8 Bits with Jim Bennett!

This week we are joined by Jim Bennett, Education Advocate at Microsoft. Join us as we learn about the amazing things Jim is working on and his journey into Tech!

Episode Transcript

Pj Metz (01:58):
doo doo doo doo doo doo welcome to the podcast and the
stream. And this is the place tobe right now. Those are the real
words, actually. Do you knowthat?

Brandon Minnick (02:10):
I didn't know that?

Pj Metz (02:11):
Yeah, those are real.
Those are real words that Isaid. Welcome to the podcast
about people behind the tech. Iam PJ Betts and I am coming to
you live from the coldest thatOrlando Florida has been all
year. My house is 65 degrees.

(02:32):
And I'm freezing with me asalways, Brandon Minnick. But
Brandon, you're not home. You'recoming to us from a very special
location today.

Brandon Minnick (02:42):
Yeah, I was as interesting as because you're
saying Florida was cold. I'm inNorway right now. And it's
basically December. So woke upthis morning to a nice fine
layer of snow. I didn't pack anysnow boots. I don't know why I

(03:02):
didn't check the weather beforetraveling to Norway. But I got
one sweater, one jacket and ascarf in this great hat to keep
me warm. I am surviving.

Pj Metz (03:17):
Well, to be fair, you've been you've been on the
road for a hot minute. So you'reprobably thinking, Oh, I'll
check the weather for the placeI'm headed. And then beyond that
your brain was like, yeah, it'sall the same.

Brandon Minnick (03:28):
Yeah, I will say yeah, long story short, I
wasn't supposed to stay inEurope. This long. I was in
Prague when we had our lastepisode with Dr. G. Wright
missed it, go check it out.
She's amazing. And I wassupposed to fly home. And then
even when I landed in Prague,Norway still had rules out there
that said Americans gonna getin. And then the conference

(03:50):
ended up basically helping usout. So I was able to get in. It
was like, well, I could fly fromEurope all the way back to the
West Coast of the US for fivedays. Do it all over again. And
talk to my wife and she's like,now just just stay out there. So
yeah, I've been out here thewhole time. I've been doing
laundry in the hotel. It's beengreat.

Pj Metz (04:14):
Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Nothing like hotel
laundry, I gotta say and as anew person to the traveling for
work group. Like I'm veryexcited for the day that I'm
going to have to be like, Look,I packed two pairs of jeans and
I've been here longer than Iexpected. Can I please do
laundry? Oh, I don't even knowthe process. I don't know the
process for that. That'sterrifying,

Brandon Minnick (04:36):
is it?
Eventually you'll just get tothe point where you have the
hotel do the laundry for you.
Even though it's like $80 for aload of laundry. Just because
you just can't any like washingunderwear in the sink just isn't
cutting it anymore.

Pj Metz (04:51):
No. Yeah, that doesn't sound great at all.

Brandon Minnick (04:55):
But anyways, I am here for an amazing
conference. It's called NDCHello, that's Norwegian
developer conference. It's oneof the biggest conferences in
the world, especially for dotnetdevelopers. So if anybody out
there wants to check it out, andDC will be live streaming. So
you can watch, you can buytickets, everything live, they

(05:16):
will also be posting all thevideos. So you can even catch my
session on Graph QL. That'scoming up later this week. It'll
lead on YouTube, sometime. Sowe'll keep googling NDC Oslo,
Brandon Minnick Graph QL tolearn about all the things, but
yeah, really excited. It's gonnabe a fantastic conference,
there's only been two days ofworkshops where I was just

(05:39):
telling BJ how we were hacking,or I was at a hacking workshop,
hosted by Scott Helm, one of thepremier security experts in the
world. So just the guy a truehonor to be in His presence.
It's it's been prettyincredible.

Pj Metz (05:52):
Did you guys uh, did y'all illegally hit F 12. and
inspect some code? Oh, yeah.

Brandon Minnick (05:59):
Oh, we've been using all the developer tools we
do at SQL injections. We've beendoing cross site scripting
Don't,

Pj Metz (06:05):
don't dare. Don't you dare hit F 12. If you're in the
state of Missouri, it's notallowed.

Brandon Minnick (06:13):
He also taught me or taught all of us. How do
you take down Netflix for yourwhole hotel? Is staying at the
same hotel I'm

Pj Metz (06:22):
in now? Because there's no other entertainment in this
hotel. I can only watch the snowoutside for so long. So yeah,
are you are you uh, you areeventually going to be coming
back? Is this conference, yourlast bit of this trip? Is this
the last leg?

Brandon Minnick (06:37):
Yeah, basically the last thing for the year, I'm
back, flying back home Saturday.
So really looking forward tobeing home being in my own bed.
And then yeah, not having to geton a plane for the rest of the
year will be

Pj Metz (06:49):
very nice. Fantastic.
Saturday, Saturday, I am runninga half marathon and asked me how
well I've trained for it. BJ, Ihave no trained Jerry. Well for
it at all. It's been the longestdistance I've run is I think six
and a half miles. So it's goingto be a treat to go double that.

(07:09):
For the first time. There'sgoing to be a lot of walking and
a lot of maybe eating like, Idon't know, Sour Patch Kids to
keep my energy up as I go. Idon't know how I'm supposed to
do this. I wear I wear Hawaiianshirts in December. I'm clearly
not the person that should berunning half marathons. Uh, but
yeah, that's, I mean, that'swhat's going on with me. Is this

(07:30):
this half marathon? I knowyou're training for a very
special run that's happening inlike February, March, right?

Brandon Minnick (07:37):
Yeah, doing the full marathon in March. So right
after this, I'm going to go runsix miles,

Pj Metz (07:42):
who right after this, I'm going to go inspect a tree
that was cut down in my frontyard during, during this
morning, and I'm very excitedbecause I hated that tree. was a
bad tree. Bad man. Bad tree.
Look, listen, speaking oftechnology, um, we have a very
special guest here today. Don'tbe branded someone that you
actually know from real worldlife.

Brandon Minnick (08:04):
We do. Such an amazing person, one of one of my
favorite people. He's actually Idon't even know if he knows
this. But he's one of thereasons I have the job I have
now. So long story short, Iturned down this job. And then I
found out that he along with acouple other people who I looked
up to for joining the team. Iwas like, I had the opportunity

(08:29):
to work with these guys, andimmediately went back and asked
if I could still have the job.
So without further ado, welcometo the show Jim Bennett.

Jim Bennett (08:42):
Hello, how goes everyone.

Brandon Minnick (08:45):
Oh, it's so good to see you again, Jim. For
the people out there who don'tknow, who are you? What do you
do?

Jim Bennett (08:51):
Who am I what to do. Um, so I'm Jim, I work for
Microsoft. I'm what's called aneducation cloud advocate, which
is one of these great titlesthat nobody has heard of
Microsoft knows what it means.
And most people in Microsoftdon't know what it means. But I
do the same job at Brandon. Quitnow he is on the center of his
brand new I focus on theeducation space. So I help

(09:14):
students I help educators besuccessful with Microsoft
technologies. Yet mainlyUniversity, I know a little bit
high school, maybe boot camps,career changes, but mainly kind
of university level. And a lotof that is around just making
sure they've got the resourcesthey need to learn how to use
the stuff that we make. IoT theInternet of Things is my

(09:38):
particular passion. So I play alot with little devices. Hence
why you can probably see behindme I have all manner of
different gadgets and gizmos andyou know

Pj Metz (09:48):
how many of those devices connect to the internet?

Jim Bennett (09:53):
Most pretty much most. I mean, this one here this
is an AI box is called an AzurePortal. It's got cameras with AI
accelerators and microphones,accelerators that click the
internet. I've got all manner ofRaspberry Pi's and Arduino
devices there and all my lightsconnect to the internet. And you
know, I can just press a buttonon a stream deck on my desk, and

(10:15):
then if ever catches

Pj Metz (10:16):
up, it will say, Oh,

Jim Bennett (10:19):
you know, oh, that kind of good stuff.

Pj Metz (10:22):
It doesn't connect to the internet. But I can go with
our brand colors back here. Bam.
There's what we call the eightbits green. Now, trademark
pending, trademark, pending,it's coming.

Jim Bennett (10:38):
You should have sent me the RGB code for that.
And I could have done that in mylife. It could have matched

Pj Metz (10:42):
Oh, man, I don't know it's this button on the
controller. Do you see?

Brandon Minnick (10:49):
Jim, thank you so much for joining us today, I
feel like you are just theperfect guest to have on the
show. Because eight bits is allabout the people behind the
tech, and even morespecifically, about how to get
into tech. And like youmentioned a minute ago, that's
quite literally your job is tobring tech to students. So I'm

(11:15):
curious, because I mean, Iplayed computer games growing
up, I could use the command linein order to run the computer
games, but I never learned tocode as a kid. So what tell us
what what are you bringing tothese students in? And also, how
young are we teaching kids technowadays.

Jim Bennett (11:39):
So in terms of what I'm bringing the students I'm,
I'm trying to make sure thatwhat we at Microsoft provide for
them is student friendly. So ifyou've ever waited through our
marks of documentation, you everwaded through all of our online
learning materials, we're reallygreat at building stuff for
professional developers, we'rereally great at assuming you
know, all the things, and thenwe bring you more. So you know,

(12:02):
you want to learn about how toconnect a Raspberry Pi to the
internet, you want to createthings, you want to send data to
the cloud, what have you. Andwe've got great documentation
that talks about the security ofhow you should connect and you
know, how should architectureapplication, which is really,
really important stuff. Ifyou're building up your big
company, and you want to haveall the, you know, you're a
student is your first year ofcomputer science, you've just

(12:24):
dabbled a little bit in C Sharpor Java for object oriented
programming 101. And you've gotthis Raspberry Pi, and you want
to connect it to the internet.
What do you do? So I'm I'm thereto try and think about how I can
build the right content. So yougo on the internet and search
for, you know, IoT connects tothe internet, I want to make
sure that what you get when youdo that Google search is

(12:47):
something that's actually goingto help you at your level. So
it's, you know, let's just dosome basic Python code. Let's
not show you all the exampleswith all this, that and the
other that you would need in theenterprise world. Here's the two
lines of code to make do thething. It's really my area of
focus is

Pj Metz (13:05):
let's see, where were you? Where were you? What I was
learning to code a year ago?
What I need a gym. I was

Jim Bennett (13:15):
still doing this stuff. It's just you know, I
guess we haven't gotten goodenough of the out there yet.

Pj Metz (13:19):
Let's I mean, also, like it was I mean, I was brand
new to cut, I didn't know what Iwas doing. And Brandon watched
me go through it, where I'd belike, I'm trying to do this. And
I don't know a brand. I waslike, Well, let me see if I can
help. And I think it does comefrom a certain amount of like,
knowing how to Google what it isthat you're actually looking for
can be difficult. So I am forone, very happy that in the

(13:42):
future, no one will have to gothrough what I went through of
typing. How do I make VisualStudio run my code? It will just
be information that's easilyfound. Because the first time I
opened Visual Studio code, I waslike, what, how do I make it go
cuz I knew how to make it gowith the website I was building
with Brandon, there was a littlelike, Run button. I didn't know.

(14:07):
It was intimidating. It'sfantastic.

Jim Bennett (14:09):
You've kind of hit on the nail of the difference
between a senior levelprogrammer, you know, your
principal level staff level Clevel programming, and you're
kind of junior level programmer.
It's not about how good you areat coding. It's about how good
you are at googling. Yeah, it'strue. Um, that was a great
session. So we run this thingcalled the Imagine Cup. It's
like a student competition. Youknow, get students together,

(14:30):
build projects, win big prizes.
And we had a kind of kickoffevent for it. And Scott
Hanselman, though, if you heardof him, vaguely famous guy from,
from somewhere around Portland,he did a session and one of the
things he points out is thedifference between the more
advanced programmers or seniorprogrammers and the junior ones
is just that we've come across awhole class of problems before

(14:52):
and we know how to cut out thoseproblems quickly. So when we hit
a thing that doesn't work. Ifyou're a junior, you're like, I
don't know where to start.
whereas the more seniorprogrammer will come along, it
definitely can't be that, orhere's a little test I can do
for that. And I can clear outthat whole class of problems and
just focus down so we can we cannarrow down quicker, because
we've seen it before. That'sreally the only difference.

Pj Metz (15:14):
I mean, it's as simple as knowing where to look in the
logs for the error that youactually need in order to figure
out the problem that just comeswith experience. Oh,

Jim Bennett (15:23):
yeah, yeah, I mean, I've worked with a guy who was a
phenomenal programmer, simplybecause he was a genius with
Reddit with regex. I know theyexist. Applications, he, he
didn't have the experience. Sohe wasn't able to kind of
architect the whole applicationat his experience level, because

(15:44):
he'd never kind of come acrossthose problems. But when
something was broken, it'll belike, right, here's the logs.
And he would, he would better dohis regex queries through the
logs. And he could trace throughexactly what was happening. And
there's really complexapplications. And these were
financial applications, who gotdata coming in prices, stock
prices, currency rates, all thatkind of stuff, orders go in and

(16:08):
out. And he could just navigatethrough the logs and find out
the problem. And it's like, yes,you're a genius. Because you can
do that. And there's a morejunior programmer, you'd say,
this doesn't work. They wouldjust be hours trying to figure
it out. He like push, push,push, push, push, here's the log
statements.

Pj Metz (16:27):
Oh, man, that's fantastic. And I love that we
are actually in like, you and Iare in fairly similar fields.
I'm on the education team atGitLab. That's kind of our
thing. We're trying to bringDevOps to classrooms. So um,
earlier, Brandon asked youabout, like, what are you
bringing the students how yougetting students involved. So
um, I want to keep hearing moreabout that, because like, I'm

(16:51):
community taught, I learned withBrandon and I learned with Chloe
Condon. And I learned with CodeAcademy where I actually typed
out code and learn stuff. Solike, um, water? I don't know, I
just want to hear more I want toI didn't want to interrupt. But
I also like, I want to hear moreabout what you're doing with
students. How about you saidwith boot camps, what have you

(17:11):
done with boot camps.

Jim Bennett (17:13):
So I haven't done that much of boot camps across
our team, we say we mainlyprioritize universities, but
kind of the, the biggest thingwe have been doing that kind of
overlaps at the boot camp space,is we've been trying to build
curriculum. So if you are a bootcamp, for example, or you're a
community college, or you're oneof these universities that
doesn't have a $50 billionendowment, because you know,

(17:36):
you're not an actual hedge funddisguises University for tax
reasons. But if you're one ofthese institutions, you need
this kind of content, you needto know what to teach. And it's,
it's a massive cost to train upteachers, getting to build the
content and get the teach thecontent, especially to keep that
content fresh, to get thecontent up to date and keep it
keep it relevant. You know, I'veworked the number of

(17:57):
universities who don't teachcloud computing, because they
just don't, they've don't havethat in their curricula. They
don't have the time or money torebuild a whole load of courses,
all based around cloudcomputing. So we as a, as a team
team that I'm on, we've tried toput together those curricula. So
you know, if you wanted to teachweb dev, you could build up a 24

(18:18):
lesson course that you could goand teach. Or you could just
take ours. We've built one. It'sMIT licensed, it's on GitHub.
And it's completely free foranyone to use. And you can you
can do it self guided learning.
So you can come if you comeacross it, you can wade through
it yourself. And you can learnthe basics of JavaScript. This
is what a function is, this iswhat a loop is, this is a loop
on CSS as a little HTML, andlearn how to build your first

(18:41):
web app. And then it's now youcan go off and learn how to
deploy the cloud if you want to.
And we have that that and youcan learn that for free. But if
you're a lecturer, if you're ateacher, you can also just take
that content, and you can teachin the classroom. And
personally, my team actuallycreated our web one, Jen looper,
she runs an organization calledfront end foxes, which is a

(19:02):
nonprofit organization forfemale identifying developers
who want to learn how to codethat came out of view vixens
these to focus on view as a webframework. Now there's a whole
load of just anything web. Andthey are teaching cohorts of
students from this web developerfor beginners course. So you can
literally sign up join thecohort and learning and we're

(19:23):
kind of expanding that we've gotmachine learning for beginners,
we've got data science, forbeginners, we've got Internet of
Things for beginners. So you canliterally you want to learn
internet things. We've got a 24lesson course you can work
through. It's obviously it'sbuilt by Microsoft. So whenever
you have to go to the cloud, wepoint you towards Microsoft
services. Yeah, we have to wehave to find this

Pj Metz (19:46):
lesson. Like I get it.
You got it. You got to don'tbite the hand that feeds you,
you know, you got to lead itright back up the arm.

Jim Bennett (19:52):
Exactly, exactly.
But you know, we've made it sothat we teach you the basics of
what is what is IoT? What is theInternet of Things? What are the
different microcontrollers. andsimple computers. What is a
sensor? What does it do? Howdoes it work? How does an
actuator work? When you'reskating to the cloud? Why did
you take the car? What do you dowith it? What do you think about
the data that you do? How do youbring artificial intelligence to
IoT devices, which kind of oneof the big growth areas at the

(20:14):
moment, and we kind of build upall that, but we use the
Microsoft platform as the toolsthat you use to do it, we teach
you the Internet of Things,using Microsoft tools, we don't
teach you the Microsoft tools,we teach you the Internet of
Things. That's the focus. Andit's kind of this kind of stuff
we're doing. So if you're astudent, and you want to learn
how to do the Internet ofThings, the kinds of courses
that you can work through it,we've worked with a company

(20:36):
called Seed studios who makehardware. So you can literally
buy the chem, IoT, it's Internetof Things, you need the things,
you got to click a button, andthey will send you a box with
all the kit that you need allpre packaged, we've also got a
simulator for it as well. So ifyou want to do internet of
things, but you don't want tospend 100 bucks on a kit, it's
100 bucks, it's a lot of money,it is a lot of money to spend,

(20:59):
and you just want to dabble inthat you don't buy the hardware,
we've got simulators thatsimulates the entire hardware
stack. So you can do the wholething you can ever get Internet
things, you can learn aboutsensors and actuators and gather
data from sensors and controlactuators send the data to the
cloud process it run artificialintelligence on the edge, all
this kind of stuff withoutbuying any hardware doesn't cost
you a penny. And it's it's thiskind of stuff we're bringing,

(21:22):
and we're working with lecturersaround the world who want to
take this content and just teachin the classroom, they don't
have an IoT course, they don'thave the time to develop one.
Because these are really busyfolks who for some reason, don't
get paid very well. You know,education, absolute most
important thing on the planet,we don't pay them outlay. And so
if we can help them by saying,Here's your curriculum, prebuilt

(21:45):
you take what you want, it'scompletely free, we don't care
what you do with it, take thebits you want, take the whole
thing, whatever, then we canempower them to actually teach
these concepts to students in away that they couldn't do
before. Because

Pj Metz (22:00):
you're you're teaching WHAT IS IT training the trainers
and giving them the resourcesthey need? Which is to be
honest, like I was a teacher for11 years, the way Brandon sold
me on developer relations was Imean, you're I'm kind of still a
teacher like you get to stay ateacher. And that seems to have

(22:21):
been Brandon's philosophy behindthe way he approaches debt. Does
that make sense? Brandon, thatyou just see yourself as like a
teacher like as an educator,right?

Brandon Minnick (22:29):
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think the
best thing you can do as adeveloper advocate is shoes is
to teach people and kinda likeJim was saying, you, you teach
them how to do cool stuff. Andyes, Jim and I both work at
Microsoft. So we're going toteach you how to do that cool
stuff using the Microsoft tools.
But yeah, all those skills willtranslate to other languages,
other frameworks, other clouds.

(22:53):
And so the the idea is, we justwant you to become a better
developer be able to make goodstuff. Less bugs. Yeah. Longer
up times. But absolutely, yeah,teaching is the main part of the
job.

Jim Bennett (23:11):
Yeah, it's kind of two parts. It's, we teach people
how to do things. And then whenthey when they hit problems with
what with what they're trying todo, we go back to Microsoft and
say, fix it, so that we canteach people better. You know,
we advocate for our audiences,we advocate, we are developer
advocates. And I like to thinkthat we advocate for developers

(23:32):
not our job involves advocatingto developers, but really, to
me, it's advocating for them, sothat we can provide them the
support they need. And then whenthey say this doesn't work, I
can't understand this. I don'tknow that I want to do this, I
don't I don't understand yourdocumentation is it doesn't make
sense for me, or doesn't makesense, or this is not logical,
or I can't grok this, we cantake that feedback back to the

(23:55):
to the people Microsoft and fixthat, which means your learning
experience is better. It's kindof like when you say you're a
teacher, it's kind of in theclassroom. If a student can't
understand the worksheet thatthey're working through, you can
then go back to Teachers PayTeachers, or you know, where you
get the worksheet from what wasyour teachers, you can you can

(24:16):
kind of fix that for the nextset of teachers. My wife is a
elementary school teacher. SoI've been learning all about
this. She literally just startedshe graduated as an elementary
school teacher focusing onspecial needs a few months ago,
and so she's working as asubstitute teacher, and my
daughter's elementary school,just five minutes up the road,

(24:36):
and she's supporting everythingfrom the resource rooms to the
learning centers to classrooms.
She's a kindergarten teachertoday. So I get to hear about
all these great facilities forteachers.

Pj Metz (24:45):
A lot of teachers pay teacher's shout out to you for
saving my Great Gatsby unit and2014 I really appreciate it.

Jim Bennett (24:52):
So for those who don't know, teachers pay
teacher's is where teachers cancreate learning materials and
then sell it to other teachers.
So if you're ready Teacher Youcan literally buy learning
materials. And the reasonthere's all this kind of
transactional nature is teachersdon't get given enough money to
pay for the materials they need.
So they don't get paid enoughanyway. So they will, they have

(25:14):
to buy it themselves, becausethere's no other way to do it.
But if they sell on Teachers PayTeachers, they can actually get
more, they get paid more. Yeah,the teachers paycheck is
pathetic for what they do. It'shideous how badly teachers are
paid, I could probably spend therest of the session just
ranting. We can buy aircraftcarriers and spend 2 trillion on

(25:35):
fighter jets that don't work.
But we can't pay teachers adecent wage, and we expect them
to buy stuff. Last night, popthe Dollar Tree with my wife so
she could buy some stickers andpens and stuff to get out in
class today out of her ownpocket. And this is just, this
is terrible.

Pj Metz (25:51):
And this is why I'm in tech.

Jim Bennett (25:55):
While other people are leaving teaching, there's a
great resignation happening andteaching.

Brandon Minnick (25:59):
Yeah, it's funny, I was just when I was in
Prague, I was chatting with somefolks who are from around that
area, specifically Switzerland,and they were saying how
teachers there. It's one of thehighest paid professions. And
when you think about it, itmakes a lot of sense to have
your best, brightest smartestpeople teaching because then

(26:21):
they'll pass on that knowledgeand the next generation becomes
even

Pj Metz (26:26):
better, brighter, smarter, leveling up, right.

Brandon Minnick (26:30):
You're, you're investing in the next
generation, and then you allwill essentially grow as a
society together. And, you know,those are gonna be the people
making the COVID vaccines 20years from now, because they're
gonna

Pj Metz (26:44):
be around. Yeah, I mean, both of you are saying the
exact the exact same thing thatI hear a lot of times that
teachers are underappreciated,undervalued and certainly
underpaid. And that teachers payteacher's website. There's also
free stuff on there, peoplebelieve in what they're doing so
much that they'll just give itaway for free. It's, it's it's

(27:04):
endemic, that like, teachershave to have something called
Teachers Pay Teachers to makeextra money. But I will say
like, there's some amazingbright educators out there that
are making amazing things forevery kind of subject. And what
Teachers Pay Teachers does, itdoesn't just allow teachers to
get paid for some of the workthey're doing. It allows us to

(27:25):
share stuff with each other. Andyou ask any educator in the
world, if you're working in aschool, and another teacher
says, Oh, I don't know what todo for this unit. Another
teacher is gonna step in and sayI have something for you. And
they will just give it to you.
We are constantly just trying togive stuff to each other. So
teachers pay teacher's said,Look, we want you to keep doing
that. We want a place for you todo that. But also you can get,

(27:45):
you know, $15 for this GreatGatsby unit for this Pythagoras
and theorem unit. It comes withall the quizzes, tests,
assignments that you need, andit gives you the curriculum,
hey, you're going to do this forthree weeks. Here's what
everyday looks like, here's whatit looks like. If you're on
block schedule, here's what itlooks like. If you're on a
standard schedule. It's afantastic website, any educators

(28:07):
out there, I highly recommendit. Um, Jim, first off, I'm
loving you for being like aneducation advocate on this show
is fantastic. But I want to askabout like, we're talking about
education, we're talking abouthow you're helping educate the
next generation of how did youget started with coding what
what did your coding educationor where did you start with

(28:30):
tech?

Jim Bennett (28:32):
Hmm, so I actually started a very, very long time
ago.

Pj Metz (28:37):
I don't believe it.

Jim Bennett (28:39):
I actually started would have been Oh 1983 1984 So
you know, we're talking 35 yearsago. A lot. Yes, I am that old.
I know. I look at a mere 21

Pj Metz (28:58):
But listen, you are you are absolutely the youngest
looking old person I've everseen in my life. But so 93 It is
it is a high five and I loveyou, Jim. It's so is this what
machine is this on that you'rethat you're programming on?

Jim Bennett (29:17):
So I learned to program on the Zedeck spectrum,
the 48k version with a rubberkeys. So there's that there used
to be an inventor in the UK SirClive Sinclair. He sadly passed
away 16th of September thisyear. But he was a brilliant
inventor and he was trying tobring computing devices to the
masses. So we actually inventedthe first pocket sized pocket

(29:39):
calculator. Yeah, the first oneis actually smart enough to go
in your pocket

Pj Metz (29:42):
first pocket calculator. Yep.

Jim Bennett (29:45):
The first one is small enough, the Sinclair
executive. And that was thefirst one that's small enough to
go go in your pocket. And hewent from the side inventing
computers, and he wanted tobuild home computers, so not the
big ones you find in massiveways. houses for data processing
businesses, he wanted to buildhome computers. So we started
off with a single digit X 81with one kilobyte of RAM in it,

(30:08):
you can get around packed,expand it to 16 kilobytes of
RAM, or basically set itprocessor. And then he released
I think was about 83, hereleased the 48k ZX Spectrum. So
that's the one you got in thepicture there. The one with the
rubber keys, it was this lovelymetal shell had this rubber keys
used to type it had 48 kilobytesof RAM. And that is nothing you

(30:30):
know, I've got source code fileswith with that. But it's didn't
have much, much RAM had no builtin storage. So what you had to
do is you had to plug in acassette deck. Now for those who
have not seen cassettes,cassettes are literally long
strips of magnetic tape, thatwill kind of roll up in this
plastic box. And it used to getmusic on there, and you get a

(30:53):
bit of games on that. So youdon't have to buy a tape deck, a
separate one, wow. Then you plugin cables into the back of the
spectrum. And you could readfrom the tapes, or write to the
tapes. That's how you save saveprograms. There you go there,
wow. And that actual cassettethere, that's the one that comes
that's the next spectrumhorizons that is that came with

(31:15):
the original spectrum, it had anumber of games on there. One
called horoscope skiing, I thinkwas on there hungry Horus, and a
few other games. And it had somebasic coding activities.

Pj Metz (31:27):
So I have to say,

Brandon Minnick (31:30):
just just to paint a picture for anybody
who's listening on the audiopodcast, we're pulling up
pictures of these of the theSedex spectrum. And if you can
picture in your mind, this iswhat it reminds me of when you
ever see like a policeinterrogation. And they have
this tape recorder recording.
Um, and before they sit down,they hit the record button, and

(31:52):
then they started interrogatinghim. That's what this looks
like. But you're saying this isthe computer.

Jim Bennett (32:00):
Yeah, so the tape that was set up, so you click
the Insert button. That's howthat's what that was just always
none of this has seen it, saveit to a zip drive or, you know,
so my age there again, or afloppy disk or USB stick or SD
card, it was on a cassette.

Pj Metz (32:14):
And that's wild. Yeah.
And those

Jim Bennett (32:17):
cassettes, you'll get a cassette that could play,
you know, half an hour of musicon the cassette. And that would
record an entire program on thatit would take. So if you loaded
a game, you could buy games oncassettes, and it will take
seven minutes to load. So youput the cassette in seven
minutes. To say start loadingthe game, you press play on the
tape deck, and it will takeseven minutes to load. And

(32:39):
sometimes the game will crash assoon as it loaded. So you start
all over again. But that was thethis was the first real the
first real home computer andthis

Pj Metz (32:48):
Yeah, like even this first picture I was looking at
it's from a Guardian article.
And the title is the legacy of acomputer for the masses. This is
bringing it to homes insomething that an average home
could afford.

Jim Bennett (33:05):
Yeah, this was like 100 pounds at the time. I don't
know what that back in the day.

Pj Metz (33:11):
We're doing it 1983 pounds. Today money. And I'm
guessing it's gonna be like 350pounds. That's what I'm guessing
100 pounds is gonna be like 350Where can I type it in? Where's
the character? There we go. Theone we're gonna do dollars.

Jim Bennett (33:31):
Yeah, so probably probably about 300 pounds today.
So you think about how muchyou'd pay for a bottle, the
range Xbox so that the gamesgrabs on, it's kind of that kind
of price. So it was stillexpensive. Not everyone could
afford one. But it was priced ata point that the masses could
start to buy them. And you youplug it into a TV. So don't

(33:51):
worry about any kind of monitorsare nothing special to say you
plug into TV. And yeah, my dadcame home with one one day. And
it was just amazing. It was thisthing. And she put in the
cassette and you play games likewow. And then you could actually
write in Word and he willconvert the words things that
would happen. So the very firstprogram I wrote you always have

(34:14):
to have line numbers because thecode is pregnant basic. And you
have to have line numbers veryfirst program I wrote was line
one print quotes Hello quotesran that and it printed Hello on
the screen that was my firstever Hello World and probably
about 8384

Pj Metz (34:30):
Is that not the most exciting thing though? Like
every I feel like everyone thefirst time they said computer do
this and it did it. You're likeI am I am a God. This is

Jim Bennett (34:42):
better than that to go to one run that instrument.
Hello, hello. Hello.

Brandon Minnick (34:50):
Wow,

Jim Bennett (34:51):
this is this is the thing. And actually if you go
back to the pictures you had upthere Yeah, that was one picture
A little bit down below thepictures of Clive Sinclair,
there's a picture there with anorange book. So when he came in
this big orange book was ringbound with kind of black spiral
ring binding. And it had how toprogram in basic. So it actually

(35:13):
taught you how to write basiccode. And it had example
programs you could type in. Soyou can type in word games like
hang man, or very basic graphicsgames, you can just moving
around the screen, things likethat. And so not

Pj Metz (35:26):
only is it like an affordable computer for home,
like, yes, you have to have atape deck. Yes, you already have
to have a television. But italso automatically already comes
with how to program and how howyou can take what we have, and
build things with it.

Jim Bennett (35:43):
Mm hmm. Oh, yeah, that was really that was part of
Clive's idea. So class I did wasto try and not just bring a
games machine, but bring anactual computer people would
use, yeah, they could, theycould program themselves. And
there was lots of applicationsyou get, you get a printer for
it. So you could do wordprocessing, you could do you
know, a database where youactually save the data off to
cassette tapes, you have to loadthe database program from a

(36:04):
cassette analyze your data froma cassette, but it will all
these things too. And yet codingwas just, it just exploded. So
there was so many magazines andbooks are being released on how
to code. Now I was young at thetime, I was kind of 767. As I
started doing this, I didn'thave the attention span, to do
all the programs. Yeah, hang manwas hundreds and hundreds of

(36:26):
lines of code. And I'll do alittle bit but I would get
bored. But my mom, my mum,absolutely fantastic person,
she's ABS incredible. And shehad the patience to sit down
with me and actually copy andfinish off typing. So I'll do a
bit share with you. But I do abit she would do that. And she
would support me and all thetyping that I would do, so that

(36:47):
we could get the programwritten. So thanks to her, I was
able to it wasn't the Howard ofthe board. I didn't thanks to
her. That got me hooked.

Pj Metz (36:57):
That's absolutely fantastic. I love the idea. Like
sometimes it takes someone elsekind of nudging you along and
being like, Look, I know it'snot great right now, or you're
not fully in right now. But ifwe just keep going this could be
and surely she wasn't like, thisis going to help you because in
30 years, you're going to beworking at Microsoft, and we're
going to need you to make themoney that you got to go out

(37:19):
there and work for a techcompany, she was just thinking,
I know that there's somethinginteresting here. And I want you
to get there. Because sometimesyou gotta you got to wade
through some stuff, that's notas interesting. Um, but like
speaking of interesting, I thinkwe have an ad break that we were
gonna take real quick. And we'lljust hear some from our

(37:39):
sponsors. And we'll be back injust one second y'all. Hi, I, if
you're hearing my voice, thatmeans you've been listening to
or watching eight bits withBrandon and PJ. And we're here
to talk to you about yourproduct. And how it can help you
in your life by to do whateveryour product does. So if you're

(38:04):
an avid listener of the show, oryou watch us on Twitch, then you
will know that your product,your product is right for you.
That's right. That's a real ad.
I'm almost sad that one day weare going to replace that with a

(38:28):
real ad. But if you'd like toadvertise with us, this is a
program that does take moneythat Brandon's fronting all of
it. And he needs to get paidback at least a little. No, we
we are that's open. We willadvertise on here. Hello at
eight bits.tv will send us anemail and we will talk with you

(38:50):
about that. Brandon, what do youguys this, this adds so good.

Brandon Minnick (38:56):
So, so Jim, I'm really curious, because I feel
like if you told anybodynowadays that your first
experience into computing andeven gaming was, well, I turned
it on. And then I waited sevenminutes. And then if it didn't
crash, I got to use it. And itwas amazing. They would think

(39:16):
you're crazy. So what what wasthe next step? So how did this
technology evolve? And then howdid you evolve? How did you
evolve with it? Yeah, yeah,

Jim Bennett (39:28):
um, I mean, the next step for me was just I just
coded. I just kept on coding andI would try and do things more
advanced, more advanced. Now,things were a lot slower back
then it wasn't just the sevenminutes that you have to wait
for the game to load. If youneed to know how to do something
now you would just Google itwould go to Bing and Google it
with Bing and you'd find thething that you have to do

Pj Metz (39:52):
with being late with

Jim Bennett (39:53):
big, you can just go into a get the answer. back
then. We didn't have that wedidn't have there was no
internet. There wasn't there waslike a community, I couldn't go
into a discord forum and ask aquestion. I would have to
literally go to the library.

Pj Metz (40:08):
Now, how did you find funny pictures of cats?

Jim Bennett (40:10):
We didn't have funny pictures of cats didn't?

Pj Metz (40:14):
Wasn't ages before the internet. So did you? Did you go
to the library and find morebooks on programming then? Yeah,
yeah,

Jim Bennett (40:23):
I mean, we used to go every week. So Wednesday's
was late opening at the library.
And because I live too far awayto just go there on my own,
yeah, eight 910 years old, I canjust get get my bike and ride
three miles to library. So weused to go every Wednesday, that
late opening, so we'd go with mydad after work every Wednesday,
and I would be looking around, Iwould get some books to read.
And I would look in thecomputing section. And

(40:43):
occasionally, they would havesome books. The problem is it's
so library, they don't have 1000copies of every book. And they
still got small amount ofcompeting books. So even smaller
amount of Basic Books for thespectrum. And you had to hope
for somebody hadn't taken thebook out. So yeah, go there,
flip through try and find abook. If it didn't have any
books. It was a librarian. Yeah,excuse me, do you have any books

(41:04):
on the spectrum, I could reserveand you have to wait three
weeks, potentially, for the bookto come back. So you can get it
out again. And so you just getthis book, and you'd be glued to
it? Yeah, I got one for graphicsprogramming in basic on the
spectrum. And the last thing youbuilt was like this haunted
house. And so it's this house inthe woods, all eight big
graphics. Yeah, the spectrum hadthis weird thing where every

(41:27):
eight by eight pixel square, youcan only have two colors, just
two colors per square. That'sthat that kept the graphics
memory down. That's a big massproducer. So you have a very
blocky graphics. And you'd buildthis, this house with trees and
lightning flash and then open uplike a pumpkin and pop out. And
you know, I got this book. Andit took me like three weeks to
get all the code in because theyhad to go back to the library

(41:48):
and say, Can I renew thislibrary book, please, because I
haven't finished the code onthere. And you get lucky no
one's dead. So get out for threeweeks and just finish off this
graphics program. And it's justjust brilliant. And it was just
kept me kept me going. It's kindof all types of programming and
playing games. Downside is, youknow, I had a sibling had to
share the computer with asibling. So it was, you know,

(42:09):
parents were all to get onehour. And that's it. And then
hopefully, through codingsomething, stop, save it to
cassette, wait an hour for mynext turn and get back on it.
But it's kind of carried thatcarry that I'm going with things
back then as well. That wasn'tthe computer science education
in schools. So I was doing thison my own time. At school, we

(42:29):
didn't have any computers, wecould code. As I got older, I
got towards the upper end ofhigh school. We had BBC micros,
which is from the BritishBroadcasting Corporation,
computers they released gave outall the schools. And the
computer lessons we had were howto put things in a card style
database how to do desktoppublishing. You know, I did a
GCSE was exams you do in the UKwhen you're 16 in it, no coding

(42:50):
at all. They didn't have anycoding, it was Excel, Sarah page
plus how to use a handheldscanner. You know, it was
nothing that was coding. So Iwasn't exposed to coding as a
career. It wasn't reallysomething that was talked about
in our career sessions. Wedidn't talk about the fact you

(43:12):
could get into tech. It wassomething I was doing at home.
And I knew some people at schoolwho were dabbling with PCs, and
Pascal's and eventually beupdated to a PC. I kind of do a
little bit of little bit promoon the PC, but it wasn't really
taught. And so I didn't havethis idea in my mind of I want
to go into a career as a programjust wasn't a career I knew
about, right. But I was actuallyenjoying chemistry. I was doing

(43:33):
chemistry at school, I lovedchemistry, great teacher, I had
absolutely loved chemistry. So Ithought I'll get I'll be a
chemist, I'll go work for somechemical company making stuff
just because I like this. AndI've no idea what I want to do.
And look through chemistrydegrees. And I saw a chemistry
degree. They called it ComputerAided chemistry. And so it was
letter chemistry, plus copies ofstuff. So you did things like

(43:55):
coding, you do things likemolecular modeling. So actually
build 3d chemical structures onscreen and workout protein
folding and how they connecttogether. And then you did
things like machine interfacing.
So how do you control a piece ofchemical equipment from code so
you write code to control themachine that put stuff in
things? And I thought, Thissounds a lot of fun. I'm

(44:17):
enjoying this competing stuff.
I've done some programming. Ienjoy this chemistry stuff.
Let's do this. And so I got intothis degree program. And I
realized as soon as I did myfirst eight hour lab as a coder,
I don't care about chemistry. Ijust don't care about that. I
just want to write code. But Ikind of stuck with it. Probably
should have switched degrees ifI thought about it, but I still
didn't really have a career pathin my mind because nobody

(44:39):
explained tech careers to me atthe time. Did a couple years of
that did an internship. Yeah.
And my internship. Yeah, I wasworking for what was SmithKline
Beecham. It's now part ofGlaxoSmithKline when the big
global pharmaceutical glamorousas a coder. They literally
wanted somebody to build towrite code. Yeah, that was a
little bit code. There's a comein and code for spend a year

(45:00):
writing code. So start off withsome VBA, some classic ASP, not
even SP dotnet. This was prettyloud.
And then we dived into Delphi,which is Object Pascal kind of
drag and drop controls on thescreen right Pascal code behind
and I spent basically the bulkof a year as a Pascal coder,
Delphi coder, building upsystems for what's called

(45:24):
combinatorial chemistry. So theyit's one of the tricks they do
in in pharmaceuticals is theywill mix 100 of these 100 of
these and differentcombinations, produce 10,000
drugs and then just test themagainst something to see. It's
very slapdash approach, but theydo it on bulk, they say a couple
of things hit and then they candive in deeper. So it's, it's,
it's that sounds bizarre, but itworks. It's really, really

(45:45):
effective for for certainthings. And so we're building
the systems to put it together.
And I was getting paid to writecode. And it was just brilliant.
Absolutely brilliant. And I wasvery junior. Yeah, never had a
professional coder before. And Iworked with some fantastic
people who supported me all theway through as you know, they
saw I had an inkling for I had areal interest. Yeah, is that
right? You want to learn more? Ibought this book, here you have

(46:05):
it, first you work through it.
First, you learn this thing.
Yeah, here's some ideas aboutthis. Here's some stuff like
this from people who had beenprogramming for longer. They
still weren't professionalprogrammers by trade. They
started off in the lab doingchemistry, but they liked
helping out on like, writingsome VBA in Excel. So they kind
of got promoted into it. Thiswas kind of 9798. So the the job

(46:27):
market for programmers was very,very small. It was kind of a
citizen developers. But once Ispent a year coders, I said,
this is what I want to do,wrapped up my year of chemistry,
it's like, right, the next job Itake, I'm a coder, got to be
allowed to have thick,

Pj Metz (46:44):
and it's funny, your your career path was never like
really a huge leap from oneplace to a completely different
one. It was incremental andbuilding on something that you
had previously done before. AndI think that's where a lot of
younger people who are trying toget into the industry, they
think, Oh, I'm never gonna makeit up there. But a lot of times,

(47:06):
it's these like steps that buildon what you've already done, and
what you've already created foryourself, that allows you to
move from one level to the next,I think your your story seems to
be a perfect example of that.
Yeah, I

Jim Bennett (47:16):
mean, my first professional job when I got out
of university was working for achemical and biological
informatics company. So thiscompany produced systems for
managing chemical data, imaginebiological data, and I joined
that chemical data team. So wewere doing things like building
what's called Oracle Datacartridge. So allows you to find
a new data type in Oracle thatyou can query. So we were

(47:38):
querying chemical structures inour home. So this was back in
99 2000, we could query aMilliken million structures in a
10th of a second to find outwhether you had exact match to a
chemical structure. Yes, prettygood stuff we're building. But I
couldn't have built it withoutunderstanding the chemical
structure. Yeah, how do youencode it? Well, you've got this
thing of like these letters withlines between them. What does

(47:59):
this mean? We're actuallyfeeling phenol Groupon. And this
is a, you got a charge on thisone, or you've got this, that
and the other. And because Iunderstood the difference
between an ionic bond, acovalent bond, that single bond,
double bond, aromatic bond,triple bond, I knew how to write
the code to take the chemicalstructures that the scientists

(48:19):
were dealing with, encode thosein a form the computer can
understand, and then build thequeries. So I was working with
folks who all came from achemistry background. The, the
first guy I worked with did thesame degree as me just one year
beforehand. So it kind ofallowed me to take my knowledge
of chemistry, with my love oflogic computing, and bring those

(48:40):
together. And they didn't mindthe fact that I didn't have that
much programming experience.
They were like, Nope, you'reweak to hear, you're going up to
London for a C++ trainingcourse, it's been a week up in
London learning C++, because wewant you for your aptitude and
your chemistry skills. Andyou're saying that's kind of a
path we're seeing a lot, wereally are actually seeing that
law with the idea of the rise ofthe citizen developer. So you're

(49:02):
the whole kind of low code, nocode movement, allows people who
have the business knowledge,they know the area they work in,
but don't no tech, who want toget into tech, to take what
they've got, take theirknowledge, and apply it using
computer technology that isdesigned to be easily accessible
for people who don't want to digin and write code and take their

(49:25):
first steps. Just like thepeople I was working with, when
I was worthless with cambium.
They started off with XLstarted, right VBA. And then
they moved into programmingteams. It's kind of the same
idea. Now you can start with thepower platform, whatever loco
platform, you want to take whatyour skills get into tech as a
citizen developer, locodeveloper, and then you can move

(49:47):
into full code developer if youwant to. And it's it's lovely.
We've now got the tools to buildthat journey that I went on, you
know, 20 odd years ago.

Brandon Minnick (50:00):
Yeah. Now Jim, I got to ask a selfish question
here. Because a lot of this,I've learned for the first time,
and we've known each other foryears now. And it's funny
because I've always known you asor when I met you. We were
mobile app developers together,using Xamarin. So so how do we

(50:20):
bridge the gap? How'd you getfrom building processes for
chemical companies to creatingmobile apps and C sharp.

Jim Bennett (50:30):
It was another set of kind of incremental steps. So
did the company for kind of fiveyears, and the tech industry was
really building up back then,especially around the city of
London. So there was these bigbanks paying ridiculous amounts
of money for people to work intech. And I was working in town
called Guilford, half an houroutside London, earning a good a

(50:52):
good salary, a good salary, butI was learning I got to London,
I could get this much money. Andso I thought, why not? Let's go
work. Let's go and slave for theman. Let's go as money. So I've
been programming full timeprogrammer for five years, I was
really deep in C++. Yeah, thatwas that was the the language
back at the time reading C++,and apply for a job at a bank

(51:15):
and got offered a job with amahoosive paper. And kind of
went from there, I was workingfor banks, coding for banks,
ended up traveling around theworld. I was working for HSBC,
the Hong Kong Shanghai BankingCorporation in London, they
asked me to help interviewed fora person with my skill set in
Hong Kong. So we could actuallyintegrate our system in London

(51:36):
with their system in Hong Kong.
And I said, I'll do it, I'lljust move to Hong Kong.

Brandon Minnick (51:41):
I know the perfect guy for it.

Jim Bennett (51:45):
You know, I can do it. And I moved to Hong Kong. My
wife's always been of theattitude of, we'll just go
whatever it is, we'll go, I camehome and said to her, should I
apply for this? And she said,Why haven't you done it already?
You know, she's always up forany any crazy schemes like that,
which is fantastic. And so kindof working through the banking
industry. But as I did that, Irealized the banking industry is

(52:07):
a toxic environment. This is notthis is very much a blanket
statement. This is not meant toinclude everything. I know,
there are some great teams andbanks, but in general, it is a
toxic environment. Yeah, I'mworking there with traders who
only care about money. Theythat's sexist, it's racist. It's

(52:27):
constant insulting each other.
The number of times people beshouting insults across the
across the office, they they'rethe sexist comments that have
come through from people. It'sthe racism that you'd get. It's
a really toxic environment. It'sall about money. Everyone can
get away with whatever theylike, as long as they're making
the money. And you start gettingsucked into that culture. And

(52:47):
that's not a good culture. Youknow, I've kind of look at
myself going, I'm driven bymoney here. And this is not the
right thing to do. This is nothow I should be looking at, you
know, the receipt from for theMcLaren from the trader sits
next to me as a coder fell on mydesk was like, Oh, I wouldn't
mind that, that McLaren, youknow, he's driving around Hong
Kong at 30 miles an hour, Iwouldn't want my map. And that's
not a good mindset to have.

(53:10):
Sure. And so I realized I neededto change. I ended up working in
Bermuda for a hedge fund therebecause plein air us Hong Kong
had bad air, not with mydaughter really cleaned out. And
I just worked for the guy whowas a terrible manager. And it
just destroyed me. As you know,I'm done with this. I'm done.
I'm literally done with thisbanking farm. And it is not a
good thing. And I'm done withthis take take take culture that

(53:33):
is banking. How can I give back.
And so I started looking at theways that developer communities
work. I started looking at thepeople who were giving back the
people I was learning from, whatwere they doing to contribute?
And so I thought I want some ofthis, quit my job went off to
Thailand, parts of the coworking space. Again, my wife's
like, Yeah, let's go toThailand, parts of the co
working space, taught myselftechnology if I thought I want

(53:54):
to learn something, I was adotnet developer at the time,
I'd seen the Xamarin thing and acouple of Microsoft builds. I
thought this looks like fun. Iwant to learn this. I've got my
iPhone, I've tried Objective C,let's try this damn thing. And
all months in a co working spacelearning Xamarin. And as I
learned it, I thought I'm goingto give back every step of the
way. So I was on the Xamarinforums, first of all, asking

(54:14):
questions, then answeringquestions on Stack Overflow,
answering questions. I waswriting blog posts blog about
everything I did. Every step Howcan I give something back? How
can I give something back endedup back in London working for a
bank because you know, the moneyruns out after well on the work
of a bank. My thought while I'mdoing this, I'm going to be
community focused. So I wasfocusing on what meetups kind of

(54:35):
give talks about what technologycan talk about. We've got
involved in the meetup scenestarted off by going then
started then started givingsessions started talking at
meetups here how can I take thisfurther? Apply to speak at
Xamarin Evolve? Yeah, what thehell? Let's apply to this big
tech conference. I've got nochance of getting in because I'm
relatively unknown. You've beenaccepted our we're gonna make

(54:56):
you a Xamarin MVP. Wow. Youknow, Jamie Singleton, I love,
you know, of Xamarin. Back thenshe's now Business Manager at
Microsoft, the dotnet. Team. Butyou know, it's just working with
amazing community folks whosupported me as I was giving
back to the community. And itwas just really, really great.
And so, flew ends up getting ajob as a Xamarin, mobile

(55:17):
developer in New Zealand,because yeah, travel around the
world. And just really codingand still started off joining
the local Xamarin meetup and up,work as an organizer of that
meetup, trying to bring peoplethrough getting trained up
running Xamarin events, he flewoff to Xamarin, evolve, gave a
talk there had a fantasticsession. And it's just a
gorgeous culture of constantlygiving back to the community.

(55:38):
And I loved it, it was so goodfor my soul.

Pj Metz (55:42):
You didn't have to wait either. Like this is this is
what I think like, like, I'mimmediately taking a lesson from
this. A lot of people think, oh,I need to establish myself, then
I can start to do it. As you'regoing when you learn something,
and you figure it out. tellsomeone else about it. Because
the way you figured it out mighthelp somebody else. And

(56:03):
especially the way you said youworked with Xamarin, you were
like, I was writing as I waslearning, I'd learned something,
I'd make a blog about it, I'dlearned something I'd get on the
forum, I'd learned something.
I'd go to a meetup, I listen atthe meetup, eventually, I go to
a bunch of meetups and like, I'mlike, oh, I want to talk about
something at a meetup. You don'thave to wait until you're
established to start being apart of the community, the

(56:24):
community is hungry for peopleto give to it. And so start
giving as soon as you can.

Jim Bennett (56:32):
But also the community, a lot of committees
made up of beginners, there's alot of people looking to learn.
So they're in the same boat asyou. So if you can say, here's
this very simple thing that I'veworked out how to do, you may
not think it's much, but thereis probably 1000 10,000 people
out there across the world whoalso want to learn that simple
thing. And so because you'redoing it from the perspective of

(56:55):
a beginner, you've madeaccessible to all those
beginners, earlier aboutMicrosoft's fantastic
documentation for professionaldevelopers. And we're
identifying these gaps wherebeginners come along and just
get swarmed by it. If you can dothis very basic, here's how you
do this. Here's the very muchnot even 100 level, the zero
level, this is how you getstarted. This is this is what

(57:18):
this button does this is thatthis is where the Run button is
Visual Studio code to find thisinformation out, and the more
that's there, the easier it isto find it on Google. So yes, if
you think I want to be involvedin a community, but I'm a
beginner, that is the perfecttime to start. You put out your
beginner content, you helpothers on the same journey as
you. And then as you get that Ijust keep that that humble

(57:41):
nature in your mind of Iremember when I was a beginner,
the kind of content needed tocreate now that I'm more
advanced, I need to keepcreating that that beginner
content, because that's whatpeople love. If you look at the
conference sessions, you know,the ones that they like, oh, we
want this really detailedconference session for this
conference. So people couldlearn something, but the ones
that are packed are usually the100 level sessions, the zero

(58:04):
level sessions, they're very,there is a huge demand for
introductory content out there.
And as new technology changecomes along, things keep
changing. There's more demandfor this beginner content. So
now, if you want to getinvolved, do it now start
creating now write that blogpost today. You know, take that
one, print hello to one and blogabout it. Do that now,

Pj Metz (58:28):
Brandon, this is the exact advice you've been given
me for a year. I love it.

Brandon Minnick (58:33):
I couldn't say it any better myself. And it's
funny because I I use Jim'scontent. Like I said, I looked
up to Jim in the community. AndI wouldn't have the job I have
today if Jim hadn't heard thatJim was taking this role in the
same team. So thank you, Jen.
And Varsa. Thanks so much forjoining us on the show today. We

(58:56):
only have one minute left, butlet people out there know where
they can find you.

Jim Bennett (59:02):
Yeah, all over the internet. Jimbo Bennett. So if
you just Google Jimbo Bennett,you'll probably find me on
Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn,Instagram. Jimbo Bennett. I'm
really friendly chap. Pleaseconnect. If you build anything
called Share it with me. I wantto celebrate everybody's
success. So if you've just evenif it's just something you think
is not cool yet, you've got yourfirst LED lit on an IoT device.

(59:23):
Share with me. I want tocelebrate your success. I love
when people share their projectswith me. So please, please. So
Jimbo Bennett ever on theinternet. Please connect. Please
share that the great thingsyou've done so we can celebrate
it together.

Pj Metz (59:37):
It's great. This makes me so happy. This makes me so
dang happy. This has been agreat show, Brandon, like, Thank
you for helping me be on thisshow. Jim, thank you for being
on this episode. I'm just I'msuper happy to be here right
now.

Jim Bennett (59:53):
Thank you both for having me. This has been a lot
of fun. I really appreciateeverything that the two of you
do. Really appreciate what youdo for the community. And I
appreciate the chance to be herewith you today.

Brandon Minnick (01:00:03):
Likewise, Jim, and thanks for listening,
everybody. This has been anotherepisode eight bits and we'll see
you again next week.