April 24, 2021 • 33 mins
Harry Guthrie, also known as @guthers on Slack, is a recent UQCS alumni, studied software engineering, and has a wealth of experiences to share, from travelling in Illinois to China to co-founding a software company, Autop, and everything in between. Tune in to hear about how “saying yes” to opportunities can lead you to exciting and unexpected places.
Harry is Co-Founder of Autop, a Brisbane-based company delivering real-time business analytics to employees and marketing company owners to automate and optimise business efficiency. He graduated with a Bachelors degree in Software Engineering in 2020 and was a member of the UQCS Committee in 2018. He was a research scholar at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA and also participated in the 2019 Start-Up China Program in Dalian.
Autop: https://www.autop.online/
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Episode Transcript
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Matt (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to the Router, the official podcast of
the UQ computing society, wherewe explore the human side of
tech.
I'm your host, Matt.
And today I'm joined by HarryGuthrie, also known as@guthers
on Slack.
He's a recent UQCS alumni,studied software engineering and
has a wealth of experiences toshare from traveling in
Illinois, to China, toco-founding a software company
(00:22):
Autop and everything in between.
Tune in to hear about how sayingyes to opportunities can lead
you to exciting and unexpectedplaces.
All right.
Hello, Harry.
And welcome to the Router.
How are you today?
Harry (00:42):
I'm well, thanks.
How are you?
Matt (00:44):
I'm great.
Um, before I start, I justwanted to get a quick intro from
you about yourself, uh, what youdo.
Um, and what was uni like, Iguess?
Harry (00:57):
Yeah, so, uh, my name is Harry Guthrie.
Uh, I graduated at the end of2020, so I've been graduated for
five months now, I suppose.
Um, I am a co-founder at Autop.
I run the tech side of thebusiness, um, and, uh,
university was just sort of aseries of, um, experiences.
(01:20):
Uh, I just sort of said yes tolots of stuff.
And that led me to lots of weirdand interesting places.
Um, I'm not what one wouldconsider studious, um, but I
still managed to go and do lotsof really cool extracurricular
stuff without having remarkably.
Okay, great.
Um, but yeah, so that's sort of,I suppose the TLDR of me!
Matt (01:41):
Very nice.
Um, I guess that's a goodphilosophy in life, right?
Say yes to everything.
Harry (01:44):
Yeah, exactly.
Matt (01:46):
Um, so I guess let's talk about uni, uh, to begin with a
lot of our listeners, uh,current university students, uh,
or have just graduateduniversity.
Um, were there any experiencesthat kind of stand out, uh,
during your time at university?
Um, I've had that you'veparticipated in a research
(02:09):
project overseas.
Can you tell us about that?
Harry (02:11):
Yeah, so I went over to the States, um, as part of a, um
, research group.
Um, it was a joint researchgroup between UQ, Monash and,
uh, university of Illinois, uh,more specifically the
researching the research groupthere.
Um, and yeah, so I just, I mean,I was over there for a month,
(02:34):
pretty much on the.no two monthson the dot actually.
Yeah, a while ago.
Uh, um, yeah.
And so we were simulating beevision while we're over there
and, um, that just sort of,yeah, I just sort of took a
chance at uni and that sort ofpanned out and, um, I mean, what
would you like to know?
Matt (02:52):
Uh, I, I guess we don't want to know kind of like, how
did you find that?
How did you, how did you getthat?
Like how did you end up beingable to go to America for two
months?
(03:02):
Yeah, so, yeah, so I mean, back to that sort of saying yes
to most things, I sort of lookat a lot of stuff like, Oh, you
know, I might as well try it andsee how it goes.
And so what happened was I wasin COSC3500, I believe it is the
high performance computingcourse.
Um, and during one of thesessions at the end of the
session, or maybe the start, uh,Dr.
(03:24):
David Abramson came in and justgave a talk about, um, a seminar
series that was being runbetween the UQ research
computing center and, uh, NCSAin the States, um, which is the
national center for supercomputing applications.
Um, and it was just like, Hey,if you're interested, come
along.
And he mentioned that there wasthe possibility of potentially
(03:45):
doing some internationalresearch.
He sorta thing, it was verynoncommittal.
Um, it was like a, Hey, thatmight be a thing that might
happen.
Um, but I thought, look, youknow, he, David gave a bit of,
um, a brief on different likeseminar topics.
And I thought some of them werepretty interesting.
And so I went along to thisseminar series that I think it
(04:06):
was seven or eight seminarslong.
Uh, they provided us with foodand drink, um, you know, like
little nibbles beforehand.
So, you know, poor uni studentknow, of course I'm going to go,
Matt (04:16):
Take all the food you can get right?
Harry (04:18):
Exactly.
I'm like, Oh, I'm just getting afree feed.
But, um, you know, they, they,they know their audience, you
know, you get uni, you didn'tsay with the promise of free
food, and then, you know, you'relike, Oh, I'm actually
interested by these topics.
Um, a methodology, I think UQCSimplement well.
Um, but, uh, yeah, and so thetopics were really cool.
Um, you know, they were talkingabout, uh, the dark energy
(04:40):
survey and like, you know,information coming in from these
telescopes that is like on amassive scale and, you know, the
sort of technical challengesbehind transmitting computing
and storing the results and allthat sort of stuff from live.
You know, you have like a 12hour window where you might need
to readjust your, your telescopevery quickly to like pinpoint on
(05:02):
a particular location in, youknow, across, you know, um,
thousands of gigabytes of data,but you need to be able to
readjust within a few seconds,right?
Like we're talking ridiculousscales.
Uh, and that was just reallycool because, you know, um, just
some of the numbers that throwaround and just sort of
awe-inspiring amounts ofcomputation.
(05:23):
And I just, yeah, I thought thatwas really cool.
And, you know, um, the work thatNCSA was doing at the time, it
was really cool and they did hada lot of different projects.
Um, another one was about likein Cyprus doing augmented
reality, uh, to show renditionsof like old buildings.
Um, and you know, like, so you'dwalk around Cyprus holding up
(05:45):
your phone and looking throughyour screen tablet with this
sort of augmented reality scapearound you, that takes the
buildings that you're sittingnext to you, but either
refurbishes them all.
Well, you know, I think one ofthe ones is they were, they put
in the walls that were formallyaround, um, the city and, you
know, just stuff like that.
That's like, it's just reallycool.
It's, you know, non-businessapplied problem solving and it's
(06:07):
, it was just really coolbecause it's, you know, as
programmers, a lot of the timeyou end up in enterprisey sort
of stuff.
And I mean, I have to, but itwas something that, you know, I
thought if I had the opportunityto explore it, because at the
time I was considering, youknow, was research where I
wanted to go.
Um, as everybody, I think atsome point things, even, even
(06:27):
those of us without good grades,um, you know, we still consider
it.
Um, yeah.
And so that was sort of theintro to that saying yes.
Matt (06:38):
Saying yes to one seminar series and you're suddenly on
your way to, um, United States.
Harry (06:43):
Yeah.
Matt (06:44):
Were there any other opportunities that you kind of,
anything that comes to mind fromyour uni days?
Harry (06:51):
I mean, there's the trip you and I went on.
Uh, yeah.
Uh, this is what I was going to,um, segue into.
Yeah.
You teach yourself up perfectlyif you, if you would like to
segue in,
Matt (07:04):
Well, yeah.
So Dalian trip, what do youreckon to that?
Can you tell us, I guess, dothose, Oh, maybe I should intro
that.
Um, so to those who are unaware,um, every year, or at least up
until, um, 2019, uh, UQ sentabout 30 or so, uh, students,
uh, over to China as part of a,uh, startup and entrepreneurship
(07:27):
program for, uh, for developersand, uh, people who, you know,
wanted to try out, uh, IT, orsoftware engineering or
something, and like in a bit ofa like startup context.
Um, so yeah, just jetted off toChina for a month.
Yeah.
It was pretty fun.
Uh, anything that stood out foryou?
Harry (07:48):
Yeah.
Oh look, it was, it was justsort of completely different to
everything I'd already done.
Um, I wasn't a lot involved witha lot of like the
entrepreneurial side of theundergraduate thing.
Um, and it was just, yeah, itwas just really interesting
because we, um, we were thrownvery, very headfirst into like
this experience and I don'tthink any of us knew what was
(08:12):
coming for us, you know?
Um, like I was probably one ofthe older people on that trip.
Um, I think I was maybe secondeldest and probably one of the
most, I was fortunate.
I I've, I worked in industrybefore I worked in industry
before I even started uni onlyby a little bit.
(08:34):
Like, I wasn't, you know, thisisn't my second wind or
anything.
Um, I just got fortunatelygetting a job out of high
school.
Um, and so I had a bit moreexperience, um, but like the,
the trick wasn't around, Oh,what can you build and how quick
it was, Hey, we got two weeks tobuild something.
And then the next weeks we'lllike the business and the
(08:56):
marketing of it and all thatsort of stuff.
Um, which is just really cool.
It was completely different.
Um, you know, and I think likethey, they also did a lot of
like lessons on like Chineseculture and like linguistics
And, you know, like which waspretty cool.
Um, you know, you, you, I didn'treally, hadn't had, hadn't had
(09:17):
much opportunity to do stufflike that beforehand.
Um, so it was like a lot of fun.
Um, yeah, like, I mean, a lot ofdrinking, um, every day we, you
know, would, uh, go drink some,uh, from like one of the bars
nearby and smoke shisha it wasgreat time.
Matt (09:37):
Yeah.
I highly recommend it.
Um, I guess with these kinds ofthings, uh, it's a bit hard to
say we recommend going on trips.
Cause I think about every singleperson wants to leave Australia
at the moment.
Um, but, uh, I guess, I guessyou'd say something like if
you're given the opportunity,even,
Harry (09:57):
Even within Australia, I think like I only cottoned onto
this really late in myuniversity sort of tenure, um,
which was longer than it shouldhave been.
Um, um, just go to things likethere's a lot of opportunity.
UQ invest a lot of time andmoney, um, into, you know,
(10:17):
trying to promote students toget out and get involved in
stuff.
And like, you know, I I've,I've, I've talked to Nimrod from
the UQ ventures and he's areally cool dude to talk to
really lovely.
Um, and you know, he's talkingabout like what UQ Ventures is
just trying to do, you know,like by itself, um, you know, if
you're more business inclinedand I, you know, I didn't know
(10:39):
that well, I'd heard of it, butI didn't really care while I was
at uni.
And I think that's probably oneof the biggest mistakes I've
made at uni was not actuallygetting more involved with like
opportunities.
Like, so not necessarilysocieties, sorry, Matt.
Um, but like things offered bythe university through it's like
research groups and all thatsort of stuff, just because
(11:00):
there are opportunities there,if you go look for them.
Um, and just when you seesomething presented itself, just
going, yeah, let's do it.
Matt (11:09):
Yup.
Sounds good.
Just go for it.
Harry (11:11):
Yeah.
I mean, I was also UQCScommittee, um, I think 2017 now,
which is terrifyingly long ago.
It was around there.
I can't remember the exact year.
Um,
Matt (11:24):
Might've been 2018.
Cause I remember seeing you in2018.
Harry (11:28):
Yeah, I think my, I think it might've been 2018.
Um, yeah.
And look, that was a experience.
Um, uh, we out, my tenure ascommittee member was
interesting.
Um, we had a transition of powermidway through our run because,
um, Taylor Manderson had decidedshe no longer wanted to be
(11:49):
president, which was fairenough.
Um, because she'd been at for awhile.
Um, so yeah, it was aninteresting transition.
Um, Cameron took over from herand you know, it, he, he worked
his ass off for it, but it wasvery interesting because, you
know, you sort of started with afoot down and all that sort of
stuff.
Um, um, although I think I mightbe misremembering.
(12:10):
I think Cameron might havealways been present, but Taylor
was a committee member aimedwith helping Cameron and then
she dropped out of the committeegeneral.
I, I might be misrememberingthat slightly, but yeah, it was
an interesting time, but youlearn a lot really quick, you
know,
Matt (12:27):
Societies are like kind of a bit of a roller coaster.
Harry (12:30):
Yeah.
They're an organism.
Yeah.
That little thing it's sort oflike the university group from
hell, because, you know, you'reall university students.
You're gonna have times whereyou're busy as, but like UQCS is
one of the biggest societies, ifnot the biggest, like, I mean,
you know, if you discount EUS, Ithink maybe like we're probably
(12:51):
one of the biggest, likedefinitely have the most active
members going to shitconstantly, you know, and we
have the largest like socialmedia presence, like with Slack,
you know, maybe not socialmedia, but you know, a way that
if it's something thatconstantly needs to be moderated
to some degree, 24 seven, Ithink at the time we would have,
you know, somebody messaging thecommittee twice a week,
(13:14):
different stuff
Matt (13:15):
And, you know, just random like things like that.
Harry (13:18):
And you know, the code of conduct, I think came out in our
year, like that wasn't a thing.
Or if i t, you know, like wecreated a lot of stuff that was
very imperfect and hasdefinitely been improved upon
since, but like, it was
Matt (13:35):
A lot of varied work, right?
Yeah.
Harry (13:38):
There's always something different and new to be done.
And like, you know, um, there'sa, yeah, it's a great
opportunity to kind of learnabout a lot of different and,
you know, particularly beingrequired to do lots of different
stuff, you know, you'll havepeople who aren't public
speakers who would be getting upand having to talk to crowds of
200 people because they're like,Hey, we need to run some
(14:00):
logistics for hackathon tonightand I know what they are.
So I'm going to be the one tosay them, even though I don't
particularly want to speak to acrowd like this big, um, which
is awesome, you know, like youget pushed out of your comfort
zone and you learn that you'reokay.
You know, being uncomfortable.
Matt (14:15):
Yeah.
There's definitely been timesI've had to, um, step out of my
comfort zone as well, um, as acommittee member.
And I think it's a really goodexperience to just let you know,
force yourself to it.
Harry (14:27):
Yeah.
Would you like to share anyparticular instances with our
listeners?
Matt (14:32):
Well, you mentioned something about, uh, having to
get up in front of many, manypeople to make an announcement
when you are not comfortablepublic speaking.
Uh, that is a very commonoccurrence for me.
Um, but you know what, that'swhat it's all about.
And, um, I guess, yeah, even,even for me, those experiences
have dramatically changed theway I, um, you know, deal with
(14:53):
public speaking and things likethat.
Yeah.
Harry (14:55):
Um, you know, you said, yes.
I mean, like, this is sort oflike the, Hey, everybody go
watch the, um, the yes, man, amovie now.
Um, but you know, like it's,it's, it's an interesting way of
looking at things like I'll trymost things once, obviously
there's things I won't dobecause they're unsafe or, um, I
think are actually clearlywrong, obviously there's no way,
(15:16):
you know, it's not like ablanket rule, but you know, if
you can't think of a goodobjection, other than all that
makes me feel a bituncomfortable from a, like out
of my comfort zone perspective,that's not a good enough reason.
You know, like obviously there'sa lot of caveats to that around
safety and all that sort ofstuff that I'm just going to
(15:36):
brush past.
Um, you know, but as long as you
Matt (15:40):
Can mentally manage it, and if it's something that you
feel comfortable, you know, ormaybe it might make you feel a
little bit uncomfortable, butyou know, something that yeah.
It fit into your life.
Harry (15:49):
It's acknowledging that there's things that are going to
make you uncomfortable, that itcan help you grow as a person.
I think there's a lot of valuein doing that.
And I mean, that's sort of howI've ended up in my current
position.
It's just, there's a series ofsaying yes and now I co-run a
company.
Matt (16:03):
Yeah.
Autop.
Tell us about that.
So you've gone from, you know,uni and, uh, I hope I'm
pronouncing Autop correctly.
Wonderful.
Harry (16:12):
Cool.
Okay.
So many people say auto-P, uh,and, um, so yeah, what happened
was, and this is another UQCSstory, um, uh, February last
year, uh, a person with a Slackhandle, Brad VK put a message up
on projects.
(16:33):
So one of the channels going,Hey, I'm looking for tutoring
more or less.
And I, I messaged them and Iwent, Hey, I'm interested.
And, you know, I met this guy atuni, um, and you know, we, we
had, uh, a tutoring session and,um, he later told me that that
was my unofficial interview.
Um, yeah.
Um, so you know, like theclassic story of, Hey, do you
(16:54):
want to be my co-founder, um,listen up business kids.
This is how you do it.
So Brad is a very, very, verysmart, uh, he has no, he had no
technical background and hadmade like this sort of, Zapier
no code solution.
That was almost a person proofof concept.
And that was sort of what I washelping fit a bit.
(17:16):
And he went, okay, I'm going toneed to learn how to write
Python to add to that.
Uh, Brad now knows how to writecode in both Python and flutter
and like, you know, connect likea flask API up to a like flutter
front-end to like load APIrequests onto a mobile or a
website.
Like Brad has learned aremarkable amount, very quick.
So business students learn and,you know, caught us into going
(17:38):
to tutor tutoring sessions wherewe, you know, agree to help out.
And I did a lot of, um,consultancy all throughout and
like doing a lot of differentsorts of projects, like, um, so
it went from, Hey, I'll true toyou to, Hey, I'll do some
consultancy work for you, um,where I'll help build this pro
product and project.
And eventually he went, Hey,what if I gave you equity?
(18:01):
And you charged less?
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Because I, you know, I, Ithought the project was really
cool and what, what it is aroundis we want people to be able to
tell the full story thatbusiness.
So you have sales and everybodyknows how to track this sales
and that tells you how muchmoney's coming in.
But when you're trying to trainteams and you're trying to like
(18:22):
produce good teams that focus onthe right things in a lot of
businesses, you have KPIs.
So, um, key performanceindicator.
I shouldn't forget that that'sone of the things to my
business, but I mean, I alwayscall it KPI
Matt (18:36):
Uh, no one remembers the abbreviations anyway.
It's just you know KPI.
Yeah.
Harry (18:40):
And so, you know, the KPIs tell a much more full story
of how business runs.
And so what we sort of did washow do we create like a sort of
reporting platform that providesfeedback and does all this sort
of stuff.
And, um, you know, that's justkept evolving and evolving and
evolving.
And like, I mean, we've got somereally cool stuff coming out
soon with like leaderboards andstuff inside teams, so that, you
know, you get like gamificationgoing and all that sort of
(19:02):
stuff.
And, you know, it's just beenthis constantly interesting
roller coaster of what, how canwe provide more value and, um,
you know, integrate with otherproviders.
So like, you know, we loadedsales dynamically and, you know,
it's this massively interestingroller coaster of, Oh, is, you
know, do we have money thisweek?
Maybe?
Um, you know,
Matt (19:24):
That's what starting business is all about, right.
Yeah.
Harry (19:27):
Okay.
And you have, if you're astartup and you have way too
much money within the first fewmonths, you've done it wrong
somehow.
Um, uh, but yeah, like it's beena very interesting rollercoaster
, but it just started by, I waslike, Oh yeah.
Tutoring this kid that seems,looks like something I can do,
I've got a bit of spare time.
Um, and that turned into, Oh, I,you know, just thinking about
things from another perspective,right.
(19:48):
You know, I could have justtutored him and said, okay, good
luck have fun.
I'm like, Oh, but what are youactually doing?
Oh, okay.
Why do you need to learn this?
Okay.
You need it for thisapplication.
Cause I mean, I always foundthat I learned best when I had a
particular thing to learn from.
Right.
Um, and I went, okay, why areyou trying to learn code?
Is there like, w let's okay,let's start to build the
components of this, you know, uh, tool and, you know, have it do
(20:10):
what you need it to do.
Uh, and so yeah, now I, yeah, Ihave, like, I have a co-founder
who has like some interestingamounts of architecture in the
work in weird and wonderful ways, um, and fail often and
wonderfully.
Um, it's nothing crashes thesystem.
That's the only important thing,you know, an API requests can
(20:34):
fail without hitting the fan
Matt (20:37):
Silent or light failure.
Harry (20:41):
I found AWS serverless actually makes life remarkably
easy.
So it effectively spins up aLambda instance to take care of
the API requests as it'sreceived.
I see.
And it's really cool.
Um, and like, I mean, I'm, I'mnot a dev ops engineer by like,
I don't have any formaltraining.
(21:03):
I've just sort of had to learnstuff because you know, you ever
want to host a website yourself.
You're like, okay, what do Iactually need to do here?
Oh, cool.
I can spin up an EC2 instancethat serves that.
Okay, cool.
How do I plug my EC2 instancesto the outside world?
And, you know, you run into allthese weird sort of problems as
you, as you do it.
And, you know, um, so I've sortof cobbled stuff together.
I'm not necessarily sayingthat's the best solution, but,
(21:25):
um, yeah, like, so like doing aFlask API with several, this
turned out to be really, reallygood.
Um, you know, like we can handlethousands of requests a day and
it's fine.
You know, most requests areresolved in 0.1 of the second,
um, you know, including making adatabase call and all that.
(21:46):
So it's pretty cool.
Um, surprisingly it workssurprisingly well.
Um, yeah,
Matt (21:51):
I guess if you have anyone who's here who wants to start up
, uh, start a startup, uh, youheard him here first.
AWS serverless.
Yeah,
Harry (21:59):
Now, now somebody's going to do that and they're going to
go, why isn't this working?
And I'm going to go, I dunno,not my problem!
Matt (22:05):
And know they know who to go to for tech support now!
Harry (22:08):
I'd be happy to answer people's questions.
If they messaged me on Slack, myhandle is@guthers.
Like if people are interested inlike, like again, it's all my
opinion, take it at your ownrisk.
Um, but you know, like more thanhappy to like, go, like what
architecture would I suggest?
Like, I mean, you know, one ofthe most interesting things is
(22:30):
tech languages like that you'rewriting it in and this is going
to upset a lot of people.
Cause it's disproved witheverybody.
It's irrelevant.
What you pick it within, withinreason, obviously like, unless
you have like a very specificapplication and there's like
some very clear like advantages,but most of the time it's just
language fanatics and likeholywars.
(22:53):
Yeah.
But like, if you like a languagethat's a fairly valid reason to
pick it.
Like, unless there's like anarchitectural problem there.
And like, you know, we pickPython because it's the easiest
thing for a non- coder to pickup.
Right.
You know?
Um, and you know, so now, andnow Brad's learnt Flutter out of
that, which in my opinion,Flutter is really good.
Like it is, I've used likeCordova and stuff to do like app
(23:16):
stuff before.
And that was like horrible.
Um, you know, it's a breath offresh air.
Yeah.
And, you know, Flutter Web isn'treally meant to be used in
production, but we do, um, Isorta just stay slow, but talk
to you about it and go, no, youshouldn't use that in
production.
I'm like, yeah, you look, you'reprobably not wrong.
There's a lot of issues with itstill, but it means we have two
(23:38):
languages in our stack, youknow, SQL and that's incredibly
valuable.
And, you know, you can sharecode between your app and your
website.
And that's like also veryimportant.
Matt (23:53):
No.
Yeah.
The whole, the whole like monocode based thing, like it was
like a react native and there'skinds of like approaches.
It's kind of like the other way.
Right.
You know, going from native toweb, um, which is kind of cool.
And I've, yeah.
I had a lot of hype aroundflutter and, you know, um,
there's plenty of people in theSlack as well, who would just
even, um, you know, plenty offanatics.
Harry (24:16):
Yeah.
But honestly, I think flutter,there's some like getting your
head around stateless and notstateless.
Widgets is like probably one ofthe first learning curves.
Once you get around that you canbuild so much really easily.
Like, I, I, to be fair, I have acouple of like clauses that I
use all the time that's likearound, um, don't load this page
(24:38):
until this API request has beenmade in resolved correctly.
Don't do it.
Just don't do it, you know?
Um, and like having those sortof loading utils like those you
make, you know, you make yourabstract class does it.
You've good.
Um, you know, that's probablylike the only bit that you
actually have to engineeryourself, like to really make
stuff up.
But if it's like a fairly staticwebsite or app, you can build
(25:02):
shit pretty quick.
Um, and yeah, I'm sorry ifanybody, under 18 listening to
this podcast, but um, yeah, Imean, yeah, just giving shit a
go, you know, it's, it's, it'seasier said than done.
Uh, and you ended up in someweird places, you know, um,
(25:23):
doing contracting where you havelike clients, like I need this
thing by the end of the week andyou're like, yeah, but I have an
assignment then, so I'm notgoing to have it done by the end
of the way you end up in someweird positions, but you know,
it's experience.
And you know, every, everybodywho graduates uni has different
levels of experience in grades.
My grades were never good.
I was better at buildingprojects and doing stuff.
(25:46):
Um, you know, and that's howI've always sold myself.
And, you know, that's, you know,you can choose to be very
academically inclined and that'sa choice you make.
And that means you get goodresults.
But if you're not asacademically focused yeah.
There's, there's other avenues,you know, I'm saying this as
somebody who did not get goodgrades and I did not get like an
honors class one or two, I got a3A, like I'll tell people that I
(26:09):
don't care.
You know?
Cause that doesn't matter to me.
I have five years of industryexperience, you know, and even
if you don't have five-year,that's like start as soon as you
can build projects, find people,people need done.
You know, I've done projects forresearch groups at UQ outside of
that other thing I talked about,like just, you know, Hey, you
need a solution develop.
Cool.
Let's just do it.
You know, it's just saying yesand all well within reason
(26:32):
obviously, but you know, getexploring possibilities wherever
possible.
Um, yeah.
It's, it's, I, I definitely sayit's well worth it.
Matt (26:41):
Maybe I should call this this, uh, episode say yes.
Say yes with Harry Guthrie.
Harry (26:47):
Uh, Say Yes, comma don't blink, um, for any of my Whovian
fans.
Um,
Matt (26:53):
Um, well I guess is there any, um, any final, final things
you wanted to say besides, uh,you know, to try and try
everything out, any advice forthose who want to start their
own?
Uh, well I guess this is a bitof a different situation.
Cause you kind of, you, youjoined as a number two, right.
You know?
Yeah.
But, um,
Harry (27:13):
Yeah, look, it's, it's a hundred percent, you know, if
you want to do more things andbuild more projects, there's
nothing stopping you.
Software is wonderfully amazing.
You know, you have people infirst and second go, I don't
know where to start.
It's like, fantastic.
That means you built nothing,which means everything's left to
(27:35):
build, you know, you're notoverbuilding crud for websites
yet.
You know, you haven't had to dothat yet.
You haven't learned why that'ssuch a terrible thing.
Like PDF generation is a wholehost of misery that you haven't
learned about.
You know, mapping is terriblycomplicated and time consuming.
You know, you haven't learnedwhy things are bad and why
people charge once for them yet,because I haven't found a map,
(27:59):
um, a PDF solution that doesn'treally suck.
Um, you know, and you know,you'll have LaTeX and that might
be a way to do it if you, youknow, but like, are you going to
be able to deploy LaTeX ontolike a windows machine that your
client's running because you'vedecided to go for a desktop
application, right?
Because you don't want to haveto host stuff, you know, you end
up in weird positions all thetime because of how you've
(28:20):
chosen to go about stuff, youknow?
Um, and you know, like I wouldsuggest that, Hey, the
everybody's first websites orresume website, right.
You know, you put up a website,pick a stack, you know, you can
probably even do it for free.
I mean, obviously you can do itthrough, um, GitHub pages for
(28:43):
free.
Um, you can also use, uhGoogle's Oh no, no.
Google's Firebase.
Oh yes.
Firebase, yeah, that deploysFlutter code ridiculously
easily.
Um, that's how I host mywebsites for work, uh, for free,
um, you know, like that worksperfectly fine.
(29:03):
Obviously if you're connectingit to more things and you need
backend, if you have differentproblems to worry about, but you
know, like there's nothingstopping you from spinning up a
Firebase instance with like aflutter page that has just a
counter that you click on, youknow?
Cool.
You've learned how to deploythat.
You now have that page up there,you know how to create a new
(29:24):
Flutter project.
And that's not that now, youknow, like that's the, that's
it, it's cool.
You know?
And it's like, okay, what do Ido with it now?
It's like, okay, I need a, athing that I, um, you know, note
taking apps are fairly constant,but that made you have to worry
about state management, which isa second problem, you know?
Okay, that's good to learn,right?
Yeah.
You know, if you want persistentstate versus current state or
(29:47):
whatever, you know, and th thoseare things that you don't know
about until you get there andyou go, Oh, why does this
matter?
How, how come when I refresh mypage?
I've I've redeployed.
And it says, it's deployed.
And I hit F5 on Chrome.
Why hasn't my page change?
Because Chrome is rememberingyour shit.
And that sucks.
You know, you need to changeyour page on Chrome.
You don't know about thatproblem until you've run into
(30:09):
it, you know, but if a clientmessages you going, Oh, this
hasn't updated, then you'relike, it definitely has.
You need to understand whythey're saying that, you know,
the, and you don't know aboutthese problems until you're
there.
And that's the really coolthings.
And that's what separates peoplewho have experience with people
who don't, you just don't knowabout these problems that
actually affect real lifeapplications until you're there.
(30:30):
And the only way you do it is,and find that out is by doing
it, like there's no course on,Hey, PDF generation is going to
suck.
Hey, you know, like nobody tellsyou
Matt (30:39):
PDF 1001.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
So give everything a go, Iguess.
Harry (30:47):
And you know, if you're especially first years, you
know, you go, Oh, I don't knowenough yet.
Fantastic.
Good, good.
Yeah.
Google.
It you'll find out.
And if it doesn't work the firsthundred times, like your sh your
website looks like garbage, itdoesn't matter.
You've got a website out there,you know, Oh, I spent, I spent a
week figuring out how toactually deploy from five days.
(31:08):
Cool.
Now, you know how deploymentswork?
You've learned something that isa marketable skill.
It's something you could say toa recruiter, or w I, I taught
myself how to deploy sites.
That's much, and this mightruffle some feathers, but that's
much more interesting than I gotstraight seven first semester,
because I found most employersin my experience.
(31:31):
And maybe this is based off andhow I try to sell myself in an
interview care more about yourexperience as opposed to your
grades.
And yes, grades do matter.
Occasionally you have employeeswho cut you out.
I've been cut out from jobsbecause of it, you know, that
maybe those aren't the jobs youwant.
Um, you know, because typicallypeople who are only looking at
grades, uh, the people who aregoing to be your direct manager,
(31:54):
most of the time, they're notthe software people, they're the
business.
People who think that's what'smost important, or that that's
the metric by which they, theycan most easily yardstick you
on.
Um, I think I'm pontificated forlong enough.
Matt (32:14):
Nice.
All right.
Thanks so much for, um, sharingexperiences.
Um, you know, so it sounds likea pretty interesting journey.
Um, and yeah, if people want to,you know, have a chat to you,
uh, where should they contactyou?
Slack?
Yeah.
Harry (32:27):
Just message me on Slack.
That'd be the easiest.
Right.
Um, yeah.
And I mean, if you're a companythat needs a business analytics
solution, I'll have my shamelessshill ready.
Uh,
Matt (32:37):
I will check the link in the description as well.
Harry (32:42):
All right.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for that.
Matt (32:45):
All right.
That's all for today.
Thanks so much for listening.
Uh, as usual, our next episodewill be out in a fortnight
around midday on Sundays, uh,until then come join us on our
Slack community atslack.uqcs.org.
My name is Matthew Low and thispodcast was created by the UQ
(33:08):
computing society with gracioussupport from our industry
sponsors.
Hello, and welcome to the Router, the official podcast of
the UQ computing society, wherewe explore the human side of
tech.
I'm your host, Matt.
And today I'm joined by HarryGuthrie, also known as@guthers
on Slack.
He's a recent UQCS alumni,studied software engineering and
has a wealth of experiences toshare from traveling in
Illinois, to China, toco-founding a software company
(00:22):
Autop and everything in between.
Tune in to hear about how sayingyes to opportunities can lead
you to exciting and unexpectedplaces.
All right.
Hello, Harry.
And welcome to the Router.
How are you today?
Harry (00:42):
I'm well, thanks.
How are you?
Matt (00:44):
I'm great.
Um, before I start, I justwanted to get a quick intro from
you about yourself, uh, what youdo.
Um, and what was uni like, Iguess?
Harry (00:57):
Yeah, so, uh, my name is Harry Guthrie.
Uh, I graduated at the end of2020, so I've been graduated for
five months now, I suppose.
Um, I am a co-founder at Autop.
I run the tech side of thebusiness, um, and, uh,
university was just sort of aseries of, um, experiences.
(01:20):
Uh, I just sort of said yes tolots of stuff.
And that led me to lots of weirdand interesting places.
Um, I'm not what one wouldconsider studious, um, but I
still managed to go and do lotsof really cool extracurricular
stuff without having remarkably.
Okay, great.
Um, but yeah, so that's sort of,I suppose the TLDR of me!
Matt (01:41):
Very nice.
Um, I guess that's a goodphilosophy in life, right?
Say yes to everything.
Harry (01:44):
Yeah, exactly.
Matt (01:46):
Um, so I guess let's talk about uni, uh, to begin with a
lot of our listeners, uh,current university students, uh,
or have just graduateduniversity.
Um, were there any experiencesthat kind of stand out, uh,
during your time at university?
Um, I've had that you'veparticipated in a research
(02:09):
project overseas.
Can you tell us about that?
Harry (02:11):
Yeah, so I went over to the States, um, as part of a, um
, research group.
Um, it was a joint researchgroup between UQ, Monash and,
uh, university of Illinois, uh,more specifically the
researching the research groupthere.
Um, and yeah, so I just, I mean,I was over there for a month,
(02:34):
pretty much on the.no two monthson the dot actually.
Yeah, a while ago.
Uh, um, yeah.
And so we were simulating beevision while we're over there
and, um, that just sort of,yeah, I just sort of took a
chance at uni and that sort ofpanned out and, um, I mean, what
would you like to know?
Matt (02:52):
Uh, I, I guess we don't want to know kind of like, how
did you find that?
How did you, how did you getthat?
Like how did you end up beingable to go to America for two
months?
(03:02):
Yeah, so, yeah, so I mean, back to that sort of saying yes
to most things, I sort of lookat a lot of stuff like, Oh, you
know, I might as well try it andsee how it goes.
And so what happened was I wasin COSC3500, I believe it is the
high performance computingcourse.
Um, and during one of thesessions at the end of the
session, or maybe the start, uh,Dr.
(03:24):
David Abramson came in and justgave a talk about, um, a seminar
series that was being runbetween the UQ research
computing center and, uh, NCSAin the States, um, which is the
national center for supercomputing applications.
Um, and it was just like, Hey,if you're interested, come
along.
And he mentioned that there wasthe possibility of potentially
(03:45):
doing some internationalresearch.
He sorta thing, it was verynoncommittal.
Um, it was like a, Hey, thatmight be a thing that might
happen.
Um, but I thought, look, youknow, he, David gave a bit of,
um, a brief on different likeseminar topics.
And I thought some of them werepretty interesting.
And so I went along to thisseminar series that I think it
(04:06):
was seven or eight seminarslong.
Uh, they provided us with foodand drink, um, you know, like
little nibbles beforehand.
So, you know, poor uni studentknow, of course I'm going to go,
Matt (04:16):
Take all the food you can get right?
Harry (04:18):
Exactly.
I'm like, Oh, I'm just getting afree feed.
But, um, you know, they, they,they know their audience, you
know, you get uni, you didn'tsay with the promise of free
food, and then, you know, you'relike, Oh, I'm actually
interested by these topics.
Um, a methodology, I think UQCSimplement well.
Um, but, uh, yeah, and so thetopics were really cool.
Um, you know, they were talkingabout, uh, the dark energy
(04:40):
survey and like, you know,information coming in from these
telescopes that is like on amassive scale and, you know, the
sort of technical challengesbehind transmitting computing
and storing the results and allthat sort of stuff from live.
You know, you have like a 12hour window where you might need
to readjust your, your telescopevery quickly to like pinpoint on
(05:02):
a particular location in, youknow, across, you know, um,
thousands of gigabytes of data,but you need to be able to
readjust within a few seconds,right?
Like we're talking ridiculousscales.
Uh, and that was just reallycool because, you know, um, just
some of the numbers that throwaround and just sort of
awe-inspiring amounts ofcomputation.
(05:23):
And I just, yeah, I thought thatwas really cool.
And, you know, um, the work thatNCSA was doing at the time, it
was really cool and they did hada lot of different projects.
Um, another one was about likein Cyprus doing augmented
reality, uh, to show renditionsof like old buildings.
Um, and you know, like, so you'dwalk around Cyprus holding up
(05:45):
your phone and looking throughyour screen tablet with this
sort of augmented reality scapearound you, that takes the
buildings that you're sittingnext to you, but either
refurbishes them all.
Well, you know, I think one ofthe ones is they were, they put
in the walls that were formallyaround, um, the city and, you
know, just stuff like that.
That's like, it's just reallycool.
It's, you know, non-businessapplied problem solving and it's
(06:07):
, it was just really coolbecause it's, you know, as
programmers, a lot of the timeyou end up in enterprisey sort
of stuff.
And I mean, I have to, but itwas something that, you know, I
thought if I had the opportunityto explore it, because at the
time I was considering, youknow, was research where I
wanted to go.
Um, as everybody, I think atsome point things, even, even
(06:27):
those of us without good grades,um, you know, we still consider
it.
Um, yeah.
And so that was sort of theintro to that saying yes.
Matt (06:38):
Saying yes to one seminar series and you're suddenly on
your way to, um, United States.
Harry (06:43):
Yeah.
Matt (06:44):
Were there any other opportunities that you kind of,
anything that comes to mind fromyour uni days?
Harry (06:51):
I mean, there's the trip you and I went on.
Uh, yeah.
Uh, this is what I was going to,um, segue into.
Yeah.
You teach yourself up perfectlyif you, if you would like to
segue in,
Matt (07:04):
Well, yeah.
So Dalian trip, what do youreckon to that?
Can you tell us, I guess, dothose, Oh, maybe I should intro
that.
Um, so to those who are unaware,um, every year, or at least up
until, um, 2019, uh, UQ sentabout 30 or so, uh, students,
uh, over to China as part of a,uh, startup and entrepreneurship
(07:27):
program for, uh, for developersand, uh, people who, you know,
wanted to try out, uh, IT, orsoftware engineering or
something, and like in a bit ofa like startup context.
Um, so yeah, just jetted off toChina for a month.
Yeah.
It was pretty fun.
Uh, anything that stood out foryou?
Harry (07:48):
Yeah.
Oh look, it was, it was justsort of completely different to
everything I'd already done.
Um, I wasn't a lot involved witha lot of like the
entrepreneurial side of theundergraduate thing.
Um, and it was just, yeah, itwas just really interesting
because we, um, we were thrownvery, very headfirst into like
this experience and I don'tthink any of us knew what was
(08:12):
coming for us, you know?
Um, like I was probably one ofthe older people on that trip.
Um, I think I was maybe secondeldest and probably one of the
most, I was fortunate.
I I've, I worked in industrybefore I worked in industry
before I even started uni onlyby a little bit.
(08:34):
Like, I wasn't, you know, thisisn't my second wind or
anything.
Um, I just got fortunatelygetting a job out of high
school.
Um, and so I had a bit moreexperience, um, but like the,
the trick wasn't around, Oh,what can you build and how quick
it was, Hey, we got two weeks tobuild something.
And then the next weeks we'lllike the business and the
(08:56):
marketing of it and all thatsort of stuff.
Um, which is just really cool.
It was completely different.
Um, you know, and I think likethey, they also did a lot of
like lessons on like Chineseculture and like linguistics
And, you know, like which waspretty cool.
Um, you know, you, you, I didn'treally, hadn't had, hadn't had
(09:17):
much opportunity to do stufflike that beforehand.
Um, so it was like a lot of fun.
Um, yeah, like, I mean, a lot ofdrinking, um, every day we, you
know, would, uh, go drink some,uh, from like one of the bars
nearby and smoke shisha it wasgreat time.
Matt (09:37):
Yeah.
I highly recommend it.
Um, I guess with these kinds ofthings, uh, it's a bit hard to
say we recommend going on trips.
Cause I think about every singleperson wants to leave Australia
at the moment.
Um, but, uh, I guess, I guessyou'd say something like if
you're given the opportunity,even,
Harry (09:57):
Even within Australia, I think like I only cottoned onto
this really late in myuniversity sort of tenure, um,
which was longer than it shouldhave been.
Um, um, just go to things likethere's a lot of opportunity.
UQ invest a lot of time andmoney, um, into, you know,
(10:17):
trying to promote students toget out and get involved in
stuff.
And like, you know, I I've,I've, I've talked to Nimrod from
the UQ ventures and he's areally cool dude to talk to
really lovely.
Um, and you know, he's talkingabout like what UQ Ventures is
just trying to do, you know,like by itself, um, you know, if
you're more business inclinedand I, you know, I didn't know
(10:39):
that well, I'd heard of it, butI didn't really care while I was
at uni.
And I think that's probably oneof the biggest mistakes I've
made at uni was not actuallygetting more involved with like
opportunities.
Like, so not necessarilysocieties, sorry, Matt.
Um, but like things offered bythe university through it's like
research groups and all thatsort of stuff, just because
(11:00):
there are opportunities there,if you go look for them.
Um, and just when you seesomething presented itself, just
going, yeah, let's do it.
Matt (11:09):
Yup.
Sounds good.
Just go for it.
Harry (11:11):
Yeah.
I mean, I was also UQCScommittee, um, I think 2017 now,
which is terrifyingly long ago.
It was around there.
I can't remember the exact year.
Um,
Matt (11:24):
Might've been 2018.
Cause I remember seeing you in2018.
Harry (11:28):
Yeah, I think my, I think it might've been 2018.
Um, yeah.
And look, that was a experience.
Um, uh, we out, my tenure ascommittee member was
interesting.
Um, we had a transition of powermidway through our run because,
um, Taylor Manderson had decidedshe no longer wanted to be
(11:49):
president, which was fairenough.
Um, because she'd been at for awhile.
Um, so yeah, it was aninteresting transition.
Um, Cameron took over from herand you know, it, he, he worked
his ass off for it, but it wasvery interesting because, you
know, you sort of started with afoot down and all that sort of
stuff.
Um, um, although I think I mightbe misremembering.
(12:10):
I think Cameron might havealways been present, but Taylor
was a committee member aimedwith helping Cameron and then
she dropped out of the committeegeneral.
I, I might be misrememberingthat slightly, but yeah, it was
an interesting time, but youlearn a lot really quick, you
know,
Matt (12:27):
Societies are like kind of a bit of a roller coaster.
Harry (12:30):
Yeah.
They're an organism.
Yeah.
That little thing it's sort oflike the university group from
hell, because, you know, you'reall university students.
You're gonna have times whereyou're busy as, but like UQCS is
one of the biggest societies, ifnot the biggest, like, I mean,
you know, if you discount EUS, Ithink maybe like we're probably
(12:51):
one of the biggest, likedefinitely have the most active
members going to shitconstantly, you know, and we
have the largest like socialmedia presence, like with Slack,
you know, maybe not socialmedia, but you know, a way that
if it's something thatconstantly needs to be moderated
to some degree, 24 seven, Ithink at the time we would have,
you know, somebody messaging thecommittee twice a week,
(13:14):
different stuff
Matt (13:15):
And, you know, just random like things like that.
Harry (13:18):
And you know, the code of conduct, I think came out in our
year, like that wasn't a thing.
Or if i t, you know, like wecreated a lot of stuff that was
very imperfect and hasdefinitely been improved upon
since, but like, it was
Matt (13:35):
A lot of varied work, right?
Yeah.
Harry (13:38):
There's always something different and new to be done.
And like, you know, um, there'sa, yeah, it's a great
opportunity to kind of learnabout a lot of different and,
you know, particularly beingrequired to do lots of different
stuff, you know, you'll havepeople who aren't public
speakers who would be getting upand having to talk to crowds of
200 people because they're like,Hey, we need to run some
(14:00):
logistics for hackathon tonightand I know what they are.
So I'm going to be the one tosay them, even though I don't
particularly want to speak to acrowd like this big, um, which
is awesome, you know, like youget pushed out of your comfort
zone and you learn that you'reokay.
You know, being uncomfortable.
Matt (14:15):
Yeah.
There's definitely been timesI've had to, um, step out of my
comfort zone as well, um, as acommittee member.
And I think it's a really goodexperience to just let you know,
force yourself to it.
Harry (14:27):
Yeah.
Would you like to share anyparticular instances with our
listeners?
Matt (14:32):
Well, you mentioned something about, uh, having to
get up in front of many, manypeople to make an announcement
when you are not comfortablepublic speaking.
Uh, that is a very commonoccurrence for me.
Um, but you know what, that'swhat it's all about.
And, um, I guess, yeah, even,even for me, those experiences
have dramatically changed theway I, um, you know, deal with
(14:53):
public speaking and things likethat.
Yeah.
Harry (14:55):
Um, you know, you said, yes.
I mean, like, this is sort oflike the, Hey, everybody go
watch the, um, the yes, man, amovie now.
Um, but you know, like it's,it's, it's an interesting way of
looking at things like I'll trymost things once, obviously
there's things I won't dobecause they're unsafe or, um, I
think are actually clearlywrong, obviously there's no way,
(15:16):
you know, it's not like ablanket rule, but you know, if
you can't think of a goodobjection, other than all that
makes me feel a bituncomfortable from a, like out
of my comfort zone perspective,that's not a good enough reason.
You know, like obviously there'sa lot of caveats to that around
safety and all that sort ofstuff that I'm just going to
(15:36):
brush past.
Um, you know, but as long as you
Matt (15:40):
Can mentally manage it, and if it's something that you
feel comfortable, you know, ormaybe it might make you feel a
little bit uncomfortable, butyou know, something that yeah.
It fit into your life.
Harry (15:49):
It's acknowledging that there's things that are going to
make you uncomfortable, that itcan help you grow as a person.
I think there's a lot of valuein doing that.
And I mean, that's sort of howI've ended up in my current
position.
It's just, there's a series ofsaying yes and now I co-run a
company.
Matt (16:03):
Yeah.
Autop.
Tell us about that.
So you've gone from, you know,uni and, uh, I hope I'm
pronouncing Autop correctly.
Wonderful.
Harry (16:12):
Cool.
Okay.
So many people say auto-P, uh,and, um, so yeah, what happened
was, and this is another UQCSstory, um, uh, February last
year, uh, a person with a Slackhandle, Brad VK put a message up
on projects.
(16:33):
So one of the channels going,Hey, I'm looking for tutoring
more or less.
And I, I messaged them and Iwent, Hey, I'm interested.
And, you know, I met this guy atuni, um, and you know, we, we
had, uh, a tutoring session and,um, he later told me that that
was my unofficial interview.
Um, yeah.
Um, so you know, like theclassic story of, Hey, do you
(16:54):
want to be my co-founder, um,listen up business kids.
This is how you do it.
So Brad is a very, very, verysmart, uh, he has no, he had no
technical background and hadmade like this sort of, Zapier
no code solution.
That was almost a person proofof concept.
And that was sort of what I washelping fit a bit.
(17:16):
And he went, okay, I'm going toneed to learn how to write
Python to add to that.
Uh, Brad now knows how to writecode in both Python and flutter
and like, you know, connect likea flask API up to a like flutter
front-end to like load APIrequests onto a mobile or a
website.
Like Brad has learned aremarkable amount, very quick.
So business students learn and,you know, caught us into going
(17:38):
to tutor tutoring sessions wherewe, you know, agree to help out.
And I did a lot of, um,consultancy all throughout and
like doing a lot of differentsorts of projects, like, um, so
it went from, Hey, I'll true toyou to, Hey, I'll do some
consultancy work for you, um,where I'll help build this pro
product and project.
And eventually he went, Hey,what if I gave you equity?
(18:01):
And you charged less?
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Because I, you know, I, Ithought the project was really
cool and what, what it is aroundis we want people to be able to
tell the full story thatbusiness.
So you have sales and everybodyknows how to track this sales
and that tells you how muchmoney's coming in.
But when you're trying to trainteams and you're trying to like
(18:22):
produce good teams that focus onthe right things in a lot of
businesses, you have KPIs.
So, um, key performanceindicator.
I shouldn't forget that that'sone of the things to my
business, but I mean, I alwayscall it KPI
Matt (18:36):
Uh, no one remembers the abbreviations anyway.
It's just you know KPI.
Yeah.
Harry (18:40):
And so, you know, the KPIs tell a much more full story
of how business runs.
And so what we sort of did washow do we create like a sort of
reporting platform that providesfeedback and does all this sort
of stuff.
And, um, you know, that's justkept evolving and evolving and
evolving.
And like, I mean, we've got somereally cool stuff coming out
soon with like leaderboards andstuff inside teams, so that, you
know, you get like gamificationgoing and all that sort of
(19:02):
stuff.
And, you know, it's just beenthis constantly interesting
roller coaster of what, how canwe provide more value and, um,
you know, integrate with otherproviders.
So like, you know, we loadedsales dynamically and, you know,
it's this massively interestingroller coaster of, Oh, is, you
know, do we have money thisweek?
Maybe?
Um, you know,
Matt (19:24):
That's what starting business is all about, right.
Yeah.
Harry (19:27):
Okay.
And you have, if you're astartup and you have way too
much money within the first fewmonths, you've done it wrong
somehow.
Um, uh, but yeah, like it's beena very interesting rollercoaster
, but it just started by, I waslike, Oh yeah.
Tutoring this kid that seems,looks like something I can do,
I've got a bit of spare time.
Um, and that turned into, Oh, I,you know, just thinking about
things from another perspective,right.
(19:48):
You know, I could have justtutored him and said, okay, good
luck have fun.
I'm like, Oh, but what are youactually doing?
Oh, okay.
Why do you need to learn this?
Okay.
You need it for thisapplication.
Cause I mean, I always foundthat I learned best when I had a
particular thing to learn from.
Right.
Um, and I went, okay, why areyou trying to learn code?
Is there like, w let's okay,let's start to build the
components of this, you know, uh, tool and, you know, have it do
(20:10):
what you need it to do.
Uh, and so yeah, now I, yeah, Ihave, like, I have a co-founder
who has like some interestingamounts of architecture in the
work in weird and wonderful ways, um, and fail often and
wonderfully.
Um, it's nothing crashes thesystem.
That's the only important thing,you know, an API requests can
(20:34):
fail without hitting the fan
Matt (20:37):
Silent or light failure.
Harry (20:41):
I found AWS serverless actually makes life remarkably
easy.
So it effectively spins up aLambda instance to take care of
the API requests as it'sreceived.
I see.
And it's really cool.
Um, and like, I mean, I'm, I'mnot a dev ops engineer by like,
I don't have any formaltraining.
(21:03):
I've just sort of had to learnstuff because you know, you ever
want to host a website yourself.
You're like, okay, what do Iactually need to do here?
Oh, cool.
I can spin up an EC2 instancethat serves that.
Okay, cool.
How do I plug my EC2 instancesto the outside world?
And, you know, you run into allthese weird sort of problems as
you, as you do it.
And, you know, um, so I've sortof cobbled stuff together.
I'm not necessarily sayingthat's the best solution, but,
(21:25):
um, yeah, like, so like doing aFlask API with several, this
turned out to be really, reallygood.
Um, you know, like we can handlethousands of requests a day and
it's fine.
You know, most requests areresolved in 0.1 of the second,
um, you know, including making adatabase call and all that.
(21:46):
So it's pretty cool.
Um, surprisingly it workssurprisingly well.
Um, yeah,
Matt (21:51):
I guess if you have anyone who's here who wants to start up
, uh, start a startup, uh, youheard him here first.
AWS serverless.
Yeah,
Harry (21:59):
Now, now somebody's going to do that and they're going to
go, why isn't this working?
And I'm going to go, I dunno,not my problem!
Matt (22:05):
And know they know who to go to for tech support now!
Harry (22:08):
I'd be happy to answer people's questions.
If they messaged me on Slack, myhandle is@guthers.
Like if people are interested inlike, like again, it's all my
opinion, take it at your ownrisk.
Um, but you know, like more thanhappy to like, go, like what
architecture would I suggest?
Like, I mean, you know, one ofthe most interesting things is
(22:30):
tech languages like that you'rewriting it in and this is going
to upset a lot of people.
Cause it's disproved witheverybody.
It's irrelevant.
What you pick it within, withinreason, obviously like, unless
you have like a very specificapplication and there's like
some very clear like advantages,but most of the time it's just
language fanatics and likeholywars.
(22:53):
Yeah.
But like, if you like a languagethat's a fairly valid reason to
pick it.
Like, unless there's like anarchitectural problem there.
And like, you know, we pickPython because it's the easiest
thing for a non- coder to pickup.
Right.
You know?
Um, and you know, so now, andnow Brad's learnt Flutter out of
that, which in my opinion,Flutter is really good.
Like it is, I've used likeCordova and stuff to do like app
(23:16):
stuff before.
And that was like horrible.
Um, you know, it's a breath offresh air.
Yeah.
And, you know, Flutter Web isn'treally meant to be used in
production, but we do, um, Isorta just stay slow, but talk
to you about it and go, no, youshouldn't use that in
production.
I'm like, yeah, you look, you'reprobably not wrong.
There's a lot of issues with itstill, but it means we have two
(23:38):
languages in our stack, youknow, SQL and that's incredibly
valuable.
And, you know, you can sharecode between your app and your
website.
And that's like also veryimportant.
Matt (23:53):
No.
Yeah.
The whole, the whole like monocode based thing, like it was
like a react native and there'skinds of like approaches.
It's kind of like the other way.
Right.
You know, going from native toweb, um, which is kind of cool.
And I've, yeah.
I had a lot of hype aroundflutter and, you know, um,
there's plenty of people in theSlack as well, who would just
even, um, you know, plenty offanatics.
Harry (24:16):
Yeah.
But honestly, I think flutter,there's some like getting your
head around stateless and notstateless.
Widgets is like probably one ofthe first learning curves.
Once you get around that you canbuild so much really easily.
Like, I, I, to be fair, I have acouple of like clauses that I
use all the time that's likearound, um, don't load this page
(24:38):
until this API request has beenmade in resolved correctly.
Don't do it.
Just don't do it, you know?
Um, and like having those sortof loading utils like those you
make, you know, you make yourabstract class does it.
You've good.
Um, you know, that's probablylike the only bit that you
actually have to engineeryourself, like to really make
stuff up.
But if it's like a fairly staticwebsite or app, you can build
(25:02):
shit pretty quick.
Um, and yeah, I'm sorry ifanybody, under 18 listening to
this podcast, but um, yeah, Imean, yeah, just giving shit a
go, you know, it's, it's, it'seasier said than done.
Uh, and you ended up in someweird places, you know, um,
(25:23):
doing contracting where you havelike clients, like I need this
thing by the end of the week andyou're like, yeah, but I have an
assignment then, so I'm notgoing to have it done by the end
of the way you end up in someweird positions, but you know,
it's experience.
And you know, every, everybodywho graduates uni has different
levels of experience in grades.
My grades were never good.
I was better at buildingprojects and doing stuff.
(25:46):
Um, you know, and that's howI've always sold myself.
And, you know, that's, you know,you can choose to be very
academically inclined and that'sa choice you make.
And that means you get goodresults.
But if you're not asacademically focused yeah.
There's, there's other avenues,you know, I'm saying this as
somebody who did not get goodgrades and I did not get like an
honors class one or two, I got a3A, like I'll tell people that I
(26:09):
don't care.
You know?
Cause that doesn't matter to me.
I have five years of industryexperience, you know, and even
if you don't have five-year,that's like start as soon as you
can build projects, find people,people need done.
You know, I've done projects forresearch groups at UQ outside of
that other thing I talked about,like just, you know, Hey, you
need a solution develop.
Cool.
Let's just do it.
You know, it's just saying yesand all well within reason
(26:32):
obviously, but you know, getexploring possibilities wherever
possible.
Um, yeah.
It's, it's, I, I definitely sayit's well worth it.
Matt (26:41):
Maybe I should call this this, uh, episode say yes.
Say yes with Harry Guthrie.
Harry (26:47):
Uh, Say Yes, comma don't blink, um, for any of my Whovian
fans.
Um,
Matt (26:53):
Um, well I guess is there any, um, any final, final things
you wanted to say besides, uh,you know, to try and try
everything out, any advice forthose who want to start their
own?
Uh, well I guess this is a bitof a different situation.
Cause you kind of, you, youjoined as a number two, right.
You know?
Yeah.
But, um,
Harry (27:13):
Yeah, look, it's, it's a hundred percent, you know, if
you want to do more things andbuild more projects, there's
nothing stopping you.
Software is wonderfully amazing.
You know, you have people infirst and second go, I don't
know where to start.
It's like, fantastic.
That means you built nothing,which means everything's left to
(27:35):
build, you know, you're notoverbuilding crud for websites
yet.
You know, you haven't had to dothat yet.
You haven't learned why that'ssuch a terrible thing.
Like PDF generation is a wholehost of misery that you haven't
learned about.
You know, mapping is terriblycomplicated and time consuming.
You know, you haven't learnedwhy things are bad and why
people charge once for them yet,because I haven't found a map,
(27:59):
um, a PDF solution that doesn'treally suck.
Um, you know, and you know,you'll have LaTeX and that might
be a way to do it if you, youknow, but like, are you going to
be able to deploy LaTeX ontolike a windows machine that your
client's running because you'vedecided to go for a desktop
application, right?
Because you don't want to haveto host stuff, you know, you end
up in weird positions all thetime because of how you've
(28:20):
chosen to go about stuff, youknow?
Um, and you know, like I wouldsuggest that, Hey, the
everybody's first websites orresume website, right.
You know, you put up a website,pick a stack, you know, you can
probably even do it for free.
I mean, obviously you can do itthrough, um, GitHub pages for
(28:43):
free.
Um, you can also use, uhGoogle's Oh no, no.
Google's Firebase.
Oh yes.
Firebase, yeah, that deploysFlutter code ridiculously
easily.
Um, that's how I host mywebsites for work, uh, for free,
um, you know, like that worksperfectly fine.
(29:03):
Obviously if you're connectingit to more things and you need
backend, if you have differentproblems to worry about, but you
know, like there's nothingstopping you from spinning up a
Firebase instance with like aflutter page that has just a
counter that you click on, youknow?
Cool.
You've learned how to deploythat.
You now have that page up there,you know how to create a new
(29:24):
Flutter project.
And that's not that now, youknow, like that's the, that's
it, it's cool.
You know?
And it's like, okay, what do Ido with it now?
It's like, okay, I need a, athing that I, um, you know, note
taking apps are fairly constant,but that made you have to worry
about state management, which isa second problem, you know?
Okay, that's good to learn,right?
Yeah.
You know, if you want persistentstate versus current state or
(29:47):
whatever, you know, and th thoseare things that you don't know
about until you get there andyou go, Oh, why does this
matter?
How, how come when I refresh mypage?
I've I've redeployed.
And it says, it's deployed.
And I hit F5 on Chrome.
Why hasn't my page change?
Because Chrome is rememberingyour shit.
And that sucks.
You know, you need to changeyour page on Chrome.
You don't know about thatproblem until you've run into
(30:09):
it, you know, but if a clientmessages you going, Oh, this
hasn't updated, then you'relike, it definitely has.
You need to understand whythey're saying that, you know,
the, and you don't know aboutthese problems until you're
there.
And that's the really coolthings.
And that's what separates peoplewho have experience with people
who don't, you just don't knowabout these problems that
actually affect real lifeapplications until you're there.
(30:30):
And the only way you do it is,and find that out is by doing
it, like there's no course on,Hey, PDF generation is going to
suck.
Hey, you know, like nobody tellsyou
Matt (30:39):
PDF 1001.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
So give everything a go, Iguess.
Harry (30:47):
And you know, if you're especially first years, you
know, you go, Oh, I don't knowenough yet.
Fantastic.
Good, good.
Yeah.
Google.
It you'll find out.
And if it doesn't work the firsthundred times, like your sh your
website looks like garbage, itdoesn't matter.
You've got a website out there,you know, Oh, I spent, I spent a
week figuring out how toactually deploy from five days.
(31:08):
Cool.
Now, you know how deploymentswork?
You've learned something that isa marketable skill.
It's something you could say toa recruiter, or w I, I taught
myself how to deploy sites.
That's much, and this mightruffle some feathers, but that's
much more interesting than I gotstraight seven first semester,
because I found most employersin my experience.
(31:31):
And maybe this is based off andhow I try to sell myself in an
interview care more about yourexperience as opposed to your
grades.
And yes, grades do matter.
Occasionally you have employeeswho cut you out.
I've been cut out from jobsbecause of it, you know, that
maybe those aren't the jobs youwant.
Um, you know, because typicallypeople who are only looking at
grades, uh, the people who aregoing to be your direct manager,
(31:54):
most of the time, they're notthe software people, they're the
business.
People who think that's what'smost important, or that that's
the metric by which they, theycan most easily yardstick you
on.
Um, I think I'm pontificated forlong enough.
Matt (32:14):
Nice.
All right.
Thanks so much for, um, sharingexperiences.
Um, you know, so it sounds likea pretty interesting journey.
Um, and yeah, if people want to,you know, have a chat to you,
uh, where should they contactyou?
Slack?
Yeah.
Harry (32:27):
Just message me on Slack.
That'd be the easiest.
Right.
Um, yeah.
And I mean, if you're a companythat needs a business analytics
solution, I'll have my shamelessshill ready.
Uh,
Matt (32:37):
I will check the link in the description as well.
Harry (32:42):
All right.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for that.
Matt (32:45):
All right.
That's all for today.
Thanks so much for listening.
Uh, as usual, our next episodewill be out in a fortnight
around midday on Sundays, uh,until then come join us on our
Slack community atslack.uqcs.org.
My name is Matthew Low and thispodcast was created by the UQ
(33:08):
computing society with gracioussupport from our industry
sponsors.
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