going to kind of relate this to something that I can personally relate to. So I feel like you were talking earlier about how you have a little bit of maybe FOMO or something where I'm talking about smell and I'm learning spelt and testing and this other stuff. And I feel like there is a big mental hurdle there, right?
[00:26:31] Adam: if it's a topic, you know, nothing about, it's just a name, then you see that name and it just appears like this huge. Wall that you have to scale, but once you scale it, like once you start to climb it, you see that, oh, it's only like knee-high anyway, I can just step over this thing. And now I'm on the other side and it's, there's not that much to it.
[00:26:50] Adam: And now I kind of, like I, I learned the 80% in a couple of days and that's enough to, kind of fake it till you make it sort of thing. And you do that for a few things. And now all of a sudden, like You may not be a fluent master at all of them, but you
[00:27:07] Adam: can have a
[00:27:08] Adam: right. You can have an intelligent conversation about them.
[00:27:11] Adam: And I think that you'll find the same as true when you start to learn about buses and, Yeah.
[00:27:16] Carol: Yeah. All
[00:27:16] Carol: those things,
[00:27:17] Ben: Yeah.
[00:27:19] Carol: men, I really liked that thought, and that's good. Like, I always see these hurdles. I get stopped and I'm like, oh, want to go do it? I want to go do it, but I know I'm going to fail at learning it. So I just don't take another step into it. And I go learn something that I know I already kind of have a good grasp on.
[00:27:35] Carol: I'll go add something to my repository of already known things. So yeah. I should see things as.You know, get into it a little bit, just see where it goes. It may not be so bad. And if it is that bad, well, I still started and it's
[00:27:49] Adam: Unknowns are intimidating.
[00:27:50] Carol: Barry right, Barry,
[00:27:52] Ben: That's probably one of my biggest regrets in my career is I think somewhere along the line, I lost the will to not the will. I lost the drive to experiment on totally random things that everything that I wanted to experiment with started to become relating to work or relating to something I had previously experimented on going back to Carol's point about putting something you already know into your own repository, kind of a thing that it's been so much of, what I've done is minor extensions of the thing that I already knew, which think has value at work.
[00:28:31] Ben: Because I'm constantly thinking of slightly different ways to do something or ways to make things more efficient, but it really does sort of pigeonhole me in terms of the number of things that know.
[00:28:42] Adam: Yeah.when you're taking that approach, you're taking small steps outside of your circle, and sometimes you it's beneficial or you'll learn more faster if you just like, take that leap of faith and jump outside of your circle to another circle. And you'll find that you, after you're there, you see the bridge between the two, there's a lot of, relational, not that's a bad word choice, but a lot of information that, that is shared a lot of knowledge that's
[00:29:06] Carol: Yeah.
[00:29:06] Adam: the two, but you couldn't see it this side of the.
[00:29:09] Ben: Yeah. I think I've become very afraid of doing things that are completely throw away, that everything I do has to be building towards something of value that I can
[00:29:18] Ben: sort see. I think
[00:29:19] Ben: yeah, I've become very fearful of. Somebody mentioned something on a podcast, and now I'm going to go try it for a weekend and then maybe never look at it again.
[00:29:28] Ben: And that, that, that sort of freeness of spirit and enthusiasm, I think I've
[00:29:34] Ben: dampened
[00:29:35] Adam: been years,
[00:29:36] Adam: like many years, since this one like that through the CFML community, there was this period of time where it seemed like everybody and their brother was reading the book seven languages in seven. I did not participate in that
[00:29:48] Adam: trend. I didn't read the book. I don't even know what languages there are, but it's just like a primer on seven different programming languages.
[00:29:55] Adam: And I think that most of them are vastly different than the ones that we are super familiar with. and the idea is, to just expose you to these other things so that you can kind of see what else is out there in the world. What are your other options? You don't have to, stay on the
[00:30:10] Ben: yeah.
[00:30:10] Adam: wall.
[00:30:11] Ben: There's a database version of that too. Now I think there's a seven databases in seven weeks as well. I have not read
[00:30:17] Ben: that one.
[00:30:18] Adam: got too many books that, yeah, I got two books sitting here on my desk that I need to finish, sooner rather than later.
[00:30:24] Adam: And
[00:30:25] Adam's Next Five Years
[00:30:25] Carol: So let, let's talk about five years with you, Adam.
[00:30:28] Adam: Sure. I think it's probably a little bit easier for me, because I'm on a trajectory. so I have been working for the same company for going on 10 years. It'll be 10 years in March and there have been a number of times that I ask myself, should I have moved on for the sake of moving on?
[00:30:48] Adam: Because that's like the best way to get a raise in our industry and to get exposure to more things. And I think the reason that I haven't is because I really liked the work that I do. Like the vertical that we're in. we strictly deal with colleges and universities, higher education. I'm not necessarily like in love with or tied to that industry.
[00:31:11] Adam: We have found a good, for lack of a better word product market fit. And we have a good business going here and because of that and because of our small team and scrappy attitude to we're getting it done with a minimal team, we are, we have a lot of really interesting problems to solve scaling and multitenant stuff and distributed systems.
[00:31:33] Adam: And that makes for really interesting and challenging work. And so I am excited to walk down my hall and come into my office every day. I also get to work from home for the last 10 years have been great. and so I'm excited to come into work everyday and I have no hesitation to stay a little bit late to finish the thing that I'm working on.
[00:31:51] Adam: Right. I'm not, I never finished the day watching the clock. so from that perspective, I'm really happy to be here and I don't think I would want to leave. And so it's easy for me to say in five years, I'll still be.
[00:32:04] Carol: Yeah.
[00:32:04] Adam: on top of that, we have things in motion now that we can see are going to fundamentally change our business.
[00:32:10] Adam: So it's just a matter of like, is that in the next year, the next three years, the next five years, next 10 years. So I can make an estimation and say, like, in the next five years I expect that we will have made some significant changes to our stack and we will probably have at least doubled our development team, which okay.
[00:32:31] Adam: So we'll go from three full-time to six,
[00:32:34] Adam: uh,
[00:32:35] Carol: Okay.
[00:32:36] Adam: Yeah. and,just other, a collection of other little things like that, but one of the things is, I expect that among those changes, want to see myself take that leadership role, like the CTO sort of thing. And, I'm eager for that challenge too.
[00:32:53] Adam: Right? Like
[00:32:54] Carol: Do do you have a CTO Right.
[00:32:56] Adam: I mean, on my business card it says CTO,
[00:32:59] Carol: Okay.
[00:33:00] Adam: but Right. There's, it's a company of five people, so it's kind of a,
[00:33:04] Carol: Okay.
[00:33:05] Adam: of an all chiefs, no Indians type situation
[00:33:07] Adam: here.
[00:33:07] Carol: Following, following. Okay.
[00:33:09] Carol: Gotcha.
[00:33:09] Adam: , So we talked about, the challenges of learning new technology. And I had that same appeal. Like I, I enjoyed learning new technologies. I'm really enjoying, learning spelt, but the idea of learning how to manage people, how to be a team lead, how to be a good CTO. I'm not excited about the idea of like literal full days of meeting.
[00:33:32] Adam: But aside from that, the challenges of stepping into that leadership role, just for some reason, really appeal to me. And I honestly, I think it's an opportunity to look at the exact same problems that we have now and the types of challenges that we face, but look at them sort of from a different angle, right.
[00:33:50] Adam: From a business
[00:33:50] Carol: Yeah,
[00:33:51] Adam: perspective.
[00:33:52] Carol: but you have that back knowledge from the position you've been in for so long. So view you'll have is going to be
[00:33:58] Carol: really good.
[00:33:59] Adam: So that's kind of where I see myself in the next five years.
[00:34:03] Gaining Responsibility
[00:34:03] Carol: so I'm going to negative Nancy you a little
[00:34:06] Carol: bit, and I'm sorry. So sorry.
[00:34:08] Carol: I, I, so I love, I love it. I love that you're like super passionate and want to do this. I'm on the flip of that. I went from being. On a team to a team lead to like a principal engineer role where I'm carrying everything to after several years of doing that type of work and being over just so much.
[00:34:32] Carol: And so many people I don't ever want to do that again. I just want to be on the team writing code on a product. I love with a stack that makes sense to me. And that challenges me every day. I don't want to be the one making the big decisions. I don't want to lose sleep at night. I want to, in my day, loving what I do and not having that extra stress of all of these people are reliant on me to have jobs and to have futures.
[00:35:01] Carol: And the company is on my shoulders. I just want to, you know, sign off for the day, have a beer, pet my puppy and enjoy the back porch. I don't want to spend my day thinking about it. So I. That's not where I see myself anymore. 10 years ago when I started, believe me, that's where I saw
[00:35:20] Adam: I want to jump in here. I know we're talking about yours now, but you're relating it to mine and
[00:35:24] Adam: I, I ha
[00:35:25] Carol: I
[00:35:25] Carol: am
[00:35:25] Carol: no, go
[00:35:26] Adam: to
[00:35:26] Carol: No,
[00:35:27] Adam: counterpoint your counterpoint. so, you were talking about, you don't want that weight on your shoulders. I get that because I had that now. right. It's not solely on my shoulders, but we, like I said, we're, it's A five person company.
[00:35:38] Adam: We all carry that weight to some extent. And certainly the CEO more than anybody else, he signs the paychecks. He's
[00:35:45] Adam: the one that
[00:35:46] Carol: Right.
[00:35:46] Adam: we're going to make payroll every week, every other week.
[00:35:49] Carol: And even if there's a bunch of money in the bank, that's still a pressure that I'm going to take home every
[00:35:56] Adam: Yeah, I think, but I think is maybe that's one of the things that's making it easier for me to, look positively at that transition possibility because I've already made peace with that feeling.
[00:36:06] Adam: I'm sorry
[00:36:06] Carol: Yeah. And I'm not saying it's bad for you. I'm just saying like, that's not me anymore. It's not, again, if we would have had this conversation, when you and I first met, I would have told you about every startup I ever wanted to do and how I wanted to run my own company and how I wanted to be over everything.
[00:36:25] Carol: And after do, after being over at just what level I was, I don't, that's just not me anymore. I really,, really just love writing code and sitting with a team of people and doing it together and having discussions and. This is where I've actually found that I am the best suited at like I've really can't see myself managing people.
[00:36:50] Carol: I could see myself at some point being more like a librarian because people are going to come into this industry younger than me, and they're going to think faster than I am, and they're going to be up on all the new hip things and I'm okay. Just taking the knowledge I have and transferring that into what we're doing at the moment.
[00:37:08] Carol: Maybe it's not in the tech stack that I'm familiar with, or I know, but I can relate it to what they're doing and I'm okay with like trends, like rolling into that type of role later on. But I, I don't want to be in a management role. I just want to write code and be happy and pet my
[00:37:23] Rule Of Reversible Outcomes
[00:37:23] Adam: Yeah, I think when it comes to this too, the other thing that's going through my mind is, the rule of reversible.
[00:37:29] Adam: Have you heard of this? So basically if there's a decision that you have to make and it's a stressful decision, you should ask yourself, can I undo this decision? if I make this decision, how much am I committing to that?
[00:37:44] Adam:
[00:37:44] Carol: Everything needs a
[00:37:45] Carol: rollback.
[00:37:46] Adam: So this app that we're considering moving over to , if we get a week or two weeks or a month into the process of converting it over and we go, eh, this isn't working, what does it cost us to abandon that and go back and do something else, right? That's that is what you have to ask yourself when you're trying to decide whether or not to take on that decision.
[00:38:07] Adam: And so if the outcome is reversible, then that should lower your inhibition or make it easier to make that decision, be willing to try something.
[00:38:18] Ben: I think, Amazon talks way doors and like, you should never be afraid to
[00:38:23] Ben: walk through a two-way door,
[00:38:25] Carol: this is a two way door.
[00:38:27] Adam: Hm.
[00:38:27] Ben: like a reversible
[00:38:29] Carol: Okay. Okay.
[00:38:30] Ben: talking
[00:38:31] Ben: about
[00:38:31] Adam: a full
[00:38:31] Adam: commit.
[00:38:32] Carol: just opens and closes.
[00:38:35] Ben: here. Here's something that I struggle with. And I don't know if I don't think this is imposter syndrome though. I think it's maybe under that umbrella. When I look at the roles in a company, I look at other people as doing the things that I can't do. So, I look at the CTO and he's a people manager and above.
[00:38:55] Ben: Big picture guy, and that's not what I am. So I look at that. I'm going to go to this guy, add more value because he's doing the things that I can't do. the CEO is the visionary and the roadmap and the product leader. He's doing all the things that I can't do. So he must be adding more value, but then the, if I can step outside of myself of my anxieties, everybody at the company has different roles and they're all adding value the same time.
[00:39:21] Ben: So theoretically, you could take the other perspective. The CTO looks at the individual contributors and is like, oh, well, they're actually in there writing code. And I don't really know how to do that. So they're the ones really building the product. but I don't know how to rationally. I don't know how to grapple with those feelings of anxiety that, I'm not living up to the value that other people are doing are adding because they're doing the things that I can't do.
[00:39:46] Ben: It's very
[00:39:46] Ben: challenging.
[00:39:47] Carol: So I've had the conversation with my kids talking about what what degree should I get? Like, what should I do when I'm in college? And what you said made me think of that. They are like, oh, I want to do this. Or, you know, I want to play in the NBA or I want to do whatever it is. Some big thing. I'm like, you can't look at what you want to do.
[00:40:07] Carol: Uh, like let's stop and look at what you're good at. Let's look at what skills you have and what you are really passionate about, that you're good at. And then let's play with those. And maybe those can lead into something that you want, but if you just go and do something that you want, and you're not good at it, you're going to fail at it.
[00:40:25] Carol: So at least start with something that you're good at. And let that be like your point. If you're not good with people, he'll be a manager. Like that's, that's easy.
[00:40:33] Ben: just be
[00:40:34] Ben: the entire
[00:40:35] Carol: You would be miserable. Like don't do that. I'm not going to go play in the NBA. I'm tall, but I can't have no coordination. Like that's not my thing.
[00:40:43] Carol: Right. We'll just fall all the time. But I am pretty good with people. I mean, I would be okay. Managing people. I just don't love it. I don't love doing it. I enjoy what I do. Just writing code called the team for
[00:40:57] Ben: mark Esher long time
[00:40:59] Carol: him.
[00:41:01] Ben: community. Yes. Super great guy. he always gets on me on social media when I'm talking about how I wish more. And he's always saying you should become a manager and then you become force multiplier because your enthusiasm can then be pushed down on to other people can then implement your enthusiasm.
[00:41:18] Ben: But, and I think that mentality, and this is not a dig at Mark's perspective at all, but I think that mentality of managers do more because they're force multipliers gives me a lot of anxiety. And insecurity is as an individual contributor because I know I'm not a force multiplier. a force of one and it's a very forceful one,
[00:41:39] Ben: but it's still one.
[00:41:40] Carol: And to me, that's
[00:41:40] Carol: okay.
[00:41:42] Adam: Yeah. I mean,
[00:41:43] Carol: to do that. Yeah,
[00:41:44] Adam: it's totally legit to retire on your last day of your career. being an IC.
[00:41:50] Ben: I think
[00:41:51] Carol: I think so to you. But I also think that because I have went through the steps I've seen like what my life feels like when I am in the other roles. When I have authority, when I'm asked to make the final decision, when everything coming out of the company has to go through my hands. I felt that, and I know I didn't like it, so that's easy for me to say I'm okay to end if my career ended and I have just did nothing but been a senior engineer. That's where I, that's where I retire at. I'm happy. I'm happy. Uh, I was pulled in to what you said about what mark said. I was pulled several years ago and I was told to be a cheerleader for the company.
[00:42:33] Adam: Oh, no.
[00:42:33] Carol: And I was like, excuse me, like, do you know what I do every day? I'm like, I'm literally writing your product. And you're telling me to just be the cheerleader. And they're like, hold on. hold on. Like, we don't mean it like that. We mean that take what you have that passion you have and push that to the rest of your team.
[00:42:53] Carol: I'm like, well, say that. Don't tell me to go be a cheerleader. Will I am the only female engineer
[00:42:58] Carol: in this company? Like really?
[00:43:00] Carol: C'mon.
[00:43:01] Adam: be a plague of enthusiasm.
[00:43:03] Carol: you. I would've taken that so much better, so much better. I was just offended at the you know, I, once I understood where they were coming from, it was just a bad terminology.
[00:43:13] Carol: Like be a force multiplier, if you can do that, do that
[00:43:16] Adam: Yeah.
[00:43:17] Carol's Next Five Years
[00:43:17] Carol: So yeah, five years, I want to be on the team. I want to be riding a product that you know, is doing well or growing a new product that just started, or don't really care, actually be writing some code on a stack that makes me happy and learning, and she won't be a puppy anymore. So petting my grown dog at that point.
[00:43:38] Adam: You'll have another
[00:43:39] Adam: puppy to go along with.
[00:43:40] Carol: yeah. we'll we'll get her a playmate. Yeah. I mean, that's where I see myself in five years and I'm okay with that plan.
[00:43:47] Interacting With Customers
[00:43:47] Ben: One thing that I do feel very strongly about is I like talking customers, even if it's not on a very frequent basis. I like doing work that is customer facing because. A lot of satisfaction out of solving problems for customers. I don't think I can really, I don't think I would be very happy working on something that was entirely internally facing to a company like building internal tools or building stuff for the support team.
[00:44:17] Ben: I mean, you could argue that those are customers, but it's somehow not a customer in the same way
[00:44:21] Ben: to me personally.
[00:44:22] Carol: like, I mean, the project I wrapped up a few months ago, I mean, reducing customer support by 40%, their touchpoints emails and giving them the opportunity to go actually be customer service representatives and actually build our clients. Like to me, that makes me happy. Like they are coming to me until I get we're getting all this praise and how much happier we are and how they enjoy it studying while I'm not getting it from the external customer.
[00:44:50] Carol: I'm absolutely getting that same. And I go meet with them and they show me problems in their workflows and they show us issues that they're having with the system that we've written. And I'm like my customers, my good customer, even though as internal.
[00:45:03] Ben: let me interject and then clarify, cause I, what you're saying is a hundred percent, right. And I wasn't straight about I think maybe the feelings that I'm having are, I don't want to be in a situation where I just interface my manager and then my
[00:45:17] Ben: manager
[00:45:19] Ben: the world. Like I need to have some interaction with people that I'm solving problems for so that I get that feedback and fuzzies when I do the
[00:45:28] Carol: agree.
[00:45:28] Carol: Yep. So now we're on the same page. Good job, man.
[00:45:30] Ben: Yeah,
[00:45:31] Ben: I think.
[00:45:32] Ben: I think.
[00:45:33] Stepping Down
[00:45:33] Ben: Here's one thing is a bit of a non-sequitur, but this is just something that was rattling around in my head during this conversation. So early days in the company, I was the CTO, but I wasn't CTO on paper, not like in any real practical way. I was basically an individual contributor in a small company that
[00:45:51] Ben: happened to
[00:45:51] Ben: have the title of
[00:45:52] Ben: CTO.
[00:45:53] Carol: business card.
[00:45:55] Ben: Yeah. And then I stepped down and I became an individual contributor carried around a lot of, I don't know what the right word is. I felt bad it for a long time.
[00:46:04] Ben: about
[00:46:04] Carol: down.
[00:46:05] Ben: For stepping down, I felt like I wasn't living up to my potential and maybe I was letting people down or it wasn't, adding value in a way that I could really maximize value. And at one point we had a CTO and we've had a number of CTOs.
[00:46:16] Ben: we had a CTO who came in and I remember made this like really bold move. And at the time I don't want to get into the specifics of what it was. Cause I don't know if I'm allowed to. but he made this huge, bold move. And I remember that moment and thinking to myself, this is why I'm not CTO, because I would never have goal to, to pull that move.
[00:46:38] Ben: And these are the kinds of people that come in and did it. And then the reality is nothing ever came from. And eventually he left the company and, it's funny to look back at that and think like, here's this guy who had the CTO swagger and was able to make moves that I would have never made, but in reality, like nothing ever came of it.
[00:46:59] Ben: So it's like I gave him at the time, all this
[00:47:02] Ben: credit and then that credit didn't lead to anything. And I don't know, it's, I've had a lot of conflict on how I play that moment over and over in my head sometimes.
[00:47:14] Carol: you should feel bad for stepping down. And I know you probably don't now,
[00:47:18] Ben: Uh,
[00:47:18] Carol: you do still, I don't think you sh I don't think you should. Cause when I was in the business sort of principal engineer, principal development, right. So I'm like, I need to not do this anymore and I wasn't allowed to step down and it forced me out of the company.
[00:47:33] Carol: I mean, I, I couldn't do it anymore. So I had to make the decision to just leave because I could not do that. I, they were okay with me not doing the role. And then they were willing to like compromise elsewhere. So I had to leave. So maybe it's you stepping down or burning yourself out and leaving on bad terms.
[00:47:54] Carol: So look at it from that point of view, if nothing else that you still get to be at the company you love.
[00:47:59] Ben: that's
[00:48:00] Carol: Yeah.
[00:48:00] Ben: That's true.
[00:48:02] Carol: There's always a bright side to everything. I try to find them. I try.
[00:48:06] In 10 Years?
[00:48:06] Adam: Okay. Should we do 10 years or do you think.
[00:48:08] Adam: that's too much for one show.
[00:48:10] Carol: Oh man. I would like to
[00:48:11] Carol: retire in 10
[00:48:12] Ben: I'll
[00:48:13] Ben: dead
[00:48:13] Carol: done working.
[00:48:14] Adam: think my doge is going to pay off that much by then.
[00:48:18] Carol: so my doge might not pay off, but the perk of having a kid, having my boys really young is that it does mean later in life. I don't need the big house. I don't need the tuition accounts. I don't have so much to support. So it does give me the opportunity of my mass, right. To retire earlier than most of my peers who will still be putting kids through college and still be supporting big family
[00:48:46] Adam: Yeah,
[00:48:47] Carol: I won't have that. So I do plan to retire early.
[00:48:50] Adam: that's a good point. I mean, my youngest is 10 right now, so it'll be another eight years in theory. Right. If everything goes according to tradition, before
[00:48:58] Adam: he's out of the house and potentially for good,
[00:49:01] Carol: Yeah. I am a year and a half away from, well, less than that now. Yeah. Like a year. Yeah. A year and a half away from my youngest graduating high
[00:49:09] Adam: well, and I mean, you're a couple of years younger than
[00:49:12] Adam: me.
[00:49:13] Carol: Yeah. And 36.
[00:49:15] Adam: You're not just a couple of years younger than me.
[00:49:17] Ben: my, my wife listens to this podcast occasionally and she's always like, my hero just awesome.
[00:49:26] Adam: Meanwhile, my wife is like, you're not offended that I don't listen to your podcast. Right.
[00:49:29] Carol: well, if we're talking about people, mine got a Patreon. Hey, like he joined to come like, hang out with us and be super supportive. Right. He's so sweet. Yeah. That's so sweet. Tell her that I'm super happy. She said that. Cause I don't, I definitely don't I struggle with that insecurity on my own that I just, I don't feel like I contribute.
[00:49:52] Carol: So I
[00:49:52] Adam: Oh, you Carol, you contribute. I like you guys know. I have lunch with one of our patrons and my former boss, regularly. And he almost every time that we go out to lunch has positive comments to say about all three of you guys.
[00:50:06] Adam: Um,
[00:50:06] Carol: Oh, but nothing about you. Sorry.
[00:50:10] Adam: Hey,no. Hey strokes my ego every time that we got to lunch.
[00:50:16] Carol: Okay. Fair enough.
[00:50:19] Adam: No, but it. he always has comments about how smart you guys are and, just awesome things to say
[00:50:25] Carol: Yeah, I appreciate it. I mean, I'm learning a ton from hanging out with you guys. You're definitely challenging me. So I just appreciate that. If nothing else, if nobody listened, I would still want to keep doing this just to be
[00:50:35] Carol: challenged.
[00:50:36] Adam: heck Yeah,
[00:50:37] Carol: Yeah,
[00:50:38] Adam: people
[00:50:38] Ben: I
[00:50:40] Ben: interesting.
[00:50:40] Carol: Right. We're not just lame now.
[00:50:44] Ben: I think the four of us do very different types or we're all in, in different roles. So it's interesting. It's not just the four of us jamming out on, I did this. Oh yeah, I did that too. We all have very
[00:50:55] Ben: different perspectives.
[00:50:56] Ben: I
[00:50:56] Carol: Yeah. I agree.
[00:50:58] Carol: I
[00:50:58] Adam: Yeah.
[00:50:59] Adam: Cool.
[00:51:00] Patreon
[00:51:00] Adam: All right. This episode of Working Code was brought to you by FTP and files to your production server. What could go wrong and listeners like you, if you like what we're doing here, you might want to consider supporting us on Patreon. And you could do that by going to patreon.com/WorkingCodePod.
[00:51:15] Adam: And if you don't already know, Patreon is a place where you can support us for as little as $4 a month. And all of our patrons get our after show and early access to new episodes. And then after show, as soon as they're ready. , and we want to send a big thank you to our top patrons, Monte and Peter.
[00:51:28] Adam: Thank you guys so much for your huge and ongoing support
[00:51:32] Thanks For Listening!
[00:51:32] Adam: and a patronizing podcast. Isn't your thing, not a problem. We appreciate just that you take the time. if you enjoyed this episode, you could post about it on your social media. That would be helpful. and you could also really help us out if you left us a rating and a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, please send us your questions and show topics on Twitter or Instagram @WorkingCodePod.
[00:51:51] Adam: Or leave us a message at 512-253-2633 that's 512-253-CODE. Or you can join our Discord, which is now open to the public and share your ideas in there. you can get access to our Discord at workingcode.dev/discord. We'll catch you next week and until then.
[00:52:09] Ben: Remember folks, your heart matters. And to our American friends, things
[00:52:15] Bloopers
[00:52:15] Adam: okay. hold on. I will start to show. From this American life and WBZ Chicago. This is serial. One story told week by week.
[00:52:45] Carol: I love that. Love it. Love it.
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